Thunder In The Deep (02) (20 page)

"Sonar, Oceanographer," Lieutenant Bell said, "give me best course to evade Sierra sixteen." He had the conn.

"Recommend course one eight zero," Ilse said. Due south, away from charted mines. " That would bring us closer to the center of the current gyre. Eddies there make density cells, and chaotic Doppler."

"Concur," Kathy said.

Bell gave helm orders. Meltzer acknowledged and complied. Challenger turned. Ilse listened to Bell confer with Sessions.

"We're losing ground," Bell said. "We have to go faster or we'll miss the tide. . . . Helm, make turns for twenty knots."

"Sir," Kathy said, "if we maintain that speed, as we get shallower we risk the propulsor cavitating."

Just then Jeffrey came into the CACC, looking tired. Ilse realized he'd sensed the change in course and speed—assuming he'd actually been asleep.

Bell gave him a quick update.

"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 knew the Calais tidal range was large, ten meters or more, forcing Deutschland toward mid-Channel, closer to the surface fight.

"COB," Jeffrey said, "put out a magnetic field like an Akula Two, smartly." COB acknowledged.

Jeffrey hoped the mines, friendly and enemy alike, would all be programmed to ignore a Russian submarine. COB finished as the German mines landed on the bottom. None exploded, at least so far.

A quintuplet of Class 130's crossed Challenger's bow, and there were many more splashes. One of the 130's blew up just to port. Jeffrey heard the noises as its hull broke into pieces. Air boiled to the surface as the pieces tumbled down, and water roared, the ocean flooding in. The pieces thumped to the sand. Something set off a mine. Jeffrey was torn whether to recover the precious LMRS. It was probably safer where it was. If they lost the fiber-optic wire, they could retrieve it by acoustic link. Two hydrofoils exploded a thousand yards ahead. Their pieces pelted the bottom. More mines exploded, and the fiber optic broke.

The surviving German corvettes began to withdraw, still lobbing Harpoons at the Royal Navy frigates. The frigates answered blow for blow. Their 114mm Vickers dual-purpose guns went into action.

One frigate roared by directly overhead. Jeffrey thought he heard the whine of turrettraversing gear, the clanking of its autoloading ammo train. The big gun fired. In the CACC, mike cords and lighting fixtures jiggled, and too late Jeffrey held his ears. Another Class 130 was hit off Challenger's port bow, but she barely slowed. She was hit again, and Jeffrey heard secondary explosions. The corvette started sinking, still moving at fifteen knots, right toward Challenger. Jeffrey had to move. He dared not go forward or to port because of German mines. He could back up in the safety corridor, completely blind, or take shelter to starboard amid the British mines and German wreckage. With the LMRS cut off, he ordered COB and Meltzer to raise the boat off the bottom and go to back one third.

The bow sphere had a perfect view of the latest 130's death throes. Jeffrey heard the roar of flooding again, the sharper roars and cracks and bangs of the frigid sea on red-hot engine blocks. Added was the screech of tortured steel. Things inside the 130 still exploded as she hit the bottom hard, blocking Challenger's pathway forward decisively. Another German ship crossed Challenger's stern, disappearing for a moment in the sonar blind spot. Did she drop more mines? Jeffrey ordered all stop.

Kathy announced the Cornwalls were launching torpedoes. A dozen lightweight Sting Ray fish dashed at the Class 130's from the flank. Some scored hits, loud metallic whangs, followed by more sounds of disemboweled hulls dragged down by gravity. Other fish rushed for the Calais coast, looking for a target, any target.

"Torpedoes in the water!" Haffner shouted. "Bearing two seven zero, range eleven thousand meters. Sting Rays, attack speed forty-five knots!"

"If we fire antitorpedo rockets," Eberhard said, "we'll give ourselves away. Achtung, Einzvo, decoy in tube eight. Program it to sound like a Class two-twelve with a damaged screw and bilge pumps running."

"Understood."

"Los!"

Beck watched the decoy's track. The Sting Rays picked it up. Not wire guided, they mindlessly converged. One Sting Ray won the race, and set off all the others sympathetically. Deutschland vibrated sharply from the multiple concussions. She rolled to port as the shock wave echoed off the Calais shore.

"Captain," Kathy said, "loud explosion bearing zero nine zero, range twenty thousand yards."

"The Sting Rays?" Jeffrey said.

"Confirmed. . . . Sir, we have an ambient and hole-inocean submerged contact near the Calais coast, based on echoes from the Sting Ray warheads."

"Is it something on the chart?"

"Negative, sir."

"Size of contact?"

"Wait, please. . . . Appears to be beam on, length approximately three hundred feet."

"Must be a dead Axis corvette," Jeffrey said, "lost in some recent action like this one." Beck listened as the hydrofoils and hovercraft wove in and out, and the corvettes and frigates thrust and counterthrust. One big ship, which side's Haffner couldn't tell, went down; her magazines exploded underwater.

"Ambient and hole-in-ocean submerged contact," Haffner said, "backlit against the Goodwin Sands." "Size of contact?" Beck said.

"Appears to be beam on, length one hundred meters."

"A Cornwall," Eberhard said, "or a piece of one." Beck watched the tactical plot, frigates chasing corvettes east. "They're coming in our direction, Captain."

"First Watch Officer," Haffner shouted, "new passive sonar contact to starboard! Many inbound aircraft, fast movers bearing one three five! They sound like our Tornado fighter-bombers!"

"Let's get out of here while we still can," Eberhard said. "Pilot, go to one-third speed ahead, RPM's for ten knots."

"Sir," Kathy said, "new passive sonar contact to port. More inbound aircraft, this time from the west. They sound like Royal Navy Sea Harriers."

"We have to get out of here;" Bell said. "This skirmish is getting out of hand." Jeffrey thought hard:-"Sonar, is the acoustic sea state high enough you can spot wrecks and mines on the wide arrays in ambient passive mode?"