Straits of Power

“Control, Bridge, have men standing by at all hull hatches. When I order all stop and our way comes off, have them come up fast and uncleat the camouflage cover. Once they retract the cleats, they go below and dog the hatches.”

“Bridge, Control, when our way off, uncleat the cover, go below, and dog hatches, aye.”

Jeffrey watched his console. Raptors were picking off the Axis cruise missiles, but there were still too many missiles in the air. The missiles had not changed course. Challenger would be well inside the search cones of their sensors soon. They’ll come in right above the wave tops, straight at me at five hundred knots. I won’t even see them till the final seconds of my life.

Jeffrey had no weapons for defending against threats that moved so fast. Challenger reached the place Sessions had chosen for diving.

The seafloor’s barely deeper than my ship is tall. Let’s pray the Axis warheads aren’t designed to go off underwater.

“Helm, all stop. Back two thirds until our way comes off, then all stop.” Backing — throwing the pump jet into reverse — halted the ship more quickly, since her hull had great momentum.

Meltzer acknowledged. The phone talker rushed below. The pump-jet wash churned forward from the stern, then ceased.

Challenger was a stationary target, with a radar cross section larger than a barn.

Jeffrey heard hull hatches popping open, and unseen crewmen raced to unfasten the camouflage cover. He heard wet ropes being cut with axes. The men went below and the hatches slammed shut.

“Chief of the Watch, Bridge, submerge the ship! Dive, dive!”

COB warned that the bridge hatch was still open. Jeffrey overrode the rules — this was an emergency crash dive. He heard air start to rush through the open ballast tank vents atop the hull, fore and aft. He could also hear, below, the electronic diving klaxon, and COB’s voice announcing the dive on the 1MC.

Jeffrey locked the clamshells closed above his head. He detached the bridge display screen, cradling it under one arm. He clambered through the upper sail-trunk hatch. He could feel that the ship was taking forever to start to submerge. He dogged the hatch, then hurried down the ladder to the lower hatch. He pictured the inbound missiles, each a hungry, flying shark.

Chapter 10

Jeffrey took his place at the control-room command console. The control-room lighting was red, standard at night. The ship at last was submerged, with the Seabees’ cover jettisoned. Bell sat next to Jeffrey, and assumed the XO’s usual role as battle stations fire control coordinator. A lieutenant (j.g.) took over as officer of the deck; he was responsible for machinery status inside the ship, so Jeffrey and Bell could concentrate on the picture outside, and tactics.

COB and Meltzer sat side by side at the ship control console on the forward bulkhead of the control room. Jeffrey had Meltzer steer Challenger north at five knots, to put distance between the ship and the now-conspicuous floating camouflage cover — but without raising an obvious surface hump or wake turbulence that the enemy could home on. With the ship’s hull so near the swells and the sky, this was a real possibility.

Jeffrey glanced at a chronometer, then at the vertical large-screen tactical plot on the forward bulkhead. The cruise missiles had been thinned out by the Raptors, but a small group was barely two minutes away.

We need to hunker down. It’s just too shallow here.

“Helm,” Jeffrey ordered, “all stop.”

“All stop, aye, sir.” Meltzer turned the engine order telegraph, a four-inch dial on his console. A pointer on the dial responded. “Maneuvering answers, all stop!”

“Chief of the Watch,” Jeffrey said, “on the sound-powered phones, rig for depth charge.”

COB acknowledged. The word would pass quickly and quietly through the whole ship this way in a matter of moments. “Rig for depth charge,” as a modern expression, was used to warn the crew to hold on tight and be prepared for incoming fire.

Jeffrey needed to do something to steady his nerves in the few endless seconds remaining until the missile impact on or near the camouflage cover. He felt his heart pounding, and could just imagine what some of the others were going through right now — especially the new people. His important passengers weren’t in sight: Felix and the SEALs were assigned to damage-control parties forward. Gamal Salih and Gerald Parker waited in the wardroom farther aft, to help as first-aid orderlies. They could all be too busy, soon.

Jeffrey stood to make himself more visible, and peered around to inspect his control-room crew. They’d been reassured when he returned from the bridge in one piece, and they’d gotten themselves submerged okay, and now he was there with them as protector and authority figure.

The starboard side of the control room held a line of weapons and fire-control consoles. Since Challenger was much too close to shore to use her nuclear torpedoes, the weapons officer, Lieutenant Bud Torelli, supervised the weapon-systems technicians in person. Torelli had a special-weapons console outside the torpedo room, for positive control when nukes would be fired.

The port side of the compartment held a line of seven sonar consoles. Royal Navy Lieutenant Kathy Milgrom sat at the head of the line. Neither tall nor slim, she spoke with a Liverpool accent that Jeffrey enjoyed hearing. Like many of Challenger’s crew of 120, Milgrom wore eyeglasses — submariner eyeglasses, with narrow frames and small lenses, designed to fit under an emergency air-breathing mask. Jeffrey thought the eyeglasses combined with her build made Milgrom look owlish. As Jeffrey always reminded — corrected — himself, owls were birds of prey who hunted by night. Lieutenant Milgrom was extremely good at her job.

The thing that was missing from the newest control rooms were periscopes; instead, photonics mast imagery would be displayed on high-definition full-color monitors around the compartment.

“New passive sonar contact,” Milgrom called out. “Airborne, short range, closing fast on bearing—”

A punishing crack hammered the hull. It hurt Jeffrey’s ears and almost knocked him from his feet. The crew all braced themselves. Aftershocks and reverberation made Challenger shake, as remnants of the airborne blast force echoed through the shallow water between the bottom and the surface and then back again. Mike cords hanging from the overhead jiggled; the fluorescent light fixtures, suspended from spring-loaded fittings, swayed and cast moving red shadows. Construction dirt and dust — missed by the harried cleanup workers — were thrown into the air. Jeffrey grabbed a stanchion by the overhead and held on tight. Times like this, I miss old-fashioned periscopes. They were great for grabbing. He tried not to cough from the dust.

As the reverbing thunder from outside continued, a terrifying kaboom battered the ship and everyone and everything inside. The pain in Jeffrey’s eardrums was intense. The surrounding sea was so disturbed by the nearby airborne detonation that Challenger lurched this way and that as the ocean around her sloshed. Jeffrey’s hand, from gripping the overhead fitting, felt pins and needles — even though the entire compartment was shock isolated from the hull by rubber pads and oil-filled cushions and mechanical pivots, for quieting.

Once more echoes and aftershocks banged away at the hull. COB and Meltzer struggled at their controls, to keep Challenger from hitting the bottom or broaching. But there wasn’t much they could do rapidly when the ship wasn’t moving; she lacked any lift on her bow planes or stern planes.

Jeffrey waited for the next eruption. In these conditions, Challenger’s powerful sonars were no use in giving any warning.

Nothing more happened. Now Jeffrey noticed that the deck, and console screens and keyboards, and peoples’ hair, were covered with bits of colored plastic.

Leftover crimped insulation from a month’s work on the electrical wires. Hidden behind or under things, hurled up by the bashing we took.

More time passed. It was possible that some missiles had taken a dogleg course, so they wouldn’t all arrive together.