Tidal Rip

“I thought it would be what he’d least expect, and would pull him north away from us.”

“Why didn’t you stand and fight? Go back west and search for Beck and engage him?”

“We’re in a weird role reversal, XO. As an SSGN captain, he’s supposed to be the hunted. But he came hunting us. Instead of him mainly needing to preserve his ship as a force in being, we’re the ones who have to favor self-preservation for now.”

“Captain?”

“The one thing we can’t afford to do is let him get past us alive, between us and the northeastern terminus of the ridge. His top quiet speed is faster than ours, and in such rugged terrain we might never be able to find him again. Then he’d have a clear shot at his most high-value targets. Even if he exposes himself by going shallow to launch, we can’t count on being precisely there to sink him in time.”

“I only half follow you, Skipper. I did remind you last week he came to von Scheer fresh from being first officer on a ceramic-hulled fast-attack. And also fresh from a long-running battle with you, so he knows your style.”

“Yeah. And you were right, XO. Absolutely right… So I need to be more unpredictable…. We can afford to drawthings out a bit, I think. We need to, for now.”

“How does that help us, sir?”

“Trade space for time and get the feel of Beck and his ship. See better how he likes to fight… We know Beck has to work his way northeast along the ridge. He’s got hundreds of miles to cover before he’s close enough to the convoy to launch. Meanwhile let’s act like we’re feeling defensive, cowed.”

“What do we do?”

“Retreat. In the only direction we can. Northeast along the ridge toward Africa.”

CHAPTER 40

“Still no sign of Challenger or her wreckage,” Stissinger said two hours later.

Instead of responding, Ernst Beck studied the live-feed laser line-scan video coming in from his off-board probes. He’d sent them ahead of von Scheer as expendable scouts in case Jeffrey Fuller survived and was waiting in counterambush for him nearby.

Beck saw piles of freshly broken boulders, a result of the avalanches triggered inside the Walvis Ridge mountain pass. The water was clouded with sediment and rock dust, kicked up by the nuclear blasts. He also saw fragments of dead sea creatures drift through the field of view from the probes: shredded deep-sea jellyfish, broken body parts from strange siphonophores — snakelike beings covered with thousands of stinging tentacles for capturing prey and dozens of small translucent stomachs for digesting. Some of the stomachs he saw were still intact and held food. Beck noticed a colony of blackened starfish, all unmoving on the bottom, charred by the radiant heat of the blasts. He saw demonfish, naturally black, with hideous faces and huge fangs that made them look like something out of a horror movie. Except the luminous barbs near the mouths of these demonfish didn’t glow, and they floated upside down — dead.

Von Scheer came out of the pass heading south. Beck gave helm orders to turn the ship northeast to avoid the antisubmarine perils of the wide-open and almost bottomless Cape Basin. He had the copilot use the remote-controlled probes to search the ridge terrain just northeast of the seamounts that guarded that side of the pass.

The wait for some report was tense and frustrating, but necessary.

Von Loringhoven came over. “You realize, don’t you, that if he decided to run, he’s getting away.”

“It isn’t about him, Baron. It’s about us. Whether we get to launch our missile salvos soon enough. If we’ve scared Jeffrey Fuller off, and we can get in range of the convoy safely and then make a good escape, so much the better. We’ll be free to concentrate on hunting and killing Challenger after that.”

“Agreed,” von Loringhoven said.

“But none of that has happened yet.”

“So what do you intend to do?”

“We need to continue up the ridgeline at a good pace. Let me show you what I mean…. Einzvo?”

“Captain?”

“Have Sonar take the conn for a moment. Join me and the baron at the navigation table.”

Young Werner Haffner took Beck’s seat. He seemed honored to have the duty at such an important time. Beck smiled to himself. Haffner’s boyish enthusiasm was a welcome tonic.

As he matures, if he survives, he’ll make a good submariner indeed.

Stissinger paced aft and stood with Beck and von Loringhoven at the plotting table. Beck explained to the navigator what he wanted to see.

A display appeared of the now-familiar land and undersea terrain in this theater: the western African coast, the Walvis Ridge, the Angola Basin, the Bight of Guinea — St. Helena chain of seamounts to that basin’s north, and the Cape Basin to the Walvis Ridge’s south.

An animation appeared, showing the convoy moving toward the shore of the Allied pocket in the Congo Basin.

Beck cleared his throat. “The convoy’s base course is roughly east. Our own base course, because of the ridge, has to be more like northeast. To converge on the convoy before it’s too late, we need to better the convoy’s average speed by almost fifty percent.”

The animation began again, with the convoy moving at twenty knots and the von Scheer making the same twenty knots. The icon of the von Scheer closed the range to the convoy as it moved up along the ridge on the chart — but not fast enough.

The animation repeated, with von Scheer doing thirty knots. Now a red circle around the own-ship icon showed the range of her Mach 2.5 cruise missiles — five hundred miles; a green line marked the atomic rules-of-engagement two-hundred-mile limit from land. At thirty knots, the red circle enveloped a big part of the convoy before the convoy reached the two-hundred-mile limit.

Von Loringhoven watched all this. “Very clear explanation. It seems at thirty knots, which I believe is your top quiet speed, we should achieve our goal.”

“It isn’t quite that simple. We need to allow extra time for appropriate caution and self-defense. And we need to allow for the flight time of our missiles. Even at Mach Two point five, hugging the wave tops, it takes about fifteen minutes to achieve their maximum range. Baron, in fifteen minutes a nuclear-powered supercarrier going all out can cover ten or more sea miles, wider than the lethal burst zone of our missile warheads. So we have to build into their flight paths autonomous searching-strategy patterns, unless we can receive good and accurate targeting data in advance. And those patterns looping and zigzagging after their prey use up even more time.”

“So why don’t we get the data?”

“We’d need a high-baud-rate radio link. To download firing solutions for a hundred-plus missiles is a complex and painstaking task. To get that link established, without a kampfschwimmer team on an island and an acoustic connection into the water to us, we’d have to come to periscope depth and raise a mast ourselves, well in advance of when we launch. The Allies already know we’re somewhere in the Walvis Ridge, thanks to the mushroom clouds above the surface marking our skirmish with Challenger. It’ll be bad enough with the datum we make as our missiles all take to the air.”

“You’re saying we need to fire our missiles half blind, to have the best chance to survive to fire them at all?”

“Yes. Thus we need to get as close as humanly possible to the convoy, and that burns up even more time.”

“What is your intention now?”

“I know Fuller well enough to know he won’t give up until one of us is destroyed…. Navigator, overlay the Subtropical Convergence.”

The navigator typed some keys. A broad and fuzzy yellow ribbon snaked along the map. It crossed the Walvis Ridge at an angle, three hundred sea miles northeast of the mountain pass that von Scheer had just left behind. Beck pointed to that spot, where the Subtropical Convergence intersected