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.”
Chapter 24
It was the dead of night in Istanbul that same Sunday. Klaus Mohr struggled to keep his brain divided into three totally separate compartments: scientist, traitor, family man. The first two had to stay active at once, while the third he was forced to hold deeply repressed. This was hard enough, but worse yet, the two active parts of his thoughts contradicted each other. The strain of the constant balancing act was terrible in itself, but also posed the problem that all his scheming might fall apart in front of armed witnesses.
“I don’t understand the problem this time,” the Kampfschwimmer lieutenant said. “We did everything the exact same way we always do. We checked the connections over and over.” His team of seven men nodded. Their eyes looked tired, but their bodies held coiled energy, like panthers. Their leader, the lieutenant, like the others was tall and trim and very fit. He had a hooked, pointy nose, and very thin lips, which made his already gaunt face seem more pinched. “We know we drew a good load for the power supply. I thought the ammeter was faulty, but the cables we tapped were live, they sparked.”
Mohr took a deep breath. The Kampfschwimmer all smelled of sweat and sewage, though they’d washed well enough for sanitary purposes. The room held a permanent, stale cooking odor, like rancid grease and strange spices, left over from the previous tenant. Mohr pretended to feel frustrated, as he should have been under these circumstances in his role as a scientist. This part of his act was effective, because his frustration as hopeful defector was vivid enough.
Klaus Mohr was meeting with the Kampfschwimmer field team in a Plan Pandora safe house. Blackout curtains were drawn, and the lighting in the small room was dim. Istanbul, an open, neutral city, had no wartime blackout, but the curtains were essential for security. The furnishings that came with the rented building were sparse, so some of the commandos squatted or sat on the floor, with their submachine guns worn on shoulder straps or cradled on their thighs. Other Kampfschwimmer were elsewhere, inside or outdoors Mohr didn’t know, standing guard. Mohr himself slumped in an easy chair whose stuffing poked through tears in its back. The lieutenant sat on a metal kitchen stool that creaked as he moved. Between them, as the center of attention on the rug-less worn wooden floor, was the portable quantum-computer equipment. The commandos had just returned from a test. Their test had failed, as Mohr intended. He’d set the equipment out of calibration intentionally.
Klaus Mohr had to act like he was surprised by the problem and badly wanted to fix it. Otherwise, his cover would be blown. From his meeting with that Pakistani last week, Awais Iqbal, Mohr knew he needed to stall until Friday, then hold another meeting like this or his entire plan would come unglued.
Mohr had no illusions now: The device he’d created was a new type of weapon of mass destruction.
He’d received permission from his bosses to attend the party on Friday. He needed to tread very carefully so the permission didn’t get yanked when he announced the need for another field test, back-to-back with Iqbal’s affair. The waiting was taking a toll on Mohr’s nerves.
“Everything worked fine last time,” the lieutenant said, trying to be helpful, sounding puzzled both at the equipment trouble and also at Mohr’s blank stare; Mohr snapped out of his introspection. “The systems crashed just like they should have.” The lieutenant laughed. “Total chaos at the Izmir airport for a few hours, till we let them come back up. But this time, at Zonguldak? Cell phones, bank machines, nothing.” Izmir lay on Turkey’s southwest coast; Zonguldak faced the Black Sea.
Mohr nodded, distracted. His feelings of remorse at having to turn against his own country grew stronger constantly. His sense of grief and regret at abandoning his family, and his worry that they’d be punished despite his best efforts to distance himself from them, weighed on him every morning like a boulder squashing his chest. This was the part of his mind he needed desperately to wall off.
