Straits of Power

by Joe Buff

  Meltzer came back onto the sidewalk. “The van lady said she’s finishing a run to Haifa. She’ll be here in half an hour, maybe.”

  Felix finally looked at his watch. He shook his head in disgust. “She the only van?”

  Meltzer nodded. “The only one working this late on a Sunday.”

  It was almost 6:43 P.M.; they’d didn’t have half an hour to sit around waiting. They had to reach the dig, reclaim their dive gear, suit up, grab a ride out to the underwater work area, swim to a prearranged murky spot to meet the minisub, and then hurry out to sea to dock with Challenger.

  “What about a local taxi service?”

  “With eight of us and all this luggage, I better try a sherut company. They’re more like minibuses for hire than cabs.”

  “They take U.S. cash?”

  “Oh yes. They’ll be very happy to.”

  Meltzer came out more quickly this time. “When they heard my American accent, they quoted an outrageous price. I told them I’d give the driver a twenty-dollar tip if he could be here in five minutes.”

  It was closer to ten minutes. There were only seven seats in the minibus, but everybody climbed in with their bags and boxes. Meltzer handed the driver a twenty-dollar bill. He said he’d give him another twenty if he got them the three miles downhill to the beach by 7 P.M.

  The driver floored the accelerator. Traffic on the cross roads and the highway continued to be light. The minibus pulled up at the dig. The group found the same two perimeter guards who’d questioned them on the way out from the site encampment, and the women let them pass through the barbed wire. They hustled to reclaim their wet suits and dive gear, then took fresh compressed-air tanks.

  Their next problem was getting rafts. Several were pulled up onto the beach—at this late hour, activity underwater was slowing. Meltzer told the woman on duty they’d head out to the wreck site themselves, anchor, then when finished return on their own. Tired from a long day, she saw no reason to refuse this.

  Felix and Costa picked a pair of rafts whose outboard motors had enough gas. They loaded both rafts hastily, revved up the engines, and headed for the orange buoys. The sun was very low, in their faces, reminding them that the fixed departure time for Challenger was drawing awfully near.

  On the beach, sirens grew loud enough to overpower the sound of the outboard motors. Felix glanced back. Flashing lights lined the highway outside the site. He saw a man in blue by the vehicles, with the white of a neck brace around his throat, pointing out to sea at the rafts, literally jumping up and down. From the distance, given the circumstances, Felix recognized the figure too well: the cop from the manhole. Soldiers near him spoke on radios. The heavy machine gun a kilometer down the beach opened up like a jackhammer. Red tracers probed their way toward the rafts. “Everyone into the water!” Felix ordered.

  The meeting point with the minisub was the wide place of cloudy water up-current from the dig-support boat Felix’s team had used to get a ride to the beach. Waste silt and mud, after sifting through screens on the boat, had been dumped overboard all day, creating an area where visibility would be obscured.

  The team hugged the bottom at thirty feet. Now their scuba bubbles could ruin everything. Machine-gun bullets sprayed the surface above, but didn’t punch down too near. The excavation support boat started its main diesel engines. Clanking and splashes meant it was raising its anchor, and jettisoning all its hoses. Felix remembered those two soldiers with the Galils. Fired straight down, their small bullets would move slowly after thirty feet of water, but the soldiers probably also had hand grenades—and they might call in a naval craft with full-size depth charges. The dig boat roared at them as they swam at it.

  Felix and Chief Costa stirred up sand and silt for camouflage; the whole team froze and held their breaths, halting the bubbles. The dig boat rushed overhead, steering toward where Meltzer had claimed they’d come from earlier—south, by the Crocodile River outlet. Soon there were sharp underwater explosions. The concussions hurt Felix’s eardrums and punched at his gut, but the force of the blasts wasn’t dangerous.

  The team reached their goal, the cloudiest water, which made it even harder to see. Using a low-power homing sonar that Costa wore on his belt, the men and Challenger’s minisub found one another. They entered the open bottom hatch. Most of them went in back with Mohr’s equipment cases and their other bags.

  Meltzer and Costa, still in their damp wet suits, took over from the two Challenger crewmen who’d been piloting the minisub. Felix stood behind their seats as they aimed for the pressing rendezvous. Meltzer immediately went to flank speed, making almost twenty knots but guzzling the high-test peroxide fuel left in the German mini’s tanks. The mini nosed down as the seafloor fell away. They met Challenger where she should be, in 150 feet of water, at 1957—7:57 P.M., three minutes before she’d leave without them. The mini’s passive sonars showed increasing naval activity on the surface. Suddenly the mini drifted to a stop. The fuel gauges read empty—they’d reached Challenger, but with no propulsion they couldn’t make the docking inside her hangar.

  “I only have minimal battery power,” Meltzer stated. “Captain Fuller will either improvise along with me, or decide it’s too late and too risky and leave. . . . Well, here goes nothing.”

  He used the digital acoustic link to Challenger: Felix watched over his shoulder as he typed a message that appeared, for checking, on a screen. Satisfied, Meltzer sent it. He was asking Challenger to maneuver to position her open hangar doors below him. He would have to come inside by Costa flooding variable ballast tanks to make the minisub heavy enough to drift down, while Meltzer depleted the last of his batteries in an attempt to control the docking by using the minisub’s small side thrusters alone. Felix thought Meltzer deserved a medal for everything he’d done, and for what he was trying now.

  Challenger acknowledged the message. Meltzer flipped on his look-down photonic sensors in short spurts, as the huge submarine turned with her own side thrusters, then held steady underneath the mini, with the open hangar beckoning. Costa worked his control panel. Meltzer’s joystick was never still as the minisub descended. He’d switched off as many things as possible, including the environmental systems and internal lights, to conserve the last few amps of available battery power.

  They entered the hangar without mishap, but the thrusters stopped responding. The battery charge was almost completely flat. The mini couldn’t put itself onto the docking pylons. Felix’s watch said 1803.

  Captain Fuller’s control-room photonic displays must have shown the minisub’s plight. The hangar doors started closing around the mini, then Challenger began to move. She nosed steeply downward, tilting the mini with her, going deep. From its own inertia the mini, in the water inside the hangar, drifted backward more than Meltzer and Costa could control. The German mini’s stern slammed into the rear bulkhead of the hangar with a crunch. Felix realized this was the mini’s main screw getting smashed. He hoped the closed hangar doors suppressed the noise enough that it wouldn’t be detected by Israeli hydrophones. Meltzer ordered Chief Costa to blow variable ballast, using compressed-air reserves, to make the minisub buoyant. Felix knew at once that this would give them their only chance to get out without flooding the mini or risking being crushed. The inertial navigation system, still operating but its readouts dimming by the second, showed that the mini—and by implication Challenger—was accelerating, to twenty-six knots.

  No minisub or Axis diesel-AIP could go this fast. Only a nuclear fast-attack sub could. Captain Fuller was clearing the area, racing for outside the circle of possible location of any U-boat that might have picked up a commando team—actually the SEALs—that Israel would be trying to chase and destroy.

  Analog gauges showed that the sea pressure in the flooded hangar had been relieved. The mini floated upward until it bumped the hydraulically closed and dogged hangar roof—another mechanical transient Felix prayed would go unnoticed—and lodged there, safe enough for now. E
verything went dead except for emergency flashlights. Proper mating to Challenger’s air-lock trunk was impossible. The team would need to get back into their scubas, leave through the mini’s bottom hatch, and swim down into the air lock. Before they could even start, the minisub tilted sideways as Challenger banked into a hard turn southwest.

  Chapter 46

  Late afternoon, local time that Sunday in Norfolk, Ilse was becoming despondent. Captain Johansen, Admiral Hodgkiss’s senior aide, had told her she needed to come up with something to prove her innocence. Struggling all week at her console, mostly sleeping on the floor if she slept at all—studying stale data on the Snow Tiger and the odd flow noises, going through on-line references until her vision blurred—she got nowhere. She had a headache and a backache.

  The door to the private workroom opened with no one knocking first. Ilse turned around. Johansen stood there, and she braced to attention, but he refused to meet her eyes. Next to him were the two FBI special agents who’d interrogated her many days before. They looked triumphant. Ilse caught a glimpse of a squad of armed marines in the corridor before Johansen swung the door shut.

  One of the special agents pulled out a set of handcuffs. Ilse backed up against her console, shaking her head back and forth in fear and disbelief. They grabbed her, spun her around, and cuffed her wrists behind her back. “You are under arrest.”

  “Captain,” Ilse pleaded, “what’s going on? I didn’t do anything.”

  “They all say that,” the more dominant of the two special agents snapped. “Then they try to cut a deal, to cheat the hangman. Then they don’t have much to offer. Then they hang.”

  “Captain.”

  Johansen finally made eye contact, but his eyes were icy cold. “It was in the open literature all along, and you’ll be incommunicado anyway. . . . METOC figured out that the Snow Tiger is almost certainly German. You appear to have not done enough to allow the Allies to track the Snow Tiger, then you misled us into thinking that her flow noise was a natural phenomenon.”

  “But how could a submarine go so fast and not make tonals?”

  “An obscure paper by Hong Kong scientists. METOC found it and saw the connection. Sheets of rubber and epoxy with tiny, tuned lead balls.”

  “What?”

  “The indictment against you has been unsealed. A double titanium hull? You know how expensive that is? Russia doesn’t have that kind of money. Russia uses single titanium hulls for better crush depth, and if they use an outer hull for high-explosive torpedo defense, it’s always cheap steel. The only reason anybody would build submarines with double titanium hulls is if they expected to fight a tactical nuclear war. It takes years to build a nuclear submarine. Whoever paid for the Snow Tiger intended years ago to be fighting a tactical nuclear war. . . . It’s obvious when you see it. You of all people, with where you’ve been in battle, should have seen it, but you pretended not to.”

  “You have to warn Captain Fuller!”

  “That’s no longer your concern. Your clearance is revoked. There’s nothing more anyone here can do for you.”

  “But I didn’t do anything!”

  The FBI special agents dragged Ilse away.

  Jeffrey listened to a short debrief from Felix, Costa, Meltzer, Salih, and Mohr after the team’s last-minute but safe return from their hair-raising excursion into Israel. Jeffrey chuckled at some parts, but was concerned by others. They’d left a very visible trail behind. This might help, if it warned Israel to be on the lookout for other—Kampfschwimmer—raiding parties. But Israel might realize quickly that one particular raid was American. They could protest to Washington, to extract further aid concessions and in the process make Jeffrey look bad at the Pentagon, or they could say nothing, to save face. In the worst outcome they might begin a hunt for alien code in their computer systems and find Mohr’s patch. Even if it was actually benign, and helpful, they might not understand it and could try to remove it, undoing whatever good Felix and Mohr had achieved—assuming they’d beaten every Kampfschwimmer team, which remained to be seen.

  Jeffrey ordered Meltzer to get some sleep while he could.

  Felix, in private, told Jeffrey that Klaus Mohr seemed to behave well during the mission. But Felix himself admitted he had no way to know for sure what Mohr had done, either for or against Israeli defenses. The big questions hung in the air, more distracting and odious than ever. Should Jeffrey have trusted Klaus Mohr? Was there someone smarter than Mohr in Germany, someone even Mohr himself didn’t know about, who’d tricked them all? Was Jeffrey’s decision to violate Israeli sovereignty the biggest mistake of his life?

  Jeffrey accepted that, for now, things were out of his hands. All he could do in the next few hours was worry obsessively, second-guess himself over and over, and stay ready to respond to whatever did happen. He recognized that he was already in so far, the Allies had little to lose and possibly much to gain by his going one step further: On Jeffrey’s orders, Klaus Mohr applied his software patch to Challenger’s systems. There were no apparent ill effects, yet. But the worm was designed to hide itself until reaching its activation time. The most skilled conventional searchers might not find it until too late.

  At midnight, nearing Egypt, Jeffrey went to battle stations. Once again Bell sat next to him as fire-control coordinator. The most experienced people available manned each station in the red-lit, hushed control room. Jeffrey ordered Meltzer, now somewhat refreshed and at the helm, to slow to ten knots.

  The tactical plot presented a maze of Egyptian gas-drilling fields. There were dozens of offshore platforms in their path as Challenger climbed into shallower water. Some still operated, while others had been damaged in raids by German fighter-bombers, cruise missiles, patrol boats, or Kampfschwimmer. Some of the damaged ones were capped, while others burned unchecked, belching towering, hellish natural-gas flares above the surface.

  Jeffrey told Milgrom to switch on the sonar speakers. Bubbling, roaring, clanking, creaking, and grinding sounds filled the air. This background noise, along with the ship’s own active acoustic masking, helped conceal Challenger. Jeffrey decided to leave the air-circulation fans on: His crew was getting worn out at this late stage in the mission, and despite his best efforts of leadership, they might let down their guards at the thought of starting for home. He wanted the control-room environment to stay nicely crisp and fresh—to keep his people at their sharpest. Just as when he approached Israel, Egypt too might consider an unknown large submerged contact to be hostile.

  “Captain, Nav,” Sessions called out from the plotting table, “we are through the twelve-mile limit into Egyptian territorial waters.”

  “Very well, Nav.”

  Jeffrey had respect for the battle-hardened Egyptian Navy. Coastal defense was their specialty, and Jeffrey was violating their coastal waters as much as a submarine could: Challenger was approaching the designated anchorages at the northern entrance to the Suez Canal. In water barely 100 feet deep, even Challenger’s innards had enough iron and steel to get noticed by magnetic-anomaly detection at short range.

  Sessions recommended a course for the proper anchorage area; Jeffrey gave new helm orders to Meltzer, telling him to reduce speed to five knots. They began to negotiate around another maze of obstacles—the undersides of floating merchant hulls.

  “Our ride should be dead ahead,” Bell reported. Passage through the Suez Canal required five days’ prior notice. A place in the anchorage areas was then assigned by the Suez Canal Authority, which supervised all canal operations, including toll collection—Egypt’s largest source of hard currency came from these tolls; keeping the canal open for neutral shipping was vital to her economy. This was why Israeli and Egyptian ships had stopped using the canal soon after the start of the war—if attacked by the Axis and sunk there, the wreckage would create a long and difficult salvage job.

  Ships were assigned where to anchor based on their size, their speed and maneuverability, their expected mechanical reliability, and wheth
er they carried dangerous cargo. Challenger had picked up last-minute specifics by ELF radio late the week before. The incoming message had been in a code that Jeffrey could only read with a one-time-use decryption key contained in his sealed egress orders.

  “Confirmed, sir,” Milgrom said. “Master Six-one is operating hull-mounted obstacle-and-mine avoidance sonar intermittently, according to pattern in prearranged instructions.” This recognition signal was also in Jeffrey’s egress orders, along with the registered name of Master 61.

  “Very well, Sonar. Helm, put us beside the Bunga Azul.”

  The M/V—motor vessel—Bunga Azul was a large and modern bulk dry-cargo ship, over six hundred feet long, able to make a sustained speed of twenty-four knots, and with a crew of only eighteen men thanks to automation and computer assists. She’d been constructed by an American firm in a big yard on the Gulf Coast, under security precautions disguised as overdone antiterrorist measures. She was called a motor vessel and not a steamship because she was powered by huge diesel engines, which drove electric generators feeding motors attached to her twin screw shafts—a more efficient arrangement than steam for some merchant ships. She was flagged in neutral Panama, and operated by a neutral Indonesian shipping company. But Jeffrey had been told that, through intermediate dummy corporations, the ship was really controlled by the CIA. Her crew was hand-picked and well paid.

  Officially, the Bunga Azul was heading to Indonesia with a cargo from Ukraine. In actuality, she had much more in common with the Glomar Explorer, the ship built in the 1960s in secret by Howard Hughes, so the CIA could salvage a sunken—and nuclear armed—Soviet Golf–class diesel sub that had been lost in the Pacific under suspicious circumstances. The Glomar Explorer was designed to float with her bottom open, to lift the Golf off the seafloor and into her hold, all unseen.

  From above, the Bunga Azul was filled with wheat, but the holds all had false bottoms. Under that was a space large enough to accommodate a submarine the size of USS Challenger.