Tidal Rip

“Tubes seven and eight fired electrically!”

“Units running normally!”

These two fish will hunt for von Scheer, give Ernst Beck something to worry about.

“Units from tubes one through four have detonated!”

My defensive countershots, against those four torpedoes closing from the south.

The blast forces hit at once from directly behind, while the brutality of the first four blasts ahead had barely diminished.

The awful punishment renewed: noise, vibrations, crew injuries, ship damage. Pitching, rolling, yawing, heaving.

Jeffrey was nearly deaf already, but the shocks and aftershocks and blast reflections never let up. There was terrible pain in his ear canals and a silvery whistling and ringing in his head — it got worse and worse as the punishment went on. Still, he forced himself to think.

“Helm! Right ten degrees rudder, make your course one eight zero!”

Meltzer turned his head toward Jeffrey as his bloodless hands gripped the control wheel. His lips moved, but Jeffrey couldn’t tell what his own helmsman said — the noise, the deafness, were winning. Jeffrey realized both men simply could not be understood verbally.

Jeffrey used sign language. He mimed holding the control wheel, then mimed turning it right. He held up all ten fingers. Ten degrees. He pointed at a gyrocompass and held up one finger, then eight, then touched index finger to thumb to form a zero. Course one eight zero. South.

Meltzer nodded and went to work.

In the churning, surging, hellish Jacuzzi now swirling in the deep-water pass — between crumbling seamounts and opposite walls of million-degree atomic bubble clouds and multikiloton turbulence — Challenger altered course. The ship banked into a turn to the right, as sharply as Jeffrey dared at flank speed. Challenger swung back the way she’d just come, still moving as fast as she could.

Jeffrey leaned toward Bell. He had to bellow at the very top of his lungs. “Reload tubes one through four and seven and eight, Mark Eighty-eights!”

Bell nodded. The wait seemed endless; at last the reloading was done.

Jeffrey issued more orders. He sent two more snap shots after his two already in the water: north and then west around the Wust Seamount again, to also hunt on their own for von Scheer.

“Why not south for those two?” Bell shouted. “Pinch him from both sides like he just did to us?”

“You’ll see.”

“Aye aye!”

“Sonar!” Jeffrey yelled.

Milgrom didn’t respond.

Jeffrey unbuckled his seat belt and struggled toward her. He gripped stanchions on the overhead to steady himself. Aftershocks and body blows came as each throbbing fireball finally broke the surface far above; hard pounding continued from avalanche rocks and viciously stirred-up water. The pummeling almost threw him from his feet. Sharp console edges and metal equipment seemed to beckon for his head and for his groin.

Jeffrey grabbed the back of Milgrom’s seat as Challenger rolled and bucked yet more. “Any inbound torpedoes?” he yelled in her ear.

“Impossible to tell!” she shouted back.

Meltzer turned toward Jeffrey. Meltzer pointed at a gyrocompass. His course was steady on one eight zero, due south.

Jeffrey forced his way back to his seat. He ordered Bell to reload tubes seven and eight, and make tubes one through four and seven and eight ready for snap shots.

Jeffrey watched the gravimeter and the confused, outdated tactical plot. He had Challenger heading straight for the wall of acoustic and hydrodynamic chaos from his own most recent atomic Mark 88 blasts.

Jeffrey used his console keyboard to send a message to Engineering through the ship’s LAN. “Push the reactor to one hundred fifteen percent.” The control-room phone talker was lying on the deck, stunned and with a bloody nose — and conversation through the sound-powered phones or intercom was impossible anyway.

A quickly typed message came back: “115 %, aye.” The ship picked up a few tenths of a knot.

“Helm!” Jeffrey shouted.

Meltzer turned.

Jeffrey pointed up. He gave hand signals for one, then two, then zero, then zero, then zero. Make your depth twelve thousand feet. He needed to take Challenger away from so close to the seafloor terrain.

Meltzer pulled back his wheel, and Challenger’s bow nosed up.

She charged into the curtain of reverb, countless collapsing bubbles of steam, invisible whirlpools, and monstrous thermal and turbulence updrafts and downdrafts.

Sitting beside him, Bell pointed at Jeffrey’s waist. Jeffrey remembered to buckle his seat belt just in time.

Challenger twisted and turned like never before. She needed every foot of added clearance from the bottom. The noise was now so loud it no longer registered. The ship’s instruments showed that the vibrations and flexing of the hull itself, and inside, were stronger than ever. But Jeffrey was so physically numbed it hardly seemed to matter. He eyed the gravimeter carefully and gave thanks it didn’t care about the noise. He gave thanks to God and the contractors that the device was still even functioning.

At the proper moment he issued more helm orders. This time he typed and sent them through the LAN. But he had trouble holding his hands to the keyboard. His vision was so blurred he could barely see the keys. He had little control of his fingers as he tried to type. Finally he hunted and pecked a barely intelligible message: “left10° rudder. Curs 030.” He hit ENTER.

Challenger turned left as she rounded the south edge of the Walvis Ridge, where the deep-water pass let out onto the Cape Plain. She headed hard almost north-northeast, along the ridge.

The mountain pass and all its noise and buffeting quickly fell behind. Conversation was possible again. Jeffrey ordered Meltzer to bring the ship back into the ridge topography quickly, and resume nap-of-seafloor cruising at the ship’s top quiet tactical speed, twenty-six knots. Trailing a towed array in such broken terrain was impractical — it would get snagged and ruined or lost. But Jeffrey ordered Milgrom and her people to use the wide-aperture arrays and bow sphere to search passively for any signs of enemy subs or their torpedoes. He had the photonic sensors at bow and stern activated in passive-image intensification mode to help Meltzer and Sessions navigate amid the uneven, unweathered volcanic crags and ravines — and also to help the fire controlmen scan for possible mines. Glows and flashes from riled biologics gave barely enough light to see.

Milgrom reported intermittent contact on a clutch of von Scheer’s Sea Lions, rushing belatedly south through the pass and continuing on into the Cape Basin. They were pinging, and eventually turned back north toward the ridge, but Challenger was well shielded by intervening terrain. Bell said these Sea Lions posed no threat.

Bell was also busy handling damage control and crew injury reports. There were several broken bones, concussions, and very bad cuts; the corpsman and his assistants were swamped with patients on the wardroom operating table and in the enlisted mess triage and treatment area. A number of systems — mechanical and electronic — were down or impaired, but backups or bypasses were covering the major problems.

Jeffrey waited for Bell to take a pause in the assessments he was making and the orders he was issuing — he didn’t want to distract his XO — and meanwhile he allowed his own head to clear up more.

“That was a close one,” he said when Bell was free for a moment; he was too shaken up and relieved to keep such strong emotions bottled inside.

“Why did you send all your offensive fish north, Captain?”

“I wanted Beck to think I was using them to screen us as we came up through the pass that way.”

“That’s why you turned back south?”