“We can manage a mile from the feed-in anchor. That’s all.”
“Good. Stay shallow, but get out to deeper water.” Jeffrey glanced at his screens. “Head two five zero.” West-southwest. “That’ll give you six hundred feet of water. I don’t want you right by the Rocks when tactical nukes start going off. The tsunami effects, understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I don’t want German combat swimmers finding you. They might be looking for an Allied mini already.”
“Understood.”
“Keep the bottom hatch dogged. Be careful who you let in…. Be careful who you let get near you. They might plant limpet mines, even drop them on you like bombs if you try going deep.”
There was a thoughtful, pregnant silence on the line for a minute. “Acknowledged.”
“Good luck. Out.”
Jeffrey turned and looked at Bell. “Estabo’s on his own. At least the mini can hide underwater, watch for threats with her cameras and sonars.”
Bell nodded. “Estabo seems like a man who knows how to take care of himself, Captain.”
“I hope so. I hate abandoning people.”
“Sir, what the chief on the mini told us — that the radio jamming is worse. It seems like more confirmation.”
“I think I see where you’re going, XO, but say it.”
“Electronic countermeasures support from other German forces, all of a sudden? From land, from space, from U-boats, I don’t know. But I think it’s another sign von Scheer is preparing to launch.”
“Bring up the map of all the old phone cables Orpheus uses. Put it on your console, XO, my displays are swamped.”
Bell typed on his keyboard. “We do have a bit of an information explosion going, don’t we, Captain?”
Jeffrey ignored the remark. He did not want to think about his ship exploding.
The large-scale map came up on Bell’s screen. The two men studied it together, elbow to elbow.
“So this is the cable the von Scheer crossed when Orpheus first picked her up.” Jeffrey pointed to a jiggly line that ran north, past the east side of the local rise capped by the Rocks.
“She came from east to west.” Bell moved his hand from right to left on the map. “Just about here.” He pointed to a spot on the map. “She must have been moving in to deploy her minisub with the kampfschwimmer.”
“This one other cable is real important to us now,” Jeffrey said. It also ran north, but on the west, the left side of the Rocks. “Orpheus hasn’t sensed von Scheer cross over that cable, yet.”
“So she has to be somewhere between the two, Skipper.”
“Yup. The question is whether she’s still north of this rise here by the Rocks. Or has she been moving southward, sneaking east of the Rocks running deep, while we’ve been moving north, going shallow and to the west?” Jeffrey moved his hands while he talked, as if the von Scheer and Challenger were twirling past each other with the Rocks stuck in the middle, screening them both.
“Why would she move south, Captain?”
“To look for us? Beck has to know there’s another sub in the area.”
“But he’s not a fast-attack, Captain. It’s not his job to go hunting for an enemy and offer combat.”
“You’re right, XO. And that’s our other trump card, in addition to Orpheus. We are a fast-attack. We get paid every day to go looking for trouble and mix it up with our adversary.”
“I admit that’s an important observation, sir, but very dangerous if we’re wrong. Remember, Beck used to be XO on a fast-attack. And he knows you, sir.”
Jeffrey frowned. “Our problem is that the Rocks split this whole area between the two phone cables into separate playing fields. North, and south. Which one do we play in?”
Uncertainty piled on uncertainty.
“Go north, sir,” Bell said decisively.
Jeffrey smiled. “Why so sure?”
“Our priority is protecting the convoy. The convoy is north. Beck’s priority is attacking the convoy. The convoy is north.”
“North it is.” Jeffrey knew everyone in the control room who wasn’t wearing sonar headphones heard snatches of this talk. For clarity, he said, “Helm, steady as you go.”
“Aye aye,” Meltzer said. “My course is zero one five, sir.” A bit east of due north.
“Until Orpheus tells us otherwise, XO, we assume von Scheer is north of the Rocks, somewhere between these two cables.”
This give-and-take between a submarine’s senior officers, in the control room before and during an attack, was an old and valued Silent Service tradition. Brainstorming approaches and tactics, thinking things through out loud, was essential to survival and success.
Bell called up a larger-scale chart. “Check this out, Captain. The two cables are almost parallel, but not quite. They slowly draw closer together, as they run north away from the Rocks.”
Jeffrey saw what Bell was getting at. “They intersect here.” He touched a spot on the map near the Azores and used Bell’s joystick to move a cursor. He clicked on the Rocks, then clicked again when the cursor hit where the two cables met. He read off the distance that popped on the screen. “One thousand one hundred nautical miles.”
“That’s a long way off.”
“I know. At flank speed that would take us over twenty hours…. And at flank speed our best sonars would be half deaf, and von Scheer might hear us coming from a hundred miles away or more.”
“It’s an awfully big area to search,” Bell said.
“The convoy forward elements are closer than that already. That cuts down the area somewhat. It’ll keep on shrinking even if we don’t do anything more ourselves.”
Bell nodded. The convoy was moving south, generally toward the Rocks and away from the Azores.
Jeffrey pondered. “The closer the convoy gets, the more the search area narrows. But the closer the convoy gets, the more it moves in easy range of von Scheer’s missiles.”
“Use our active sonar, sir? While there’s still time?”
“Without knowing who’s winning or losing on the Rocks, the SEALs or the kampfschwimmer, we don’t know how much time we really have. Active sonar used too soon might hurt us more than it helps…. It’s time to commit to another strategy step.”
“Sir?”
“Helm, slow to ahead one-third, make turns for seven knots.”
Meltzer acknowledged.
“Sir?” Bell asked again.
“If we can’t be rushing all over the place, we go for the other extreme. We lurk in one spot until the situation clarifies.”
“Should I show you the large-scale bottom terrain?”
“You just read my mind, XO.”
Bell typed again. He windowed a map of the seafloor, in that key slice of ocean between the two old phone cables.
Jeffrey and Bell studied the nautical chart — its area reached far beyond the maximum range of their gravimeter, which could see out only thirty-five or forty miles from Challenger.
“The eastern foothills of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge,” Jeffrey said. “Rugged and rolling terrain, all the way from here to the convoy and past. All deep, but well within a ceramic-hulled submarine’s operating envelope.”
“Yes, Captain. For both us and for the von Scheer.”
“I can think of several things we might do next, XO. But I don’t like any one of them.”
“Sir?”
“Von Scheer has to come shallow to launch her missiles. We know it, and Beck knows we know. That’s his one real weakness.”
“That’s why I suggested active sonar, Captain. If he rises out of the bottom terrain, we’ll make contact. He’ll use outof-phase acoustic masking, but our arrays and signal processors are probably smart enough to not be fooled. Especially if we get an echo off the slats at the back of his pump jet.”