Tidal Rip (31 page)
Authors: Joe Buff
F
elix Estabo’s shouting came over the sonar speakers on
Challenger
. Everyone in the control room looked as if they’d suddenly been jolted by cattle prods, but Jeffrey never felt more alive in his life.
At last the waiting is over. The combat begins.
“Minisub, minisub,” Jeffrey shouted into his mike for the acoustic link. “Maintain your position! Maintain your position! Keep feeding me Orpheus data as long as you can!”
“Minisub, acknowledged,” came the reply over the sonar speakers.
“Ground station, ground station, hold your position! Hold the Rocks at all cost!”
Something garbled and breathless came back.
“Chief of the Watch,” Jeffrey ordered COB, “sound silent battle stations antisubmarine.”
COB acknowledged. Phone talkers spread the word throughout the ship—the general-quarters alarm, and the 1MC loudspeakers, made too much noise when stealth was vital. In seconds, more enlisted men and chiefs dashed into control from aft, some still pulling on clothing or shoes. They manned and powered up empty consoles or stood in the aisles to help or learn or supervise.
Next to Jeffrey, Bell quickly reconfigured their screen displays. At battle stations, as usual, Bell was fire-control coordinator.
“Sonar, threat status?” Jeffrey snapped.
“No new contacts,” Milgrom reported coolly.
She always is a cool one under fire.
Milgrom’s even tone helped get the others settled and focused.
Jeffrey stared at the gravimeter, at the large-scale nautical chart: the saw-toothed peaks of the local part of the soaring Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the jutting and dwarfish Rocks with the mini nearby. Terrain all around them was jumbled and jagged…. South-southeast of the St. P and P Rocks, and just a few hours distant at flank speed, the Romanche Gap plunged twenty-five thousand feet deep—almost as deep as Mount Everest was high.
And the SMS
Admiral von Scheer
could be anywhere.
Except for Orpheus. Beautiful, beautiful Orpheus. I’m sorry I ever doubted you. Admiral Hodgkiss was right all along.
“Helm,” Jeffrey rapped out, “ahead two-thirds, make turns for twenty-six knots. Make your course zero four five. Napof-seafloor cruising mode.”
“Ahead two-thirds, turns for twenty-six knots, aye, sir,” Meltzer acknowledged at the helm. “Make my course zero four five, aye. Nap of seafloor, aye.” Meltzer turned his engine-order telegraph, a four-inch dial on his console. He worked his control wheel. “Maneuvering answers, ahead two-thirds twenty-six knots! My course is zero four five, sir!” The helmsman’s burly Bronx accent sounded tough and determined.
“Northeast, Captain?” Bell asked. His job was to play devil’s advocate as Jeffrey led the attack against what seemed the devil himself.
“It’s the last thing they’ll expect. They’re on the other side of the mountain. We know where they are, but they don’t know where we are, if they even know we’re here at all.”
“But going so shallow?”
“This way we’ll maintain contact with the mini and the Rocks as long as possible. And it’s the shortest route to the
von Scheer
’s position.”
“The kampfschwimmer must have reported resistance from the SEALs by now.
Von Scheer
will guess Estabo’s men got there by submarine.”
“Yes, but they won’t know
which
submarine. They’re supposed to think we’re in dry dock.”
“There are a dozen other passes we could take across the ridge, Captain. A straight line is too obvious.”
“We need to do the unexpected.”
Bell nodded reluctantly. “Understood, sir.”
“Cheer up, XO. We can’t be in two places at once, but neither can the
von Scheer
. Let Beck be the one to keep guessing.”
Challenger
’s bow nosed up steeply as she began to climb the flank of the ridge by the Rocks. Her depth would go from eleven thousand feet to just a few hundred in less than ten miles.
“Sir,” Bell said, sounding worried all over again, “why are kampfschwimmer on the Rocks to begin with?”
“To keep the Rocks from us.”
“But they have to have planned this for days. How did they know
our
guys would be there?”
Jeffrey ignored Bell in favor of something more urgent. “Fire Control, arm and load nuclear Mark Eight-eight Mod Twos, torpedo tubes one through eight.”
Bell relayed commands to his weapons officer below. Jeffrey and Bell entered the warhead-arming passwords on their consoles.
“Preset all warhead yields to maximum, one kiloton.”
“Maximum, one kiloton, aye,” Bell repeated for absolute clarity. He typed commands on his keyboard.
The torpedo tubes were loaded one by one. The main work was done by hydraulic assists, but the warhead-arming hookups had to be connected and then passworded by hand.
“Make tubes one through eight ready in all respects including opening outer doors.”
Jeffrey would proceed with fish wet, ready to charge on their way to his opponent in an instant. He preferred to make the mechanical transients of loading and flooding the tubes, and opening the outer doors, while the intervening terrain still masked him from his enemy.
This task done, Bell glanced at Jeffrey again insistently. “The kampfschwimmer, the Rocks. We’re missing something, Captain. Something important.”
In a flash of insight, Jeffrey saw it. He blanched.
A satellite dish to an Axis sea-surveillance bird in space, and an acoustic link into the water, would give
von Scheer
all the firing-solution data against the convoy that Ernst Beck could ever want…. And from way outside the longest reach of the escorts’ radar pickets…I came here to look for Beck using phone cables under the ocean. He came here to look for the convoy with sensors outside the atmosphere.
Jeffrey grabbed for a microphone. “Ground station, ground station, I repeat. Estabo, Estabo,
hold the Rocks at all costs!
”
Felix Estabo’s voice came back, reverbed and scratchy over the undersea acoustic link. He sounded muffled too, from speaking through his protective suit helmet. “We’re trying! I—” There was a noise on the link like that of men shouting and scrambling. There was a screech like a bullet ricochet. There was a fast
puff-puff-puff
as a silenced weapon close to Estabo’s open mike fired on full auto. Then the mike clicked off.
“
Targeting data,
XO,” Jeffrey said. “The Germans want the Rocks to set up a link to get long-range targeting data.”
“Yes, sir, that has to be it.”
Jeffrey’s heart raced. “Data for Ernst Beck to launch his missiles at the Allied convoy, unmolested by the escorts…If the Germans seize control of the Rocks for just a few minutes, our first detect on the
von Scheer
will be the sound of dozens of Mach-Two-plus missiles salvoing into the air.”
Once her missiles are away, the
von Scheer
is spent, an empty shell…. To sink her after she launches against the convoy will be no victory.
Jeffrey knew that every second counted badly now, both underwater and on land.
Felix cursed doubly when one of his men was hit by a bullet through his helmet’s soft plastic faceplate. The man began to scream, in English, before he bled out inside his suit from a severed main artery.
My first killed-in-action as leader…And so much for our Brazilian disguise.
The kampfschwimmer heard it too. The energy of their assault redoubled.
“Dig in?” one of Felix’s chiefs shouted.
Felix looked at the ground on the slope where they were taking cover. Two inches down it was solid basalt. “We’d need jackhammers!”
More bullets whizzed overhead. The protective suits kept Felix and his men from hearing them well, from feeling their passage disrupting the air—and this added to the danger. The chief was trying to control his team using hand signals alone because they hadn’t taken radios—whose signals would be blocked whenever basalt outcroppings stood in the way, and whose electronics would be damaged by fallout gamma rays. With the SEALs’ fields of vision impaired by the helmets of their radiation suits, near-chaos reigned. Felix heard another SEAL scream in agony. Then one of his people bellowed in triumphant rage—he’d just shot a kampfschwimmer dead.
Felix peeked around a rock for a split second to use his binoculars. He ducked, barely in time, as an incoming three-round burst sent dust and pebbles flying.
“I see no mortars or hand grenades! I think they just have direct-fire weapons like us!” Rifles and pistols.
“They’re trying to outflank us!” the chief yelled back.
Felix looked at the lay of the land, the folds in the slopes, the jagged escarpments.
So this is how it feels to be in full command, as an officer. This is what it’s like to have chiefs taking orders from me.
It was scary, but Felix found he wanted it.
“We have to hold the high ground!”
“Firing line across this side of the island, or circle in an all-around defense?”
Felix looked about again and thought as fast as he could. Razor-sharp spines led down from Southeast Rock’s central saddle in both directions, right into the sea. If his men spread out along the spines and fired down from the top, they might keep the Germans pinned down on the opposite side of the Rock.
But Felix and his men hadn’t come prepared for a major firefight. They only had so much ammo.
If each kampfschwimmer brought just one more magazine than each of my SEALs, we’ve had it. Or if the Germans are only slightly better shots, or have slightly better fire discipline, or use slightly better tactics…
The uncertainty stabbed him in the chest like a bayonet.
So
this
is the burden of command. I’ve already lost the element of surprise to the enemy. My logistics are inadequate. My commo’s barely functioning. I have to make too many choices at once…. And my men are bleeding and dying.
“Chief, this isn’t Iwo Jima! We have to stop thinking like Marines or infantry!”
Felix grabbed the mike to the minisub. To his relief the line still worked. “We need reinforcements. Every man not needed to run the Orpheus, suit up on the double. Head north underwater, outflank the Germans clockwise, come up on Northwest Rock and support us from there. Take the kampfschwimmer in enfilade.”
The chief in the mini acknowledged. Northwest Rock faced the opposite slope of the central spines of Southeast Rock. From there, fresh SEALs could attack the Germans from behind.
An enlisted SEAL shouted. Kampfschwimmer were charging up the slope in a coordinated rush.
Felix told his chief to get his men spread out along the spines and conserve their ammo but drive the Germans back. The chief made hand signals, and the SEALs began to act. With every weapon silenced, the battle was strangely quiet—but it would be a person’s final mistake to think the bullets were any less deadly.
Felix gestured for the chief to follow him. They belly-crawled across the open ground on part of the saddle and huddled in the ruins of the stone lighthouse. The location would serve as his command post, the pivot point in their battle to hold the Rocks. Felix dragged the microphones along with him. He tried to keep their wires concealed, and tried not to break either mike. But the conspicuous satellite dish was already riddled by the kampfschwimmer, and its preamplifier box was totally smashed. Then the whole dish toppled flat: Felix lost contact with Norfolk. The Germans continued their uphill rush.
Some kampfschwimmer were knocked down by American bullets, but they crawled or hobbled away behind boulders and draws—and Felix saw no blood trails. He realized their suits were lined with Kevlar, like the SEALs’. To stop them, he knew his men had to stick to head shots. He told his chief to give the order.
Over the sonar speakers in the Zentrale, Ernst Beck listened to his acoustic link. The kampfschwimmer chief in the mini-sub, watching the Rocks through the periscope, was relaying Beck a blow-by-blow description of the battle.
“Their charge has been repulsed, Captain! The Americans still hold the high ground!”
“This will never do,” von Loringhoven said.
Lieutenant Shedler was leading from in front, on the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks. Because he was under fire, his men couldn’t set up a communications link to the minisub, or to Beck. The captain knew he had to do something himself.
Beck and Stissinger peered at a detailed topographical map of the Rocks and surrounding waters.
Beck used the acoustic link. “Chief, shift the minisub’s position south. Send the rest of your men into the water. Have them come up on Southeast Rock and take the SEALs from behind.”
“
Jawohl
. Moving now.”
“How did the SEALs ever get there?” von Loringhoven asked.
“That’s a very good question,” Beck replied. “More to the point, what do they want? What was that satellite dish for?”
There was an awkward silence.
“Targeting data from SOSUS hydrophones?” Stissinger suggested.
“Perhaps.” Beck considered everything he knew—why
he
was there by the Rocks, the enemy convoy that was coming, the defense plans U.S. commanders are likely to have made. “If you’re right, Einzvo, that would seem to prove the SEALs came via submarine.”
Von Loringhoven looked like he’d been slapped. “Find it! Destroy it!”
“Baron, you don’t have to tell me how to do my job.”
A
fter another fitful, nightmare-ridden attempt at a few hours’ sleep, Ilse Reebeck had just come back on duty to the console she’d been assigned at the Atlantic Fleet Command Center in Norfolk. The past several days of waiting for news from
Challenger
had been even more nerve-racking for her than for the others in the big war room because Ilse had served in battles on
Challenger
three times before. She knew most of the chiefs and enlisted men well. She was good friends with Kathy Milgrom, and the two had had fun “pajama parties” in their shared stateroom on the ship. COB had been Ilse’s mentor and father confessor as she tried to fit into a military hierarchy. And Jeffrey Fuller, of course, was someone she went back and forth between liking and hating—a roller coaster she hoped would continue, for the way it seemed to meet her deeply conflicted emotional needs. She desperately wanted
Challenger
to win, and Jeffrey Fuller and the others to survive.