Straits of Power

wanting to murder Mohr doesn’t somehow make him more reliable for us.”

“You seem to have done a flip-flop since that meeting.”

“That meeting was before I had to sit in your control room and hear Ohio being destroyed, Captain.”

Jeffrey winced. Mohr looked dismayed at hearing this news.

Jeffrey grew angry that Parker carped on the subject of Ohio, undermining Jeffrey in front of other people. He pointedly changed the subject, and became more distant and formal.

“Lieutenant Estabo, report your assessment of what the first contact with Herr Mohr and your assault on the safe house indicate. Mr. Parker here did not sit in on any of that.”

Felix took a deep breath. Reading Jeffrey, his manner became more crisp. “Our on-site validation was based on unclassified reference sources only. It looked good enough to continue with the extraction, but, objectively speaking, proves nothing about Herr Mohr’s claims…. And while from the German perspective the outcome of the safe-house battle would have been uncertain, it is conceivable that the supposed need to assault the Kampfschwimmer was in actuality a design to drag us into a double bluff.”

“Lieutenant?” Jeffrey didn’t follow Felix.

“Sir, the requirement for a firefight with casualties on our side might have had an undercurrent of psychological warfare. People value most those things that are scarce and hard to get. It’s human nature.”

“Granted. How does that apply here? I still don’t see it.”

“The need to prepare and execute combat against a fortified place, suffering potential KIAs and WIAs, as indeed we did, could be mental sleight of hand to get us to believe that the thing we fought for and won was a valuable treasure… when in fact the thing we obtained was, is, an infernal device we’ve carried into our own fortress, Challenger, I mean, and maybe Israel.”

“So the computer modules are like a Trojan horse? The Germans let you win at the safe house on purpose?”

“That scenario can’t be eliminated, sir. It’s possible the Kampfschwimmer were sacrificed intentionally by the Axis High Command. It’s even possible they were volunteer suicide troops.”

“They let you kill them?” Jeffrey asked in disbelief.

“They might not have let us, sir, knowingly, themselves, but Herr Mohr did provide us with tactical information and the element of surprise, which German planners ought to have been aware made it likely that our attack on the Kampfschwimmer team would succeed.”

Mohr began to back into a corner, literally. “How can you all be so paranoid? There is no time for such bickering!”

Jeffrey didn’t respond. He considered everything Felix had said.

“Lieutenant, sweat the details of your hypothesis. Was there anything during the safe-house assault that raises doubts about what really went on?”

“I hadn’t considered it that way, Captain.”

“Do so.”

“Well… Our initial entry might have been a little too easy. The way they opened the door to Gamal Salih without him having to make more of a scene.”

“Anything else?”

“Hmmm… The way one German lay over the quantum equipment, as if protecting it with his body.”

“He wore a flak vest?”

“Yes. And not all of them did as we went in.”

“So one Kampfschwimmer shielded the gear instead of helping repulse your team?”

“Maybe,” Felix said. “And you’d think that when it was evident they were being overrun, he’d have destroyed the computer stuff to keep it out of our hands, not sacrificed his life to keep the gadgets intact.”

“Where was Herr Mohr while all this went on?”

“Well out of the line of fire, in an armored limo.”

“And what did you mean when you said that they might’ve been suicide troops? Suicide fighters kill themselves to kill other people, not help them.”

“Not necessarily, sir, if you think about it. They could try to be fall guys without us realizing it, as part of the psychological gambit. That’s what I meant about it all being mental sleight of hand. Plus, they didn’t help us. They pretended to help us. That’s how they got the Trojan horse through the gates.”

“Oh boy,” Jeffrey said. “Talk about wheels within wheels.”

“But the quantum gear works,” Mohr insisted. “I saw the results of the field tests in Turkey. We shut whole areas down until the worm’s built-in time limit expired.”

“That’s consistent with things we do know,” Parker said. “Turkey has suffered some inexplicable system outages lately.”

“Why wasn’t I told that before?” Jeffrey demanded.

“It didn’t come up. And you didn’t need to know. And it only strengthens the case against Mohr. If it’s cause and effect between his equipment and those outages, which I remind you all is unproven, that would merely indicate that the malevolent hardware Mohr has with him does work. It demonstrates nothing whatsoever about him having a patch that would save Israel from some bizarre teleportation virus.”

“Herr Mohr,” Jeffrey said, looking directly at the man, hard. “You’re asking us, in effect, to invade an ally, Israel, with which American relations are already strained. You’re asking us to not tell them we’re coming, go in covertly ourselves, and jigger with their command and control, supposedly for their own good.”

Mohr stared right back at Jeffrey. “If you tell Israel you’re coming, they’ll never agree. Never! With the way you all keep showing so much skepticism, how can you possibly expect them to take seriously whatever arrangements you present before Tuesday that have anything to do with quantum patches? That’s totally obvious already, isn’t it?”

“Granted.”

“And you can’t ask them for permission to do the patch even if you believe me, because if they hear one word about this, they’d refuse and you forfeit the option to go in secretly! If they learn that I and my device are getting anywhere near them, they’d do everything possible to stop us!”

“What’s this us?” Parker snapped.

“Ease up,” Jeffrey cautioned him sharply. “Don’t distract me.” He turned back to Mohr. “You’re telling me that if I take you in there at all, the whole operation has to stay invisible.”

“Yes. Do you at least accept that part, Captain Fuller, in isolation from everything else?”

“Yeah…. What do you have to say for yourself about Lieutenant Estabo’s comments? His views on the safe- house raid?”

“I knew those men from training and working with them. They all had wives and children. They had every reason to live, to fight for their lives for the sake of their families.”

“You abandoned your family,” Parker stated. “Supposedly for some higher cause. Why couldn’t the Kampfschwimmer too?”

“I did it to protect my family! The Kampfschwimmer would have gained nothing for their dependents by allowing themselves to be killed! They’d have left widows and orphans! No German ideology or military tradition has ever glorified such conduct!”

“All right,” Jeffrey said. “Let’s leave that particular point aside and cut to the chase. Is there a way to demonstrate your device for us?”

Mohr sighed. “Not convincingly, Captain. The patch and then the worm? Nothing would happen. The worm alone? Your ship would be crippled. A single laptop? Without close verification by scientists in your country, you’d just see a dead computer. You wouldn’t know absolutely that quantum hacking was what I did to kill it.”

Jeffrey nodded, making a sour face. He knew Mohr was correct on this bit, which only made the broader issue harder to resolve. “Just out of curiosity, what keeps this worm from taking over the world?”

“The worm is programmed to know where it is by detecting characteristics of the host systems it attacks. It’s also set to expire, six days postattack. Damage outside of Israel and Egypt should be minimal. Affected computer networks there will come back up, after the Axis has occupied both countries through the land-and-cyberspace