Straits of Power

everything. Felix and his men tied numbered tags to their gear, and the woman gave them claim checks. She spoke good English. Meltzer said they’d be back in two hours, to put in another short dive before dark. He asked how they could get a lift into Zichron Yaakov, a town a few miles away where he said they were staying. She pointed to a van.

As the team trudged up the beach to the van, hefting their equipment bags, Felix noticed more barbed wire, and other young women guarding the inland perimeter exits. They wore army uniforms and carried Uzi submachine guns — an old design, used mostly by rear-area troops, but deadly if well maintained. Felix’s group was challenged at gunpoint by two of these women.

They spoke little English. While Felix’s heart was in his throat again, they questioned Meltzer and he responded as best he could. He gestured out at the boat, and the raft they’d ridden in on. These soldiers insisted the team open their equipment bags and unlock Mohr’s module cases and his tool kit. They looked them over carefully. They waved electronic wands around each case: detectors for explosives, poisons, radiation, and germs. Finally one of the women nodded and pointed the team toward the shuttle van. Felix knew that the hardest part by far was yet to come.

As they clambered into the van, he realized that none of the soldiers had names or rank insignia on their uniforms, for security. Meltzer told the driver, another woman, their supposed destination. The driver wore civilian clothes, but had a loaded Uzi on the seat beside her. The van’s windows were all rolled down. With a jerk it picked up speed and cut onto the highway, heading south. A nice breeze came in the windows. Traffic was conspicuously light, except for crowded buses and long military convoys.

Soon swamps and lagoons mixed with eucalyptus groves, date trees, and tilled fields. Ahead was a coastal kibbutz — a socialist collective farm — and a road sign said it was called “Nakhsholim.” The van turned inland instead at the first intersection. They crossed a rail line, then another north-south road. Their side road began to gain altitude. They were climbing the foothills of the Carmel Range, only 1,500 feet tall at its peak, but compared to the flat coastal plain running south, these green hills before them seemed high. They passed large vineyards along the road, then soaring, narrow, fragrant cypress trees. Behind the van, the view to the Med with the late-afternoon sun above the sea was stunning.

The van made a sharp right turn. Soon they were on a street of Zichron Yaakov: population six thousand, employment mostly in agriculture or light industry, plus tourism — the latter was sluggish because of the war, except for the ubiquitous Japanese. The street was lined by stucco one-story buildings with red-tile roofs. It was paved in places with cobblestones, and the streetlamps were decorative old-fashioned gas lights; the first Zionist settlement at Zichron Yaakov had been founded in the 1880s.

The van stopped at the hostel. The driver gave Meltzer a card, then touched the cell phone on her dash: Call if they wanted transport later. Everyone waited on the sidewalk until her vehicle was well gone. Their jaws set. It was time to assume new identities, and do the thing they’d come here for.

Chapter 44

It wasn’t easy finding the type of manhole Mohr said they needed. He’d deduced that one of the buried fiber- optic trunk cables from Tel Aviv to Haifa had to pass under Zichron Yaakov somewhere. It was by far the largest town on a straight line from the Mediterranean shore to the West Bank Territory’s border, barely sixteen miles eastward from the sea. Such placement of the cable was forced in part by the need to protect it, and in part by the need to give good connection service in the town. The size and shape of the maintenance- access manholes — rectangular, one by two meters or so — were set by the need to sometimes move big parts and equipment in and out.

Felix knew this was at best a series of hopeful assumptions. Challenger lacked maps of Israel’s fiber-optic grid, because in Norfolk no one thought they would ever use them. The idea of stealing the information in Israel was dismissed right away, with Gerald Parker’s wholehearted agreement. He’d warned that any physical or computer-hacking break-in or search for such data could be spotted instantly by the Shin Bet, Israel’s ruthless internal state-security apparatus. The SEALs’ raid would end in catastrophe, the team either captured or killed.

The group began walking the streets, lugging Mohr’s gear, looking for the manhole that would let him hook up his quantum computer. Meltzer preempted suspicion by people they passed as best he could, acting friendly and making quick greetings to Israelis they met on the spotless sidewalks.

Felix often glanced at his watch. He was in a race with almost a dozen Kampfschwimmer teams to get into the Israeli systems first. He also kept thinking of the hard deadline Captain Fuller had set for minisub pickup. Even if they found the cable, even if Mohr’s gizmo functioned correctly — and Mohr didn’t show any signs that he was in fact a double agent for the Germans — Felix realized they might not make it back before Challenger sailed. They’d be stuck in Israel lacking a good explanation of how they’d arrived, with an all-out Axis offensive charging toward them very soon. The American embassy would surely be watched, might be penetrated, and going there could betray Challenger and Mohr.

Face it, this effort was launched on a swim fin and a prayer. The fatalistic mood of the Israeli pedestrians Felix saw didn’t help. They all knew that the war — which up to now had spared their homeland, though it nearly bankrupted their economy — would soon become a vicious fight for survival, a fight to the death. Memories of previous wars and terrorism fueled the communal concerns. Knowing what a different generation of Germans had done to a different generation of Jews added an edge of fury that Felix could tell was seething all around him. The scenic views between the leafy trees reminded him of how much could still be lost. Few of the locals he went by were males between sixteen and fifty — they’d been mobilized, massing nearer the front where the Afrika Korps would be.

Mohr pointed into the road. Meltzer walked to the manhole cover, consisting of four smaller pieces placed side by side flush with the pavement, and read the words on the heavy metal castings. After reading them he said, “Right type of manhole, but welded shut.” Security.

Felix’s mind raced, trying to think of where they could steal an acetylene cutting torch.

“No,” Mohr whispered. “This is good. It means we’re in the proper area. We need to trace the cable’s route and find one kept open for quick repairs and testing. You see?”

Felix nodded. He considered splitting up his team to search in opposite directions. But this would probably waste as much time as it saved, since he needed everybody when the work began. His instinct told him to go north.

After snaking for blocks through the streets of Zichron Yaakov, they found another manhole for the fiber-optic line, also welded shut. Felix’s frustration level was almost unbearable.

Then it dawned on him. Technology-dependent firms would want to be close to the fiber-optic main, to have the shortest, least expensive, reliable high-baud-rate connections. To find the main he had to find such companies. A commercial area would be busier too, so a manhole there might not be sealed against tampering like these unguarded ones in quieter residential districts. Felix led the way southwest, to an office park near the modern town center. Following curving streets that ran steeply uphill and down, they located what they needed.

In plain sight of people on the street, and of others who might glance out the windows of their offices, the team put down their equipment bags. Chief Costa and his three enlisted SEALs — da Rosa, Azavedo, and Magro — opened the bags, chatting as casually as they could in Portuguese to keep up their cover as hired guest workers. Meltzer began to fuss about, pretending to be their foreman, waving his arms, pointing, and issuing commands in English and monosyllabic Hebrew. He understood conventional fiber optics from qualifying on Challenger’s systems. The supposed cable-maintenance crew removed eight uninflated orange life jackets, which everybody put on as if they were traffic-safety vests. The team donned hard hats brought from the ship.

Costa pulled out a crowbar. Rosa, Azavedo, and Magro stepped into the street, and began directing vehicles around and away from the manhole. Costa used the crowbar to lever the sectional covers off; Felix and Salih helped him slide each awkward piece to one side in a pile facing oncoming cars. Below these was a sheet-metal pan for channeling rainwater into drains. Costa lifted it, exposing an opening into cool, musty blackness. Mohr climbed down the ladder with a flashlight, and the SEALs passed him his modules one by one, then his tool kit. As his team