THAT SAME EVENING, ON DEUTSCHLAND
Off the starboard quarter, many sea miles away, another air-dropped nuclear depth bomb detonated. The roar and reverb engulfed Deutschland. The shock wave made her pitch and buck, but Ernst Beck got no new damage reports. There was pain and a feeling of pressure in his ears, from an endless day of such punishment. Beck wondered if it'd make him go deaf in old age, assuming he lived that long.
'They're dropping them at random,' Eberhard scoffed.
The temporary stalemate at the sinking troopship Button was over now. Allied carrier aircraft, and fresh destroyers and helos, were hunting Deutschland with a vengeance but she was too stealthy, especially in this rugged seafloor terrain. Another A-bomb went off, further away. A heavy manual slipped from a console top, and the crewman caught it just before it hit the deck. Eberhard gave him a withering glance.
Deutschland's bow nosed up as she climbed a canyon wall deep in the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Then she nosed steeply down, to take the next in the endless series of canyons at an angle. Beck watched the gravimeter. Soon the vessel climbed once more. She topped the volcanic escarpment.
'Sir!' Haffner said. 'New passive sonar contact.' It was a long-range secure acoustic communication; the message address was Deutschland. Beck knew the top-secret transmitter was in the Biscay Abyssal Plain off occupied France. Beck's intercom light flashed — the junior officer in charge of the communications room.
'Sir, incoming message is in captain's personal code.'
Beck told Eberhard.
'Pass the message packet to me.'
Beck saw Eberhard enter the password to access his private decryption routines. The algorithms ran. It took ten seconds for the plain-text to come onto Eberhard's screen.
'Scheisse.' Shit.
'Sir?'
'We're congratulated on sinking an official total one point four million tons, based on reconnaissance satellite imagery, but we're ordered to avoid all contact with the Truman carrier group.'
Beck hesitated. 'Why, Captain?' They were stalking Truman now; bagging her would be a perfect capstone to Deutschland's victory against the Allies' Convoy Section One.
'I suppose it's not so bad. We're to proceed immediately to the verge of the Celtic Shelf.
'Just west of the U.K. 'To establish a barrier patrol and ambush USS Challenger. She's expected to be making for the North Sea.'
'Does the message say her objective, sir?'
'Intel suspects they're headed for Norway. A commando raid against the ceramic SSGN we're building in Trondheim.'
'That would be a high-priority target for them, Captain.'
'The only problem for Challenger is that Trondheim is a diversion. The activity there is fake. Even I don't know where they're really hiding the new boat…. With our superior sonars, we'll pick up Challenger easily, whatever longitude she follows north. We'll turn my old friend Jeffrey Fuller into radioactive fish food.'
ONE DAY LATER, ON CHALLENGER
The CACC was hushed. Jeffrey took a deep breath — and regretted it; the air still stung as it went up his nose.
The final search for the USS Texas was about to begin. However it ended, it wouldn't take long. For the umpteenth time Jeffrey wondered if the enemy had gotten here first, and was waiting for him. He hoped the long- term mine reconnaissance system (LMRS) — a remote-controlled probe vehicle — wouldn't give Challenger away.
'Captain,' COB said, 'LMRS approaching next-tofinal way-point. Now on the southern flank of Seamount 458, hovering at depth twenty-seven hundred feet as ordered.' The fiber-optic feed was working properly.
'Very well,' Jeffrey said. Each seamount here was named by the depth at its peak in meters, based on British Admiralty nautical charts. Though Challenger's charts were online, easily converted to feet or fathoms, the metric reference persisted.
'Sir,' COB said, 'advise that the tether is now strung out for twenty-four nautical miles, nearing the end of both the torpedo tube's and on-probe reels.' Jeffrey frowned. 'If it breaks or isn't long enough, we'll have to go on with autonomous link.'
'For that we'd need to shift Challenger, sir,' Bell said. For a good acoustic line of sight to the probe. 'We'd make a datum by moving, and another by signaling the LMRS.' Jeffrey thought hard for a moment. 'No, I like our hiding place here…. COB, just be careful with the probe.'
'Understood,' COB said.
'Helm, any trouble maintaining ship's position?'
'Negative, sir,' David Meltzer said, in the seat on COB's right. 'Challenger holding well against the bottom crosscurrent.' Their depth was ninety-one hundred feet, at the base of the southeast slope of a different seamount, labeled 960.
Jeffrey eyed the gravimeter again. The huge bulk of the seamount completely masked Challenger — that was the idea.
'A dozen seamounts all together in this cluster,' Jeffrey said. 'The Olympus Knoll.' The cluster formed a rough oval, with its long axis running north-south. The formation lay some three hundred nautical miles due north of Graciosa, a small island in the wesiern Azores.
'Collectively,' Ilse said, 'they mark an ancient hot spot in Earth's mantle, like the Azores or Hawaii.'
The Knoll's peaks loomed high above the local sea-floor, an undulating plain ten thousand feet deep.
'And only one of them,' Jeffrey said, 'Mount 458, is tall enough near its summit, shallow enough, for a Virginia-class sub to survive…. The Axis has to know that, too.'
'Sir,' Ilse said, 'why don't we search for Texas with our gravimeter?'
'At this range the resolution is much too coarse to see it,' Bell said.
'Sonar,' Jeffrey said, 'any new contacts?'
'Nothing but biologics, sir,' Kathy said. 'But advise that surrounding terrain blocks our arrays on many bearings.'
'I'm not comfortable with how thorough' our area search really was,' Bell said.
'Me, neither,' Jeffrey said. 'But we can't dawdle and play things safe. There are badly injured people on Texas…. We don't know what shape any of them are in by now, and we have another pressing engagement ourselves.'
Bell nodded glumly. 'It would be difficult to try to hit Greifswald with just Clayton and his men.,'
'I've been thinking that if we need to, we could try to rig the warhead from one of our own torpedoes, and somehow carry it into the lab.'
'Wouldn't work, sir,' Bell said. 'Security. They're very specifically designed to not be removable from the unit in the field.'
'In extremis? Clayton's good at that sort of thing.'
Bell shook his head. 'Once, on a bet, a special weapons surety guy from Johns Hopkins and I tried to figure out how'
'And?'
'We spent a solid week on it — we were bachelors then, on leave. No can do, sir. Period. Without the right tools and electronic preauthorization, which they didn't give us at Cape Verde, you'd disable the arming suite permanently, and damage the physics package, too.'
'Yeah,' Jeffrey said. 'I'm sure you're right.' There was an uncomfortable pause.
'My biggest worry right now would be Deutschland,' Jeffrey said. 'She could dig us out of this bottom terrain, with her hull and her sensors and weapons.'
