Straits of Power (33 page)

“No signs of human activity at all, actually. I heard some ricochets, but I don’t think they hit anyone.”

“Okay, good.”

“They knew to keep their heads down. This sort of area, stray bullets are not unique to tonight, believe me. . . . Sorry about your man.”

Felix grunted. He was starting to get choked up. He
hated
the after-action adrenaline crash, especially when his team took losses.

Salih and Costa trotted down the block and around the corner, returning in the gypsy cab and the Hyundai.

Everyone quickly squashed into one vehicle or the other, equipment and computer gear and body bag and all. Salih drove over to the parked German BMW. Costa in the Hyundai, with Felix and two men in back and the dead Gabrielli across their laps, sped to Mohr in the Mercedes.

They distributed their loads more evenly. Gabrielli was placed in the trunk of the Mercedes. The cars roared off in four different directions—just as the sounds of sirens began in the distance.

By splitting up and blending in, the cars were able to evade police and regroup at their final meeting point. To make better time, they used different roads than before, choosing routes that were more open, less congested—hostile surveillance was less of a problem now than direct interdiction by Turkish authorities.

Some of the cars went straight north through a belt of university campuses. Others, including Felix in the Mercedes with Salih and Mohr, looped northeast and then northwest, past a big synagogue and a massive cathedral—then came mosques, palaces, harems, and an ancient Roman arena, made into museums, all closed this time of the night.

The team got back together in a dark and deserted park, on the south shore of the Golden Horn, between the Ataturk Bridge and the Galata Bridge. They unloaded all their equipment, the wounded men—Porto and de Mello Vidal—and the body bag with Gabrielli inside. Then the four vehicles were driven off to be concealed behind bushes close to each bridge. The SEALs left two damaged Turkish MP-5s, magazines of Czech ammo, and phony “EMNIYET” flak vests in some of the cars; the uncleaned submachine guns had very obviously been recently fired, and some of the flak vests had bullet hits in them or blood on them. By morning the real police would find them, maintaining the SEALs’ cover story of being rogue Portuguese anti-German extremists. The cars dumped by the two bridges would make it look like the guerrillas had changed mounts after the attack and driven into the New City.

Felix and three unwounded SEALs all ran back to the meeting point after disposing of the cars. The distance they’d each had to cover was half a mile, but they put every ounce of remaining endurance into it, and they were worn out.

Felix lowered the sonar transducer into the putrid water of the Golden Horn, and activated it. While they waited for Meltzer to hear them and approach in the minisub, Salih and the unwounded SEALs changed from battle dress into their dive gear.

With binoculars Felix scanned the water for Meltzer’s periscope. The meeting point was in a little cove on the shore of the park, giving a bit of added privacy.
There.
Felix saw the periscope, looking straight back at him, not moving. He knew the photonics head had an image-intensification mode just like his binocs did, so Meltzer surely saw him. Meltzer had come as close in as he could, without the top of the mini showing or the bottom lock-in chamber hatch becoming mired in the mud.

“Chief, you and me.” Felix and Costa clipped themselves together with a six-foot lanyard and quietly entered the water. Soon they returned, carrying what looked like a streamlined coffin.

“Klaus,” Felix said, “you first. Then your equipment. Then we take the wounded, one by one.”

Mohr had already been briefed. Felix undid the watertight clamps and opened this pressure-proof personnel transfer capsule. Mohr lay down inside and Felix strapped him in and turned on the air supply. He resealed the capsule. Mohr gave him a thumb’s-up through the little window where a passenger’s face would be, riding inside with no need to wear scuba gear or even be able to swim.

Felix adjusted the buoyancy tanks of the capsule. He and Costa went underwater with the grand prize of their extraction mission safely cocooned—Herr Doctor Klaus Mohr, alias Peapod to the CIA, code name Zeno to the Axis.

Chapter 38

A
t noon on Saturday, Jeffrey tapped his foot impatiently outside the air-lock trunk that led up into
Challenger
’s minisub hangar. The mini had docked and the hangar doors were closed; the ship was secured from battle stations. The minisub had returned seven hours earlier than seemed possible, and Jeffrey
really
wanted to know why.

He’d verified that Felix was in the mini and not under duress by using the acoustic link to ask questions only Felix himself could properly answer. And he knew there were casualties.

Felix half-stumbled out of the air lock, exhausted and elated all at once. “Woo, was that one hell of a ride!”

Challenger
’s chief medical corpsman and his assistants moved in and climbed up to assist the wounded SEALs. They would work on them inside the minisub first, then lower them strapped into Stokes litters, stretchers covered with protective wire cages.

Gerald Parker came down the ladder from the mini, also visibly frazzled—and frustrated, irritated, even incensed.

An unfamiliar figure appeared behind Parker. He was tall and slim and handsome, blond with blue eyes. Jeffrey thought he looked as thoroughly German as a German ever could; he had to resist his natural impulse to hate the man on sight as the enemy. His hair and clothes were a mess. His face was gaunt; he needed a shave and his eyes were bloodshot.

The stranger glanced around at his new environment, bewildered at first. He quickly got his bearings, and recognized Jeffrey.
From my picture somewhere?

Parker and Felix opened their mouths to say something, but the German beat them to it.

“Captain Fuller, it is a great honor to meet you at last. My name is Klaus Mohr. We must speak in private immediately.”

Parker butted in. “Captain, I would not recommend it. Mohr has been uncooperative since he stepped into the minisub. He repeatedly refused to give me a debrief of any kind. He’s holding something back when he should be spilling his guts out to me.”

Mohr gave Parker a look of contempt. Perfect Aryan specimen and haughty Ivy League WASP glared at each other.

Jeffrey, feeling bombarded, turned to Felix. “Lieutenant?”

“Well, yeah. He said he needed to rest, and wanted to have to go through the details only once, with the man in charge. You, Captain. Then he told us that every hour counted, and that the minisub couldn’t waste fuel. He suggested a way to solve the latter problem.”

“And?”

“I assessed it to be feasible, and also advantageous since our fuel margin was already slim. It worked—I have to give him that much. In the big picture, I don’t know. My job was to deliver the guy. He’s here.” Felix shrugged.

Jeffrey decided to slow this conflict down to get control over it. He’d take things step-by-step. He sized Mohr up. He wasn’t surprised that there was antagonism between Mohr and Parker, considering how badly Jeffrey and Parker got along. Parker was overbearing, a bully, a snob. That might work in other contexts, with agents Parker thought he owned because of extortion or whatever, but it was clear at once that Klaus Mohr knew nobody owned him. He had a very intelligent face, a dignified bearing, evident self-pride, and, if half the CIA’s guesswork was right, he’d also have heavyweight academic credentials. From Mohr’s point of view, if sincere, he was doing the Allies a favor, not the other way around.

Parker is the wrong man for this job. . . . But I’ve learned a few things from him. I can manipulate too.

Jeffrey intended to put Mohr through the wringer. And he’d do it subtly, only after first breaking the ice.

“What was your time-saver, Herr Mohr? May I call you Klaus?”

“In my role as trade attaché, I know . . .” He frowned to himself. “Excuse me, I
knew
the sailing times of shipping bound for Axis-occupied ports. Several were leaving Istanbul before dawn. I said we should hitch ourselves to one.”

“A routine dive task when you think about it, sir,” Felix said, sounding much more tired now. “We used the mini’s tow cable to attach it to the bottom of the rudder pin of a big merchie that mostly did twenty-two knots once she got under way. At twelve thousand tons displacement, we figured she wouldn’t notice the drag of a sixty-ton mini. Hair-raising trip, submerged right under her wake, but it did get us to you faster.”

“How’d you unhitch at twenty-two knots?”

“Near this end of the Dardanelles we used the switches that jettison the mini’s tow cleats from inside. . . . The merchie gets tangled in that loose cable, well, score one for us. It’ll look like some kind of accident, right? Remember, sir, everything’s German.”

Jeffrey watched in silence as the two wounded SEALs were brought down and under the corpsman’s supervision their litters went into the wardroom. Gamal Salih helped, not his usual irrepressibly chipper self now, but still glad to have had a chance to hurt Germany as a front-line freedom fighter again.

The body bag with the dead SEAL came down, carried by four of Felix’s men.

Jeffrey pointed aft. “The freezer. The mess-management people will show you.” Bodies were stored there when space permitted. “My condolences on your loss.”

The SEALs left with their burden, not saying anything.

We paid a high price to get you, Klaus Mohr, including the sacrifice of
Ohio,
and there’s still a long way to go to arrive home safe.

“Mr. Parker, Lieutenant Estabo, Herr Mohr, follow me
now.”

Jeffrey had the three of them—Gerald Parker of the CIA, Felix Estabo the SEAL, and Klaus Mohr, German defector—wait in Bell’s stateroom while Jeffrey went and fetched Bell.

“Time to open my egress orders,” Jeffrey said when he and Bell were alone in Jeffrey’s stateroom. He unlocked his safe and pulled out the bulky envelope, then carefully entered the code to bypass the anti-tamper incendiary mechanism.

He read the hard-copy orders silently. “No surprises to us. Let’s hope they’ll be a big surprise to the enemy.” He handed the orders to Bell.

Bell looked them over, his expression becoming haunted for a moment. “It’s awful seeing the references to
Ohio.
I keep feeling we should have done
something
to help them.”

“That subject is closed,” Jeffrey said curtly.
Ohio
was to have separated from
Challenger,
to lurk in the Med, so her vast weaponry could be used to help repulse the Afrika Korps offensive. Then she was supposed to sneak out past Gibraltar, the same way she’d sneaked in.

Turned out to be a one-way trip for Parcelli.
Jeffrey pushed the thought from his mind. It was too poignant, and he had other difficulties—two of which were that
Ohio
’s arsenal was gone from the playing field at a critical time, and her loss left lingering, unanswered questions about an Axis mole or trap.

Jeffrey took the orders back from Bell, entered the code to rearm the incendiary, and gingerly put the pouch in his safe. “XO, have a messenger get our guests in here. They’re right next door but I want to stand on ceremony. . . . For now, you’re command duty officer. Stay in the control room and keep an eye on things. We’re by no means out of the woods.”

“Understood.”

“This could take me a while. Our defector seems in a mad rush about something not yet specified, and he hasn’t exactly hit it off with our CIA friend.”

“Trouble, Skipper?”

“When have we had a mission that wasn’t trouble?”

Felix, Parker, and Mohr stood around Jeffrey’s tiny fold-down desk. They all tried talking at once.

“Quiet,” Jeffrey snapped. “One at a time. Klaus, you put yourself in harm’s way to help us. We did the same for you. So we’re even. Calm down, prioritize, tell me what I need to know.”

“Plan Pandora’s purpose is to collapse the Israeli command, control, and communications net.”

“We suspected that already,” Parker said.

“Don’t interrupt. Continue, Zeno.”

“The method of attack is based on a new type of quantum computer. . . . Let me brief you the way I briefed officials in Berlin.”

“Finally,” Parker said under his breath.

Mohr ignored him. “What I do uses quantum entanglement to achieve something called quantum teleportation, to infiltrate enemy firewalls and virus filters.”

“What’s quantum entanglement?” Jeffrey asked.

“Two entangled photons act as if they’re directly connected regardless of how far apart they become. That was one of Einstein’s discoveries, a basic property of nature, part of the way the universe works.”

“I don’t see where this is leading.”

“You will, Captain, soon, and getting this from me is necessary. In quantum computing in general, information is carried by the photons’ spin, their polarization, instead of the zeros and ones in conventional electronic binary computers.”

“How does this help you attack anybody?”

“I control swarms of entangled photons moving in a sequence that makes them look like random strays, the ultimate in seemingly harmless noise. I send one photon from each entangled pair into the targeted networks. That’s step one. Then, at my end, I slow their partners to a walking pace for a microsecond, long enough to be able to alter their spins to become specific bits in a computer worm’s program-code string. That’s step two.”

“I still don’t see what this has to do with cyberwar.”

“The distant photons automatically acquire the same new spin because they’re entangled with the ones at my end. So they too suddenly form into the worm, already past every firewall. It’s as if I reach across into someone else’s systems through another dimension. That’s why scientists call it teleportation.”

“It happens instantly, this spin change at the far end?”

“As I said, that’s what quantum entanglement means. There’s much more to it, to be able to harness that instant action-at-a-distance without violating the light-speed restriction on any transfer of measurable information. Solving that was one of my most significant insights. Unlike all the other countries working on practical teleportation, I looked for and found a way to accomplish it where I didn’t need someone cooperating with me at the far end, performing the things required to keep Einstein’s speed limit satisfied. The lack of that need for friendly assistance is what starts to make the quantum computer a weapon instead of a calculator. . . . There’s the lesser issue of decoherence, which is the term for the entanglement gradually falling apart as the photons interact more and more with their environment. I invented a method to hold back decoherence for much longer than anyone else has been able to do.”

“And then what?”

“The other crucial thing was that I realized the Israelis and everyone else were viewing quantum computing in a very different way. They wanted it to replace much slower classical computers. I worked toward
hacking
normal computers, servers, and routers using quantum computer entanglement teleportation. That’s my second breakthrough. It completes the weaponization concept. And I and my team, in secret, we got there first.”

Parker snorted. “It sounds like a bunch of science fiction gobbledygook to me.”

“How much do you know about nuclear physics?” Jeffrey asked.

“Nothing, frankly.”

“Well, I know a little something. Proceed, please, Herr Mohr, but try to wrap it up.”

“To summarize, a flood of seemingly random photons are made to collate themselves into countless copies of the worm, too late to be stopped. The quantum worm then propagates further once inside each infected processor. There’s no need to dupe any users into opening attachments. The worm paralyzes operating systems and launches a massive denial-of-service attack at everything from military headquarters to fighter-jet avionics to cell-phone switching centers to battle-tank fire-control computers, and power plants and even digitized data-link radios carried by infantry. The multiplier effect, the negative synergy, of so many nodes and facilities crashing at once is catastrophic.” Mohr was breathless by the time he was done.

Jeffrey glanced at Felix. “Lieutenant? How much on-scene vetting could you do before the final extraction?”

“Klaus gave references to unclassified work on the theory, and some lab experiments that showed the principles did work. Tunable laser diodes, narrow band-pass wavelength filters, beam-splitter crystals, semireflecting mirrors, and a bunch of other, weirder stuff. We checked them on-line at a pay terminal. Some of the papers were even written in Israel. Tel Aviv University, and the Technion in Haifa.”

“Well,” Jeffrey told Mohr, “there’s plenty of time to sort this all out when we get you to America.”

“You don’t understand. Plan Pandora has been moved up. Berlin must have suspected something, either a leak or a spoiling attack by the Allies against the Afrika Korps. Their worst fears will be confirmed when they find the dead Kampfschwimmer and no sign of my corpse.”

“What’s their launch date for the offensive?”

“Six
A.M.
Tuesday, Berlin time.”

Jeffrey was shocked. “That’s way earlier than we thought. Way,
way
earlier.”

“We have to stop the computer attack
soon,
or all is lost.”

“You want us to go after the attack team?”

“There are too many of them.”

“Explain.”

“There are eleven separate teams, to make sure that at least one succeeds. Every gear set in existence has been thrown into this. Different approach routes and methods of attack. Some are going by U-boat, after covert pickup on the Turkish coast. Others will ride on merchant ships. At least one will go with help from local anti-Israel extremists into southern Lebanon.”

“Details? Routes? Specific targets?”

“I was insulated from that part, for security. But there are two methods of inserting the entangled photons for the worm. One is by directly tapping a fiber-optic land line.”

“So the teams need to get into Israel?”

“And survive long enough to hook up the equipment to the lines, which takes less effort than you might think.”