Straits of Power

by Joe Buff

  Meltzer was mirroring the kid’s argumentative attitude. He’d told Felix that Israelis often spoke this way as a matter of course. Seeming defensive could ruin everything.

  As if to punctuate Felix’s worries, an Israeli Navy fast-patrol boat roared by, a thousand yards farther out in the Med.

  The kid disappeared without answering Meltzer. The boat’s pump and vacuum engines, mounted amidships on deck, suddenly stopped. Felix heard snatches of Hebrew, and static from a radio. Two men in their early twenties took the teenager’s place at the rail. They wore green combat fatigues, and aimed assault rifles at the eight men clustered in the water. “You,” one of the soldiers shouted to Meltzer. “We called both beach camps. They say they never heard of you, or anybody from NYU.” His accent was more noticeable than the kid’s, with a singsong quality that would have been lyrical if it hadn’t been so venomous.

  Felix’s team had come unarmed except for their dive knives: Archaeologists and hired-hand diving assistants would not carry guns. To flee would surely draw fire from these soldiers, and a quick call to the patrol boat would put an end to the matter. The soldier who wasn’t talking seemed too trigger happy to Felix as it was. Meltzer would have to bluff it out, as he’d been scripted to in advance.

  “Come on!” Meltzer shouted back in his best Bronx accent and rough New York City style. “There’s a goof on the roster, all the admin’s like chaos here. This whole thing’s a mad rush, you know that better than I do! Why do you think we had to use Turks and Portuguese?”

  Meltzer meant the site work was all a mad rush, to telescope most of a summer’s worth of excavating into just a few weeks, between the recent end of northern Israel’s rainy season and the start of a German offensive whose precise timing wouldn’t be known to civilian researchers. Extra volunteers and workers made the site areas hectic. The professors running the project needed good data to publish or perish and get tenure—or not—and the grad students needed to finish their dissertations, to earn their doctorates—or not. Meltzer was pretending to be such a grad student, flown in from the U.S.

  “Why weren’t you drafted?” the soldier questioned Meltzer. The draft had been reinstated in America because of the war.

  Felix tried not to cringe. They hadn’t thought of this in the hurried role-playing rehearsals. Meltzer, in his mid-twenties, physically fit and in reality on active duty, needed an excuse.

  “I have Crohn’s disease.”

  “Mah?” What?

  Felix was impressed. The soldiers might just fall for this.

  “A chronic inflammation of the small intestine! Bad news! . . . Relax! It’s genes! You won’t catch it!”

  “So how can you dive?”

  This soldier just wouldn’t quit. Felix saw for himself that Klaus Mohr wasn’t exaggerating when he said wartime Israelis were totally paranoid.

  “I wear a diaper.”

  Felix laughed, almost giddy with relief. Meltzer had come up with the perfect answer—with an assault rifle aimed at his face. The soldier thought Felix was snickering.

  “We all do on long or deep dives,” Salih threw in, which was true for both recreational and professional divers.

  “One at a time,” the soldier said. He gestured with his muzzle toward the ladder from the water at the stern of the boat. He pulled back the charging handle of his rifle and let it snap forward, chambering a round. “First hand up your sacks.”

  The team swam to the stern. Their bags with Mohr’s cases were passed to one of the boat’s other crewmen, someone tanned bronze, in his mid-fifties, potbellied but surprisingly strong. He moved with a sailor’s ease. Felix assumed from his proprietary air that he was the vessel’s owner. Meltzer climbed the ladder, followed by Salih, then Mohr, then Felix.

  “Maspik!” the soldier shouted. Enough! He’d shrewdly divided Felix’s team in half, with four SEALs still in the water. He’d also separated the team from their equipment bags. The teenager and the older man had opened them without asking permission, and started searching the contents. They pulled out clipboards resembling the ones used at the wreck site, improvised from what had been available on Challenger; the ship’s vast on-line e-book library of tour guides for crewmen on leave had told Felix this much, the same way it let him and Gerald Parker identify this site and assess its probable present active status.

  Like many items in the bags—including pencils, an underwater camera with blank film, and Mohr’s quantum computer and tool case—the clipboards were damp with saltwater. Everything had been soaked while still on Challenger, to appear more authentic when examined. Were they authentic enough?

  Felix and those with him stood on the deck, dripping. Their compressed-air tanks and weight belts were heavy out of the sea. Standing upright in the head-to-toe loose-fitting wet suits was serious labor. They had to squint in the bright sun reflecting off the Med, because their hats and sunglasses were in side pouches of the gear bags. Even with a light onshore breeze, and the temperature in the seventies, Felix felt much too warm as he waited to see what happened next.

  “What’s in these cases?” the boat owner demanded.

  Felix’s tension worsened. Explaining the cases couldn’t be avoided. Neither could Mohr keep mute forever, and Meltzer was too junior to lead a major university archaeological expedition, even a last-minute add-on by a school not a principal dig sponsor.

  “May I show them to you?” Mohr asked politely.

  The soldier pointed his rifle angrily at Mohr, stepping back to keep the foursome covered. His partner held his own weapon pointed at the men still in the water. Felix had seen that the rifles were Galil ARs, with their safeties off. Long, curved magazines projected down and forward from their receivers; each held fifty rounds of the same ammo as an M-16. Felix did not want to take a bullet—or a burst of bullets. None of his team wore body armor.

  “You have a German accent,” the soldier said to Mohr, his voice thick, bloodcurdling, hate-filled.

  “So?” Mohr answered back aggressively. “And I suppose that no Israelis speak with German accents? Hmm?”

  “You are not Israeli.”

  “Did I say I was?”

  “What are you?” The soldier had his Galil’s unfolded stock on his shoulder now, and peered down its sights at Mohr’s head.

  Uh-oh, Felix told himself, sweating, here’s the punch line.

  “I’m German. And an adjunct professor at New York University. And not a supporter of Imperial Germany or I wouldn’t be here, would I?” Mohr advanced on the soldier, loaded Galil and all, in a rage that he summoned from deep inside himself. “Don’t you know there are good Germans? Do you know how many of my friends were shot for resisting tyrants last year in Germany?” Spittle began to fly from Mohr’s mouth. “Do you think I like having to explain myself wherever I go, as if I’m some kind of vile insect? Do you think I like it?” His nose almost touched the flash suppressor at the Galil’s muzzle now.

  Felix thought that if they survived this, Mohr deserved an Oscar for his performance.

  “Where are your papers?”

  “At the hostel. We don’t take them with us on dives.”

  “What are these boxes?”

  “Magnetometers, gravimeters. For finding and mapping out underwater wrecks. I’m testing them on working sites to calibrate them. You understand the word ‘calibrate’?” Mohr folded his arms across his chest defiantly, over the straps of his scuba and his uninflated buoyancy vest.

  For an uncomfortable minute the soldier kept his rifle trained on Mohr. Then his eyes drifted to the equipment cases sitting on the deck. His eyes darted back to Mohr, testing for a reaction, any excuse to open fire. The tactic was as transparent to Mohr as to Felix. Mohr gave the soldier a dirty look, then spoke quietly and evenly. “Get us a ride to the beach, or shoot me. Make up your mind.”

  The soldier lowered his rifle, snapped the selector onto safe, and shouted to the wheelhouse, then to his partner. The other soldier safed his weapon. The boat owner talke
d on the radio; a response crackled in Hebrew. Soon a young woman on the beach, at the primary camp north of the minefield, pushed a rubber raft into the water and started its little engine, heading for the boat.

  The soldier glanced at Meltzer. “Eight people and those bags, you need two trips.” The deck’s pump and vacuum engines came back to life, making noises and giving off smelly exhaust.

  Chapter 43

  Chief Costa and the enlisted SEALs had already gone to the beach with some of Mohr’s gear. Now Felix, Meltzer, Salih, and Mohr rode the raft steered by the young woman. She’d spoken to Meltzer briefly in Hebrew, but ignored her other passengers. To her, Felix could tell, he and Salih were underlings. Klaus Mohr kept his mouth shut, not pressing his luck. The woman, her expression serious, purposeful, handled the raft with skill.

  They approached the shore quickly. To the left of the beach the land rose to gray cliffs, with an indentation forming a cove. There were structures and activity on the cliffs. Felix knew this was Tel Dor, one of the most extensive ongoing land-based archaeological digs in Israel. Farther north was a promontory, topped by a Crusader fortress crumbling from neglect. South by a few miles, also directly on the shore, lay another Crusader ruin, with the base of what had once been a tall, massive tower.

  Large rocks stuck out of the water near the beach. The rubber raft wove between them, kicking up cool spray that sprinkled Felix’s body and face. The sea altered from deep blue to turquoise green, the surf was barely three feet high, and white water lapped against yellowish sand. The raft ran up on the beach. The woman turned off the outboard to save scarce gas.

  “Todah,” Meltzer said. Thank you. The woman nodded, then went about checking the raft. The narrow tide line here was mostly free of detritus from naval battles a hundred-plus miles to the west; Felix saw bits of charred driftwood, and small blobs of oily gunk, easily sidestepped.

  He scanned the setup on the beach. Open-sided canvas tents gave shade, where people at long tables rinsed artifacts, then immersed them again in buckets for preservation; records were kept on laptops. A close-sided tent had a sign that said “East Carolina University Underwater Archaeology Group.” Another such tent had a sign in Hebrew and English; the English part said “University of Haifa.” Farther off, a generator purred. Cables were strung over tall planks driven into the sand, providing power to different parts of the encampment. A tank trailer with diesel fuel sat near the generator. A bigger trailer had “Fresh Water Do Not Drink” marked on its tank. One open-sided tent held coolers, coffee urns, and food; workers wolfed down snacks there.

  Closer to the multilane coastal highway stood a row of chemical toilets, and a few parked vans and cars—Haifa was twelve miles straight north. Felix also noticed a big stack of white PVC pipe, a pile of empty compressed-air scuba tanks near the highway, and rows of filled tanks standing upright on wooden pallets close to the water. The sand in many places was wet; it was crisscrossed by countless footprints and sets of tire tracks.

  Rolls of barbed wire stretched along the whole south edge of the area, from the surf to the highway. Portable floodlights on poles, switched off now, pointed both at the encampment and toward the deserted beach beyond the wire. Hundreds of yards off, on a twisting corridor through the minefield, Felix saw a sandbagged heavy machine-gun emplacement.

  He went to the co-ed shower area. Burlap screens on stakes gave minimal privacy. Chief Costa and his men had by now washed off, cleaned their gear, and changed into casual civilian clothing from dry side pouches in their bags. Felix and those with him did the same, then strapped dive knives near their ankles, under their slacks.

  They carried their dive gear to an open-air spot with wooden tables and clotheslines equipped with plastic hooks. All sorts of gear was piled on the tables; wet suits hung from the hooks; an attendant kept an eye on everything. Felix and his men tied numbered tags to their gear, and the woman gave them claim checks. She spoke good English. Meltzer said they’d be back in two hours, to put in another short dive before dark. He asked how they could get a lift into Zichron Yaakov, a town a few miles away where he said they were staying. She pointed to a van.

  As the team trudged up the beach to the van, hefting their equipment bags, Felix noticed more barbed wire, and other young women guarding the inland perimeter exits. They wore army uniforms and carried Uzi submachine guns—an old design, used mostly by rear-area troops, but deadly if well maintained. Felix’s group was challenged at gunpoint by two of these women.

  They spoke little English. While Felix’s heart was in his throat again, they questioned Meltzer and he responded as best he could. He gestured out at the boat, and the raft they’d ridden in on. These soldiers insisted the team open their equipment bags and unlock Mohr’s module cases and his tool kit. They looked them over carefully. They waved electronic wands around each case: detectors for explosives, poisons, radiation, and germs. Finally one of the women nodded and pointed the team toward the shuttle van. Felix knew that the hardest part by far was yet to come.

  As they clambered into the van, he realized that none of the soldiers had names or rank insignia on their uniforms, for security. Meltzer told the driver, another woman, their supposed destination. The driver wore civilian clothes, but had a loaded Uzi on the seat beside her. The van’s windows were all rolled down. With a jerk it picked up speed and cut onto the highway, heading south. A nice breeze came in the windows. Traffic was conspicuously light, except for crowded buses and long military convoys.

  Soon swamps and lagoons mixed with eucalyptus groves, date trees, and tilled fields. Ahead was a coastal kibbutz—a socialist collective farm—and a road sign said it was called “Nakhsholim.” The van turned inland instead at the first intersection. They crossed a rail line, then another north-south road. Their side road began to gain altitude. They were climbing the foothills of the Carmel Range, only 1,500 feet tall at its peak, but compared to the flat coastal plain running south, these green hills before them seemed high. They passed large vineyards along the road, then soaring, narrow, fragrant cypress trees. Behind the van, the view to the Med with the late-afternoon sun above the sea was stunning.

  The van made a sharp right turn. Soon they were on a street of Zichron Yaakov: population six thousand, employment mostly in agriculture or light industry, plus tourism—the latter was sluggish because of the war, except for the ubiquitous Japanese. The street was lined by stucco one-story buildings with red-tile roofs. It was paved in places with cobblestones, and the streetlamps were decorative old-fashioned gas lights; the first Zionist settlement at Zichron Yaakov had been founded in the 1880s.

  The van stopped at the hostel. The driver gave Meltzer a card, then touched the cell phone on her dash: Call if they wanted transport later. Everyone waited on the sidewalk until her vehicle was well gone. Their jaws set. It was time to assume new identities, and do the thing they’d come here for.

  Chapter 44

  It wasn’t easy finding the type of manhole Mohr said they needed. He’d deduced that one of the buried fiber-optic trunk cables from Tel Aviv to Haifa had to pass under Zichron Yaakov somewhere. It was by far the largest town on a straight line from the Mediterranean shore to the West Bank Territory’s border, barely sixteen miles eastward from the sea. Such placement of the cable was forced in part by the need to protect it, and in part by the need to give good connection service in the town. The size and shape of the maintenance-access manholes—rectangular, one by two meters or so—were set by the need to sometimes move big parts and equipment in and out.

  Felix knew this was at best a series of hopeful assumptions. Challenger lacked maps of Israel’s fiber-optic grid, because in Norfolk no one thought they would ever use them. The idea of stealing the information in Israel was dismissed right away, with Gerald Parker’s wholehearted agreement. He’d warned that any physical or computer-hacking break-in or search for such data could be spotted instantly by the Shin Bet, Israel’s ruthless internal state-security apparatus. The SEALs’ raid w
ould end in catastrophe, the team either captured or killed.

  The group began walking the streets, lugging Mohr’s gear, looking for the manhole that would let him hook up his quantum computer. Meltzer preempted suspicion by people they passed as best he could, acting friendly and making quick greetings to Israelis they met on the spotless sidewalks.

  Felix often glanced at his watch. He was in a race with almost a dozen Kampfschwimmer teams to get into the Israeli systems first. He also kept thinking of the hard deadline Captain Fuller had set for minisub pickup. Even if they found the cable, even if Mohr’s gizmo functioned correctly—and Mohr didn’t show any signs that he was in fact a double agent for the Germans—Felix realized they might not make it back before Challenger sailed. They’d be stuck in Israel lacking a good explanation of how they’d arrived, with an all-out Axis offensive charging toward them very soon. The American embassy would surely be watched, might be penetrated, and going there could betray Challenger and Mohr.

  Face it, this effort was launched on a swim fin and a prayer. The fatalistic mood of the Israeli pedestrians Felix saw didn’t help. They all knew that the war—which up to now had spared their homeland, though it nearly bankrupted their economy—would soon become a vicious fight for survival, a fight to the death. Memories of previous wars and terrorism fueled the communal concerns. Knowing what a different generation of Germans had done to a different generation of Jews added an edge of fury that Felix could tell was seething all around him. The scenic views between the leafy trees reminded him of how much could still be lost. Few of the locals he went by were males between sixteen and fifty—they’d been mobilized, massing nearer the front where the Afrika Korps would be.

  Mohr pointed into the road. Meltzer walked to the manhole cover, consisting of four smaller pieces placed side by side flush with the pavement, and read the words on the heavy metal castings. After reading them he said, “Right type of manhole, but welded shut.” Security.