Authors: Joe Buff
L
ate 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 who’d interrogated her many days before. They looked triumphant. Ilse caught a glimpse of a squad of armed marines in the corridor before Johansen swung the door shut.
One of the special agents pulled out a set of handcuffs. Ilse backed up against her console, shaking her head back and forth in fear and disbelief. They grabbed her, spun her around, and cuffed her wrists behind her back. “You are under arrest.”
“Captain,” Ilse pleaded, “what’s going on? I didn’t
do
anything.”
“They all say that,” the more dominant of the two special agents snapped. “Then they try to cut a deal, to cheat the hangman. Then they don’t have much to offer. Then they hang.”
“Captain.”
Johansen finally made eye contact, but his eyes were icy cold. “It was in the open literature all along, and you’ll be incommunicado anyway. . . . METOC figured out that the Snow Tiger is almost certainly German. You appear to have not done enough to allow the Allies to track the Snow Tiger, then you misled us into thinking that her flow noise was a natural phenomenon.”
“But how could a submarine go so fast and
not make tonals
?
”
“An obscure paper by Hong Kong scientists. METOC found it and saw the connection. Sheets of rubber and epoxy with tiny, tuned lead balls.”
“What?”
“The indictment against you has been unsealed. A
double
titanium hull? You know how
expensive
that is? Russia doesn’t have that kind of money. Russia uses single titanium hulls for better crush depth, and if they use an outer hull for high-explosive torpedo defense, it’s always cheap steel. The only reason
anybody
would build submarines with double titanium hulls is if they expected to fight a tactical nuclear war. It takes
years
to build a nuclear submarine. Whoever paid for the Snow Tiger intended years ago to be fighting a tactical nuclear war. . . . It’s obvious when you see it.
You
of all people, with where you’ve been in battle, should have seen it, but you pretended not to.”
“You have to warn Captain Fuller!”
“That’s no longer your concern. Your clearance is revoked. There’s nothing more anyone here can do for you.”
“But I didn’t
do
anything!”
The FBI special agents dragged Ilse away.
Jeffrey listened to a short debrief from Felix, Costa, Meltzer, Salih, and Mohr after the team’s last-minute but safe return from their hair-raising excursion into Israel. Jeffrey chuckled at some parts, but was concerned by others. They’d left a very visible trail behind. This might help, if it warned Israel to be on the lookout for other—Kampfschwimmer—raiding parties. But Israel might realize quickly that one particular raid was American. They could protest to Washington, to extract further aid concessions and in the process make Jeffrey look bad at the Pentagon, or they could say nothing, to save face. In the worst outcome they might begin a hunt for alien code in their computer systems and find Mohr’s patch. Even if it was actually benign, and helpful, they might not understand it and could try to remove it, undoing whatever good Felix and Mohr had achieved—assuming they’d beaten every Kampfschwimmer team, which remained to be seen.
Jeffrey ordered Meltzer to get some sleep while he could.
Felix, in private, told Jeffrey that Klaus Mohr seemed to behave well during the mission. But Felix himself admitted he had no way to know for sure what Mohr had done, either for or against Israeli defenses. The big questions hung in the air, more distracting and odious than ever. Should Jeffrey have trusted Klaus Mohr? Was there someone smarter than Mohr in Germany, someone even Mohr himself didn’t know about, who’d tricked them all? Was Jeffrey’s decision to violate Israeli sovereignty the biggest mistake of his life?
Jeffrey accepted that, for now, things were out of his hands. All he could do in the next few hours was worry obsessively, second-guess himself over and over, and stay ready to respond to whatever did happen. He recognized that he was already in so far, the Allies had little to lose and possibly much to gain by his going one step further: On Jeffrey’s orders, Klaus Mohr applied his software patch to
Challenger
’s systems. There were no apparent ill effects, yet. But the worm was designed to hide itself until reaching its activation time. The most skilled conventional searchers might not find it until too late.
At midnight, nearing Egypt, Jeffrey went to battle stations. Once again Bell sat next to him as fire-control coordinator. The most experienced people available manned each station in the red-lit, hushed control room. Jeffrey ordered Meltzer, now somewhat refreshed and at the helm, to slow to ten knots.
The tactical plot presented a maze of Egyptian gas-drilling fields. There were dozens of offshore platforms in their path as
Challenger
climbed into shallower water. Some still operated, while others had been damaged in raids by German fighter-bombers, cruise missiles, patrol boats, or Kampfschwimmer. Some of the damaged ones were capped, while others burned unchecked, belching towering, hellish natural-gas flares above the surface.
Jeffrey told Milgrom to switch on the sonar speakers. Bubbling, roaring, clanking, creaking, and grinding sounds filled the air. This background noise, along with the ship’s own active acoustic masking, helped conceal
Challenger.
Jeffrey decided to leave the air-circulation fans on: His crew was getting worn out at this late stage in the mission, and despite his best efforts of leadership, they might let down their guards at the thought of starting for home. He wanted the control-room environment to stay nicely crisp and fresh—to keep his people at their sharpest. Just as when he approached Israel, Egypt too might consider an unknown large submerged contact to be hostile.
“Captain, Nav,” Sessions called out from the plotting table, “we are through the twelve-mile limit into Egyptian territorial waters.”
“Very well, Nav.”
Jeffrey had respect for the battle-hardened Egyptian Navy. Coastal defense was their specialty, and Jeffrey was violating their coastal waters as much as a submarine could:
Challenger
was approaching the designated anchorages at the northern entrance to the Suez Canal. In water barely 100 feet deep, even
Challenger
’s innards had enough iron and steel to get noticed by magnetic-anomaly detection at short range.
Sessions recommended a course for the proper anchorage area; Jeffrey gave new helm orders to Meltzer, telling him to reduce speed to five knots. They began to negotiate around another maze of obstacles—the undersides of floating merchant hulls.
“Our ride should be dead ahead,” Bell reported. Passage through the Suez Canal required five days’ prior notice. A place in the anchorage areas was then assigned by the Suez Canal Authority, which supervised all canal operations, including toll collection—Egypt’s largest source of hard currency came from these tolls; keeping the canal open for neutral shipping was vital to her economy. This was why Israeli and Egyptian ships had stopped using the canal soon after the start of the war—if attacked by the Axis and sunk there, the wreckage would create a long and difficult salvage job.
Ships were assigned where to anchor based on their size, their speed and maneuverability, their expected mechanical reliability, and whether they carried dangerous cargo.
Challenger
had picked up last-minute specifics by ELF radio late the week before. The incoming message had been in a code that Jeffrey could only read with a one-time-use decryption key contained in his sealed egress orders.
“Confirmed, sir,” Milgrom said. “Master Six-one is operating hull-mounted obstacle-and-mine avoidance sonar intermittently, according to pattern in prearranged instructions.” This recognition signal was also in Jeffrey’s egress orders, along with the registered name of Master 61.
“Very well, Sonar. Helm, put us beside the
Bunga Azul.”
The M/V—motor vessel—
Bunga Azul
was a large and modern bulk dry-cargo ship, over six hundred feet long, able to make a sustained speed of twenty-four knots, and with a crew of only eighteen men thanks to automation and computer assists. She’d been constructed by an American firm in a big yard on the Gulf Coast, under security precautions disguised as overdone antiterrorist measures. She was called a motor vessel and not a steamship because she was powered by huge diesel engines, which drove electric generators feeding motors attached to her twin screw shafts—a more efficient arrangement than steam for some merchant ships. She was flagged in neutral Panama, and operated by a neutral Indonesian shipping company. But Jeffrey had been told that, through intermediate dummy corporations, the ship was really controlled by the CIA. Her crew was hand-picked and well paid.
Officially, the
Bunga Azul
was heading to Indonesia with a cargo from Ukraine. In actuality, she had much more in common with the
Glomar Explorer,
the ship built in the 1960s in secret by Howard Hughes, so the CIA could salvage a sunken—and nuclear armed—Soviet
Golf
–class diesel sub that had been lost in the Pacific under suspicious circumstances. The
Glomar Explorer
was designed to float with her bottom open, to lift the Golf off the seafloor and into her hold, all unseen.
From above, the
Bunga Azul
was filled with wheat, but the holds all had false bottoms. Under that was a space large enough to accommodate a submarine the size of USS
Challenger.
Jeffrey’s problem was getting inside. She was anchored fore and aft to avoid drifting in the breeze or on the current, and her anchor chains created obstacles—plus, there was almost no room under her keel for
Challenger
to fit.
And he did not have a lot of time to enter her. Most of the canal was only one way. Ships here did not have free will. The authority sent them through in groups they called convoys. The standard 0100 convoy, south through the canal, would start forming up into single file very soon. If Jeffrey missed it, this hollowed-out merchie had to wait for the 0700 southbound convoy. The next one after that wasn’t until tomorrow, Tuesday—when the Afrika Korps offensive was due to begin, according to Mohr, and the Suez Canal was the last place on earth Jeffrey ever wanted to be trapped.
Meltzer’s piloting display showed the underwater part of the
Bunga Azul,
outlined vaguely by
Challenger
’s starboard wide-aperture array using ambient ocean noises bouncing off the hull, highlighted by acoustic hot spots wherever machinery ran within. The constant scraping of her anchor chains’ big links against each other gave further sonar clues on how to steer, but all of this wasn’t enough.
“Chief of the Watch,” Jeffrey ordered, “activate all hull-mounted photonics sensors. Passive image-intensification mode.” Stealth now was absolutely paramount; the Egyptian navy would be on guard for enemy subs finding temporary refuge under the convoy before it sailed.
COB acknowledged. Display monitors came on, but their pictures only showed darkness. Scant illumination pierced the dirty water from the quarter moon up in a cloudless sky.
“Use amplification factor one hundred thousand.” Now the water by
Challenger
became barely visible. “Helm, put us directly under Master Six-one. Use auxiliary maneuvering units as needed.” These were small and quiet propulsors near bow and stern that gave
Challenger
sideways thrust, making her much more nimble in close confines.
Jeffrey studied the display monitors. The
Bunga Azul
’s bottom seemed to be sitting on
Challenger
’s sail; the space between his own keel and the seafloor was too small for a man to stand upright.
“Helm, engage autopilot in hovering mode.”
Meltzer acknowledged. Now,
Challenger
’s computer watched for any drift in the inertial navigation fix. Commands were sent to the auxiliary maneuvering units, as well as to the pump-jet main propulsor, to hold the boat perfectly steady in every dimension except for depth. Depth was maintained by the computer working the variable ballast pumps—which Jeffrey dearly hoped would be mistaken for noises from the
Bunga Azul.
“Sonar, use look-up obstacle-avoidance array to signal we are ready for bottom doors to open.”
Milgrom acknowledged. Jeffrey watched the monitors.
Suddenly a deafening noise came over the sonar speakers.
“Master Six-one is blowing ship’s whistle.” The foghorn, supposedly stuck, was meant to disguise the mechanical transients about to occur. Radio calls would be made to apologize, explain that it wasn’t a sign of distress, and avoid attracting helos and patrol boats. At least, that was the plan.
Jeffrey knew pumps inside the
Bunga Azul
would be moving seawater out of ballast tanks that lined her sides like a floating dry dock, using that water to partly flood the central part of the ship without changing her trim. Next, Jeffrey watched as the bottom doors swung down and open. Their edges cleared both sides of
Challenger
’s sail by inches.
It was time to surface into the
Bunga Azul
’s gigantic secret compartment. Jeffrey double-checked the relative positions of his sub and the merchant ship. COB and Meltzer stood ready to take over in an instant if the autopilot malfunctioned.
Challenger
’s bow dome and her stern parts—rudder, stern planes, pump jet—were delicate, and she could easily be crippled in an upward collision with the
Bunga Azul.
If things went really sour, and the surface ship’s rudder or screws were hit by
Challenger
and damaged, Jeffrey’s entire egress ahead of the Afrika Korps offensive would be kaput.
Challenger,
her crew, Mohr, and Mohr’s computer modules all could go the way of
Ohio.