Straits of Power

by Joe Buff

  “This is the Captain,” Jeffrey announced to everyone in the compartment. “I have the conn.”

  “Aye aye,” the watch standers said. The junior officer got up and Jeffrey took his place. The seat was still warm, and Jeffrey adjusted it to be more comfortable for himself. Satisfied, he projected his voice clearly and evenly.

  “Chief of the Watch, sound silent battle stations antisubmarine.”

  “Silent battle stations, ASW, aye.”

  COB had found some excuse to kibitz in the control room, inspecting and checking the readings and settings on different equipment, something usually done by a junior crewman. COB immediately took the seat at the ship’s control console, as battle-stations chief of the watch.

  Jeffrey couldn’t help smiling.

  “Fire Control, pass the order to Ohio, man silent battle stations antisubmarine.” Bell was now fire-control coordinator.

  Bell repeated the message back to avoid misunderstanding or error, then saw to having it sent.

  “Ohio acknowledges, sir, manning battle stations ASW.”

  “Very well, Fire Control.” Parcelli was obviously expecting the word any minute. He’ll know what to do from here for a while. Jeffrey refocused on Challenger business.

  “Chief of the Watch, rig for ultraquiet.”

  “Ultraquiet, aye.”

  COB spoke to the phone talker, who repeated the message, then held down the switch of his sound-powered mike and passed the order around the ship.

  “Chief of the Watch, rig for depth charge.”

  “Rig for depth charge, aye.”

  As COB and the phone talker ran through their litany again, Lieutenant (j.g.) Meltzer hurried into the control room to relieve the man at the helm.

  “Ohio has signaled us, Captain,” Bell reported. “All stations manned and ready.”

  Jeffrey glanced at a chronometer. “Acknowledge and tell Ohio I say, ‘Quick work, well done.’ ”

  Jeffrey windowed the nautical chart, the gravimeter display, and the tactical plot on his console screen. The gravimeter would be most useful as they approached the coasts and the water got shallower.

  From a depth now of five thousand feet, the seafloor would quickly slope upward toward the continental shelves of Europe and Africa as they converged. Currents and countercurrents, and tectonic collision and folding, had gouged a notch 2,000 feet deep or more through most of the Strait. But along the western approaches, the water went down only six hundred feet. The deep path through the strait itself was studded with seamounts—extinct undersea volcanoes—rising almost a thousand feet from the bottom.

  On the tactical plot, amber icons showed neutral shipping moving in and out of the Strait. Red icons that crossed the plot at greater speed were small Axis surface warships patrolling the waters outside. Aircraft were sometimes detected in the distance, streaking across the sonar waterfall displays like comets or meteors.

  Lieutenant Milgrom’s technicians identified any new contacts, and Lieutenant Torelli’s fire-control technicians tracked them all for the plot. The minefields outside the Strait showed on the tactical plot and the nautical chart. Their positions had to be announced by international law; neutral ocean rovers verified the data.

  Jeffrey’s greater concern was antisubmarine minefields inside the Strait, ones the Germans might not have announced. Challenger and Ohio carried remote-controlled probes designed to scout ahead for such hazards, but his intended tactics precluding using them. He was also concerned about bottom sensors, and hydrophone arrays, sprinkled around and stretching across the whole floor of the Strait. Then there was the biggest unknown: the whereabouts and intentions of Russia’s Snow Tiger.

  For all this, and more, Jeffrey’s and Parcelli’s officers and chiefs had developed careful plans in intensive working sessions each time they’d rendezvoused.

  Jeffrey knew from bitter experience how rapidly plans could come undone. He’d seen that the most crucial tactics usually had to be dreamed up on the spot. . . . But doing so, repeatedly, for more than six months with too little leave to rest had begun to deplete him.

  Something’s missing. I see what it is.

  I don’t have my usual relish for combat this time—I feel stale and weary.

  I’ll just have to gut it out. Performing while exhausted is a constant aspect of war, and almost four hundred lives on two vessels depend on me.

  Jeffrey spoke again to Bell, but knew everyone in the control room could hear him.

  “Now we wait for the sun to go down, then the tide to begin running out. Then the shooting starts, hopefully well northwest of us, near Cape Trafalgar.”

  Chapter 23

  Ilse Reebeck sat at the console in her private workroom. It was starting to feel like solitary confinement. To take a break, she called onto her screen a situation map for the Med, a duplicate of what would loom large now on a wall in the war room, and would also be closely watched by top brass at the Pentagon.

  The display showed four Allied nuclear submarines in the eastern North Atlantic, coming in two pairs toward the Strait of Gibraltar. The types of icons used showed that the positions were only estimates, based on prearranged operational plans. The plot didn’t name the individual subs, and Ilse hadn’t been told what their intentions were. But she assumed that soon at least some of them would try to force their way past Gibraltar and into the Med. She also knew that one of them was Challenger.

  Part of the map displayed different identified enemy units, all around the Med, belonging to the various branches of the German armed forces. Enemy lines of communications—routes of logistics support—were also shown on the maps, along with known depots and data on their contents. The map showed the array of military units in Egypt and Israel too, dependent for resupply on air transport and the shipping route up through the Red Sea. The map was so large scale that it even reached down to Ethiopia, where the Great Rift Valley formed the northeast flank of the beleaguered Allied pocket in Central Africa—cut off from Egypt by German forces and local auxiliary fighters holding Sudan.

  Ilse figured that this picture was assembled from many forms of intelligence, including visual and infrared surveillance, radar, signals intercepts, message decryptions, human-agent reports, plus expert conjecture and surmise at the CIA, the NSA, and the Pentagon’s own various intelligence offices. She knew that hundreds of sensor platforms, and thousands of clerks and analysts, were needed to keep the big picture reasonably complete and up to date.

  She called up another display that she found even more interesting, though disturbing, an ever-changing collage of visuals from spy satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles. These would zoom in on a crowded harbor in occupied Italy, or a group of German tanks on the move in the Libyan desert, or a rail yard in Greece choked with rolling stock. These pictures made the icons on the tactical plots seem much more concrete. Ilse reminded herself that many millions of people lived in these places, would be involved directly in fighting the war, or would be enveloped by the German surprise onslaught when it started.

  The green phone on Ilse’s console rang. “Lieutenant Reebeck.”

  Johansen’s yeoman said he was putting through a call from outside the base. The person who got on the line was a lieutenant commander in the Naval Oceanographic Office, a major component of METOC, headquartered at the John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

  “I have something you’ll be interested to know,” the lieutenant commander told Ilse.

  “Yes, ma’am?” The woman was a superior officer; she spoke with a nasal twang, as if from the upper Midwest, maybe Minnesota.

  “Remember that datum you called a slant-wise avalanche?”

  “Yes.”

  “We heard something like it again.”

  “In the same place?”

  “No, not in the same place.” The woman sounded like she was smiling, and this put Ilse on her guard.

  “Where? Using what platform?”

  “In the South Atlantic. In waters we keep
a careful eye on these days.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “The Cape Plain.” Off the South Africa coast. The woman gave the coordinates.

  “Do you want me to study the data?”

  “That won’t be necessary.” Now she sounded vindictive. Ilse didn’t like this at all.

  “For your information, the datum was detected at a depth of about two thousand feet, with the seafloor there at sixteen thousand feet.”

  “So it couldn’t have been an avalanche.”

  “Nope. Your analysis was incorrect. As a matter of fact, misleading.”

  “So what do your people think they were, ma’am? Turbulence between conflicting underwater storm fronts?” The ocean could have major storms down deep, where strong currents formed temporarily, much like high winds blowing over the surface. The currents were just a few knots, but the moving water—much denser than air—carried tremendous energy.

  “Either that,” the woman said, “or gas seeps spreading sideways at a density discontinuity, or some other natural phenomenon. We’re making new discoveries all the time, as you well know.”

  “Were there tonals?”

  “No. There were no tonals. The rest isn’t your concern.”

  “Then why did you phone me?”

  “To say we don’t appreciate your meddling and ineptitude.” The lieutenant commander hung up on Ilse.

  Ilse was livid.

  She put down the phone, then picked it up again. She wanted to call someone to complain, but realized that that would be childish. Captain Johansen had already told her that politically motivated blame games were intensifying.

  A moment later he knocked, then walked into the room.

  “You aren’t doing too well.”

  Ilse knew what was coming.

  “It seems your technical analysis of that odd flow noise, discredited now, gave the FBI more ammo to use against you in this spy witch-hunt.”

  “Can’t my own embassy do something to get them off my back? It’s getting hard for me to work with all these distractions.”

  “The FBI beat us in getting there. The director talked to the Free South African ambassador in person. The embassy says that when push comes to shove, they’re unable to vouch for you. Your being in the U.S. at the time the coups and the war broke out looks bad given everything else. It’s too much as if you were put in this country as a sleeper agent.”

  “But I was here at a conference! I had no idea what would happen back home! If I hadn’t gone to the conference, I’d’ve been teaching at the University of Cape Town and would have been executed right next to my family!”

  “That’s what the FBI director said you would say.”

  Chapter 24

  It was the dead of night in Istanbul that same Sunday. Klaus Mohr struggled to keep his brain divided into three totally separate compartments: scientist, traitor, family man. The first two had to stay active at once, while the third he was forced to hold deeply repressed. This was hard enough, but worse yet, the two active parts of his thoughts contradicted each other. The strain of the constant balancing act was terrible in itself, but also posed the problem that all his scheming might fall apart in front of armed witnesses.

  “I don’t understand the problem this time,” the Kampfschwimmer lieutenant said. “We did everything the exact same way we always do. We checked the connections over and over.” His team of seven men nodded. Their eyes looked tired, but their bodies held coiled energy, like panthers. Their leader, the lieutenant, like the others was tall and trim and very fit. He had a hooked, pointy nose, and very thin lips, which made his already gaunt face seem more pinched. “We know we drew a good load for the power supply. I thought the ammeter was faulty, but the cables we tapped were live, they sparked.”

  Mohr took a deep breath. The Kampfschwimmer all smelled of sweat and sewage, though they’d washed well enough for sanitary purposes. The room held a permanent, stale cooking odor, like rancid grease and strange spices, left over from the previous tenant. Mohr pretended to feel frustrated, as he should have been under these circumstances in his role as a scientist. This part of his act was effective, because his frustration as hopeful defector was vivid enough.

  Klaus Mohr was meeting with the Kampfschwimmer field team in a Plan Pandora safe house. Blackout curtains were drawn, and the lighting in the small room was dim. Istanbul, an open, neutral city, had no wartime blackout, but the curtains were essential for security. The furnishings that came with the rented building were sparse, so some of the commandos squatted or sat on the floor, with their submachine guns worn on shoulder straps or cradled on their thighs. Other Kampfschwimmer were elsewhere, inside or outdoors Mohr didn’t know, standing guard. Mohr himself slumped in an easy chair whose stuffing poked through tears in its back. The lieutenant sat on a metal kitchen stool that creaked as he moved. Between them, as the center of attention on the rug-less worn wooden floor, was the portable quantum-computer equipment. The commandos had just returned from a test. Their test had failed, as Mohr intended. He’d set the equipment out of calibration intentionally.

  Klaus Mohr had to act like he was surprised by the problem and badly wanted to fix it. Otherwise, his cover would be blown. From his meeting with that Pakistani last week, Awais Iqbal, Mohr knew he needed to stall until Friday, then hold another meeting like this or his entire plan would come unglued.

  Mohr had no illusions now: The device he’d created was a new type of weapon of mass destruction.

  He’d received permission from his bosses to attend the party on Friday. He needed to tread very carefully so the permission didn’t get yanked when he announced the need for another field test, back-to-back with Iqbal’s affair. The waiting was taking a toll on Mohr’s nerves. Five more days. Each day heightened the chances that Mohr’s arrangements for defecting would be found out.

  “Everything worked fine last time,” the lieutenant said, trying to be helpful, sounding puzzled both at the equipment trouble and also at Mohr’s blank stare; Mohr snapped out of his introspection. “The systems crashed just like they should have.” The lieutenant laughed. “Total chaos at the Izmir airport for a few hours, till we let them come back up. But this time, at Zonguldak? Cell phones, bank machines, nothing.” Izmir lay on Turkey’s southwest coast; Zonguldak faced the Black Sea.

  Mohr nodded, distracted. His feelings of remorse at having to turn against his own country grew stronger constantly. His sense of grief and regret at abandoning his family, and his worry that they’d be punished despite his best efforts to distance himself from them, weighed on him every morning like a boulder squashing his chest. This was the part of his mind he needed desperately to wall off.

  He also had another difficult task because of Iqbal. He’d need to describe the layout and defenses of this safe house to his rescuers, in the greatest detail possible. This made him view his surroundings in a whole new way.

  Mohr tried to memorize the floor plan and physical arrangements. He tried to gauge the thicknesses of the walls, interior and exterior. He wondered if the floors were thick enough to stop soft-nosed bullets. He wondered if there was an easy way down and inside from the roof.

  “Herr Doctor Mohr?” The lieutenant had caught his mind wandering again.

  “I was thinking,” Mohr responded, which was true. He pretended to be annoyed with the Kampfschwimmer. “I’ll need to check through everything carefully. Break each module down, go through systems integration step by step, troubleshoot.”

  “How long will it take to fix the gear?”

  “I can’t even guess till I figure out what’s wrong.”

  “What should we do, then?”

  “I’ll have to stay here awhile, to work.”

  “Thank you. Should I have one of my men inform the consulate?”

  Mohr’s driver and bodyguard, who’d dropped him off near the safe house, would be staying on the move through the streets—parking might attract the wrong attention.

  Mohr nodded to the lieutenant
, and the lieutenant passed an order to one of the enlisted men, who left.

  “Maybe we should get some sleep, sir,” the lieutenant said. “It’s very late. I can use the couch. I’ve slept on much more uncomfortable things. You can borrow my bed. It has the best mattress and pillows.”

  “First help me bring the equipment to the clean room. I want to examine a couple of items. Then sleeping sounds like a good idea.”

  “Jawohl, Herr Doctor.”

  Mohr and the commandos stood. Some hefted the equipment modules. They climbed a flight of stairs and came to one room whose ceiling and walls were completely covered with transparent plastic sheets held on with brown duct tape. More of the plastic sheets, like curtains, hung across the only way in, to keep out dust. This was the improvised clean room. Through the plastic, Mohr could see the table with tools and instruments where he’d tinkered with the equipment before.

  “Leave these outside. You’re all too dirty.”

  The lieutenant apologized. “We had to get to some rather inaccessible places.”

  “I’ll take them from here. I don’t need you or your men now.” Mohr tried to sound imperious, arrogant. Then it occurred to him that if the Americans did assault this building and won, he was talking to a dead man. Is he close to his parents? Married? Does he miss his wife and kids? . . . Will they miss him?

  Mohr cleaned off the module cases in the hallway. The commandos went into other parts of the house. He assumed that, as usual, they’d rotate through security watches while the remainder of the team slept.

  Klaus Mohr lifted the first module with both hands, and slipped through the curtains into the clean room.

  The high-capacity photon quantum-entanglement unit. How I wish to God I’d never invented the thing.

  Jeffrey fretted, pacing in the aisle in Challenger’s control room. With the fans turned off for greater stealth, and twenty-plus people squeezed into the compartment, the air tasted increasingly stuffy. It was also getting uncomfortably warm from all the electronics running, even with the water outside the hull at a cold fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit. The lighting was nighttime red, and Jeffrey’s eyes were well adapted by now.