Straits of Power

Parker filled it himself, assertively. “Signals intercepts and code breaking, thanks to our chums at the NSA, are giving us conflicting signs.” The NSA was the National Security Agency. “Human intelligence, what we have of it, isn’t helping to clarify things much.” He let that hang in the air, like bait, looking right at Jeffrey.

He’s playing my game back at me already…. Careful, this guy’s an old pro from the infamous “Company.” A corporate survivor when other heads rolled, or he wouldn’t be here now. A veteran of inside-the- Beltway battles, in an outfit that doesn’t take prisoners…. But he doesn’t come across like your typical intell analyst. Too worldly wise a manner, and traces of well-traveled earthiness.

A spy handler, then? That’s wicked, dirty, Byzantine stuff.

Jeffrey decided to go with his own strengths, and be entirely straightforward and simply take Parker’s bait. “What sort of conflicting signs?”

“Satellite photos show there’s a buildup of forces in occupied Norway. The threat there would be a move against the UK, or, more likely, Iceland, to outflank the UK.”

“I could see that that would be a priority,” Jeffrey conceded. “It’d give the Germans much better access to the North Atlantic…. And their not-so-neutral helpers, the Russian Federation, would probably love to see something precisely like that.”

The Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap was a well-placed nautical choke point, an accident of geography that during the Cold War had helped block Soviet subs from reaching the open ocean easily. Now, with the G-I-UK Gap under Allied control, it did the same to modern German U-boats.

This was why the coup leaders knew they had to conquer France. They gained hundreds of miles of coastline that let out on the ocean directly, with near-indestructible U-boat pens still standing from World War II.

“We can’t tell how many of the assets we’re seeing in Norway are genuine,” Parker went on. “We know the Swedish arms industry is working under contract with Berlin to mass-produce and export dummy replicas of the Germans’ Leopard III tanks. Perfect for using as decoys. A fiberglass-variant body that on radar looks like ceramic- composite armor. Natural-gas burners to mimic engine heat, the works.” Sweden was neutral, assertively so, and shared a long border with Norway. “That’s just FYI…. Then there’s the North African front.”

“North Africa? But our pocket’s too strong for another Axis offensive…. Strike east instead of south? A push through Egypt and Israel? I don’t think so. Not with those dozen nukes Israel planted in Germany.”

“So you think North Africa’s a diversion, a bluff?”

Jeffrey hesitated. “That makes the most sense.”

“How do you know the alleged Israeli nukes in German cities aren’t the bluff?”

“They told the Germans where they’d hidden one, and they found it and disarmed it. It was real. That’s public info.”

“So maybe there was only the one, not twelve.”

Jeffrey blushed. Ouch…. This is frightening. “Does anyone know the truth then, besides Israel? If the Germans even suspect they’re bluffing, the deterrent effect would be lost.”

Parker smiled, though it didn’t seem to Jeffrey like anything to smile about. “After a couple of months of, shall we say, rather extreme search efforts, the Germans found another bomb.”

Jesus. “So it isn’t a bluff.”

“We do know the Germans are moving their tanks and dummy tanks all over the place like crazy…. And I want you all to see something.” Parker turned his laptop on. He activated a flat display screen mounted on the wall.

Wilson and Hodgkiss leaned closer.

An image appeared on the screen. Jeffrey could tell right away that it was a very-high-definition satellite photo. It showed two dozen airplanes, in formation, over water.

Jeffrey peered at the screen. With no visual cues in the picture, he couldn’t tell how big the planes were. “They look funny.” Their wings were too stubby compared to the fuselage bodies. “Where is that?”

“Black Sea,” Parker said. “And they are funny…. The following capability is highly classified, Captain. You’re seeing it on a need-to-know basis.”

“I understand.” Submariners had to be very good at keeping secrets.

“The actual image resolution is much finer than this display screen can reproduce. I do not exaggerate to say that on the original, with proper equipment, you can watch one of the copilots picking his nose. I could tell you exactly how long his fingernails are, but I won’t.” Parker tapped a few keys. The frozen still image, in shades of gray, suddenly changed to full-color movement in video — without losing any sharpness at all. The satellite camera followed the planes. The angle of the picture slowly shifted as the satellite orbited.

A pretty high orbit, maybe a thousand miles, to have such good dwell time…. I had no idea you could watch things, live, in color, from outer space so perfectly like this.

Now Jeffrey could see that the aircraft were flying right over the water: Backwash from multiple jet engines mounted on each fuselage — not on those stubby wings — created rooster tails on the sea. As the planes moved, and the amazingly powerful camera tracked them, a coastline entered the picture.

An inlet or bay.

The aircraft slowed and formed in single file. Jeffrey noticed ships, then buildings and vehicles on land. These established a sense of scale.

Jeffrey finally realized what he was seeing.

Holy crap, that’s the Bosporus Strait! That’s Istanbul! Those planes must be gigantic.

“Wing-in-ground-effect aircraft,” Jeffrey said aloud.

Parker cleared his throat. “We know the Soviets experimented with these things as far back as the 1960s. One project was called the ekranoplan. It actually flew. Flew very well, thank you. The Sovs canceled the program, even before the Berlin Wall came down. At least, we thought they did. We don’t know when they restarted, or how they hid it till now.”

Wiggies, as the U.S. Air Force called the basic concept, relied on a cushion of air trapped between the bottom of the wings and any smooth surface, such as water or a flat beach. This gave them vastly greater aerodynamic lift than airplanes flying higher up. In theory there was no limit to their dimensions — the bigger, the better. For short spurts, they could gain enough altitude to clear bridges — something Khrushchev had mysteriously boasted about, but the claim had been dismissed at first as Communist disinformation. Then an early American spy satellite caught a blurry, grainy picture of one at a pier — wiggies were basically seaplanes. Using pier-side objects of known size for comparison, that ekranoplan was, to this day, one of the largest flying machines ever built.

Jeffrey was rattled. He knew some U.S. companies sold much smaller wiggies for civilian use — including as water taxies — but nothing in the Allied inventory, including the biggest military-transport aircraft America had, came even close to what he was seeing now.

The Russian wiggies were intended as the ultimate amphibious invasion platforms. Coming at you from way out at sea. Low and under your radar. Moving at hundreds of knots. Each of them carrying troops and tanks and the whole rest of an army — with cargo capacity per plane so big it was scary.

“Where did they go?” Jeffrey asked.

“Watch,” Parker told him.

Turkey was neutral, so the modern Russian ekranoplans were exercising their right of military passage after prior notice. They quickly left Istanbul behind, transited the Sea of Marmara, and then went through Turkey’s other tight spot between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean: the Dardanelles Strait. As the satellite began to lose a good angle, the mass of aircraft aimed southwest, to cross the Aegean Sea between Turkey and Greece.

The picture went blank, then resumed, a different satellite pass.

Now the planes were in the Ionian Sea, well within the Med, between Greece and the boot of Italy. Both countries were occupied by the Germans. With the Axis also controlling Spain and North Africa and the Strait of Gibraltar between them, large parts of the Med amounted to an Axis lake.

The Russian wiggies moored at a port between the heel and toe of Italy. Jeffrey guessed this was the major harbor, Taranto, outside the range of Allied cruise-missile strikes from the Atlantic, or from Israeli waters too.

The video stopped.

“What was their cargo?” Commodore Wilson asked.

“That’s the whole point,” Parker said. “They carried no cargo. The wiggies themselves were the delivery.”