Straits of Power (2 page)

Chapter 1

May 2012

C
ommander Jeffrey Fuller stood waiting in the warmth on the concrete tarmac at a small corner of the sprawling U.S. Navy base in Norfolk, Virginia. He looked up at the very blue sky, telling himself that today was a good day for flying: sunny, with almost no haze; easterly breeze at maybe ten knots; and a scattering of high, whispy, bright-white clouds. Noise from helicopters taking off and landing assaulted his ears. Another helo sat on a pad in front of him, as its powerful twin turbine engines idled. The main rotors above the Seahawk’s fuselage, over the passenger compartment, turned just fast enough to be hypnotic. Jeffrey had been badly overworked for much too long. He fought to not stare at those blades, and abandon himself to being mesmerized, and letting his mind go blank and drift away. But the intoxicating stink of sweet-yet-choking helo exhaust fumes, mixed with the subtler smell of the seashore wafting from the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, stirred his combat instincts, helping him stay alert and on his toes.

Jeffrey glanced at his watch, then at the cockpit of the matte gray Seahawk. The pilot and copilot sat side by side, running through their checklists. The helo should be ready for boarding soon.

Jeffrey was glad. Ever since he’d woken up before dawn this morning, for some reason he felt the loneliness and burdens of command with added poignancy. This seemed a warning of bad things to come, things he knew in his bones would happen soon—Jeffrey had learned to trust his sixth sense for danger and crisis through unforgiving, unforgettable experience. The ceramic-composite-hulled nuclear submarine of which he was captain, USS
Challenger,
sat in a heavily defended, covered dry dock at the Northrop Grumman Newport News Shipbuilding yards not far from here, northwest across the James River. For several weeks now she’d been laid up and vulnerable, undergoing repairs and systems upgrades after Jeffrey’s latest hard-fought battle, thousands of miles away, deep under the sea.

His rather young and clean-cut crew were working on
Challenger
around the clock, side by side with the shipyard’s gruff and gritty men and women who applied their skills to Jeffrey’s ship with a vengeance. Vengeance of a different sort was on everyone’s mind, because this terrible war against the Berlin-Boer Axis was by no stretch of the imagination close to being won. Atomic explosions were devastating the Atlantic Ocean ecosystem, and stale fallout from the small warheads being used sometimes drift to settle in local hot spots even well inland. Gas-mask satchels were mandatory for all persons east of the Mississippi; radiation detectors were everywhere. Some reservoirs, too contaminated, were closed until further notice; entire industries, including East Coast beach resorts, were wiped out, even as other industries thrived because of the war. Only price controls, and price supports, prevented rampant hyperinflation or a regional real estate market crash.

A messenger had arrived, just as Jeffrey sat down to go over today’s main progress goals with his officers. And now here he was, thanks to that message, not in the wardroom on
Challenger
but waiting for a helo shuttle at barely 0800—eight
A.M.
Taken from his ship and crew on short notice, and ordered at once to the Pentagon without even the slightest hint as to why, left Jeffrey distracted and concerned. He was a man who liked control of his destiny, and was addicted to adrenaline:
Deny me these and I’m almost half empty inside.
The ribbons on Jeffrey’s khaki short-sleeved uniform shirt did little to console him.

Even thoughts of his recent Medal of Honor, and his brand-new Defense Distinguished Service Medal, couldn’t disperse Jeffrey’s mental unease. Strong as they were in traditions and symbolism, the ribbons were merely small strips of metal and cloth. They paled compared to the draining things he’d gone through, and the awful things he’d had to do, to earn these highest awards from a thankful nation. The medals grated on Jeffrey’s conscience too, because they made him be a hero and a national celebrity, but said nothing of those who’d been killed under his leadership. Jeffrey sometimes felt haunted by the faces of the dead; he had a keen sense of cause and effect, of the link between his actions and their consequences, and he remembered clearly every person who died while doing what he as captain had told them to do.

Jeffrey perked up when a crew chief came out of the back of the Seahawk carrying a bundle of head-protection gear with built-in sound-suppression earcups, and inflatable life jackets. Jeffrey put on all the safety equipment, donning the big, padded eye goggles last. He picked up his briefcase and his gas-mask bag.

Conversation was impossible now. The crew chief told his passengers what to do by using hand signals. The other passengers, junior officers and chiefs who were strangers to Jeffrey, seemed to know the routine. By privilege of rank and standard navy etiquette, Jeffrey got in last. He took the place reserved for him, among several running down the center of the fuselage and facing sideways, so he could look out a window. He buckled in, then shifted to get more comfortable on the black vinyl sheets of his seat.

The crew chief stowed the luggage; his assistant slid the door closed. The crew chief came around and quickly checked everyone very carefully. He pulled Jeffrey’s seat-harness shoulder straps uncomfortably tight, then gave a firm tug to the chin strap of his helmet. Jeffrey and the crew chief made eye contact. The navy didn’t salute indoors, but the chief had seen Jeffrey’s ribbons. The chief gave Jeffrey a look of acknowledgment, and extra respect. Jeffrey, never more rank conscious than he needed to be, returned the look and gave a quick nod. The chief’s eyes showed a special hardness that couldn’t be faked, and the gauntness of premature aging that no one could hide, which proved he’d been in combat in this war. In comparison, the other passengers looked too fresh faced, their eyes in an indefinable way much too naive for them to be combat veterans.

Couriers, perhaps,
Jeffrey thought,
or some other essential administrative jobs.

He felt heavy vibrations through the deck and through his backside. The muffled noises getting through his hearing protection grew louder and deeper in pitch. Outside the windows the ground receded, then the Seahawk put its nose down so the main rotors could dig into the air and grab more speed. The helo turned west, inland.

Immediately, two other helos closed in on the Seahawk, one from port and one from starboard. Jeffrey knew these were the shuttle’s armed escorts. They were Apache Longbows, two-man army combat choppers. Jeffrey saw the clusters of air-to-ground rockets in big pods on both sides of each Apache. He watched the chin-mounted Gatling gun each Apache also bore, as the 30-millimeter barrels swiveled around, slaved to sights on the helmets worn by the gunners.

These escorted shuttle flights were necessary. The Axis had assassination squads operating inside the U.S., targeting military personnel with high-level expertise or information. They’d almost certainly been pre-positioned and pre-equipped secretly, during the long-term conspiracy that had led to the war. Some of the teams were former Russian special forces, Spetznaz, now in the pay of the Germans and willing to die to accomplish their tasks. The schedule of the helo shuttles varied randomly, and their flight paths varied as well, to stay unpredictable.

Jeffrey forced himself to relax. He was well protected now.

The passenger compartment smelled of lubricants, plastic, and warm electronics; there was no solid bulkhead between the passengers and where the pilot and copilot sat, and Jeffrey could see the backs of their heads if he craned his neck to the right. The compartment was stuffy from the aircraft having sat in the sun before, so the crew chief’s assistant slid open a couple of windows. A pleasant, slightly humid breeze came in.

Built-up urban and then suburban areas petered out, and the land below was more forested, the road net thinner. The helos descended to just above the treetops without slowing, and the tips of southern pines tore by in an exhilarating blur. The Apaches both wore camouflage paint with blotches of green and black and brown, so they became harder to see against the foliage. Jeffrey’s helo, with its plain gray paint job, would blend in much better against the sky for anyone looking at it from the ground. He assumed this tactic was intentional.

He folded his arms across his chest, lulled into a semi-doze by the Seahawk’s steady, reassuring rotor and transmission vibrations and engine roar. He still felt pangs of regret for finally ending his on-again, off-again relationship with Ilse Reebeck, a Boer freedom fighter who’d joined him on several classified missions. Once, Ilse had broken up with Jeffrey, saying they came from different cultures on separate continents, and with his seeming death wish in battle, Jeffrey could never be Ilse’s choice for a lifelong mate, someone to father her children. But then she’d wanted to get back together again, and Jeffrey had been more than willing. The passion that resumed, whenever they were on leave together, quickly became as stormy and edgy as ever—and eventually Jeffrey had simply had enough. He realized that the two of them were in an emotional co-dependency, that the same things that drew them together also triggered deep-seated resentments.

Jeffrey was startled when the helo suddenly banked sharply into a very tight right turn. The power-train vibrations grew harder and rougher as the helo’s deck tilted steeply to starboard. The g-force pressed Jeffrey into his seat; outside, the world slid down away from view and he could see only the sky. Jeffrey’s gut tightened. He grabbed wildly for armrests that weren’t there and felt afraid and didn’t know what to do with his hands. The others in the compartment also showed worry . . . except for the crew chief and his assistant, who were amused. The Seahawk leveled off and everything returned to normal.

Jeffrey realized that this was simply a course change. The crew chief pointed out the starboard side of the aircraft; Jeffrey turned his head as far as he could. Through a window, he barely made out a city on the horizon. He concluded that the helos had passed well south of Richmond, and now were flying northeast, toward Washington. Below Jeffrey, the trees sometimes gave way to open, rolling fields, many recently plowed and planted—with food in short supply nationwide and the transportation infrastructure overstrained, every spare acre of available soil was farmed.

Sitting back again, and looking out the port side, Jeffrey noticed hints of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance, paralleling his flight path. Both army Apache gunships flew near the Seahawk in a loose formation.

Jeffrey began to think about what sort of meeting awaited him at the Pentagon. He assumed he hadn’t been told anything for security reasons. He took for granted that the meeting was vital, or he wouldn’t have been torn away from supervising the work on his ship. He guessed it had something to do with another combat mission. Jeffrey dearly hoped this was so. He ached to get back in the thick of it, to defend American interests and give the Axis one more bloody nose—or maybe in this round knock their teeth out.

Through his earcups, and above the noises of flight, Jeffrey noticed a strange new sound. He lifted one earcup, and even over the deafening turbine engines mounted not far above his head, he heard a nerve-jarring siren noise in the cockpit. The crew chief and the assistant, whose flight helmets—unlike the passengers’—were equipped with intercoms, seemed agitated. They began to stare very nervously out both sides of the aircraft.

The Seahawk banked hard left and almost stood on its side, buffeting Jeffrey in his harness. The helo leveled off but kept turning and stood on its other side, wrenching his neck so he almost got whiplash. Both engines were straining now, and the siren noise continued. Jeffrey was afraid they’d had a control failure and would crash. Then Jeffrey heard thumps, and felt bangs.
Oh God. We’re disintegrating in midair.

The Seahawk turned hard left, again. It fought for altitude. Through the window Jeffrey saw multiple suns, hot and almost blinding. Then he saw something much worse.

Two black dots approached the Seahawk, fast, riding bright-red rocket plumes that left billowing trails of brownish smoke. Jeffrey understood now: Those little suns were infrared decoy flares. The Seahawk was under attack from shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles. There were Axis assassination teams at work somewhere on the ground.

Either they somehow learned my helo’s flight plan, which wasn’t set till the last minute, or they were camped there for a while, knowing they’d have a shuttle pass within range eventually—and today they got lucky.

Jeffrey felt more thumps and bangs. His heart was pounding and his hands shook badly, even though his mind was crystal clear. The crew chief and his assistant gestured for everyone to grab the straps of their shoulder harnesses—to steady themselves and avoid arms flailing everywhere—as the pilot and copilot pulled more violent evasive maneuvers. Jeffrey did what he was told, and it helped, but not a lot.

He hated feeling so defenseless. Any second a missile could strike the Seahawk, or its proximity fuse could detonate. The helo’s tail could be blown off or its fuel tanks be hit and explode or shrapnel could shred the unarmored cockpit. Shattered and burning, pilotless, the Seahawk would plunge into the earth.

There was a sharp blast somewhere close, but the Seahawk kept flying. It made another hard turn, and Jeffrey saw that one of the missiles had been fooled by the decoy flares. A ragged cloud of black smoke mingled with the heat flares floating on small parachutes.

The other missile was rushing off into the distance, with a perfectly straight red beam from nearby seeming to shove it away, like a rod of something solid. Jeffrey realized this was an antimissile laser, designed to confuse the heat-seeker head and homing software of the inbound enemy weapon. What Jeffrey perceived as a magic rod was the nonlethal laser beam lighting up fine dust and traces of smoke in the air. The laser came from one of the Apaches.