Straits of Power

by Joe Buff

  The minisubs had crush depths comparable to a full-size steel-hulled submarine. Challenger had to carry hers in her pressure-proof hangar—otherwise, when diving to depths that were comfortable for Jeffrey’s ceramic-composite ship, the mini would implode. Not only would the horrible noise ruin the task group’s stealth, the German mini’s loss would cripple the mission to extract Klaus Mohr. This forced Jeffrey to bring Challenger up to near Ohio’s depth for the briefing-planning rendezvous. Jeffrey left Bell in charge as command duty officer—acting captain—on Challenger, and Lieutenant Willey had the deck and the conn in the sub’s control room.

  Meltzer and his copilot finished going through their prerelease checklist; an intercom connection let them speak with COB. The control compartment’s front and side bulkheads were dominated by four large display screens. Switches, gauges, and indicator lights filled consoles wrapping tightly around the pilot and copilot. Main controls—the throttle and steering joystick—were mounted between their two seats. Behind Jeffrey was the heavy watertight hatch into the lock-out chamber. A similar hatch led aft from there to the passenger compartment.

  “Green board, sir,” Chief Costa told Meltzer.

  “Challenger, Minisub Charlie,” Meltzer said into his lip mike, giving his call sign. “Ready for pressure equalization and opening hangar-bay doors.”

  Jeffrey had ordered Parcelli to hold Ohio ahead of Challenger, a few hundred yards off Challenger’s port bow, while Challenger pointed northeast and Ohio aimed herself southwest, toward Jeffrey’s ship. The plan was for each vessel to stay within the arc covered by the other’s wide-aperture array on their facing sides, to keep in acoustic-link contact, while not blocking each other’s arrays from hearing outward to both flanks. By pointing in opposite directions, each ship’s bow sphere covered the other’s baffles; with minisubs maneuvering about, Jeffrey wanted neither ship to trail a towed array. He’d ordered Parcelli to hold Ohio’s depth at 600 feet, 250 feet shallower than his own ship, to avoid any risk of collision.

  To maintain proper formation in the currents that varied at different depths, both ships needed some speed so their rudders could bite. Three knots was fast enough, but this meant that to keep together, one ship had to move backward. Jeffrey had decided Challenger would be the one to do so. He’d ordered the task group to steer southwest, away from Gibraltar, to disguise their true base course and implied destination.

  The mini’s bow nosed up as Meltzer worked his controls. He activated the photonic sensors, and images of the ocean outside appeared on some of the screens. Too far east to hide in the confusing sound-propagation eddies of the Gulf Stream, and too far north of the Sargasso Sea to hide under the layer of floating seaweed there, Meltzer had his work cut out for him as he approached Ohio. One of Parcelli’s minis had vacated its place so the German one could dock, but Ohio’s other ASDS still sat firmly attached, just to one side of where Meltzer needed to come in for a landing. For stealth, Meltzer dared not make any noise, and dared not use his floodlights. This meant he had neither active sonar nor good visual cues to guide his final approach.

  Meltzer changed the outside displays to image-intensification mode. At first Jeffrey saw nothing new on the screens, then a school of small fish darted by. Then something huge came into view, a gigantic cylinder. As Meltzer worked his joystick and throttle, Jeffrey saw that this cylinder had a sail. Meltzer needed to dock right behind that sail, but instead of bow planes near the cylinder’s nose, Ohio had fair-water planes that jutted from her sail. Meltzer had to steer well clear, or the edge of a plane could tear a gash through the minisub’s hull.

  “Permission granted to open our bottom hatch,” Meltzer reported.

  Jeffrey, the most senior, climbed down Ohio’s air-lock ladder first, and walked out into the SSGN. He was now on the topmost deck of the missile compartment. The first two silos had been turned into lock-in/lock-out chambers; he’d just come through one of these. Altogether, two dozen massive silo tubes marched aft, twelve each along two side-by-side rows. Years ago, Jeffrey knew, all of them had held a Trident long-range ballistic missile, the ultimate strategic deterrent that worked—because it never once had to be used. Now these silos held SEAL equipment, or large-size undersea probe vehicles, or airborne recon drones that could be launched with Ohio submerged, or seven Tactical Tomahawk cruise missiles each, or a big clutch of Polyphems. The missile compartment was festooned with fire-fighting gear and protective suits, chemo sensors in case of toxic or flammable leaks—from weapon fuel and warheads, and stored SEAL explosive ordnance—plus radiation detectors.

  Jeffrey glanced at the overhead; he could readily see the curve of Ohio’s pressure hull, wrapping downward to both sides. Outside the hull, up there, bathed by the ever-squeezing ocean, sat an ASDS and his German minisub.

  As a small crowd of his people gathered behind him, he saw Captain Parcelli coming along the narrow passageway from forward, to offer greetings. Jeffrey was glad to see Parcelli smiling, and was pleasantly surprised that Parcelli wore a blue cotton jumpsuit—instead of his previously inevitable dress uniform.

  “Welcome aboard, Captain,” Parcelli said. His handshake was firm but not bone crushing, and he held it long enough to show that the welcome was sincere.

  “Thank you, Captain,” Jeffrey responded.

  Parcelli nodded to those he already knew among Jeffrey’s group. Other introductions were made.

  “Feels like a homecoming?” Jeffrey joked to Felix, since he’d served on Ohio before.

  “I forgot how spacious she was,” Felix said under his breath.

  Parcelli turned back to Jeffrey while they all walked forward. “Let’s head to the Special Operations Forces spaces, SEAL country as we Ohio Gold people call it. We can use the briefing facilities there.”

  Jeffrey nodded. He still sensed Parker’s concern about something, and wanted to know right away what it was.

  Ilse, alone in the small room with the workstation, had already spent several hours going over the available data on the Russian submarine that Hodgkiss’s aide had called a Snow Tiger.

  She almost jumped out of her skin when Johansen shoved open the door and stalked into the room. He looked very unhappy.

  “More data for you.” He gruffly handed over some ultra-high-density optical storage disks.

  “With respect, sir, your manner. Why is more data bad?”

  “Because this batch might be the last we get.”

  “Captain?”

  “Displeasure is being passed down from the top.”

  “Displeasure with what? Or with whom?”

  Johansen sighed. “One of our subs was trailing the Snow Tiger rather close in, gathering everything possible, but her captain was somehow outsmarted and the Russian simply vanished in the middle of the North Atlantic. Now it could be anywhere, doing anything, at the worst imaginable point in the war. There are red faces, and purple faces, up to the CNO level and beyond.”

  Ilse frowned. “Do we need to warn Challenger?”

  “What have you figured out so far?”

  “Look at this.” Ilse showed Johansen her work on the Snow Tiger’s midships magnetic-field signature, recorded while it was stopped in the G-I-UK Gap. He watched as a 3-D color animation moved and changed shape on her console screen, the fields overlaid on an outline of the Snow Tiger’s hull. “I think the Snow Tiger has twin reactors, cooled by liquid metal, and coolant circulation is driven by electromagnetic pumps. The moving shapes are the pulsating fields of the pumps.”

  “Others have already come to that conclusion. The Snow Tiger could be the fastest, quietest submarine afloat. This new data covers the Snow Tiger accelerating to twenty knots. Tonals, broadband, flow noise, and measurements of wake turbulence when the trailing sub got directly behind her.”

  “And?”

  “Try to figure out the Snow Tiger’s maximum speed, and what she’d sound like then.”

  “Sir, that’d require a team of experienced people to even come close
to meaningful answers!”

  “From the mood I sense at the Pentagon, you’d better come up with whatever you can, and soon. An embarrassment to an Atlantic Fleet sub, of the magnitude and significance we just had, is ultimately a political embarrassment to Admiral Hodgkiss, who is, as I already told you, not without his rivals and enemies.”

  “Don’t people have better things to do, like win the war?”

  “Sometimes ranking officials get more concerned about their future position if we do win than if we lose, especially when they know that failing means we could all be dead anyway. There, I said it out loud. With this other business Challenger is involved in going on too, everyone’s into backside-protection mode. Scapegoats, witch hunts, you don’t want the details.”

  “You’re setting me up, aren’t you? Giving me a task you know full well is impossible here.”

  “Hasn’t it occurred to you that this workspace is not a prison, but a sanctuary?” Johansen gestured at the four walls. “That hostile FBI interview was obviously meant to get you to panic and make a mistake, or bolt, or send a call-for-help message to your control that special agents could intercept and get enough goods on you to make an arrest. Those odd phone messages and brush-bys suggest that somebody, maybe Axis operatives or maybe even a traitor in the FBI, is setting you up. The enemy tried to kill you outright a month ago. The next best thing is framing you. In wartime captured spies hang. And the timing isn’t an accident either. Your best character witness, Commander Fuller, is incommunicado indefinitely. The FBI director knows it, and Axis intell surely sensed it coming too.”

  “Does Commander Fuller know about the accusations?”

  “He stood up for you forcefully to the director himself. The director took him to pieces in front of the president.”

  Ilse blanched.

  “Do you really think Admiral Hodgkiss would assign you a seemingly endless task without good reason? Your intimate knowledge of Commander Fuller’s combat personality and tactical mind-set makes you invaluable, but it also makes you a target. The admiral is keeping you out of sight and out of mind of those who are busy casting about for victims, at any price.”

  “METOC. A submariner complains that they didn’t give adequate support for his boat to maintain contact. I was on that desk, they could pin it on me. Add that to the FBI file, I’m toast.”

  “Good, Lieutenant. You’re finally catching on.”

  Chapter 20

  Jeffrey was impressed that Parcelli ran a tight and happy ship. The pride and confidence of Ohio’s Gold crew couldn’t be hidden, and couldn’t be faked either for someone with Jeffrey’s practiced eye. This was a first for him, appraising another captain’s leadership ability during an inspection of his vessel. Ohio’s crew were clearly fond of Parcelli, as Parcelli was of them, which was good. With over two hundred men aboard, the corridors teemed like a beehive.

  After more greetings were made in Ohio’s control room, with her chief of the boat and some of her key officers, the group, larger now, went down two decks to the wardroom. This one was much less cramped than Challenger’s. Jeffrey left Milgrom and Sessions here to begin a working meeting with Ohio’s people.

  Parcelli led Jeffrey and those with him up ladders and along passageways. They arrived at the Special Operations Forces command-and-planning center. This space had once held the sophisticated navigation equipment Ohio needed to make sure each of the H-bomb warheads on each of her missiles hit its target very precisely—after leaving the earth’s atmosphere and then reentering thousands of miles away. That equipment had all gone with the SSGN conversion. Now the compartment was filled with communication and SEAL mission-planning consoles and workstations. The consoles were manned; the space was busy.

  Parcelli reintroduced Jeffrey to Commander McCollough, in charge of Ohio’s sixty-six SEALs. They’d last met onshore in Norfolk, when Hodgkiss assembled the players and told them their roles.

  “Welcome aboard, Captain, and welcome to my domain.”

  “Thank you, Commander. A pleasure to visit your lair.”

  “Changed a lot from your day, I bet.” McCollough playfully raised an eyebrow. His Boston-Irish accent was as charming as ever; he possessed impressive natural charisma.

  “I’ll say,” Jeffrey told him, looking around and smiling. In the short time Jeffrey had been in the SEALs, in the mid-1990s, before being wounded, ASDS minisubs and SSGN conversions of boomers were projects in the R&D stages—efforts that might easily have both been given the budget ax.

  “There’s my man!” McCollough exclaimed when he saw Felix. McCollough was clearly not someone to stand on ceremony—but then SEALs seldom were when among their own kind. “You did us proud. Still wanna go back to master chief?”

  There was a familiarity present that wasn’t shown in front of Hodgkiss. It was McCollough who’d put Felix in for the commission from master chief to full lieutenant, before Felix left Ohio for Challenger—and then, under Jeffrey’s command, had gotten his bayonet wound from a German Kampfschwimmer while doing other things that won him the Medal of Honor.

  “Well . . .” Felix pretended to be thinking about it. “Nah, I think I’ll stay being an officer. My wife would kill me if I had to tell her I took a pay cut.”

  McCollough made eye contact with Jeffrey; the man had a very clear, no-nonsense gaze. “I suggest we use the large conference room, Captain.”

  Everyone settled down at their places around the conference table. The furnishings were spartan, with exposed wires, cables, pipes, and air ducts everywhere. The emergency air-breathing masks stored in plain sight, and the fittings in a pipe on the overhead for plugging in the masks, left no doubt that they were riding in a submarine.

  The main display screen on the bulkhead glowed to life. Gerald Parker put a disk into a laptop provided by someone on Commander McCollough’s staff.

  Parker stood at the front of the compartment, next to the screen. His blasé attitude showed that he was used to doing such presentations, and had no trouble addressing groups. Parker’s stance was erect and aloof; Felix thought he came across as a tight-ass, and a preppie.

  Felix glanced at his men. All eight of them were attentive. This operation was highly compartmented, so they didn’t know much of whatever was coming. Like any SEAL about to be clued in on something dangerous but important, these guys were excited.

  A map of Turkey popped onto the screen. The map zoomed in on the stretch of water between the Aegean Sea east of Greece, crowded with islands and shoals, through the narrow Dardanelles Strait, and into the wider bathtub-shaped Sea of Marmara.

  The map also showed the bottleneck from the far side of the Marmara into the big dead end of the German- and Russian-controlled Black Sea. This bottleneck, less than half a mile wide in many places, was labeled “Bosporus Strait.” The city of Istanbul lined both banks. Bridges spanned the Bosporus, giving road access between the parts of the sprawling metropolis.

  Right away the difficulties started piling up.

  “This is where you’re going,” Parker stated to Felix, pointing to Istanbul. “Challenger will drop you off outside the Dardanelles. Your team with Mr. Salih and me goes the rest of the way, there and back, in the captured German minisub. One hundred fifty nautical miles each way. A long, slow trip. Call it fifteen hours in each direction at a cruising speed of ten knots to save fuel. Go faster for any reason, you get less mileage, we won’t make it back. And deep-draft merchant shipping will be a constant menace while the mini navigates. I will remain in the minisub while the rest of you go ashore.”

  “Contingency plan?” Felix asked.

  “Ohio’s minis will both be engaged in delivering Commander McCollough’s teams to Axis-occupied Greece. Covert recon and overt diversions. This is the first time the U.S. has entered the Med in such force since the start of the war. Every use must be made of the opportunity.”

  “So no mini is available to come and meet ours and bail us out? If we run out of gas, we have to swim?”

>   “If you run out of gas, we have to improvise. So kindly don’t waste gas. Your passenger and cargo are too important.”

  “Specifically? My men haven’t heard this yet.”

  “I know. We’re going to extract a German defector.”

  “Right, Peapod. How do we know we can trust the guy?”

  “We can’t be positive of anything. Our National Command Authorities deem it worth taking the risk. Contact with Peapod has already been made by a third party, Aardvark, who now steps aside after telling his secretary to make some seemingly innocent phone calls that will later assist your efforts. . . . The extraction is set for next week, Friday night.”

  “That’s not much time.”

  “It’s a very tight schedule.”

  “We’ll be violating Turkish neutrality,” Felix said.

  “Does that bother you?”

  “I’ve done this sort of thing before.”

  “I know. And you know, get caught and you get interned for the duration of the war, if you’re lucky. If you’re not, you’ll be shot as spies. Either way you stick the U.S. with a major diplomatic incident. We want Turkey on our side, not neutral and not going Axis. Make a mess, Germany will make the most of it.”

  “Understood.”

  “A serious complication has arisen.”

  Something always does. “Meaning . . . what?”

  “The extraction won’t be as straightforward as we’d hoped. The problem is, we need not just the defector, but some special equipment he uses. Computer gear. That’s all Aardvark could confirm, with the Moscow-rules script we provided.”

  Felix’s jaw set. Moscow rules meant the greatest possible spy-tradecraft care taken, when working on a deadly enemy’s most closely guarded ground. “And our friend can’t just walk out of the consulate with his software on a disk in his briefcase to meet us somewhere, or put a computer in some luggage and saunter out the door. ‘Bye, I’m going yachting this weekend.’ How heavy, bulky is the equipment? Do we know?”