“Or, he’ll hear us prematurely and not come up from the bottom terrain. He’ll either shoot nuclear torpedoes at us, which is bad enough, or he’ll sneak quietly away. If he shoots, we get some idea of where he is, and we shoot back and maybe at least we damage his ship. But if Beck sneaks away, we’re left empty-handed. Until he launches… He’ll be thinking what we’re thinking. So he’ll know his best choice is to sneak away, once he either gets what he wants from the kampfschwimmer or knows they lost on the Rocks. Time is on his side, not ours.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Sonar,” Jeffrey called.
Kathy Milgrom turned her head. “Captain?”
“Anything at all of von Scheer on passive sonar?”
“No contact on von Scheer whatsoever. My men would have reported it instantly, sir.” Milgrom gave the captain just enough of a look, as if to say, And you know they would have too.
“Very well, Sonar.” Jeffrey stared into space.
“But there’s Orpheus, Captain,” Bell said.
“Two hours or so from now, XO, unless we slow down even more or change our course, we’ll be too far north of the Rocks and we’ll lose the acoustic link with the minisub. From there we’ll be on our own. No more help from Orpheus on getting von Scheer’s location and course and speed so we can move to intercept her smartly, whatever her actual distance from us right now. It all hinges on that fixed anchor station…. But if Beck does sneak off north, he’ll unwittingly lie masked between those two cables until he’s too far off for us to put a stop to him, and we won’t even know it. In that case, us lingering here and depending on Orpheus will have done more harm than good.” It’s like we can’t win either way.
Bell looked at the map for a very long time. Jeffrey let him think; he knew there were many moving parts to this tactical problem, and he didn’t want to rush Bell. Undersea warfare was in some ways like a grand-master chess tournament. You had to think several moves ahead. You had to consider a lot of different strategy choices and trade-offs. And you had to try to take account of what your opponent would think and feel and do.
But unlike chess, the stakes here aren’t prestige or money. The stakes are life and death for hundreds, even thousands of people.
Bell looked up abruptly. He seemed emotionally unsettled, but he’d clearly made up his mind. “We have to nuke the Rocks ourselves, Captain, now.”
Jeffrey raised his eyebrows. “Why?”
“We can’t afford for Estabo to loose his battle. If the kampfschwimmer win, and we guessed right about their purpose, they’ll send good targeting data to von Scheer.”
“And if we nuke the Rocks we kill everybody, so that way the Germans can’t win?”
Bell nodded, but seemed doubtful when he heard Jeffrey put it so bluntly out loud.
Jeffrey shook his head. “First of all, I’m not intentionally killing friendly troops. Second, the blasts would cause so much noise and aftershocks we’d lose the acoustic link to Orpheus, assuming the mini even survived.”
“I agree, sir. I just felt I had to offer the option.”
“Good. Keep it up.” But Jeffrey felt halfhearted when he said it. The von Scheer was out there, somewhere tantalizingly close — unseen but real. She must weigh something like twenty thousand tons submerged, and have well over a hundred men in her crew, but even so she’d vanished. For all the brainstorming with Bell, Ernst Beck’s mind remained opaque to Jeffrey. The German captain held the initiative, and Beck’s ship remained invisible.
Jeffrey felt frustration. The taste of failure began to rise inside his gut like bile.
“Captain!” Kathy Milgrom called.
Jeffrey turned, his train of thought broken. “What is it?”
Milgrom didn’t flinch. “New contact on acoustic intercept… Multiple contacts on acoustic intercept.” The acoustic intercept array was specifically designed to detect another active sonar pinging.
“Range? Bearing? Classification? Come on, give me a proper report.”
I’m starting to lose my grip here. Chill out, buddy. Your people don’t need such abuse.
“Contact rough bearing is north, sir, picked up through the deep sound channel. Range approximately four hundred miles. Contact classification, tentative, is airdropped active sonobuoys.”
Jeffrey brightened.
“Another cluster of sonobuoys, Captain. Closer to us, by maybe fifty miles.”
“Can you identify the sonobuoys?”
“Definite American and British manufacture, sir. Some are SSQ-seventy-fives.” That model of sonobuoy could descend to sixteen thousand feet or more.
“Okay, Sonar. Good. Thanks. Keep the info coming…. XO, plot these contacts on the large-scale nautical chart.”
Marks for the rough location of the sonobuoys began to appear on the chart on Bell’s console.
“What do you think, XO? Antisubmarine search by the convoy’s forward aircraft screens?”
“There’s a trend to the patterns they’re dropping,” Bell said. “They’re not probing along the relief convoy’s base course through the Narrows, Captain.”
“Hmm… Let’s just watch for a minute…. Helm, steadyas you go.”
“Aye aye, sir. My course is zero one five.”
“Captain,” Bell said, “something strange is happening here.” He pointed at the map.
Jeffrey looked at the map. Minutes ticked by. Precious minutes. Then he saw it, and in a flash all his second-guessing and worries vanished.
“That brilliant son of a bitch,” Jeffrey exclaimed. “He figured it out!”
“Captain?” Bell said.
“The sonobuoys, XO! They’re all being dropped between the two phone cables. Admiral Hodgkiss figured it out! Our radios are jammed so we can’t talk to him, but still he sees the same things we’ve been seeing, thinks the same things we’ve been thinking…. He sent us air support, XO. Thoseplanes are coming at us at almost five hundred knots. Unless Ernst Beck has stronger nerves than I do, he’ll have to move out of the way, east or west, or an SSQ-seventy-five will hit him on the nose and then a big nuclear depth bomb’ll hit him hard right in the head.”
Jeffrey walked over to Milgrom’s console to watch as more and more data came in. A solid carpet of sonobuoys was saturating the bottom terrain between the convoy and the Rocks, between the two old telephone cables. The leading edge of the carpet inched south steadily.
The number of sonobuoys expended was truly prodigious. Jeffrey knew that, at this rate, soon the carriers and even their underway-replenishment-support auxiliary ships would exhaust their entire inventories.
Jeffrey was very glad that he’d decided to stay shallow and not rush away farther north. Otherwise, those constant pings might’ve bounced off Challenger’s hull and given her away to the von Scheer, or — worse — might have subjected him to friendly atomic fire.
“Captain,” Bell called out. “New Orpheus contact. Positive Orpheus contact! Von Scheer is moving due east, here. Her speed is thirty knots.”
Thank you, Admiral Hodgkiss! You flushed Beck for us after all.