Straits of Power

by Joe Buff

  Which is it, Herr Doctor Mohr? What did you do? Was that message really you begging for help, or you luring me into a trap of unimaginable deviousness?

  Jeffrey lost track of how long he stood there on the bridge wing, staring back toward Egypt and Israel, as the ship passed Port Suez and Port Taufiq and the empty northbound anchorages, and then buoy after buoy as she went south. Now, from time to time he saw natural-gas platforms. The sand dunes of African Egypt rolled by, on and on to Jeffrey’s left as he looked astern. The rugged, more irregular Sinai-peninsula coast on his right was sometimes near and sometimes far.

  “Sir!” Siregar called him.

  Jeffrey had been gripping the bridge wing rail so tightly for so many hours that his fingers were cramped like claws. He needed to pull his upper body away to get his hands free.

  The master offered an intercom handset to Jeffrey. He tried to take it, but dropped it. The cramping in his fingers was horribly painful and they wouldn’t respond to his will.

  Siregar held the handset to his head for him.

  “Captain,” Jeffrey said.

  “XO,” Bell said. “Sir, the ESM room reports that jamming strength is declining. They aren’t sure if it’s because we’re farther away from the battle now, or what.”

  “And . . . ? ”

  “They think they’ll have the satellite feed in a minute.”

  “Understood. I’ll watch the laptop screen up here.” Jeffrey had it sitting on a shelf under one of the bridge windows, beside a pile of thick mariners’ reference manuals. He glanced at the Bunga Azul’s bridge crew. They all stood very tensely, looking terribly tired and worried. Their fear of intentional Axis air attack, or an errant cruise missile from out of nowhere, was valid, contagious, and thick.

  The laptop screen came alive. Red and green icons peppered the map of the eastern Med and the countries around it.

  Things did look grim. German tank divisions were racing across Egypt’s western desert, toward El Alamein. Israeli and Egyptian tanks were in the wrong place, useless, too far south to stop them, on the other side of the impassable Qattara Depression—150 miles long from east to west.

  Aircraft were fighting now over the eastern Sinai; the Israeli Air Force seemed unable to keep the Luftwaffe squadrons from shoving ever forward. The ekranoplans were moving past the Nile Delta now, continuing east. With their speed of three hundred knots, they could be unloading around Tel Aviv in under an hour. It looked like the Germans were going to achieve the unthinkable—air superiority inside Israel’s borders, and naval superiority along her coast. With Israel’s armored brigades so far away and so slow, the country was in imminent danger of being overrun.

  There were no icons denoting tactical nuclear explosions—yet. A counter in a window in one corner of the display showed zero atomic detonations in Germany so far.

  How much longer will Israel’s top commanders wait? When will the counter in that window start to climb above zero, toward ten, if Israel begins to set off the A-bombs she planted in Germany?

  For all the situational awareness the digital displays gave him, Jeffrey loathed his current status as a spectator. He understood much better what senior people like Admiral Hodgkiss, or the president, must be going through, onlookers in war rooms with largely passive roles as distant battle was joined—a battle over which they no longer had any input or influence. Jeffrey too had already done his thing, made his decision and now would live or die by it, his ordering of the SEALs to take Mohr into Israel secretly.

  Something strange began to happen on the screen. The Israeli aircraft formations, like scattered pieces of a ruined jigsaw puzzle, started to assemble themselves into a perceivable, rational pattern.

  Icons for air-search radars suddenly came alive all over the Sinai and in Israel’s Negev Desert. Other icons, for surface-launched supersonic antiaircraft missiles, popped onto the screen as if from out of nowhere.

  Another icon joined the crowd, an unmanned aerial reconnaissance and communications-relay drone, out over the Mediterranean.

  A dot appeared in the middle of the drone icon. Jeffrey knew this meant it completed a network-centric data linkup between a target and one or more shooter platforms.

  Jeffrey observed all this, confused. Was this data phony, inserted into the Allied net by the Germans? Had Jeffrey become delusional from sleep deprivation and guilt, and was he seeing things that weren’t there, things he wanted to see more than he wanted to face real life?

  More green icons showed on the display, so many now that the computer-generated imagery refreshed itself, and grouped nearby similar icons into one, with a head count beside it. Clumps of Israeli F-16s became one symbol with a number showing the formation size, such as 4 or 12. New icons quickly separating from Israeli corvettes and fast-patrol boats in the Med updated to show they were Gabriel-III advanced naval-attack missiles, with their radio retargeting links in good working order. These too regrouped and the number beside the Gabriel icon grew as waves of cruise missiles tore southwest. First 16, then 32, then 48, then 64. . . . Slowly the Gabriel-III count rose to over 100.

  The Egyptian and Israeli armored brigades south of the Qattara Depression split into two groups. One headed west at high speed, and the other turned back east. Their timing was perfect.

  They were going to get the Afrika Korps armor caught in an inescapable pincer, with the Med on one side and the huge Qattara Depression on the other—by looping around the depression itself to come at the Germans from in front and behind simultaneously.

  Jeffrey felt a mixture of glee and immeasurable relief.

  Israel’s and Egypt’s commanders are geniuses. It was they who set the world’s biggest trap! They realized this morning that the Axis had tried a new information-warfare computer attack when it failed except in remote areas—because of Mohr’s patch—but they pretended it truly succeeded and acted as if all their major systems were down.

  They’d lured the German planes into a killing zone of seemingly paralyzed ground-to-air defenses that were only biding their time. They’d decoyed the German armor into a different sort of killing zone.

  To Jeffrey, those commanders’ ability to think on their feet at lightning speed, and the discipline of their troops at every level, was astonishing.

  And the Germans knew it. They began retreating everywhere.

  The counter in the window monitoring Israeli nukes going off in Germany stayed at zero. Jeffrey gave thanks to God.

  The ekranoplans had turned back west, but were so heavily loaded their top speed was 150 knots slower than the Gabriel-IIIs. With real-time adjustments for the cruise-missile courses provided by Israeli drones, the Gabriels couldn’t miss. Jeffrey looked on as the red and green icons connected.

  It all seemed so abstract, like a video game someone else was playing. But he knew that what the icons stood for were real aircraft with real aircrews, real tanks, real passengers—and real, live, powerful cruise-missile warheads. It didn’t take long before the ekranoplan-group icon counter dropped from 24 to 12 to 6 to 0, and disappeared from the laptop screen.

  Jeffrey, his fingers loosened up now, used the intercom to call Bell.

  “Tell Klaus Mohr I could kiss him.”

  “Sir?”

  “Everything worked. Better than we could ever have expected.”

  “It’s wonderful news, Captain. We can see on the theater-status display down here.” Jeffrey heard his people cheering, in the background over Bell’s mike.

  “Wait one.” Something had caught Jeffrey’s attention out of the corner of his eye. “XO, rig for dive. We’re almost in the Red Sea. I should be in the control room very soon.”

  Jeffrey double-checked the Bunga Azul’s nautical chart against her inertial-navigation readout, dead-reckoning plot, and a fix obtained by a crewman making sightings on the relative bearings to different islands in the Strait of Jubal. He eyed the ship’s radar and sonar displays. The water beneath the keel was 100 feet deep, but within 6 miles—14 minu
tes at 24 knots—the bottom dropped to a comfortable 700 feet. The Sinai peninsula ended just ahead, to port. The African coast of Egypt continued endlessly south, to starboard.

  His curiosity aroused, Jeffrey, with powerful image-stabilized marine binoculars, went out on the port bridge wing. Movement and black specks he’d noticed before resolved themselves into helicopters that were hovering or circling over a spot in the water on the horizon off the Bunga Azul’s port bow.

  Above cobalt blue water where wavelets glinted yellowish gold in the afternoon sun, beneath an azure sky, he saw that two of the helos had cables dangling into the water. Two other helos dropped small things that hit the water and made little splashes.

  Dipping sonars, and sonobuoys. Antisubmarine helicopters?

  He looked higher in the sky and did a systematic search, spotting two twin-engine maritime-patrol aircraft.

  He went back inside and used his laptop to scroll down the screen. Up to now he’d only been looking at the theater network-centric status plot farther north—the counter for nukes in Germany read 0; none had gone off in the Middle East.

  Scrolling more, he found the Jubal Strait, where the Gulf of Suez let out into the northern Red Sea. He saw the group of icons. Two helos were Israeli. Two were Egyptian. The maritime-patrol planes were American, working at extreme range, from a carrier strike group far southeast in the Arabian Sea.

  These icons were all in green. There was one other icon, in amber. Jeffrey felt as if he’d been electrocuted.

  The amber icon was a PROBSUB, a probable submarine contact. The amber color meant that its nationality was unconfirmed. But next to the icon was text that gave a tentative identification of the suspected submarine, and the text said “SNOW TIGER.”

  If the Snow Tiger is so stealthy, how did they even know she was there? As Jeffrey watched, the network data-satellite feed was updated. The PROBSUB became a CERTSUB—a definite submarine contact was localized. Strangely, its color stayed amber.

  He wondered why the German wasn’t firing. The aircraft practically had him cornered. Surely he had Polyphem antiaircraft missiles. He could swat the helos and drive off those patrol planes easily.

  Oh. Rules of engagement. He isn’t stupid. He won’t shoot first. Which means the helos and planes can’t drop depth charges or antisubmarine torpedoes first.

  Either that, or the Snow Tiger is a nosy Russian after all, not German. Maybe Hodgkiss’s information was wrong on that one rather crucial detail.

  The intercom connection from Challenger buzzed. Jeffrey answered; it was Bell. “Sir, Milgrom reports we’ve been pinged by a sophisticated sonar. Our arrays could hear it right through the Bunga Azul’s side ballast tanks and bottom doors.”

  What the—

  That’s how they knew he was here. He’s been going active, probing every ship headed south big enough to hold an SSN.

  “XO, Captain, go to battle stations antisubmarine.”

  “Battle stations, ASW, aye.”

  Then the planes did drop torpedoes, on white parachutes to ease their impact with the water, just as the CERTSUB turned red and new icons appeared on the screen. Two submarine-launched torpedoes were coming right at the Bunga Azul.

  Chapter 49

  On the bridge of the Bunga Azul, Jeffrey took the conn and glanced at the nautical chart. “Helmsman, right hard rudder! Get us over this shoal marked as forty-six feet!”

  “But—” Siregar tried to disagree.

  “Do it!” If the chart was inaccurate, or the ship drew a couple more feet than she was supposed to—with USS Challenger in her hold—they’d run aground.

  It would be a tight race as it was. The torpedoes fired by the Snow Tiger were almost certainly Russian export-model Series 65s; with neutral Saudi Arabia less than fifty miles away, Jeffrey doubted the Snow Tiger would go nuclear. But the latest versions sold to Germany boasted a maximum attack speed of seventy-five knots, three times the speed of the Bunga Azul. Conventional Series 65s had high-explosive warheads that weighed a ton, three times the size of an ADCAP Mark 48’s.

  Jeffrey knew that the standard strategy for an antiship torpedo attack wasn’t to actually hit the hull, but to detonate the warhead under the hull. A hole in a ship’s side might not be a fatal blow. A blast beneath her would snap her keel, and maybe even break the ship in half instantly.

  I can’t let one of those weapons get under the Bunga Azul. I have to force them to go for her side after all.

  There was some extra protection there, because the ballast control tanks, partway empty now since the submarine hold was flooded, made a sort of double hull, or spaced armor. And the false bottoms of the cargo holds were one continuous structural deck, giving the vessel added strength and stiffening.

  Jeffrey grabbed the intercom for Challenger. “XO, Captain, collision alarm! Rig for depth charge!”

  Bell acknowledged.

  Jeffrey told Siregar to sound his collision alarm. The master pulled a lever. The ship’s whistle began to sound shrill blasts, and gongs came over loudspeakers.

  Jeffrey examined the obstacle-avoidance sonar display.

  “Helmsman, all stop. All back full until our way comes off, then all stop.”

  The master stared at Jeffrey. “We sit here and take two torpedoes?”

  “They might miss or they might malfunction. If we’re stopped right over a shoal next to a coral reef, they might not see us if their guidance wires break.”

  “Please Allah, let it be so.” There were other shoals and reefs, plus a maze of long but narrow islands, and half-exposed rusting wrecks, both ahead of and behind the Bunga Azul in this area outside the main shipping channel.

  With bone-shattering concussions, and towers of flame and filthy water, first one and then the other Series 65 slammed into the Bunga Azul’s port side. Even by following Jeffrey’s example—holding on to something with one hand while standing on tiptoes with both knees bent, to absorb the force and avoid a fractured spine—the bridge crew were knocked to the deck. The Bunga Azul rolled hard to starboard and was brought up sharply when her flat bottom hit the top of the reef. She rolled heavily to port and her bottom slammed into the rocky shoal. The whole ship vibrated and flexed.

  Jeffrey shook off the numbness that gripped his arms and legs, then shook his head to reduce the pain in his ears and get his eyes to refocus. It seemed to be raining. He realized that this was the many tons of water thrown upward by the torpedo blasts, now coming back down. Then he smelled smoke—burning paint, wood, plastic—mixed with the stink of torpedo explosive. Still feeling disembodied, he vaguely registered men shouting and more alarm bells sounding. Armored bridge windows were cracked; manuals and coffee mugs and laptops were strewn on the deck; phone handsets, hanging dislodged, bounced and swayed by their wires.

  Jeffrey rushed to the engine-order telegraph, and rang up all ahead full. Someone at the other end of the telegraph acknowledged, and the ship began to vibrate in an ugly new way—but she moved.

  The master and helmsman began to revive.

  “Steer one-eight-zero!” Jeffrey yelled to the helmsman, who took the wheel. Due south. “Get us behind Shakir Island, into the Shadwan Channel. Then steer one-three-five.” Southeast, down the middle of a small side channel between the island and Africa, leading to deep water in the Red Sea.

  The Bunga Azul was already listing ten degrees to port.

  Jeffrey grabbed Siregar by both shoulders and looked right into his eyes. They urgently needed to lighten the ship and keep her from rolling onto her side. “Pump out all your ballast control tanks. Pump the submarine-hold water level down eight feet. Then counterflood the starboard tanks just enough to keep your list to five degrees.”

  Siregar understood. He issued orders over an intercom. He listened, examined display panels on the bridge, then turned to Jeffrey. “Only half our fire mains can be pressurized. Wheat in the aft-most cargo hold is in flames, with the hatches blown off, and many smaller fires may grow and join between the engine r
oom and the superstructure. Fuel oil leaking near the stern, and fuel bunkers threatened by fires. Injured men reduce our chances of fighting the fires. Our radar and our sonar are knocked out.”

  Jeffrey called down to Bell. “Do you still have the satellite feed?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Give me a damage report.”

  “No significant damage to Challenger.” She was very shock hardened, and loose objects had been carefully stowed.

  “Status in the hold?”

  “Port-side inner bulkhead bulging inward in two places aft. Plates and welds have failed, we’re getting heavy spray of seawater into the hold. . . . We can hear the host ship’s ballast pumps, they’re not keeping up with the flooding into the hold.”

  “Stand by.”

  Jeffrey turned to Siregar; the pain in the master’s eyes said he knew his ship was going down. “We need that satellite feed to Challenger for as long as humanly possible. We need it to target the enemy submarine.”

  “I understand.” There was iron in Siregar’s voice.

  Jeffrey glanced at the nautical chart. Siregar’s navigator stood up, favoring his left arm. He saw Jeffrey erect and determined and ran to the chart, but the man was half dazed. Jeffrey called rudder orders to the helm, to zigzag past shoals and reefs on either side. The bulk of Shakir Island hid the helos and patrol planes from view.

  Jeffrey grabbed his laptop off the deck—built to navy ruggedness specs, it hadn’t broken. He studied the tactical plot. A pull-down menu gave details about the aircraft battling the CERTSUB: More depth charges and air-dropped torpedoes were attacking the Snow Tiger. It was heading south in water over three thousand feet deep, near the bottom, accelerating. The plot claimed two probable torpedo hits, and six depth-charge near misses. But even the latest U.S. air-dropped torpedoes, the Mark 54s, had a warhead that weighed only 100 pounds. They could harass a double titanium hull, and shake up the crew—certainly harm the stern planes or rudder or pump jet if they got lucky—but not by themselves score a hard kill on the Snow Tiger. Air-dropped depth charges, which fell but didn’t home, also had to be lightweight; at worst they’d be a nuisance against a target with such good sensors and such high speed.