'No,' Jeffrey said. 'You're here to help us pick the best approach route, and choose stealth tactics to get in and out of the Baltic.'
'But I don't know those waters at all. I'm South African, remember? Durban was near deep water, right on the Indian Ocean. Greisfwald is two hundred miles inside a shallow Axis choke point tighter than a hangman's noose!'
'And you were very helpful at Durban. You had the best data available. That area didn't matter much to NATO, when the big threat was the Sovs. But don't worry. Everything's provided.' Jeffrey handed her a packet of laser disks.
'What is this?'
'Remember the MEDEA project?'
'Sure. A committee of civilian scientists got special clearances to look at all the classified oceanographic data the U.S. Navy collected during the Cold War. They recommended releasing it, for research purposes.' Pure science, resource planning, environmental protection, oil and mineral exploration. 'I'm not sure what actually happened.'
'Some of it was declassified,' Jeffrey said. 'But none of the best stuff. Now you have everything. You should feel privileged.'
'I'm supposed to digest this in three days? Do you know what you're asking?' Ilse made eye contact with Jeffrey through their respirator masks.
'Join the club.'
Ilse felt angry at Jeffrey again. He'd barely made up for his temper in the control room before, and now he was Mister Imperious again.
'This is Cold War era data?' Ilse said.
'Yeah. Is that a problem?'
'It sure is! All the salinity and currents and temperatures in that whole area, they're cyclical. There are broad directional trends, too. That only became clear in the late nineties! Twenty-year-old data could be all wrong!'
'Miss Reebeck, I want to see a more positive attitude.' 'I—' Ilse was interrupted by a beep.
'Conn and Captain, Sonar!' Kathy said. 'New passive sonar contact on the starboard wide-aperture array! Submerged contact bearing zero three four! Designate the contact Sierra Seven!'
'What is it?' Jeffrey said.
'Amethyste II Axis SSN! Range twenty thousand yards and closing! Conjecture tasked to intercept this ship based on our recent surface datum!'
Ilse unplugged herself and dashed to her console and plugged in again. The steel-hulled Amethyste H's were war prizes from France, state-of-the-art and very dangerous. Jeffrey took the conn.
'Helm, slow to ahead one third. Chief of the Watch on the sound-powered phones, repeat rig for ultraquiet…. Sonar, Oceanographer, give me optimum depth to evade Sierra Seven!'
THIRTY MINUTES LATER, ON DEUTSCHLAND
Above Deutschland Allied aircraft and frigates searched, but she was lost deep amid the countless rugged transform faults of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Beck watched the forbidding undersea volcanic terrain go by on the gravimeter display. He saw the jagged talus slope, the pileup of huge unweathered boulders, at the base of the latest canyon Deutschland followed. Soon it would be time to open fire.
Now, over the sonar speakers, Beck could hear the sounds of Convoy Section One, bouncing off the canyon walls. The noise grew louder and louder, a heavy mechanical throbbing churning whine, the signature of a combined one million shaft — horsepower striving for Great Britain — vital for the supplies they carried, and vital as a symbol of this clash of arms between cultures that could only have one winner. Beck saw Eberhard listen to the noise, then glance at a chronometer again. The escort reinforcements from the north, too distant for human hearing, were also getting closer by the minute.
Beck snuck another glance at Eberhard, intent on his attack plan and his screens. Beck's captain — his boss, king, god, role model all in one — seemed more unreachable than ever.
— The man clearly savored the final moments of stalking his grandiose prey, but this was a pleasure he would share with no one. Off the ship, at banquets and balls, Eberhard was polished, suave, even charming. Now, here was a different Kurt Eberhard, the driven Germanic warrior incarnate, whose very essence Ernst Beck, a German naval officer himself, had always found enigmatic.
Eberhard and Beck finished deploying their initial salvo of weapons, like ticking time bombs. Sixteen Shipwreck cruise missiles bobbed deep in the water in special capsules, positioned away from Deutschland, their chronometers steadily running down to the preset moment of launch. Two groups of Sea Lion torpedoes, and two brilliant decoys, were also loitering out there at stealthy slow speed, their fiber-optic wires leading back to the ship. Unlike those of Allied submarines, Deutschland's outer tube doors could be closed for a reload without losing the wires to units already launched; tubes one through seven held another salvo of nuclear eels.
Beck heard a string of distant rumbling roars. Each swelled and then died away. Several overlapped: more atomic detonations, near far-off Convoy Section Two.
'Load tube eight,' Eberhard ordered, 'quadruplet of Honeybee unmanned aerial vehicles.
'The low-observable Honeybees were miniature helicopters, and a built-in autopilot made them easy for Beck's technicians to fly. They were hardened against the electromagnetic pulse of a tactical nuclear blast, and linked to Deutschland by rugged fiber-optic tether. Their live imagery would be fed to the Zentrale's wide-screen displays.
'Arm the atomic warheads, tubes one through seven.'
Beck followed Eberhard through their special weapons arming procedures. 'All commands accepted,' the weapons officer said; the warheads were armed. In battle, Weapons and Sonar reported to Beck.
Beck's mouth was suddenly dry, and he felt a peculiar lethargy coming over him…. In his younger days, he'd pictured the romance of rounding Cape Horn in a driving gale, or showing the flag for peace and prestige at naval reviews abroad, or maybe patrolling for gunrunners off Kosovo under U.N. auspices, or helping fight against terrorism. But never this….
There was a little time before the engagement would begin; Beck asked the messenger to get him some hot tea.
Eberhard glanced at Beck. For a split second there was a harshness in Eberhard's eyes. It gave a whiff of consummate arrogance, of moving in social circles where Beck knew he could never go. There was a whiff of something else though. Not the warrior ethos Beck expected and could respect — warriors had honor, and practiced teamwork, and loved their men. What he saw now in Captain Eberhard, what he sensed for the first time, was something very different, directed not at Beck but at the world: a sociopath, amoral coldness.
'Launch the. Honeybees,' Eberhard ordered, dragging Beck back to the matter at hand. Beck focused his mind on business, all his doubts and regrets buried deep. Beck drew a breath, in awe.
The air was clear, and cloud cover minimal. The entire miles-across convoy was spread before him, in crisp view from different angles. Hardworking merchant vessels, of all different sizes and types, rolled and pitched through the North Atlantic's mountainous winter swell. Whether steam turbine-powered or diesel, many smokestacks gave off thick smoke, white or black — the white suggested fuel oil tainted by seawater leaking in. The strong wind merged the exhausts into a gray haze blown southwest, above the countless whitecaps of the gale.
The surviving escort warships did what they could to guard their charges, but many of the frigates — the ones still afloat — were visibly damaged from nuclear battle near the Azores the previous day, their superstructures or helo decks charred, their masts bent at an angle, their bilge pumps discharging heavily.
Beck's technicians busily tallied the targeting data: a fleet oiler, Cimarron-class, good for forty thousand tons. A group of large grain ships, and refrigerated meat transports. A giant liquid natural gas carrier. Two so-called troopships, improvised in desperation: the Cape Fear and Sgt. William R. Button, both actually U.S. Navy cargo- container vessels. The hundreds of big steel boxes were modified as habitation modules, each for an infantry squad; Button also carried a million gallons of transferable bulk fuel. Beck spotted the convoy commodore's flagship, a large
