Straits of Power

SSNs one by one as they move up to take their designated patrol boxes. Enemies we don’t hear first by our superior sonars, we’ll certainly locate exactly from great range when they start to launch missiles.”

“How do you suggest we get to the north end of the Red Sea stealthily?”

“We’ll need to move slowly through the Bab el Mandeb, so our wake hump doesn’t show because it’s so shallow. We can then continue northward at perhaps fifteen knots, in case any enemy SSNs are in the Red Sea already.”

“Navigator,” Schneider called out, without bothering to turn his head to look at the man.

“Navigator, aye aye, sir.”

“Steaming distance from Bab el Mandeb to Sharm al-Sheik?”

“Eleven hundred and ten sea miles, Captain.”

“Very well, Navigator.” Schneider leaned back in his seat, and gave Knipp a sidelong glance. “Fifteen knots puts us where we want to be in three days. We don’t have three days to dawdle.”

“Because the offensive might start soon?”

“And because enemy SSNs going faster than fifteen knots could overtake us from behind…. Copilot, activate anti-LIDAR and anti-LASH active hull coatings. It’s broad daylight up there.”

The copilot acknowledged.

“Attention in Control. I intend to penetrate the Bab el Mandeb at five knots. Soon thereafter we’ll reach rugged seafloor terrain off several large islands. This terrain will block our noise as we accelerate. I will then go to flank speed and make the entire transit north at sixty knots along the bottom. We will therefore arrive on station in early afternoon, local time, on Monday.”

“Understood,” the watch standers said.

The Red Sea’s floor, right down the middle as it ran north, was conveniently at or close to Doenitz’s crush depth. This route was lined with black-smoker hot vents, petroleum seeps, and volcanic sinkholes filled with extra-salty scorching brine, all of which would aid concealment.

Schneider’s intercom blinked. Verdammt, what is it now? He palmed the handset: the radio room. An ELF code ordered Doenitz to trail her floating wire antenna.

Schneider did this while still on the bottom, to help mask the antenna winch’s mechanical transients. Then he ordered the pilot to reduce depth until the floating wire could reach up toward the surface. A message started coming through. The message was in Schneider’s private captain-only code.

Another change of orders? Are those nincompoops on shore in Berlin ordering me back to Durban after all this time and labor wasted to get where I am?… It’s worth it, though, to have a crack at Challenger before von Scheer is ready to break out.

Schneider gave Knipp the conn and went to his cabin. He opened his laptop, entered his passwords, and read the decoded message. At the beginning he cursed again, but then he was positively delighted.

Chapter 42

Klaus Mohr reminded himself, with savage and poignant irony, that he had wanted, demanded, to be here. He fought down the urge to panic, and forced himself to keep breathing in and out through his scuba regulator. This was the culmination of a quest that had been eating Mohr alive for many weeks. The interval for possible success was exceedingly narrow, measured in a handful of hours, with no margin at all for mistakes.

Vertigo, claustrophobia, and fear of drowning made his heart race, and his respiration was faster than the effort to kick with his legs should have required. The shallow water was so murky through his dive mask, even on a sunny afternoon, that his only guides on where to go were the tug of the lanyard between his waist and his dive buddy, Gamal Salih, plus the dive computer strapped to his left wrist. Mohr needed the direction the bubbles of his open-circuit scuba took just to show him which way was up. The computer’s glow-in-the-dark readouts said it was 4:08 P.M. local time, an hour behind schedule already, and he had only twenty minutes left of air. He could never reach the Israeli shore, a quarter mile away, in twenty minutes at the rate he was going. Worse, the hostile shore was on his right, due east, and his compass said he and Salih were swimming north.

That was the point. The team sent to infiltrate Israel — at Mohr’s own vehement urging, and on Captain Fuller’s finely debated orders — walked a delicate high-wire act that, with this swim, had barely begun.

Steady mechanical buzzing and growling filled Mohr’s ears. Underwater, it was hard for even a seasoned diver to tell where sounds were coming from. This was Klaus Mohr’s first-ever dive, aside from the hurried training inside one of Challenger’s lock-out trunks. He was keenly aware of the reasons for why it might also be his last. The surrounding murk that made it hard for Salih to aid him in an emergency was the least of his worries.

The murk diminished as Mohr swam farther north, maintaining ten feet over the bottom that was only twenty feet deep. Now he could see Salih, and then to each side the whole team. But this cut both ways, since others could see them too, just as easily.

Felix Estabo and Chief Costa and the three enlisted SEALs put Mohr to shame. Each of them dragged a waterproof bag holding one of Mohr’s computer modules or his tool kit, with adjustable buoyancy bladders to keep the bags from rising or sinking. Lieutenant Estabo really had his hands full, since his dive buddy was Lieutenant (j.g.) David Meltzer — one of Challenger’s qualified safety-and-inspection divers, but never schooled in undersea special warfare tactics.

Yet Meltzer’s help was essential. He’d spent a summer in Israel in high school, and had been top of the class in his Hebrew school before that. Along with the SEALs and Salih, Meltzer — like Mohr — used conventional scuba that gave off bubbles. Stealth was not part of the plan; when properly equipped, and so heavily burdened, traveling submerged was much more efficient than raising constant splashes along the surface, as long as their air supply held out.

The notion of hiding in plain sight, in the water and then on the land, made Mohr feel naked. He kept going on willpower alone.

A new buzzing noise began, at a higher pitch, growing loud and then diminishing. Mohr watched as a black rubber raft with an outboard engine bounced through the gentle swells above, busy on some errand. It passed the team a bit farther out to sea, carefully avoiding their telltale bubbles, meanwhile casting a moving shadow on the bottom. Mohr looked at the seafloor, and amid the rocks and sand and mud, and starfish and colorful coral, he could see the shadows of eight men, including himself, with their gear bags.

Ahead, almost a soccer-field length away, a large boat sat at anchor, its hull below the waterline looming dark and menacing. That dive-support boat was the main source of the steadier, throaty buzzing and growl, but the boat didn’t move. The support boat was the team’s first destination.

Between Mohr and the boat — a fifty- or sixty-footer — there was much human activity on the bottom. Felix changed course slightly, and the invasion team followed. They swam close enough to the other group to be spotted but not interfere, and not have their swim fins kick up silt to disturb these divers intently at work. Some noticed Mohr and his companions, glanced up, and waved. He waved back. The strangers took his presence for granted. But Mohr knew that to them, it was he who was a stranger, and a mortal enemy.

This was the easiest part. With dive masks over their eyes and nose, and scuba regulators in their mouths, it was hard to tell people apart.

Mohr’s heart beat even faster. He calmed down by observing the work as the team swam on, his scientist’s curiosity aroused. These mental notes would be vital soon. They might make all the difference to whether or not his cover story could bear scrutiny. He was the team’s most indispensable member, but also its weakest link.

The edges of the working site were marked by orange nylon cables, rising from concrete blocks on the bottom to orange balls on the surface that served as buoys. Another black rubber raft, its outboard engine idling, was moored nearby. Mohr expected that this one held the diver lifeguards and a radioman, in case anybody below got into trouble. That raft would also be flying a larger version of the flags attached to each buoy: a blue-and-white swallowtail pennant, the international warning signal to passing ships that divers were present.

The site itself was laid out in a coordinate grid of one-meter squares, formed by stretches of white plastic