Straits of Power

the sailing times of shipping bound for Axis-occupied ports. Several were leaving Istanbul before dawn. I said we should hitch ourselves to one.”

“A routine dive task when you think about it, sir,” Felix said, sounding much more tired now. “We used the mini’s tow cable to attach it to the bottom of the rudder pin of a big merchie that mostly did twenty-two knots once she got under way. At twelve thousand tons displacement, we figured she wouldn’t notice the drag of a sixty-ton mini. Hair-raising trip, submerged right under her wake, but it did get us to you faster.”

“How’d you unhitch at twenty-two knots?”

“Near this end of the Dardanelles we used the switches that jettison the mini’s tow cleats from inside…. The merchie gets tangled in that loose cable, well, score one for us. It’ll look like some kind of accident, right? Remember, sir, everything’s German.”

Jeffrey watched in silence as the two wounded SEALs were brought down and under the corpsman’s supervision their litters went into the wardroom. Gamal Salih helped, not his usual irrepressibly chipper self now, but still glad to have had a chance to hurt Germany as a front-line freedom fighter again.

The body bag with the dead SEAL came down, carried by four of Felix’s men.

Jeffrey pointed aft. “The freezer. The mess-management people will show you.” Bodies were stored there when space permitted. “My condolences on your loss.”

The SEALs left with their burden, not saying anything.

We paid a high price to get you, Klaus Mohr, including the sacrifice of Ohio, and there’s still a long way to go to arrive home safe.

“Mr. Parker, Lieutenant Estabo, Herr Mohr, follow me now.”

Jeffrey had the three of them — Gerald Parker of the CIA, Felix Estabo the SEAL, and Klaus Mohr, German defector — wait in Bell’s stateroom while Jeffrey went and fetched Bell.

“Time to open my egress orders,” Jeffrey said when he and Bell were alone in Jeffrey’s stateroom. He unlocked his safe and pulled out the bulky envelope, then carefully entered the code to bypass the anti-tamper incendiary mechanism.

He read the hard-copy orders silently. “No surprises to us. Let’s hope they’ll be a big surprise to the enemy.” He handed the orders to Bell.

Bell looked them over, his expression becoming haunted for a moment. “It’s awful seeing the references to Ohio. I keep feeling we should have done something to help them.”

“That subject is closed,” Jeffrey said curtly. Ohio was to have separated from Challenger, to lurk in the Med, so her vast weaponry could be used to help repulse the Afrika Korps offensive. Then she was supposed to sneak out past Gibraltar, the same way she’d sneaked in.

Turned out to be a one-way trip for Parcelli. Jeffrey pushed the thought from his mind. It was too poignant, and he had other difficulties — two of which were that Ohio’s arsenal was gone from the playing field at a critical time, and her loss left lingering, unanswered questions about an Axis mole or trap.

Jeffrey took the orders back from Bell, entered the code to rearm the incendiary, and gingerly put the pouch in his safe. “XO, have a messenger get our guests in here. They’re right next door but I want to stand on ceremony…. For now, you’re command duty officer. Stay in the control room and keep an eye on things. We’re by no means out of the woods.”

“Understood.”

“This could take me a while. Our defector seems in a mad rush about something not yet specified, and he hasn’t exactly hit it off with our CIA friend.”

“Trouble, Skipper?”

“When have we had a mission that wasn’t trouble?”

Felix, Parker, and Mohr stood around Jeffrey’s tiny fold-down desk. They all tried talking at once.

“Quiet,” Jeffrey snapped. “One at a time. Klaus, you put yourself in harm’s way to help us. We did the same for you. So we’re even. Calm down, prioritize, tell me what I need to know.”

“Plan Pandora’s purpose is to collapse the Israeli command, control, and communications net.”

“We suspected that already,” Parker said.

“Don’t interrupt. Continue, Zeno.”

“The method of attack is based on a new type of quantum computer…. Let me brief you the way I briefed officials in Berlin.”

“Finally,” Parker said under his breath.

Mohr ignored him. “What I do uses quantum entanglement to achieve something called quantum teleportation, to infiltrate enemy firewalls and virus filters.”

“What’s quantum entanglement?” Jeffrey asked.

“Two entangled photons act as if they’re directly connected regardless of how far apart they become. That was one of Einstein’s discoveries, a basic property of nature, part of the way the universe works.”

“I don’t see where this is leading.”

“You will, Captain, soon, and getting this from me is necessary. In quantum computing in general, information is carried by the photons’ spin, their polarization, instead of the zeros and ones in conventional electronic binary computers.”

“How does this help you attack anybody?”

“I control swarms of entangled photons moving in a sequence that makes them look like random strays, the ultimate in seemingly harmless noise. I send one photon from each entangled pair into the targeted networks. That’s step one. Then, at my end, I slow their partners to a walking pace for a microsecond, long enough to be able to alter their spins to become specific bits in a computer worm’s program-code string. That’s step two.”

“I still don’t see what this has to do with cyberwar.”

“The distant photons automatically acquire the same new spin because they’re entangled with the ones at my end. So they too suddenly form into the worm, already past every firewall. It’s as if I reach across into someone else’s systems through another dimension. That’s why scientists call it teleportation.”

“It happens instantly, this spin change at the far end?”

“As I said, that’s what quantum entanglement means. There’s much more to it, to be able to harness that instant action-at-a-distance without violating the light-speed restriction on any transfer of measurable information. Solving that was one of my most significant insights. Unlike all the other countries working on practical teleportation, I looked for and found a way to accomplish it where I didn’t need someone cooperating with me at the far end, performing the things required to keep Einstein’s speed limit satisfied. The lack of that need for friendly assistance is what starts to make the quantum computer a weapon instead of a calculator…. There’s the lesser issue of decoherence, which is the term for the entanglement gradually falling apart as the photons interact more and more with their environment. I invented a method to hold back decoherence for much longer than anyone else has been able to do.”

“And then what?”

“The other crucial thing was that I realized the Israelis and everyone else were viewing quantum computing in a very different way. They wanted it to replace much slower classical computers. I worked toward hacking normal computers, servers, and routers using quantum computer entanglement teleportation. That’s my second breakthrough. It completes the weaponization concept. And I and my team, in secret, we got there first.”

Parker snorted. “It sounds like a bunch of science fiction gobbledygook to me.”

“How much do you know about nuclear physics?” Jeffrey asked.

“Nothing, frankly.”

“Well, I know a little something. Proceed, please, Herr Mohr, but try to wrap it up.”

“To summarize, a flood of seemingly random photons are made to collate themselves into countless copies of the worm, too late to be stopped. The quantum worm then propagates further once inside each infected processor. There’s no need to dupe any users into opening attachments. The worm paralyzes operating systems and launches a massive denial-of-service attack at everything from military headquarters to fighter-jet avionics to cell-phone switching centers to battle-tank fire-control computers, and power plants and even digitized data-link radios carried by infantry. The multiplier effect, the negative synergy, of so many nodes and facilities crashing at once is