04 Tidal Rip Read online

  JOE BUFF

  TIDAL RIP

  If you won’t dare to think the

  unthinkable now, then someday you might be forced

  to live through it for real.

  No land force can act decisively unless accompanied by a maritime superiority.

  —George Washington

  Battleships are cheaper than battles.

  —Theodore Roosevelt

  We assume that peace is the “normal” pattern of relations among states….

  No idea could be more dangerous.

  —Henry Kissinger,

  in Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy

  CONTENTS

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE

  In mid-2011, Boer-led reactionaries seized control of the government in…

  CHAPTER 1

  Commander Jeffrey Fuller let the hubbub of the cocktail reception…

  CHAPTER 2

  In absolute and enveloping darkness, Felix Estabo quietly went through…

  CHAPTER 3

  Jeffrey was still at the reception at the hotel. As…

  CHAPTER 4

  When Jeffrey left the president, the crowd at the reception…

  CHAPTER 5

  Sit tight,” Jeffrey’s driver shouted. “We’re armored all around!” A…

  CHAPTER 6

  A half-hour flying time south of Washington, Jeffrey’s helicopter banked…

  CHAPTER 7

  In the western Barents Sea, east of Norway, Ernst Beck…

  CHAPTER 8

  Before dawn, Felix and his lieutenant roused the sleeping members…

  CHAPTER 9

  To leave the Norfolk Navy Base covertly and rejoin USS…

  CHAPTER 10

  Two days later, nearing the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap, Ernst Beck sat…

  CHAPTER 11

  Felix Estabo woke that morning in his coffin-sized sleeping rack…

  CHAPTER 12

  Thirty-six hours later, in the Caribbean Sea aboard Challenger, Jeffrey…

  CHAPTER 13

  After sneaking through the teeth of Allied defenses in the…

  CHAPTER 14

  Jeffrey sat in the captain’s place, at the head of…

  CHAPTER 15

  Beck sat at his command workstation in the Zentrale.

  CHAPTER 16

  Four days later, near the St. Peter and St. Paul Rocks,…

  CHAPTER 17

  Ernst Beck sat alone and lonely at the head of…

  CHAPTER 18

  Jeffrey and Milgrom and Bell were still sequestered in Jeffrey’s…

  CHAPTER 19

  Felix’s minisub was nestled in a sheltered area where the…

  CHAPTER 20

  Felix Estabo’s shouting came over the sonar speakers on Challenger.

  CHAPTER 21

  After another fitful, nightmare-ridden attempt at a few hours’ sleep…

  CHAPTER 22

  Felix fired another short burst from his MP-5, then ducked…

  CHAPTER 23

  Ernst Beck watched the data on his console in disbelief…

  CHAPTER 24

  Ilse Reebeck watched at her post in Admiral Hodgkiss’s war…

  CHAPTER 25

  Two days later, off the east coast of Brazil, Jeffrey…

  CHAPTER 26

  Jeffrey awoke refreshed from his long nap and took a…

  CHAPTER 27

  Twelve hours later, after a block of frequently interrupted sleep…

  CHAPTER 28

  Ernst Beck had the conn in the von Scheer’s hushed…

  CHAPTER 29

  The sea was warm and sunlight dappled the surface overhead.

  CHAPTER 30

  The armored personnel carrier left downtown and got on a…

  CHAPTER 31

  Beck was startled out of his sleep when a messenger…

  CHAPTER 32

  Adrenaline surged through Jeffrey’s body, and he fought hard not…

  CHAPTER 33

  Da Gama had left the room again to issue more…

  CHAPTER 34

  Felix listened as the noise of the chopper receded into…

  CHAPTER 35

  Jeffrey changed from his dress uniform into dirty gray overalls.

  CHAPTER 36

  Beneath the helo, on the surface of the sea, Jeffrey…

  CHAPTER 37

  Much to Ernst Beck’s distaste, but as had been planned…

  CHAPTER 38

  Jeffrey’s vacation at sea had come to an end. He…

  CHAPTER 39

  Ernst Beck’s ship was at battle stations and the Zentrale…

  CHAPTER 40

  Still no sign of Challenger or her wreckage,” Stissinger said…

  CHAPTER 41

  Six hours later, Jeffrey felt as if his ship had…

  CHAPTER 42

  Ernst Beck listened in disbelief as Werner Haffner reported a…

  EPILOGUE

  The relief convoy made it more or less safely to…

  GLOSSARY

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES FROM THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE

  OTHER BOOKS BY JOE BUFF

  COVER

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  PROLOGUE

  In mid-2011, Boer-led reactionaries seized control of the government in South Africa in the midst of social chaos and restored apartheid. In response to a UN trade embargo, the Boer regime began sinking U.S. and British merchant ships. Coalition forces mobilized, with only Germany holding back. Troops and tanks drained from the rest of Western Europe and North America, and a joint task force set sail for Africa—into a giant, coordinated trap.

  Then there was another coup, this one in Berlin, and Kaiser Wilhelm’s great-grandson was crowned, the Hohenzollern throne restored after almost a century. Ultranationalists, exploiting American unpreparedness for such all-out war, would give Germany her “place in the sun” at last. A secret military-industrial conspiracy had planned it all for years, brutal opportunists who hated the mediocrity and homogenization of the European Union as much as they resented what to them seemed like America’s smug self-infatuation. Big off-the-books loans from Swiss and German money-center banks, collateralized by booty that would be plundered from the losers, funded the stealthy buildup. The kaiser was to serve as the German shadow oligarchy’s figurehead, made to legitimize their New Order. Coercion by the noose won over citizens who had not been swayed by patriotism or the sheer onrush of events.

  This Berlin-Boer Axis had covertly built small tactical atomic weapons, the great equalizers in what would otherwise have been a most uneven fight—and once again America’s CIA was clueless. South Africa, during “old” apartheid, had a successful nuclear arms program, canceled around 1990 under international pressure. Preparing for new apartheid, and working in secret with German support, the conspirators assembled many new fission devices: compact, energy-efficient, very low-signature dual-laser isotopeseparation techniques let them purify uranium ore into weapons grade in total privacy.

  The new Axis, seeking a global empire all their own, used these low-yield A-bombs to ambush the Allied naval task force under way, then destroyed Warsaw and Tripoli. France, in shock, surrendered at once, and continental Europe was overrun. Germany won a strong beachhead in North Africa, while the South African army drove hard toward them to link up. The battered Allied task force put ashore near the Congo Basin, in a last-ditch attempt to hold the Germans and well-equipped Boers apart. In both Europe and Africa the fascist conquest trapped countless Allied civilians: traveling businesspeople, vacationing families, student groups on summer tours. Americans and Brits were herded into internment camps near major Axis f
actories and transport nodes, as hostages and human shields. It was unthinkable for the Allies to retaliate against Axis tactical nuclear weapons used primarily at sea by launching ICBMs with hydrogen bombs into the heart of Western Europe. The U.S. and UK were handcuffed, forced to fight on Axis terms on ground of Axis choosing: the midocean, using A-bomb-tipped cruise missiles and torpedoes. Information warfare hacking of the Global Positioning System satellite signals, and ingenious jamming of smart-bomb homing sensors, made the Allies’ vaunted precision-guided high-explosive munitions much less precise. Advanced radar methods in the FM radio band—pioneered by Russia—removed the invisibility of America’s finest stealth aircraft.

  Thoroughly relentless, Germany grabbed nuclear subs from the French, and advanced diesel subs that Germany herself had exported to other countries—these ultraquiet diesels with fuel-cell air-independent propulsion needn’t surface or even raise a snorkel for weeks or months at a time. Some were shared with the Boers, whose conventional heavy-armaments industry—a world leader under old apartheid—had been revived openly during the heightened global military tensions of the early twenty-first century. A financially supine Russia, supposedly neutral yet long a believer in the practicality of limited tactical nuclear war, sold weapons as well as oil and natural gas to the Axis for hard cash. Most of the rest of the world stayed on the sidelines, biding their time out of fear or greed or both.

  American supply convoys to starving Great Britain are being decimated by the modern U-boat threat, in another bloody Battle of the Atlantic. The UK has suffered stoically through one of the harshest winters on record—food, fuel, and medical supplies are running critically low. Tens of thousands of merchant seamen died in the Second World War, and the casualty lists grow very long this time too.

  Now, nine months into the war, in early spring of 2012, America is smarting from serious setbacks in the Indian Ocean theater. The vital Central Africa pocket—composed of surviving U.S./coalition forces and friendly local African troops—is in danger of complete envelopment by the Axis. With cargo vessels being sunk much faster than they can be replaced, resupply across the shipping lanes is becoming harder and harder. Yet if the pocket and the UK fall, the Axis onslaught will overwhelm all of two continents. At the same time, Axis agents are making serious trouble in Latin America, exploiting continued local political instability and economic distress; a whole new front could threaten U.S. security and strategic material resources from due south. Brazil, like South Africa, had a nuclear weapons program in the 1980s—its current status isn’t known by American intelligence.

  If the situation deteriorates much further, and Allied forces become too overstretched, the U.S. will have no choice but to recognize Axis territorial gains. With so many atom bombs set off at sea by both sides, and the oil slicks from many wrecked ships, oceanic environmental damage has already been severe. Presented with everything short of outright invasion, and nuclear weapons not used against the United States homeland quite yet, the U.S. may be forced to sue for an armistice: a de facto Axis victory. A new Evil Empire would threaten the world, and a new Iron Curtain would fall.

  America and Great Britain each own one state-of-the-art ceramic-hulled fast-attack sub—such as USS Challenger, capable of tremendous depths—but the Axis own such vessels too. With Germany’s latest, the Admiral von Scheer, representing a whole new level of antiship power and stealth, the U.S. is on the defensive everywhere, and democracy has never been more threatened. In this terrible new war, with the midocean’s surface a killing zone, America’s last, best hope for enduring freedom lies with a special breed of fearless undersea warriors….

  In the not too distant future

  The air was cold and dank and smelled of diesel oil. Ozone laced with the stench of dead fish was pungent. Wearing his full dress uniform, including clumsy ceremonial sword, Korvettenkapitan Ernst Beck stood morosely on the concrete pier amid the modern underground U-boat pens, above the Arctic Circle. Noise echoed from all around him in the vast but sealed-off space, from cranes and pumps and power tools and forced ventilation ducts. Beck could almost feel the weight of thousands of meters of solid granite press down on him from above, from the steep and snow-clad mountain, up a long and very deep fjord, into whose sheltering massiveness this complex of pens had been blasted and cut.

  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 millio
n 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.