us.”
“Sir, it made the most sense at the time. Beck outthought us both. It’s my job to backstop you, but instead I led you straight down the path Beck wanted you to take. Seventy-knot sprint speeds. What a bunch of hooey! It was all just mental smoke and mirrors. I fell for it too, Skipper.”
Instead of answering, Jeffrey looked once more at the picture of Ernst Beck that he kept windowed on his console.
Then he studied the status screens. Eight nuclear fish were armed and ready in Challenger’s torpedo tubes. Her new towed sonar array, installed in New London dry dock, was deployed. Instead of electric hydrophones along a lengthy cable, this array had three separate parallel cables. And the acoustic sensors were thousands of tiny fiber-optic coils in line, each with its own built-in laser. The subtlest low-frequency signals hitting the cables distorted the coils by the slightest amount, and this altered the laser-light wavefronts’ behavior by just enough to be recorded. The whole system was a quantum leap in performance ahead of even the most advanced conventional electric-based towed arrays. Kathy Milgrom and her staff were using it well.
Challenger was in the deep sound channel, listening for whiffs of the von Scheer that even the quietest submarine had to give off. Infrasonic noises, disturbances with a frequency as low as only one cycle per minute — a sixtieth of a hertz — were caused by any sub’s motion through the water, and by resonances of internal heavy machinery with the hull, and by slow and rhythmic flexing of the hull itself, all of which no known quieting mechanism could suppress.
Challenger was moving at top quiet speed, twenty-six knots. The ship’s course was generally southwest. Though the shortest route from the Rocks to Buenos Aires ran straight down the long east coast of Brazil, Jeffrey had decided to swing wide into very deep water. The ship was between the landmass of South America and the rugged terrain of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, over the vast abyssal plain that separated the two. Here, the bottom was at or below von Scheer’s and Challenger’s crush depths. Here, it would be much harder for Ernst Beck to hide. And here, so long as he stayed more than two hundred nautical miles from the neutral coast, the Joint Chiefs of Staff global rules of engagement let Jeffrey go atomic against an enemy target.
In the last two days, Challenger had left the convoy and its escorts and air support over a thousand nautical miles behind. Now no sonobuoys pinged anywhere near — they were being saved to guard the convoy, or for later, and their pinging might by accident give Challenger away. Now Challenger’s on-watch communications officer in the secure radio room listened for another ELF order telling Jeffrey to come up to two-way radio depth. If such a message did arrive, it could mean news of an Orpheus contact on von Scheer. By now the new listening station on Ascension Island might be up and running.
And now Challenger’s active sonar was secured. The foundations of Jeffrey’s new tactics were stealth and surprise. The South Atlantic was huge — almost five thousand miles from Buenos Aires to the Congo-basin coast. Von Scheer could already be almost anywhere inside an arc with a total area of millions of square miles. Every hour, as Ernst Beck steamed at thirty knots — or whatever his maximum quiet speed actually was — that arc of possible locations expanded more.
Jeffrey’s main advantage, he hoped, was that Beck didn’t realize he was on his tail again — this was why Hodgkiss was holding back on surface warfare and air support: in order not to tip Jeffrey’s hand, to make Beck think Challenger still searched for him near Africa. Another advantage, Jeffrey hoped, was that he himself could stay closer to Brazil, and hence take a shorter route to Argentina, because the von Scheer had more to conceal from Brazil — and thus more reason to hide — than Challenger did. Brazil’s navy was not insignificant, and her coastal defenses were strong. And a third advantage, Jeffrey hoped, was that whatever devious route Ernst Beck might take, his ultimate destination was known: the pro-Axis, prowar faction waiting a few more days to the south. The geography was fixed, and for once worked in the Allies’ favor: the coast of Argentina started south of the coast of Brazil.
“New passive sonar contact,” Lieutenant Milgrom announced. “Transient contact.” Jeffrey looked up, eager for news.
“Contact bearing zero five zero, range extremely distant, identified as underwater nuclear detonation, near the North African coast.”
“Very well, Sonar,” Jeffrey said. “Any trace of von Scheer? Hole-in-ocean contact?” The von Scheer backlighted by acoustic illumination from that nuclear blast. “Ambient sonar contact?” The echo of the blast off von Scheer’s hull.
“Wait please.” It could take minutes for a quiet spot or echo far away to be detectable, and minutes more for Challenger’s signal processors to verify a genuine detection.
The wait seemed to drain the last of Jeffrey’s energy. The Battle of the South Atlantic just started with that nuclear shot. The battle started, and I’m not there to help.
“Negative contact, Captain.”
Jeffrey felt terribly disappointed.
“New passive sonar contact,” Milgrom called. “Contact held on towed array.”
Jeffrey’s adrenaline surged.
“Contact bearing two eight two.” West. “Contact is submerged.” Jeffrey’s heart leaped into his throat. “Contact distant, uncertain range… Correction, contact is over the Brazilian continental shelf…. Contact now held on starboard wide-aperture array. Contact classified as a snorkeling diesel submarine.”
“Axis?” Please, God, give me a target, any target so I can score a kill.
“Infrasonic tonals indicate engines of British manufacture…. Contact tentatively identified as Brazilian Navydiesel submarine recharging its batteries.”
“Very well, Sonar.”
There was still no sign of the Admiral von Scheer, and no message from Norfolk.
Two hours later, Jeffrey almost nodded off as Bell stepped aft to use the head; Lieutenant Sessions came over from the navigation console to fill in for Bell.
Jeffrey watched and listened as COB, sitting at the ship-control station, spoke to the control-room phone talker. COB asked the phone talker to contact the maneuvering room and request Lieutenant Willey to come forward to discuss some engineering details. Jeffrey thought the details seemed minor, but he trusted COB implicitly — and he knew he needed to delegate, not interfere.
Jeffrey decided that his tight, aching stomach might be ready to handle more caffeine and asked the teenage messenger of the watch to get him a mug of hot coffee from the wardroom, loaded with milk and sugar. COB heard this and asked the messenger to wait. He said he’d go aft soon himself and he’d take care of it.
Jeffrey went back to staring at his screens.
Bell returned from the head; he resumed as fire control and general keeper-of-eyes-on-things. Willey arrived from aft, looking a bit puzzled.
COB stood up and stretched, glancing at his commander. “Captain, I think I want to go over this with you first, in private.”
Since Willey was right there, and Willey was senior to Sessions, Jeffrey told Willey to take the conn in his place while Sessions retained the deck. The watchstanders acknowledged, and Jeffrey led COB aft the few paces to the captain’s stateroom.
COB closed the door behind them.
“What’s up?” Jeffrey asked. He caught a glimpse of himself in his dressing mirror. His face was haggard and drawn, and his beard stubble was heavy. As if to emphasize the point, his stomach picked that particular moment to growl, loudly.
“Skipper,” COB said firmly, “there are times when I just gotta say what I gotta say.”
“COB?”
“You need to eat and you need to sleep just like the rest of us.”
