Straits of Power

JOE BUFF

STRAITS
OF
POWER

“Sir, when the love of peace degenerates into fear of war, it becomes of all passions the most despicable.”

—Senator Giles of Virginia,
to President Thomas Jefferson,
before the War of 1812

The enemy you don’t see coming, because of your own blind spots and preconceived notions, is the one who’ll get you every time—and the enemy knows it too.

Contents

Note from the author

S
ubmarines rank among the most sophisticated weapons systems, and the most impressive benchmarks of technology and engineering, ever achieved by the human race. Stunning feats of courage by their crews, of sacrifice and endurance, loom large on the pages of history. Since the end of the Cold War, a whole new generation of submarine classes, with astonishing sensors, weapons, off-board vehicles, and stealth, was conceived and is under construction by the United States Navy.

The world’s oceans are the world’s highways for the transport of goods and the conduct of commerce. Continued mastery of undersea warfare is vital, because whoever controls the ocean’s depths controls its surface, and thus protects much of the world. Seapower, strongly employed, is key to upholding peaceful societies everywhere.

But do America and our Allies take our free access through international waters too much for granted? Advanced submarine technology is proliferating among countries who haven’t always been our friends. Nuclear weapons are also spreading at an alarming pace, with transnational conspiracies, shrewdly hidden for years, only recently being unmasked. What mortal threats to freedom still remain hidden?

The enemy you don’t see coming, because of your own blind spots and preconceived notions, is the one who’ll get you every time—and the enemy knows it too. The 9/11 Commission Report warned us all of “failures of imagination” and “unprepared mindsets.” Beyond the global war on terror, what shape might the twenty-first century’s almost inevitable, eventual, major worldwide armed conflict take? When faced with so many dangerous future unknowns, the Navy wargames worst-case scenarios to learn everything it can. As a professional writer and seasoned risk analyst, my extreme action-adventure novels aim to do the same thing, based on a firm foundation of extensive, constant non-fiction research. Perhaps the only certainty is that heroic submariners and special operations forces will play a key role in deterring that next big war, or in winning it.

Prologue

B
y the middle of 2011, the global war on terror had flared up and died down repeatedly, with serious losses in treasure and blood. Personal freedoms in many countries had also been eroded, while international friendships more and more were a thing of the past. Third World economies teetered on the edge of ruin, even as some long-standing major players thrived; the divide between the haves and the have-nots gaped like an open, festering wound. Whole peoples turned inward, or turned against themselves, as ideologies became dogmas and moderation was crushed under cynical rhetoric. All this was the cost, and the legacy, inflicted or triggered by those whose highest goals were senseless destruction and death. Then, just as the worst of the terrorism seemed to have finally been contained, that struggle was eclipsed by a shocking new conflict of much greater magnitude.

In July 2011, Boer-led reactionaries seized control of the government in South Africa, which was in the midst of social chaos, and restored apartheid. In response to a UN trade embargo, the Boer regime began sinking American and British merchant ships. U.S.-led coalition forces mobilized, with only Germany and Russia holding back. Troops and tanks drained from the rest of Europe and North America, and a joint task force set sail for Africa—and into a giant, coordinated trap.

Then there was another coup, this one in Berlin, and Kaiser Wilhelm’s great-grandson was crowned, the Hohenzollern throne restored after almost a century. Ultranationalists, exploiting American unpreparedness for such all-out war, would give Germany her “place in the sun” at last. A secret military-industrial conspiracy had planned it all for years, brutal opportunists who hated the unfettered cross-border mixing of the European Union as much as they resented what to them was seen as America’s arrogance and bullying. Big off-the-books loans from major Swiss and German banks, collateralized by booty to be plundered from the losers, funded the stealthy buildup. The kaiser was the German shadow oligarchy’s figurehead to legitimize their new order. Coercion by the noose won over citizens not swayed by patriotism or the sheer onrush of events.

This Berlin-Boer Axis had covertly built small, tactical atomic weapons, the great equalizers in what would otherwise have been a most uneven fight—and once again America’s CIA was clueless. South Africa, during “old” apartheid, ran a successful nuclear arms program, canceled around 1990 because of international pressure. Preparing for the new apartheid, and working in secret with German support, the conspirators assembled many new fission devices; compact, energy-efficient, very low signature dual-laser isotope separation techniques let them purify uranium into weapons-grade quality in total privacy.

The new Axis, seeking a global empire all their own, used these low-yield A-bombs to ambush the Allied naval task force under way, then destroyed Warsaw and Tripoli. France, stunned, surrendered at once, and continental Europe was overrun. Germany won a strong beachhead in North Africa, while the South African army drove hard toward them to link up. The battered Allied task force put ashore near the Congo Basin, in a last-ditch attempt to hold the Germans and well-equipped Boers apart. In both Europe and Africa, the fascist conquest trapped countless Allied civilians: traveling businesspeople, vacationing families, student groups on summer tours. American and British citizens were herded into internment camps next to major Axis bases, factories, and transport nodes, and were held as hostages and human shields.

It was unthinkable that the Allies retaliate against Axis tactical nuclear weapons, used primarily at sea, by launching ICBMs loaded with hydrogen bombs into the heart of Western Europe—especially when the massive, murderous fallout of H-bombs dropped on land obeyed no nation’s overflight restrictions. The Axis intentionally, shrewdly, avoided acquiring any hydrogen bombs of their own. Thus the U.S. and the UK were handcuffed, forced to fight on Axis terms on ground of Axis choosing: the mid-ocean, with A-bomb-tipped cruise missiles and torpedoes. Information-warfare hacking of the Global Positioning System satellite signals, and ingenious jamming of smart-bomb homing sensors, made the Allies’ vaunted precision-guided high-explosive munitions much less precise. Advanced radar methods in the FM radio band—pioneered by Russia—removed the invisibility of America’s finest stealth aircraft.

Thoroughly relentless, Germany grabbed nuclear subs from the French, and advanced diesel subs that Germany herself had exported to other countries—these ultraquiet diesels with fuel-cell, air-independent propulsion needn’t surface or even raise a snorkel for weeks or months at a time. Some were shared with the Boers, whose conventional heavy-armaments industry—a world leader under the old apartheid system—had been revived openly during the heightened global military tensions of the early twenty-first century. A financially supine Russia, supposedly neutral yet long a believer in the practicality of limited tactical nuclear war, sold weapons as well as oil and natural gas to the Axis for hard cash. Most of the rest of the world stayed on the sidelines, biding their time out of fear or greed or both.

American convoys to starving Great Britain are being decimated by the modern U-boat threat, in another bloody Battle of the Atlantic. Tens of thousands of merchant seamen died in the Second World War, and Allied casualty lists grow very long this time too.

Almost a year into the war, in late spring of 2012, America is still recovering from serious setbacks in the Indian Ocean theater. The vital Central Africa pocket, composed of surviving U.S./coalition forces and friendly local African troops, is temporarily in less danger of being enveloped by the Axis—maybe. In a frightening new thrust from which the whole world is still reeling, Axis agents made serious trouble in Brazil and Argentina; key U.S. resource supplies and America’s southern flank were suddenly put in jeopardy.

Now, the Germans plan a fresh campaign of astonishing daring and callousness, based on a hair’s-breadth margin between success and utter catastrophe. This new Axis land offensive could topple an already unstable global geopolitical balance: Japan recently announced that it was a nuclear power, but insisted on staying neutral. Then the Israelis revealed that early in the global war on terror, they used supposed cooperation with German authorities to smuggle in and hide on German soil a dozen Hiroshima-yield atom bombs. The bombs would be set off by Mossad sleeper agents in Germany if Israel’s survival was threatened by any Axis assault. The U.S. was given no notice of this in advance, and, from America’s diplomatic and military perspective, Israel made the shocking announcement at the worst possible time. Relations between the U.S. and Israel are sundered by bitter mistrust. Most ominous of all, American and British intelligence see signs that the latest German attack somehow involves the Middle East.

If the situation deteriorates much further, and reckless Axis risk taking brings everyone involved too close to the brink—with Allied forces badly overstretched as it is—the U.S. will have no choice but to recognize German and Boer territorial gains. With so many atom bombs set off at sea by both sides, and the oil slicks from many wrecked ships, oceanic environmental damage has already been severe. Presented with everything short of outright invasion, and nuclear weapons not used against the United States homeland quite yet, the U.S. may be forced to sue for an armistice: a de facto Axis victory. A new evil empire would threaten the world, and a new Iron Curtain would fall.

America and Great Britain each own one state-of-the-art ceramic-composite-hulled fast-attack submarine—such as USS
Challenger,
capable of tremendous depths—and the Axis own such advanced vessels too. But there is a dangerous wild card, beyond the impending German land offensive. Unrecognized by the Allies for what role she’ll really play, the first in a whole new class of nuclear subs has been custom built in secret in Russia, exclusively for German use: The ultrafast and remarkably stealthy
Grand Admiral Doenitz
is armed to the teeth and about to set sail. This tremendous covert increase in the level of Russian support for the Axis might disrupt Allied operations decisively. The U.S. is on the defensive as it is, and democracy has never been more threatened. In this terrible new war, with the mid-ocean’s surface a killing zone, America’s last, best hope for enduring freedom lies with a special breed of fearless undersea warriors. . . .