Milgrom and Bell nodded again, reluctantly.
“Don’t you see what’s happening?”
“Sir?”
“Atlantic Fleet’s whole take on the shape of the battle has been all wrong. The defensive tactics, the carrier and escort dispositions, everything, they’ve been all wrong.”
Bell nodded.
Milgrom glanced at the XO. Her face turned grim. “The Axis have been one step ahead of us the entire time, haven’t they, sir?”
Jeffrey looked into space and worked his jaw. “For a solid week the carrier battle groups and escorting ships and fast-attacks have been at general quarters almost nonstop. Their antisubmarine helos and aircraft have been flying patrols on high alert around the clock. Men and women will be exhausted, close to dropping on their feet, from lack of sleep and interrupted meals. Equipment will be worn down more and more, to the point where critical failures are almost imminent, from the aggressive operational tempo. Crews on the merchant ships will be going crazy from the endless waiting game…. And nobody’s sunk one single U-boat. And I think I know exactly why.”
“Yes, sir,” Milgrom said; she obviously realized why too.
“The real battle, the battle the Axis intend to fight exclusively on their own terms, hasn’t even started yet. Their submarines are massed much farther south that we expected.”
Bell looked. “You mean—”
“Yup. In a day or so, the convoy starts to go through the Atlantic Narrows. The Axis knows we’re coming, and they know our ships can’t hide. Then, for another entire week, the convoy and escorts try to run the South Atlantic. The carrier battle groups and our available fast-attacks are mostly deployed for a fight in the North Atlantic, that was supposed to have come from the east, from Europe, already. Now they’re out of position to give good mutual support against a massed threat to the south. If they come steaming through the Narrows one at a time, they’ll get torn to pieces. Think about it.”
“Oh, God,” Bell said.
“To the west, thousands of miles away, will be the neutral, unhelpful shores of South America. To their east and then their north will loom the bulge of occupied North Africa, menacing the convoy’s left flank the whole way. To the south, against their other flank, are Boer home waters.”
“I see what you’re leading to, Captain,” Milgrom said.
“That’s where they’ll strike. That’s what they’ve been waiting for all along, sitting fat and happy and stealthy and rested and fresh. The convoy-versus-U-boat fight won’t be in the North Atlantic at all. It’ll be in the one place where the enemy holds every card, geographically, logistically, strategically…. They’ll have mobile antiship and antiaircraft cruise-missile launchers moving along the coast, shooting and scooting, working in concert with the wolf packs. The whole fight will be on the last leg of the convoy’s journey, in the South Atlantic, with the tail of support for U.S. forces stretching back six or seven thousand miles, stretched to the breaking point.”
Bell hesitated. “What should we do? Reposition the ship? Is all of this work by the Rocks just a waste?”
Jeffrey stood there in his stateroom with the door closed. “XO, I wish I knew.”
CHAPTER 17
Ernst Beck sat alone and lonely at the head of the wardroom table. Two great men looked down at him, one alive and one dead.
To his left, on the bulkhead in an expensive gilt-edged frame, hung an oil painting of the new kaiser, Wilhelm IV. To Beck’s right, on the opposite bulkhead, hung a portrait of his ship’s namesake, Admiral Reinhard von Scheer — commander in chief of the High Seas Fleet at the height of World War I.
Reinhard von Scheer wore a thin black mustache; the hair at his temples had started to gray; his eyes were dark and piercing. The artist of the portrait had captured von Scheer’s expression skillfully, and brought the man forever to life. Von Scheer’s intelligent face was poised somewhere between a dissatisfied frown and a benevolent smile. The smile looked like it was just on the verge of winning out over the frown. From history, Beck knew the admiral had been daring but prudent, inventive but cautious, a brilliant tactician under fire… and an iron-willed opportunist who at Jutland — Skagerrak to the Germans — damaged a vastly superior British force and then escaped against all odds with his own squadrons mostly intact.
Beck looked Admiral von Scheer in the eyes very thoughtfully. He remembered that he himself sat in a different dead man’s place — the von Scheer’s original captain, his former commanding officer, had until recently used this sacrosanct chair at the head of the wardroom table. Did he feel Reinhard von Scheer gazing down at him, testing him, challenging him, as I do?
Beck had lost track of the time when the einzvo, Karl Stissinger, walked into the wardroom, right on schedule. Always empathetic and perceptive, Stissinger saw his captain locked in a staring match with the long-deceased admiral.
“That’s one contest you can’t win, sir,” he joked. “I tell myself it’s just dabs of oil paint on canvas; he isn’t really here, but those eyes, those eyes… Even a century later you don’t want to let that man down.”
Beck turned to Stissinger and smiled wanly. “I know. It’s like he’s our conscience, watching us from that wall…. I try to imagine the weight on his shoulders, that fateful day and night, with fifteen-inch enemy battleship shells pounding at him incessantly. Armor-piercing shells the weight of small autos, smashing at him and his ships and his men. The noise, the smoke, the fear, and the tension. The drenching bursts of near misses, the bone-breaking shudder of hits, and the fires.”
Stissinger shivered and glanced at the other painting, as if to change the subject. “Our new kaiser, on the other hand, is what one might call an enigma.”
Beck let out a deep sigh. “Before the war, I used to think the people who wanted a kaiser again were all hobbyists or hotheads. Sure, Wilhelm the Second abdicated and fled to royal relatives in Holland in 1918, but he always assumed he’d come back once Versailles died down. In the thirties, General von Hindenberg wanted to restore him to power, you know, but Hitler had other ideas. Wilhelm must have died a bitter man.”
“As I recall, Captain, he spent the last twenty years of his life in exile in the Netherlands, chopping down trees for exercise. He chopped down something like fifty thousand trees. He must have gone mad, if he wasn’t half mad to begin with.”
“Some people said, and still say, the Versailles Treaty itself was a major war crime. Enslaving and plundering our nation just to satisfy French and British vindictiveness and greed… And Wilhelm had good reason to go mad. He abdicates voluntarily, for the good of the nation, right? Then he watches from refuge in Holland as Edward the Eighth abdicates in the thirties over that scandal with Mrs. Simpson. That didn’t end the British monarchy at all. The next in line stepped in…. It must have all seemed so unfair….”
Beck looked at the picture of the new kaiser. Wilhelm III, crown prince in World War I, had never gotten to assume the throne. After the coup last year in Berlin, when the ultranationalists restored the crown to have a figurehead, the sudden-kaiser chose the name Wilhelm IV, for tradition and continuity — or because he was told to.