Straits of Power

drive.

Pandora’s cost is already high.

Jeffrey almost jumped out of his skin as another enemy missile detonated in the sky while a different one hit land near the shipyard, simultaneously. The rumbles reached Jeffrey ten seconds apart, because the first missile had been closer. There was more fire on the water, and on the land. The fires lit up the sky. Fresh and stale smoke trails intertwined like strands of fluffy spaghetti. The constant glare and flashes drowned out the stars.

Sessions called again with a slight course correction. Jeffrey passed orders to Meltzer. Ahead of Challenger now lay the famous Lucius Kellam, Jr. Bridge-Tunnel. It ran for seventeen miles from near Norfolk to the south tip of the Delmarva Peninsula, carrying U.S. Route 13 across the whole mouth of the Chesapeake Bay. This bridge had two tunnel sections, each about one mile long, that ran between man-made islands. Challenger would use the southern tunnel channel, to round the point of Virginia Beach as rapidly as possible.

As they drew close, Jeffrey saw that the ten-acre islands at each end of the tunnel were surrounded by lines of tethered barrage balloons. Between the thick tethers of the helium-filled balloons were suspended meshes of thinner, lighter wires, like hurricane fencing.

Probably spun monofilament fibers. The mesh would stop an incoming cruise missile cold…. A warhead down the throat of a tunnel would sever the vital logistics artery — all seventeen miles of it — for much longer than just knocking out a prefab bridge section would.

Out beyond this final barrier lay the open Atlantic Ocean. The water was still much too shallow to dive.

Challenger continued racing seaward on the surface of the water. Ten minutes later, as the antiaircraft cacophony diminished behind Jeffrey but fires still lit the sky, he wondered why the U-boats hadn’t launched another salvo yet. Between them, they could have up to twelve more missiles.

Had they been sunk? Or had they used the first few missile launches to make the U.S. reveal the deception schemes and give away the antiaircraft ships’ and defensive batteries’ positions to spy satellites?

They would need time for such data to get to Moscow and be transmitted to the submerged U-boats by the Kremlin’s extremely-low-frequency antenna. Then the U-boat captains would have to work out their next moves. Jeffrey wondered if this was why there was a delay. He asked himself if it might explain why the U-boats didn’t shoot two dozen missiles as fast as they could, to try to swamp American defenses and overwhelm their target all at once — but have no second attack wave remaining.

Jeffrey’s left earcup crackled. There were no kills claimed on the U-boats yet. They kept avoiding maritime patrol aircraft and helicopters that aggressively dropped depth charges and lightweight homing torpedoes near where the missiles had first risen from the sea. The U-boats used noisemakers to divert all the torpedoes, and applied skillful tactics to evade the depth-charge drops. Jeffrey could hear frustration rise in the voices on the radio circuit.

As the undersea noise and reverb from wasted torpedoes and depth bombs diminished, fresh sonobuoys seemed to show that the U-boats had spread farther apart — to make the antisubmarine forces cover a wider search area and split their efforts in two.

A new report came in. Jeffrey was electrified. Four more cruise missiles had just taken off, two from each of two places. The U-boats were definitely alive, definitely still fighting.

Once again the American antisubmarine aircraft closed in. This time the U-boats stung back. They launched Polyphems. The airplanes and helos scattered, using defensive countermeasures and escape tactics of their own.

Jeffrey was angry. If Challenger was there, those U-boats would be dead by now.

Then another call sign spoke, one that Jeffrey had figured out was from an air force AWACS plane, patched into the navy command circuit, overseeing the whole battle with its powerful radar dome atop the fuselage.

The latest salvo of Axis missiles was aimed in a different direction, more to the south, staying over the sea.

Jeffrey watched the new icons on the bridge-console computer display. They were on a collision course with his ship.

The air force joined the battle in earnest now: The AWACS vectored a squadron of F-22 Raptors, state-of- the-art supersonic fighters, to try to shoot the cruise missiles out of the sky.

There’ll be around a dozen planes in that squadron.

“Bridge, Control.”

“Control, Bridge, aye.”

“Captain,” Bell reported, “four vampires inbound, bearing zero-three-two, range one seven zero miles, approach speed five hundred knots. ETA twenty minutes.”

“Very well, Control.”

Jeffrey could see this for himself on the bridge computer, and he’d already heard it over the radio link, but it was Bell’s job to tell him anyway, for redundancy and clarity.

Jeffrey watched the newest icons, for the Raptors from Andrews Air Force Base, near Washington. Their speed vectors were long, suggesting they were on afterburner. Their course arrows pointed southeast.

Someone very senior decided to leave the capital less protected, to try to aid my ship…. But it’s touch and go as to whether the Raptor icons will get to the cruise-missile icons and stop them in time.

As if the U-boat captains were reading Jeffrey’s mind and wanted to shake his confidence, the radio reported that four more cruise missiles had been launched. Jeffrey watched his screen. Their course was the same as the previous four, as if they too were chasing Challenger.

“Nav, Bridge.”

“Bridge, Nav, aye,” Sessions answered.

“Give me a course to the deepest water we can reach in ten minutes at present speed.” On the surface, at flank speed, Challenger did over twenty knots — but energy wasted by wave making kept her from going nearly as fast as when submerged.

Jeffrey lifted his left earcup and strained to listen to the open air. He heard the sound of water churning up and over Challenger’s forward hull, hitting the support legs of the camouflage cover and swirling past the base of the sail. He heard the whistling of the wind over the Plexiglas windscreen and also through holes in the camouflage cover; panels knocked loose on the cover banged as Challenger rolled. The entire cover made a constant wooden creaking noise. But no guns fired, no antimissile missiles launched. Jeffrey knew that cruise missiles and Raptors were in a race beyond the horizon. He asked himself over and over if those missiles were aimed at what the enemy now knew to be Challenger, or if they followed a different approach course to have a better chance of clobbering the dry dock they didn’t realize he’d left.

“Bridge, Nav.”

“Nav, Bridge, aye.”

“Course to deepest location is zero-nine-zero, Captain.” Due east. “Be advised that that is close to the previous rendezvous point between Ohio and her captain’s minisub.”

“Understood. Ohio should be well south now, near her rendezvous with us. I see no added hazard of proceeding on zero-nine-zero.”

“Bridge, Control, concur,” Bell said. He’d been listening in; his station at the command console was only a few feet forward of Sessions’s digital plotting table.

“Helm, Bridge, left five degrees rudder, make your course zero-nine-zero.”

Meltzer acknowledged, from down in the control room with everyone else.

Even with the gentle rudder turn, at high speed and with her camouflage cover Challenger heeled dizzyingly.

Crap. My speed. Small container ships don’t move this fast. If the Axis know anything, they know I’m not what I seem.

“Control, Bridge, prepare to submerge the ship.” Bell acknowledged. “Phone talker,” Jeffrey said to the youngster crouched beside him under the clamshell half, “when I order all stop, go below.” The enlisted phone talker nodded.