Straits of Power (34 page)

“What’s the other method?”

“It’s heavier, less mobile, but it can work from outside Israel’s borders.”

Jeffrey didn’t like the sound of this at all.

“It involves more hardware to protect against quantum decoherence through the open air, and a special transmitter.”

“Transmitter?”

“Some military radars work at frequencies ideal for my purposes. Radar, like all radios, and in fact all electromagnetic radiation, uses photons too, just as light does.”

“Yup.”

“The transmitter is what’s called a maser, the equivalent of a laser for the proper sort of radar beam. . . . There’s a big radar installation on Mount Hermon in northern-most Israel. Their antennas are one portal for picking up a maser beam of entangled radar-frequency photons. Others are any patrolling radar-surveillance planes. Even a fighter aircraft can have its radars infiltrated, and a maintenance or intell avionics download would then inject the photons into the wider networks. Entangled photons imprint on photons of different energy, and even on electrons, so they pass right through all the modems, amplifiers, and connectors involved.”

“How perfect, pervasive, would this assault really be?”

“There’ll be isolated pockets that escape contamination, but most such people won’t be able to find each other amid the chaos. Nothing wireless will work because the central-station software won’t be functioning. Remember, Israelis for years have been heavily dependent on cell phones instead of land lines. Cell phones can only talk through central stations via towers, they can’t talk one to one, on their own. The same applies to modern data-link army radio sets. They aren’t walkie-talkies.”

“So what are you suggesting?”

“We have to get to Israel before
any
of the attack teams. I have a patch that counteracts the worm, but only if it’s injected before the first worm arrives.”

“It’s like a vaccine, not a cure?”

“Exactly. I can get it into Israel’s networks, the same way the German teams plan to attack.”

“So you want me to take
Challenger
toward Israel, raise an antenna mast, and beam in this patch?”

“If only it were that simple, Captain. To be absolutely sure of success, it has to go in through a fiber-optic line. That version of my equipment is the only type I could possibly bring out with me. The other type is nowhere near man packable.”

“Say that again. Slowly, in simpler words.”

“You need to sneak me into Israel,
now,
so I can tap into a fiber-optic trunk somewhere.”

Chapter 39

M
ohr’s statement hung in the air pregnantly. Parker exploded. “This is absurd! This man is asking us to do his dirty work for him! He’s using
us
to deliver the virus!”

Mohr was deeply offended. “I am not a saboteur. I gave up everything to help you.”

“Quiet,” Jeffrey said, “everybody. . . . I have one big question for you, Klaus. Why didn’t you warn Israel directly?”

“Warning alone would do no good. You can’t stop the worm simply by knowing it’s coming. No normal computer-security methods have any effect against quantum teleportation. If Israel shuts down all their radars and signals-intercept equipment to avoid penetration that way, they’ll leave themselves blind before an imminent Axis blitzkreig, and they’d
still
be wide open to the worm via fiber optic.”

“Couldn’t you slip them the patch conventionally, on a disk, like with regular virus protection?”

“The patch’s being distributed by regular means to all the users in Israel who need it would be spotted at once by German agents. I’d have been dangling from a noose within hours, and Berlin would work to replicate the unique expertise I intentionally hoarded. It might take them a year, but eventually they’d be able to recalibrate each of the handmade gear sets with a different worm, while also making more gear sets.”

Jeffrey nodded. “And you wouldn’t be there to help Israel the next time, because you’d be dead.”

“The only reason I’m valuable to
you,
Captain, now that the consulate knows I disappeared, is that the Axis is under such immense strategic pressure to keep up their war momentum after their recent setbacks. The Afrika Korps juggernaut is primed to jump off from their starting positions
soon.
To cancel things and wait a year to try again would be militarily unacceptable. They need to use the worm I already programmed for them, the one for which I have a patch. That’s why we must hurry. Berlin’s best choice is to push their quantum-attack teams forward urgently. Think of what that means, Captain. . . . Israel is in tremendous danger.”

“Or at least, so you say. Don’t try to stampede me. I want to understand why you didn’t offer your full assistance to Israel weeks ago, quantum-computer equipment and everything.”

“I did. I contacted them, indirectly, before I reached you more elaborately. The Israelis traced me back to my group. That’s when my staff at the consulate started dying, and then they took a shot at
me.
The Mossad must have thought the simplest way to stop Pandora would be to kill me right away, in Istanbul. And they’re viciously untrusting people, Captain. With the atom bombs they planted in Germany several years ago, sometimes I think they’re outright fanatics.”

“Mr. Parker?”

“That last part in and of itself makes sense. It’s consistent with things we know independently, including the report of the hit attempt by our agent in the brothel. But as you and I discussed with others at the Pentagon, Israel wanting to murder Mohr doesn’t somehow make him more reliable for us.”

“You seem to have done a flip-flop since that meeting.”

“That meeting was before I had to sit in your control room and hear
Ohio
being destroyed,
Captain.”

Jeffrey winced. Mohr looked dismayed at hearing this news.

Jeffrey grew angry that Parker carped on the subject of
Ohio,
undermining Jeffrey in front of other people. He pointedly changed the subject, and became more distant and formal.

“Lieutenant Estabo, report your assessment of what the first contact with Herr Mohr and your assault on the safe house indicate. Mr. Parker here did not
sit in
on any of that.”

Felix took a deep breath. Reading Jeffrey, his manner became more crisp. “Our on-site validation was based on unclassified reference sources only. It looked good enough to continue with the extraction, but, objectively speaking, proves nothing about Herr Mohr’s claims. . . . And while from the German perspective the outcome of the safe-house battle would have been uncertain, it
is
conceivable that the supposed need to assault the Kampfschwimmer was in actuality a design to drag us into a double bluff.”

“Lieutenant?” Jeffrey didn’t follow Felix.

“Sir, the requirement for a firefight with casualties on our side might have had an undercurrent of psychological warfare. People value most those things that are scarce and hard to get. It’s human nature.”

“Granted. How does that apply here? I still don’t see it.”

“The need to prepare and execute combat against a fortified place, suffering potential KIAs and WIAs, as indeed we did, could be mental sleight of hand to get us to believe that the thing we fought for and won was a valuable treasure . . . when in fact the thing we obtained was, is, an infernal device we’ve carried into our own fortress,
Challenger,
I mean, and maybe Israel.”

“So the computer modules are like a Trojan horse? The Germans let you win at the safe house
on purpose
?
”

“That scenario can’t be eliminated, sir. It’s possible the Kampfschwimmer were sacrificed intentionally by the Axis High Command. It’s even possible they were volunteer suicide troops.”

“They
let
you kill them?” Jeffrey asked in disbelief.

“They might not have
let
us, sir, knowingly, themselves, but Herr Mohr did provide us with tactical information and the element of surprise, which German planners ought to have been aware made it likely that our attack on the Kampfschwimmer team would succeed.”

Mohr began to back into a corner, literally. “How can you all be so
paranoid
? There is no time for such bickering!”

Jeffrey didn’t respond. He considered everything Felix had said.

“Lieutenant, sweat the details of your hypothesis. Was there anything during the safe-house assault that raises doubts about what really went on?”

“I hadn’t considered it that way, Captain.”

“Do so.”

“Well . . . Our initial entry might have been a little too easy. The way they opened the door to Gamal Salih without him having to make more of a scene.”

“Anything else?”

“Hmmm . . . The way one German lay over the quantum equipment, as if protecting it with his body.”

“He wore a flak vest?”

“Yes. And not all of them did as we went in.”

“So one Kampfschwimmer shielded the gear instead of helping repulse your team?”

“Maybe,” Felix said. “And you’d think that when it was evident they were being overrun, he’d have destroyed the computer stuff to keep it out of our hands, not sacrificed his life to keep the gadgets intact.”

“Where was Herr Mohr while all this went on?”

“Well out of the line of fire, in an armored limo.”

“And what did you mean when you said that they might’ve been suicide troops? Suicide fighters kill themselves to
kill
other people, not help them.”

“Not necessarily, sir, if you think about it. They could try to be fall guys without us realizing it, as part of the psychological gambit. That’s what I meant about it all being mental sleight of hand. Plus, they
didn’t
help us. They
pretended
to help us. That’s how they got the Trojan horse through the gates.”

“Oh boy,” Jeffrey said. “Talk about wheels within wheels.”

“But the quantum gear
works,”
Mohr insisted. “I saw the results of the field tests in Turkey. We shut whole areas down until the worm’s built-in time limit expired.”

“That’s consistent with things we do know,” Parker said. “Turkey has suffered some inexplicable system outages lately.”

“Why wasn’t I told that before?” Jeffrey demanded.

“It didn’t come up. And you didn’t need to know. And it only strengthens the case against Mohr. If it’s cause and effect between his equipment and those outages, which I remind you all is unproven, that would merely indicate that the malevolent hardware Mohr has with him does work. It demonstrates nothing whatsoever about him having a patch that would save Israel from some bizarre teleportation virus.”

“Herr Mohr,” Jeffrey said, looking directly at the man, hard. “You’re asking us, in effect, to invade an ally, Israel, with which American relations are already strained. You’re asking us to not tell them we’re coming, go in covertly ourselves, and jigger with their command and control, supposedly for their own good.”

Mohr stared right back at Jeffrey. “If you tell Israel you’re coming, they’ll never agree. Never! With the way you all keep showing so much skepticism, how can you possibly expect them to take seriously whatever arrangements
you
present before Tuesday that have anything to do with quantum patches? That’s totally obvious already, isn’t it?”

“Granted.”

“And you can’t ask them for permission to do the patch even if you believe me, because if they hear one word about this, they’d refuse and you forfeit the option to go in secretly! If they learn that I and my device are getting anywhere near them, they’d do everything possible to stop us!”

“What’s this
us
?
”
Parker snapped.

“Ease up,” Jeffrey cautioned him sharply. “Don’t distract me.” He turned back to Mohr. “You’re telling me that if I take you in there at all, the whole operation has to stay invisible.”

“Yes. Do you at least accept that part, Captain Fuller, in isolation from everything else?”

“Yeah. . . . What do you have to say for yourself about Lieutenant Estabo’s comments? His views on the safe-house raid?”

“I knew those men from training and working with them. They all had wives and children. They had every reason to live, to fight for their lives for the sake of their families.”

“You
abandoned your family,” Parker stated. “Supposedly for some higher cause. Why couldn’t the Kampfschwimmer too?”

“I did it to
protect
my family! The Kampfschwimmer would have gained
nothing
for their dependents by allowing themselves to be killed! They’d have left widows and orphans! No German ideology or military tradition has
ever
glorified such conduct!”

“All right,” Jeffrey said. “Let’s leave that particular point aside and cut to the chase. Is there a way to demonstrate your device for us?”

Mohr sighed. “Not convincingly, Captain. The patch and then the worm? Nothing would happen. The worm alone? Your ship would be crippled. A single laptop? Without close verification by scientists in your country, you’d just see a dead computer. You wouldn’t know absolutely that quantum hacking was what I did to kill it.”

Jeffrey nodded, making a sour face. He knew Mohr was correct on this bit, which only made the broader issue harder to resolve. “Just out of curiosity, what keeps this worm from taking over the world?”

“The worm is programmed to know where it is by detecting characteristics of the host systems it attacks. It’s also set to expire, six days postattack. Damage outside of Israel and Egypt should be minimal. Affected computer networks there will come back up, after the Axis has occupied both countries through the land-and-cyberspace envelopment.”

“Is the U.S. homeland under threat from the worm?”

“Not over intercontinental ranges. Quantum decoherence makes the entanglement deteriorate from too many collisions with external matter and energy. The error-correction packet needed gets impractically large. . . . Decoherence with range is why a fiber-optic tap is preferable to beaming at a radar dish, and why you can attack a nearby plane but not a satellite directly.”

“Are Axis systems protected?”

“Yes, as one of many standard periodic security updates. Remember, the worm manifests itself, it runs, like a normal program. The difference is how quantum teleportation gets it past firewalls and antivirus screening. . . . In fact, I recommend that you let me inject the patch into
Challenger
’s systems, since I’m not sure how safe you’d be under Israeli airspace otherwise.”

Parker sputtered, “You can’t possibly trust this guy. This is
way
over the top.”

“I’ll be the final judge of that. I’m in command of this ship.”

“I’ve already seen what happens when you’re in command.”

“How
dare
you?”

Parker backed down, and put a more conciliatory tone in his voice. “I dare because I need to get something across that you don’t seem to be willing to hear, Captain. What Mohr says is too pat. This talk about teleportation is beyond me. Even if it’s true,
especially
if it’s true, we definitely haven’t precluded that the Germans could be using us as their messenger boys. Also, it’s outside the plan and it violates orders.”

“You mean bringing him back to the U.S. for a long debrief?”

“Precisely. Let the National Security Agency get hold of his equipment and pick his brains and see what the hell he’s talking about. If what he claims holds up under studied scrutiny, and from the Allied perspective his intentions are benign, there’s plenty of time to warn Israel convincingly and
then
give them his gear with the patch.”

“But Mohr says the offensive opens Tuesday morning.”

“That’s another part that’s too pat. How do we know, except for his say-so? A standard part of any con is pressure to make the victim decide before common sense can kick in. To me, his talk of a moved-up timeline is a warning in itself.”

“Lieutenant, your opinion?”

“From the parts of the technical stuff that I can follow, sir, the hacker attack
is
plausible enough to be scary. If Herr Mohr is telling the truth, and we don’t help him, Israel will lose, big time, and the Allies will lose big too.”

Jeffrey turned to Mohr again. The German seemed annoyed by the fact that everyone had been talking about him as if he wasn’t there.

“Herr Mohr, lay out for me
explicitly
how Pandora is supposed to help Berlin with the atom bombs that Israel planted in Germany.”

“The worm will prevent Israel from getting the go codes to their agents within Germany to detonate the bombs. Also, the worm does not destroy data files. The Afrika Korps and German intelligence experts, with pretasked special-forces strike teams, expect to capture people, documents, and disk drives they can use to quickly identify the agents who control the bombs and also learn the location of each bomb. That’s how they preempt any potential dead-man switch in the Israeli ROEs.”