While he killed time patiently waiting for his captain, Beck — whose rank equaled lieutenant commander in the U.S. or Royal navies — thought the recent construction work here looked skillfully done and well planned. He knew it was mostly completed by Norway, an active member of NATO, before Norway was overrun and occupied when Beck’s country, resurgent Imperial Germany, went to war. In fact, if Beck paid careful enough attention when he breathed, the air still smelled slightly sour, from the curing of fresh-poured cement. The lighting, from floodlights and bare fluorescents, was glaring and harsh. From near and far many voices yelled to one another, orders or questions and answers projected above the machinery din. Beck’s crewmen were crisp and professional; the yard workers in their own proud way sounded tough and intentionally vulgar.
As he glanced up for a moment at the lowering, hard gray ceiling of the pens — barely higher than the sail, the conning tower, of his stark black nuclear submarine — Ernst Beck also felt the weight of the burden of many cares. In the dock beside him loomed the big new vessel, the mighty undersea warship on which he would serve as executive officer, with all the responsibilities that entailed. A family man with a devoted wife and sturdy young twin sons, good Catholic in the traditional Bavarian way, and trapped in a tactical nuclear war he believed to be morally wrong, Beck knew he was lucky to still be alive. He also felt secretly guilty, that he could smile and make love with his wife and drink beer when so many others were dead and utterly gone, friends and colleagues some of them, vaporized or crushed and drowned or felled by acute radiation sickness. Yet ironically, Beck also was glad. He knew he was lucky indeed after his recent misadventures in battle: to have this fine ship, to get this important assignment, even to be allowed to go to sea once more at all….
Again Beck felt that gnawing in his innermost self, and fought against another combat flashback. Not now, of all times, with my captain due any moment and our warship about to put to sea. But still the flashback came, the same way the awful nightmares never ceased.
The screams of torpedo engine sounds, and of terrified, agonized men. The murderous crack and rumble and the body-wrenching shock force, like thunderclaps mixed with an earthquake, as nuclear torpedoes went off near and far. The acrid smell of fear in the control room, and the smell of choking smoke, then the worse smell of burning corpses mixed with urine and vomit and shit… Running breathlessly, and hoarsely shouting orders above the crackle of the flames. Climbing the steep steel ladder in desperation with a dying master chief draped on his shoulders — Beck’s best friend. Trying to think straight and give leadership while truly scared and exhausted beyond enduring.
Beck shook his head. There was nothing glamorous about tactical nuclear war at sea. It tore at the heart and battered the mind, and left the human soul in shredded fragments. These broken shards of Ernst Beck’s soul ripped at him from inside sometimes, a feeling in his stomach like broken glass. The intergenerational Germanic craving for empire, even at the risk of national self-immolation, seemed incurable, unquenchable. Decades could pass, and the disease was reborn, like a flare-up of a stubborn case of malaria… or the dreaded return of a once-cured cancer that this time might be terminal.
For escape, Beck turned to gaze admiringly at his ship, his submarine — his new home and his new life. She’d been christened the SMS Admiral von Scheer, to honor the commander of the German fleet at the Battle of Jutland in World War I — a battle the Germans called Skagerrak, and which to this day they insisted they’d won. The British saw it differently, but the Brits were on the point of starvation now, and maybe on the point of surrender, in part thanks to Beck’s previous war-fighting handiwork. Beck had already helped sink a million tons of Allied shipping, and killed God knows how many people in the process, and he was a hero. He now wore the prestigious Knight’s Cross around his neck.
But Ernst Beck didn’t feel like a hero.
Blessedly, he was distracted when he saw a young, skinny figure clamber up through the von Scheer’s forward hatch. Beck recognized Werner Haffner, the sonar officer, a lieutenant junior grade from Kiel — a historic German port and naval base on the Baltic Sea.
Haffner was high-strung but capable. Unlike most of the von Scheer’s crew, Haffner had been with Beck before, on his previous mission, the one from which so few men came back. The crew of the von Scheer, who all reported to Beck directly or indirectly, were still largely unknown quantities to him. Though they, like Beck himself, had for years trained secretly aboard not-so-neutral Russia’s nuclear submarine fleet — for a hefty fee, of course — the bulk of von Scheer’s crew were as untested in actual combat as their brand-new ship. This worried Beck, who would somehow have to turn them into one cohesive unit through the unforgiving medium of war itself.
“Sorry, sir,” Haffner said.
“You’re lucky our captain is running even later than you,” Beck responded as sternly as he could. “Fix your uniform, and try not to trip over your sword again.” But Beck smiled. He liked Werner Haffner, and felt better having the leutnant zur see standing there next to him. Seeing Haffner reminded Beck that surviving was possible.
One of von Scheer’s senior chiefs approached Beck on the pier. The oberbootsmann wore work clothes, gray coveralls and steel-toed boots. He looked harried but in control. The chief braced to a cocky, all-knowing attention. “We’re ready to take on the fuel for the Mach eight missiles, Einzvo. The dockyard handling parties are getting in position now to transfer the liquid hydrogen.”
“Carry on.” Since Beck was executive officer — erster wach-offizier in German, first watch officer — he was often addressed in that navy slang, the acronym 1WO pronounced phonetically “einzvo.”
Beck glanced toward the after part of his ship. The two dozen thick, pressure-proof hatches for the cruise missiles were all tightly closed. Most of those hatches covered internal silos that each held several supersonic antiship cruise missiles, nuclear armed. These missiles were of Russian design, export-model Modified Shipwrecks. They did Mach 2.5, fast enough. Some of the silos held cargo instead, including crated tactical atomic warheads that Beck assumed were meant for delivery to the Boers in distant South Africa. The Boers made their own warheads, using native uranium ore, but they might be running low on weapons-grade material because of recent heavy use in the Indian Ocean battle theater.
And one of the von Scheer’s silos held two German-designed top-secret liquid-hydrogen-powered ground-hugging cruise missiles that actually did Mach 8. Nothing the Allies had could stop them, even if they knew they were inbound. One such missile, nuclear tipped, was enough to destroy an American supercarrier with almost absolute certainty. Beck hoped that on this next mission the von Scheer would account for two.
The Mach 8 missiles were in very short supply, thanks to interference from the Allies. For all Beck knew, the two he held on board were the last ones Germany had, and it would take a year to retool and manufacture more. Who could tell where the war might stand by then?
The loudspeakers in the dock area announced the commencement of fueling operations. The tinny-sounding voice concluded, “All unnecessary personnel leave the area.” Beck listened to the words echo and die away against the oppressive concrete walls enclosing him and his men and his ship.