Crush Depth

Bell made himself comfortable quickly; he seemed matured, more well-anchored internally, and more outwardly positive about life since becoming a father. Jeffrey envied him these things.

Bell filled Jeffrey in on the status of the cleanup and repairs in the torpedo room. It would take a lot of work to custom-machine replacement parts to get the torpedo autoloader functioning again. The countermeasures launchers — which took up half the space in the medical corpsman’s cubicle back near the enlisted mess — also needed more time to be made serviceable after the battle damage.

Jeffrey got up and shut the door and sat down again. “How are the wounded doing?”

“Our one potential crisis, sir, is the man whose arm was crushed by that loose torpedo. Circulation past the shoulder is not good. With what little more the corpsman can do for him here, he might lose the arm.”

“Amputate?”

Bell nodded.

“Then we need to get the guy to a proper hospital…. With a minisub in our hangar now, maybe we can drop him off, covertly. I’ll talk to the commodore.”

“It would be important for morale for you to do something, Captain. Nobody wants to see the guy get gangrene and get sent home to his family maimed.”

Jeffrey hesitated. “XO, what’s your read on morale in general?” Jeffrey knew morale in war was a very volatile thing. Submarine crews, living in such close quarters, felt a strong sense of community and reacted emotionally as a group. To be at their best, they needed steady support and constant input of encouragement and good news. Jeffrey already intended to tour the ship again this evening, for exactly that purpose.

“Actually, sir,” Bell said, “morale went from somewhat bad to rather good in a hurry, because of the Tirpitz.” Bell smiled. “The men think you’re a lucky captain, Captain. They’re happy to be sailing with you now.”

Jeffrey frowned. “What’s the emphasis on the ‘now’ part?”

Bell took a deep breath. “The guys were troubled to see us ordered to leave dry dock before we were ready, missing qualified men and stuck with two dozen clueless replacements. They thought we were taking too many chances, and we wouldn’t come back.”

Jeffrey grunted. He couldn’t entirely disagree with their reasoning. “But you say morale is up?”

Bell nodded.

Jeffrey didn’t want to come across to Bell as insecure, but he was puzzled. “Explain the mechanics of this to me.”

“Our meeting the Tirpitz at all was a sheer coincidence, one-in-a-million odds. The fact the score came out Challenger one, Tirpitz nothing, when Tirpitz had us dead to rights, was also pure random chance.”

“But that was the enemy’s bad luck, not our good luck. I don’t get it.”

“If you put the whole thing together, Captain, we’ve had our shakedown cruise and our working-up period now, in that battle. Everybody feels much better there. Plus, it’s like it was destiny or something, an act of God, us meeting the Tirpitz—”

Jeffrey held up one hand. “I’m not sure about that last part, XO. I want to talk to you more about that in a minute.”

“Well, the final thing I wanted to say is that we got to score a kill, a big one. We got even for the New York raid. Us, sir, USS Challenger, on our very first day at sea. That makes us a lucky ship, and you a lucky captain.”

Jeffrey worked his jaw pondering this. Then he grinned. “I did think your crack about being too underdressed to die was pretty good.” Both men laughed. Then Jeffrey glanced at his laptop, and felt a sinking feeling again.

Bell read Jeffrey’s face and was confused. He thought Jeffrey was signaling that the meeting was over.

“You wanted to talk to me more about meeting the Tirpitz, sir?”

Jeffrey debated whether to confide in Bell or keep it to himself. My XO is supposed to be my sounding board. But a captain is a superior being, all-knowing and infallible….

Hell, if I try to stay arms-length from my key people all the time, I’ll wind up with ulcers for sure.

“I’m writing my after-action report on the battle with Tirpitz. I’m thinking about my turn away when we first made contact. I think I blew it, and endangered the ship and our crew and our mission.”

“Sir?” Bell looked flabbergasted. “From where I sit, the men worship you now, even more than after the Germany raid. You always stay clearheaded in battle, and kept us fighting until the bitter end. You’ve got the best sort of credibility that any sub skipper could ask for. You produce results in combat, time after time.”

Jeffrey shook his head. “Turning beam-on to the Tirpitz, showing them our full side-profile noise signature, with erratic sound-propagation conditions at the time, was just too risky. Tirpitz got a datum off us, and it let them shoot. If they hadn’t blown up from their own weapon failure, we’d’ve definitely been sunk.”

“Hmmm… You had to evade, Captain. That was in the Commodore’s standing orders from above. We couldn’t get Master One’s course or speed, exactly because of said bad sonar conditions. For all you knew, she was coming right at us fast. You had to turn well away.”

“I’m not sure you’re right.”

“What were you going to do? Put the ship into reverse? We’re unstable enough going backward with a seasoned guy at the helm. It seems to me your turn away, a simple maneuver for Harrison, was the safer decision, given all the circumstances.”

Jeffrey absorbed that. “Thanks, XO. I suppose needing to think about it again, to write out a formal report, it’s got me second-guessing myself.”

Bell smiled. “Nobody said it was easy being CO. That’s what they pay you the big money for.”

Both men laughed again. Jeffrey was glad he’d confided in Bell. The man’s perspective had cheered Jeffrey up.

But then Bell frowned, which was rare for him. “Maybe you’ve got me second-guessing too now, Captain, but something’s starting to not smell right, about meeting the Tirpitz the way we did…. Either it really was just one humongous coincidence, or the Tirpitz knew we were coming.”

This was someplace Jeffrey didn’t want to go. “How could they know we were coming?”

“Compromised our sound surveillance system data, maybe?”

“The good commodore insists that’s not the case.”

“You believe him?”

“I think I believe him. The Tirpitz is — was — a lot slower than us. How could she have been vectored into position so soon? She was right there in front of us, a perfect setup.”

“Maybe they didn’t tap our hydrophone grids. Maybe they’ve planted their own along our coast, or have some new secret weapon we don’t know about.”

“I think you’ve been watching too many old Cold War movies, XO.”

Bell pursed his lips. “They might still have known in advance that we were coming, from a spy.”

“The commodore told me he didn’t decide which way to go, north or south, until we submerged. So it’s not like anyone off the ship knew…. We’re probably okay, about there being a leak.”

Bell didn’t relax. “The Germans didn’t need to know we were heading south, Captain. All they needed to know was that we were sailing. Anybody can look at a map of the globe…. Maybe they sent Tirpitz south, and they sent another submarine north, to hit us near Newfoundland, say, in case we took the Arctic route. Tirpitz was the one that got lucky, or unlucky.”

Jeffrey nodded slowly, reluctantly. “Don’t tell anyone else about this, XO. If we’ve been compromised, I want the crew to stay in blissful ignorance…. I’m going to talk to Commodore Wilson.”

Jeffrey knocked on Wilson’s stateroom door. Lieutenant Sessions’s voice called from inside, “Who’s there?”

Jeffrey was annoyed. “Captain Fuller.”