“Damaged?”
“Damaged. Her XO wouldn’t tell me much at first. Secrecy, the usual. But I saw several body bags come off.”
“I don’t like where this is going.”
“I gather they’d tried to raid the German underground U-boat pens at Trondheim.” Trondheim was on the coast of central Norway. “Somebody senior thought that’s where the von Scheer must’ve been hiding. But apparently all the activity there was fake, a big deception, to draw us off from where von Scheer really was, far up in the nether reaches by North Cape, hard on the border with Russia.”
“So what happened?”
“The Germans were waiting for the SEALs. They took heavy losses and failed to penetrate the base. The Carter was badly banged up getting away.”
“Any word on Clayton and Montgomery?” They were two SEALs, a lieutenant and a senior chief, who’d been with Challenger on recent missions. Jeffrey and Bell — and a lot of Challenger’s crew — had gotten to like Clayton and Montgomery a lot, living so tightly together and sharing the dangers of war. Clayton was very even-tempered and easy to talk to. Montgomery had a dry sense of humor and an extremely sharp tongue, but people tended to trust him and he exuded strong natural charisma.
Bell looked at Jeffrey. “It seems likely from their previous experience that they both would have been on that raid. Now we don’t know if they’re alive or dead, and nobody in New London would tell us.”
Jeffrey frowned. “It doesn’t bode well that we’re picking up a different team this time.”
“I know, Captain. That’s what the whole crew’s thinking. New SEALs are not a good sign. The idea Clayton and Montgomery might be dead is getting our people down. Uncertainty is even worse than knowing for sure. It gnaws at you.”
“All right. Once you and I go over one more thing, I’ll make the rounds and get everybody cheered up. We can’t have them thinking dark thoughts based on hearsay and guesswork. And this business about us playing Russian roulette is bullcrap. This ship’s crew are all professionals. They’re not supposed to mope and feel sorry for themselves when we’re fighting for our country’s whole way of life. Their job is to make the enemy be the one to get the willies and have self-doubt.”
“It’ll make a difference, sir, them hearing that from you.”
“I’ll fill them in on the big picture, this relief convoy to Africa and everything. I know you already did that. But getting it again, from me, should boost their sense of purpose.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“We have the consoles for this Orpheus gizmo?”
“Affirmative. Installed and tested. My understanding is the off-hull equipment will come when we rendezvous with Ohio.”
“So Admiral Hodgkiss told me… And so I will tell each member of my crew. Next stop, the Caribbean Sea. Then we head for the one place where the Orpheus setup will work, and do the most good…. Orpheus. Is that a code name, oran acronym for something tongue-twisting, do you think?”
“I believe it’s a code name, Captain. I doubt they’d use an acronym, sir, on the off chance an Axis agent or mole could figure out what the letters stood for.”
Jeffrey rose to signal he was ending the meeting. “It’s good to know, XO, given what we’ll be facing against the von Scheer, that just for once it’s the Allies who’ve come up with a secret weapon that could turn the tide.”
CHAPTER 10
Two days later, nearing the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap, Ernst Beck sat alone at his desk in his tiny, austere cabin. To one side of his laptop lay the heavy packet of remaining unopened envelopes within envelopes that Rudiger von Loringhoven had given him. Since the von Scheer left Norway, the packet had already been stripped of its two outermost layers: the rendezvous with the pair of Russian submarines in the Barents Sea and then details for piercing the G-I-UK Gap. Some of those latter details were displayed right now on Beck’s laptop screen.
Beck reached over and palmed his intercom mike. In the control room, the junior officer of the deck responded.
“Have the einzvo report to my cabin.”
Beck stared for a moment at the unopened packet. Its contents, he knew, would guide his actions stage by stage in the cataclysm to come. The Allied relief convoy, and USS Challenger. The SMS von Scheer was the threat to draw Challenger out, and the convoy was the flypaper to make sure that threat stuck.
Beck’s latest phase orders, like those before, were couched in the dry, precise terms he’d long since learned to expect from Berlin. Well-composed naval orders gave wide discretion to commanders at sea to exercise initiative while adapting to real-world conditions as they unfolded on the spot. But formal naval orders routinely ignored the human emotions their dictates would surely evoke in those whose duty it was to carry them out in a life-or-death global struggle.
Beck sighed.
The crisply worded orders always sidestep the tension of waiting, the chaos and confusion of actual battle, the crew’s grinding fear or terrified panic, the agony of wounds. The orders never touch upon the constant dread of escalation of the wider war. And they never address the crushing load they put on a captain’s shoulders: the near-inhuman demands for brutal, decisive ruthlessness and always-mounting tactical innovation — to deceive or slaughter the enemy in clever and subtle new ways.
Someone knocked on Beck’s door.
“Come.”
Karl Stissinger entered. “Good morning, Captain.”
“It’s time,” Beck said. He gestured at his laptop screen.
Stissinger nodded. “Shall we fetch our mysterious guest, sir?”
“He asked to be called Baron von Loringhoven in public, by the way.”
Stissinger raised his eyebrows. “Oh, a baron, is he?” Stissinger chuckled. “The way he’s been hiding and having messengers bring all his meals, there’s wide speculation he might even be a count. You know, Captain, as in Count Dracula?”
“Not so loud,” Beck said. “He’s right next door.”
“In what should be my cabin, with him sharing it as our guest.”
“He said privacy was needed, for security.”
“I believe it. The messengers say he’s always huddled over papers and maps and documents, and keeps scribbling on a thick notepad. Each time they bring a new meal tray, he turns everything upside down before asking them in. The previous meal, the leftovers, sit shoved in a corner. Besides his computer, he just has the reading light on, day and night. Never uses the overhead fluorescents, and the men swear his bed looks completely unslept in.”
Beck nodded. “He seems to take what’s going on very seriously.” He pointed at the door into the head, the bathroom he shared with von Loringhoven. “I’ve heard him take a shower a couple of times. And I know he pisses and shits like any mortal.” Beck grinned lopsidedly. “You can tell the men I seriously doubt he’s a vampire.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Anyway, let’s see if our baron wants to join us in the Zentrale for the latest excitement.”
The von Scheer was at battle stations, running deep. Beck and Stissinger sat at the command console. Von Loringhoven stood, wedged in behind them, so he could look between their shoulders at their status plots. Way over their heads, the surface Gulf Stream current ran northeast, back the way they’d come. The air and water temperatures were well above freezing here; there was rain and wind and heavy seas, but no ice.