Von Loringhoven came around to Beck’s side of the little fold-down desk.
“Right here is the place.” Beck tapped a spot on the map with his light pen. “Of course, we still have details to work out, but we have several days to get there…. I suggest, Baron, that you and I both make up for our sleep deficit. I’ll have a messenger fetch us a good meal now, then wake us both in time for dinner.”
“Delightful.”
Beck used his intercom to dial the wardroom pantry chief. They spoke briefly. Beck hung up.
“Fresh ham, hot carrots, also fresh, and freshly baked bread, for two, is on the way. Eat with me here, Baron.”
“With pleasure.”
“Excuse me for a moment while I speak to the einzvo.” Beck stepped out of his cabin and walked the few paces to the Zentrale. The acting weapons officer had the deck, while Stissinger kept an eye on things. Beck approached Stissinger.
“Our guest has accepted the invitation to dine in the wardroom tonight.” He touched the side of his nose, knowingly, and saw an answering sparkle in Stissinger’s eyes.
“We’ll make a good shipmate out of him yet, Captain.”
Beck gave the weapons officer and navigator orders to get the von Scheer under way, toward the craggy, broken bottom terrain of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge: “Nap of seafloor cruising mode. Mean speed of advance twenty-five knots. Base course southwest until we reach the east side of the main ridge flank, then base course south. Maintain rig for ultraquiet.”
Both men acknowledged; Stissinger calmly monitored their performance. Beck returned to his cabin. Von Loringhoven sat there patiently.
Beck started to clear the papers and computer from his desk. But first, he took one more look at the nautical chart on the laptop screen. “A clever stratagem,” he said expansively, “and a good choice. A useless menace to navigation, hundreds of miles from land. A perfect place to set up a land-based satellite downlink station, and an undersea acoustic link to talk to us while we can hide…. My only trouble isthe real estate belongs to a neutral country.”
“Don’t concern yourself,” von Loringhoven said. “Efforts are under way that ought to remove that worry from your mind.”
“Specifics?”
“Not yet.”
“Funny, I somehow knew you’d say that.” Both men chuckled, sharing a good laugh for the first time since they’d met.
Beck looked at the map a final time, examining their destination. “Desolate, unoccupied, a radioactive wasteland now. It’s the last place I’d ever think to choose… which is probably exactly why Berlin chose it. And it is so centrally located.” He turned off his computer just as two messmen arrived with the meal trays.
On both trays were two shot glasses filled with schnapps.
Beck raised the first glass. “To a successful voyage, and now to a nice long well-earned nap.”
Von Loringhoven raised his glass. “To a successful voyage, and to more good work by our kampfschwimmer.” He downed his schnapps in one gulp.
For a moment, Beck thought there was a soulless predatory look in the other man’s eyes. It sent a chill up his spine, enough to ruin the feeling of warmth brought on by the schnapps.
Von Loringhoven raised his second glass. “To our destination, our ear to Berlin’s sea-surveillance satellites, the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks.”
CHAPTER 16
Four days later, near the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks, Jeffrey stood in the aisle in Challenger’s control room. A main display screen on the forward bulkhead, above COB’s and Meltzer’s ship-control stations, showed him and everyone else the big picture. Challenger lurked deep in the western foothills of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, eleven thousand feet down. Farther west was the flat and open Ceara Plain, four thousand feet even deeper than that, off the northeast coast of Brazil. Challenger’s minisub lingered shallow, near the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks. The mini was careful to keep a direct acoustic line of sight to Jeffrey’s ship, southwest of the Rocks.
The two vessels communicated by covert undersea acoustic link, which transmitted voice or data by a series of digitized pulses. The pulses were incredibly short, at frequencies extremely high and changing thousands of times each second — so the likelihood of intercept by an enemy was very low. The range of the link was up to thirty nautical miles, depending on local oceanographic conditions.
Most of the Orpheus setup work was complete. Robotic undersea vehicles, launched from Challenger and controlled by the ship’s technicians or by specialist SEALs in the mini-sub, had tapped into the undersea telephone cables. Thin wires from those taps were strung to a place by the Rocks, in sheltered water one hundred feet deep. SEAL divers had rigged those wires into an anchor and relay station, ready for use by men at Orpheus consoles in the minisub, and ready for linkage by fiber-optic to a satellite transceiver site that the SEALs would create on the Rocks.
“Captain,” Lieutenant Milgrom reported, “Lieutenant Estabo is calling from the minisub. He indicates he’s ready to transfer to the Rocks.”
“Ask him how Orpheus is performing so far.”
“Wait one, sir.” She spoke into her microphone and listened on her headset. Classified signal-processing software encoded and decoded the two-way conversation and generated the sonar pulses Challenger sent to the minisub; the mini had identical software, though her sonar arrays were simpler and less powerful.
“Sir, his men are just now calibrating the consoles. Lieutenant Estabo prefers to establish the satellite link with Norfolk first, to double-check each other using raw incoming Orpheus data.”
“Very well. Tell him to proceed.”
Milgrom spoke into her mike, then signed off. To deliver Felix to the Rocks, the mini would have to move in closer, and the line of sight, the acoustic link, to Challenger would be blocked.
Jeffrey looked at the main display once more. Bell had the conn, and Jeffrey glanced over the man’s shoulder at the tactical situation plot. Something just didn’t add up.
“XO, Sonar, I want you both in my stateroom.”
Officers traded places as Bell passed the conn to Lieutenant Sessions. One senior chief, the assistant navigator, took over for Sessions. Another senior chief, the sonar supervisor, sat in for Milgrom. Bell and Milgrom followed Jeffrey to his stateroom.
“What’s the matter, Skipper?” Bell asked. He stood, because Jeffrey was standing. Milgrom stood too, and frowned, because Jeffrey was frowning.
“Sonar, when was the last time you heard a nuclear detonation in the North Atlantic?”
“Days, sir. We’ve heard hardly any since departing New London.”
“And how long has the relief convoy been under way?”
“About a week,” Bell said. “Pretty much the same as us.”
“And where is the convoy right now?”
“Right now? Streaming down toward the Atlantic Narrows.”
“We’re just picking up traces of their signature, sir, on our wide-aperture arrays,” Milgrom said.
“A week. Why haven’t the U-boats attacked?”
Milgrom and Bell looked at each other. Bell spoke for both of them. “I guess we’ve all been wondering, Captain.”
“And our latest intelligence download from Norfolk confirmed what our sonars have heard. Or haven’t heard.”
Milgrom and Bell nodded; when Challenger went shallow to launch the minisub with Felix and his men, Jeffrey had used his floating wire antenna to grab short text messages from headquarters. Jeffrey summarized what he’d been told then.
“The convoy escorts picked up a few false contacts, dropped high-explosive torpedoes or depth charges, and then nothing. No confirmed contacts, no confirmed kills… They blew up biologics by mistake, or bleary-eyed observers were just seeing things, or nervous sonar techs heard sounds that weren’t there.”