Straits of Power (23 page)

Chapter 22

J
effrey and Bell sat in Jeffrey’s stateroom. It was late afternoon on a Sunday—the Sunday before the Friday that Felix’s team, with Gamal Salih, would arrive in the German minisub at Istanbul. The final task-group planning and coordination meetings, held on
Challenger,
were done with, a final rendezvous with
Ohio
in the eastern Atlantic completed. Jeffrey and Parcelli had wrapped it up with a firm handshake, determined expressions on their faces, and wishes of good luck.

But we also knew it might be the last time we saw each other alive. . . . It’s as if we made a contest of it, which of us would outwardly betray less tension or doubt. We were very closely matched. I’d have to call it a draw—we both won. . . . Not that that changed how we really felt inside.

Among many other items, a set of simplified code words had been agreed on, to supplement the standard list, for the fastest and most unambiguous use of the secure acoustic link, in the special war-fighting conditions the task group might encounter.

Challenger
and
Ohio
would stay in a flexible tactical formation, varied on Jeffrey’s orders as the situation evolved—until that fateful moment when Lieutenant Estabo either did or didn’t return with Klaus Mohr and his special equipment, most likely early on Sunday, a week from now. If things went well,
Challenger
and
Ohio
wouldn’t again conduct a rendezvous to exchange any people before then. The task group’s egress orders for after that remained unopened in Jeffrey’s and Parcelli’s safes. Jeffrey had no idea what the orders might say.

At least Gamal Salih welcomed the chance to be more involved in the excursion into Istanbul. Jeffrey knew well from his previous mission involving Salih, where submarine captain and freedom fighter had bumped into each other under fire in northern Germany, that the man was very handy with a pistol or a knife. He had good reasons of his own for craving vengeance, and the killing of German combatants ran in Salih’s blood as a natural talent.

Right now, a nautical chart showed on Jeffrey’s laptop screen. The place, inside the Med but farthest from land, which he’d have to try to reach to self-destruct his ship in a worst-case outcome, was marked on the digital chart by a red dot.

The dot was an abstraction. The dangers and uncertainties summarized by its being there were real.

Bell, sitting patiently, followed his gaze.

Jeffrey noticed this, and said, “We’ll find out soon what the Axis ROEs truly are in this theater. If they identify
Dreadnought
while she creates a diversion for us using
Texas,
and the Germans go nuclear less than two hundred miles from land, things might turn ugly fast and spread far and wide from there.”

Bell nodded. He was usually much more talkative in private, especially when under stress, when he seemed to like to verbalize his anxieties. His taciturn conduct emphasized too clearly that the strategic issues hanging in the balance put this mission way beyond any situation they’d dealt with before.

Jeffrey thought of Plan Pandora, whatever exactly it was—he still didn’t know for sure, and only Klaus Mohr could tell him. He thought of those modern ekranoplans that Russia sold to Germany—the ultimate amphibious-warfare assault craft—and of the land offensive, thrust at Israel, that the Afrika Korps seemed on the verge of launching.

He thought of the Israeli atom bombs planted in Germany, and of Israel’s remaining nuclear arsenal, over a hundred warheads at least. Some were deployed on her diesel subs for deterrence. Some were suspected of even being hydrogen bombs.

Jeffrey’s intercom light blinked. He grabbed the handset. “Captain.”

It was the lieutenant (j.g.) in charge of the radio room. Jeffrey listened. “Very well, Radio.”

Jeffrey looked at Bell. “ELF code came through. The
Texas
and
Dreadnought
action starts right after sunset. Our extraction mission for Peapod is on, definitely confirmed.”

Bell nodded soberly, but again said nothing.

“You go into Control.
Ohio
should’ve copied the message themselves, but use the acoustic link to make sure.”

Bell stood. “Man battle stations, sir?”

“Not yet. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

Bell left. Jeffrey sat alone in his stateroom, staring at the chart on the computer screen. The shores of Spain and North Africa converged like the mouth of a funnel. The neck of the funnel, the Strait of Gibraltar itself, was seven nautical miles across at its tightest, and twenty long. The Bay of Gibraltar, now a German naval base, was at the far end of the Strait.

Texas
and
Dreadnought
are approaching from the northwest. They’ll be somewhere off Cape Trafalgar soon.

Jeffrey thought of that great battle fought near Trafalgar, by the UK’s Vice Admiral Nelson against a merged French and Spanish fleet, over two hundred years before. Nelson won, but was killed in the battle.

Challenger,
with
Ohio
in company, was approaching the Strait of Gibraltar from the southwest, as prearranged, much closer to Casablanca than Trafalgar.

Jeffrey turned off his laptop. He glanced one last time at the picture of his parents, taped to a bulkhead. He touched the photo gently, and traced the two figures on it longingly with his index finger. He knew how badly it would tear them up if they outlived him, their youngest child, their only son.

He paused to listen to the gentle hushing from the air-circulation vents—soon they’d be turned off for added stealth, to prepare for battle. Jeffrey’s senses were heightened, colors appeared more vivid, and he thought he could hear his heart as it beat.

He looked at his hands while he held them out in front of his body. They were perfectly steady, but his fingers felt ice cold. He rubbed them on his pants legs so the friction would warm his palms.

He opened the door to the corridor, and strode into his control room. He stopped near the command console, where an officer from Torelli’s weapons department had the conn. Bell already sat at the console, next to the lieutenant (j.g.).

“This is the Captain,” Jeffrey announced to everyone in the compartment. “I have the conn.”

“Aye aye,” the watch standers said. The junior officer got up and Jeffrey took his place. The seat was still warm, and Jeffrey adjusted it to be more comfortable for himself. Satisfied, he projected his voice clearly and evenly.

“Chief of the Watch, sound silent battle stations antisubmarine.”

“Silent battle stations, ASW, aye.”

COB had found some excuse to kibitz in the control room, inspecting and checking the readings and settings on different equipment, something usually done by a junior crewman. COB immediately took the seat at the ship’s control console, as battle-stations chief of the watch.

Jeffrey couldn’t help smiling.

“Fire Control, pass the order to
Ohio,
man silent battle stations antisubmarine.” Bell was now fire-control coordinator.

Bell repeated the message back to avoid misunderstanding or error, then saw to having it sent.

“Ohio
acknowledges, sir, manning battle stations ASW.”

“Very well, Fire Control.”
Parcelli was obviously expecting the word any minute. He’ll know what to do from here for a while.
Jeffrey refocused on
Challenger
business.

“Chief of the Watch, rig for ultraquiet.”

“Ultraquiet, aye.”

COB spoke to the phone talker, who repeated the message, then held down the switch of his sound-powered mike and passed the order around the ship.

“Chief of the Watch, rig for depth charge.”

“Rig for depth charge, aye.”

As COB and the phone talker ran through their litany again, Lieutenant (j.g.) Meltzer hurried into the control room to relieve the man at the helm.

“Ohio
has signaled us, Captain,” Bell reported. “All stations manned and ready.”

Jeffrey glanced at a chronometer. “Acknowledge and tell
Ohio
I say, ‘Quick work, well done.’ ”

Jeffrey windowed the nautical chart, the gravimeter display, and the tactical plot on his console screen. The gravimeter would be most useful as they approached the coasts and the water got shallower.

From a depth now of five thousand feet, the seafloor would quickly slope upward toward the continental shelves of Europe and Africa as they converged. Currents and countercurrents, and tectonic collision and folding, had gouged a notch 2,000 feet deep or more through most of the Strait. But along the western approaches, the water went down only six hundred feet. The deep path through the strait itself was studded with seamounts—extinct undersea volcanoes—rising almost a thousand feet from the bottom.

On the tactical plot, amber icons showed neutral shipping moving in and out of the Strait. Red icons that crossed the plot at greater speed were small Axis surface warships patrolling the waters outside. Aircraft were sometimes detected in the distance, streaking across the sonar waterfall displays like comets or meteors.

Lieutenant Milgrom’s technicians identified any new contacts, and Lieutenant Torelli’s fire-control technicians tracked them all for the plot. The minefields outside the Strait showed on the tactical plot and the nautical chart. Their positions had to be announced by international law; neutral ocean rovers verified the data.

Jeffrey’s greater concern was antisubmarine minefields inside the Strait, ones the Germans might not have announced.
Challenger
and
Ohio
carried remote-controlled probes designed to scout ahead for such hazards, but his intended tactics precluding using them. He was also concerned about bottom sensors, and hydrophone arrays, sprinkled around and stretching across the whole floor of the Strait. Then there was the biggest unknown: the whereabouts and intentions of Russia’s Snow Tiger.

For all this, and more, Jeffrey’s and Parcelli’s officers and chiefs had developed careful plans in intensive working sessions each time they’d rendezvoused.

Jeffrey knew from bitter experience how rapidly plans could come undone. He’d seen that the most crucial tactics usually had to be dreamed up on the spot. . . . But doing so, repeatedly, for more than six months with too little leave to rest had begun to deplete him.

Something’s missing. I see what it is.

I don’t have my usual relish for combat this time—I feel stale and weary.

I’ll just have to gut it out. Performing while exhausted is a constant aspect of war, and almost four hundred lives on two vessels depend on me.

Jeffrey spoke again to Bell, but knew everyone in the control room could hear him.

“Now we wait for the sun to go down, then the tide to begin running out. Then the shooting starts, hopefully well northwest of us, near Cape Trafalgar.”

Chapter 23

I
lse Reebeck sat at the console in her private workroom. It was starting to feel like solitary confinement. To take a break, she called onto her screen a situation map for the Med, a duplicate of what would loom large now on a wall in the war room, and would also be closely watched by top brass at the Pentagon.

The display showed four Allied nuclear submarines in the eastern North Atlantic, coming in two pairs toward the Strait of Gibraltar. The types of icons used showed that the positions were only estimates, based on prearranged operational plans. The plot didn’t name the individual subs, and Ilse hadn’t been told what their intentions were. But she assumed that soon at least some of them would try to force their way past Gibraltar and into the Med. She also knew that one of them was
Challenger.

Part of the map displayed different identified enemy units, all around the Med, belonging to the various branches of the German armed forces. Enemy lines of communications—routes of logistics support—were also shown on the maps, along with known depots and data on their contents. The map showed the array of military units in Egypt and Israel too, dependent for resupply on air transport and the shipping route up through the Red Sea. The map was so large scale that it even reached down to Ethiopia, where the Great Rift Valley formed the northeast flank of the beleaguered Allied pocket in Central Africa—cut off from Egypt by German forces and local auxiliary fighters holding Sudan.

Ilse figured that this picture was assembled from many forms of intelligence, including visual and infrared surveillance, radar, signals intercepts, message decryptions, human-agent reports, plus expert conjecture and surmise at the CIA, the NSA, and the Pentagon’s own various intelligence offices. She knew that hundreds of sensor platforms, and thousands of clerks and analysts, were needed to keep the big picture reasonably complete and up to date.

She called up another display that she found even more interesting, though disturbing, an ever-changing collage of visuals from spy satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles. These would zoom in on a crowded harbor in occupied Italy, or a group of German tanks on the move in the Libyan desert, or a rail yard in Greece choked with rolling stock. These pictures made the icons on the tactical plots seem much more concrete. Ilse reminded herself that many millions of people lived in these places, would be involved directly in fighting the war, or would be enveloped by the German surprise onslaught when it started.

The green phone on Ilse’s console rang. “Lieutenant Reebeck.”

Johansen’s yeoman said he was putting through a call from outside the base. The person who got on the line was a lieutenant commander in the Naval Oceanographic Office, a major component of METOC, headquartered at the John C. Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

“I have something you’ll be interested to know,” the lieutenant commander told Ilse.

“Yes, ma’am?” The woman was a superior officer; she spoke with a nasal twang, as if from the upper Midwest, maybe Minnesota.

“Remember that datum you called a slant-wise avalanche?”

“Yes.”

“We heard something like it again.”

“In the same place?”

“No, not in the same place.” The woman sounded like she was smiling, and this put Ilse on her guard.

“Where? Using what platform?”

“In the South Atlantic. In waters we keep a careful eye on these days.”

“Ma’am?”

“The Cape Plain.” Off the South Africa coast. The woman gave the coordinates.

“Do you want me to study the data?”

“That won’t be necessary.” Now she sounded vindictive. Ilse didn’t like this at all.

“For your information, the datum was detected at a depth of about two thousand feet, with the seafloor there at sixteen thousand feet.”

“So it couldn’t have been an avalanche.”

“Nope. Your analysis was incorrect. As a matter of fact, misleading.”

“So what do your people think they were, ma’am? Turbulence between conflicting underwater storm fronts?” The ocean could have major storms down deep, where strong currents formed temporarily, much like high winds blowing over the surface. The currents were just a few knots, but the moving water—much denser than air—carried tremendous energy.

“Either that,” the woman said, “or gas seeps spreading sideways at a density discontinuity, or some other natural phenomenon. We’re making new discoveries all the time, as you well know.”

“Were there tonals?”

“No. There were no tonals. The rest isn’t your concern.”

“Then why did you phone me?”

“To say we don’t appreciate your meddling and ineptitude.” The lieutenant commander hung up on Ilse.

Ilse was livid.

She put down the phone, then picked it up again. She wanted to call someone to complain, but realized that that would be childish. Captain Johansen had already told her that politically motivated blame games were intensifying.

A moment later he knocked, then walked into the room.

“You aren’t doing too well.”

Ilse knew what was coming.

“It seems your technical analysis of that odd flow noise, discredited now, gave the FBI more ammo to use against you in this spy witch-hunt.”

“Can’t my own embassy do something to get them off my back? It’s getting hard for me to work with all these distractions.”

“The FBI beat us in getting there. The director talked to the Free South African ambassador in person. The embassy says that when push comes to shove, they’re unable to vouch for you. Your being in the U.S. at the time the coups and the war broke out looks bad given everything else. It’s too much as if you were put in this country as a sleeper agent.”

“But I was here at a conference! I had no idea what would happen back home! If I hadn’t gone to the conference, I’d’ve been teaching at the University of Cape Town and would have been executed right next to my family!”

“That’s what the FBI director said you would say.”