Jeffrey Fuller #05 - Straits of Power by Joe Buff

Author:Joe Buff [Buff, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2011-09-08T17:18:36+00:00

Chapter 27

Fresh from a full meal and a catnap, Egon Schneider exercised his privilege as captain of Grand Admiral Doenitz and took a long, hot shower. So far, he was satisfied with the performance of his new ship and his crew.

He dressed in a black jumpsuit and seaboots, and strode into his control room. A junior officer had the conn. Schneider’s einzvo, Manfred Knipp, kept an eye on things. Schneider read different displays, to update himself on the overall situation.

“I have the conn,” he announced. Acknowledgments were duly made, the junior officer vacated his seat, and Schneider sat down at the command console. The control-room lighting was red; it was nighttime on the surface.

Schneider’s trip through the whole South Atlantic Ocean at sixty knots had gone well. Doenitz’s sonar men performed repeated self-noise checks using the arrays mounted along the hull. The special superquiet cladding materials layered around the propulsion system’s various components suppressed the flank-speed tonals beautifully. To slow once he reached his station outside Durban, Schneider ordered all machinery to suddenly be turned off. He kept the temperature in both reactors just high enough to prevent the liquid-metal coolant from solidifying.

Nice to not have to worry about any signature from the coolant pumps. With no moving parts, the electromagnetic pumps emitted no decibels at all. Schneider drew electricity temporarily from Doenitz’s massive battery banks. The ship glided to a halt making nothing but flow noise. Then he ordered a patrol speed of three knots, with the turbogenerators back on line. This was enough to let his crew maintain control on the planes and the rudder, and was also enough to let him trail a towed array and recharge his batteries.

Schneider glanced again at his gravimeter display. He liked this setup a lot. The continental shelf by Durban, facing the Indian Ocean on South Africa’s east coast, was very narrow. Only fifty sea miles offshore, the bottom dropped to two thousand meters and then kept going deeper. Before reaching the rises of the Agulhas Plateau to the south, or the Mozambique Plateau to the east, the depth reached three thousand meters—ten thousand feet—and then four thousand plus.

Genuine blue water. Ideal for antisubmarine work.

Manfred Knipp came over. “Respectfully, Captain. Your intentions?”

“No change, Einzvo.” Schneider had taken the conn merely to keep his hand in. He felt no need to justify himself.

“Jawohl.”

Schneider eyed the tactical plot. “I see those two Los Angeles–class boats are still keeping their close blockade on the port.”

Ernst Beck’s damaged von Scheer was being repaired in the hardened underground sub pens dug into the bluff that formed one side of Durban Bay. The whole top of the bluff was crammed with internment camps for American and British businesspeople and tourist families—including hundreds of children—to discourage attack before the von Scheer put to sea. The human shields had all been corralled from South Africa and the countries to her north when the war broke out.

“No indication either Los Angeles unit detected us, sir.”

“Not surprising,” Schneider said dryly.

He had

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