Straits of Power (39 page)

“The radio. Translate next time they broadcast.”

“Right.” Meltzer perched on the base of the ladder.

“Anything I can do to help?” Felix prodded Mohr.

“Yes. Stop interrupting me.”

The radio voice repeated, talking longer than before. Meltzer listened. “A policeman hasn’t made his regular check-in. The town station dispatcher is asking other patrolmen if they know where he is.”

“What are they saying?”

“I can’t tell. I think these portable radios are only strong enough to talk back and forth to the station’s big transceiver. We won’t hear another cop until he’s real close.”

The dispatcher spoke again. Meltzer translated. “They’ve asked some other policemen to look for the missing cop.”

“And, we know exactly where he is,” Felix said dryly.

“Yeah,” Meltzer said, fretting.

“Sit tight. Glue your ears to the radio.”

Felix turned to watch Mohr, for lack of anything better to do. Mohr’s elbows bobbed up and down as he tightened a dozen small nuts one by one with a ratchet wrench. The nuts held a boxy clamping device in position around the trunk cable. Mohr assembled lengths of interconnecting, rigid photon-wave guides, a bridge between the device and one of his modules. He shifted his stance, and began to operate controls on another module. He studied the readouts and didn’t look happy.

“Problem?” Felix asked.
Please, no.

“I have other things to try first. Do not interrupt.”

Felix bit his tongue. Mohr was breathing harder and starting to sweat. The work chamber had gotten uncomfortably warm, from all the body heat plus Mohr’s equipment running. Felix wondered if Mohr’s intent all along had been to damage Israeli systems, not aid them. He remembered Captain Fuller’s orders to kill Mohr if the German behaved with deviousness. Felix tried to figure out what a devious Klaus Mohr would look like, as opposed to an absorbed Mohr or a worried Mohr. He drew a blank, having only annoyed Mohr by staring at him.

The radio spoke again. Before Felix could ask, Meltzer said the dispatcher was dealing with other routine business, not the missing cop.

Felix made a face. “There’s a point at which they’ll announce a town-wide alarm.”

“I know,” Meltzer said.

Mohr told them both to be quiet. He needed to concentrate.

“Turn off the radio,” Felix ordered.

“What?” Meltzer was surprised.

“Turn it off. It isn’t helping any of us.”

Chapter 45

A
s each minute went by, the heat building up in the work chamber grew more oppressive. Meltzer, with his fiber-optic expertise, would be a better aide for Mohr if he needed assistance. Felix popped his head out at street level to take a breather. The office buildings that had before been his guide to finding this manhole now seemed like vigilant sentries lined up against him. The street itself, his team’s route of escape, felt instead like a path that would lead more cops—or soldiers—directly to them. He wondered how much longer it could possibly be before someone looking out a window noticed that something was amiss.
How soon before a patrol car searching for the cop drives by, and then stops?
He worried that one or more of the Kampfschwimmer teams might be compromised somewhere, impairing Pandora but triggering a national alert that would rob Mohr of a chance to finish his job soon enough. These issues, Felix told himself, were beyond his ability to influence, so agonizing further would do no good.

Felix did the most reassuring, visible thing he could think of to delay any curious observers from grabbing a phone to dial 100, the Israeli national police. He left the manhole and sat down on its edge, his legs dangling inside; he stretched his arms, took a deep breath, and relaxed. He forced himself to not glance at his watch. He really didn’t want to know what time it was. So long as Mohr succeeded in injecting his quantum-teleportation computer patch, Israel would be protected, and their priority mission goal would be achieved. After that, making it back to
Challenger
was highly desirable, but basically was gravy. A pitched battle against armed Israelis would serve no purpose. It was better in that worst-case scenario to just surrender, and then try to keep mum long enough so the patch, designed to hide itself, couldn’t be removed before Germany’s worm took effect. The Mossad or Shin Bet would never believe the truth, as Felix understood it. They’d fixate on Mohr’s presence right away. Felix had to let Mohr be taken alive if this happened, presuming he still trusted Mohr by then, because Mohr’s knowledge was too valuable for him to die unnecessarily on Israel’s soil.

Felix asked himself, if it came to that, whether Mohr would be the first one to cave during interrogation or torture, or the last. Mohr was the oldest person on the team, had tremendous strength of character, and had already been tested emotionally in ways far beyond the best-imaginable SEAL training.

Felix sighed. A pleasant evening was coming on. He tried to enjoy what might be his last moments of freedom, or of life. To clear his mind, he gazed up at the sky.

“He’s finished.”

Felix was startled.

“He’s finished,” Meltzer repeated from the bottom of the ladder.

Felix flashed Meltzer a grin that, for the first time today, wasn’t faked. “Ready to pack up?”

Meltzer nodded. Felix waved to Salih, who’d taken charge of the part of the team that had stayed in the street. Felix helped heft the equipment cases through the manhole opening. Mohr climbed out, tired but satisfied.

Felix went in to do one last inspection. He made sure no tools were forgotten. The pistol sat on the amplifier; carrying it around, even concealed, would be too risky, too easily noticed or detected. Guile needed to serve from here on, not gunplay. The policeman, well cocooned by duct tape, very thoroughly secured, followed Felix with angry eyes.

“Someone will rescue you soon.”

The team made a beeline for the hostel where the dig van had dropped them off. The straight route was much shorter than the zigzag they’d taken in search of a useable manhole. Even so, it was mostly uphill, and the better part of two hours’ high tension in Zichron Yaakov had already been as draining as physical labor. Felix told everyone to think and behave as if a keg of cold beer awaited them at the hostel. This way they posed as a private maintenance crew just coming off duty, sweaty from a day in the field, eager for refreshment. Felix repressed the knowledge that soon, if not already, the police in and around the town would sound a full alert for their missing comrade—quickly leaving the cop’s assigned town-center patrol area was the only thing that had let the SEALs avoid an unpleasant encounter so far. But if they didn’t find the cop quickly, and release him to describe his attackers, they’d conclude he might have been kidnapped by terrorists, and a brutal manhunt would be on; neither scenario favored Felix’s team.

Felix also tried to squelch his lingering doubts about what Mohr had done, or failed to do, in the manhole with his quantum equipment.

At the hostel, Meltzer went inside to find a phone and call the van at the dig to come pick them up—American cash used at the hostel desk would buy him telephone tokens or a prepaid card.

We’re about to find out if cell phones have already died because of Kampfschwimmer quantum-hacker meddling.

Meltzer came back onto the sidewalk. “The van lady said she’s finishing a run to Haifa. She’ll be here in half an hour, maybe.”

Felix finally looked at his watch. He shook his head in disgust. “She the only van?”

Meltzer nodded. “The only one working this late on a Sunday.”

It was almost 6:43
P.M.
; they’d didn’t have half an hour to sit around waiting. They had to reach the dig, reclaim their dive gear, suit up, grab a ride out to the underwater work area, swim to a prearranged murky spot to meet the minisub, and then hurry out to sea to dock with
Challenger.

“What about a local taxi service?”

“With eight of us and all this luggage, I better try a
sherut
company. They’re more like minibuses for hire than cabs.”

“They take U.S. cash?”

“Oh yes. They’ll be very happy to.”

Meltzer came out more quickly this time. “When they heard my American accent, they quoted an outrageous price. I told them I’d give the driver a twenty-dollar tip if he could be here in five minutes.”

It was closer to ten minutes. There were only seven seats in the minibus, but everybody climbed in with their bags and boxes. Meltzer handed the driver a twenty-dollar bill. He said he’d give him another twenty if he got them the three miles downhill to the beach by 7
P.M.

The driver floored the accelerator. Traffic on the cross roads and the highway continued to be light. The minibus pulled up at the dig. The group found the same two perimeter guards who’d questioned them on the way out from the site encampment, and the women let them pass through the barbed wire. They hustled to reclaim their wet suits and dive gear, then took fresh compressed-air tanks.

Their next problem was getting rafts. Several were pulled up onto the beach—at this late hour, activity underwater was slowing. Meltzer told the woman on duty they’d head out to the wreck site themselves, anchor, then when finished return on their own. Tired from a long day, she saw no reason to refuse this.

Felix and Costa picked a pair of rafts whose outboard motors had enough gas. They loaded both rafts hastily, revved up the engines, and headed for the orange buoys. The sun was very low, in their faces, reminding them that the fixed departure time for
Challenger
was drawing awfully near.

On the beach, sirens grew loud enough to overpower the sound of the outboard motors. Felix glanced back. Flashing lights lined the highway outside the site. He saw a man in blue by the vehicles, with the white of a neck brace around his throat, pointing out to sea at the rafts, literally jumping up and down. From the distance, given the circumstances, Felix recognized the figure too well: the cop from the manhole. Soldiers near him spoke on radios. The heavy machine gun a kilometer down the beach opened up like a jackhammer. Red tracers probed their way toward the rafts.
“Everyone into the water!”
Felix ordered.

The meeting point with the minisub was the wide place of cloudy water up-current from the dig-support boat Felix’s team had used to get a ride to the beach. Waste silt and mud, after sifting through screens on the boat, had been dumped overboard all day, creating an area where visibility would be obscured.

The team hugged the bottom at thirty feet. Now their scuba bubbles could ruin everything. Machine-gun bullets sprayed the surface above, but didn’t punch down too near. The excavation support boat started its main diesel engines. Clanking and splashes meant it was raising its anchor, and jettisoning all its hoses. Felix remembered those two soldiers with the Galils. Fired straight down, their small bullets would move slowly after thirty feet of water, but the soldiers probably also had hand grenades—and they might call in a naval craft with full-size depth charges. The dig boat roared at them as they swam at it.

Felix and Chief Costa stirred up sand and silt for camouflage; the whole team froze and held their breaths, halting the bubbles. The dig boat rushed overhead, steering toward where Meltzer had claimed they’d come from earlier—south, by the Crocodile River outlet. Soon there were sharp underwater explosions. The concussions hurt Felix’s eardrums and punched at his gut, but the force of the blasts wasn’t dangerous.

The team reached their goal, the cloudiest water, which made it even harder to see. Using a low-power homing sonar that Costa wore on his belt, the men and
Challenger
’s minisub found one another. They entered the open bottom hatch. Most of them went in back with Mohr’s equipment cases and their other bags.

Meltzer and Costa, still in their damp wet suits, took over from the two
Challenger
crewmen who’d been piloting the minisub. Felix stood behind their seats as they aimed for the pressing rendezvous. Meltzer immediately went to flank speed, making almost twenty knots but guzzling the high-test peroxide fuel left in the German mini’s tanks. The mini nosed down as the seafloor fell away. They met
Challenger
where she should be, in 150 feet of water, at 1957—7:57
P.M.
, three minutes before she’d leave without them. The mini’s passive sonars showed increasing naval activity on the surface. Suddenly the mini drifted to a stop. The fuel gauges read empty—they’d reached
Challenger,
but with no propulsion they couldn’t make the docking inside her hangar.

“I only have minimal battery power,” Meltzer stated. “Captain Fuller will either improvise along with me, or decide it’s too late and too risky and leave. . . . Well, here goes nothing.”

He used the digital acoustic link to
Challenger:
Felix watched over his shoulder as he typed a message that appeared, for checking, on a screen. Satisfied, Meltzer sent it. He was asking
Challenger
to maneuver to position her open hangar doors below him. He would have to come inside by Costa flooding variable ballast tanks to make the minisub heavy enough to drift down, while Meltzer depleted the last of his batteries in an attempt to control the docking by using the minisub’s small side thrusters alone. Felix thought Meltzer deserved a medal for everything he’d done, and for what he was trying now.

Challenger
acknowledged the message. Meltzer flipped on his look-down photonic sensors in short spurts, as the huge submarine turned with her own side thrusters, then held steady underneath the mini, with the open hangar beckoning. Costa worked his control panel. Meltzer’s joystick was never still as the minisub descended. He’d switched off as many things as possible, including the environmental systems and internal lights, to conserve the last few amps of available battery power.

They entered the hangar without mishap, but the thrusters stopped responding. The battery charge was almost completely flat. The mini couldn’t put itself onto the docking pylons. Felix’s watch said 1803.

Captain Fuller’s control-room photonic displays must have shown the minisub’s plight. The hangar doors started closing around the mini, then
Challenger
began to move. She nosed steeply downward, tilting the mini with her, going deep. From its own inertia the mini, in the water inside the hangar, drifted backward more than Meltzer and Costa could control. The German mini’s stern slammed into the rear bulkhead of the hangar with a crunch. Felix realized this was the mini’s main screw getting smashed. He hoped the closed hangar doors suppressed the noise enough that it wouldn’t be detected by Israeli hydrophones. Meltzer ordered Chief Costa to blow variable ballast, using compressed-air reserves, to make the minisub buoyant. Felix knew at once that this would give them their only chance to get out without flooding the mini or risking being crushed. The inertial navigation system, still operating but its readouts dimming by the second, showed that the mini—and by implication
Challenger
—was accelerating, to twenty-six knots.

No minisub or Axis diesel-AIP could go this fast. Only a nuclear fast-attack sub could. Captain Fuller was clearing the area, racing for outside the circle of possible location of any U-boat that might have picked up a commando team—actually the SEALs—that Israel would be trying to chase and destroy.

Analog gauges showed that the sea pressure in the flooded hangar had been relieved. The mini floated upward until it bumped the hydraulically closed and dogged hangar roof—another mechanical transient Felix prayed would go unnoticed—and lodged there, safe enough for now. Everything went dead except for emergency flashlights. Proper mating to
Challenger
’s air-lock trunk was impossible. The team would need to get back into their scubas, leave through the mini’s bottom hatch, and swim down into the air lock. Before they could even start, the minisub tilted sideways as
Challenger
banked into a hard turn southwest.