Tidal Rip

Jeffrey and Bell sat down, and Jeffrey turned his laptop on again. This time he called up a large-scale nautical chart of the whole South Atlantic, with the bottom terrain highlighted.

“I have a search plan, XO. It’s simple. I’m completely changing tactics.”

“Tell me more, Skipper. More ass-backward Mahan?”

“No. Ass-backward Jeffrey Fuller.”

“Huh?”

“You said it yourself before. Searching for von Scheer on the way over here, we struck out completely.”

“Yes.”

“Now that Sonar’s making doubly sure the von Scheer’s on the run, you realize, don’t you, XO? We’ve scored a strategic and tactical victory against her without ever firing a shot. Without ever even holding sonar contact once in this theater…”

Bell gazed at the overhead for a moment, digesting this, then tapped his fingers to his lips, digesting it more. “You know, Captain, you’re right! This has to be one for the history books. A masterstroke of thinking outside the box!”

Jeffrey was feeling rather pleased with himself. As he gradually had time to reflect on it, the magnitude of what he’d accomplished was almost frightening.

I’ve also made some key people in Berlin extremely angry at me, in a different and worse way than ever before…. Those people have long memories. This frightened Jeffrey too.

He took a deep breath, and let it out. “Anyway, here’s my new search plan.”

“Keep going active as we transit east?”

“No. We already played that particular hand at the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks, and you see where that got us against Ernst Beck. Ditto for searching on passive with our fancy triple fiber-optic towed array.”

Bell nodded. “Shot nerves and ulcers for a week. Empty hours of worry for the safety of our families back home.”

Jeffrey smiled. “Now we intentionally avoid all contact with the von Scheer as we cross the South Atlantic. We waste no time on search tactics during the transit. Instead we make flank speed as much as possible, and hide in the bottom terrain on the way. In the meantime, I’m making you command duty officer.” Effectively, acting captain. “I’ll be on vacation.”

“Sir?”

“For the next two days I plan to relax. Catch up on sleep, eat regular meals, watch a movie or two in the enlisted mess, and hang out with the crew. Maybe even sit in on one of the training classes, pick up some of the nuts and bolts to broaden my mind, who knows? There’s a cool book I want to finish, something Felix recommended, by this famous surreal Argentine writer, Borges.”

“Reasoning behind all this, sir?”

“My intention is to swing north well away from von Scheer’s probable track, and do an end around, and ambush him from in front when I’m nice and refreshed.”

Bell looked at the laptop. “But the Mid-Atlantic Ridge is huge, sir! There must be two thousand miles of broken terrain he could hide in, running north-south, to take the relief convoy from the rear from almost anywhere.”

“Except with the geography, that isn’t what he’ll do.”

“Sir?”

“He needs to move carefully, to be on the lookout for us. Since he seems to know how Orpheus works, he’ll also have to go very slow, or go very shallow, whenever he nears an old phone cable. All this will limit his mean speed of advance, correct?”

“Correct. But Beck will be bitterly furious now, and ruthlessly driven to score big kills and get in his last licks!”

“By the time he’d reach that part of the ridge starting from Argentina, the convoy would be much more than five hundred miles beyond it. His supersonic cruise missiles won’t have the range…. So he’ll have to head here.” Jeffrey tapped the map with a pencil. “The Walvis Ridge. A lengthy undersea offshoot of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Mountains and fissures that slice up toward the southern flank of the Congo-Basin pocket like a dagger.”

Bell looked at the map and worked his jaw. “I think I see what you’re getting at, sir.”

“Both sides of the Walvis Ridge are very deep and wide and flat. The Cape Plain just to its south, the Angola Basin right on its north. So the Walvis is narrow and straight. All this’ll channel Beck quite nicely for us as he chases the convoy.”

Bell pondered. “The overhang of Saharan Africa corrals the convoy from one flank. You’re saying he can’t go for the convoy’s rear, that with the time and distance involved it’s too far north from Buenos Aires? So he’ll go for its southern exposure, closest to friendly waters off greater South Africa?… I concur. The way the Walvis slants northeast, it’ll let Beck make up for lost time and bring him in good missile range of all our ships, right outside the two-hundred-mile limit. He goes nuclear and plasters our convoy hard at the very last minute.”

“If Beck gets that far. We’ll be waiting for him at the southwest end of the ridge, where it first branches off from the Atlantic’s central tectonic spreading seam. Here.” Jeffrey touched the exact spot on the chart. “South of this flyspeck of land, the tiny Tristan da Cunha Island group. This is where we cut the von Scheer off. This is where we fight the endgame, deep and using nuclear fish two thousand miles from Africa.”

CHAPTER 38

Jeffrey’s vacation at sea had come to an end. He was marking its close with a long hot shower, after a final good night’s sleep. Jeffrey thought back on the past two days, during which he’d forced his mind to stay in low gear and mingled with his crew — doing things for once in spite of the war, rather than because of it.

One high point had been that, by coincidence and because of the lull, two of his enlisted men finished their qualifications: they’d earned their Silver Dolphins. The presentation to the honorees, by their captain, was a cherished tradition — and always a festive occasion too. Jeffrey had most of his crew, including available officers and chiefs, crammed into the enlisted mess for the ceremony. He gave a speech, read passages from the stirring memoirs of great submariners from times and wars past, and urged everyone on to bigger and better efforts as a team.

The occasion, and his vacation in general, were marred for him by only one thing, and it came from outside the hull. The closer Challenger got to Africa, the more clearly and loudly passive sonar picked up the noise of the convoy battle. Some blasts could be identified as nuclear torpedoes. Bigger ones were airdropped atomic depth charges. Others, milder, were cruise-missile airbursts, their energy passed through the water.

There was no way for Challenger to judge who was winning. The convoy escorts or the U-boats? The land-based antiship cruise missiles, or the naval and air-force suppressive counterstrikes against the mobile launchers and their radars and command-and-control? All Jeffrey and his people knew was that the fighting was growing more vicious, more destructive, as the convoy drove unflinchingly closer to land to relieve and reinforce the beleaguered Allied-held Central African pocket. But the convoy formation was surely more and more ragged, the escort ships increasingly worn down. The sudden arrival of a super-stealthy SSGN fresh on the scene, with a massive salvo of nuclear-tipped supersonic cruise missiles attacking from the convoy’s vulnerable southern flank, might tip the balance decisively — in the wrong direction.

Certainly, if I fail to protect the convoy from the von Scheer here and now, not only will the war effort suffer badly but I’ll be personally finished, disgraced — prior Medal or not.

The navy was Jeffrey’s chosen profession, his livelihood, his calling. He also knew that even if he survived this war and the Allies won, dealing with the aftermath emotionally would be difficult. The best way, for him, to make