'They know about the solar storm, too,' Jeffrey said. 'Any spy satellite that didn't shut down by now would've fried…. By the time this storm is past, he'll be underway again, either back into the North Sea or submerged in the Baltic proper.'
'It's outrageous,' Bell said. 'How can they call themselves neutral, pulling an act like this?'
'Their H-bombs and ICBMs, that's how.'
'Sirs,' Kathy said, 'think of Churchill and Roosevelt, with Lend-Lease before Pearl Harbor.'
Touche, Jeffrey thought. While still officially neutral, FDR gave the Brits fifty old destroyers. 'Meanwhile, folks, we just lost our umbrella, and we have thirty miles to go before we can drop off the minisub…. Plus, as a belligerent, we're violating Swedish neutrality ourselves.'
Jeffrey ordered the helm to hold position on autohover. Now that the Delta was clear, he wanted time for the sonar and target tracking teams to update the tactical plot.
'New contact on the bow sphere and starboard wide array,' Kathy said. 'Range and bearing consistent with Master thirty-four.'
'What is it?'
'A ship's whistle, sir.' A foghorn.
'Good.' Fog meant visibility would be poor. 'We'll give the fog more time to thicken.' Jeffrey was suspicious. Except for the Delta, and an unknown German warship distant and drawing away from Challenger, it was too quiet up there.
'Sir,' Kathy said. 'New passive contact on the port wide-aperture array… Surface contact, in our baffles, contact held by echoes off the shore.'
'Where is it?' Jeffrey said.
'Wait, please…. Best estimate bearing three eight five, range four thousand yards. Signal strength increasing.'
'She's awful close,' Bell said.
'Can you classify the contact?'
'Wait, please,' Kathy said, working frantically with her sonarmen. 'MTU and MWM
diesel engines now. Assess as a Class three-fifty-one minesweeper control ship, sir, and a triplet of Troika HL three-fifty-one remote-controlled minesweeping drones.'
'The drones have magnetic minesweep solenoids,' Bell said. 'Retrofitted with minehunting sonar, too. Also able to trail two antimine paravanes.'
'They're making sure the channel stays clear,' Jeffrey said.
'They must have left the occupied Danish coast after the Delta passed through.'
'Hmmm,' Jeffrey said. 'Are they following the Delta? Maybe they only trust the Russians so far.'
'No, sir,' Bell said. 'Fire control indicates contacts not pursuing Delta's track. They're coming in our direction, speed nine knots.'
They'll be on top of us in barely ten minutes. They can't possibly miss us…. Are they purposely trying to flush us?
There was nowhere for Challenger to dodge aside here. She had to move forward, at least as fast as the minesweeper, which was faster than Jeffrey — submerged in such shallow water — really dared go. He prayed, then ordered Meltzer to speed up. The minesweeper didn't react.
Two hours later, alone in her stateroom, Ilse stripped naked. She began to don her clothing for the raid: a fresh pair of panties and bra, South African manufacture. Thick wool socks and long underwear, top and bottom, U.S. Navy issue. Over that went her jet black dry suit, except for the SpecWar combat booties and flameproof gloves and thermal hood. She left the front of her dry suit partly unzipped. Cold as Ilse felt, she held off bundling up or she'd work up a sweat. Later, wet underwear could cost her her life.
On second thought, Ilse pulled on the gloves — her hands were ice cubes. At least they weren't shaking, yet. She took one last long look at the photo of her family, taped to the bulkhead inside her rack. She wondered if there was an afterlife. Jeffrey sat at the command console, all suited up. Meltzer, relieved by the relief pilot, was in the captured minisub.
Jeffrey knew he'd be finishing the startup checklists there, with the help of Challenger's chief Ger-ling — German language specialist. Clayton and Montgomery stood in the CACC aisle, hard to make out in their dry suits and face paint in the rig-for-black. From sonar and LMRS data, Jeffrey understood now why it had been so quiet thirty miles back. To port, the west, lay Denmark's huge Sjaelland Island. To starboard, east, loomed the continental land mass of Sweden. Between them waited the Sound, the path into the Baltic. The entrance to the Sound was barely six thousand yards wide. This choke point was heavily defended by both the Germans and the Swedes — which hadn't been in any Intel brief.
Challenger sat in seventy-six feet of water, bottomed in the sand. She hid against a muddy shoal littered with wrecks both old and new, wooden-hulled and steel. The ship's propulsion was shut down, for both quiet and cooling, since there was nowhere she could run if found out anyway.
Jeffrey sighed to himself. War-fighting is like a tournament with sudden-death elimination rules. One misstep and you're out — permanently…. Well, we're sure committed now.
SIMULTANEOUSLY, AT TRONDHEIM IN NORWAY
Ernst Beck stood on Deutschland's quarterdeck. It was really just the rounded top of the hull behind the sail, with a nonskid coating, by the torpedo loading hatch. The naval brass band — hastily assembled when the zip announced, by undersea acoustic link, that she was coming in — paused for the moment. Captain Eberhard — ode down the brow and onto the concrete pier, as the strains of the martial tune echoed inside the giant _ underground space. He was off to make his demands of the yardmaster, for rushed repairs and a weapons reload. They had to get underway again very quickly: Challenger was coming.
This installation Deutschland visited was constructed by the Norwegian Navy, during the arms race after the war scare in Asia five years before. It was completed just in time to be grabbed by the Kaiserliche Marine — the Imperial German Navy — at the start of the real war in Europe. Built into the side of a granite mountain, thirty sea miles up a fjord, this was far more than a hardened dry dock. It was an entire subterranean submarine base. Norway had been an active part of NATO; some pens were large enough for the U. S. Navy's Seawolfclass. These accommodated Deutschland comfortably, too. Ernst Beck watched as several of his wounded men were helped up the inclined ladder through the open loading hatch. He and Jakob Coomans gave them a hand. These, the ambulatory cases, made it down the brow on their own, to be met by nurses and orderlies. They were taken away in a battery-powered jitney, to the base hospital on the upper level. Next were the stretcher cases. An ambulance took them away. The band struck up again, this time a funeral dirge.
Beck glanced at the Class 212 in the next pen. Her crew, two dozen officers and men, stood on the pier at attention now. They looked clean, well rested, excited — their first mission? Men from Deutschland's crew, some wearing beards, now began to bring up the body bags. Beck watched the proceedings silently. His jaw and throat ached from grief. It was hard to hold back tears. He saw dignitaries at the edge of the dock surreptitiously wipe their eyes.
'Look at them,' Coomans said under his breath. He pointed with his gaze to the 212's crew. They were tall, and slim, and most of them blond. Handsome, Beck told himself, almost beautiful in dress uniform. Each time another body emerged from Deutschland's hull, they snapped a salute and held it till the corpse was off the brow.
'They look eager enough, and proud,' Beck said.
'Fools. That captain is young enough to be my son. What does he know, what do any of them know, of mortality and death?'
'They see the bodies.'
'They see glory and honor. They don't see cause and effect.'
'They're ready to rack up some tons, after the fine example we set. It's their duty.'
'Do they have any idea how many people we've killed, murdered, to score those tons?
Have they any idea the odds they'll ever make it back in that suicide machine?' The 212 did seem tiny next to
