Straits of Power

At the Severodvinsk shipyard complex, on the White Sea in bleak northwestern Russia, just south of the Arctic Circle, Egon Schneider was very annoyed. He had a stack of papers to sign on behalf of his government, taking official possession as captain of the latest piece of military hardware that Russia was selling to Germany. Schneider paused to rub his palms against his thighs for warmth; the yard office he was borrowing in this awful place was chilly. He flexed his cramping right hand, picked up the pen, and went back to work. Each form had to be done in triplicate, in each of two languages, with Schneider’s original signature or initials in multiple places on every page — but hard copy, delivered by trustworthy couriers, defeated electronic eavesdropping.

It seems fitting somehow for it all to end like this, with drudgery rather than ceremony. But the entire process was a closely guarded secret, even in a New Russia that was openly aiding the Axis for selfish reasons of its own. One of which is to have someone else cut America down to size.

The Allies surely knew that the vessel existed. In today’s world such things were impossible to hide. The U.S. and UK were meant to believe that this lead ship in a new class was destined for Russia’s own Northern Fleet. They had no idea she’d been christened Grand Admiral Doenitz, in honor of the leader of Germany’s U-boats in World War II. To the latest coalition of so-called Allies, Doenitz was known only as the first of Russia’s Project 868U Malakhit-B-class fast-attack submarines.

She was the absolute best of everything that Germany and Russia could produce, enhanced by whatever else worthwhile their spies had stolen from the U.S. and UK: Twin liquid-metal-cooled reactors that provided tremendous power for their size, with all-electric drive to big DC motors that turned the pump-jet propulsor shaft — so Doenitz had no noisy reduction gears. A titanium inner hull, much stronger than steel, was surrounded by a thinner titanium outer hull, with a free-flooding space in between, giving the boat a crush depth of better than 1,200 meters—4,000 feet. The titanium double-hull arrangement aided quieting, was immune to magnetic anomaly detectors, and gave tremendous protection against incoming fire.

But it didn’t stop there.

Liquid-metal reactor coolant, unlike the pressurized water used by the Allies, could be circulated by electromagnetic pumps. Since such pumps had no moving parts, they never made a sound, even when running at full power. The reactors were temperamental in other ways, but worth it: The coolant was radioactive, and would solidify if the reactors were ever shut down at sea for too long.

The outsides of the ship were made of a new composite layered material. One layer held grids of electrodes, and the substance flexed in response to impulses sent through these electrodes; the sonar men could use this to cancel sounds from inside the ship, and suppress any echo from hostile active sonars. The outermost permanent coating was made of artificial proteins and long-chain polymers, which were incredibly slippery, increasing speed through the water for a given power output, and further improving quiet by reducing the hull’s flow noise.

Schneider smiled to himself. The portion of this outer coating on Doenitz’s upper works was one of the sub’s most intriguing parts. Other electrodes made the special material there responsive optically — it could change color in small patches, and even alter its reflectivity. The ship could thus defeat LIDAR, a form of optical radar that used blue-green lasers to search for suspicious objects in the sea. Doenitz could also beat LASH, which, ironically, the Americans had perfected but not fully classified. LASH — littoral airborne sensor hyperspectral — used the backscatter of illumination from sunlight, caught via special sensors and then processed by computer, to locate anomalous color gradations and shapes, even deep under water that was dirty; the anti-LASH coating let Schneider’s ship blend in perfectly.

But his favorite thing of all was in the engineering compartments. Another composite material, this one developed first by Hong Kong scientists, but foolishly not exploited by the American military, consisted of a rubber- and-epoxy matrix embedded with tiny lead balls. The size of the balls tuned slabs of this rubber to a specific frequency. The breakthrough by the scientists had been to show how a sheet less than 2.5 centimeters — an inch — thick could completely block sound at that frequency.

This didn’t seem very practical to the U.S. Navy, because any submarine gives off sounds at a number of different frequencies — called tonals — and some of these varied widely up and down the scale even on a single ship as it altered its speed.

Schneider smiled again. The answer, like most great ideas, was obvious when you saw it, and German naval architects had seen it. Use a sheet for each tonal that the sub gave off when making flank speed with both reactors pushed to the max. Flank speed meant as fast as a vessel could go. Coat the inside of the machinery spaces and pump-jet cowling with the proper sets of slabs, and the submarine, once she accelerated to flank speed, would suddenly become very quiet. Normally, flank speed made any sub horribly loud. Doenitz, instead, would suddenly vanish from any Allied platform’s sonar screens; Schneider looked forward with predatory relish to exploiting this secret weapon.

And the new ship was staggeringly fast. Doenitz did sixty-three knots on sea trials, ten knots better than the U.S. or Royal Navy’s speediest submarines. Schneider intended to use his full complement of fifty atomic torpedoes well.

Someone knocked on the door of the windowless, guarded yard office he was using.

“Come!”

Manfred Knipp entered. “Excuse me, Captain.”

“Yes?”

Knipp snapped to attention and clicked the heels of his boots. “Ship is ready for sea in all respects, sir.”

“Jawohl, Einzvo. I’ll be down.” Schneider gestured at the papers piled on the desk. “Tell the tugs I need fifteen more minutes.” Einzvo was German navy slang for 1WO, first watch officer, who was actually Erster Wachoffizier. Knipp was Schneider’s executive officer.

“Jawohl.” Knipp did a smart about-face and left.

A corner of Schneider’s mouth curled up in a sneer once Knipp was gone.

He and Knipp were opposites; both had grown up in East Germany’s stark and badly polluted Dresden, where traumatic memories of the World War II firebombing still lingered. But they’d met only after joining the navy when Germany reunified in 1991, trying to forget their impoverished youth under dreary Soviet domination. Both encountered prejudice because they came from the supposedly backward East, but reacted, compensated, in different ways. Knipp loved spit-and-polish, and took the glamour and glitter of court in this new Imperial Germany much too seriously for Schneider’s tastes. The restored Hohenzollern kaiser was just for show. Anyone with good sense knows that. The real decisions are made by the general staff, guided by an oligarchy of very rich and well-connected business executives. Acting by secret committee, they’re the true heads of state. It was with these oligarchs that Schneider identified, they whom he strove to emulate and intended to someday join. Invisible but lethal power, wealth so immense it need not be measured, privilege taken for granted, these were what drove Schneider’s ruthless ambition.

Knipp was into meticulous procedures and rigorous checklists. Schneider went much more for the big picture. Knipp was married, with children; Schneider was single. Knipp believed in God, while Schneider was an avowed atheist. Knipp was tall and fit and handsome. Schneider stood at only average height, and was almost fifteen kilos — thirty pounds — overweight. Knipp had good empathy with other people, and a warm, approachable personality. Schneider was a loner in any crowd, distant and aloof by choice and by nature, but a polished mingler whenever it suited his purposes — and he aimed his networking high. Knipp was patient and happy to have this prestigious assignment on Doenitz. Schneider was always in a hurry and never satisfied, least of all now. But Knipp was a very good einzvo, and Schneider intended to take him along when he made his next big move.

This was the other thing that annoyed Schneider every time it crossed his mind.

I’m a full-rank senior to Ernst Beck, and a better submarine commander. I should have gotten the ceramic-hulled von Scheer when her original captain was killed. Instead Berlin gave her to Beck, her einzvo… and then look what happened. He’s holed up ten thousand sea miles south of me, undergoing repairs, and I’m supposed to head down there and bail him out like some sort of nursemaid.

Schneider knew it was his own bad luck to be stuck in this drab and filthy deep freeze, beating endlessly on the Russians to get Doenitz finished to proper German standards of exacting quality control. It took years of painstaking construction work, hounding the yard supervisors and foremen mercilessly, and