“Challenger will almost certainly wait at this prominent terrain feature here. A deep pass leading north-south through the ridge just east of the Wust Seamount. He’ll expect us to come past, and then he’ll pounce.”
“Understood,” Stissinger said.
“What are you going to do about that?” von Loringhoven asked.
Beck turned to von Loringhoven. He tolerated the baron’s presence out of self-interest: it was better to have him as a political friend than a political enemy. Since their defeat in South America, the baron’s presence aboard had become superfluous. But Beck was wise enough to know that both he and von Loringhoven would have to close ranks and work very hard to save their reputations and careers when they returned to Germany.
Sinking Challenger and devastating the Allied relief convoy will be my route to professional salvation. Having von Loringhoven here as a high-ranking objective witness will corroborate my claims when I draft my after-action report.
Beck’s newfound value system, the pseudotheology of the classic Germanic warrior ethic, inspired him and infused him with eagerness for the hunt.
I’m conscious of this transformation within me. I’m grateful for the moral load it took off my mind.
Beck smiled a predatory smile. “Baron, we’re going to send Captain Fuller a little surprise.”
“Torpedoes in the water,” Milgrom shouted. “Two, three, four torpedoes in the water at our depth, passing below our northern off-board probe! Four more torpedoes in the water under our southern probe!”
“Torpedo headings?” Jeffrey snapped. “Weapon types?”
“Torpedoes now rounding north and south faces of Wust Seamount at seventy-five knots. Torpedoes inbound at Challenger. Torpedoes are Axis nuclear Sea Lion units!”
Hostile inbound weapon icons popped onto the tactical plot.
Shit. Beck knew I was here. He’s smarter, more aggressive than I thought.
He’d supposed to act like a boomer captain, hiding and protecting his ship till it’s time for him to launch.
But he’s fighting like a fast-attack commander, a good one — sneaky, hard-hitting, outpsyching me from the start.
The gravimeter told Jeffrey he was badly boxed in: Immediately behind Challenger, a cluster of seamount peaks rose straight up almost three miles high.
“Inbound torpedoes now held as direct path contacts on both port and starboard wide-aperture arrays!”
Beck had Challenger caught in a vise. There was no place Jeffrey could run: seamounts in front and behind, four atomic torpedoes charging at him fast from the right and four more from the left. Noisemakers were useless this deep, strangled by the weight of miles of seawater pressing down. Challenger’s brilliant decoys had a crush depth similar to her off-board probes — at fifteen thousand feet they’d implode in the tubes the moment the pressure was equalized.
In the control room, Jeffrey felt many pairs of eyes glance his way. Those faces showed everything from panic to dependency, to an almost childlike faith that the captain — their father figure in a crisis — would find some way for them to survive.
All these thoughts and glances happened in fractions of a second.
“Fire Control,” Jeffrey rapped out, “firing point procedures, nuclear Mark Eighty-eights in tubes one through four. Set warhead yields to maximum.” One kiloton each.
“Preset!” Bell shouted.
“Snap shots, tubes one through four, fan spread, due north, shoot.” A snap shot lacked a firing solution, but launching fish this way, unprogrammed, saved precious time.
Four Mark 88s dashed from the tubes and into the sea. “Tubes one through four fired electrically!”
“All units running normally!”
The four Mark 88 fish ran through the mountain pass, toward the Angola Basin, trailing their guidance wires.
“Helm, ahead flank. Thirty degrees right rudder. Make your course due north.”
Meltzer acknowledged. Challenger turned north and gained speed.
“Fire Control, aim one Mark Eighty-eight at each of the inbound Sea Lions to the north. Set them to blow by timer within kill range of those enemy weapons.”
“The weapons may try to evade.”
“Not in this narrow pass. They’ve got no more maneuvering room than we do.”
“Lost the wire, LMRS from tube eight,” a fire-controlman yelled. Challenger’s hard turn north had overstrained the fiber-optic tether to the probe that Jeffrey had holding to the south side of the Wust Seamount.
“My course is due north, sir!” Meltzer shouted.
“Very well, Helm!”
The ride became rough as Challenger’s speed built up toward fifty knots.
“Sonar,” Jeffrey snapped, “any more torpedoes inbound? Any contact on von Scheer?”
“Negative,” Milgrom said. “Negative.”
“Shut the outer doors, tubes one through four and seven and eight.”
“Lost the wires, all empty tubes!”
“Fire Control, tubes one through four and seven and eight, reload, nuclear Mark Eighty-eights!”
Bell relayed commands. Jeffrey pictured everything as below, at the special-weapons control console and inside the huge but cramped torpedo room itself, Lieutenant Torelli and his men were hard at work. He prayed there were no malfunctions or mistakes.
Jeffrey eyed the tactical plot. Four torpedoes were coming straight at him from directly ahead. His own atomic fish charged in their direction at a net closing speed of almost a hundred and fifty knots. Jeffrey charged after his own fish, doing fifty knots himself. Four enemy torpedoes gained at him from behind, at a net closing speed of twenty-five knots.
This’ll be close. The timing has to be perfect.
“Units from tubes one through four have detonated!” Bell shouted.
The signals, through the fiber-optic cables, moved at the speed of light. The noise and shock force, Jeffrey knew, moved only at the speed of sound in water. The ranges were so short, his time to live or die so fleeting now, that the fiber-optic signals beat the blast fronts on their race to Challenger by much too little time to think.
Four one-kiloton nuclear blasts went off at once ahead of Challenger. An all-consuming demon of painful decibels and shaking smashed at the ship from every side. Challenger continued her hard sprint forward, into the midst of Jeffrey’s self-made thunder in the deep. Noise battered the ship in every octave, and vibrations tore at her with every resonance period from high to low. They made Jeffrey’s feet and buttocks jar and ache like pins and needles. They made his teeth chatter as Challenger shook, and his skeleton seemed to rattle inside his body. Challenger rose and fell like a roller coaster as Meltzer and COB fought to regain control.
Crewmen’s arms and legs flailed as they tried to cover their ears and open their mouths — to relieve the pressure against their eardrums from the cacophony outside.