Straits of Power

good eye in judging the other vessels’ distances and speeds and even their masters’ intentions — the ship-to-ship radio was useless now, there was so much shouting in different languages on every channel.

The southbound ship ahead of Jeffrey made a fatal mistake, and turned just as an approaching big cargo ship moved into its path. Their bows smacked at an angle, at a combined speed of almost fifty knots.

The forward ends of both ships crumpled hideously with a sound like rolling thunder. They recoiled off each other, dead in the water, and both began to settle by the bow. They were sinking, as salty lake water poured in through gashes and fractures in their hull plates; merchant ships lacked a surface warship’s numerous watertight compartments; their crews were too small for extensive rapid damage control.

Jeffrey saw, like ants, men rush to the lifeboats.

“Don’t do what they did,” Jeffrey said to Siregar, pointing to the sinking ships.

Siregar stood there, watching everything, pursing his lips, his eyes very grim.

He barked orders to the helmsman. Jeffrey had to steady himself as the Bunga Azul heeled one way as she made a sharp turn the other way.

Siregar blew the ship’s whistle in a series of short, sharp blasts. He seemed to be playing chicken with another oncoming vessel. Jeffrey dashed to the Bunga Azul’s starboard open-bridge wing. The northbound ship charged up their side on an opposite course with less than ten feet between its hull and theirs. As their two bridges passed, the other ship’s master shook his fist at Jeffrey angrily for ignoring the international rules of the road.

Siregar took the wheel himself. The Bitter Lakes were narrowing. They ended and the canal resumed — again only 600 feet wide. But there were more ships in the canal bed, coming north.

Siregar blew his whistle in an endless series of blasts. Bearing down on the other ships at high speed, giving them no choice but to hug the east side of the channel, he forced each small and slow vessel at the tail end of the northbound convoy out of his way.

They were clear. The Bunga Azul had the whole canal to herself. At twenty-four knots they should be past Port Suez in less than an hour, out of the canal — but with seven more hours ahead as a sitting target going through the Gulf of Suez until they reached the Strait of Jubal and finally found deep water.

Jeffrey’s laptop showed nothing from the satellite downlink.

He went out onto the open-bridge wing, on the shadier port side. He stared back behind the ship, at the water and then at the sky.

Plumes of greasy black smoke were erupting from the Bitter Lakes. Other plumes, some new and strong and others weak and thinning, rose high from the ground where dozens of planes had been shot down. The sky was still crisscrossed with contrails and missile trails, but the air battle was moving eastward.

Over the Sinai Peninsula. Closer and closer to Israel.

What if Mohr’s theater-wide Swiss-cheese effect on Egyptian and Israeli command and control was no accident? What if it had nothing to do with quantum-physics uncertainties at all, but was Mohr’s way of faking an out for himself?

What if Gerald Parker was right, and Klaus Mohr was a double agent, and Felix and his team had injected the very worm Mohr claimed to be trying to halt?

What if I made the biggest blunder in modern military history, and handed Imperial Germany control of the Middle East?

Jeffrey stood alone on the bridge wing as the Bunga Azul ran south. He felt a strong breeze on his back from her speed. He watched the churning and splashing of her screws, and looked at her wake, receding behind them, and his mind began to wander into a state of despair.

He also watched the horizon carefully, to north and east and west. He waited for the thing he dreaded most: a searing flash, a mushroom cloud, as the Israelis, out of desperation, used their nuclear option to halt the Afrika Korps advance — or the Germans used the nuclear option first, to preempt.

The fate of the world is teetering on the edge of a razor blade, and I don’t know what’s happening beyond what little I can see from here… and it’s all my fault for disobeying, no, inventing orders.

Jeffrey remembered what Klaus Mohr had said in that message he’d sent from the brothel: “Eternal darkness if we fail.”

It was true, that sentence, regardless of Mohr’s real motives. Nuclear winter and human extinction — or an unbreakable Axis grip on half the world, with covetous, emboldened glances cast at the other half.

Which is it, Herr Doctor Mohr? What did you do? Was that message really you begging for help, or you luring me into a trap of unimaginable deviousness?

Jeffrey lost track of how long he stood there on the bridge wing, staring back toward Egypt and Israel, as the ship passed Port Suez and Port Taufiq and the empty northbound anchorages, and then buoy after buoy as she went south. Now, from time to time he saw natural-gas platforms. The sand dunes of African Egypt rolled by, on and on to Jeffrey’s left as he looked astern. The rugged, more irregular Sinai-peninsula coast on his right was sometimes near and sometimes far.

“Sir!” Siregar called him.

Jeffrey had been gripping the bridge wing rail so tightly for so many hours that his fingers were cramped like claws. He needed to pull his upper body away to get his hands free.

The master offered an intercom handset to Jeffrey. He tried to take it, but dropped it. The cramping in his fingers was horribly painful and they wouldn’t respond to his will.

Siregar held the handset to his head for him.

“Captain,” Jeffrey said.

“XO,” Bell said. “Sir, the ESM room reports that jamming strength is declining. They aren’t sure if it’s because we’re farther away from the battle now, or what.”

“And…? ”

“They think they’ll have the satellite feed in a minute.”

“Understood. I’ll watch the laptop screen up here.” Jeffrey had it sitting on a shelf under one of the bridge windows, beside a pile of thick mariners’ reference manuals. He glanced at the Bunga Azul’s bridge crew. They all stood very tensely, looking terribly tired and worried. Their fear of intentional Axis air attack, or an errant cruise missile from out of nowhere, was valid, contagious, and thick.

The laptop screen came alive. Red and green icons peppered the map of the eastern Med and the countries around it.

Things did look grim. German tank divisions were racing across Egypt’s western desert, toward El Alamein. Israeli and Egyptian tanks were in the wrong place, useless, too far south to stop them, on the other side of the impassable Qattara Depression—150 miles long from east to west.

Aircraft were fighting now over the eastern Sinai; the Israeli Air Force seemed unable to keep the Luftwaffe squadrons from shoving ever forward. The ekranoplans were moving past the Nile Delta now, continuing east. With their speed of three hundred knots, they could be unloading around Tel Aviv in under an hour. It looked like the Germans were going to achieve the unthinkable — air superiority inside Israel’s borders, and naval superiority along her coast. With Israel’s armored brigades so far away and so slow, the country was in imminent danger of being overrun.

There were no icons denoting tactical nuclear explosions — yet. A counter in a window in one corner of the display showed zero atomic detonations in Germany so far.

How much longer will Israel’s top commanders wait? When will the counter in that window start to climb above zero, toward ten, if Israel begins to set off the A-bombs she planted in Germany?

For all the situational awareness the digital displays gave him, Jeffrey loathed his current status as a spectator. He understood much better what senior people like Admiral Hodgkiss, or the president, must be going through, onlookers in war rooms with largely passive roles as distant battle was joined — a battle over which they no longer had any input or influence. Jeffrey too had already done his thing, made his decision and now would live or die by it, his ordering of the SEALs to take Mohr into Israel secretly.

Something strange began to happen on the screen. The Israeli aircraft formations, like scattered pieces of a ruined jigsaw puzzle, started to assemble themselves into a perceivable, rational pattern.

Icons for air-search radars suddenly came alive all over the Sinai and in Israel’s Negev Desert. Other icons, for surface-launched supersonic antiaircraft missiles, popped onto the screen as if from out of nowhere.