'Cavitating, surface wake, and thermal scarring,' Jeffrey said, 'we have to chance it. Sometimes you just play the percentages, and pray.'
SIMULTANEOUSLY, ON DEUTSCHLAND
Ernst Beck glanced at the navigation plot, as Deutschland snuck through the shallow waters ten sea miles due north of lie d'Ouessant, off the coast of occupied France. The ship was entering the English Channel.
It felt strange to be this close to home, and yet have home so far beyond Beck's reach. He pictured the base at Bordeaux, where his family now lived, and the industries of Munich, near his father's farm. Both would be high on the list of Allied targeting priorities, if the A-bombs or even H-bombs started to fly — the high-explosive cruise missiles and bomber raids were bad enough.
It was a very delicate gamble the Putsch leaders tried to play out now, confining atomic war to the high seas, or purely military targets on land in isolated areas, hoping to wear down the enemy's will to resist, hoping to force them to ask for an armistice. The Allies hadn't wrought direct revenge for nuking Warsaw and Tripoli, at least not yet — they'd been too shocked by such Axis blows that opened the war, and too squeamish since then to set off a nuclear warhead of their own in the middle of Europe. Perhaps the Allied leaders quietly agreed, as Kurt Eberhard once cynically put it to Beck, that Warsaw and Tripoli had been the two most expendable cities in the world.
But how long could this precarious balance last?
Beck heard Eberhard speaking with Werner Haffner at the sonar consoles. Beck wondered if Deutschland's presence in the Channel, now that she was being hunted theater-wide, would itself be the wild card that led to the dreaded escalation, to mushroom clouds on London and Berlin, on New York and Johannesburg.
ALMOST ONE DAY LATER: 0215 LOCAL TIME, 0 DAY MINUS 2
Everyone on Challenger was at battle stations. Jeffrey had the conn. He finished his latest coffee, returning the plastic mug to his console's cup holder. The CACC was rigged for black, the only light the glow of instruments and console screens. Conversation was kept to a bare minimum. Challenger's LMRS probe was two thousand yards in front of the ship, scouting for German mines and unreported wrecks, inside the narrow British submarine safe- corridor-of-the-day.
For the last few hours Challenger had steamed at a risky nine knots in mid-Channel, where the water was almost two hundred feet deep. Now, with Dover to port and Calais to starboard, barely eighteen nautical miles apart, the depth was half that; Jeffrey'd had to slow, but the fast tide and prevailing current gave them a push. Now, with deadest night above them, things were quiet. They were almost through, into the North Sea. The magnetometers showed a solar storm strength of G3, what NASA called 'strong.' Jeffrey wondered if this could make mines go off on their own, including British mines. A manufacturing flaw, or sabotage by Axis agents, or combat damage could never be ruled out. A lot of the mines along here were CAPTORs, which unleashed a Mark 46 torpedo to chase and destroy its quarry. Many mines lay inside the minimum arming run of Challenger's antitorpedo rockets.
Jeffrey took a deep breath, and tried to ease the tension in his neck and shoulders. He lifted his coffee mug, then remembered it was empty. He opened his mouth to ask the messenger for a refill.
'New passive sonar contact!' Kathy interrupted. 'On the starboard wide-aperture array.
Surface contact, bearing zero nine five, range ten thousand yards.' In such terribly shallow water, with the uneven bottom and shoals, detection ranges were unpredictable, and dangerously short.
'Range closing rapidly,' Kathy said. 'Tonals indicate multiple Axis diesel engines.'
'Classification?' Jeffrey snapped. He had no need of caffeine now — adrenaline surged.
'Class one-thirty corvettes! Three, no, four one-thirties! Advancing at flank speed in echelon formation, almost forty knots, directly at us!'
'Put it on the speakers,' Jeffrey said. He heard the roar of all those diesels, four per ship, and the high-speed churning of many variable-pitch props.
'Those things are shallow draft, but I'm not taking chances. Oceanographer, what's the bottom?'
'Sand and gravel,' Ilse said.
'Helm, all stop. Chief of the Watch, bottom the boat.' 'Sir,' Bell said, 'if they spot us we'll be helpless.' 'Not entirely. Bottom the boat.'
'Captain, advise we use the wide-aperture arrays in active echo suppression and hole plug mode.'
'Negative, XO. This close in that won't work well. I'd rather play dead. Let them think we're a wreck, if they spot us.' Not that that would help much, Jeffrey knew. Both sides bombed wrecks all the time.
Ernst Beck watched the tactical plot as the squadron of Class 130's passed almost directly overhead. He could hear them through the hull, very easily. He felt as if he could almost reach and touch them.
Give them hell, he projected his thoughts to the corvette sailors, as Deutschland followed the German submarine safe corridor near the Out Ruytingen shoal off Belgium.
'New passive contact on the port wide-aperture array,' Haffner said.
'What is it, Sonar?' Beck said.
'Multiple lift fans and airscrews… four Royal Navy Type two-thousand hovercraft!'
'Armed with Harpoon missiles and lightweight mines,' Beck said.
'Hovercraft bearing two eight nine, range ten thousand meters. Signal strength increasing rapidly.'
'Hostile contact's course is east-southeast. Type two-thousands making forty knots, on an interception course with our one-thirties.'
'We're caught under a mining/countermining skirmish,' Eberhard said. 'Pilot, all stop. Let us drift with the current while they fight it out.'
Jeffrey listened to the melee develop overhead. Fire control technicians tried to track the action.
Jeffrey heard the roaring whoosh as Harpoon anti-shipping missiles launched. The Germans retaliated, also with Harpoons. All contacts showed high bearing rates of change, and their engines strained deafeningly as they fought to evade the missiles. Missiles struck home with dreadful whumps. Ammo and mine stocks blew up, crackling and erupting. Ships sank and men died.
Kathy announced more contacts. British light hydrofoils were moving in from the north to back up the surviving Type 2000 hovercraft. More volleys of missiles took to the air. Now Jeffrey could hear the steady pounding of Axis OTOBreda 76mm cannon. They were answered by Allied 30mm Oerlikons, faster but not as loud. Armor- piercing shells smashed home and burst, or missed and smacked the sea and burst.
Four Royal Navy frigates, Cornwall-class, rounded Goodwin Sands, making flank speed, thirty knots. Each one's twin gas turbines screamed louder still, at full military power. Another squadron of Class 130's was tearing west from Calais. Helos lifted from the ships. Their engines and rotors added to the din, as German Lynx fought British Sea Kings in an air war of their own.
More ship-to-ship missiles ripped by overhead, and engines whined and roared and roared and whined from all around, mixed with the clattering, beating roar of the helos. Still the Oerlikons and Bredas clashed.
A Class 130 was hit and blew up instantly, and Challenger rocked. The hulk struck the bottom almost at once, somewhere to starboard. A Cornwall was hit repeatedly by more Harpoons. It slowed. Another salvo peppered the ship as she beached on Goodwin Sands. Her magazine exploded, killing anyone still alive, and Challenger rocked. Air-to-air missiles flashed between the helos again. More warheads detonated, avgas detonated, flesh and wreckage rained onto the sea.
A Class 130 streaked down Challenger's port side, less than a hundred feet away. Jeffrey heard a slash- splashsplash-splash-splash.
Mines.
Beck listened to the battle raging to port. Deutschland wasn't in the thick of it, but a stray Harpoon might hit the water above, and its warhead equaled a medium-weight torpedo's punch.
The navigator announced the tide was changing, falling, here on the French side of the Dover Strait. Beck
