Tidal Rip

friendly waters?”

“Of course, sir.”

“Lieutenant Reebeck is not coming with you this time.” Now Hodgkiss gave Jeffrey a quizzical look. Jeffrey realized someone, somewhere, had decided Jeffrey and Ilse had better be separated. Then he remembered he himself considered asking that Ilse be transferred off Challenger after his previous mission.

“Lieutenant Reebeck will remain here at my headquarters, with Commodore Wilson, to assist me in divining your probable tactics and intent, since we will frequently lose communications contact with your vessel. Lieutenant Reebeck will also apply her skills as combat oceanographer to help the larger effort.”

Jeffrey digested this. It made good sense from the wider context of the admiral’s tasks and areas of control.

He waited for Hodgkiss to go on.

“No, Lieutenant Clayton and his SEALs are not on Challenger. They will not be joining you either.”

“Then—”

“You will be taking on a different team of SEALs, by rendezvous with another submarine’s minisub, as you reach your principal operating area.”

Hodgkiss leaned back and folded his hands behind his head. Jeffrey let down his guard — and instantly regretted it.

“Why aren’t you wearing your Medal?”

Jeffrey hesitated. This was embarrassing. “It was lost, sir.”

“Yes, I know. I know exactly where, and when, and how. The question was purely rhetorical.”

“Sir?”

“Before we resume the other meeting and move on to general business, I wanted to personally make a point to you, Captain.”

“Admiral?”

“This time, once you join Challenger, you are not to go gallivanting off with the SEALs and expose yourself to enemy fire on land…. If necessary to destroy the von Scheer, your ship and crew are expendable. You, as an individual, separated from your ship, are not.”

CHAPTER 7

In the western Barents Sea, east of Norway, Ernst Beck sat alone in his cabin — the captain’s cabin of the Admiral von Scheer. Beck brooded, about what had happened already, and about what his own next actions would be.

The ship’s real captain was dead. And Beck needed to take the von Scheer into the sharpest teeth of Allied antisubmarine defenses very soon. By an accident of geography, the only fast way from Norway into the North Atlantic Ocean was through the Greenland — Iceland — United Kingdom Gap. This nautical choke point — the G-I-UK Gap — had been a major focus for both NATO and the Soviets during the Cold War. Right now, running this formidable gauntlet was the price Ernst Beck had to pay for the von Scheer’s hidden construction up by the bleakest Arctic wastes, so near Russian aid and Russian protection.

Help wipe out a massive Allied convoy to the Central African front. Sink USS Challenger once and for all. Which happens first doesn’t matter — just don’t come back to port until they’ve both been done.

Beck knew that even though German submarines had nuked the gap’s SOSUS hydrophone lines at the start of the war, the U.S. and Britain by now would have planted more. They were even using small and stealthy mobile, autonomous, roving multisensor platforms to detect and localize undersea intruders. A large number of the Allies’ very best fast-attack submarines would be deployed in and around the gap. Perhaps a dozen of them at once, each in its own preassigned barrier patrol box… in reinforcing lines on both the near and far sides of the gap. Not to mention airborne and space-based and surface warship surveillance systems — and antisubmarine torpedoes and mines.

Beck rubbed eyes that still burned from the effects of smoke and seawater. He sighed to himself.

My first deployment as captain, the von Scheer ’s first combat sortie, could end quickly, stillborn. And right now, as per my basic orders, I’m sneaking the ship in the wrong direction — east into the Barents Sea, not west toward the gap — and I don’t even know why.

Beck looked around the cabin. He’d had so little time to adjust to being the man in charge, and even less time to grasp the immensity of the tasks before him. A photo of his wife and sons was attached to the wall, in the same place where so recently another man’s wife and children seemed to stare at Beck accusingly.

The deceased captain’s personal effects had all been left behind at the U-boat base under the mountain up a fjord in occupied Norway. The base admiral’s staff would sort through everything and return the dead man’s possessions to his family with a letter of condolence. Beck was sure the letter would say only that he’d been killed in action defending the Fatherland. Given the victim’s rank, the condolences would probably be signed by someone senior in Berlin — and routed from Berlin too, to reveal nothing about the location, let alone the cause, of this latest tragic loss. This latest of many, many a tragic loss.

Beck listened as von Scheer’s air circulation fans issued their reassuring hushing noise from the ventilator grilles in the overhead. The air had that familiar smell of a nuclear submarine submerged: pungent ozone, oil-based lubricants, enamel paint on hot metal, nontoxic cleansers, warm electronics, and stale human sweat. The ship was running as deep as the local bottom terrain would permit: three hundred meters, about one thousand feet. A strong blizzard raged on the ocean’s surface. Beneath thick overcast, the waves topside were high. But the von Scheer’s deck was rock steady as she moved at an ultra-quiet fifteen knots.

Weather here in the Barents Sea is almost always dreadful this time of year — off the Kola Peninsula, Russian turf, their chunk of the Scandinavian landmass, near Polyarny and Murmansk… and the major installations of Russia’s Northern Fleet.

Beck looked up from reading his orders when a messenger knocked. He stood and cracked the door so the messenger couldn’t see the classified documents stacked on his cabin’s little fold-down desk.

The messenger was very young, perhaps eighteen. He snapped to attention and handed Beck some standard reports from the ship’s engineer. Beck eyed the forms on the old-fashioned clipboard. All was in order with the von Scheer’s twin nuclear reactors. The big pump-jet propulsor at her stern was working perfectly. So was everything between, from the steam generators to the main turbines and condensers, to the massive dynamos the turbines spun, to the solid-state power-control circuits, to the permanent-magnet DC motors that made the propulsor shaft turn. Beck initialed the forms in all the proper places — a captain’s paperwork burden never ceased.

Beck gazed at the messenger’s face. He saw someone youthful but hard, obedient and proud — yet somehow shallow in spirit, not given to introspection or philosophy or moral doubt.

A well-honed fighting machine, like the von Scheer herself, except made of human flesh. A component of a weapon system, really, more than a person. Trained, to the finest standards of classic German craftsmanship and discipline, but with little development of underlying self … A member of my crew.

Outside, in the passageway, personnel traffic quickly became more hectic. The watch was changing, as it did every six hours. The midnight watch was coming off duty; the morning watch was coming on. One of Beck’s more experienced officers would be passing the deck and the conn to one of the others, according to a preestablished schedule. That officer would decide on all aspects of internal ship’s machinery status, and direct the von Scheer’s movements as well — but formal accountability, and ultimate blame, always lay on Beck’s head as commanding officer.

The cooks would be in the middle of serving breakfast now. Beck took a deep breath and savored delicious odors wafting from the galley: fresh-baked bread, ham, scrambled eggs. It made his stomach rumble, but he had work to do. He’d grab a light snack later, or maybe just wait until lunch.

Beck opened his cabin door another few centimeters while the messenger stood there stiffly. He wanted to