Tidal Rip

be in the North Atlantic at all. It’ll be in the one place where the enemy holds every card, geographically, logistically, strategically…. They’ll have mobile antiship and antiaircraft cruise-missile launchers moving along the coast, shooting and scooting, working in concert with the wolf packs. The whole fight will be on the last leg of the convoy’s journey, in the South Atlantic, with the tail of support for U.S. forces stretching back six or seven thousand miles, stretched to the breaking point.”

Bell hesitated. “What should we do? Reposition the ship? Is all of this work by the Rocks just a waste?”

Jeffrey stood there in his stateroom with the door closed. “XO, I wish I knew.”

CHAPTER 17

Ernst Beck sat alone and lonely at the head of the wardroom table. Two great men looked down at him, one alive and one dead.

To his left, on the bulkhead in an expensive gilt-edged frame, hung an oil painting of the new kaiser, Wilhelm IV. To Beck’s right, on the opposite bulkhead, hung a portrait of his ship’s namesake, Admiral Reinhard von Scheer — commander in chief of the High Seas Fleet at the height of World War I.

Reinhard von Scheer wore a thin black mustache; the hair at his temples had started to gray; his eyes were dark and piercing. The artist of the portrait had captured von Scheer’s expression skillfully, and brought the man forever to life. Von Scheer’s intelligent face was poised somewhere between a dissatisfied frown and a benevolent smile. The smile looked like it was just on the verge of winning out over the frown. From history, Beck knew the admiral had been daring but prudent, inventive but cautious, a brilliant tactician under fire… and an iron-willed opportunist who at Jutland — Skagerrak to the Germans — damaged a vastly superior British force and then escaped against all odds with his own squadrons mostly intact.

Beck looked Admiral von Scheer in the eyes very thoughtfully. He remembered that he himself sat in a different dead man’s place — the von Scheer’s original captain, his former commanding officer, had until recently used this sacrosanct chair at the head of the wardroom table. Did he feel Reinhard von Scheer gazing down at him, testing him, challenging him, as I do?

Beck had lost track of the time when the einzvo, Karl Stissinger, walked into the wardroom, right on schedule. Always empathetic and perceptive, Stissinger saw his captain locked in a staring match with the long- deceased admiral.

“That’s one contest you can’t win, sir,” he joked. “I tell myself it’s just dabs of oil paint on canvas; he isn’t really here, but those eyes, those eyes… Even a century later you don’t want to let that man down.”

Beck turned to Stissinger and smiled wanly. “I know. It’s like he’s our conscience, watching us from that wall…. I try to imagine the weight on his shoulders, that fateful day and night, with fifteen-inch enemy battleship shells pounding at him incessantly. Armor-piercing shells the weight of small autos, smashing at him and his ships and his men. The noise, the smoke, the fear, and the tension. The drenching bursts of near misses, the bone- breaking shudder of hits, and the fires.”

Stissinger shivered and glanced at the other painting, as if to change the subject. “Our new kaiser, on the other hand, is what one might call an enigma.”

Beck let out a deep sigh. “Before the war, I used to think the people who wanted a kaiser again were all hobbyists or hotheads. Sure, Wilhelm the Second abdicated and fled to royal relatives in Holland in 1918, but he always assumed he’d come back once Versailles died down. In the thirties, General von Hindenberg wanted to restore him to power, you know, but Hitler had other ideas. Wilhelm must have died a bitter man.”

“As I recall, Captain, he spent the last twenty years of his life in exile in the Netherlands, chopping down trees for exercise. He chopped down something like fifty thousand trees. He must have gone mad, if he wasn’t half mad to begin with.”

“Some people said, and still say, the Versailles Treaty itself was a major war crime. Enslaving and plundering our nation just to satisfy French and British vindictiveness and greed… And Wilhelm had good reason to go mad. He abdicates voluntarily, for the good of the nation, right? Then he watches from refuge in Holland as Edward the Eighth abdicates in the thirties over that scandal with Mrs. Simpson. That didn’t end the British monarchy at all. The next in line stepped in…. It must have all seemed so unfair….”

Beck looked at the picture of the new kaiser. Wilhelm III, crown prince in World War I, had never gotten to assume the throne. After the coup last year in Berlin, when the ultranationalists restored the crown to have a figurehead, the sudden-kaiser chose the name Wilhelm IV, for tradition and continuity — or because he was told to.

Stissinger looked at the picture. “I frankly wonder, sir, how happy he was to get the title.”

“No one knows. He puts on a good-enough face in public. Maybe they threatened his family. ‘Take the job, or else.’”

“Wouldn’t surprise me, sir.”

“He’s an ornament, pure and simple,” Beck said. “Willing or unwilling, he has no real power at all…. Sometimes I feel bad for him.”

“It’s a weird contrast, the two paintings. Don’t you agree, Captain? Two men, one a proven combat leader, maybe even a genius, in a major war Germany lost, and the other a ceremonial hostage in a war that it looks like we’ll win.”

“Yes,” Beck said. “A very strange contrast.”

“Anyway, Captain, Haffner reports we’re just beginning to pick up traces of the convoy and escort ships on sonar.”

“Already? They’re still very far.”

“Screw cavitation, propulsion-plant noises, hulls as they pitch through the swells. It’s a really huge contact, sir. Noise leaks into the deep sound channel,” he said, referring to a layer in the open ocean that acts as an acoustic superconductor, in which sounds can travel for hundreds of miles with little signal loss.

“They’re still a day or two away from running right over us, I should expect.”

“That’s the navigator’s estimate also, Captain, based on his best guess of the cargo ships’ speed. Twenty knots sustained, if they’re lucky. A slower actual rate of advance, from course doglegs and zigzagging to try to confuse our forces.”

Beck glanced at a clock. “Our guests are late.” He reached for the intercom near the captain’s place, but the wardroom door opened. In walked the lieutenant in command of the kampfschwimmer group, Johan Shedler. Since the salvage of the American warheads from that sunken destroyer, Beck had begun to look at Shedler with respect, even awe — the man appeared refreshed, returned to normal by now, after his long decompression from his deep dialysis dive.

“Sorry I’m late, Captain. I needed to oversee a few things. My men are almost ready.”

“Good, good,” Beck said. “Sit. Please.” Shedler’s full team was sixteen men — only half of whom had been fitted out with and trained to use the dialysis packs.

Shedler glanced with curiosity at the thick envelope of sealed orders by Beck’s place on the table, then stood up again almost immediately, at attention, as Rudiger von Loringhoven entered the wardroom.

“Ach,” von Loringhoven said with evident self-satisfaction. “I see we’re all here.” He held a sheaf of notes and papers under one arm.

“Let’s begin the briefing,” Beck said. “We’re running out of time.”

Stissinger and Shedler paid careful attention. Portions of what they were about to hear were unfamiliar to them, Beck knew, and they both had important parts to play in the details. The purpose of this briefing was to lay out all the pieces for ample study, minimize the chance of ambiguity or miscommunications, even belabor the obvious in order to assure foolproof implementing of the whole complex attack plan.

Beck started. “The entire arrangement is designed to provide us with supremely accurate, real-time targeting data on the Allied convoy and escorts while von Scheer herself stays stealthy and at a safe distance. Stealthy, that is, at least until we salvo-launch our missiles from near the Rocks, at the limit of their