Straits of Power

along the hull. The special superquiet cladding materials layered around the propulsion system’s various components suppressed the flank-speed tonals beautifully. To slow once he reached his station outside Durban, Schneider ordered all machinery to suddenly be turned off. He kept the temperature in both reactors just high enough to prevent the liquid-metal coolant from solidifying.

Nice to not have to worry about any signature from the coolant pumps. With no moving parts, the electromagnetic pumps emitted no decibels at all. Schneider drew electricity temporarily from Doenitz’s massive battery banks. The ship glided to a halt making nothing but flow noise. Then he ordered a patrol speed of three knots, with the turbogenerators back on line. This was enough to let his crew maintain control on the planes and the rudder, and was also enough to let him trail a towed array and recharge his batteries.

Schneider glanced again at his gravimeter display. He liked this setup a lot. The continental shelf by Durban, facing the Indian Ocean on South Africa’s east coast, was very narrow. Only fifty sea miles offshore, the bottom dropped to two thousand meters and then kept going deeper. Before reaching the rises of the Agulhas Plateau to the south, or the Mozambique Plateau to the east, the depth reached three thousand meters — ten thousand feet — and then four thousand plus.

Genuine blue water. Ideal for antisubmarine work.

Manfred Knipp came over. “Respectfully, Captain. Your intentions?”

“No change, Einzvo.” Schneider had taken the conn merely to keep his hand in. He felt no need to justify himself.

“Jawohl.”

Schneider eyed the tactical plot. “I see those two Los Angeles—class boats are still keeping their close blockade on the port.”

Ernst Beck’s damaged von Scheer was being repaired in the hardened underground sub pens dug into the bluff that formed one side of Durban Bay. The whole top of the bluff was crammed with internment camps for American and British businesspeople and tourist families — including hundreds of children — to discourage attack before the von Scheer put to sea. The human shields had all been corralled from South Africa and the countries to her north when the war broke out.

“No indication either Los Angeles unit detected us, sir.”

“Not surprising,” Schneider said dryly.

He had ordered Doenitz into a racetrack search pattern, a long oval, moving back and forth along the coast farther out than the two old American subs. He expected that the high-value targets the Allies would use in this blockade, Seawolf or her sister ship Connecticut, and Challenger or even Dreadnought, would also establish a more distant blockade. The Seawolfs had very strong and thick steel hulls, which let them dive much deeper than a Los Angeles or a Virginia class. They also had more torpedo tubes, and a substantially higher flank speed.

My advantage is, I can move slowly, since I’m already in position where the American vessels will want to be. To get here with reasonable promptness, they need to move much faster than three knots…. I’ll be quieter and my hydrophones will have better sensitivity. Sonar superiority, that’s the key to victory in any sub-on-sub battle.

Now it was just a question of continuing to patrol, and waiting — and pretending to be a snooping Russian submarine if a low-value Allied unit somehow came within its own detection range of Doenitz before Schneider’s sonar men heard it, so he could evade. The Boers had been warned that a Russian nuclear sub was in the area, doing espionage on the U.S./UK blockade of von Scheer. This prevented a friendly fire accident, and maintained the subterfuge that Schneider’s ship was a Russian 868U, not a German one.

At the moment, Doenitz was heading southwest, paralleling the coastline on the inshore leg of the racetrack search pattern. The Agulhas Current ran at this depth, one thousand meters, at about three knots. Combined with Schneider’s speed, this let him cover more ground over the seafloor every hour. He’d chosen to make the offshore leg of the oval be the one that went back northeast, because well away from the coast the current was weaker, and worked against his progress less.

Schneider’s intercom light blinked. It was the communications officer, a junior lieutenant in charge in the radio room: Doenitz received a code block through her on-hull ELF antenna, saying Schneider had to prepare to receive a message through the secure undersea acoustic transmitter the Boers had installed in the deep Transkei Basin with help from Imperial Germany.

“Navigator, give me a course to aim our starboard wide-aperture array at the Transkei Basin.”

“One-one-five, Captain.”

“Pilot, rudder starboard five degrees, steer one-one-five.”

The pilot acknowledged. Doenitz turned.

This is irregular. Why are the Boers sending me a message?

The bottom-emplaced transmitter system had much greater range than the sub-to-sub covert acoustic link that Schneider was more familiar with using. He waited for the message to be received.

Eventually, the communications officer decoded the header. It said the rest of the text was in Schneider’s personal captain-only code.

So the Boers relayed it, without being able to read it.

Good.

“Pass the message to my cabin.”

Schneider next addressed the junior officer who’d had the conn before. He’d remained in the control room, standing in the aisle, because he still was officer of the deck for this watch. Schneider told the young man to take the conn, and get back on course for the racetrack patrol.

Schneider went into his cabin and locked the door. He used his private passwords and top-secret software to decode the message. After he read it, he used the intercom to summon Knipp.

The einzvo knocked on his door in a moment — both men’s cabins were only a few paces aft of the control room.

“Sit.”

Knipp did what he was told.

“It seems the high command’s priorities are changing.”

“Sir?”

“They plan a new offensive soon, eastward, by the Afrika Korps. That’s all the message indicates, nothing about its objectives, but I assume it’s been planned for a while.”

“After the battle for the Central Africa pocket?”

This struck a raw nerve in Schneider. That battle was the one where Beck had commanded von Scheer and had not done well.

“The relevant thing for us is that Berlin suspects the Allies have seen the logistic movements preparatory to this offensive, and they might intend a spoiling attack.”

“To break up the offensive before it builds any momentum? Does the message say how?”

“Allied carrier groups, with their escorting submarines, are expected to stop protecting the shipping lanes from the Persian Gulf to the Pacific, and make a sudden lunge toward the Arabian Sea instead. This would get their aircraft and cruise missiles within striking range of our army’s line of advance through Egypt and Israel. We’re ordered to break off our patrol here and proceed at once to the Arabian Sea, and be ready to engage those submarines and carriers. At our discretion, we can enter the Red Sea as well. Further information on enemy naval movements, and permission for us to open fire, will be sent by ELF.”

“Understood, sir.”

“Since time is of the essence, we’ll need to head north at flank speed. This means we need to find terrain that’s shallow enough to mask us as we accelerate.”

“Jawohl.”

Schneider grabbed his laptop angrily. He called up a nautical chart. “We’ll head through the Mozambique Channel.” Between the huge island of Madagascar, and Africa. “Plenty of seamounts and shoals there to hide us