At the proper moment he issued more helm orders. This time he typed and sent them through the LAN. But he had trouble holding his hands to the keyboard. His vision was so blurred he could barely see the keys. He had little control of his fingers as he tried to type. Finally he hunted and pecked a barely intelligible message: “left10° rudder. Curs 030.” He hit ENTER.
Challenger turned left as she rounded the south edge of the Walvis Ridge, where the deep-water pass let out onto the Cape Plain. She headed hard almost north-northeast, along the ridge.
The mountain pass and all its noise and buffeting quickly fell behind. Conversation was possible again. Jeffrey ordered Meltzer to bring the ship back into the ridge topography quickly, and resume nap-of-seafloor cruising at the ship’s top quiet tactical speed, twenty-six knots. Trailing a towed array in such broken terrain was impractical — it would get snagged and ruined or lost. But Jeffrey ordered Milgrom and her people to use the wide-aperture arrays and bow sphere to search passively for any signs of enemy subs or their torpedoes. He had the photonic sensors at bow and stern activated in passive-image intensification mode to help Meltzer and Sessions navigate amid the uneven, unweathered volcanic crags and ravines — and also to help the fire controlmen scan for possible mines. Glows and flashes from riled biologics gave barely enough light to see.
Milgrom reported intermittent contact on a clutch of von Scheer’s Sea Lions, rushing belatedly south through the pass and continuing on into the Cape Basin. They were pinging, and eventually turned back north toward the ridge, but Challenger was well shielded by intervening terrain. Bell said these Sea Lions posed no threat.
Bell was also busy handling damage control and crew injury reports. There were several broken bones, concussions, and very bad cuts; the corpsman and his assistants were swamped with patients on the wardroom operating table and in the enlisted mess triage and treatment area. A number of systems — mechanical and electronic — were down or impaired, but backups or bypasses were covering the major problems.
Jeffrey waited for Bell to take a pause in the assessments he was making and the orders he was issuing — he didn’t want to distract his XO — and meanwhile he allowed his own head to clear up more.
“That was a close one,” he said when Bell was free for a moment; he was too shaken up and relieved to keep such strong emotions bottled inside.
“Why did you send all your offensive fish north, Captain?”
“I wanted Beck to think I was using them to screen us as we came up through the pass that way.”
“That’s why you turned back south?”
“I thought it would be what he’d least expect, and would pull him north away from us.”
“Why didn’t you stand and fight? Go back west and search for Beck and engage him?”
“We’re in a weird role reversal, XO. As an SSGN captain, he’s supposed to be the hunted. But he came hunting us. Instead of him mainly needing to preserve his ship as a force in being, we’re the ones who have to favor self-preservation for now.”
“Captain?”
“The one thing we can’t afford to do is let him get past us alive, between us and the northeastern terminus of the ridge. His top quiet speed is faster than ours, and in such rugged terrain we might never be able to find him again. Then he’d have a clear shot at his most high-value targets. Even if he exposes himself by going shallow to launch, we can’t count on being precisely there to sink him in time.”
“I only half follow you, Skipper. I did remind you last week he came to von Scheer fresh from being first officer on a ceramic-hulled fast-attack. And also fresh from a long-running battle with you, so he knows your style.”
“Yeah. And you were right, XO. Absolutely right… So I need to be more unpredictable…. We can afford to drawthings out a bit, I think. We need to, for now.”
“How does that help us, sir?”
“Trade space for time and get the feel of Beck and his ship. See better how he likes to fight… We know Beck has to work his way northeast along the ridge. He’s got hundreds of miles to cover before he’s close enough to the convoy to launch. Meanwhile let’s act like we’re feeling defensive, cowed.”
“What do we do?”
“Retreat. In the only direction we can. Northeast along the ridge toward Africa.”
CHAPTER 40
“Still no sign of Challenger or her wreckage,” Stissinger said two hours later.
Instead of responding, Ernst Beck studied the live-feed laser line-scan video coming in from his off-board probes. He’d sent them ahead of von Scheer as expendable scouts in case Jeffrey Fuller survived and was waiting in counterambush for him nearby.
Beck saw piles of freshly broken boulders, a result of the avalanches triggered inside the Walvis Ridge mountain pass. The water was clouded with sediment and rock dust, kicked up by the nuclear blasts. He also saw fragments of dead sea creatures drift through the field of view from the probes: shredded deep-sea jellyfish, broken body parts from strange siphonophores — snakelike beings covered with thousands of stinging tentacles for capturing prey and dozens of small translucent stomachs for digesting. Some of the stomachs he saw were still intact and held food. Beck noticed a colony of blackened starfish, all unmoving on the bottom, charred by the radiant heat of the blasts. He saw demonfish, naturally black, with hideous faces and huge fangs that made them look like something out of a horror movie. Except the luminous barbs near the mouths of these demonfish didn’t glow, and they floated upside down — dead.
Von Scheer came out of the pass heading south. Beck gave helm orders to turn the ship northeast to avoid the antisubmarine perils of the wide-open and almost bottomless Cape Basin. He had the copilot use the remote-controlled probes to search the ridge terrain just northeast of the seamounts that guarded that side of the pass.
The wait for some report was tense and frustrating, but necessary.
Von Loringhoven came over. “You realize, don’t you, that if he decided to run, he’s getting away.”
“It isn’t about him, Baron. It’s about us. Whether we get to launch our missile salvos soon enough. If we’ve scared Jeffrey Fuller off, and we can get in range of the convoy safely and then make a good escape, so much the better. We’ll be free to concentrate on hunting and killing Challenger after that.”
“Agreed,” von Loringhoven said.
“But none of that has happened yet.”
“So what do you intend to do?”
“We need to continue up the ridgeline at a good pace. Let me show you what I mean…. Einzvo?”
“Captain?”
“Have Sonar take the conn for a moment. Join me and the baron at the navigation table.”
Young Werner Haffner took Beck’s seat. He seemed honored to have the duty at such an important time. Beck smiled to himself. Haffner’s boyish enthusiasm was a welcome tonic.
As he matures, if he survives, he’ll make a good submariner indeed.