Tidal Rip

At least he could see through his faceplate better. The inside of the plastic had started fogging up, but now heavy droplets of condensation ran down to streak the fog. It was like driving a car in the rain with no defroster.

Seeing his chiefs make frantic hand signals, he broke cover and picked up the pace.

The deadly contest for the cargo-ship hulk was down to the final sprint. Because of the place where the first and then reinforcing teams landed on each of the Rocks, SEALs and kampfschwimmer were sandwiched in the most bizarre tactical setup Felix had ever seen. The rate of fire was low because everyone on both sides was fast running out of ammo. Felix’s MP-5 was empty, and now he held his pistol in one hand, continuing to fire at fleeting targets of opportunity. It seemed that his men had a razor-thin positional edge overall — Felix’s reinforcements had landed on Northwest Rock, by chance the one closest to the hulk.

Felix dashed along a narrow shingle beach. On one side of him was a slope and on the other was the ocean. Surf broke as he panted along the beach. But around a bend too small to be called a headland, the minuscule beach petered out, ending in a sudden drop from the upslope into the water — a sheer cliff. Felix decided to run, not swim; swimming was much too slow.

Felix started up the slope toward the spine at the top of this Northeast Rock. A German carrying a pistol came over the slope, and the two of them almost collided. Felix and the German fired their weapons at the same time, aiming two shots dead-center chest by instinct — but both pistols only fired one shot, then were empty. Both men staggered backward as the bullets hit outer-suit Kevlar and thudded hard against their Draegers’ casings inside. Both men recovered instantly. They holstered their pistols and swung their MP-5s as clubs.

The German was taller, nimble and quick. But Felix was also good. Each man kept trying to smash the other’s skull, yet every thrust was parried, every blow deflected away.

Felix changed his tactics, trying not to telegraph his next move. He bent for his K-bar fighting knife, intending to rise with a slash at the enemy’s face: the clear plastic was the only vulnerable point of the suit. But the German had picked up a big piece of stone. He and Felix locked eyes for a moment, knife versus rock. There was a mix of hate and admiration in that German’s eyes, and Felix felt the same.

The man threw the rock at Felix’s head, perfectly aimed and hard enough to kill. Felix was forced to duck. By the time he got up, the German was halfway down the slope. He went right into the water and dove out of sight.

Felix turned. His tunnel vision from that man-to-man contest cleared. Then it registered on him that the German had been wearing a tactical radio headset under his protective hood. He’d shouted something as he threw the rock, something authoritative, into his mike. The other surviving kampfschwimmer were withdrawing into the sea.

That guy was their leader, their officer. They’re conceding the Rocks, for now. They’ll retreat into their minisub while there’s still time…. They know we came by submarine, just as they did. They know what’s coming next, too: atomic-torpedo warhead blasts.

Felix ran down the opposite slope and splashed through the filthy shallows. His two chiefs and their teams already had climbing ropes set up, reaching to what was left of the main deck of the cargo hulk.

Felix realized that most of his men were dropping on their feet by now. They helped one another as much as they could as they climbed. Two men were wounded; the dead had to be left where they fell, until later — if there was a later.

Both wounded SEALs had broken limbs, where German bullets had hit arms or legs and only the Kevlar had kept the slugs from penetrating — but the impacts weren’t cushioned by any trauma pads like a flak vest. The other SEALs used one rope with a double bowline tied at the end to lift these two men onto the hulk.

Felix helped from below; he insisted on being last. He took a running jump and climbed the rope hand over hand. He used his aching, trembling leg muscles too, because his arms burned and felt rubbery — his body had very little left. Clambering over the rusty, pitted gunnel onto the even more corroded, crumpled deck, he took stock of the hulk.

His men held the viable high ground. The only problem was, they had barely any ammo left to repulse another kampfschwimmer attack — and the kampfschwimmer might reload from stocks in their minisub.

First problem first. This hulk needs to become our bomb shelter, against close-by bursts in a tactical nuclear undersea duel.

The cargo ship was a mess. Blast and heat had wrecked the steel of her superstructure. Massive cargo-hold covers and cranes had simply vanished, blown off or blown apart, and the hold contents were burned to ashes and heaps of twisted metal.

One hold held what once had been dried meat products. The ashes were soaked with seawater sloshing and slapping through cracks and tears in the hull. The mess was revolting to look at. Then Felix reminded himself that outside his suit there was also a smell.

The deck was perfectly steady in the moderate surf on the east side of the Rocks — the hulk was hard aground.

Felix told his exhausted men to move into the dented and mangled superstructure. Inside was better protection, and also shade, which gave some relief from the dangers of heatstroke. Even so, now that the immediate struggle had died down, several of Felix’s men passed out. Their fellows had to hold their Draeger regulators in their mouths and prop their jaws shut, by reaching through the softness of their hoods. Other SEALs just lay on their sides, staring into space numbly, to relieve their chests of the weight of their front-worn Draegers.

I must maintain team discipline, even now.

Felix posted lookouts to cover every quarter of approach to the Rocks and the hulk. In dark corners, by the sunlight that streamed in through cracked and sooty portholes, he could make out human remains.

During his disaster-diver recovery training, earlier in his career, he’d been told never to look at the faces. But Felix had superb peripheral vision. He could see that most of these remains didn’t even have faces.

He spoke to the wounded SEALs. Both were in great pain, but they coped bravely. Their broken limbs were dressed with field-expedient splints, made from MP-5s and rope.

Felix glanced out a porthole, east. He wondered how high the tidal waves would be when they arrived here. He wondered if they’d wash right over the top of the hulk. He wondered if the hulk would capsize or shatter when the airborne shock fronts struck, after the undersea fireballs broke the surface. He wondered how much hard radiation those fireballs would still give off, in the seconds and minutes after the warheads’ initial detonation, as mushroom clouds exploded into the air.

Jeffrey bounced against his seat belt as Challenger tore after von Scheer at flank speed…. Or at least after the place where Orpheus said the von Scheer should be.

She’s down there somewhere, on the bottom, heading east. We’re looking down at the seafloor terrain from thousands of feet higher up. The ridgelines here all run east-west, so von Scheer won’t be screened from us by bumps or cracks in the bottom…. Right now Ernst Beck can’t hide.

“Sonar, go active!” Jeffrey ordered. “Maximum intensity, ping.”

Challenger’s bow sphere emitted an earsplitting screech, a burst of sonic power so loud it came back through the hull and nearly deafened most of the crew. The screech began to rise and fall in tone, like a whale call. It ended abruptly, with a sudden silence that seemed a portent of doom. Milgrom’s people hunched over their sonar consoles.

The ping was on its way, a spreading blast front of pure acoustic power — a mix of changing frequencies to cut through ocean reverb, optimized by the most advanced signal processors known. Designed to pick out a target whether it was moving or still, to sense its speed and even give its size and shape and which way it was heading… Impossible for the stealthiest sub in the world to cloak itself entirely or suppress a telling echo.

Sound traveled through seawater at almost a mile every second, five times as fast as through air. Even so, it would take half a minute for any real target return to come back.

Jeffrey forced himself to keep breathing evenly. Next to him, as fire-control coordinator, Lieutenant Commander Bell looked prepared and eager to unleash the forces trapped within tiny atoms, and give birth to brand-new underwater suns, to destroy the von Scheer with unspeakable violence and kill