Authors: Joe Buff
L
ate Tuesday morning, toward the end of his regular office hours as a trade attaché, Klaus Mohr hung up from a puzzling phone call. He sat at his desk and brooded. Traffic noise coming through the open window broke in on his thoughts. A muezzin called the faithful to noon prayer from loudspeakers on the minaret of a nearby mosque. As if in counterpoint, radios and disk players outside blared as each passed by, in cars or held by pedestrians, an ever-changing mix of Western and Turkish and Arabic music that ebbed and flowed in exotic dissonance.
The musical dissonance, and the tug-of-war between theological and secular, seemed to Mohr to reflect his own mental state.
The phone call had left him concerned and confused. The voice was pleasant, female, young, and spoke German with a Pakistani accent. She’d told Mohr she was a secretary at Awais Iqbal’s company. Mr. Iqbal sent apologies that he wouldn’t be able to make the party Friday night; an export-import deal abroad had hit some snags. Instead, one of his local friends would pick Mohr up, with the same arrangements as before. The new person would be Turkish, and unlike Iqbal, he spoke fluent German. Mr. Iqbal hoped Herr Mohr would have a better time than ever.
Mohr didn’t like this.
What if Iqbal was captured by German security, and interrogated? What if the substitution of someone else on Friday night is a trap?
I need to be very careful.
The strain of it all was becoming too much. Just yesterday, he’d received a message from his wife in Berlin. She’d said she’d heard too much of his shameful philandering with prostitutes. She demanded a divorce, with full custody of their children. Legal papers were being prepared in case he resisted, and to show him she hadn’t the least desire to try to reconcile. The tone of her message was bitter.
Mohr would curtly agree to all her terms, of course. It meshed with his broader scheme perfectly. This was the ideal way to protect his family from Axis retribution—if he defected successfully, and also if he was caught.
But the reality of her message pierced Mohr’s soul. He dearly loved his wife and children. If only he could explain. But there was no way he could ever explain.
Other things troubled Mohr too. Activity in the classified part of the consular facilities was suddenly heating up. He feared the Axis knew there was a leak somewhere. The pressure to finalize everything for Plan Pandora had skyrocketed. He saw that this forced his hand.
I must be sure the equipment is working smoothly, very soon. No further delaying tactics or I’ll be faced with a guaranteed no-win: Lingering equipment trouble will mean I can’t go out Friday night with the Turk, a trivial matter compared to Pandora from my superiors’ point of view. . . . I might be put under scrutiny for sabotage, or arrested, if the technical work develops further glitches now. . . . And I won’t be able to assure that one Kampfschwimmer team with their crucial gear are in the safe house Friday after midnight.
That last thing screamed to be Mohr’s top priority. Without the gear, and with the Pandora schedule moved up, his knowledge by itself became quite worthless to the Allies—the same way his special gear, without him alive and present to explain it, would do the Allied cause no good.
Mohr pondered in near despair . . .
Got it!
I’ll pretend one attack team’s gear set is a lemon. Plagued by gremlins, as the old American expression went. . . . Yes. The set I started fiddling with on Sunday, which I’ll fix but then miscalibrate in a different way before it’s field-tested again in the daytime on Friday.
Mohr knew he needed to have the other gear sets functioning flawlessly, to save his skin and keep viable his last-ditch hope of defecting—which meant he had no choice but to leave behind for German use ten copies of a working, terrible weapon.
Mohr’s stomach turned as he had another realization. If he told his bosses about the call he’d just received, they could, for entirely different reasons, refuse to let him go: A last-minute change might make his bodyguards suspicious. Iqbal had been inside the consulate before, and after meeting with Mohr he’d been covertly photographed, then given a discreet background check. Who was this other person? Mohr hadn’t even been given a name. He only knew that Iqbal’s secretary had said Iqbal told her he vouched for the man. Assuming that some clever explanation by the Turk when he showed up, or maybe a note signed by Iqbal—whose signature the lobby log had on file—kept that part from becoming a problem later, the altered invitation gave Mohr’s bosses an easy opening to order him to decline it now, and simply stay on duty and stick to Pandora. . . . Yet if Mohr’s phone calls were monitored by consular security, for him to not tell his bosses early would definitely raise a red flag.
He’d never dreamed that espionage could be this complicated.
Mohr had to report the change immediately. He prayed he’d still be allowed to attend the party. Smooth-talking his superiors got harder every time—he was running out of ideas and excuses, and they were getting visibly annoyed.
The answer stared at Mohr from on top of his desk. His callousness surprised him. He would use the letter from his soon-to-be ex-wife as a tool, as his ticket to go with the Turk on Friday night: Now of all moments, divorcing, he needed thoroughly decadent release to clear his head. But the people he reported to might answer in just the opposite way: Now of all moments, he needed to reserve his head for essential business only.
If he couldn’t attend the party, but was instead taken directly to the safe house with strengthened bodyguards, he’d never make contact with the Turk, never brief his rescuers on the safe house’s inner layout, or even be able to tell them where it was. Even if his rescuers managed to tail him anyway, he’d never evade his own bodyguards and the Kampfschwimmer—if shooting started he’d probably die in the cross fire. . . . And that assumed his bodyguards and the Kampfschwimmer didn’t have secret instructions to make sure Mohr was never captured alive.
Wednesday morning, Captain Johansen, with Admiral Hodgkiss himself, came into Ilse’s workroom. Ilse stood to attention, surprised to see the admiral there in person.
“At ease, Lieutenant,” Hodgkiss said, “though nothing about this will be easy.”
“Yes, sir.” Ilse was crestfallen. She had an idea of what was coming. She was also frightened—to land in the clutches of America’s overstretched, imperfect criminal-justice system as an accused foreign spy in a war could be the end of her.
“The director of the FBI has gone over my head to try to convince the CNO to pull your security clearance and sever your relationship with the United States Navy.”
“What now?”
“I placed my reputation on the line to back you up. This bought us time, but not a lot. The FBI is having an indictment drawn up against you for espionage. They say they had enough to go to a classified-level grand jury. The CNO told JAG to use some Byzantine jurisdictional issues to delay the indictment as long as they can. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service has also formally complained that they weren’t involved in the FBI’s work up to now, and the CNO is using that but it’ll only give us another few days. Overall, things don’t look good. The FBI director can bypass the Department of the Navy, bypass the whole Department of Defense, and cut straight to the cabinet level on matters of homeland security. He’s started to already, using something against you for which you aren’t cleared, which is circumstantial but he presents as damning, more persuasively each time he recites it. There’s also the issue of how the Axis knew when
Challenger
would sail. It might have been by HumInt, and your name remains on the dwindling shortlist of suspects.”
“Don’t my prior contributions count for
anything
?
”
“That’s one of the problems. Your most valuable services of all, things you did several months ago, are top secret and highly compartmented. Candidly, Naval Intelligence and the CIA both feel maintaining that secrecy is crucial to the outcome of the war. So crucial, in fact, that it outweighs anything else you might do for the Allies going forward. I’m sorry.”
“You mean they’re willing to cut me loose? Leave me out in the cold after everything I did for them?”
“From the perspective of military necessity, it does make sense to keep an ironclad lid on your old contributions. Especially since it’s obvious that enemy agents are working
somewhere
close to the rest of this, given the incriminating evidence against you that’s being manufactured lately. Perhaps not just to negate your effectiveness now, but also force open files that any mole would love to get his hands on.”
“Yeah.”
“Your two recent technical errors, or let me call them apparent or alleged errors, with METOC, don’t help your case.”
“I know. So what should I do?”
“Lieutenant, I trust you implicitly, partly because I do know all you’ve done to aid the Allied cause, and partly because I know Captain Fuller trusts you implicitly and I trust him.”
“Yes, sir. But what does that mean I should do?”
“Give me and JAG and the NCIS and the CNO more ammunition. Do something else, something more, of unquestionable significance to prove which side you’re loyal to.”
Ilse perked up. “Like go on another commando raid?”
“No. You’re limited to this workroom, your quarters, and the direct route in between. Adequate food will be brought to you. You’re not even to visit other parts of the base without prior written permission from Captain Johansen.”
“From now on,” Johansen said, “the marine bodyguards will continue to escort you everywhere, but their tasking is changed.”
“You mean they’re jailers.”
“The FBI insisted, as a precaution,” Hodgkiss said. “Be glad I won the fight to even still give you a work console. And we’re not sure how much longer that will last.”
“You may not communicate on any substantive issues with persons other than myself,” Johansen said. “All phone calls or e-mails from this room or your quarters to anyone on or off the base will be blocked. Electronic equipment in your quarters has been confiscated, including your cell phone and personal laptop. Data access from this console has been narrowed.”
“Solitary confinement, or nearly so. Do I get a lawyer?”
“Only after the indictment is unsealed. Then an attorney will be provided. When things get that far, in a week at the outside, your solitary confinement will be genuine, and total. The gears of the legal process will then begin to grind dispassionately, and as I say at the moment the weight of admissible evidence hangs rather heavily against you.”
“So in effect that’s my deadline to somehow clear myself.”
Hodgkiss nodded. “No more than a week, maybe less. After that you’ll be incarcerated, awaiting trial as a spy. Captain Fuller isn’t here to testify in your defense; he won’t be for some time, assuming he comes back at all. The FBI knows this and is clearly railroading procedures through in his absence.” Hodgkiss pointed at the console. “Apply your technical skills with dispatch to the projects I previously assigned you. Be the first on anyone’s staff to come up with something really good, to exonerate yourself and forestall that indictment.”
T
wo and a half days after
Challenger
and
Ohio
passed through the Strait of Gibraltar, there was still no sign they’d been detected. For much of that period, Jeffrey had the task group secure from battle stations, so captains and crews wouldn’t be worn ragged. Both ships returned to their regular watch-keeping schedules, with good meals and adequate sleep and recreation, for the one-thousand-nautical-mile trip paralleling North Africa. In water mostly ten thousand feet deep, they resumed the cruising formation they had used in the Atlantic, at a speed of eighteen knots.
To pass the time, a checkers tournament was held in the enlisted mess; an electrician’s mate, the odds-on favorite, won, as expected. His reward was to pick the toppings for the pizzas baked for midrats, an extra meal served every day at midnight. The chiefs, in their separate quarters, played bridge or cribbage; some were wickedly good at both. The wardroom, with Jeffrey joining in now and then, went on a binge of watching old cowboy movies on the wide-screen video monitor on the bulkhead there, as each officer’s workload allowed.
Despite the more relaxed atmosphere, and the lack of sounds of battle from outside, reminders of the impending Afrika Korps offensive never ceased. The on-watch control-room crew tracked noise from a large number of merchant ships, some of them neutral and some of them enemy owned. Many cargo vessels plied the routes between the underside of Europe and ports in Africa. Sonar men reported that most of these rode deep, heavily laden, if going to Africa, but rode shallower, in ballast, heading back north. Jeffrey sometimes wondered what the Allies intended to do to interfere. This logistics buildup made the Afrika Korps stronger every day. As tempting as it was, Jeffrey’s orders were explicit: Hold your fire unless first fired on by the enemy and evasion gives no recourse. Avoid at all cost
any
event that might compromise the Zeno extraction.
Over the deep Alboran and then Algerian Basins, the prevailing currents had been in the task group’s favor, and they used this to make better time. Then they passed through the strait between westernmost Sicily and Tunisia’s jutting Cape Bon—at almost 100 miles wide, spacious compared to Gibraltar. They steamed on toward Malta, the little island now coming up fast. Malta lay between southeastern Sicily and western Libya. All three places were firmly in German hands. Jeffrey ordered his task group to go to battle stations.
Because of the timing forced on him by his mission, it was broad daylight. Visual observations by the enemy would be much easier, Axis personnel would be more lively and alert, and worst of all there was LASH. It turned the sun itself into a mortal threat for submarines while shallow. The acronym seemed apt. The mere thought of it made Jeffrey feel as if he was getting flogged, the skin and flesh on his bared back being flayed by an unseen adversary. LASH really might be the end of them all.
Jeffrey hoped to God that he was doing the right thing. He could no longer put it off; he warily eyed his displays.
North of Malta was a broad bank that extended to the Sicilian coast, barely fifty miles away. The bank rose like a hump from the bottom to less than 300 feet. The water over this hump was the Malta Channel.
South of Malta lay a short stretch of deep water, studded with seamounts in close proximity behind which anything might be hiding—moored hydrophones, antisubmarine mines, or German class 212s. Then came the vast Tunisian Plateau, where all the water was even shallower than in the Malta Channel.
It’s time, again, to do the unexpected—according to plan.
“Nav, recommend a course through the Malta Channel. Down the middle.”
“Zero-nine-seven, sir.” Just south of due east. Sessions obviously had the answer ready before Jeffrey asked.
“V’r’well, Nav,” Jeffrey said briskly. “Helm, on my mark, left five degrees rudder, make your course zero-nine-seven.”
Meltzer acknowledged.
“Fire Control, signal
Ohio.”
Jeffrey gave the information for the course change, on his mark.
Bell acknowledged, then said that
Ohio
acknowledged receipt of warning of the turn.
“Mark.”
Challenger
turned and
Ohio
followed. The formation turn was executed smoothly, no easy maneuver since
Ohio
handled differently from
Challenger.
I have to give Parcelli his due. His people learn well from even the slightest practice.
The Malta Channel area teemed with fish, and with fishing boats and their nets. The shoals and banks of the channel also teemed with offshore natural-gas drilling platforms, which made all sorts of machinery noise—and undersea pipes, which gave off flow noise.
Challenger
and
Ohio
continued on course for the channel. They adjusted their depth for the rising local topography.
As the water became more and more shallow, the background-noise level rose. The highlight, in Jeffrey’s mind, was Mount Etna, a live volcano on Sicily 11,000 feet tall. Magma shifted constantly in widespread underground chambers, and vibrations too subtle for people on land to notice threw valuable extra decibels into the sea. The channel’s current made even more noise, as its lower portions flowed over jagged protrusions from what the chart indicated as “Numerous Wrecks,” or it gushed past platform pylons. The magma displacements created magnetic anomalies.
Merchant shipping continued to churn the waters overhead.
Jeffrey went through the whole series of orders and responses with Bell and Meltzer, to command the task group to slow to five knots. The reduced speed was necessary for several reasons. In shallower water, as the outside pressure lessened, to go much faster would make
Ohio
’s screw begin to cavitate. This was the submarine equivalent of a car burning rubber from too much torque to the tires and not enough road traction. Cavitation threw off a characteristic hissing, a dead giveaway to the vessel’s presence;
Challenger
’s cowled pump jet was much less prone to this than
Ohio
’s huge bronze screw. And too shallow, if they didn’t slow, both subs would create a moving hump on the surface above their hulls, with a subtle propulsor wake that trailed behind. Even in choppy water in a busy shipping channel, enemy forces processing special radar bounced off the surface could eke out the truth that something submerged was there.
The blend of these factors robbed Jeffrey of an important option for the next several hours: They dared not put on a burst of speed to avoid a potential problem. To do so would tell the Axis exactly where to zero in.
Everyone in the control room knew it too. People hunched tensely over their consoles. Whenever a fresh, unidentified sonar contact was listed, some of the newer men cringed.
Challenger
and
Ohio
entered the thirty-mile-long channel. The clearance between the surface and the bottom became even narrower. This impaired sonar performance, because sound paths bouncing repeatedly between the waves and the seafloor muck lost signal strength before they could spread very far.
A double-edged sword.
The same bad propagation that muffled the task group’s signature also made both vessels partly blind.
We won’t have much advance notice of ships on a possible collision course. A supertanker’s keel is still as dangerous to us as the unseen part of an iceberg would be to that tanker.
Jeffrey’s primary worry remained optical detection—including LIDAR and LASH. LIDAR, at least, was active, and photonic sensors on
Challenger
’s and
Ohio
’s hulls could warn if a laser emitter was near. The water in the channel was turbid—cloudy—from biologic waste, erosion silt, particles from undersea volcanoes, dust blown from the deserts of North Africa, and human pollution. So a laser would scatter light in all directions, tipping off the task group to move to one side before the hostile emitter could get a measurable return.
LASH, on the other hand, was completely passive. The sunlight of Sicily this time of year was infamously strong. No storm had brewed up to give fortuitous cover. The weather, confirmed acoustically and photonically by
Challenger,
was fine.
About LASH, Jeffrey could do nothing but sweat and continue to pray. He did both, in deadly earnest. He patted his forehead with his handkerchief unashamedly; when it became too soggy, he used the cloth to squeegee further perspiration down the sides of his temples, away from his eyes.
“Sir,” Bell reported as evenly as he could,
“Ohio
signals, deploying three off-board Seahorse Mod Five probes.”
It was time to implement the next part of the plan.
“Very well, Fire Control,” Jeffrey said very formally. “Signal
Ohio,
‘Commander Task Group acknowledges.
Challenger
now deploying two LMRS probes.’ ”
“Ohio
acknowledges, sir.”
The LMRS probes were launched through torpedo tubes, and controlled by fiber-optic wire or via acoustic digital link. The Seahorses were larger, because they could be carried in triplets in one of
Ohio
’s big old missile tubes. They were fully autonomous, had much longer range and endurance, and their sensors were much more capable than the smaller ones on an LMRS; with a minisub in its in-hull hangar,
Challenger
couldn’t accommodate even one Seahorse probe—another reason
Ohio
was so vital as an escort.
By using acoustic links, both ships could see the data from all five probes. The off-board unmanned vehicles moved on ahead, searching stealthily for obstructions or hazards, like five fingers feeling their way for items lost under a dresser. The probes’ low-probability-of-intercept super-high-frequency active sonars, and passive image-intensification cameras, did most of their work. Transiting the Malta Channel, these feeds were indispensable.
Fishing nets could extend for miles from a trawler, Jeffrey knew. An uncharted wreck could lie on the bottom, with the top of its mast or superstructure rising many feet up from the floor. Loose or misplaced mines, or even unexploded ones left from World War II, could also be anywhere.
In conditions like these, an Axis U-boat might be anywhere.
Jeffrey watched his console as all the data kept pouring in. Murky black-and-white pictures showed him trash strewn on the channel floor—liquor and beer bottles, big tin cans with their opened lids bent back, and empty oil drums were common.
Then some probes found the edges of debris fields leading to wrecks. The control-room mood became grim, fatalistic. A shiver went up Jeffrey’s spine as his task group passed each drowned graveyard. He got an all-too-explicit tour of a World War II cargo ship, lying on its side with a huge hole punched below the waterline. The styling of the ship looked Italian or German, not British.
Probably hit by a Royal Navy sub, in the era of the battles for Tobruk and El Alamein.
Now and then Jeffrey needed to change course, coordinating with
Ohio,
to avoid one danger or another in their path. He asked Milgrom to turn on the sonar speakers.
The racket he could hear was reassuring. These waters were noisy indeed.
Milgrom reported aircraft overflights. These included military helos—identified by their engine power and transmission-gear ratio—and fixed-wing maritime patrol planes—also identified by their engine and prop sounds.
Jeffrey did what he could to steer away from the projected path of each aircraft. The formation’s own plotted path on his chart became a confusing zigzag, headed vaguely east. It was nearing local noon; the sunshine would aim straight down at them.
Milgrom announced another patrol plane.
Too close.
“Hard left rudder! Due north!”
Bell typed frantically and Meltzer yanked his wheel. The task group made a panic turn to clear the zone beneath the aircraft.
“Natural-gas platform dead ahead,” Sessions stated between clenched teeth.
Jeffrey ordered another sharp turn, back on course, just as the aircraft flew by.
Two dozen people collectively held their breaths and waited forever.
“No depth charges dropped or torpedo-engine sounds,” Milgrom whispered hoarsely once her chief and his men were positive.
Everyone, including Jeffrey, tried to breathe normally.
We sure are doing the unexpected. No nuclear submarine captain in his right mind would go through the Malta Channel if he had any choice. The deep water with its seamount maze was a much more logical tactic.
Not for the first time, Jeffrey asked himself if he’d done the right thing choosing to steer this way, or if he’d let down everyone whose survival depended on his leadership judgment.
And then, before his eyes, the bottom suddenly dropped off to 600 feet, then 1,500, then 6,000, and then 10,000. Jeffrey had been so preoccupied that he was startled to see that they were through the Malta Channel, safe. The Ionian Basin beckoned, the deepest part of the Med.
“Yee-haw,”
the exhausted assistant navigator, a senior chief from Galveston, murmured under his breath. He typed and called up a different chart on the digital-plotting table, repeated on Jeffrey’s console screen; the Malta Channel vanished.
“Yee-haw is right,” Jeffrey answered out loud.
Challenger
’s course remained steady, east. The African coastline veered away south, while the heel and toe of Italy lay far north. Well ahead stood occupied Greece.
“Chief of the Watch, secure from battle stations.” Officers, chiefs, and other enlisted crewmen began to unwind, waiting for their regular watch-standing reliefs to arrive.
Two minutes later, Gerald Parker strolled in. “May I observe, Captain? Sheer curiosity. I’ve barely seen your control room since we set sail.”
Jeffrey wished Parker would just go away. The chemistry between the two was bad and not getting better. Their personal styles, their outlooks on life, the professional worlds in which they moved were too different. Dinner chitchat in the wardroom kept making this painfully clear. Jeffrey tried every human-relationship management tool he’d been taught over the years as part of his navy training, but Parker saw through them at once. He always bobbed and weaved, as if he were subtly taunting Jeffrey. His attitude stayed adversarial, and he never let down his guard. His goal appeared to be to show Jeffrey that the CIA man was vastly sharper at reading personalities, spotting needs and motivations, and exploiting weaknesses to manipulate people. He never gave an inch, never offered a single gesture of trust, and never tired of verbal jousting—he actually seemed to enjoy it.