Tidal Rip

Behind her Bell’s snap shots detonated. The ocean erupted as it had before. Blast forces from aft arrived and punished the ship. Noise and shock fronts bounced off terrain to the sides and in front of Challenger, and punished her more. The ride was terribly rough, acoustic conditions impossible. More damage reports poured in, jury-rigged emergency repairs were made in haste, and Jeffrey fretted. My ship’s margin for survival is wearing too thin…. The contest with Beck is as much about good damage control as it is about smart fighting tactics.

Still fleeing northeast, up the Walvis Ridge toward Africa, Jeffrey ordered flank speed. Maybe Beck is better than me.

“No sign of him, sir,” Stissinger reported. Off-board probes had scouted well ahead and thoroughly.

“He retreated again.” Beck knew he was stating the obvious.

“What now?” von Loringhoven asked.

Beck rested his head in his right hand, with his upper lip cupped in the crook of his thumb and forefinger. His elbow leaned on his console top, taking the weight of his forearm and head. He stared into space and thought over everything he knew.

“He has to stand and fight sooner or later. The closer to the convoy we get, the more all the time pressure passes from us onto him. He obviously used my own trick from the Rocks. A wall of nuclear blasts as a screen to mask his escape.”

“What if he used all of our tricks?” Stissinger said. “Including doubling back? He might be behind us now, planning to take us from the rear.”

“We’d’ve heard him,” Beck said. He had von Scheer holding between the convergence and the nuclear disturbance near Fuller’s last hiding place. As ordered, Haffner’s sonarmen were pinging on low power to both sides, where directional acoustic paths were clearest. This ensured that Challenger didn’t do what Stissinger said she might do. “No, Einzvo, he ran ahead again.”

Beck called a nautical chart onto his console. He had it repeat on Stissinger’s screen. “The next significant terrain feature is here,” Beck said. As von Loringhoven leaned over his shoulder, he used his light pen. “The Valdivia Seamount complex. Seven or eight major peaks all grouped together, after a long stretch of very deep ridge terrain. That’s… another three-hundred-sea-mile leapfrog ahead. Some of these seamounts are so shallow, their tops are only fifty or a hundred meters deep. The way they’re clustered, the paths between them form a maze.”

“Is that good?” von Loringhoven asked.

“For us? Yes. In the maze we can try to get lost. Fuller can’t afford that. He also can’t afford an action somewhere between there and here. The odds of him succeeding in a one-on-one, in deep water where neither ship has a terrain or sound-propagation advantage, are around fifty-fifty.”

“You think he won’t gamble the convoy with odds of fifty-fifty?” Stissinger asked.

“No. Not even to be unpredictable. Not even to take us by surprise just for the purpose of surprise. The convoy is simply too important for him to risk on the flip of a coin…. So, his next move will be to hit us just before the Valdivia Seamounts while he gets concealment on their edge and we have to come at him through open water.”

“Head for the Valdivia Seamounts?” von Loringhoven asked.

Beck nodded.

CHAPTER 41

Six hours later, Jeffrey felt as if his ship had been at battle stations forever. Challenger worked her way along a stretch of the Walvis Ridge that was very rugged but deep. A depth gauge read 9,850 feet. Even so, the basins to both flanks plunged quickly to 16,500 feet; Jeffrey was hugging the Walvis at more than a mile above the surrounding ocean floor.

Sometimes, when old volcanic extrusions or ledges didn’t block the path of sound, the port wide-aperture array could clearly pick up noises from the continuing convoy battle. The battle seemed slightly less violent than before. Jeffrey suspected this was because of the reduced number of platforms on both sides that had survived to keep up the fight. The convoy still had a long way to go to reach its destination and achieve its crucial strategic purpose. But in the meantime it was serving another use: as flypaper for the U-boats and enemy land-based antiship threats.

Because major reinforcement of the Central African pocket would be a big setback for the Axis, they had to do everything possible to prevent the convoy from getting through. This meant the Axis High Command could not preserve their war-fighting assets as a force-in-being, in order to menace the Allies indirectly or reduce the Allied side’s options; those assets had to come out and fight. In the bigger picture, this was good, so long as the military value of the U-boats sunk equaled or exceeded that of the convoy ships and escorts sunk — where the measure of value included human lives and weapon stocks. If the trade-off went the other way, and the value of U-boats lost was much less than the damage they inflicted, the Allies would suffer adverse attrition at sea, apart from the question of the fate of the Congo-basin pocket. Even now, with the passage of time having allowed Sonar and Fire Control to assemble more data, Jeffrey didn’t know who was winning and who was losing.

There’s a definite possibility, that the slaughter on both sides will be so extreme that in the end neither can claim to have won.

All this put Jeffrey in a black mood. He still needed to stop the von Scheer somehow. That ugly thought recurred: Maybe I just have to face the fact that Ernst Beck is better than me.

Jeffrey eyed the gravimeter. The Valdivia Seamounts loomed a short distance ahead, clustered like a drowned archipelago. Somewhere behind him, he knew, the von Scheer was coming his way — Beck could read the same charts.

“What gambit this time, Captain?” Bell asked.

Jeffrey forced himself not to sigh. “If we try the same thing three times in a row, I don’t know if that’s what Beck will expect or it isn’t what he’ll expect.”

“You mean, he might think you’d never pull the same tactic thrice when it didn’t work twice?”

Jeffrey nodded. “The point is the tactics didn’t work, twice. Both times von Scheer got closer to the convoy, and we risked irreparable damage with nothing to show for it but fewer weapons left in our torpedo room and more injured crew. I can see some other choices, but I like all of them even less.”

“Captain?”

“I prefer to keep my own counsel for now.” Jeffrey felt terribly alone, brooding over crushing facts he couldn’t escape.

“Sir, with respect, I need to understand your intentions.”

Jeffrey hesitated. “Okay.” He had other officers take the conn and fire control. He led Bell aft to his stateroom. They went in and shut the door.

Jeffrey glanced at himself in the dressing mirror. His eyes were sunken, with dark bags under them. His eyelids drooped, as if he’d been up late drinking or had a serious case of the flu.

Worse than either of those. I’ve been through two tactical nuclear skirmishes. My head hurts worse than from any imaginable hangover. My body aches worse than from any known flu.

“This’ll be easiest for both of us if we make it quick. You know I had a private session with Hodgkiss before you picked me up?”

Bell nodded tentatively.

“He told me we’re expendable in an equal exchange with von Scheer to protect the convoy…. More normal tactics now, with two ships and captains so evenly matched as we’ve seen, it’s a toss-up who’d win. The odds are unacceptable that the winner would be Beck. If Beck wins, the convoy loses.”

Bell looked at the deck and pursed his lips; Jeffrey proceeded. “A forced one-for-one exchange may be our only remaining alternative. We can’t let him get past us. In a regular fight, the odds are