Straits of Power (22 page)

“What’s the rest of it?”

“You’ll operate there as Portuguese expatriates. Stranded in Turkey by the war when your mother country was occupied. . . . Few Turks can tell apart Portuguese accents from Brazil versus Portugal, or notice any American tinge to the speech. . . . That was the plan all along, when the only issue was taking out Mohr’s bodyguards. Now you’ll be leaving a much bigger footprint, with a safe-house assault involved. So your motivation, your
legend,
has to be amplified. You’re a splinter faction of self-appointed partisans, incensed at the Germans for occupying Portugal, and you’re getting even. Heckler and Koch MP-5 submachine guns are made under license in Turkey. That’s the reason you were issued the particular MP-5 versions you have, with Czech-manufactured shells, and thus appropriate shell-case markings, to add to the confusion.”

“Freedom fighters?” Captain Fuller asked. “A scratch resistance group that nobody heard of before?” He seemed to buy into the concept.

Parker nodded. “A savage hit-and-run raid, hurting Germans where they’re most exposed, at the edge of territory where they have any real control. . . . An e-mail will be sent to an Istanbul newspaper after you’re gone, taking the credit.”

“There’s just one problem with all that,” Felix said.

Parker hesitated. “I don’t follow you.”

“Probably because it’s so obvious you can’t see it. . . . How do you think this’ll look to the Turks?”

“I just told you how it’ll look. I’ll be providing you all with casual clothes made in Turkey, falsified Portuguese passports, phony Turkish ID cards, internee visas, and the rest.”

Felix knew the CIA had warehouses full of foreign goods for use on special ops, and extremely talented document forgers. The SEALs had all been given what Felix now realized—from glancing at Gamal Salih—were Turkish-style haircuts before joining
Challenger.

“You left out one little detail,” Felix said.

“Lieutenant?”

“Mr. Parker, you can glorify the cover story by calling us freedom fighters if you want, but the Turkish authorities will think we’re terrorists. Their military is strong. The minute we start stabbing and shooting and blasting down doors in some house in some suburb, they’ll send their very best rapid-reaction teams. They’ll have helicopters, to look down and shoot down and fast-rope down and leapfrog over gridlock in the streets. They’ll do everything they can to wipe us out, and we’re not even allowed to shoot to kill to defend ourselves.”

Parker opened his mouth to continue just as someone knocked on the door. It was
Ohio
’s communications officer.

“Captain Fuller, Captain Parcelli, we’ve just gotten an ELF message. We’re ordered to use our periscope raft, raise the SHF mast, and copy a high-baud-rate data dump from the satellite.” SHF meant super-high-frequency radio.

This took Jeffrey by surprise, and made him uncomfortable. Even the stealthy raft could be noticed by an enemy on or above the surface.

“Who gave the order?”

“ComLantFlt, to Commander, Task Group 47.2, imperative, no recourse, and smartly.”

Admiral Hodgkiss had just told Jeffrey to use
Ohio
’s raft, and use it now.

“Very well,” Jeffrey said. “We’re coming.” He and Parcelli hurried into
Ohio
’s control room.

Parcelli was tight-lipped. He didn’t like having to break stealth, even by the slimmest margin. He made sure the sonar men and fire-control men held no contact on nearby subs or ships or planes. “You want to take the mini back to
Challenger
before I float the raft?”

Jeffrey almost said yes. But as task group commander he was supposed to be as cool as a cucumber, no matter what. The tactical uncertainties would only get worse as the mission progressed.

“No. Let’s both see what the good admiral has to say.”

Parcelli told his XO to take the conn and get ready to deploy the antenna raft. Jeffrey asked for a message to be sent to his own ship by the acoustic link, to inform Bell of what was going on; this was quickly done.

“Captain,” Parcelli said, “join me in the radio room?”

Ohio
’s radio room was a compartment off of the control room. Its door was thick, and was equipped with two different mechanical combination locks and one electronic handprint scanner. A big red sign warned unauthorized personnel to never enter.

Parcelli turned the combinations and held his hand to the scanner. Jeffrey preceded him in, then Parcelli locked the door behind them.

Jeffrey felt it strange to see blue lighting instead of the red he was used to—red or blue were used to make staring for hours at console screens easier on watch-standers’ eyes. Otherwise, the radio room wasn’t much different from
Challenger
’s. The SSGN’s special communications gear for SEAL operations, and for connectivity with surface action groups, carrier battle groups, or amphibious strike groups, were in other spaces, aft.

This radio room was small, crowded with technicians and state-of-the-art equipment, and was warm from the heat that human bodies and racks of black boxes gave off.

The lieutenant (j.g.) who was
Ohio
’s communications officer oversaw things as his people did final checks on the receivers and the decryption gear. They also tested the connections to the raft antenna, threading inside the winch cable on its drum in
Ohio
’s sail. All was in order. Every transmitter was cold, long switched off, and would stay switched off, to avoid the slightest chance of an accidental signal being sent out that would ruin the undersea task-group’s stealth.

“Raft on the surface,” a technician announced a few minutes later. “SHF mast deploying. . . . Good contact on the satellite.” Equipment in the small space came alive. Recorders began to run, digital signal-strength meters fluctuated, and red and green indicator lights flickered rapidly.

Parcelli addressed the radio-room phone talker as the download came in. “Chief of the watch is to prepare to retract the raft on my order.”

The phone talker spoke into his mike, then listened. “Chief of the watch acknowledges, retract raft on your order, aye.”

“Download complete!” the communications officer called out, sounding jumpy.

“Phone talker,” Parcelli snapped. “Retract the raft.”

“Chief o’ the watch acknowledges raft retracting, sir.”

“Very well . . . Radio, decrypt the download.”

“Header decoded, sir. Message is to Commander, Task Group 47.2, personal, copy to CO,
Ohio,
personal.”

“Sir,” the phone talker said, “XO reports no threats detected yet.”

“Very well,” Jeffrey said.
Maybe we got away with it. Nobody noticed the raft.
“Give me the disk when the decrypt is completed. Captain Parcelli, may we use your stateroom?”

Jeffrey waited while the decoding computers continued to run. The time they were taking suggested that either an extremely long text message had come in, or the message included a heavy amount of supporting numerical data.
Or both.

“Decrypt complete, sir,” a senior chief said.

“Give the disk to Captain Fuller,” the lieutenant (j.g.) ordered.

Jeffrey took the disk in his hand, holding it by the edges so he wouldn’t get fingerprints on its surface. They left the radio room and went into Parcelli’s cabin. They used Parcelli’s laptop to read the disk.

The message began with a cover memo that referenced a number of attachments. Several were raw acoustic recordings from a Los Angeles submarine’s sonars.
Those would be very data intensive, for sure.

There were also several reports and analyses attached, including—this caught Jeffrey’s attention—one that mentioned work performed by Ilse Reebeck.

But the cover memo itself was enough.

Jeffrey and Parcelli looked at each other.

“So the Russians have a new, extremely quiet fast-attack sub loose somewhere in the Atlantic.” Parcelli’s usually unflappable expression seemed worried. “Our paths might cross. This isn’t good. We know too little about her. She might detect us and we wouldn’t even be aware of it.”

“Concur,” Jeffrey said. “At least she won’t fire on us. . . . But she may pass a contact report to her base, and from there to Moscow, and from there to Berlin. If she sees us in the North Atlantic, steering east, our cover of heading south to Durban is ruined, totally blown. The Germans could deduce real easy from our latitude that we’re aimed for the Med. And the
Texas
sacrifice by
Dreadnought
right outside Gibraltar? Instead of a diversion, it becomes the circumstantial proof that we’re definitely there.”

“What are your orders?”

“Like Hodgkiss says, press on. Be doubly on our guard.”

“And pray.”

“Yeah,” Jeffrey said. “It’s a very big ocean around us. We might not come within a thousand miles of the 868U.”

“But what if the Axis or their Kremlin friends suspect our side will be doing something aggressive, given the German buildup on the eastern North Africa front? What if this Snow Tiger is abusing her neutrality to establish a barrier patrol outside Gibraltar? What if instead of a very big ocean, she’s been deployed specifically to hunt for something like our task group at the most obvious, the
only
choke point? She doesn’t
need
to fire at us. She just needs to warn the Axis defenses by radio or a laser buoy. The Germans in the Med can take care of themselves if they know what to look for. Once we’re caught inside there, it’d be like them shooting fish in a barrel.”

“Get me two copies of this disk to take back to
Challenger.
Your sonar people and mine can each go over the sound profile of the Snow Tiger, and I want to examine what’s on here myself alone in my stateroom.” Jeffrey exhaled, displeased by the ever-mounting complications. “I’ll leave Estabo and his SEALs with you and McCollough until our next rendezvous. They need the special-warfare planning and rehearsal facilities now more than ever. The simple existence of this Snow Tiger requires more caution, but caution would cost us time in the Atlantic and then in the Med, which could give the extraction team too little slack when they get to Istanbul.”

Parcelli nodded soberly. “The master schedule’s locked in. The
Texas
business and then the defector snatch, hopefully soon enough for Peapod to help us before Pandora is launched. Hodgkiss sees what we see. He knows that if there’s any delay, our entire effort might collapse on itself.”

“I’ll grab my officers and Parker and Salih and head back to
Challenger
at once. Recall your ASDS from visiting
my
ship.”

“And then?”

“We resume our tactical formation for steaming east. You high, me low, and I range ahead as the scout. You trail your towed array, I use terrain for concealment. The key to eluding this Snow Tiger lies in who detects whom first.”

Chapter 21

L
ate that same afternoon, alone at her private console, Ilse was deeply immersed in seemingly self-contradictory data about the new Snow Tiger. Studying on-line references about known and historical Russian submarine design approaches made her even more confused.

Johansen burst into the room. Ilse stood up and mentally pulled herself together. “Sir?”

“METOC won’t admit it, but it appears that they need you after all.”

“You want me back in the war room?”

“No. Continue here. Take this.”

Ilse reached out and palmed a disk. “What is it?”

“That’s what METOC wants to know. You tell me, and I’ll tell Admiral Hodgkiss.”

“But, I mean, what is it?”

“It’s a sound. Something strange. They’re not even sure it’s real. It might be an artifact of the signal-processing algorithms having a flaw, or electronic noise internal to the system and they just can’t pinpoint the defect.”

“Such things happen.”

“Don’t let what I say bias you. The admiral thinks it would be opportune if you could identify the sound for sure, and soon. Think outside the box. He said you’re supposed to be good at that. . . . I have a meeting. Good luck.”

Johansen left.

Ilse shrugged to herself. She inserted the disk from METOC into a reader on her console and went to work.

The disk had a text explanation. The data included a noise recording made a few hours ago, by a navy ocean rover patrolling over the Mid-Atlantic Ridge close to the equator. Ilse put on the headphones that came with the console. She tapped keys to replay the sound, then closed her eyes and listened.

A rushing, whooshing noise rose in strength and then fell. Ilse displayed its power spectrum over time—a jagged, wriggling graph of intensity versus frequency from moment to moment. There were no signs at all of pure tonals that a submarine would give off, no mechanical transients, or anything else man-made.

Played at normal speed, from start to finish, the entire recording of the detection by the ocean rover lasted thirty seconds. There were a couple of breaks, where the sound disappeared and then began again two or three seconds later. Ilse guessed these were caused by jagged terrain in this relatively shallow stretch of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, blocking the sound source from the ocean rover intermittently.

Ilse called up specifications on the ocean rover and its sonars. Unfortunately, the unit was too small and its hydrophones weren’t sophisticated enough to give her much with which to estimate the range between the rover and the sound—the whole rover was barely larger than a fat torpedo, and traveled at a mere four knots for long endurance.

The unidentified sound source was moving roughly north to south. She knew this because of how the bearing to the center of the sound changed with time, according to the ocean rover’s positional data. Knowing its range from the rover would help to indicate its speed. Its speed might help her figure out what it was.

She did more analyses. Eventually, from a variety of technical factors about how the power spectrum behaved, she narrowed down the source’s velocity to maybe thirty knots, minimum, and maybe a hundred knots, tops.

This was very fast, even too fast, for a sub or a decoy or a torpedo. The tonals would’ve been glaring. . . . And the signature was all wrong for a supercavitating rocket weapon. There was no sign at all of a missile engine firing, or exhaust bubble collapse, and anyway, those things went more like two hundred or three hundred knots.

Progress of a sort.

This sound is definitely a natural phenomenon of some kind.

Its intensity was stronger at lower frequencies—what acoustic engineers called gray noise. As an oceanographer Ilse knew the gray-noise quality was a sign suggesting that whatever had happened involved the displacement of rock or mud or lava. What was odd was that the fragmentary data she had did seem to imply—unless the navigational instruments on the rover were badly out of calibration—that the motion she was hearing was nearly horizontal, and its true velocity was almost constant. This didn’t make much sense among steep peaks atop an undersea mountain range, which was probably what had most puzzled METOC; other readouts Ilse examined and cross-compared said the ocean rover’s orientation and navigating were good.

Ilse struggled for hours, skimming research reports on tectonic behavior.

A slant-wise avalanche, she finally concluded. Ancient volcanic rubble, unstable from washing by eons of particle-laden current fronts, suddenly gave way, confined to a ravine so it slid sideways instead of falling straight down. It was known that the leading edge of such landslides could hydroplane, skating on a thin trapped layer of water, reaching at least fifty knots. Water resistance against the front face would keep it from accelerating much more than that. . . . After thirty seconds, the whole mess had rolled and bounced out of sound-path contact with the ocean rover.

It was obvious once you saw it. It had been right under the METOC peoples’ noses the whole time.

Felix Estabo was not a happy camper.

He and his men were running the same scenario for the fourth time. The first three times, he’d been killed.

The SEAL mission-rehearsal equipment aboard
Ohio
was superb. The virtual-reality capabilities of the helmets everyone wore far surpassed any video game the public could buy. Much of the software was so good it was rated top secret, and the system ran on
Ohio
’s supercomputer. The imagery looked completely real, and the detail of the scenario was astonishing. The compartment in which the rehearsal was played was temperature controlled, and fans created wind that affected trajectories of notional bullets fired inside the game. There were even sprinklers on the overhead to make real rain—which would show up on the pictures inside the game helmets too.

Each man stood on a treadmill, mounted on its own turntable, which sensed the speed and direction in which a player ran, and stopped if he stopped. The slope of the treadmill could vary constantly, depending on the terrain defined in the game and the player’s coordinates. It was able to imitate the physical effect of climbing stairs. The treadmill surface was wide enough for a man to lie prone, as if taking cover. Mechanical actuators underneath could also inflict the teeth-jarring, gut-pounding shock of a nearby artillery round or grenade.

The only thing lacking, Felix thought, were environmental odors.

A genuine battlefield stinks, even through a gas mask.

Since the CIA lacked much information on the safe house in which Peapod’s crucial equipment would be held—other than that it was
some
kind of house—Felix and Commander McCollough’s planning staff considered everything, and then did their best to prepare. Gerald Parker had brought data disks with building codes and architectural data for Istanbul. But as in any infiltration or forced-entry exercise, some types of structures and landscapes were easier or harder than others to penetrate.

The mission profile they were rehearsing now was intentionally made as difficult as possible. It involved a big mansion surrounded by a high wall, with a front and back gate protected by armed guards. The mansion’s exterior was stone, mostly granite or marble. This was based on an actual piece of real estate in Istanbul, something specific meant to represent one generic type.

The personality and voices of the mansion’s guards were played by SEALs from McCollough’s staff, all of whom had been in combat before. They pretended they didn’t know at first that Felix’s men were hostile, they just behaved in a careful, vigilant way.

And after dark on a Friday night, Felix thought, at a very wealthy person’s home, it can be hard to convince the guards we’re delivery boys or plumbers.

The SEALs communicated with the guards just as they would in actuality in Istanbul, using Portuguese-accented fractured English, improvised sign language—even notes, written in advance for the SEALs by someone who spoke good German, that Felix handed to the guards.

From previous run-throughs of this simulation, Felix had already decided that his team would have to kill all the guards, quickly and silently, before they could sound an alarm. The biggest risk was that real guards might be wearing life-sign monitors, which would transmit a warning if their respiration or heart rate fell outside the normal range. Jamming the transmissions would be guaranteed to alert every enemy in sight—or out of sight, inside the mansion, or elsewhere in a property holding backup troops. So transmissions had to be sniffed for in the ether, to know if monitors were worn by the adversaries on the perimeter. Then, if so, signals of fake live people—on the proper frequency—had to replace the real vital signs of the guards, seamlessly, as they died. Felix’s men came aboard
Challenger
with the portable equipment needed to do this. They were also trained in working down in utility manholes, to cut power and sever fiber optics on cue, to surprise and isolate their objective.

But past the guards was a wide lawn with no trees. It made a perfect killing field against intruders. Automatic weapons from the stone mansion had unobstructed arcs of fire . . . and the high stone wall and solid metal gates would stop the bullets from hitting elsewhere in the neighborhood. Such a lawn might have motion detectors, including pressure-sensitive strips hidden under the earth. These detectors would call the Kampfschwimmer to arms instantly, and might even set off booby traps to kill or wound the SEALs, or stun them for capture.

The team was prepared for this too. Probes could detect buried objects. Big rolled-up sheets of lightweight composites that flattened and became rigid under battery power would let the SEALs crawl through a field of buried mines if need be—but only assuming that the German traps weren’t set to be too sensitive, so as to avoid false alarms from stray cats or free-roaming guard dogs.

Then there was the safe house itself. Infrared visors helped penetrate walls to some extent, to identify body heat.

The technology list went on.

The gadgets and the tactics interrelate. They have to. Need dictates form and function.

Felix’s heart was pounding as the scenario played on. To him and his men, this was no game. The pretend assault was a matter of life and death, because soon the bullets and knives would not be make-believe.

Felix cursed to himself.

The defenses were too deep and strong. His team couldn’t push past the wall, and across the lawn, and inside the mansion without being seen and shot at while their only cover was hopelessly inadequate. Felix led from in front, it was his duty, and that was why he kept getting killed. . . . But unlike in real life, he got to see how the battle continued without him. Every time, they failed in their critical goals: Enter without too much disturbance for a neighbor to call the police, and exit with Peapod’s gear intact and not too many friendly losses.

Felix took a deep breath. His team was about to try once more to get inside the mansion without getting slaughtered.

Suddenly, Commander McCollough’s giant face stared at him as if through a fish-eye lens, replacing the scene from the simulator.

This must be the man’s idea of a practical joke.

Most SEALs liked practical jokes, unless the joke was played on
them.

“Time’s up,” McCollough’s voice sounded in the earphones of Felix’s virtual-reality helmet. “The minisubs to
Challenger
will be ready for us soon.”

Felix pulled off the helmet. Underneath, his hair and forehead were drenched in sweat.

He glanced around at what
Ohio
’s SEALs called, with dry irony, the dance floor: the set of treadmills on turntables. His men stood there, panting, their weapons in one hand and their simulator helmets in the other. The team all looked at Felix. He could see that his chiefs felt discouraged.

“Well,” Felix said, “maybe this time we would’ve made it.”

Costa and Porto were skeptical. His men stared at the deck, their morale visibly low, which wasn’t like them.

“Look sharp!” Felix snapped, showing his displeasure forcefully. “We learned a lot the past few days. Mistakes were corrected and weak habits fixed, so they won’t cost us bad when we go with live ammo.”

But Felix asked himself a tough question: Did they need more men? Should he convince Commander McCollough to lend him another team for reinforcements?

No. Too many operators on something like this gets too complex and conspicuous. Integrating new guys, doubling the number for whom we need to steal local transport, coordinating a bigger group, and then everybody escape-and-evading to a badly overloaded mini. . . . That’s not the answer.

Felix saw the truth, which he knew Captain Fuller and Gerald Parker would like even less than he did.

They needed a human Trojan horse to have the slightest chance of pulling this off. Gamal Salih would have to do much more than just make contact at the consulate and pick up Peapod for a night of partying. Salih, an ethnic Turk who spoke fluent Turkish and German, would have to be the SEALs’ shill, right there when they assaulted the German safe house. Even then, from these simulations, the outcome stacked up as iffy.

Felix led his men toward the showers built into a lower part of the first two missile tubes, under the pressure-proof lock-out chambers. They’d tidy up before returning to
Challenger
for the duration of the mission; after days of this practicing with little sleep and even less hygiene, the team smelled like a pack of billy goats.