Cauldron

that might have been laid by submarines or aircraft during the past several days.

Sachsenwald followed, flanked on either side by guided missile frigates. With their sonars and radars energized, they would screen their charge from air, surface, or submarine attack. This was not a job for stealth or concealment. This close to home they could count on a lot of help if they came under attack.

Just to be on the safe side, an antisubmarine helicopter crisscrossed the formation’s path, dipping its sonar into the water for periodic searches. Even the fighter patrols orbiting high overhead followed racetrack patterns that kept them close to the group.

Proceeding at fifteen knots, the formation steamed northeast for four hours, crossing in front of the Weser River mouth and Bremerhaven on their way to the Elbe. The German warships actually had to go out a fair distance into the North Sea to clear the shallows, before they could make the turn back toward Cuxhaven.

Nothing menaced them during the short voyage. Once they rounded the western point of the river’s mouth, the covering force spread out while the minelayer went to work.

Sachsenwald was an old ship, but minelayers don’t need fancy sensors or weapons systems. She was fitted with the latest navigational gear, and her capacious holds carried almost a thousand SAI moored mines. Steering a slow, straight course, her sailors planned to spend the entire day rolling the deadly devices out ports in her stern. Each would be dropped as part of a carefully predetermined pattern, weaving a deadly and nearly impenetrable web.

When the conflict started, the British submarine Ursula had been in port. Acting under orders issued by the admiralty, her crew had worked rapidly to off-load some of her Tigerfish and Spearfish torpedoes and to replace them with a smaller but equally deadly cargo — Stonefish mines.

Ursula had sailed from its Scottish base that same night and arrived off the Elbe four days later — intact and undetected despite a few close brushes with EurCon ASW patrols. The same shallow seas that hampered British and American sub-hunting efforts cut both ways.

Creeping in on her whisper-quiet electric motor, the small submarine had maneuvered in close to the German coast, crowded by the shallows and bucking the currents at the river’s mouth. The same eddies that made it difficult to maneuver, though, helped hide her from enemy sonar. The mix of fresh and salt water where the Elbe met the North Sea further confused the sonar picture.

With her tubes loaded with mines instead of torpedoes, Ursula had moved along a preplanned track — firing them one after another during an hour-long, nerve-racking cruise down the main shipping channel. Then, its mission accomplished, the British submarine had crept out by the same way it had come, with no one the wiser.

One of those Stonefish mines now lay in Sachsenwald’s path.

Other German ships had already come near the mine as it lay half-buried in the mud on the channel floor, but each of them had been rejected as a potential target by the microchip in its brain. Most had been fishing craft or patrolling gunboats. A pressure sensor measured their wake as they passed, and spurned them as too small. Several vessels — mostly freighters and barges — were large enough, but the mine’s acoustic sensor rejected them because they didn’t match the sound signatures loaded in its memory.

One of the ships the Stonefish had ignored was a minesweeper towing a magnetic and acoustic sweep. Although the German vessel’s minehunting sonar passed right over it, the mine lay off to one side, not directly beneath the ship. Its plastic construction and rubberized coating didn’t return much of an echo, and it was missed.

Now Sachsenwald approached. She was on the third leg of her pattern, plowing through the river mouth’s choppy waters at twelve knots. The destroyer-sized pressure wave she created fulfilled the mine’s requirements, and the sounds her diesel engines made matched a set loaded into its memory. The weapon waited. There was still a chance that this enemy ship would not approach within lethal range.

The noise of Sachsenwald’s engines grew and grew. When the acoustic sensor’s calculations said it was close enough to inflict damage on the target, the mine armed itself. But it didn’t detonate yet. Although the German minelayer was only about seventy meters away, the noise level was still increasing as she drew nearer.

Sachsenwald plowed on, her twin mine chutes dropping packages at precise intervals. The mine listened, sensing but not understanding the thrum of the propellers and the clattering of her engines.

She passed ten meters to port and started to open the distance.

The Stonefish’s sensors picked up the drop in noise level and triggered the fuse.

Five hundred kilograms of PBX, half a ton of modern explosive, detonated on the seabed just thirty-two meters away from Sachsenwald’s steel hull.

The violence of the explosion knocked the ship almost all the way onto her port side. A massive column of dirty water shot fifty meters high into the air before cascading down on the heeled-over minelayer with crashing force.

Anyone standing was instantly thrown to the deck, or into a bulkhead. The shock was hard enough to break bone. It also knocked dozens of pieces of machinery and electronic equipment out of commission as it rippled through the hull. The ship’s screws, turned slightly toward the mine, were both shattered, and the propeller shafts were twisted out of true. Worst of all, both diesel engines, massive multiton blocks of steel, were torn off their foundations and slammed into bulkheads.

As the force of the explosion whipped through the minelayer it sprung the seams on several hull plates. Some of her structural members were broken and a spot on the hull nearest the blast was dished in. The ship’s keel was actually bent, wrenched out of alignment. But Sachsenwald was still watertight. Her hull was not breached.

The worst result was fire. Diesel fuel pipes, cracked by the shock and still under pressure, spewed a fine mist into the engineering compartment. The minelayer had righted itself, and was starting a roll in the other direction, when a spark ignited the fuel-air mixture. Another explosion rumbled through the ship, killing every man in engineering instantly.

Those of the bridge crew who could stand were getting up when they heard and felt the thunder aft. A quick glance back confirmed their worst fears. A wide, dark column of black smoke billowed high above their ship. Flames licked red and orange deep in the heart of the smoke.

Sachsenwald’s captain, sitting on the deck with a broken ankle, ordered damage control teams into action on the double. He had already determined to fight for his ship’s life as long as she was above water. He had no choice. If the fire burned out of control, no one abandoning ship could possibly get far enough away in time.

But the fire was already out of control. Ruptured bulkheads had allowed the flames to reach the mine hold aft. Broken in a dozen places, its automatic sprinkler system couldn’t put out enough water to keep the mines cool.

Only a fifth of Sachsenwald’s mines had been laid, so the compartment was still packed to capacity. Heated to near-red heat by the flames roaring through the hold, several of them “cooked off,” detonating and starting a chain reaction. SAI mines were smaller than the British Stonefish, but there were eight hundred of them aboard the minelayer — more than sixty tons of high explosive crammed together in a small space.

Sachsenwald disappeared in a wall of water, fire, smoke, and hurtling debris — shredded by a stuttering series of explosions, each big enough to have wrecked the ship by itself. Separate blasts followed each other so closely that they were almost indistinguishable. It took almost forty-five seconds for all the mines to explode.

Several were blown clear and burst in midair, or in the water after they landed.

The shock wave roaring outward from the fireball and smoke cloud was strong enough to rock the furthest ship, Koln, a Bremen-class frigate nearly three kilometers away. Pieces of Sachsenwald’s shattered hull cascaded onto her deck, smashing radar and radio antennas and killing several sailors caught out in the open. All of the minelayer’s escorts were damaged by flying debris.

There was worse to come.

While racing to the scene, Bayern, the other escorting frigate, fell afoul of another