Then Jeffrey, his ultimate commitment already made in agreement with Bell, threw the whole rule book away. Whether or not it’s true, Ernst Beck, keep thinking I’m predictable and — as captains going head-to-head — you’re better than me.
The von Scheer had been moving slowly, for tactical caution and for stealth. Challenger built up full momentum, with her reactor pushed to 120 percent — by hiding just beyond the north side of the Walvis down on the very bottom. This gave Jeffrey good acoustic masking until he was ready to turn and rush up over the top of the ridge. He used the active pinging by his first fish to find the von Scheer, then ordered Meltzer to bear down on her relentlessly.
Now that he’d caught the von Scheer by surprise, his salvos of Mark 88s would force Beck south, out of the protection of the Walvis Ridge and into the Cape Basin, where there was nowhere for either ship to hide.
Jeffrey smiled. To hell with caution. To hell with stealth. Just keep on believing I’m bluffing, Beck. And then I’ll see you in hell.
Beck ordered salvos of Sea Lions fired at Challenger’s torpedoes in self-defense. Even with the Mark 88 guidance wires cut, their active pinging would let them home on Beck’s ship.
Beck fired other Sea Lions at Challenger, but Fuller already had more weapons in the water. Still Fuller charged right at von Scheer.
Beck ordered the pilot to turn the von Scheer south and make flank speed. He needed to buy space and time in order to give his defensive countershots enough room so they wouldn’t take von Scheer with them when they blew.
Challenger’s bow sphere went active. It must have been set on maximum power. A strident screech pierced the water and the von Scheer’s hull. The noise sundered the air in the Zentrale, rising and falling in pitch, setting Beck’s nerves on edge as if fingernails had dragged on a blackboard. It made it hard for him to think.
He wanted to retaliate, but Challenger was coming at him from behind, in that arc where his own bow sphere was useless.
Fuller has to have planned it this way.
He’s using his active sonar as a psychological weapon.
The worst of it is, it’s working.
The sonar noise was drowned out only when atomic torpedo warheads began to detonate. The von Scheer was kicked hard in the stern. Now Beck began to understand what Fuller and Challenger had gone through back in the mountain pass. Warhead concussions and fireball pulsations, bounces of shock fronts off the surface and the bottom and the ridge, pounded the von Scheer like the Roman god Vulcan working at his forge.
Still heading south into very deep water, Beck knew he had to continue to flee. The massive blasts and aftershocks did more than deafen his crew and damage his vessel. They blinded all his sonar arrays. It became impossible to know what was happening back behind the ship.
One leaker, one Mark 88 making it through Beck’s Sea Lion defensive barrage, could catch the von Scheer and put her on the bottom in pieces.
Still the blasts and hammer blows went on. The port-side torpedo autoloader jammed. Broken parts sprayed flammable hydraulic fluid, and firefighters raced to smother the fluid with foam before it ignited.
Overhead light fixtures shattered. Cooling-water pipes cracked. Consoles went dark, and software systems crashed. The control room filled with the burned-plastic reek of smoldering electronics. The crewmen raced to don their emergency air-breathing masks. Beck and Stissinger glanced at each other worriedly through their masks. A chief helped the fumbling von Loringhoven get his mask on properly and plugged its hose into the overhead supply pipe.
“He’s going to kill us all!” von Loringhoven shouted. His voice was muffled through his mask, and he was barely audible above the noise.
“No!” Beck yelled. “I know him! That’s what he wants us to think!”
Von Scheer had reached flank speed, over forty knots. But Beck knew Challenger was ten or twelve knots faster, and he realized by now that her warhead yields had been upgraded to a full kiloton. We’re in a stern chase, and he’s gaining… assuming he’s still back there at all.
Beck ordered the pilot to turn east, just enough so the port wide-aperture array could hear back the way von Scheer had come.
Haffner and his men worked hard to filter out the noise and clean up the signals. The hissing and whooshing of air-breathing masks, including Beck’s own, added to the other noise and made the scene seem mad. But Beck knew the lunacy was all too real.
Beck waited for a report from Haffner. Challenger had probably turned away, to continue the cat-and-mouse stalking as the acoustic catastrophe outside the hull died down. If Fuller got too close, he wouldn’t be able to fire at Beck — his own weapon explosions would fracture Challenger’s hull right along with von Scheer’s. Three kilometers down, Beck knew, Fuller’s only high-explosive torpedoes, his ADCAPs, were far below their crush depths.
“Flank-speed tonals and flow noise, Captain! Challenger still in pursuit!”
Beck cursed; Fuller was gaining on him. He ordered another salvo of Sea Lions fired. They had to run out in front of the ship and then loop behind to reach their target. This cost him precious space and time.
More Mark 88s went off. They had been set on lower yields, probably a tenth of a kiloton, to knock down Beck’s Sea Lions without damaging Challenger too badly.
Beck ordered the pilot to turn slightly, again. Immediately Haffner reported eight Mark 88s in the water, tearing after von Scheer at almost thirty knots net closing speed. Challenger resumed her brain-shattering sonar harassment.
Beck ordered the pilot due south. He ordered Stissinger to launch eight more Sea Lions. Stissinger yelled that the work was badly slowed because of the jammed autoloader and slippery firefighting foam, laced with oily hydraulic fluid, that was sloshing on the torpedo-room deck.
Beck ordered Stissinger to the torpedo room to take charge and steady the men. More A-bombs went off. The intercom circuits failed; the phone talker said his line had gone dead; the on-board fiber-optic LAN went down. The lights dimmed suddenly — and Beck was out of touch with the rest of his ship.
Soon a messenger came forward from Engineering, breathless from running in a heavy compressed air pack. He said an auxiliary turbogenerator was on fire and the main propulsion-shaft packing gland was leaking. The engineer requested permission to use the main batteries to drive the firefighting pumps and bilge pumps aft. Beck knew that to draw current from the main propulsion turbogenerators would slow the ship, the last thing he could afford. And draining the battery ran the risk that von Scheer might not be able to restart her nuclear reactor, in case the reactor scrammed because of blast shock or an electrical problem.