Straits of Power

sighed. He knew better.

Challenger made it through the Antik?yth?era Strait unmolested. Jeffrey ordered a turn onto course zero-seven-six, a bit north of east. Using deeper water, this would start to take them through the labyrinth of other Greek islands that sprinkled the entire Aegean all the way to mainland Turkey.

Jeffrey wondered how things really stood now between Turkey and Germany. He wondered what effect his mission might have. He realized that a safe house full of dead Kampfschwimmer would raise many questions, beyond those already covered in his briefings with Gerald Parker and Felix. Kampfschwimmer operations on Turkish soil were an act of war. How would Turkey react? Was there another, clandestine level to Jeffrey’s orders, one that had only gelled in Washington after Aardvark made his final report on his meeting with Mohr? Was there a chance to let sovereign Turkey discover for herself egregious German duplicity that the U.S. couldn’t simply put in a diplomatic note?

Jeffrey got more sleep while he could as Challenger traversed the Aegean. Then he took the conn and sounded battle stations. The loading of equipment and weapons into the minisub was finished. Meltzer would be the mini’s pilot; he’d boarded already and powered up the vessel and its controls. At a depth of two hundred feet, inside Turkish territorial waters, Jeffrey bade good luck to Parker, Gamal Salih, and Felix and his SEAL team. Jeffrey avoided melodrama. No one felt like giving a speech. Everybody understood what hung in the balance. It made people tight-lipped, their conversation terse and clipped, their eyes hooded and hard. Jeffrey watched as they climbed the ladder inside the lock-out trunk. Hatches swung shut and were dogged. Crews ran through final checklists. The minisub was released.

Chapter 32

In the dim, red, postmidnight lighting of the minisub’s control compartment, Felix looked over David Meltzer’s shoulder at the navigation display. The upcoming strait was only the first part of the fifteen-hour trip to their destination, and in many ways it was the scariest. The unforgiving Dardanelles ran forty relentless miles, never more than two miles wide, with nasty twists and turns, and wrecks in the most inconvenient places. Two hundred and fifty feet deep at best, it shoaled to barely seventy-five just before opening onto the Sea of Marmara.

The minisub was too small to have a gravimeter. It held no off-board probes for scouting ahead. It wasn’t even armed.

Turkey was neutral, and merchant shipping used the Dardanelles constantly. Challenger had already done the work of penetrating hostile defenses. But the minisub wasn’t neutral, and its unannounced submerged presence was an outright violation of recognized international treaty law. If detected, Turkish patrols had every right to shoot to kill.

“I’m activating sonar speakers,” the copilot SEAL chief Costa said, even more dour than usual; the mouth of the strait was upon them. The now-familiar sounds of churning and swishing, hissing and pounding, growling and humming of surface ships passing back and forth on the moonlit surface filled the tiny compartment.

“Turning into outbound shipping lane,” Meltzer stated. The digital gyrocompass readout became a blur, then steadied, but didn’t stay steady for long. The mini, only 8 feet high on the outside and 60 feet long, began to pitch and roll. Even down at 150 feet, the endless movement of big ships made the restricted channel not just noisy, but rough. There was almost no current or tide here, but hulls and screws caused wakes that reflected strongly and chaotically off the steep shorelines on both sides of the strait; this shoved kinetic energy deep down into the water trapped between.

The effect of the noise and the turbulence made Felix think of being caught in a giant Jacuzzi.

Felix watched as Meltzer and Costa fought their controls. The inertial navigation system marked their gradual progress. Felix, standing crammed in behind Meltzer, grabbed the back of the pilot’s seat for support. Chief Porto, who would relieve Chief Costa later, stood behind him, shoulder to shoulder with Felix.

Now and then the mini’s acoustic-intercept array would pick up active sonars coming toward them. The frequency band and other technical aspects of these pings showed that they came from commercial obstacle-and- mine avoidance sonars used by modernized merchant ships. Felix hoped that if the mini couldn’t steer aside in time, out of detection range of one of these ships, the crewman watching the sonar readout would think they were only waterlogged debris, or an ocean rover, or just wouldn’t care.

Felix decided to go into the passenger compartment and grab some sleep. While a master chief, he’d qualified in ASDS piloting, then on this mission had learned to handle the German mini too, giving better skills redundancy to his team’s mix of personnel. He planned to relieve Meltzer for a while, later on. Who knows when I’ll be able to rest again after that. He was grateful for the corpsman’s antiseasickness pills.

“Copilot,” Felix said, “mind your trim. I’m going aft.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Costa acknowledged. The mini had variable ballast tanks, just like a full-size submarine.

Felix inched his way past Porto standing next to him — no easy task in such cramped quarters. Porto, typically upbeat, seemed overflowing with energy, and Felix hoped he didn’t peak too soon emotionally. Felix undogged the pressure-proof hatch into the central hyperbaric lock-in/lock-out chamber. He stepped over the hatch coaming, then gently pulled the hatch closed and dogged it. He moved slowly and smoothly through the lock-out chamber; the ride was choppy enough without his shifting weight making things worse. At the aft end of the chamber, he opened the hatch into the passenger compartment. He held tight as the mini was jostled and tossed.

Seven seats were taken: Gamal Salih and Gerald Parker had the front row. Felix’s five enlisted men sat farther aft. Salih and Parker were going through briefing files as best they could, for last-minute brushups on mission details. The enlisted men — who viewed the turbulence as a challenge that made things more interesting — were cleaning their MP-5s for the umpteenth time, or sharpening fighting knives that were already as sharp as a surgical scalpel. The combined tone of this activity was notable tension, barely subdued.

Fifteen hours is a long time to sit. It’s like flying nonstop from New York to Tokyo.

The chairs, meant for lengthy transits, were plush, and reclined like airline seats. Everyone looked up from what they were doing when Felix came in. “Don’t mind me,” he said. He took the empty seat, then spoke to the enlisted SEAL across the aisle. “Make sure I’m up in four hours. Wake me if anything happens before then.” A supply clerk somewhere had failed to provide enough pillows. Salih, always so considerate of those around him, was first to hand Felix his own.

The mini shimmied and dipped in the swirling confines of the strait, but Felix had learned to sleep through worse in C-17s or smaller aircraft.

By the time they’d enter the more open Sea of Marmara, the windowless minisub compartment would feel claustrophobic, the novelty of leaving Challenger would’ve worn off, and the ride should become much smoother. At that point, Felix would make sure everyone rotated taking good naps. For now his people had too much adrenaline.

Felix tilted his seat back, and put his left arm across his eyes to help him fall asleep.

He wondered if he would dream. The past couple of days he’d been having nightmares, about submarine hulls imploding: the inside air temperature rising like an oven as the atmosphere compressed, Commander McCollough and sixty-five other SEALs bursting into flames before the seawater quenched the crematorium Ohio had become in her death throes.

Then Felix recalled that this minisub had been captured from a Kampfschwimmer team by a SEAL team staging from Challenger. The Kampfschwimmer were all killed in that action. Rumors back in Norfolk said the SEAL lieutenant and chief from that team were killed on a later op. Men now dead sat in these seats once, and men now dead once trod this deck.

The idea caused Felix unease. The metallic scraping and clicking of weapons being cleaned and sharpened didn’t make it any better. Felix went to sleep surrounded by ghosts of SEALs and Kampfschwimmer. His last conscious thought was of the families, widows and orphans, forever mourning and missing men lost in this godforsaken war.

“Contact lost with Minisub Charlie,” Lieutenant Milgrom reported.