Tidal Rip (64 page)

Ernst Beck racked his brain for a way to survive this suicide charge by
Challenger
. The fire and flooding in Engineering were serious, even if the influx past the main shaft packing gland was muted by the fail-safe design of the seals.
Von Scheer
’s torpedo room was still in bad shape, even with Stissinger down there helping.

Only a lucky shot would get through
Challenger
’s defensive Mark 88 salvos—and the range between the two ships was getting so short that soon a single atomic torpedo from either one would kill them both for sure. It seemed that only some other lucky stroke, such as a major breakdown on Fuller’s ship, could save Beck’s own.

And right now I don’t feel lucky.
Then Beck had a desperate idea.

“Pilot, forty degrees up bubble. Make your depth nine hundred meters.”

Von Scheer
’s nose soared for the sky. If Beck looked straight ahead, he saw the deck and not the forward bulkhead now. He was forced back against his headrest, and the ship went shallower fast. Because she was neutrally buoyant, literally floating while down in the sea, this rise toward the surface required no fight against gravity: unlike an airplane, a submarine could pull up hard without sacrificing forward speed.

“
Von Scheer
has pulled a steep up-bubble,” Bell yelled.

“Collision alarm! Forty degrees up-bubble, smartly!”

The alarm was a shipwide warning for the crew to grab something, fast. Meltzer pulled back hard on his wheel. The control-room deck became a hillside. Jeffrey and Bell were tilted steeply in their seats.

Bell turned to Jeffrey and yelled, “What is he doing?”

“Going shallow enough that his noisemakers and decoys work! And so his high-explosive Series Sixty-five torpedoes can function!”

“But we can stop his Sixty-fives with our antitorpedo rockets if we go shallow!”

“Maybe not! And shallow relieves his rate of flooding!”

Jeffrey tried to put himself in Ernst Beck’s shoes.

What manner of man is this guy? How driven is Beck to succeed and survive? How far out on the risk-taking envelope is he truly willing to go to accomplish his mission?…How willing is he, really, to die?

“Sonar!”

“Captain!”

“Status of mechanical transients on
von Scheer
?”

“Bilge and firefighting pumps! Hammering noises, and power tools now!”

“He’s leveling off!” Bell shouted.

Jeffrey eyed a depth gauge: 3,000 feet—900 meters. “Helm, zero bubble! Make your depth three thousand feet!”

Before he could shoot,
von Scheer
launched four more Sea Lions. They looped around and charged at
Challenger
.

Jeffrey ordered Bell to fire four Mark 88s to destroy them, and four more at the
von Scheer
.

“He’s still full of fight, sir.”

“So am I, but him I’m not so sure. Watch what happens now.”

The four inbound Sea Lions spread out. Bell had his men direct one Mark 88 at each inbound weapon. Bell had the warheads set at lowest yield, and blew them barely outside lethal range of
Challenger
. Beck made defensive countershots too, also at low yield, and they detonated a split second after
Challenger
’s.

Challenger
was punished hard. A wall of noise and bubble clouds stood between
Challenger
and
von Scheer
.

“Helm, all stop!”

“Sir?”
Bell yelled as the ocean outside fulminated.

“We don’t know what’s on the other side of that curtain now! With noisemakers and decoys, and up-close conventional Series Sixty-five shots, and with all the atomic reverb as distracting background noise, he can start a game of hide-and-seek and maybe get in a lethal sucker punch!” Jeffrey drew deep breaths inside his mask.

“Our job is to destroy him!”

“Our paramount job is protecting the convoy! If we stay on this side of the wall of new blasts, we do that! We’ve
already
done that! We go through there blind, with Beck having all these new options, we stand to lose both
Challenger
and the convoy!”

“But—”

“If he
wanted
to accept the double kill, he’d’ve doubled back at us and it would all be over by now! He wants to
live
. Nuclear blasts to blind us, then noisemakers, decoys, to get us all confused about his location and course and depth so he sneaks away!”

“And then goes after the convoy?”

“
No
. We can easily stay between him and the convoy! We’re faster and we’re less damaged! He could see and hear all that for himself!…We’ve forced him so far south he’s much farther away from his missile launch point than before! He
has
to know he’ll never get past us like this!”

“Why don’t we keep shooting at him with nukes?”

“Every time we tried, it was a draw! We’re low on ammo! We don’t know what else we might face as we head for the convoy!” Then Jeffrey saw it with total clarity. “The Golden Bridge, XO!”

“What?”

“Sun-Tzu! He said always give your enemy a Golden Bridge, a way to back down but save face, so you avoid mutual annihilation!

“So where’s the Golden Bridge? Who built it for whom?”

Jeffrey worked his keyboard and called up a nautical chart. “There!”

“South Africa?”

Jeffrey nodded. “He’ll limp there for repairs! Think politically, XO! Beck built the bridge for
himself,
to cover his backside with Axis High Command!…We won the psychological fight! We’ve beaten him strategically! We’ve got him on the run, retreating for real!”

“Why are you turning away?” von Loringhoven demanded.

“Baron, our best choice now is to preserve
von Scheer
as a force-in-being. If we make it to the Boers’ underground pens at Durban, we can put in for repairs. We can also get liquid hydrogen there. Remember, we still have those two Mach Eight missiles in our silos aft. They’re useless without fuel.
With
fuel, they’re unstoppable.”

“But you’re accepting defeat. You’re letting
Challenger
and the convoy get away!”

“Baron, be realistic. Fuller
has
defeated us. We’re a floating wreck and he knows it. He’s faster, he has a better rate of fire because of the damage he inflicted, his ship is in much better shape because of the damage we
didn’t
inflict or he repaired, and he’s between us and the convoy. If we head north past the acoustic wall we forced him to help us make, we’re dead for sure. If we stay on this side of the wall, he’ll hesitate to pursue because he won’t know what might smack him in the face.”

Von Loringhoven was torn.

Beck went on. “We’re in extremely deep water, ideal for antisubmarine detection. He planned that part too. Look at the nautical chart. Except for a couple of isolated seamounts which Fuller can easily send a brace of Mark Eighty-eights behind to flush us, there’s no bottom terrain we can hide in most of the way from here to the Cape of Good Hope! He hasn’t come through the bubble clouds yet because we’re shallow, and we can use our non-nuclear Series Sixty-fives point-blank…. We need to get away from here while we can, before Allied planes with atomic depth-charges close in.”

“Durban?”

“You can blame it all on the sabotage in Norway. The convoy might have gotten through intact enough in
spite
of our Mach Two point five missiles. By withdrawing and staying alive, we buy ourselves time. We also tie down major Allied forces, who have to stay on high alert simply because we exist. With two Mach
eight
missiles ready to fire, we’ll be a far, far more dangerous threat than now. You can put all that in your report. Say we led Fuller on a merry chase all over the South Atlantic, and kept him from guarding the convoy directly. Say we allowed our other U-boats to get in closer and score more kills because
Challenger
couldn’t be there. Say that from Durban we can threaten the Allies anywhere: the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific, the Arabian Gulf. Say we outsmarted HMS
Dreadnought
sneaking through the G-I-UK Gap…. Say anything you want to save our careers!
You’re
the diplomat!”

Two hours later, Jeffrey had his ship sneak east of the lingering bubble clouds and noisemakers and the decoys that sounded like
von Scheer
but were too small to really be her. The air was clean enough now that the crew were out of their air breathing masks.

With no more off-board probes in stock, Milgrom and her people did a careful search on passive sonar. Nothing. Jeffrey ordered her to ping on maximum power, a final raucous screech to find Ernst Beck and say good-bye and really rub it in.
He’s good, but I beat his ass decisively.

Milgrom reported a faint detection on the real
von Scheer
. Beck was far to the south, and heading east to hide under Boer land-based air support.

“Looks like he used his Golden Bridge, Skipper,” Bell said. “A bridge
you
forced him to build, and take.” He grinned.

Jeffrey was too lost in thought to respond. He had believed that he would certainly die along with his ship and his crew; to suddenly find himself reprieved by his own tactical skill and cold psychological calculation was stunning. Jeffrey had faced mortality before, often in combat. But never had he believed he’d really have to make the chilling word
expendable
come true…. And yet it
hadn’t
come true….

This was no time to get maudlin or philosophical, or congratulate himself either.

“XO, we’ve got a convoy to help protect.”

“Aye aye, Captain.” Bell was crisp and lively now.

“Helm, make your course due north. Ahead full, make your depth ten thousand feet.”

EPILOGUE

Two weeks later

T
he relief convoy made it more or less safely to shore, and the Central African pocket was strongly reinforced. The Axis land offensive was beaten back, and the German and Boer armies failed to come even close to linking up. And tactical nuclear fighting stayed confined far out at sea.
Challenger
was ordered to the Newport News Shipbuilding Yard, near Norfolk, Virginia, for repairs and upgrades.

Jeffrey, rested and formally dressed, now sat in front of Admiral Hodgkiss’s desk, facing the admiral alone in his office. His patrol report sat on Hodgkiss’s immaculate desktop.

Hodgkiss, that man of birdlike build and iron will, peered at Jeffrey intently. It was impossible to read his face, and this made Jeffrey very nervous.

“I wanted you all to myself,” Hodgkiss stated, “before you start through the debriefing mill.”

“Yes, sir,” Jeffrey said politely. He fought to keep his voice even and neutral.

Hodgkiss picked up Jeffrey’s patrol report, weighed it in his hand, and dropped it back onto his desk. The report was long and heavy, and landed with a thump.

The thump seemed to echo in the pregnant silence that followed. Jeffrey waited for the admiral to speak, to pronounce sentence on him, to inform him of his fate.

“I told you to show some initiative, Captain, but good Lord!”

“Sir?”

“All your machinations in South America caused some heavy political flak in Washington. You practically started a war between State and SECDEF!” The Department of State and the secretary of defense.

“A war for my head, sir?”

“Still such a direct lad, aren’t you?”

“I did what was needed at the time, Admiral.”

“And then there’s the matter of the
von Scheer
.”

Jeffrey grew crestfallen.

“You performed brilliantly.”

“Admiral?”

“I didn’t tell you to go out there and commit suicide. I told you to protect the convoy at all costs. And you did. The convoy was protected from the
von Scheer
as a direct result of your actions. Case closed.”

“But the
von Scheer
escaped.”

“Yes. On the one hand, you’ve left yourself more work to do about that, down the road. On the other hand, you’re still alive and your ship is intact to conduct that work. And on the third hand,
Challenger
will be ready for sea again well before the
von Scheer
. At least, that appears to be the situation from what your report here indicates and what our sources in South Africa say. Net net, you increased Allied options at Axis expense.”

“Temporarily.”

“Temporarily can be like forever in a war of this kind.”

“Yes, Admiral.”

“Anyway, to return to the main point, you’ve presented us all with a quandary.”

“Sir?”

“Ultimately, bending or disobeying orders, or interpreting them too creatively or aggressively, is judged by the results, not the ways and means or good intentions.”

“I understand, Admiral.”

Jeffrey waited for the reprimand.

“You’re being awarded the Defense Distinguished Service Medal.”

“Admiral?”

“We considered another Medal of Honor, but it didn’t seem quite the thing. That’s more for individual valor, conspicuous gallantry above and beyond the call of duty, blood and gore and that sort of thing.”

Jeffrey kept his mouth shut.

“What you did showed broader leadership and judgment talents. Good communication and negotiation skills with an important new coalition partner, handled superbly under adverse and trying circumstances. And outstanding weighing of your tactical versus strategic alternatives in an important part of one of history’s most decisive fleet engagements.”

“Sir, I don’t know what to say.”

Hodgkiss peered at Jeffrey again. “You thwarted the Axis plans in South America completely, and turned a skeptical neutral into a friend. You helped maintain the status quo on land in Central Africa, when we were really on the ropes there for a while…. The Axis have reached their high-watermark. The last few weeks were like Stalingrad, or El Alamein, or Midway, in World War Two. The enemy threw everything they had at us, everything, set the sneakiest traps they could possibly think to invent. And we held the line, and made significant gains, and gave the bastards a bloody nose they’ll never forget. The tide is starting to turn, thanks in part to your efforts.”