Straits of Power

by Joe Buff

  In the worst case, given everything that’s coming, I’ve got the dirty-bomb problem all over again—spreading radiation from Challenger’s reactor core around the Suez Canal, or right near Saudi Arabia and Yemen, and Africa.

  Jeffrey blanked his message screen when someone knocked on the innermost door: the radioman, back from his smoke break. “Come in.”

  Jeffrey devoted part of his mind to the implications of Hodgkiss’s new information, and the other part to watching the theater-operational status display. A clock said it would be getting light outside, with full sunrise soon.

  “Mr. Captain?”

  Jeffrey turned. The radioman, confused, annoyed, then sheepish, pointed at the electronic support-measures console. Many of the radars and radios plotted on it before had suddenly gone off the air—including the whole canal-authority voice and data net. Jeffrey grabbed the intercom for Challenger. “Get Klaus Mohr on this line.”

  “He’s still sleeping, sir,” Bell said.

  “Get him on this line.”

  The radioman, badly puzzled now, was trying to tune to civilian Egyptian stations. The convoy was nearing Ismailia, halfway through the canal. The city had a population of over one million. The news or a morning talk show should be in range. Nothing. A quick self-check showed that his black boxes were working correctly.

  The radioman had a computerized list of station frequencies. His digital tuner tried them. He turned on a speaker, making a helpless gesture. Station after station showed zero signal strength on his digital meters; Jeffrey heard nothing but silence or static. Then the radioman’s equipment, reset to autosearch, found a radio station that still worked. Jeffrey knew enough Arabic to understand what the anchorman was saying. Parts of Ismailia, in no clear pattern, had lost electrical power. Internet servers in scattered parts of the country had also crashed. The newsman said his producers were getting fragmentary reports of power outages and cell phone failures.

  “Captain Fuller? This is Klaus Mohr.”

  Jeffrey described what was happening. “What have you done?”

  “It makes sense. . . . Quantum decoherence would cause the effects to be somewhat random at this distance from Zichron Yaakov. Some areas would get the patch, but not the worm, intact, while others would get the worm but not the patch.”

  “In plain English!”

  “Pandora has started, Captain. Berlin moved up the attack. And there’s no way to know from what we’re seeing locally who got into Israel’s main systems first, us or the Kampfschwimmer.”

  Jeffrey slammed down the phone in frustration and horror.

  Challenger was right in the Afrika Korps offensive’s path, stuck inside the Bunga Azul, inside the canal—and Israeli and German tactical nukes could start to detonate soon.

  The download from the satellite continued, for now. New display icons appeared as German aircraft and cruise missiles took to the air. Other icons were added or modified as Egyptian and Israeli jets in groups changed course and speed, or left runways and fought for altitude. Allied cruise missiles launched in retaliation for the German ones. The aerial-situation plot quickly became a muddled mess of red and green symbols charging at each other at supersonic speed. They looked bound for a head-on clash, somewhere between the Nile and the Suez Canal.

  What if the worm and Mohr’s patch each grabbed hold in different places, not just in small cities in southern Egypt but throughout the entire theater? Or what if there was no patch, and Mohr was a liar or had been deceived? What if it was all a worm, one that didn’t work everywhere because of strange quantum effects even Mohr couldn’t fathom?

  What if Germany thinks Israeli command and control is crippled, but Israel thinks enough of it isn’t, and both are sure but neither is right—because everything’s like Swiss cheese? What happens next? Do they grapple and inadvertently pull each other into the abyss?

  Jeffrey scrolled to the situation plot for the Indian Ocean. The nearest supercarrier was more than 3,000 miles away, still placed to help protect the oil-tanker route from the Persian Gulf to the Pacific.

  That was six or ten times the combat radius of the carrier’s planes. The midair refueling assets needed to make a difference in blunting the Afrika Korps from so far away simply didn’t exist. U.S. Air Force heavy bombers, operating at extreme range, couldn’t be a factor before tomorrow at the earliest.

  The Germans had decisively beaten any Allied spoiling attack. Egypt and Israel were on their own when it mattered most, the vital first twenty-four hours of a multidimensional blitzkreig—and governments in Berlin, Cairo, and Jerusalem all knew it. Jeffrey snatched the phone handset to the Bunga Azul’s bridge. He asked in his best Arabic for Siregar.

  “Is the pilot able to hear you?” Jeffrey said in English.

  “Na’am,” the master answered in Arabic. Yes.

  “Then listen carefully. The German offensive has started early. We have to get past the suspension bridge at Ismailia before one side or the other blows it and the canal becomes blocked in our face.”

  “Na’amal E?” What should we do?

  “Make radio contact with the ships ahead. If radio doesn’t work, fire a flare to get their attention and use a loud hailer. Tell them you accidentally picked up some broadcasts, and get them to go to their maximum speed or get out of our way. Start a rumor, sound panicky. Scream that the new war has started, Egypt is being invaded, atom bombs could detonate any minute.”

  “Haqiqa?” Is this true?

  “Yes, it’s true. . . . And tell the pilot that big canal ships will be main targets. Let him have your launch and tell him to head for the bank and run for his life.”

  “Na’am. Na’am.” Picked up by Siregar’s open mike, coming from nearby, on land, Jeffrey could hear the mournful howl of air-raid sirens now.

  “Call me back, and make all ahead full, the moment the pilot is gone.”

  Chapter 48

  Ismailia was left behind and the Bunga Azul was pounding nearer and nearer the Bitter Lakes. Jeffrey had taken command of the sub-transporter ship on its bridge—Siregar had readily agreed; he knew Jeffrey was a combat-seasoned naval officer. Fiber-optic lines connected to laptops let Jeffrey watch the same displays he’d seen in the hidden radio room. But now he could read the Bunga Azul’s radar and sonar directly, and see the world outside through the big tinted windows that wrapped around the bridge atop her island superstructure sixty feet above the water.

  Chaos reigned everywhere. The canal authority’s radio net was still dead. The ship-to-ship radios, apparently unaffected by the worm, were swamped with demands and questions and pleading. After forcing one ship ahead of him to the side so he could pass, Jeffrey was now charging south a few hundred yards behind another cargo ship with which his speed was very evenly matched. That ship’s wake, at twenty-four knots, churned the canal surface into a foaming white, contrasting with the sparkling deep blue of undisturbed water farther ahead.

  The cloudless sky was a lighter, harsher shade of blue. It was streaked with high white contrails, and black or white smoke, where fighter jets with air-to-air missiles tangled. The white smoke meant a missile trail. The black smoke meant a jet had been hit. Sometimes Jeffrey could see parachutes bloom, from pilots who’d ejected. Sometimes he saw bright red flashes, then streaming orange flame, as no one got out and the aircraft plunged to the ground. In the distance, on either bank of the canal, there were spots of flame and smoke rising from where other planes had already crashed.

  Jeffrey couldn’t tell by eye or by the tactical plot who was winning. The aircraft, both Allied and Axis, had twisted and turned and dived and soared to the point that even through borrowed binoculars he didn’t know which planes were which. He did have the impression on the tactical plot that Israeli jets were arriving piecemeal, in an uncoordinated fashion, and that Egyptian aircraft were barely arriving at all. Another bad sign was that the center of the swarming dots and confetti of fresh contrails and smoke trails was moving relentlessly east.

&
nbsp; A laptop showed that the ekranoplans were on the move too. German fast-missile boats had darted south from Greece to do battle with the Egyptian and Israeli navies. Jeffrey knew they were clearing a path for the ekranoplans, which had already reached the Libyan coast and turned east just as Jeffrey expected. The naval battle was also confused. The defenders were having trouble massing their forces; it seemed that each vessel looked out for itself, with no central coordination or any strategy.

  Jeffrey had watched Israeli tank transporters heading across Ismailia’s soaring Mubarak Peace Bridge as he’d passed under it before. The tank transporters’ tractors belched black smoke from their straining diesels as they worked toward the top, dragging the tanks on flatbeds, then sped like runaway trains on the roadway’s downward slope leading west to the land-battle front. There was no other traffic—the bridge must have been closed to fleeing civilians. It tore enough at Jeffrey’s heart to see crowds of men, women, and children standing all along the west bank of the canal, gesturing for help to cross the water. Some jumped in and tried to swim, with pieces of wood or cushions as improvised rafts—or not even that. A few of these figures quickly tired and went under and didn’t come up. Others were run down by the speeding merchant ships fleeing south, including the Bunga Azul. Jeffrey tried not to look.

  The master kept blowing the ship’s horn as a warning to those onshore, but so many ships were blowing horns that it did no one much good. Finally Jeffrey had to ask him to stop, so he could think straight.

  The theater operational-picture download from the geosynchronous satellite kept going blank, and then coming back.

  Either the Germans have increased their jamming power, or the platforms doing the jamming are getting closer. Or both.

  Jeffrey stepped back involuntarily when a pair of fighter jets at almost zero altitude raced by right in front of his ship—moving faster than the speed of sound, there’d been no noise in advance to betray their approach. Violet-white searing flame came from their afterburners. Sonic booms from the shock waves of their flight rattled the armored glass of the bridge windows. Their engines were deafening. Even so, Jeffrey could briefly hear the rapid-fire crack crack crack of an automatic cannon. He saw red flashes and small puffs of smoke from near the nose of the trailing jet. The one in front jinked desperately to avoid the bursts of tracer that were trying to hit it and chew it apart. In an instant both aircraft were out of sight, leaving a minor sandstorm kicked up by the wash of their supersonic passage. The Bunga Azul rushed through the cloud of sand and left it behind.

  An image that took him a moment to grasp was frozen in Jeffrey’s mind. The leading plane, the one in distress, wore a blue Jewish star in a white circle on each wing. The one behind it, the one in its six—the one doing all the shooting—bore a black Iron Cross on its fuselage.

  The Israeli Air Force and the modern Luftwaffe are fighting to the death.

  The canal banks opened out before Jeffrey, at the start of the kidney-bean-shaped Great Bitter Lake. The lake was twenty miles long and up to ten miles at its widest. It was narrowest at its far end, in what used to be the separate Little Bitter Lake—until dredging and canal-widening projects joined them into one.

  The theater operational plot vanished from Jeffrey’s screen altogether. He brought up different data to check that the fiber-optic cable connection was still good and that the laptop was working.

  He called on the intercom down into Challenger.

  “XO, Captain. What happened to the satellite feed?”

  “Radio room doesn’t know, sir. The antenna’s good. We can’t tell if it’s jamming or if the satellite got knocked out.”

  Jeffrey hung up. Then he remembered the northbound convoy.

  Standard canal operating procedure was for the 0100 southbound convoy to anchor to one side in the Great Bitter Lake and let the single daily northbound convoy pass, with those ships doing ten or twelve knots.

  The northbound ships will be desperate to reverse their course, but they can’t possibly until they get to a deep and wide enough part of the lake. . . . Some of them will be massive, laden oil tankers with huge turning circles.

  No sooner had Jeffrey framed this thought than he spotted the first oncoming ships in the distance trying to make their U-turns. Two collided, one skewering the other at high speed. Fires broke out and the embracing wrecks began to drift, out of control.

  Jeffrey and Siregar watched their radar and sonar displays.

  “Can we get through the wrecks and traffic jam up ahead?”

  “If groundings and collisions do not block the whole canal. How long can you wait?”

  If the Germans suspected that a southbound cargo ship had an Allied SSN with Mohr inside, once they won air superiority they might start bombing anything big enough to be a candidate as Challenger’s host. What Jeffrey had told Siregar to tell the canal pilot before, that ships would be prime targets, was part of a lie to get rid of him. But now Jeffrey thought it might not have been a lie. At least in the Gulf of Suez he’d have room to zigzag and try to avoid dumb iron bombs.

  “We can’t wait. We must get through immediately.”

  “It will be risky.”

  “Take the risks.”

  The master had the conn. He began to order the helmsman to put on right or left rudder to avoid other ships, and also ordered the Bunga Azul to slow down or speed up. Jeffrey thought Siregar had a good eye in judging the other vessels’ distances and speeds and even their masters’ intentions—the ship-to-ship radio was useless now, there was so much shouting in different languages on every channel.

  The southbound ship ahead of Jeffrey made a fatal mistake, and turned just as an approaching big cargo ship moved into its path. Their bows smacked at an angle, at a combined speed of almost fifty knots.

  The forward ends of both ships crumpled hideously with a sound like rolling thunder. They recoiled off each other, dead in the water, and both began to settle by the bow. They were sinking, as salty lake water poured in through gashes and fractures in their hull plates; merchant ships lacked a surface warship’s numerous watertight compartments; their crews were too small for extensive rapid damage control.

  Jeffrey saw, like ants, men rush to the lifeboats.

  “Don’t do what they did,” Jeffrey said to Siregar, pointing to the sinking ships.

  Siregar stood there, watching everything, pursing his lips, his eyes very grim.

  He barked orders to the helmsman. Jeffrey had to steady himself as the Bunga Azul heeled one way as she made a sharp turn the other way.

  Siregar blew the ship’s whistle in a series of short, sharp blasts. He seemed to be playing chicken with another oncoming vessel. Jeffrey dashed to the Bunga Azul’s starboard open-bridge wing. The northbound ship charged up their side on an opposite course with less than ten feet between its hull and theirs. As their two bridges passed, the other ship’s master shook his fist at Jeffrey angrily for ignoring the international rules of the road.

  Siregar took the wheel himself. The Bitter Lakes were narrowing. They ended and the canal resumed—again only 600 feet wide. But there were more ships in the canal bed, coming north.

  Siregar blew his whistle in an endless series of blasts. Bearing down on the other ships at high speed, giving them no choice but to hug the east side of the channel, he forced each small and slow vessel at the tail end of the northbound convoy out of his way.

  They were clear. The Bunga Azul had the whole canal to herself. At twenty-four knots they should be past Port Suez in less than an hour, out of the canal—but with seven more hours ahead as a sitting target going through the Gulf of Suez until they reached the Strait of Jubal and finally found deep water.

  Jeffrey’s laptop showed nothing from the satellite downlink.

  He went out onto the open-bridge wing, on the shadier port side. He stared back behind the ship, at the water and then at the sky.

  Plumes of greasy black smoke were erupting from the Bitter Lakes. Other plumes, some new
and strong and others weak and thinning, rose high from the ground where dozens of planes had been shot down. The sky was still crisscrossed with contrails and missile trails, but the air battle was moving eastward.

  Over the Sinai Peninsula. Closer and closer to Israel.

  What if Mohr’s theater-wide Swiss-cheese effect on Egyptian and Israeli command and control was no accident? What if it had nothing to do with quantum-physics uncertainties at all, but was Mohr’s way of faking an out for himself?

  What if Gerald Parker was right, and Klaus Mohr was a double agent, and Felix and his team had injected the very worm Mohr claimed to be trying to halt?

  What if I made the biggest blunder in modern military history, and handed Imperial Germany control of the Middle East?

  Jeffrey stood alone on the bridge wing as the Bunga Azul ran south. He felt a strong breeze on his back from her speed. He watched the churning and splashing of her screws, and looked at her wake, receding behind them, and his mind began to wander into a state of despair.

  He also watched the horizon carefully, to north and east and west. He waited for the thing he dreaded most: a searing flash, a mushroom cloud, as the Israelis, out of desperation, used their nuclear option to halt the Afrika Korps advance—or the Germans used the nuclear option first, to preempt.

  The fate of the world is teetering on the edge of a razor blade, and I don’t know what’s happening beyond what little I can see from here . . . and it’s all my fault for disobeying, no, inventing orders.

  Jeffrey remembered what Klaus Mohr had said in that message he’d sent from the brothel: “Eternal darkness if we fail.”

  It was true, that sentence, regardless of Mohr’s real motives. Nuclear winter and human extinction—or an unbreakable Axis grip on half the world, with covetous, emboldened glances cast at the other half.