Straits of Power

meet the minisub, and then hurry out to sea to dock with Challenger.

“What about a local taxi service?”

“With eight of us and all this luggage, I better try a sherut company. They’re more like minibuses for hire than cabs.”

“They take U.S. cash?”

“Oh yes. They’ll be very happy to.”

Meltzer came out more quickly this time. “When they heard my American accent, they quoted an outrageous price. I told them I’d give the driver a twenty-dollar tip if he could be here in five minutes.”

It was closer to ten minutes. There were only seven seats in the minibus, but everybody climbed in with their bags and boxes. Meltzer handed the driver a twenty-dollar bill. He said he’d give him another twenty if he got them the three miles downhill to the beach by 7 P.M.

The driver floored the accelerator. Traffic on the cross roads and the highway continued to be light. The minibus pulled up at the dig. The group found the same two perimeter guards who’d questioned them on the way out from the site encampment, and the women let them pass through the barbed wire. They hustled to reclaim their wet suits and dive gear, then took fresh compressed-air tanks.

Their next problem was getting rafts. Several were pulled up onto the beach — at this late hour, activity underwater was slowing. Meltzer told the woman on duty they’d head out to the wreck site themselves, anchor, then when finished return on their own. Tired from a long day, she saw no reason to refuse this.

Felix and Costa picked a pair of rafts whose outboard motors had enough gas. They loaded both rafts hastily, revved up the engines, and headed for the orange buoys. The sun was very low, in their faces, reminding them that the fixed departure time for Challenger was drawing awfully near.

On the beach, sirens grew loud enough to overpower the sound of the outboard motors. Felix glanced back. Flashing lights lined the highway outside the site. He saw a man in blue by the vehicles, with the white of a neck brace around his throat, pointing out to sea at the rafts, literally jumping up and down. From the distance, given the circumstances, Felix recognized the figure too well: the cop from the manhole. Soldiers near him spoke on radios. The heavy machine gun a kilometer down the beach opened up like a jackhammer. Red tracers probed their way toward the rafts. “Everyone into the water!” Felix ordered.

The meeting point with the minisub was the wide place of cloudy water up-current from the dig-support boat Felix’s team had used to get a ride to the beach. Waste silt and mud, after sifting through screens on the boat, had been dumped overboard all day, creating an area where visibility would be obscured.

The team hugged the bottom at thirty feet. Now their scuba bubbles could ruin everything. Machine-gun bullets sprayed the surface above, but didn’t punch down too near. The excavation support boat started its main diesel engines. Clanking and splashes meant it was raising its anchor, and jettisoning all its hoses. Felix remembered those two soldiers with the Galils. Fired straight down, their small bullets would move slowly after thirty feet of water, but the soldiers probably also had hand grenades — and they might call in a naval craft with full-size depth charges. The dig boat roared at them as they swam at it.

Felix and Chief Costa stirred up sand and silt for camouflage; the whole team froze and held their breaths, halting the bubbles. The dig boat rushed overhead, steering toward where Meltzer had claimed they’d come from earlier — south, by the Crocodile River outlet. Soon there were sharp underwater explosions. The concussions hurt Felix’s eardrums and punched at his gut, but the force of the blasts wasn’t dangerous.

The team reached their goal, the cloudiest water, which made it even harder to see. Using a low-power homing sonar that Costa wore on his belt, the men and Challenger’s minisub found one another. They entered the open bottom hatch. Most of them went in back with Mohr’s equipment cases and their other bags.

Meltzer and Costa, still in their damp wet suits, took over from the two Challenger crewmen who’d been piloting the minisub. Felix stood behind their seats as they aimed for the pressing rendezvous. Meltzer immediately went to flank speed, making almost twenty knots but guzzling the high-test peroxide fuel left in the German mini’s tanks. The mini nosed down as the seafloor fell away. They met Challenger where she should be, in 150 feet of water, at 1957—7:57 P.M., three minutes before she’d leave without them. The mini’s passive sonars showed increasing naval activity on the surface. Suddenly the mini drifted to a stop. The fuel gauges read empty — they’d reached Challenger, but with no propulsion they couldn’t make the docking inside her hangar.

“I only have minimal battery power,” Meltzer stated. “Captain Fuller will either improvise along with me, or decide it’s too late and too risky and leave…. Well, here goes nothing.”

He used the digital acoustic link to Challenger: Felix watched over his shoulder as he typed a message that appeared, for checking, on a screen. Satisfied, Meltzer sent it. He was asking Challenger to maneuver to position her open hangar doors below him. He would have to come inside by Costa flooding variable ballast tanks to make the minisub heavy enough to drift down, while Meltzer depleted the last of his batteries in an attempt to control the docking by using the minisub’s small side thrusters alone. Felix thought Meltzer deserved a medal for everything he’d done, and for what he was trying now.

Challenger acknowledged the message. Meltzer flipped on his look-down photonic sensors in short spurts, as the huge submarine turned with her own side thrusters, then held steady underneath the mini, with the open hangar beckoning. Costa worked his control panel. Meltzer’s joystick was never still as the minisub descended. He’d switched off as many things as possible, including the environmental systems and internal lights, to conserve the last few amps of available battery power.

They entered the hangar without mishap, but the thrusters stopped responding. The battery charge was almost completely flat. The mini couldn’t put itself onto the docking pylons. Felix’s watch said 1803.

Captain Fuller’s control-room photonic displays must have shown the minisub’s plight. The hangar doors started closing around the mini, then Challenger began to move. She nosed steeply downward, tilting the mini with her, going deep. From its own inertia the mini, in the water inside the hangar, drifted backward more than Meltzer and Costa could control. The German mini’s stern slammed into the rear bulkhead of the hangar with a crunch. Felix realized this was the mini’s main screw getting smashed. He hoped the closed hangar doors suppressed the noise enough that it wouldn’t be detected by Israeli hydrophones. Meltzer ordered Chief Costa to blow variable ballast, using compressed-air reserves, to make the minisub buoyant. Felix knew at once that this would give them their only chance to get out without flooding the mini or risking being crushed. The inertial navigation system, still operating but its readouts dimming by the second, showed that the mini — and by implication Challenger—was accelerating, to twenty-six knots.

No minisub or Axis diesel-AIP could go this fast. Only a nuclear fast-attack sub could. Captain Fuller was clearing the area, racing for outside the circle of possible location of any U-boat that might have picked up a commando team — actually the SEALs — that Israel would be trying to chase and destroy.

Analog gauges showed that the sea pressure in the flooded hangar had been relieved. The mini floated upward until it bumped the hydraulically closed and dogged hangar roof — another mechanical transient Felix prayed would go unnoticed — and lodged there, safe enough for now. Everything went dead except for emergency flashlights. Proper mating to Challenger’s air-lock trunk was impossible. The team would need to get back into their scubas, leave through the mini’s bottom hatch, and swim down into the air lock. Before they could even start, the minisub tilted sideways as Challenger banked into a hard turn southwest.

Chapter 46

Late afternoon, local time that Sunday in Norfolk, Ilse was becoming despondent. Captain Johansen, Admiral Hodgkiss’s senior aide, had told her she needed to come up with something to prove her innocence. Struggling all week at her console, mostly sleeping on the floor if she slept at all — studying stale data on the Snow Tiger and the odd flow noises, going through on-line references until her vision blurred — she got nowhere. She had a headache and a backache.

The door to the private workroom opened with no one knocking first. Ilse turned around. Johansen stood there, and she braced to attention, but he refused to meet her eyes. Next to him were the two FBI special agents