Straits of Power

by Joe Buff

  Johansen left.

  Ilse shrugged to herself. She inserted the disk from METOC into a reader on her console and went to work.

  The disk had a text explanation. The data included a noise recording made a few hours ago, by a navy ocean rover patrolling over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge close to the equator. Ilse put on the headphones that came with the console. She tapped keys to replay the sound, then closed her eyes and listened.

  A rushing, whooshing noise rose in strength and then fell. Ilse displayed its power spectrum over time—a jagged, wriggling graph of intensity versus frequency from moment to moment. There were no signs at all of pure tonals that a submarine would give off, no mechanical transients, or anything else man-made.

  Played at normal speed, from start to finish, the entire recording of the detection by the ocean rover lasted thirty seconds. There were a couple of breaks, where the sound disappeared and then began again two or three seconds later. Ilse guessed these were caused by jagged terrain in this relatively shallow stretch of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, blocking the sound source from the ocean rover intermittently.

  Ilse called up specifications on the ocean rover and its sonars. Unfortunately, the unit was too small and its hydrophones weren’t sophisticated enough to give her much with which to estimate the range between the rover and the sound—the whole rover was barely larger than a fat torpedo, and traveled at a mere four knots for long endurance.

  The unidentified sound source was moving roughly north to south. She knew this because of how the bearing to the center of the sound changed with time, according to the ocean rover’s positional data. Knowing its range from the rover would help to indicate its speed. Its speed might help her figure out what it was.

  She did more analyses. Eventually, from a variety of technical factors about how the power spectrum behaved, she narrowed down the source’s velocity to maybe thirty knots, minimum, and maybe a hundred knots, tops.

  This was very fast, even too fast, for a sub or a decoy or a torpedo. The tonals would’ve been glaring. . . . And the signature was all wrong for a supercavitating rocket weapon. There was no sign at all of a missile engine firing, or exhaust bubble collapse, and anyway, those things went more like two hundred or three hundred knots.

  Progress of a sort.

  This sound is definitely a natural phenomenon of some kind.

  Its intensity was stronger at lower frequencies—what acoustic engineers called gray noise. As an oceanographer Ilse knew the gray-noise quality was a sign suggesting that whatever had happened involved the displacement of rock or mud or lava. What was odd was that the fragmentary data she had did seem to imply—unless the navigational instruments on the rover were badly out of calibration—that the motion she was hearing was nearly horizontal, and its true velocity was almost constant. This didn’t make much sense among steep peaks atop an undersea mountain range, which was probably what had most puzzled METOC; other readouts Ilse examined and cross-compared said the ocean rover’s orientation and navigating were good.

  Ilse struggled for hours, skimming research reports on tectonic behavior.

  A slant-wise avalanche, she finally concluded. Ancient volcanic rubble, unstable from washing by eons of particle-laden current fronts, suddenly gave way, confined to a ravine so it slid sideways instead of falling straight down. It was known that the leading edge of such landslides could hydroplane, skating on a thin trapped layer of water, reaching at least fifty knots. Water resistance against the front face would keep it from accelerating much more than that. . . . After thirty seconds, the whole mess had rolled and bounced out of sound-path contact with the ocean rover.

  It was obvious once you saw it. It had been right under the METOC peoples’ noses the whole time.

  Felix Estabo was not a happy camper.

  He and his men were running the same scenario for the fourth time. The first three times, he’d been killed.

  The SEAL mission-rehearsal equipment aboard Ohio was superb. The virtual-reality capabilities of the helmets everyone wore far surpassed any video game the public could buy. Much of the software was so good it was rated top secret, and the system ran on Ohio’s supercomputer. The imagery looked completely real, and the detail of the scenario was astonishing. The compartment in which the rehearsal was played was temperature controlled, and fans created wind that affected trajectories of notional bullets fired inside the game. There were even sprinklers on the overhead to make real rain—which would show up on the pictures inside the game helmets too.

  Each man stood on a treadmill, mounted on its own turntable, which sensed the speed and direction in which a player ran, and stopped if he stopped. The slope of the treadmill could vary constantly, depending on the terrain defined in the game and the player’s coordinates. It was able to imitate the physical effect of climbing stairs. The treadmill surface was wide enough for a man to lie prone, as if taking cover. Mechanical actuators underneath could also inflict the teeth-jarring, gut-pounding shock of a nearby artillery round or grenade.

  The only thing lacking, Felix thought, were environmental odors.

  A genuine battlefield stinks, even through a gas mask.

  Since the CIA lacked much information on the safe house in which Peapod’s crucial equipment would be held—other than that it was some kind of house—Felix and Commander McCollough’s planning staff considered everything, and then did their best to prepare. Gerald Parker had brought data disks with building codes and architectural data for Istanbul. But as in any infiltration or forced-entry exercise, some types of structures and landscapes were easier or harder than others to penetrate.

  The mission profile they were rehearsing now was intentionally made as difficult as possible. It involved a big mansion surrounded by a high wall, with a front and back gate protected by armed guards. The mansion’s exterior was stone, mostly granite or marble. This was based on an actual piece of real estate in Istanbul, something specific meant to represent one generic type.

  The personality and voices of the mansion’s guards were played by SEALs from McCollough’s staff, all of whom had been in combat before. They pretended they didn’t know at first that Felix’s men were hostile, they just behaved in a careful, vigilant way.

  And after dark on a Friday night, Felix thought, at a very wealthy person’s home, it can be hard to convince the guards we’re delivery boys or plumbers.

  The SEALs communicated with the guards just as they would in actuality in Istanbul, using Portuguese-accented fractured English, improvised sign language—even notes, written in advance for the SEALs by someone who spoke good German, that Felix handed to the guards.

  From previous run-throughs of this simulation, Felix had already decided that his team would have to kill all the guards, quickly and silently, before they could sound an alarm. The biggest risk was that real guards might be wearing life-sign monitors, which would transmit a warning if their respiration or heart rate fell outside the normal range. Jamming the transmissions would be guaranteed to alert every enemy in sight—or out of sight, inside the mansion, or elsewhere in a property holding backup troops. So transmissions had to be sniffed for in the ether, to know if monitors were worn by the adversaries on the perimeter. Then, if so, signals of fake live people—on the proper frequency—had to replace the real vital signs of the guards, seamlessly, as they died. Felix’s men came aboard Challenger with the portable equipment needed to do this. They were also trained in working down in utility manholes, to cut power and sever fiber optics on cue, to surprise and isolate their objective.

  But past the guards was a wide lawn with no trees. It made a perfect killing field against intruders. Automatic weapons from the stone mansion had unobstructed arcs of fire . . . and the high stone wall and solid metal gates would stop the bullets from hitting elsewhere in the neighborhood. Such a lawn might have motion detectors, including pressure-sensitive strips hidden under the earth. These detectors would call the Kampfschwimmer to arms instantly, and might even set off boob
y traps to kill or wound the SEALs, or stun them for capture.

  The team was prepared for this too. Probes could detect buried objects. Big rolled-up sheets of lightweight composites that flattened and became rigid under battery power would let the SEALs crawl through a field of buried mines if need be—but only assuming that the German traps weren’t set to be too sensitive, so as to avoid false alarms from stray cats or free-roaming guard dogs.

  Then there was the safe house itself. Infrared visors helped penetrate walls to some extent, to identify body heat.

  The technology list went on.

  The gadgets and the tactics interrelate. They have to. Need dictates form and function.

  Felix’s heart was pounding as the scenario played on. To him and his men, this was no game. The pretend assault was a matter of life and death, because soon the bullets and knives would not be make-believe.

  Felix cursed to himself.

  The defenses were too deep and strong. His team couldn’t push past the wall, and across the lawn, and inside the mansion without being seen and shot at while their only cover was hopelessly inadequate. Felix led from in front, it was his duty, and that was why he kept getting killed. . . . But unlike in real life, he got to see how the battle continued without him. Every time, they failed in their critical goals: Enter without too much disturbance for a neighbor to call the police, and exit with Peapod’s gear intact and not too many friendly losses.

  Felix took a deep breath. His team was about to try once more to get inside the mansion without getting slaughtered.

  Suddenly, Commander McCollough’s giant face stared at him as if through a fish-eye lens, replacing the scene from the simulator.

  This must be the man’s idea of a practical joke.

  Most SEALs liked practical jokes, unless the joke was played on them.

  “Time’s up,” McCollough’s voice sounded in the earphones of Felix’s virtual-reality helmet. “The minisubs to Challenger will be ready for us soon.”

  Felix pulled off the helmet. Underneath, his hair and forehead were drenched in sweat.

  He glanced around at what Ohio’s SEALs called, with dry irony, the dance floor: the set of treadmills on turntables. His men stood there, panting, their weapons in one hand and their simulator helmets in the other. The team all looked at Felix. He could see that his chiefs felt discouraged.

  “Well,” Felix said, “maybe this time we would’ve made it.”

  Costa and Porto were skeptical. His men stared at the deck, their morale visibly low, which wasn’t like them.

  “Look sharp!” Felix snapped, showing his displeasure forcefully. “We learned a lot the past few days. Mistakes were corrected and weak habits fixed, so they won’t cost us bad when we go with live ammo.”

  But Felix asked himself a tough question: Did they need more men? Should he convince Commander McCollough to lend him another team for reinforcements?

  No. Too many operators on something like this gets too complex and conspicuous. Integrating new guys, doubling the number for whom we need to steal local transport, coordinating a bigger group, and then everybody escape-and-evading to a badly overloaded mini. . . . That’s not the answer.

  Felix saw the truth, which he knew Captain Fuller and Gerald Parker would like even less than he did.

  They needed a human Trojan horse to have the slightest chance of pulling this off. Gamal Salih would have to do much more than just make contact at the consulate and pick up Peapod for a night of partying. Salih, an ethnic Turk who spoke fluent Turkish and German, would have to be the SEALs’ shill, right there when they assaulted the German safe house. Even then, from these simulations, the outcome stacked up as iffy.

  Felix led his men toward the showers built into a lower part of the first two missile tubes, under the pressure-proof lock-out chambers. They’d tidy up before returning to Challenger for the duration of the mission; after days of this practicing with little sleep and even less hygiene, the team smelled like a pack of billy goats.

  Chapter 22

  Jeffrey and Bell sat in Jeffrey’s stateroom. It was late afternoon on a Sunday—the Sunday before the Friday that Felix’s team, with Gamal Salih, would arrive in the German minisub at Istanbul. The final task-group planning and coordination meetings, held on Challenger, were done with, a final rendezvous with Ohio in the eastern Atlantic completed. Jeffrey and Parcelli had wrapped it up with a firm handshake, determined expressions on their faces, and wishes of good luck.

  But we also knew it might be the last time we saw each other alive. . . . It’s as if we made a contest of it, which of us would outwardly betray less tension or doubt. We were very closely matched. I’d have to call it a draw—we both won. . . . Not that that changed how we really felt inside.

  Among many other items, a set of simplified code words had been agreed on, to supplement the standard list, for the fastest and most unambiguous use of the secure acoustic link, in the special war-fighting conditions the task group might encounter.

  Challenger and Ohio would stay in a flexible tactical formation, varied on Jeffrey’s orders as the situation evolved—until that fateful moment when Lieutenant Estabo either did or didn’t return with Klaus Mohr and his special equipment, most likely early on Sunday, a week from now. If things went well, Challenger and Ohio wouldn’t again conduct a rendezvous to exchange any people before then. The task group’s egress orders for after that remained unopened in Jeffrey’s and Parcelli’s safes. Jeffrey had no idea what the orders might say.

  At least Gamal Salih welcomed the chance to be more involved in the excursion into Istanbul. Jeffrey knew well from his previous mission involving Salih, where submarine captain and freedom fighter had bumped into each other under fire in northern Germany, that the man was very handy with a pistol or a knife. He had good reasons of his own for craving vengeance, and the killing of German combatants ran in Salih’s blood as a natural talent.

  Right now, a nautical chart showed on Jeffrey’s laptop screen. The place, inside the Med but farthest from land, which he’d have to try to reach to self-destruct his ship in a worst-case outcome, was marked on the digital chart by a red dot.

  The dot was an abstraction. The dangers and uncertainties summarized by its being there were real.

  Bell, sitting patiently, followed his gaze.

  Jeffrey noticed this, and said, “We’ll find out soon what the Axis ROEs truly are in this theater. If they identify Dreadnought while she creates a diversion for us using Texas, and the Germans go nuclear less than two hundred miles from land, things might turn ugly fast and spread far and wide from there.”

  Bell nodded. He was usually much more talkative in private, especially when under stress, when he seemed to like to verbalize his anxieties. His taciturn conduct emphasized too clearly that the strategic issues hanging in the balance put this mission way beyond any situation they’d dealt with before.

  Jeffrey thought of Plan Pandora, whatever exactly it was—he still didn’t know for sure, and only Klaus Mohr could tell him. He thought of those modern ekranoplans that Russia sold to Germany—the ultimate amphibious-warfare assault craft—and of the land offensive, thrust at Israel, that the Afrika Korps seemed on the verge of launching.

  He thought of the Israeli atom bombs planted in Germany, and of Israel’s remaining nuclear arsenal, over a hundred warheads at least. Some were deployed on her diesel subs for deterrence. Some were suspected of even being hydrogen bombs.

  Jeffrey’s intercom light blinked. He grabbed the handset. “Captain.”

  It was the lieutenant (j.g.) in charge of the radio room. Jeffrey listened. “Very well, Radio.”

  Jeffrey looked at Bell. “ELF code came through. The Texas and Dreadnought action starts right after sunset. Our extraction mission for Peapod is on, definitely confirmed.”

  Bell nodded soberly, but again said nothing.

  “You go into Control. Ohio should’ve copied the message themselves, but use the acoustic link to make sure.”
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br />   Bell stood. “Man battle stations, sir?”

  “Not yet. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  Bell left. Jeffrey sat alone in his stateroom, staring at the chart on the computer screen. The shores of Spain and North Africa converged like the mouth of a funnel. The neck of the funnel, the Strait of Gibraltar itself, was seven nautical miles across at its tightest, and twenty long. The Bay of Gibraltar, now a German naval base, was at the far end of the Strait.

  Texas and Dreadnought are approaching from the northwest. They’ll be somewhere off Cape Trafalgar soon.

  Jeffrey thought of that great battle fought near Trafalgar, by the UK’s Vice Admiral Nelson against a merged French and Spanish fleet, over two hundred years before. Nelson won, but was killed in the battle.

  Challenger, with Ohio in company, was approaching the Strait of Gibraltar from the southwest, as prearranged, much closer to Casablanca than Trafalgar.

  Jeffrey turned off his laptop. He glanced one last time at the picture of his parents, taped to a bulkhead. He touched the photo gently, and traced the two figures on it longingly with his index finger. He knew how badly it would tear them up if they outlived him, their youngest child, their only son.

  He paused to listen to the gentle hushing from the air-circulation vents—soon they’d be turned off for added stealth, to prepare for battle. Jeffrey’s senses were heightened, colors appeared more vivid, and he thought he could hear his heart as it beat.

  He looked at his hands while he held them out in front of his body. They were perfectly steady, but his fingers felt ice cold. He rubbed them on his pants legs so the friction would warm his palms.

  He opened the door to the corridor, and strode into his control room. He stopped near the command console, where an officer from Torelli’s weapons department had the conn. Bell already sat at the console, next to the lieutenant (j.g.).