Sea of Shadows

Not even the imaginary canned violence of a video-game explosion. Just two cryptic symbols touching on a video display, joining to create a new symbol: a last-known-position marker for Wolfhound Nine-Three. An electronic headstone to mark the death place of three men.

It took a second to hit him — the tactical display had more to show him than the last positions of two downed helicopters. Something else was staring him in the face. With the two helos gone, there was a hole in the formation. A big one. A gap in the protective screen surrounding the carrier. There was another pair of helicopters at Ready-Five on Kitty Hawk’s flight deck, but it would take five minutes to get them airborne and another few minutes to position them to plug the hole. And they didn’t have five minutes. Kitty Hawk was wide open to attack.

* * *

U-307:

Leaning over the shoulder of the Sonar Operator, Kapitan Groeler watched the acoustic display. The sounds kept playing themselves back in his mind. The distant rumbles of the exploding helicopters. The serpentine hiss of burned metal quenching itself in the ocean.

They were well and truly committed now. After this, there could be no turning back.

He almost wished that he could have fired the missiles himself, pushed the buttons with his own hands. He had no desire to kill those men. But the act of killing them was far too much like murder, and ordering someone else to do it for him felt like the worst sort of cowardice.

Groeler’s jaws tightened. This was murder. The men whose deaths he had ordered were allies of his country, both by law and by intent.

Moreover, their attempt to halt the passage of Groeler’s wolfpack was in the spirit of international law and consistent with the stated intentions of the United Nations.

These killings could not even be justified under the auspices of war.

The fact that they were a necessary step toward the success of the mission did not make them seem any less repugnant.

At least if he had fired the missiles himself, he could have carried the physical responsibility for the act. The moral responsibility was already his. The orders to carry out this mission had come from the Bundeswehr, far above Groeler’s rank. But he had made the decision to carry out those orders. And the fact that he had only done so to prevent someone less capable from carrying them out in his place was little or no comfort.

But the missiles had to come from north of the American carrier formation, and Groeler’s own battle plan demanded that he position his submarine to the south — in preparation for the next phase of the operation.

So the onus of murdering the helicopter crews had fallen on Jurgen Hostettler, the young fraggetenkapitan in command of the U-304.

The Americans placed far too much faith in the invulnerability of their aircraft. It was an easy logical trap to fall into: no submarine ever had shot down an aircraft — therefore no submarine ever would shoot down an aircraft. Everyone knew that sub-SAMs were only a rumor: a spook story with which to tease helicopter pilots. No one had ever seen one — therefore they must not exist.

But the Americans had just learned the hard way that sub-SAMs were not the stuff of rumor. Like the dagger they were named for, the Dolch missiles had cut the American defenses to the bone.

With two quick squeezes of his thumb on the firing button, young Hostettler had changed the face of naval warfare. He had also, perhaps, branded himself a war criminal. Only time and the judgment of history could tell.

Groeler forced his attention back to the sonar display. The hole in the American’s defense perimeter was massive, a veritable autobahn into the heart of their carrier strike group.

He stepped through the door of the Sonar Room into the submarine’s Control Room. “Take us below the sonic layer and then increase speed to all-ahead full. If we are to penetrate the formation, we must be in exactly the right position when their defenses begin to come apart.”

* * *

USS Kitty Hawk:

The deck tilted to the left as the huge ship heeled into a tight starboard turn. To an untrained observer, it might have seemed incredible that 82,000 tons of steel could move so quickly. In fact, the carrier was by far the fastest ship in the strike group, with a top speed of over forty knots.

Kitty Hawk was making use of that speed now, building momentum rapidly as she turned to leave her slower escorts behind. That too might have surprised an observer, but strategically the carrier was far more valuable than all of her escort ships combined. And right now, Kitty Hawk was running for her life.

The watertight door at the rear of Flag Plot slammed open, and Admiral Joiner made his way across the slanting deck to his chair. “Ernie, what the hell is going on? Why are we turning?”

Commander Ortiz looked up from the tactical display. “The formation has been penetrated, Admiral. We’ve got two helos down and a hole in our defensive screen the size of Texas.”

The admiral scowled. “How did we lose two helos?”

“Looks like sub-launched surface-to-air missiles, sir.”

“Sub-SAMs? Jesus Christ, I thought those rumors were bullshit.”

Commander Ortiz nodded. “Frankly, sir, so did I. But the Germans have apparently taken the technology past the rumor stage.”

Admiral Joiner looked up at the tactical display. “You did good, Ernie.

Priority One is to protect the carrier first. That buys us time to think about Priority Two: how to turn this situation around and kick some ass!” He rubbed his chin. “Let’s establish datum halfway between the last-known positions for the helos. Designate the frigates as a Search Attack Unit and get them down there to run an active sonar search. Then I want you to issue full weapons release authority to all ships for torpedoes and ASROC.

There aren’t any friendly subs in the area, so the order is shoot first.”

Commander Ortiz reached for a radio handset. “Aye-aye, sir.”

The admiral’s eyes were still locked on the tactical display. “How much longer before our Ready-Five helos are ready to launch?”

“About three minutes, sir.”

“Get on the horn and tell the flight deck to shake a leg,” the admiral said. “And tell the frigates to keep their eyes peeled for dye markers and flares. Maybe somebody made it out of one of those helicopters.”

* * *

U-307:

The voice of the Sonar Operator came over the Control Room speaker.

“Active sonar transmissions, bearing three-zero-five and two-eight-zero.

Frequencies consistent with SQS-56 surface sonars.”

“That will be the frigates, searching for U-304, ” Kapitan Groeler said.

He nodded. The Americans were performing just as he’d expected. Their tactics were rapid, efficient, and (no doubt) lethal — at least against an adversary who was unfamiliar with them. Groeler knew their tactics well though, and that made them predictable. And in combat, predictable was synonymous with dead.

He leaned over the plotting table and reviewed the tactical situation.

The plot showed his submarine, U-307, at the southern edge of the strike group’s defense perimeter. U-305 would be in position to the west of the carrier formation, and U-306 would be to the east.

He checked his watch. In exactly fifteen seconds, U-305 and U-306 would each fire a spread of torpedoes toward the heart of the formation.

Perhaps one of them would get lucky and nail an escort ship, but it didn’t matter if every torpedo missed its mark. They would almost certainly miss the aircraft carrier, but that didn’t matter either.

The carrier couldn’t possibly know how close the torpedoes were, so it would have to turn to evade them. It