Tidal Rip

Challenger and von Scheer.

“Helm, all stop!”

“Sir?” Bell yelled as the ocean outside fulminated.

“We don’t know what’s on the other side of that curtain now! With noisemakers and decoys, and up-close conventional Series Sixty-five shots, and with all the atomic reverb as distracting background noise, he can start a game of hide-and-seek and maybe get in a lethal sucker punch!” Jeffrey drew deep breaths inside his mask.

“Our job is to destroy him!”

“Our paramount job is protecting the convoy! If we stay on this side of the wall of new blasts, we do that! We’ve already done that! We go through there blind, with Beck having all these new options, we stand to lose both Challenger and the convoy!”

“But—”

“If he wanted to accept the double kill, he’d’ve doubled back at us and it would all be over by now! He wants to live. Nuclear blasts to blind us, then noisemakers, decoys, to get us all confused about his location and course and depth so he sneaks away!”

“And then goes after the convoy?”

“No. We can easily stay between him and the convoy! We’re faster and we’re less damaged! He could see and hear all that for himself!.. We’ve forced him so far south he’s much farther away from his missile launch point than before! He has to know he’ll never get past us like this!”

“Why don’t we keep shooting at him with nukes?”

“Every time we tried, it was a draw! We’re low on ammo! We don’t know what else we might face as we head for the convoy!” Then Jeffrey saw it with total clarity. “The Golden Bridge, XO!”

“What?”

“Sun-Tzu! He said always give your enemy a Golden Bridge, a way to back down but save face, so you avoid mutual annihilation!

“So where’s the Golden Bridge? Who built it for whom?”

Jeffrey worked his keyboard and called up a nautical chart. “There!”

“South Africa?”

Jeffrey nodded. “He’ll limp there for repairs! Think politically, XO! Beck built the bridge for himself, to cover his backside with Axis High Command!.. We won the psychological fight! We’ve beaten him strategically! We’ve got him on the run, retreating for real!”

“Why are you turning away?” von Loringhoven demanded.

“Baron, our best choice now is to preserve von Scheer as a force-in-being. If we make it to the Boers’ underground pens at Durban, we can put in for repairs. We can also get liquid hydrogen there. Remember, we still have those two Mach Eight missiles in our silos aft. They’re useless without fuel. With fuel, they’re unstoppable.”

“But you’re accepting defeat. You’re letting Challenger and the convoy get away!”

“Baron, be realistic. Fuller has defeated us. We’re a floating wreck and he knows it. He’s faster, he has a better rate of fire because of the damage he inflicted, his ship is in much better shape because of the damage we didn’t inflict or he repaired, and he’s between us and the convoy. If we head north past the acoustic wall we forced him to help us make, we’re dead for sure. If we stay on this side of the wall, he’ll hesitate to pursue because he won’t know what might smack him in the face.”

Von Loringhoven was torn.

Beck went on. “We’re in extremely deep water, ideal for antisubmarine detection. He planned that part too. Look at the nautical chart. Except for a couple of isolated seamounts which Fuller can easily send a brace of Mark Eighty-eights behind to flush us, there’s no bottom terrain we can hide in most of the way from here to the Cape of Good Hope! He hasn’t come through the bubble clouds yet because we’re shallow, and we can use our non-nuclear Series Sixty-fives point-blank…. We need to get away from here while we can, before Allied planes with atomic depth-charges close in.”

“Durban?”

“You can blame it all on the sabotage in Norway. The convoy might have gotten through intact enough in spite of our Mach Two point five missiles. By withdrawing and staying alive, we buy ourselves time. We also tie down major Allied forces, who have to stay on high alert simply because we exist. With two Mach eight missiles ready to fire, we’ll be a far, far more dangerous threat than now. You can put all that in your report. Say we led Fuller on a merry chase all over the South Atlantic, and kept him from guarding the convoy directly. Say we allowed our other U-boats to get in closer and score more kills because Challenger couldn’t be there. Say that from Durban we can threaten the Allies anywhere: the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific, the Arabian Gulf. Say we outsmarted HMS Dreadnought sneaking through the G-I-UK Gap…. Say anything you want to save our careers! You’re the diplomat!”

Two hours later, Jeffrey had his ship sneak east of the lingering bubble clouds and noisemakers and the decoys that sounded like von Scheer but were too small to really be her. The air was clean enough now that the crew were out of their air breathing masks.

With no more off-board probes in stock, Milgrom and her people did a careful search on passive sonar. Nothing. Jeffrey ordered her to ping on maximum power, a final raucous screech to find Ernst Beck and say good- bye and really rub it in. He’s good, but I beat his ass decisively.

Milgrom reported a faint detection on the real von Scheer. Beck was far to the south, and heading east to hide under Boer land-based air support.

“Looks like he used his Golden Bridge, Skipper,” Bell said. “A bridge you forced him to build, and take.” He grinned.

Jeffrey was too lost in thought to respond. He had believed that he would certainly die along with his ship and his crew; to suddenly find himself reprieved by his own tactical skill and cold psychological calculation was stunning. Jeffrey had faced mortality before, often in combat. But never had he believed he’d really have to make the chilling word expendable come true…. And yet it hadn’t come true….

This was no time to get maudlin or philosophical, or congratulate himself either.

“XO, we’ve got a convoy to help protect.”

“Aye aye, Captain.” Bell was crisp and lively now.

“Helm, make your course due north. Ahead full, make your depth ten thousand feet.”

EPILOGUE

Two weeks later

The relief convoy made it more or less safely to shore, and the Central African pocket was strongly reinforced. The Axis land offensive was beaten back, and the German and Boer armies failed to come even close to linking up. And tactical nuclear fighting stayed confined far out at sea. Challenger was ordered to the Newport News Shipbuilding Yard, near Norfolk, Virginia, for repairs and upgrades.

Jeffrey, rested and formally dressed, now sat in front of Admiral Hodgkiss’s desk, facing the admiral alone in his office. His patrol report sat on Hodgkiss’s immaculate desktop.

Hodgkiss, that man of birdlike build and iron will, peered at Jeffrey intently. It was impossible to read his face, and this made Jeffrey very nervous.

“I wanted you all to myself,” Hodgkiss stated, “before you start through the debriefing mill.”

“Yes, sir,” Jeffrey said politely. He fought to keep his voice even and neutral.

Hodgkiss picked up Jeffrey’s patrol report, weighed it in his hand, and dropped it back onto his desk. The