Straits of Power

by Joe Buff

  He advanced and almost slipped in a dead German’s blood. Tear gas mixing with more and more gun smoke further obscured the view outside his mask. There was a sizzling blue-white flash and all the lights went out.

  The fuse box must’ve been hit.

  Muzzle flashes punctuated the dark.

  Felix flipped down his night-vision goggles.

  “Second floor clear,” Porto shouted.

  The surviving Germans had retreated to the top floor.

  The top floor, Mohr said, held his clean room and tools.

  “Go! Go! Go!” Felix yelled. Four SEALs dashed up the rickety stairs, Costa and Porto tossing two more flash-bang tear-gas grenades. Felix heard the Kampfschwimmer coughing.

  They got a strong dose already, even if they’ve pulled on gas masks by now.

  Felix and his three other men rushed to a spot on the second floor and reloaded with custom armor-piercing ammo. Felix gestured upward to exactly where they should shoot. They began to fire straight through the ceiling. They were creating a wall of enfilading fire, to keep the Kampfschwimmer from moving into Mohr’s equipment clean room—if they hadn’t reached it yet.

  But I can’t stop the Germans from firing into there, and my men must be very careful. Mohr’s modules aren’t bulletproof.

  A body tumbled heavily down the stairs to the third floor. Felix kept pumping rounds along a perimeter in the ceiling. His magazine ran empty. Again he had to reload.

  A stream of bullets came back through the ceiling. The man next to Felix was struck on the top of his bulletproof helmet, so hard he was knocked out. He fell, reflexively squeezing his trigger; his MP-5 fired as Felix ducked. Another burst from upstairs stitched the unconscious man’s chest. Rounds were stopped by his flak vest, but one leg jerked when it took a hit.

  Felix had to keep firing through the ceiling at all costs. He was running low on ammo. He was afraid his armor-piercing rounds would punch through the roof, despite their reduced propellant charge, and come back down through the air and hurt or kill an innocent person somewhere. A main cross beam, too splintered, snapped, and part of the ceiling sagged.

  “Cease fire! Cease fire! Third floor clear! Roof clear!” That was Chief Costa, still using Portuguese.

  “Man down, second floor!” Felix shouted.

  Da Rosa, the SEALs’ first-aid specialist, hurried from above and went to work on the wounded man’s leg.

  “Sir,” he reported, “we lost a man.”

  Oh, Jesus. Even through the gas mask, Felix could hear da Rosa’s distress. “Who? Where?”

  “Fernando, sir.” Fernando Gabrielli, one of Felix’s enlisted SEALs. Da Rosa said he’d been shot twice in the head as they’d assaulted the top floor.

  That was him tumbling down the stairs.

  Felix had no time for grief or regrets. His breathing inside his own mask was very ragged now.

  “Find Mohr’s modules! Find his tools!” Without them, all this carnage would have been for nothing.

  “We’re in the clean room!” Chief Costa’s voice came from upstairs. “Tool kit looks okay! No modules up here!”

  “Check again!”

  “We did, sir! Negative modules on roof or third floor!”

  Felix felt a stab to his heart. What if they’d left the field gear somewhere else, as a security measure?

  Felix’s men from upstairs clambered down. Chief Porto was clutching a bullet wound through his forearm. Da Rosa helped him bandage it. Another SEAL held a box by the handle: Mohr’s tool case. One man just stood there in the dark. Even through his night-vision goggles, Felix could tell he was in a daze.

  That’s one dead and two wounded. At least I didn’t see arterial blood spurt from either wound. But I think the chief’s got a broken bone in that arm.

  He saw that da Rosa was putting a splint around Porto’s wound.

  And where in hell are the modules?

  “Switch to flashlights!” Felix pulled one out of his equipment vest and checked that it still worked. He raised his night-vision goggles on their bracket attached to his helmet front. Felix started to look around on the second floor.

  He found the modules.

  All four stood together on the debris-littered floor, on the far side of bullet-riddled couches. A German corpse lay draped across the computer boxes, as if the Kampfschwimmer died shielding them with his body.

  Felix pulled the corpse off the modules. They were covered in blood.

  “Sir,” Costa called. “There’s too much smoke . . . Something’s burning.”

  “Find it,” Felix snapped. “And find a fire extinguisher.”

  Felix left the drying blood where it was on the computer modules, so as to tamper with them as little as possible. He hefted each of the modules into a separate waterproof sack, to protect them and camouflage what they were.

  “Chief! Did you find what was burning?”

  “The fuse box, sir! I turned off the main. That stopped it sparking and smoking. I dug around with my knife, no sign of hot embers.”

  “Get a body bag.” SEALs never left a man behind, dead or alive.

  Gabrielli was placed in the body bag, one of a pair the team had brought just in case. As the shifting flashlight beams from Felix’s men weirdly lit the smoke and floating dust and lingering tear gas, he went into the kitchen. The plumbing was shattered, and water was spraying under the sink, forming a widening puddle on the floor. He looked around for a bucket or big pot that didn’t have a hole in it. He found one and managed to fill it with water.

  He walked back to the body bag. His boots crunched on broken glass and splinters of wood. Spent shell casings clinked as he kicked them aside; they lay everywhere, the brass glinting brightly in his flashlight beam.

  He used the water to wash the outside of the body bag of Gabrielli’s blood and brains. He and the others used more water to wash the blood and gore they’d stepped in off of their boots.

  The SEAL with the leg wound, de Mello Vidal, had revived from the blow to his head. He complained of seeing double and feeling nauseous.

  Concussion.

  Between two wounded men, a full body bag, four heavy computer modules, and one tool-kit case—and all their weapons—Felix’s team had a lot to carry. They helped de Mello Vidal to stand up. His concussion didn’t seem too serious, but he needed to lean on da Rosa to be able to walk.

  They went down to the first floor and left the building.

  Felix was sure they were being watched from some of the darkened windows around them.

  With luck it will take someone a while to call the police. After all, so far as they know we are the police.

  Salih came up from the steps down to a basement apartment in the building next door. That little stairwell, which Mohr had told him about, had served as an effective foxhole during the raid.

  Felix saw him do a head count and look at the body bag.

  Salih said nothing.

  “Could you hear us shouting in Portuguese out here?” Felix whispered in English. The real police were meant to think the attackers were splinter-group partisans.

  “Plenty. Especially when your men were on the roof.”

  “Hear any wounded civilians?” Felix noticed broken window glass on the sidewalk in front of the building.

  “No signs of human activity at all, actually. I heard some ricochets, but I don’t think they hit anyone.”

  “Okay, good.”

  “They knew to keep their heads down. This sort of area, stray bullets are not unique to tonight, believe me. . . . Sorry about your man.”

  Felix grunted. He was starting to get choked up. He hated the after-action adrenaline crash, especially when his team took losses.

  Salih and Costa trotted down the block and around the corner, returning in the gypsy cab and the Hyundai.

  Everyone quickly squashed into one vehicle or the other, equipment and computer gear and body bag and all. Salih drove over to the parked German BMW. Costa in the Hyundai, with Felix and two
men in back and the dead Gabrielli across their laps, sped to Mohr in the Mercedes.

  They distributed their loads more evenly. Gabrielli was placed in the trunk of the Mercedes. The cars roared off in four different directions—just as the sounds of sirens began in the distance.

  By splitting up and blending in, the cars were able to evade police and regroup at their final meeting point. To make better time, they used different roads than before, choosing routes that were more open, less congested—hostile surveillance was less of a problem now than direct interdiction by Turkish authorities.

  Some of the cars went straight north through a belt of university campuses. Others, including Felix in the Mercedes with Salih and Mohr, looped northeast and then northwest, past a big synagogue and a massive cathedral—then came mosques, palaces, harems, and an ancient Roman arena, made into museums, all closed this time of the night.

  The team got back together in a dark and deserted park, on the south shore of the Golden Horn, between the Ataturk Bridge and the Galata Bridge. They unloaded all their equipment, the wounded men—Porto and de Mello Vidal—and the body bag with Gabrielli inside. Then the four vehicles were driven off to be concealed behind bushes close to each bridge. The SEALs left two damaged Turkish MP-5s, magazines of Czech ammo, and phony “EMNIYET” flak vests in some of the cars; the uncleaned submachine guns had very obviously been recently fired, and some of the flak vests had bullet hits in them or blood on them. By morning the real police would find them, maintaining the SEALs’ cover story of being rogue Portuguese anti-German extremists. The cars dumped by the two bridges would make it look like the guerrillas had changed mounts after the attack and driven into the New City.

  Felix and three unwounded SEALs all ran back to the meeting point after disposing of the cars. The distance they’d each had to cover was half a mile, but they put every ounce of remaining endurance into it, and they were worn out.

  Felix lowered the sonar transducer into the putrid water of the Golden Horn, and activated it. While they waited for Meltzer to hear them and approach in the minisub, Salih and the unwounded SEALs changed from battle dress into their dive gear.

  With binoculars Felix scanned the water for Meltzer’s periscope. The meeting point was in a little cove on the shore of the park, giving a bit of added privacy. There. Felix saw the periscope, looking straight back at him, not moving. He knew the photonics head had an image-intensification mode just like his binocs did, so Meltzer surely saw him. Meltzer had come as close in as he could, without the top of the mini showing or the bottom lock-in chamber hatch becoming mired in the mud.

  “Chief, you and me.” Felix and Costa clipped themselves together with a six-foot lanyard and quietly entered the water. Soon they returned, carrying what looked like a streamlined coffin.

  “Klaus,” Felix said, “you first. Then your equipment. Then we take the wounded, one by one.”

  Mohr had already been briefed. Felix undid the watertight clamps and opened this pressure-proof personnel transfer capsule. Mohr lay down inside and Felix strapped him in and turned on the air supply. He resealed the capsule. Mohr gave him a thumb’s-up through the little window where a passenger’s face would be, riding inside with no need to wear scuba gear or even be able to swim.

  Felix adjusted the buoyancy tanks of the capsule. He and Costa went underwater with the grand prize of their extraction mission safely cocooned—Herr Doctor Klaus Mohr, alias Peapod to the CIA, code name Zeno to the Axis.

  Chapter 38

  At noon on Saturday, Jeffrey tapped his foot impatiently outside the air-lock trunk that led up into Challenger’s minisub hangar. The mini had docked and the hangar doors were closed; the ship was secured from battle stations. The minisub had returned seven hours earlier than seemed possible, and Jeffrey really wanted to know why.

  He’d verified that Felix was in the mini and not under duress by using the acoustic link to ask questions only Felix himself could properly answer. And he knew there were casualties.

  Felix half-stumbled out of the air lock, exhausted and elated all at once. “Woo, was that one hell of a ride!”

  Challenger’s chief medical corpsman and his assistants moved in and climbed up to assist the wounded SEALs. They would work on them inside the minisub first, then lower them strapped into Stokes litters, stretchers covered with protective wire cages.

  Gerald Parker came down the ladder from the mini, also visibly frazzled—and frustrated, irritated, even incensed.

  An unfamiliar figure appeared behind Parker. He was tall and slim and handsome, blond with blue eyes. Jeffrey thought he looked as thoroughly German as a German ever could; he had to resist his natural impulse to hate the man on sight as the enemy. His hair and clothes were a mess. His face was gaunt; he needed a shave and his eyes were bloodshot.

  The stranger glanced around at his new environment, bewildered at first. He quickly got his bearings, and recognized Jeffrey. From my picture somewhere?

  Parker and Felix opened their mouths to say something, but the German beat them to it.

  “Captain Fuller, it is a great honor to meet you at last. My name is Klaus Mohr. We must speak in private immediately.”

  Parker butted in. “Captain, I would not recommend it. Mohr has been uncooperative since he stepped into the minisub. He repeatedly refused to give me a debrief of any kind. He’s holding something back when he should be spilling his guts out to me.”

  Mohr gave Parker a look of contempt. Perfect Aryan specimen and haughty Ivy League WASP glared at each other.

  Jeffrey, feeling bombarded, turned to Felix. “Lieutenant?”

  “Well, yeah. He said he needed to rest, and wanted to have to go through the details only once, with the man in charge. You, Captain. Then he told us that every hour counted, and that the minisub couldn’t waste fuel. He suggested a way to solve the latter problem.”

  “And?”

  “I assessed it to be feasible, and also advantageous since our fuel margin was already slim. It worked—I have to give him that much. In the big picture, I don’t know. My job was to deliver the guy. He’s here.” Felix shrugged.

  Jeffrey decided to slow this conflict down to get control over it. He’d take things step-by-step. He sized Mohr up. He wasn’t surprised that there was antagonism between Mohr and Parker, considering how badly Jeffrey and Parker got along. Parker was overbearing, a bully, a snob. That might work in other contexts, with agents Parker thought he owned because of extortion or whatever, but it was clear at once that Klaus Mohr knew nobody owned him. He had a very intelligent face, a dignified bearing, evident self-pride, and, if half the CIA’s guesswork was right, he’d also have heavyweight academic credentials. From Mohr’s point of view, if sincere, he was doing the Allies a favor, not the other way around.

  Parker is the wrong man for this job. . . . But I’ve learned a few things from him. I can manipulate too.

  Jeffrey intended to put Mohr through the wringer. And he’d do it subtly, only after first breaking the ice.

  “What was your time-saver, Herr Mohr? May I call you Klaus?”

  “In my role as trade attaché, I know . . .” He frowned to himself. “Excuse me, I knew the sailing times of shipping bound for Axis-occupied ports. Several were leaving Istanbul before dawn. I said we should hitch ourselves to one.”

  “A routine dive task when you think about it, sir,” Felix said, sounding much more tired now. “We used the mini’s tow cable to attach it to the bottom of the rudder pin of a big merchie that mostly did twenty-two knots once she got under way. At twelve thousand tons displacement, we figured she wouldn’t notice the drag of a sixty-ton mini. Hair-raising trip, submerged right under her wake, but it did get us to you faster.”

  “How’d you unhitch at twenty-two knots?”

  “Near this end of the Dardanelles we used the switches that jettison the mini’s tow cleats from inside. . . . The merchie gets tangled in that loose cable, well, score one for us. It’ll look like some kind of acciden
t, right? Remember, sir, everything’s German.”

  Jeffrey watched in silence as the two wounded SEALs were brought down and under the corpsman’s supervision their litters went into the wardroom. Gamal Salih helped, not his usual irrepressibly chipper self now, but still glad to have had a chance to hurt Germany as a front-line freedom fighter again.

  The body bag with the dead SEAL came down, carried by four of Felix’s men.

  Jeffrey pointed aft. “The freezer. The mess-management people will show you.” Bodies were stored there when space permitted. “My condolences on your loss.”

  The SEALs left with their burden, not saying anything.

  We paid a high price to get you, Klaus Mohr, including the sacrifice of Ohio, and there’s still a long way to go to arrive home safe.

  “Mr. Parker, Lieutenant Estabo, Herr Mohr, follow me now.”

  Jeffrey had the three of them—Gerald Parker of the CIA, Felix Estabo the SEAL, and Klaus Mohr, German defector—wait in Bell’s stateroom while Jeffrey went and fetched Bell.

  “Time to open my egress orders,” Jeffrey said when he and Bell were alone in Jeffrey’s stateroom. He unlocked his safe and pulled out the bulky envelope, then carefully entered the code to bypass the anti-tamper incendiary mechanism.

  He read the hard-copy orders silently. “No surprises to us. Let’s hope they’ll be a big surprise to the enemy.” He handed the orders to Bell.

  Bell looked them over, his expression becoming haunted for a moment. “It’s awful seeing the references to Ohio. I keep feeling we should have done something to help them.”

  “That subject is closed,” Jeffrey said curtly. Ohio was to have separated from Challenger, to lurk in the Med, so her vast weaponry could be used to help repulse the Afrika Korps offensive. Then she was supposed to sneak out past Gibraltar, the same way she’d sneaked in.

  Turned out to be a one-way trip for Parcelli. Jeffrey pushed the thought from his mind. It was too poignant, and he had other difficulties—two of which were that Ohio’s arsenal was gone from the playing field at a critical time, and her loss left lingering, unanswered questions about an Axis mole or trap.