Straits of Power

looked very unhappy.

“More data for you.” He gruffly handed over some ultra-high-density optical storage disks.

“With respect, sir, your manner. Why is more data bad?”

“Because this batch might be the last we get.”

“Captain?”

“Displeasure is being passed down from the top.”

“Displeasure with what? Or with whom?”

Johansen sighed. “One of our subs was trailing the Snow Tiger rather close in, gathering everything possible, but her captain was somehow outsmarted and the Russian simply vanished in the middle of the North Atlantic. Now it could be anywhere, doing anything, at the worst imaginable point in the war. There are red faces, and purple faces, up to the CNO level and beyond.”

Ilse frowned. “Do we need to warn Challenger?”

“What have you figured out so far?”

“Look at this.” Ilse showed Johansen her work on the Snow Tiger’s midships magnetic-field signature, recorded while it was stopped in the G-I-UK Gap. He watched as a 3-D color animation moved and changed shape on her console screen, the fields overlaid on an outline of the Snow Tiger’s hull. “I think the Snow Tiger has twin reactors, cooled by liquid metal, and coolant circulation is driven by electromagnetic pumps. The moving shapes are the pulsating fields of the pumps.”

“Others have already come to that conclusion. The Snow Tiger could be the fastest, quietest submarine afloat. This new data covers the Snow Tiger accelerating to twenty knots. Tonals, broadband, flow noise, and measurements of wake turbulence when the trailing sub got directly behind her.”

“And?”

“Try to figure out the Snow Tiger’s maximum speed, and what she’d sound like then.”

“Sir, that’d require a team of experienced people to even come close to meaningful answers!”

“From the mood I sense at the Pentagon, you’d better come up with whatever you can, and soon. An embarrassment to an Atlantic Fleet sub, of the magnitude and significance we just had, is ultimately a political embarrassment to Admiral Hodgkiss, who is, as I already told you, not without his rivals and enemies.”

“Don’t people have better things to do, like win the war?”

“Sometimes ranking officials get more concerned about their future position if we do win than if we lose, especially when they know that failing means we could all be dead anyway. There, I said it out loud. With this other business Challenger is involved in going on too, everyone’s into backside-protection mode. Scapegoats, witch hunts, you don’t want the details.”

“You’re setting me up, aren’t you? Giving me a task you know full well is impossible here.”

“Hasn’t it occurred to you that this workspace is not a prison, but a sanctuary?” Johansen gestured at the four walls. “That hostile FBI interview was obviously meant to get you to panic and make a mistake, or bolt, or send a call-for-help message to your control that special agents could intercept and get enough goods on you to make an arrest. Those odd phone messages and brush-bys suggest that somebody, maybe Axis operatives or maybe even a traitor in the FBI, is setting you up. The enemy tried to kill you outright a month ago. The next best thing is framing you. In wartime captured spies hang. And the timing isn’t an accident either. Your best character witness, Commander Fuller, is incommunicado indefinitely. The FBI director knows it, and Axis intell surely sensed it coming too.”

“Does Commander Fuller know about the accusations?”

“He stood up for you forcefully to the director himself. The director took him to pieces in front of the president.”

Ilse blanched.

“Do you really think Admiral Hodgkiss would assign you a seemingly endless task without good reason? Your intimate knowledge of Commander Fuller’s combat personality and tactical mind-set makes you invaluable, but it also makes you a target. The admiral is keeping you out of sight and out of mind of those who are busy casting about for victims, at any price.”

“METOC. A submariner complains that they didn’t give adequate support for his boat to maintain contact. I was on that desk, they could pin it on me. Add that to the FBI file, I’m toast.”

“Good, Lieutenant. You’re finally catching on.”

Chapter 20

Jeffrey was impressed that Parcelli ran a tight and happy ship. The pride and confidence of Ohio’s Gold crew couldn’t be hidden, and couldn’t be faked either for someone with Jeffrey’s practiced eye. This was a first for him, appraising another captain’s leadership ability during an inspection of his vessel. Ohio’s crew were clearly fond of Parcelli, as Parcelli was of them, which was good. With over two hundred men aboard, the corridors teemed like a beehive.

After more greetings were made in Ohio’s control room, with her chief of the boat and some of her key officers, the group, larger now, went down two decks to the wardroom. This one was much less cramped than Challenger’s. Jeffrey left Milgrom and Sessions here to begin a working meeting with Ohio’s people.

Parcelli led Jeffrey and those with him up ladders and along passageways. They arrived at the Special Operations Forces command-and-planning center. This space had once held the sophisticated navigation equipment Ohio needed to make sure each of the H-bomb warheads on each of her missiles hit its target very precisely — after leaving the earth’s atmosphere and then reentering thousands of miles away. That equipment had all gone with the SSGN conversion. Now the compartment was filled with communication and SEAL mission-planning consoles and workstations. The consoles were manned; the space was busy.

Parcelli reintroduced Jeffrey to Commander McCollough, in charge of Ohio’s sixty- six SEALs. They’d last met onshore in Norfolk, when Hodgkiss assembled the players and told them their roles.

“Welcome aboard, Captain, and welcome to my domain.”

“Thank you, Commander. A pleasure to visit your lair.”

“Changed a lot from your day, I bet.” McCollough playfully raised an eyebrow. His Boston-Irish accent was as charming as ever; he possessed impressive natural charisma.

“I’ll say,” Jeffrey told him, looking around and smiling. In the short time Jeffrey had been in the SEALs, in the mid-1990s, before being wounded, ASDS minisubs and SSGN conversions of boomers were projects in the R&D stages — efforts that might easily have both been given the budget ax.

“There’s my man!” McCollough exclaimed when he saw Felix. McCollough was clearly not someone to stand on ceremony — but then SEALs seldom were when among their own kind. “You did us proud. Still wanna go back to master chief?”

There was a familiarity present that wasn’t shown in front of Hodgkiss. It was McCollough who’d put Felix in for the commission from master chief to full lieutenant, before Felix left Ohio for Challenger—and then, under Jeffrey’s command, had gotten his bayonet wound from a German Kampfschwimmer while doing other things that won him the Medal of Honor.

“Well…” Felix pretended to be thinking about it. “Nah, I think I’ll stay being an officer. My wife would kill me if I had to tell her I took a pay cut.”

McCollough made eye contact with Jeffrey; the man had a very clear, no-nonsense gaze. “I suggest we use the large conference room, Captain.”

Everyone settled down at their places around the conference table. The furnishings were spartan, with exposed wires, cables, pipes, and air ducts everywhere. The emergency air-breathing masks stored in plain sight, and the fittings in a pipe on the overhead for plugging in the masks, left no doubt that they were riding in a submarine.

The main display screen on the bulkhead glowed to life. Gerald Parker put a disk into a laptop provided by