Straits of Power

Still nothing happened.

“Captain,” Milgrom reported, “acoustic sea state diminishing.” The noise outside was dying away. “New passive sonar contact on the port wide-aperture array. Assess as multiple fighter aircraft flying in formation. Contact fading rapidly.” Milgrom gave the bearing, and Bell gave the contact’s estimated course. Appropriate icons appeared on the tactical plot — the Raptor squadron, flying back to Washington together.

“I think that’s that,” Jeffrey said. “Chief of the Watch, on the sound-powered phones, maintain battle stations. Specify battle stations antisubmarine.” The 1MC wasn’t used submerged, in wartime conditions, for quieting. Jeffrey turned to Bell. “Fire Control, I smell something fishy.”

Before Bell could open his mouth, Milgrom broke in.

“Captain, new passive sonar contact on starboard wide-aperture array.” The wide-aperture arrays were sets of three rectangular hydrophone complexes, mounted along the ship’s hull, one set each on her port and starboard sides. Because they were two-dimensional and rigid, unlike a towed array, and their spacing gave a much broader maw to catch sound waves than Challenger’s bow sphere, the wide-aperture arrays were extremely sensitive. Special signal-processing algorithms could use their data to do an extremely powerful surveillance of the seas outside.

“Sir,” Milgrom said, “contact is signal from a friendly, disposable acoustic-link modem.” A small, programmable, underwater buoy, which repeatedly transmitted a message by secure, covert, extremely high- frequency sound. The sound was low power, and shifted around many times per second in the two thousand kilohertz band — a hundred times above the limit of human hearing. Despite this, modems could have ranges of tens of miles. The frequency-agile design made it almost impossible for an enemy not possessing the proper specifications to even detect the transmission: It jumped much faster than the minimum time interval over which an enemy sonar system had to hear a steady tone before calling it signal rather than noise without overwhelming false-alarm rates. Decoding the transmission was a separate problem, assuming a hostile detection could ever be made.

“Message decrypted by radio room. Message is from USS Ohio, Captain. Relaying now to your console in plain text.” All done through the fiber-optic LAN.

“Very well, Sonar.”

Jeffrey sat and windowed the message in a corner of his main screen.

The message was from Captain Parcelli. It was more than an hour old. Jeffrey waved for Bell to lean over and read it with him. They both got the idea pretty quickly, and gave each other meaningful, worried, annoyed looks. They went back to reading, and finished.

Since Parcelli’s ship, as a former boomer, was half again as long as Jeffrey’s, this gave the wide-aperture arrays she’d been equipped with — late in her conversion to an SSGN — even more sensitivity than Challenger’s. After Parcelli rejoined Ohio his sonar people detected the Axis missile launches, much farther inshore than American fast-attack submarines had expected, from what Admiral Hodgkiss had said in his final briefing. Parcelli decided to engage the enemy, as the best available platform within effective striking distance. His nuclear-powered sustained flank speed was almost twenty-five knots, faster by several knots than the enemy class 212s at their very fastest. And the class 212 diesel boats, with only fuel-cell air-independent propulsion and storage-battery power available while running well submerged, could keep to their top speed for only short bursts of time.

Even Ohio was noisy at flank speed, especially carrying minisubs with their extra flow noise, and Parcelli intended to use this to charge the launch point of the cruise missiles, then offer battle with the two U-boats. His assessment was that they would have brought a few torpedoes, to fire at targets of opportunity, so they would accept battle, and close the range on Ohio. Once within torpedo striking distance of each other, Parcelli intended to suddenly slow, then use his ship’s superior quieting, her vastly superior sonars and signal-processing computers, her much larger stock of decoys and countermeasures compared to the little 212s — and other systems advantages — to destroy the U-boats. The message ended by suggesting a revised rendezvous point, well to the north, near where the U-boats would be found. The exact location was specified in the message by an offset to the original classified location, to reduce the already slim chance of an enemy reading the message and arranging an ambush.

Jeffrey fought to keep himself under control. He felt his face turn crimson.

Bell said it for him, by typing on the console so no one would hear. “Looks like we have a real cowboy on our hands, Skipper!” Bell quickly erased the message.

Jeffrey nodded, tight lipped, not trusting himself to speak.

Parcelli had disobeyed orders and was endangering his ship against targets that were not his to attack. Ohio was not expendable in this context. Parcelli was even exposing himself to friendly fire — his hunt would surely take him outside today’s secret Allied submarine safe corridors.

He’s trying to rack up some kills early on, to lord it over me for the rest of the mission.

I cannot allow this. Period.

“You said you smelled something fishy, sir?” Bell prodded.

“Uh, yeah. Thanks, XO.”

One thing Jeffrey couldn’t do as task-group commander was lose his temper. He would deal with Parcelli in good time.

“The Two-twelves, XO. Never mind how they sneaked so close to Norfolk.” If they had a month or more to cruise along at four or five knots from the coast of occupied France, and drift with undersea currents, or hide under surface storms or neutral merchant ships and so on, I can see that they might have done it stealthily enough. “The Germans know we put in at Newport News for repairs, that much we couldn’t hide. It’s even possible they’d originally been dispatched to go after a supercarrier leaving port, or some other high-value target, but then Challenger entered the picture, so their orders were changed by ELF.”

“Concur, Captain. With you so far.”

“And part of the why of them sneaking so near is obvious, now that we’ve got twenty-twenty hindsight from that close shave just now.”

“Shorter flight time for their missiles. Less inertial navigation drift, for a better precision assault on our dry dock. And as we saw for ourselves, a lot less margin for our side to man the defenses…. We never spotted a hint of the smoke screen we were promised.”

Jeffrey nodded. “And leave out how they knew exactly when to launch, what day, what hour. It can’t be just coincidence. It has to be from signals intercepts, or something they saw on spy satellites, or word they got from informers or moles. We’ll hash that through with Mr. Parker and Captain Parcelli later. Another aspect of why is much more relevant, here and now.”

“Sir?”

“If they come well inside the two-hundred-mile limit, they know we won’t use nukes against them. That greatly evens the odds, in a sub-on-sub or sub versus antisubmarine battle.”

Bell caught on immediately. “As witnessed by the lack of success of our maritime patrol aircraft and the ASW helos.”

“Right. The announced Axis ROEs mean they won’t use nuclear weapons within the two-hundred-mile limit of the U.S. homeland either… assuming the U-boats obey the ROEs even if facing certain death, or their ROEs haven’t been secretly changed.” Jeffrey watched Bell grimace. “There’s another scary thing, XO.”

“Captain?”

“Fuel endurance. By coming this close, and assuming it wasn’t a one-way suicide mission, which I seriously doubt, ’cause that’s not their culture, they added almost two thousand miles to their round-trip home. The class Two-twelves can’t handle that.”

“You think they—”

“Yup. They must have had refueling support. Probably a class Two-fourteen long-endurance modified milch- cow sub.”

“Oh boy. Undersea replenishment.”

“If you were that Two-fourteen, where would you plan your next refueling meet with the Two-twelves?”