Straits of Power

by Joe Buff

  Challenger opened her hangar doors to release the minisub. Jeffrey timed it between passes of Israeli aircraft and patrol boats. He held his breath; there was no incoming fire, yet. The minisub moved inshore; Challenger withdrew to deeper water. The patrol boats had no sonars or antisubmarine weapons. They bristled with .50-caliber heavy machine guns and larger automatic cannon. Their crews’ job was to spot intruders using small craft, rubber boats, or scuba. From years of fighting terrorists, they tended to shoot first and ask questions later. They could chew Felix and his men to pieces, in the water or on the beach. Jeffrey hoped Felix’s audacious plan would prevent this.

  Chapter 41

  Egon Schneider and Manfred Knipp sat at the command console in Doenitz’s control room. Schneider was still displeased by being relegated to a side show: Lurking for Los Angeles- or Virginia-class American submarines around the Arabian Gulf, plus maybe an aircraft carrier or two.

  His flank-speed dash northward through water five thousand meters deep—so fast yet so invisible—had been exciting. Then he waited, but nothing interesting occurred.

  “It seems we’ve beaten the Americans by too wide a margin. We’re simply too fast.”

  “Sir?” Knipp asked.

  “Nothing but merchant shipping passing above us. No enemy cargo ship is a target worth revealing our presence and true nationality for.”

  “Jawohl.”

  Schneider sulked and studied the large-scale nautical chart. Doenitz was in the Gulf of Aden, where the bottom in many places was 900 to 12,000 meters deep. Twelve hundred meters was his crush depth. Now he hugged ooze-covered terrain at almost one thousand meters, moving at only four knots—for quieting, and to assure the best sensitivity for his on-hull passive sonars searching upward.

  The Gulf of Aden was an inlet off of the Arabian Sea that pointed toward Africa. At the gulf’s western end, the water suddenly narrowed to the Strait of Bab el Mandeb. Through this strait lay the Red Sea. All shipping for Israel and Egypt, to or from the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, had to pass through this one strait, less than sixteen sea miles wide, much of that blocked by islands and shoals, jagged coral reefs, and wrecks.

  “Verdammt,” Schneider cursed. “This is getting us nowhere. The Gulf of Aden is too wide for us to be sure of catching good targets, and the Bab el Mandeb is too narrow to lurk there. I don’t like this setup.” One side of the Bab el Mandeb Strait was controlled by neutral Yemen, and the other by the Allies’ Central African pocket.

  “Your intentions, sir?”

  Schneider leaned toward Knipp’s main console screen, until his large belly pressed against the edge of the console. “We penetrate the Bab el Mandeb, move to the northern end of the Red Sea, and work here, at the tip of the Sinai Peninsula. Once inside the Red Sea we get water that’s nice and deep again. Off the Sinai, by Sharm al-Sheik, we’ll be astride the Jubal Strait,

  the start of the Gulf of Suez leading to Egypt and the canal

  to the north-northwest, and also right outside the Tiran Strait,

  at the start of the Gulf of Aqaba, leading north-northeast to the harbor and naval base at Eilat in southernmost Israel, here.”

  “Understood,” Knipp said, as obsequious and yet martinetlike as ever.

  “That puts us at the center of the Y intersection. The Red Sea is the Y’s base, the Gulf of Suez is its left upper arm, and the Gulf of Aqaba is its right upper arm. This gives us several advantages compared to where we’re positioned now. Do you see them?”

  Schneider knew he didn’t have to especially like Knipp to harness him as a good einzvo. My career advancement depends on bringing up key subordinates, grooming them for eventual independent command, regardless of what I think of their personalities. . . . As far as I’m concerned, proper military leadership is altruistic only superficially. The true political goal is always selfish—to build good-looking paper credentials, thus earning, no, demanding my own next promotion.

  Knipp continued studying his screens and thinking.

  “I see one thing, sir. The deep water there is up to eighty miles wide. That gives us more options than staying close to the Bab el Mandeb.”

  “That’s tactical. Think big picture.”

  “Oh. By blocking the central intersection of that Y, we dominate any naval cooperation between Israel and Egypt along their southern flanks, before and during the Afrika Korps’ offensive.”

  “Good. What else?”

  “There’s more, Captain?”

  “Yes. Much more.”

  Knipp thought about the chart again. “I believe I see another factor now.”

  “Speak.”

  “We know Allied fast-attacks need to enter the Red Sea for their cruise missiles to reach useful targets in North Africa.”

  “Go on.” This much is obvious from the chart.

  “If we run stealthily to the north end of the Red Sea, we can then sweep southward again, and sink the Allied SSNs one by one as they move up to take their designated patrol boxes. Enemies we don’t hear first by our superior sonars, we’ll certainly locate exactly from great range when they start to launch missiles.”

  “How do you suggest we get to the north end of the Red Sea stealthily?”

  “We’ll need to move slowly through the Bab el Mandeb, so our wake hump doesn’t show because it’s so shallow. We can then continue northward at perhaps fifteen knots, in case any enemy SSNs are in the Red Sea already.”

  “Navigator,” Schneider called out, without bothering to turn his head to look at the man.

  “Navigator, aye aye, sir.”

  “Steaming distance from Bab el Mandeb to Sharm al-Sheik?”

  “Eleven hundred and ten sea miles, Captain.”

  “Very well, Navigator.” Schneider leaned back in his seat, and gave Knipp a sidelong glance. “Fifteen knots puts us where we want to be in three days. We don’t have three days to dawdle.”

  “Because the offensive might start soon?”

  “And because enemy SSNs going faster than fifteen knots could overtake us from behind. . . . Copilot, activate anti-LIDAR and anti-LASH active hull coatings. It’s broad daylight up there.”

  The copilot acknowledged.

  “Attention in Control. I intend to penetrate the Bab el Mandeb at five knots. Soon thereafter we’ll reach rugged seafloor terrain off several large islands. This terrain will block our noise as we accelerate. I will then go to flank speed and make the entire transit north at sixty knots along the bottom. We will therefore arrive on station in early afternoon, local time, on Monday.”

  “Understood,” the watch standers said.

  The Red Sea’s floor, right down the middle as it ran north, was conveniently at or close to Doenitz’s crush depth. This route was lined with black-smoker hot vents, petroleum seeps, and volcanic sinkholes filled with extra-salty scorching brine, all of which would aid concealment.

  Schneider’s intercom blinked. Verdammt, what is it now? He palmed the handset: the radio room. An ELF code ordered Doenitz to trail her floating wire antenna.

  Schneider did this while still on the bottom, to help mask the antenna winch’s mechanical transients. Then he ordered the pilot to reduce depth until the floating wire could reach up toward the surface. A message started coming through. The message was in Schneider’s private captain-only code.

  Another change of orders? Are those nincompoops on shore in Berlin ordering me back to Durban after all this time and labor wasted to get where I am? . . . It’s worth it, though, to have a crack at Challenger before von Scheer is ready to break out.

  Schneider gave Knipp the conn and went to his cabin. He opened his laptop, entered his passwords, and read the decoded message. At the beginning he cursed again, but then he was positively delighted.

  Chapter 42

  Klaus Mohr reminded himself, with savage and poignant irony, that he had wanted, demanded, to be here. He fought down the urge to panic, and forced himself to keep breathing in and out through his scuba regulator. This
was the culmination of a quest that had been eating Mohr alive for many weeks. The interval for possible success was exceedingly narrow, measured in a handful of hours, with no margin at all for mistakes.

  Vertigo, claustrophobia, and fear of drowning made his heart race, and his respiration was faster than the effort to kick with his legs should have required. The shallow water was so murky through his dive mask, even on a sunny afternoon, that his only guides on where to go were the tug of the lanyard between his waist and his dive buddy, Gamal Salih, plus the dive computer strapped to his left wrist. Mohr needed the direction the bubbles of his open-circuit scuba took just to show him which way was up. The computer’s glow-in-the-dark readouts said it was 4:08 P.M. local time, an hour behind schedule already, and he had only twenty minutes left of air. He could never reach the Israeli shore, a quarter mile away, in twenty minutes at the rate he was going. Worse, the hostile shore was on his right, due east, and his compass said he and Salih were swimming north.

  That was the point. The team sent to infiltrate Israel—at Mohr’s own vehement urging, and on Captain Fuller’s finely debated orders—walked a delicate high-wire act that, with this swim, had barely begun.

  Steady mechanical buzzing and growling filled Mohr’s ears. Underwater, it was hard for even a seasoned diver to tell where sounds were coming from. This was Klaus Mohr’s first-ever dive, aside from the hurried training inside one of Challenger’s lock-out trunks. He was keenly aware of the reasons for why it might also be his last. The surrounding murk that made it hard for Salih to aid him in an emergency was the least of his worries.

  The murk diminished as Mohr swam farther north, maintaining ten feet over the bottom that was only twenty feet deep. Now he could see Salih, and then to each side the whole team. But this cut both ways, since others could see them too, just as easily.

  Felix Estabo and Chief Costa and the three enlisted SEALs put Mohr to shame. Each of them dragged a waterproof bag holding one of Mohr’s computer modules or his tool kit, with adjustable buoyancy bladders to keep the bags from rising or sinking. Lieutenant Estabo really had his hands full, since his dive buddy was Lieutenant (j.g.) David Meltzer—one of Challenger’s qualified safety-and-inspection divers, but never schooled in undersea special warfare tactics.

  Yet Meltzer’s help was essential. He’d spent a summer in Israel in high school, and had been top of the class in his Hebrew school before that. Along with the SEALs and Salih, Meltzer—like Mohr—used conventional scuba that gave off bubbles. Stealth was not part of the plan; when properly equipped, and so heavily burdened, traveling submerged was much more efficient than raising constant splashes along the surface, as long as their air supply held out.

  The notion of hiding in plain sight, in the water and then on the land, made Mohr feel naked. He kept going on willpower alone.

  A new buzzing noise began, at a higher pitch, growing loud and then diminishing. Mohr watched as a black rubber raft with an outboard engine bounced through the gentle swells above, busy on some errand. It passed the team a bit farther out to sea, carefully avoiding their telltale bubbles, meanwhile casting a moving shadow on the bottom. Mohr looked at the seafloor, and amid the rocks and sand and mud, and starfish and colorful coral, he could see the shadows of eight men, including himself, with their gear bags.

  Ahead, almost a soccer-field length away, a large boat sat at anchor, its hull below the waterline looming dark and menacing. That dive-support boat was the main source of the steadier, throaty buzzing and growl, but the boat didn’t move. The support boat was the team’s first destination.

  Between Mohr and the boat—a fifty- or sixty-footer—there was much human activity on the bottom. Felix changed course slightly, and the invasion team followed. They swam close enough to the other group to be spotted but not interfere, and not have their swim fins kick up silt to disturb these divers intently at work. Some noticed Mohr and his companions, glanced up, and waved. He waved back. The strangers took his presence for granted. But Mohr knew that to them, it was he who was a stranger, and a mortal enemy.

  This was the easiest part. With dive masks over their eyes and nose, and scuba regulators in their mouths, it was hard to tell people apart.

  Mohr’s heart beat even faster. He calmed down by observing the work as the team swam on, his scientist’s curiosity aroused. These mental notes would be vital soon. They might make all the difference to whether or not his cover story could bear scrutiny. He was the team’s most indispensable member, but also its weakest link.

  The edges of the working site were marked by orange nylon cables, rising from concrete blocks on the bottom to orange balls on the surface that served as buoys. Another black rubber raft, its outboard engine idling, was moored nearby. Mohr expected that this one held the diver lifeguards and a radioman, in case anybody below got into trouble. That raft would also be flying a larger version of the flags attached to each buoy: a blue-and-white swallowtail pennant, the international warning signal to passing ships that divers were present.

  The site itself was laid out in a coordinate grid of one-meter squares, formed by stretches of white plastic pipe. Two black hoses, each about as wide across as one of Mohr’s slim thighs, extended along the bottom and up to the anchored boat, whose heavy pumps Mohr realized caused most of the growling he heard. A pair of divers used one of the hoses like a vacuum cleaner; Mohr could see it sucking things in—sand, silt, pebbles, and any small artifacts. Around them, in an indentation in the seafloor, were the fragmentary ribs of an ancient shipwreck. Nearby, other divers operated cameras in clear plastic cases, where intact and broken pottery jars lay jumbled in a heap atop round stones that had once been the ship’s ballast. They made notes on white plastic clipboards that held no paper, with what looked like regular pencils. Different divers were using the other hose to gently spray water, not suck. They shifted the hose back and forth systematically, raising a cloud of bottom material that was thrown against a mesh backstop so no valuable finds would be lost. They were clearing an additional area of its overburden of sand and silt, to expose more of the wreck and the debris field strewn around it centuries or even millennia ago.

  Mohr closed his eyes for a few seconds while he made his legs continue to kick. He burned the images he’d seen into his brain. The whole team would be doing this. Felix had told them sternly, before they left the minisub, that their lives and their mission depended on a long series of such small details, to support big lies.

  Felix and the others broke the surface near the support boat. He let Meltzer do the talking. “Shalom!” Meltzer shouted above the boat’s pump engines. He waved to get the attention of someone, anyone, on deck. A teenage boy leaned over the rail behind the wheelhouse. After some Hebrew they changed to English, which most Israelis spoke well from studying it in school—if they weren’t English-speaking immigrants themselves.

  “Can you get us a ride to the beach?” Meltzer yelled.

  The teenager looked at the group in the water. As rehearsed, all of them had their dive masks up on their foreheads, and breathed the open air as they trod water, to seem less furtive. The northerly current that paralleled the shore brought them slowly, relentlessly, down the length of the boat.

  “Who are you? I don’t know you.”

  Felix assumed the kid was helping on the underwater dig because he was too young for the army. But he wasn’t too young to be suspicious of intruders.

  Meltzer gave a false name, then pointed toward another dive-support boat nearly a mile to the south, whose noises the minisub had homed in on by sonar. Someone was dumping buckets of waste silt, already sifted through screens that would catch any artifacts, over the up-current side of that boat.

  “We’re from NYU!” New York University, whose archaeology department sponsored digs in the Middle East. Meltzer had been to their Manhattan campus often enough to fake it if grilled.

  “I said I don’t know you!”

  “We’re supposed to be working the other site. Got mixe
d up in the silt from the river, went the wrong way, couldn’t find the boat, and got caught by the current. Before we knew it, we were carried too far to swim back easily. So we drifted toward you, to stay clear of the minefield.”

  A stretch of beach between the two underwater dig locations was cordoned off by barbed wire, and seeded with mines and posted with conspicuous warnings. Just south of the other boat was one of Israel’s few rivers that hadn’t run dry for the summer by May, the Crocodile. The river was muddy and also polluted. To become disoriented in the outflow near its mouth, underwater, was plausible—barely.

  “Don’t you have compasses?” the kid shouted back. He seemed argumentative, skeptical by nature.

  Meltzer shrugged while he kicked with his fins. “I screwed up. The other guy tried to tell me, but I wouldn’t listen.” Meltzer gestured at Salih.

  “Who are you?”

  “Professional divers hired by the dig. We’re from Ashqelon.” A port far down the coast, dozens of miles past distant Tel Aviv.

  “Turkish?”

  “Me, yes. The others are Portuguese, guest workers, stuck.” By the war. “The bald guy is also from NYU.” Klaus Mohr had shaved his head, and dyed his eyelashes black with waterproof face camouflage Felix had given him, to appear less Germanic. Meltzer and Salih did the talking to divert initial attention from Mohr.

  “Look,” Meltzer said, “we’re exhausted, we need fresh tanks, and we might need to make another dive before nightfall. Can we please cut the crap so you can call us a ride to the beach?”