Tidal Rip

Perhaps most important of all to Beck, Stissinger was loyal. In the last two months he’d always taken orders well from Beck when Beck was first watch officer. Stissinger displayed an ideal blend of obedience and initiative; his initiative showed in the shrewd and efficient ways he got things done. He never transgressed the boundaries of what Beck told him to do or not do. As einzvo, Beck thought, Stissinger ought to be excellent at helping him run a tight ship.

I’ll soon know how well Stissinger and the officers and chiefs and men stand up to the rigors of nuclear combat…. And I’ll see how well this von Loringhoven holds up under pressure too.

Beck waited to begin the first task in his mission orders. If there had been some misunderstanding between nameless, faceless persons on shore, this impending meeting could lapse into a sudden, vicious exchange of nuclear fire. It was bad enough that he still hadn’t had the chance to put the von Scheer’s latest dockyard work through proper testing under way.

“Einzvo!” Werner Haffner called out. He sat at the forward end of a line of eight sonar consoles that lined the starboard bulkhead of the control room.

“Yes, Sonar?” Stissinger asked.

Beck caught himself. He’d almost answered Haffner himself, from old habit. Get a grip. Von Loringhoven still watches, calm and catlike. And the crewmen observe my every move, reacting to each inflection in my voice, taking cues from me on what to think and feel and do.

“New passive sonar contact on the starboard wide-aperture array,” Haffner reported. “Bearing is one-three- five.” Southeast. “Range is ten thousand meters.” Five sea miles. “Contact is submerged.”

“Contact identification?” Stissinger asked, doing his job.

“Nuclear submarine,” Haffner said. “Possibly two nuclear submarines.”

“Why was first detection made so close?” Beck broke in. Sound-propagation conditions had improved in the last few tens of sea miles. The von Scheer’s passive listening sonars were very powerful. Beck was testing Haffner and Stissinger as their first real wartime mission began.

“Contacts have just rounded Tiddly Bank, Captain,” Haffner said. “Previously were obscured by intervening terrain rise.”

“Very well, Sonar.” The correct answer — Beck had been watching the shallow water of the bank on the gravimeter. The two new contacts’ positions popped onto his main situation plot.

Von Loringhoven, standing patiently in the aisle, nodded complacently.

This civilian doesn’t appreciate how precarious things are. Are these new contacts simply sticking to the plan, or were they lying there in ambush to outnumber me two to one? Has Russia even changed sides and I’ve been too out of touch to know it?

“Einzvo,” Beck said. “Give me new own-ship course leg to determine contact course and speed. I want target motion analysis, to validate the instant ranging data from our wide-aperture array.” It was always best to cross- check the systems and algorithms — especially at the start of a cruise.

Stissinger conferred with Haffner, studied his screens, and ran software. He passed the recommended course change directly to Beck’s console through the ship’s fiber-optic local area network.

“Pilot,” Beck ordered, “steer zero-one-zero.” Almost due north. The chief of the boat, during battle stations, was the ship’s pilot. He sat at a two-man computer-assisted ship-control position at the front of the compartment. He and a junior officer — aided by the autopilot routines — managed all the ballast and trim tanks, and handled von Scheer’s rudder and bow planes and stern planes as well.

The chief of the boat acknowledged. Hearing his voice, Beck had another flashback, to a different chief piloting a different submarine. To squash the poignant memories quickly, he peered past Stissinger’s head at the waterfall displays and sound-ray traces dancing on the sonarmen’s screens.

Soon Haffner and Stissinger had the data Beck wanted. Arrows attached themselves to the contact icons on Beck’s main plot; their direction and length indicated each contact’s course and speed.

“Pilot,” Beck ordered, “slow to three knots.” Bare steerageway, to maximize hydrophone signal-to-noise sensitivity.

More information began to come in to the sonarmen.

“Good tonals now,” Haffner stated.

Stissinger turned to Beck. “Submerged contacts are two Russian Project 945A submarines, Captain. Course is directly toward our rendezvous point. Speed fifteen knots.”

“Very well, Einzvo. Navigator, plot a course for the rendezvous point.” The rendezvous was halfway between the Tiddly Bank and the Thor Iversen Bank to its north.

Von Loringhoven pursed thin lips. “Sierra Twos, to use the NATO nomenclature. Twenty years old, but upgraded, quiet. Eight torpedo tubes, with plenty of tube-launched antiship missiles, and mines, and those nasty Shkval rocket torpedoes, and regular eels.”

Eel was German Navy slang for torpedo.

“Well able to protect themselves,” Beck said as casually as he could. “Stealthy.” Shkvals scared Beck. He’d had enough of such things when the fuel for his own Mach 8 missiles exploded; both missiles, unfueled, still sat in their launching-tube canister aft.

“Yes,” von Loringhoven said. “Sierra Twos are stealthy. With the latest refits and upgrades, they’re very, very good…. A lot of that, you know, is thanks to long-term dividends from Russia’s American spies. The Walker gang, Ames, and so on. Plus the other traitors, the ones the Americans haven’t caught.” The diplomat chuckled.

Beck brought the von Scheer directly under the two Russian submarines. They’d reached the rendezvous before he did, so they sat halted while von Scheer still needed to move. Even so, with them holding the sonar advantage, they didn’t react to his presence at first.

Recognition codes, from the data disk in Beck’s orders, were exchanged between the von Scheer and the two Russian fast attacks. All three submarines used covert acoustic communications. Messages — either data or voice — were digitized and transmitted as a series of pulses in the one-thousand- kilohertz band, forty or fifty times above the range of human hearing. The frequency of the pulses changed thousands of times each second to prevent interception by enemy hydrophones.

A message came back from the more senior of the two Russian captains. He had the courtesy to send the message in German. “Greetings. You are very quiet. We did not even hear you until you signaled.”

“Good,” Beck said. “Einzvo, return the greeting. Say something complimentary, like thanks for helping Germany build such an excellent submarine. Then tell them to proceed due west and follow the deception plan.”

Stissinger acknowledged and smiled. Beck gave the helm orders to keep von Scheer under and between the two Sierra IIs. The titanium-hulled Sierras maintained a steady depth of two hundred meters, shallow for them. The von Scheer hugged the bottom terrain, for stealth, at a depth that varied from three hundred to four hundred meters in this part of the Barents Sea.

“Those captains would kill to get their hands on our blueprints,” von Loringhoven said.

“Are you worried?” Beck said.

“No. Just making conversation… They’d love to see what good German engineering did beyond what the Russian experts could give us.”

“And what our own American spies could steal for us, that Russia doesn’t know about?”

“That too, mein kapitan.”

Beck and von Loringhoven stood at the horizontal digital plotting table at the rear of the control room. The navigator and his assistants maintained a constant track of the ship’s position, based on inertial navigation systems checked against dead reckoning.

All three submarines, still moving in formation, had increased their speed to twenty-five knots to make better time as they neared deeper water.

“Any minute now they’ll start,” von Loringhoven said. “We’re coming up on the North Cape — Bear Island barrier.”

Beck nodded. The North Cape was the northernmost tip of Norway. Directly ahead, west, lay the Norwegian