Jeffrey flipped through his menu screens. His last two off-board probes were positioned to the southwest, one on each flank of the Walvis Ridge, to listen for von Scheer to emerge from the sonar forest formed by the Subtropical Convergence. Jeffrey had Challenger hovering, with her bow also aimed southwest, to launch his fish in Ernst Beck’s face with the least possible delay.
Bell cleared his throat to get Jeffrey’s attention.
“Yes, XO?”
“Why don’t we send a few fish out in front, to loiter and get a better first crack at him?”
“Not a bad idea, but their fuel only lasts so long. And even loitering their engines make noise. We’d just waste ammo, or give ourselves away.”
“Understood.”
“A good question to ask, though,” Jeffrey said. He stretched. “Overall, I do like this setup. As you said, XO, I need to do the unexpected, be unpredictable for me.”
“How does this accomplish that, sir?”
“I’m using the exact same tactic as before. Ambushing Beck from behind a major hydrographic feature. Before it was that mountain pass. This time it’s the convergence. Doing the same thing twice, especially when the first time failed, is what Beck will least expect.”
Jeffrey and Bell returned to their waiting game. More hours passed.
“Torpedoes in the water!” Milgrom screamed. “Four inbound torpedoes held by passive sonars on each off-board probe!”
“Range? Bearing? Speed?”
“Range ten thousand yards from Challenger.” Five nautical miles. “Bearing two zero five.” South-southwest. “Closing speed seventy-five knots! Sea Lions, Captain!”
“They came right out of the convergence, sir,” Bell said. “Von Scheer guessed where we were all over again.” He sounded dismayed.
All over again is right. Jeffrey was really angry with himself.
Jeffrey ordered nuclear snap shots launched in self-defense from six tubes. He had the tubes reloaded, with more Mark 88s armed. He ordered more nuclear snap shots — some against the inbound torpedoes, some into the convergence to find the von Scheer.
He knew that scoring a hit against the von Scheer — inside the convergence eddies and conflicting currents and chaotic temperature and salinity horizontal layers and vertical cells — was unlikely.
More Sea Lions could come tearing at him any moment.
“Beck suckered me good,” he said under his breath.
“Captain?”
Jeffrey needed to make a rushed decision. For his ship to take much more punishment, and suffer serious damage, would leave the convoy wide open to devastation by the von Scheer.
Supplies of crucial spare parts, and layers of systems redundancy, were severely depleted in the previous skirmish. More of this abuse, and something Challenger can’t do without will break beyond repair — and then we’ve had it.
Jeffrey ordered Bell to retarget his latest salvo entirely for self-defense, and set them to blow by timer in case he lost the wires to those fish. He wrote off the last of his off-board probes. In the edgy silence before all his fish would blow, Jeffrey ordered Meltzer to turn Challenger onto course zero three zero: north-northeast. He called for top quiet speed.
Once more Challenger retreated, farther up the ridge.
Behind her Bell’s snap shots detonated. The ocean erupted as it had before. Blast forces from aft arrived and punished the ship. Noise and shock fronts bounced off terrain to the sides and in front of Challenger, and punished her more. The ride was terribly rough, acoustic conditions impossible. More damage reports poured in, jury-rigged emergency repairs were made in haste, and Jeffrey fretted. My ship’s margin for survival is wearing too thin…. The contest with Beck is as much about good damage control as it is about smart fighting tactics.
Still fleeing northeast, up the Walvis Ridge toward Africa, Jeffrey ordered flank speed. Maybe Beck is better than me.
“No sign of him, sir,” Stissinger reported. Off-board probes had scouted well ahead and thoroughly.
“He retreated again.” Beck knew he was stating the obvious.
“What now?” von Loringhoven asked.
Beck rested his head in his right hand, with his upper lip cupped in the crook of his thumb and forefinger. His elbow leaned on his console top, taking the weight of his forearm and head. He stared into space and thought over everything he knew.
“He has to stand and fight sooner or later. The closer to the convoy we get, the more all the time pressure passes from us onto him. He obviously used my own trick from the Rocks. A wall of nuclear blasts as a screen to mask his escape.”
“What if he used all of our tricks?” Stissinger said. “Including doubling back? He might be behind us now, planning to take us from the rear.”
“We’d’ve heard him,” Beck said. He had von Scheer holding between the convergence and the nuclear disturbance near Fuller’s last hiding place. As ordered, Haffner’s sonarmen were pinging on low power to both sides, where directional acoustic paths were clearest. This ensured that Challenger didn’t do what Stissinger said she might do. “No, Einzvo, he ran ahead again.”
Beck called a nautical chart onto his console. He had it repeat on Stissinger’s screen. “The next significant terrain feature is here,” Beck said. As von Loringhoven leaned over his shoulder, he used his light pen. “The Valdivia Seamount complex. Seven or eight major peaks all grouped together, after a long stretch of very deep ridge terrain. That’s… another three-hundred-sea-mile leapfrog ahead. Some of these seamounts are so shallow, their tops are only fifty or a hundred meters deep. The way they’re clustered, the paths between them form a maze.”
“Is that good?” von Loringhoven asked.
“For us? Yes. In the maze we can try to get lost. Fuller can’t afford that. He also can’t afford an action somewhere between there and here. The odds of him succeeding in a one-on-one, in deep water where neither ship has a terrain or sound-propagation advantage, are around fifty-fifty.”
“You think he won’t gamble the convoy with odds of fifty-fifty?” Stissinger asked.
“No. Not even to be unpredictable. Not even to take us by surprise just for the purpose of surprise. The convoy is simply too important for him to risk on the flip of a coin…. So, his next move will be to hit us just before the Valdivia Seamounts while he gets concealment on their edge and we have to come at him through open water.”
“Head for the Valdivia Seamounts?” von Loringhoven asked.
Beck nodded.
CHAPTER 41
Six hours later, Jeffrey felt as if his ship had been at battle stations forever. Challenger worked her way along a stretch of the Walvis Ridge that was very rugged but deep. A depth gauge read 9,850 feet. Even so, the basins to both flanks plunged quickly to 16,500 feet; Jeffrey was hugging the Walvis at more than a mile above the surrounding ocean floor.
Sometimes, when old volcanic extrusions or ledges didn’t block the path of sound, the port wide-aperture array could clearly pick up noises from the continuing convoy battle. The battle seemed slightly less violent than before. Jeffrey suspected this was because of the reduced number of platforms on both sides that had survived to keep up the fight. The convoy still had a long way to go to reach its destination and achieve its crucial strategic purpose. But in the meantime it was serving another use: as flypaper for the U-boats and enemy land-based antiship threats.