Straits of Power (5 page)

“As a point of caution,” Parker warned, “we also need to step back and ask ourselves, hard, if any single human being could do all the different things this unknown person seems to be able to do. . . . That’s one strong cause for suspicion right there. This looks too much like something concocted by a team, not an individual. Another long-term trait of German martial practices is that the deception schemes they hatch get overinvolved, overembellished.”

“Concur,” Hodgkiss said coldly. “And if indeed done by a team, this gets a lot lower probability rating of being sincere, and a vastly higher likelihood of being some sort of trap. A trap that by the sheer vastness and complexity of the scheme must promise tremendous fruits for the Axis, at a terrible cost to us.” Hodgkiss turned to Jeffrey. “Captain, you’re the only man alive who can take us to the next stage in understanding this.”

Parker handed Jeffrey a stack of forms. “You’re cleared for TOUCHSTONE Alfa. Sign these.” Jeffrey signed.

Parker slid a thick manila envelope across the table. It was sealed, and marked
TOP SECRET
and
NOFORN
, in big red letters; NOFORN meant no non–U.S. citizens could know anything about it. It was stamped
USE EYES ONLY
, which meant it mustn’t be read out loud or talked about in specific detail—this to defeat any enemy bugging devices even in areas that were supposed to be swept.

The envelope was also marked, oddly enough, “Task Group 47.2,” which, if this was navy parlance, had to be a small unit of ships that Jeffrey had never heard of.

“These are the documents?” Jeffrey said. “In English?”

“See that door?” Hodgkiss pointed.

“Yes, Admiral.” It wasn’t the door they’d come through.

“Take the envelope and open it in there,” Parker said. “Here’s a pencil. Make notes if you want, but only in the margins of the documents themselves. When you’re done, leave everything and come back out. Spend as long as you need, but remember, every minute counts.”

“What exactly are you looking for from me?”

Parker deferred to Hodgkiss, who made one of his trademark intimidating eye locks with Jeffrey.

“Captain, tell us if these documents are real.”

Chapter 3

T
he door into the small workroom was surprisingly thick and heavy, and the furnishings were sparse and drab: a card table and a plastic office chair. Jeffrey was startled to see a burly African-American standing against one wall. The man wore a sports jacket, with a bulge at his left armpit that Jeffrey knew must be a shoulder holster.

“Have a seat, sir,” he said politely. His voice was strong and resonating, but his eyes were hooded.

“You’ve been here the whole time?”

“Yes, sir.” He double-checked that the door was firmly shut, then turned hasps at the top and bottom. Bolts slid closed with a thunk. “This room is now ultrasecure.”

Jeffrey opened the envelope. He spread the contents before him on the table. There was a cover memo from Commodore Wilson, verifying in writing his basic instructions on what to do. There were also the two documents, each in a white ring binder whose cover and spine said
TOP SECRET NOFORN
in bright red. The beginning of each translated document included a date: mid-January 2012, and late April 2012. Jeffrey started to read, the earlier first. Footnotes by the NSA’s German-language linguist specialists explained nuances of phrasing that didn’t carry over well from German to English.

Jeffrey tapped his pencil’s eraser end on the table. He read further. His heart began to pound. Despite the steady air-conditioning, the room felt much too warm. Jeffrey read more, at first in disbelief, then in utter fascination. He forgot the attendant watching him, he forgot his own fatigue. He began to have flashbacks. Sometimes, when he came across especially revealing passages, he nodded to himself while he read.

The documents were written in a direct and pithy style, as a linguist’s notation had said they would be. The wording was formal, official, but the more of it Jeffrey consumed, the more the person who wrote it came alive. He could feel the writer’s passion for his subject, and his pride, and caught hints of brilliant insights, and lasting regrets.

Feelings and sensations flooded Jeffrey now. The scream of torpedo-engine sounds, the deafening noise and pummeling of tactical nuclear warheads sending shock waves through the sea. The shouted reports of Jeffrey’s crew in his control room, the orders he snapped out hoarsely in response. The hours of silence, waiting on nail-biting tenterhooks. The seconds of sheer panic and physical pain. The biting stench of smoke, and the rubbery taste of his emergency air-breathing mask.

With the second report, Jeffrey relived another recent battle. It was as if he watched over someone else’s shoulder, seeing things as that person did, and getting inside his mind.

It was a formidable mind. It belonged to someone Jeffrey couldn’t help but admire, and whom he feared encountering ever again. Yet such an encounter appeared inevitable, and the information laid before Jeffrey, sent by whoever had sent it, could make the difference the next time between survival and death.

The documents were postaction patrol reports, filed by an Imperial German Navy nuclear submariner. The documents had to be real. They
had
to be legitimate. Far too much conformed exactly to Jeffrey’s own memory of the seemingly endless running battles. Too many open questions in Jeffrey’s mind were being answered—with what seemed to be utter credibility. The writer knew things that only someone who’d
been there
every moment,
in command,
could possibly know. And Jeffrey was, indeed, the only person alive on the Allied side who could testify for sure that these documents weren’t fake.

Jeffrey lost all track of time, devouring more and more. At last he finished reading. He looked again at the first pages, with the name of the German captain who’d prepared them. Jeffrey needed to stare at the name in print, to try to assure himself that he wasn’t dreaming. He knew the man’s face already, from an old file photo. He knew the warrior in the man, from mortal combat. Twice he and Jeffrey had clashed at close quarters, in a viciously personal way, in some of the most significant naval engagements of the war. And twice both men had survived when others had not.

Jeffrey fought to regain his equilibrium. He clawed his way back to the here and now. Yet still he stared at that name.

Ernst Beck. Prematurely balding, not handsome, known to be Jeffrey’s age but happily married, with twin ten-year-old boys. Son of a dairy farmer outside Munich, in Germany’s Bavarian south, where he’d grown up in good sight on a clear day of the towering snow-capped Alps. A modest man, even shy, judging from his file photo—a photo that Jeffrey kept windowed on his console screen while leading
Challenger
’s crew to the ends of the earth and the bottom of the sea, to try to kill Ernst Beck.

What are you planning next, Captain Beck? How does your role fit into Plan Pandora? . . . And who in the name of God sent me your patrol reports?

Back in the larger conference room, Jeffrey finished a penetrating debrief from Wilson and Hodgkiss while Parker listened.

Satisfied, Hodgkiss grabbed a secure house phone and dialed an extension. He said, “Admiral Hodgkiss. It’s affirmative,” and put down the phone.

Hodgkiss stood. “From here it all gets harder with every step. . . . Now that we know what we know, we’re ready for the next meeting. This time, Captain Fuller, don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.”

A few minutes later the foursome sat in the enclosed vestibule outside a different conference room. The vestibule itself was highly secure. An aide manning a small desk told Admiral Hodgkiss it would be a while before the meeting was ready for him and his group. Hodgkiss nodded as if he’d already expected this.

Hodgkiss and Wilson took seats on leather easy chairs in one corner and murmured together out of Jeffrey’s earshot. Jeffrey and Mr. Parker sat at opposite ends of a couch by a glass coffee table. A large and very high-ranking assemblage began to show up and go through the inner door, between two more guards. These marines wore full dress uniforms, crisply starched, not combat fatigues—and held rifles with fixed bayonets. They snapped to attention each time a dignitary passed. So did Jeffrey. Hodgkiss, Wilson, and Parker also stood.

The chief of naval operations arrived, the four-star admiral who was the most senior active-duty person in the navy. The director of naval intelligence was with him, a vice admiral, a three-star. They were trailed by aides and staffers. The admirals stopped to shake hands with Hodgkiss and Wilson and Jeffrey. It was military etiquette for a senior to always salute a junior who’d won the Medal of Honor, but the navy—unlike the army—didn’t salute indoors. The CNO and his retinue went inside.

The director of the Central Intelligence Agency got there next; he nodded at Mr. Parker and Parker nodded back—the man was Parker’s ultimate boss, yet Jeffrey sensed there was more to those nods, some sort of question and answer being passed. The DCI was a quiet man, though well-spoken, with a background in high-power Washington think tanks. The DCI’s posture was slightly stooped, yet his gaze was alert and alive; like Parker, he wore a business suit.

Then the army chief of staff went in, the four-star general who headed the active-duty army. An army one-star accompanied him, along with more aides and staff. They all ignored Jeffrey’s group, which seemed very rude behavior. The army chief of staff was known to be well practiced at being hard to read, opaque.

The director of the FBI appeared, gave Jeffrey a dirty look, and went into the conference room. The FBI man projected a thinly veiled mean streak, almost sadistic, and Jeffrey smelled trouble ahead, though he had no idea what might be brewing.

Hodgkiss and Wilson went back to talking privately in their easy chairs. To Jeffrey, judging from their stern expressions and stiff body language, the dialogue wasn’t relaxed.

On the couch, Parker slid over to Jeffrey. “That aide and the guards are cleared for anything they might overhear. That’s why they draw this duty.”

“Makes sense.”

“I am now going to brief you on something else you need to know. It will come up in this meeting and you wouldn’t want to look completely out of the loop.”

Jeffrey had to bite his tongue. “I’m listening.”

Parker spoke to Jeffrey in an undertone. His manner was condescending, impatient, as if he resented needing to fill in a tyro on something in which he possessed vast expertise. The gist was that a German in the enemy’s consulate in Istanbul wanted to defect to America. The German, assigned the code name “Peapod” by the CIA, was a bureaucrat in his country’s trade mission to Turkey. Peapod claimed to have vital information about impending dire German intentions in the Middle East, and he asked to be extracted immediately, but refused to give more details on whatever information he had.

“How did he make contact?”

“We initiated it. Through someone who works for us at a brothel.”

“Prostitute?”

Parker nodded.

“How did you know he wanted to defect?”

“We didn’t. We sometimes recruit married men by extortion, after illicit sex. We wanted more knowledge on Turkish industrial dealings with Germany. Thought we’d made a mildly useful catch, but this guy held out a whole new game plan.”

Jeffrey thought about this. “In Istanbul?”

Parker nodded again.

“Are you trying to say that Peapod originated the other items we just looked at?” Beck’s reports.

“We don’t know. That’s part of what this next meeting is about. If the subjects under discussion are in fact that closely related, Peapod has to tantalize us while being very careful to keep his HumInt contact via the prostitute, and the TOUCHSTONE Alfa SigInt transmission, looking totally separate to save his neck at his end. The Germans stationed numerous seasoned espionage men in Turkey before the war. A lot of that strength is ex-Stasi.”

“Former East German secret police?”

“Very nasty people. They’ve been rolling up our network of in-country agents as if it were child’s play. Peapod will
not
want to get nabbed because Berlin realizes too much is suddenly coming our way out of Istanbul, and he won’t want to leave an obvious big finger pointing straight back at him. Then, when we’re ready, assuming we’re interested enough to act at all, he and we will have to move rather rapidly on his extraction.”

“How could a trade attaché have all that other expertise and access?”

“His job at the consulate might be a cover for entirely different work the Germans have him doing there.”

“This is what you meant before about the Mata Hari stuff?”

Parker glanced at his watch. “We’ll see how much longer before they call us in.” He gestured at the conference-room door. “The more you know, the more you can help assess the situation. . . . Istanbul is a big seaport. Neutral merchant-ship crews get ashore, then soon sail away somewhere else. Good business for the legal red-light district. That’s how our agent in the brothel relays short messages from Peapod to us.”

“Microdots?”

“Too easy to detect. Peapod pays her in cash, in many small bills, with pen and pencil marks and stains in particular places in the stack to indicate particular words. The seamen in our employ get the money from her as change, and then at their next port of call they phone home, or to a friend in Russia, Yemen, wherever. Relayed on, using different people as cutouts, more phones, it gets to the U.S. roundabout, by word of mouth in cipher phrases.”

“Clever.”

“Necessary. With Germans on one border and Russia in their rear, Turkey has to make a big show of preserving her neutrality. Our operatives with diplomatic cover, when the Turks have the least suspicion they’re CIA, are expelled as personae non grata. Then Turkey refuses to accept credentials of any replacements. That’s another reason we’re so thin on the ground over there, and our agent’s comm links need to be transient sailors.”

Jeffrey thought about this unpleasantness, digesting it.

Zeno was a German code name intercepted by the Allies. The fact that the U.S. even know of that name was top secret. And Peapod was the CIA’s internal code name for a German who wanted to defect. The name Peapod, and his desires, were also top secret. TOUCHSTONE Alfa was the CIA’s code name for material someone in Istanbul sent the U.S. . . . If Peapod had sent TOUCHSTONE Alfa, and a whiff of this leaked to the Axis, America could lose a golden opportunity to shorten the war.

And if Peapod could do all the technical things involved in obtaining and transmitting the TOUCHSTONE Alfa documents, then was Peapod the same as this mysterious Zeno person?

Jeffrey’s head was spinning. “If Peapod is for real, why won’t he give us more of what he knows?”

“To make us come and get him.”

Jeffrey frowned. “I don’t like where this is leading.”

“Nobody does.”

The CNO’s aide came out and asked Hodgkiss’s group to go into the conference room; they entered. The head of the table held two empty chairs. One long side was occupied by the army people and the dour FBI director. The other side was taken by the navy and the CIA director. Parker sat next to his boss. Hodgkiss, Wilson, and Jeffrey took seats farther down the same side. Aides and staffers sat on less opulent chairs against the walls, behind the top brass they supported. Since the foot of the table was also empty, the whole thing looked to Jeffrey like a face-off between two adversarial parties. The atmosphere in the room reinforced this impression.

Everyone rose when the president of the United States walked in, followed by the national security advisor. Jeffrey had had a back-channel private talk with the president before his most recent undersea mission, the one for which he’d gotten the Defense Distinguished Service Medal; the commander in chief was a retired army general who’d presented Jeffrey’s Medal of Honor at a ceremony in the Rose Garden of the White House—for the mission previous to that. The national security advisor, Jeffrey knew, was a retired U.S. Air Force four-star general. She’d been the most senior woman in the armed forces, and had a severe and no-nonsense manner. The president was more laid back, most of the time, and his smile was warm when he did smile. But now he looked tired.