'He displeased me with 'his rebellious ways and casual style. I outranked him, of course, then as now, but the Americans put up with his antics.'
Beck wondered what he was supposed to say to that. His job as executive officer was to meld himself to Eberhard's will, regardless of what he thought of the man.
'We're ordered to be on alert, sir. In case Challenger enters our operational area.'
'Good. Let me see.'
Beck gave him the message slip.
Beck glanced at Eberhard's desk. He recognized a file copy of Deutschland's last war patrol report — he'd drafted it himself for Eberhard's signature three weeks ago. It was open to the final page, showing the vessel's cumulative totals since the start of the fighting.
Eberhard noticed him reading.
'Nine hundred fifty thousand tons of Allied shipping sunk,' Eberhard said. 'Already twice the previous world record, set by one of our submarine captains in World War One. Four times as good as Hitler's top-scoring U-boat ace.' He went back to the message slip.
This damage wrought by Deutschland had earned Eberhard the Ritterkreuz, the Knight's Cross, one of Germany's highest military honors. It was deserved; Beck had no question of Eberhard's tactical skill. Beck himself got the Iron Cross First Class, prestigious enough, though he cared nothing for medals.
But he did want his own command someday. Beck did want his own command. Eberhard put the message in his safe.
'How are the crew?'
'Getting back their sea legs quickly, Captain.' They'd all been on leave in Bordeaux. Submariner skills were perishable — the,men grew rusty away from the ship — but Beck was taking care of that with drills and refresher training.
'And the new hands?'
'I think they'll be ready.'
'You think or you know?'
'They'll be ready, Captain.'
'Good. I look forward to dueling with Fuller again.'
'Captain, some of the seasoned men have been holding up an index finger to one another, when they think I'm not looking.'
'An index finger, Einzvo?'
'Yes. For one million tons.'
'This patrol we'll do it. A record for the ages.'
As usual, Beck was torn by Germany's culpability in this war. But they had a right to their God-given place in the world, didn't they? Versailles, post-Nazi occupation by the Allies, endless, dreary Soviet domination in the East — all were made up for now. This was good, wasn't it?
'Sink one million tons, and then sink Challenger,' Eberhard said. 'What a Christmas gift for our monarch that would make!'
Beck figured Eberhard would be made a baron for sure.
Eberhard would like that: the nobleman's title itself. The validation independent of Eberhard's father, a crass, nouveau-riche investment banker in Stettin, in the Protestant north. The grant of a private estate in occupied French wine country. The long train of beautiful Frenchwomen warming his bed.
Yes, Eberhard would like that a lot.
'Destroy Challenger,' Eberhard said, 'and the self-infatuated Americans will be one big step closer to having to sue for an armistice.'
Deutschland leveled off. Beck and Eberhard read the depth gauge on the captain's instrument display: eleven hundred meters. With her alumina-casing hull and sea pipes, the ship was capable of three or four times that — about fifteen thousand feet. Eberhard lit up again. He sat for a minute, savoring the cigarette and thinking. Beck waited.
'They have no sense of history, the Americans,' Eberhard said. 'None of what's happening ought to have surprised them. But it did. They're like children, thinking the world should be a nice place, and everyone else should agree with them.'
'Unipolarism, they called it, sir, after the end of the Cold War.'
'We're giving the world a new unipolarism, aren't we? Once we starve out the U.K., and link up with the Boers in central Africa, we'll control two continents…. You have to admit the Boers come in handy.' They'd helped spring the giant two-step trap at the start of the war, and they were giving the Allies a two-theater conflict now. Again Beck tried not to react to Eberhard's haughty attitude. He went to his common ground with the captain, as a fellow naval officer: patriotism and duty. But did Eberhard — Germany's greatest U-boat commander — love the sea and his ship as Beck did, or was the ocean to him just water, and Deutschland just a machine? Was Eberhard a patriot, or was he simply using this war for predatory self-advancement, the same way he used everyone and everything else?
ON CHALLENGER, ONE DAY LATER
Ilse sat elbow to elbow with Kathy Milgrom, at the forward end of the sonar consoles lining the crowded Command and Control Center's port bulkhead. Although they'd both been there a while, the watch had just changed, and fresh crewmen were settling in all around them. Ilse sensed the mood of heightened urgency — they were halfway to the Texas now. Everyone put on a bright face, and fought to stay optimistic, but the relentless tension was taking its toll. The enlisted mess was turned into a war room for the rescue: stacked emergency tools and oxygen canisters, nonstop first-aid drills, constant damage control rehearsals; the men ate standing up. Jeffrey briefed his officers — and Ilse — as soon as Challenger got underway. His words about what they might find when they reached Texas had been pithy, graphic, chilling. Ilse regretted there was nothing she could do to help those poor waiting men, except help get there as quickly as possible.
The CACC, Challenger's control room, was rigged for red, despite the broad daylight twelve hundred feet above the ship, over the storm-tossed waves and distant mushroom clouds. The subdued lighting had little to do with preserving night vision. In the midst of tactical nuclear war at sea there was no way a submarine would raise a periscope mast by choice, let alone surface and man the bridge cockpit on the sail — the conning tower — even at night. The red fluorescents were used instead to make the computer screens easy on watchstanders' eyes.
'I'm about done with this module of code,' Ilse said — an enhanced model of water temperature versus salinity dynamics.
'I'll be ready for your data bridge in a minute,' Kathy said; she was the acting sonar officer. Ilse was the ship's on-board combat oceanographer, formalized now. She'd been teaching and doing research at the University of Cape Town, and was caught in the U.S. at a marine biology conference when the Double Putsch cost her her country — and cost her family their lives for resisting the old-line Boer takeover.
Ilse sat with headphones on, the left ear cup over her left ear, the right one on her cheekbone. This way she could hear the raw signals from outside, and still talk with Kathy. Intermittent thunder on the headphones formed a counterpoint: atom bombs going off, more than fifty miles away, in the latest battle between a supply convoy and the U-boats.
'This American combat systems software is splendid,' Kathy said; she was crisp, but expressive, and clearly loved her work. A full-fledged Royal Navy submariner, Kathy was supposed to have had a quiet trip into dry dock to qualify on Challenger, before further combat duty after that. Now, like Ilse, she had been pulled willy-nilly into this rescue mission to Texas; she needed to master her new job very quickly. The two women had already compared their life stories, so Ilse knew Kathy had grown up in Liverpool, then done the Royal Navy Academy at Dartmouth, followed by Oxford and active service in the surface fleet. Kathy's Liverpool accent, its edges softened now, sounded to Ilse's ear like Irish; she often talked with her hands, to the degree there was room at the consoles. Ilse glanced at Kathy in profile, backlit in red, lit from in front by the blues and greens on her monitors. Kathy was a few inches shorter than Ilse, a few kilos overweight, and wore special submariner eyeglasses. These had narrow frames
