Tidal Rip

sense of the chaos and sacrifice and slaughter, to heal the mind-tearing randomness of who lived and who died, would be to stay on active duty. The best way he knew to honor those who’d fallen would be to carry on in uniform himself, on their behalf. Yet all that might be ripped from him by brutal Washington politics, his career truncated by factors beyond his control. He’d be cast up on the beach forever, bereft, just as his father, Michael Fuller, had cautioned. The thought of that pained Jeffrey far more than the thought of being killed.

Jeffrey knew the stakes were just as high, both strategically and personally, for Ernst Beck as they were for him. The enemy captain had failed off South America. As Bell warned Jeffrey two days ago, the German would be fired up, red-hot, burning for achievement and revenge — and he would make very sure that this time he didn’t fail.

Jeffrey said one final heartfelt prayer that he’d guessed right, that the von Scheer would come along the Walvis Ridge. Then he turned off the shower and toweled dry. As he dressed he glanced at his bed.

Depending on how things go, the next sleep I ever see might well be my and my entire crew’s eternal rest.

Jeffrey remembered what Admiral Hodgkiss had told him in the beginning: In a one-for-one exchange against the von Scheer, to defend the convoy and assure the relief of the Congo-Basin pocket, Challenger and all aboard her were expendable.

Jeffrey had his ship at battle stations. All compartments reported manned and ready in record time. Everyone in the control room shared the electric feeling, a mix of excitement and stress: the final showdown was about to unfold, in an ongoing clash with the mighty von Scheer that already was Challenger’s longest continuous engagement during the war — and probably with the highest stakes the crew had ever fought for.

Jeffrey called his weapons officer, Lieutenant Torelli, to take the conn. He asked Lieutenant Willey, the engineer, to send one of his junior officers forward to act as fire control.

“XO, Sonar,” Jeffrey said, “join me and Lieutenant Sessions at the navigation plotting table. It’s strategy time.”

Bell and Milgrom gathered with Jeffrey and Sessions at the back of the control room. They grouped around the desk-high digital navigation console. The assistant navigator, a senior chief, worked with the enlisted men on the vital task of tracking the ship’s exact position and warning of navigational hazards.

“Show me a chart of everything,” Jeffrey said, “from the whole west coast of Africa out to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge.”

The assistant navigator worked his keyboard. The chart appeared on a wide-screen display. Land edged the top and the right side of the picture — there was an upside-down L-shaped bend in the very long African shoreline, at Cameroon. Jeffrey and his officers leaned closer to study the chart; these caucuses always helped his people bond.

The ship was at a depth of ten thousand feet, in the foothills of the Walvis Ridge. The control room was rigged for red. Preparing for an attack, the compartment was crowded. Almost two dozen people manned every console seat or stood in the aisles. There was a heavy sense of expectation, a strong drive to contribute to the larger fight. Noise came over the sonar speakers, amplified from in the distance.

“Listen to that,” Sessions said.

Far to the north, the convoy battle raged. Dozens of cargo ships and warships of every type — and navy auxiliaries ranging from deep-draft fleet-replenishment oilers to ammunition carriers — churned and throbbed and growled their way through the sea. Active sonars on the hulls of frigates and cruisers pinged from the surface. Dipping sonars lowered from antisubmarine helos probed above and below the thermal layer. Almost countless SSQ-75 active sonobuoys pinged from deep on the ocean floor. Friendly fast-attack subs worked hard too, unheard and unseen. The air battle over the ocean, and inland past the African shore, Jeffrey could only guess at and try to picture in his mind. The shattering fear and stark terror of all the combat, the fury and the agony, he could only project from memories of his own exposure to war.

“The antisubmarine searches are intensifying,” Milgrom said.

Jeffrey tried not to think about the suffering of troops and civilians, trapped in the pocket for almost nine months. Malnourished, wounded, badly short of medical supplies, ravaged by emerging new strains of Lassa fever, O’nyong nyong fever, hemorrhagic fever, cholera, those people needed help soon. The eastern flank of the pocket was protected by natural barriers: the Great Rift Valley was the best antitank trap in the world. The north-south string of Lake Tanganyika, Lake Victoria, Lake Turkana, and lesser lakes, halted any major enemy troop advance.

But the western flank of the pocket, anchored on the lowlands of the South Atlantic shore, was vulnerable and exposed in the face of modern combat bridging equipment and armored vehicles — based on the Russian model — designed for crossing rivers under fire. If the coastline was pinched off, hospital ships would lose friendly harbors in which to moor, and their guaranteed safe passage at sea would be useless.

A distant rumble sounded through the water, rising to a crescendo that died off abruptly — a nuclear blast. Then another crack of thunder pulsed through the sea, and then another.

“I never get used to that sound,” Bell said.

Somewhere out there, ships and aircraft and subs and enemy subs continued their battle of attrition, wearing one another down, inflicting and taking losses. Modern Axis U-boats prowled and risked death to score kills. Equipped with air-independent propulsion, or even with nuclear power, and armed with atomic torpedoes, they posed a deadly threat. Sometimes the port wide-aperture array, aimed toward the battle as Challenger steamed northeast, detected other active pings: U-boats, cornered in end- stage melees, sacrificing themselves to try to sink an Allied ship that cost twenty times as much to build and held a hundred, two hundred times as many people aboard.

Another sharp crack sounded, seeming closer than the others. Jeffrey saw his crewmen flinch, more from sympathy or concern, or out of hate.

Jeffrey felt the pressure of command leadership on his shoulders. It seemed to rival the pressure outside, squeezing Challenger’s hull: two tons for each square inch.

“They need our help,” he told the control room at large in his best, most steely voice, “and I intend to see they get it. A swarm of von Scheer’s missiles coming over the horizon would spoil the rest of their day. I intend to see the von Scheer never lives to launch her missiles.”

There was a murmur of agreement, of readiness among the crew. They began to merge their identities into one collective whole. The enlisted men, in their blue cotton overalls, began to act as what they called themselves with pride: “blue tools,” well-trained cogs in Jeffrey’s machine. Each officer was now an extension of the captain’s own combat mental process, honed to his or her duties by endless drills and indoctrination, tempered in previous battles with Jeffrey acting as their boss. The chiefs, the down-to-earth and salty foremen of the ship, the guys who “had the answers,” supervised their sections and made very sure all orders were translated into concrete and well- executed tasks.

Jeffrey cleared his throat and pointed at the northern part of the large-scale chart, at the ocean south of North Africa. Bell, Milgrom, and Sessions listened carefully.

“This line of seamounts up here slants down from the Bight of Biafra all the way to St. Helena. Most of those peaks are shallow enough for a U-boat to use to hide. The range of subsonic cruise missiles launched from the overhanging North African coast covers the whole Gulf of Guinea and extends way down to here.” Jeffrey traced his index finger along a red arc on the chart, a thousand miles below the enemy-occupied shoreline that ran left to right — west to east — from Liberia past Ghana to Nigeria. “Those cruise missiles happen to cover the Bight of Biafra seamounts and almost reach St. Helena. That gives important air support to the U-boats. It creates a bastion for them, subject to real risk only from our fast-attack submarines.”

Bell, Milgrom, and Sessions nodded.

Jeffrey went on. “We know the convoy’s steaming in a broad hook south of this red arc, staying out of range of those missiles as long as they can.” He glanced at the assistant navigator. A broad blue arrow popped onto the map display, aiming at the right side of the chart, to mark the route of the convoy. The arrow lay over the very deep Angola Basin. “As the convoy turns northeast, and rounds the home stretch to the friendly-held shore from Gamba