last, and knowingly sacrifice themselves? Or, caught in a squeeze, fighting for life, with layer after layer of defenses peeled away and every tactic failing, would Parcelli come toward Jeffrey and bring enemy fire down on Challenger?
Roar after roar meant more Tomahawk launches. These were probably programmed in antiship mode. They moved ten times as fast through the air as a torpedo moved through the water.
Heavy concussions pounded Challenger and echoed off the side of the towering escarpment between her and the Malta Channel.
“Loud explosions! Cannot identify!”
The acoustic madhouse made it impossible to follow the battle via hydrophones. The tactical plot was useless without updated data from sonar. All Jeffrey could do was wait.
Eerie moans, and cracks, and sounds like breaking glass came over the speakers, garbled by dull thuds and sharper eruptions.
“Assess destroyer and frigate sinking!” Bell said with renewed hope. “Assess explosions were Tomahawk hits!” The breaking-glass noise came when the red-hot piping of gas-turbine engines and diesels was hit by cold seawater; the moans and cracks were tormented steel bending and fracturing as the enemy warships broke apart on the outside and from within; the thuds and eruptions were ready-use ammo and entire magazines blowing up.
Torpedo engines continued to scream. Jeffrey heard another boom-boom-boom, then a rising whine as Ohio herself tried flank speed. He listened to another long series of antitorpedo rocket engines light off. I think Parcelli just fired the last of his rockets. There were sounds like shotgun blasts, and these began to mingle with torpedo warheads exploding singly or in groups. Echoes and reverb were more intense than ever.
They subsided in a way that felt all wrong, replaced by a two-toned roar — compressed air from an emergency blow, and inward-jetting seawater; the air grew more feeble, the jetting much stronger. It ended with a deafening rumble, louder and distinct from any other sound so far. Crewmen glanced at each other, puzzled or appalled. Jeffrey and Bell grasped at once the special quality of that rumble, like a deep-throated crump that tailed off into a rebounding pshew. The new noise echoed hollowly, and hopelessly — it was the unmistakable signature of a steel-hulled submarine imploding. A terrible silence ruled in Challenger’s control room, broken only by injured crewmen gasping or grunting, and by other crewmen’s sobs.
“Maybe a few got away in escape gear,” Jeffrey said to no one in particular.
“Don’t you think the Germans will know that?” Parker snapped accusingly. “Don’t you think they’ll be hunting them down?”
Jeffrey didn’t answer. His heart told him that, near crush depth, no one could make an ascent from Ohio without fatal bends.
The corpsman and his assistants arrived with stretchers and first-aid kits. The uninjured people around Jeffrey seemed like they’d just aged ten years. He felt as if he’d aged twenty.
“What are your orders, sir?” Bell asked quietly.
“Continue east and go on with the mission. Secure from battle stations in three hours if we aren’t attacked.”
Eighteen hours later, after tending to the wounded and holding a memorial for Ohio, Challenger had crossed the Ionian Sea. Jeffrey’s next job, the final leg before releasing the ex-German minisub bound for Istanbul, was to penetrate the Aegean Sea between occupied Greece and neutral Turkey. To do this, while Parcelli had still been alive, they’d decided to take the closest way in — the wide but shallow Antik ?yth?era Strait, one gap in a ribbon of islands that stretched from southern Greece to Turkey; the largest of these islands were Crete and then Rhodes.
Lord, I miss Parcelli. Jeffrey bit down his grief. But he kept seeing Parcelli’s face in his mind, and the SEAL commander McCollough, with their egos and strong personalities, both so proud of and caring about their men, brimming with sincerity and confidence, now all gone forever. Jeffrey remembered Parcelli’s cowboy behavior off Norfolk, how the two had argued afterward, taken each other’s measure, and then — on the accelerated time frame common in war — started becoming almost friends. Jeffrey gazed at his right palm, which had shaken Parcelli’s big, warm, reassuring hand. He could still feel that touch, summon up all the sensations of it. Jeffrey’s palm seemed so empty.
He ordered battle stations for the passage through the latest strait. Jeffrey was honest with himself that he was nervous — events in the Malta Channel might portend more bad things to come. His crew, still subdued or depressed, went to their positions as if some of them were sleepwalking.
“Pull yourselves together,” Jeffrey ordered. “XO, put on report anyone who shows the slightest sign of inattention.”
“Yes, sir,” Bell answered, sounding drained himself.
This was harsh, Jeffrey knew, but it was appropriate and necessary. Ohio’s heroic crew had set an example of superb dedication and discipline to the end. Her loss, with so many lives, was tragic, but Jeffrey couldn’t permit his people to mope. For him the hardest part was that most of his subordinates, because of security, had no idea why whatever Challenger was doing was so important. Thus they couldn’t understand the reason for leaving fellow submariners to die, while they themselves sneaked away to preserve their own lives. Morale had hit rock bottom.
Jeffrey needed to take action on this, but he wasn’t sure how. He hoped that as the rest of the mission unfolded — or maybe afterward, if they survived — his people not yet in the know might get some inkling of the immense value to the war effort, and to eventual peace, of what had happened to Ohio.
In the meantime Challenger had to continue alone. Jeffrey was experiencing an unease he couldn’t shake off. It was partly because of Gerald Parker’s most recent behavior. The man had a persona for every occasion, and put each on like a mask. Now he was suggesting that the loss of Ohio showed that Mohr’s extraction might be a trap after all. It could be that Parker was rattled under his always-poised exterior, or it could be that he was setting things up to distance himself from the mission in case it failed, to preserve his career at Jeffrey’s expense. The latter fit with his outrageous behavior in the control room during the battle. Jeffrey had chewed him out in his stateroom afterward, but he could tell that Parker was unrepentant. He pleaded ignorance of the ways of the sea and the customs of the navy, and claimed that his job on this mission gave him certain authority anyway. He came as close as he dared to insinuating that Ohio’s destruction was somehow Jeffrey’s fault.
Observing Parker’s conduct, listening to what he said, caused Jeffrey to have his own serious doubts about Klaus Mohr. Jeffrey hated to depend on people he didn’t know he could trust. Was Mohr, as a supposed defector, for real, or was he a phony? Did he even actually exist, or was the identity artificial, only manufactured bait?
Jeffrey did know better than to second-guess himself on his decisions in and around the Malta Channel. The choice to proceed through there was made in a participative group context, including Parcelli’s wise counsel, and input from seasoned officers and chiefs on both Ohio and Challenger. The final decision had been Jeffrey’s, yes, but he was the task-group commander, and task groups weren’t run by committee. He was sure there would be an inquiry if and when Challenger returned to the States. He’d worry about that later. He had far more compelling issues to occupy — or preoccupy — his attention for a while. It occurred to him that the U.S. might already be aware that Ohio was sunk, if one of her emergency buoys had been released, then worked properly, and its signal hadn’t been jammed by the Axis. Remote sea-surveillance data alone would probably be too ambiguous: A frantic engagement in which Ohio launched so many missiles, with many tremendous explosions under the water, might have served to disguise her escaping. Jeffrey
