'Very well, Oceanographer, Chief of the Watch.' 'Captain,' Kathy said, 'advise acoustic sea state has risen to thirteen.'
'V'r'well, Sonar.'
Jeffrey's plan was simple: If you're blind and going into a knife fight, you lure your sighted opponent into a dark room. If you're deaf in one ear, and your opponent has good hearing, you take him somewhere deafening.
Jeffrey heard a crunch on the speakers.
'Hull popping,' Kathy said. 'Self-noise transient.' Jeffrey wasn't surprised — Challenger had just gone through her test depth: ten thousand feet. The ship would have to endure every conceivable peril Mother Nature could throw at a deep-running SSN before this one-on-one battle with Eberhard was over with.
'Deutschland still pursuing,' Bell reported. 'Separation twenty-two hundred yards. No sign of change in Deutschland's course or speed.'
'Very well, Fire Control.'
'Mark eighty-eights loaded and armed in tubes one, three, five, and seven, sir.'
'V'r'well.'
'Captain, advise those are our last four Mark eighty-eights.' Jeffrey sighed. This was it. The finality was somehow comforting.
'Sea Lions loaded in tubes one through eight, Captain. All weapons armed.'
'Very well, Einzvo.'
'Sir, advise those are our last deep-capable nuclear torpedoes.'
'We know from our two skirmishes that Fuller's rate of fire is very low, and he has only four tubes working. Eight eels will be more than enough.'
Jeffrey watched as the volcano field got closer and closer. There were five main erupting cones, formed roughly in a cross twenty miles wide: one in the center, one at each of four corners. These were young seamounts, disgorging molten rock from deep within the earth. Though it didn't — show yet on the gravimeter, Jeffrey knew they were growing steadily, as the earth's core leaked and fresh-born rock piled up. More magma — called lava once it emerged from the ocean floor — welled out of side vents on the volcanoes' slopes. The seafloor here was 11,500 feet deep; the craters at the seamounts' peaks rose two or three thousand feet above that.
Jeffrey ordered Meltzer to steer just to the right of the volcano at the southern tip of the cross. He ordered the sonar speaker volume lowered; the rumbling and sizzling and crunching from directly ahead were extreme. Bell reported Deutschland still on their tail. Jeffrey wondered if Eberhard was frightened, too, taking his ship into a live volcano field, and so close to his crush depth. Eberhard was not a man to know fear easily, but this place, of all possible places, might well remind him of his ultimate mortality. Jeffrey called up the basic sonar data, a summary of what Kathy and Ilse and the sonarmen were working with. He windowed the surrounding water's temperature and density and dissolved mineral content. Chemical sniffers mounted on Challenger's hull showed him just what Ilse had told him to expect: The local ocean was a corrosive soup of sulfuric and hydrochloric acid. It was very warm, with chaotic hot spots that were impairing Challenger's cooling systems. As they approached the flank of the cone that Jeffrey called South, the acoustic sea state and hydro-graphic measurements shot higher.
Way above their heads, Jeffrey knew from the magnetometers, the solar storm still raged. Up there, too, the gale continued; any survivor of this confrontation who somehow made it to the surface in a life vest would die of exposure rapidly. Intermittently, Kathy reported crashing and tumbling from big icebergs, broken from glaciers on the Icelandic coast, driven here by winds and surface currents. Truly this was a submariner's Hell.
'Helm,' Jeffrey said, 'stand by for a hard turn to port on my mark.'
'Understood.'
'Sir,' Bell said, 'we'll unmask our weaker side to Deutschland, our damaged port wideaperture array. We'll lose him.'
'He knows we've been favoring our left side, XO. He'll expect us to turn to starboard. We've a better chance of him losing us by going to port.'
Bell nodded. He and Jeffrey grabbed their armrests as Challenger dipped suddenly; water heated by lava was less dense, reducing buoyancy. They held on again as Challenger plunged upward — caught in an updraft now, as that less-dense water, itself positively buoyant, raced for the surface.
'Helm, hard left rudder, mark.'
'Hard left rudder, aye. No course specified.'
Jeffrey watched the gravimeter, and the ring-laser gyrocompass. 'Slow to ahead one third, turns for ten knots.'
'Sir,' Beck said, 'we've lost sonar and wake turbulence contact with Challenger.'
'Good,' Eberhard said. 'Then they've surely lost contact with us. Pilot, slow to one-third speed ahead, RPMs for ten knots. Starboard twenty rudder, steer zero four five.' Coomans acknowledged.
'Status of the acoustic holography routines, Einzvo?' 'Engaged and working, sir.'
'He thinks he's evened the odds, coming here. He's no idea how well we can see in his supposed darkened room.'
Beck nodded. These brand-new signal processing routines used Deutschland's wideaperture arrays to map out the entire three-dimensional noise field structure, on both the near and far sides of a sound source, no matter how chaotic and intense that field might be. Originally invented to analyze jet and missile engine performance in wind-tunnel testing, and ideal for use with both Deutschland and her quarry in a slow-speed stalking game, they should spot Challenger even here amid the live volcanoes. All around Challenger, five live volcanoes roared and burbled. There was constant seismic activity, too, adding to the noise. A volcanic eruption, or a massive avalanche, or an earthquake and resulting seawave surge — any one of them could do in Deutschland and Challenger both. As Jeffrey had reasoned earlier, an even exchange here — both vessels sunk — was a big strategic gain for the Axis, with Germany's new SSGN almost ready for sea.
Jeffrey scratched his head. His scalp itched; he needed a shower badly. He made himself stop; it didn't look good.
'He'll probably patrol in a circle,' Jeffrey said.
'Eberhard needs to keep moving, or we might spot his reactor shielding and core on our gravimeter…. If one of us goes outside the outer ring of cones, the other might spot him there while still concealed. So neither of us is gonna leave the inner maelstrom till this issue is resolved.' 'May I ask your intentions, Captain?'
'You may ask, XO. If I were sure of the best next steps, I'd've told you already…. So, what do we know?'
Bell opened his mouth, but was interrupted by a big blast from outside. Ilse shouted that it was a magma eruption on the left flank of the central cone, the one they were calling Middle. The noise lessened, and the buffeting died down. Kathy reported she detected no torpedoes in the water — that blast hadn't given Deutschland a hole-inocean or ambientecho sonar contact on Challenger, but the threat was always there. Jeffrey ordered Meltzer to move the ship, just in case.
There was a sound like rolling thunder, and once more Challenger rocked.
'Seismic event on West,' Ilse reported. 'Probable magma subsidence, resulting lava dome collapse.'
Jeffrey waited while Kathy's people listened again for an inbound weapon. 'XO, Sonar, Oceanographer,' Jeffrey said, 'we need to do a recon. Get more water measurements, and better gravimeter resolution, too. We'll patrol clockwise for now, take the chance Eberhard's gone the other way, off on the other side of Middle. _Helm, take us closer to volcano West.'
Soon Lieutenant Willey called; at least the intercom was repaired. He warned Jeffrey that the temperature of seawater intake to the main condensor cooling loops was rising rapidly, and the efficiency of the propulsion thermodynamic cycle was being degraded. They might suffer boilerfeedwater vapor lock, and stall the turbines.
— If Jeffrey's ship did stall, Deutschland could spot the stationary mass concentration on her gravimeter; gravimeters were immune to the local acoustic conditions and turbulence. And with propulsion degraded, we couldn't evade an inbound weapon either. Jeffrey saw Bell hesitate.
'Captain, I must advise, with only four remaining Mark eighty-eights, both self-defense and sure destruction of our target will be difficult.'
'I know it, XO.'
Another terrible rumble came through the hull. 'Magma outburst!' Ilse said. 'South flank of volcano
