Choke Point wi-9

by Ian Slater

  Soon Albinski and Dixon were down to 115 feet, pressing the normal safety limits for this section of the strait. Albinski tapped his buddy’s arm, signaling them to go up. Dixon was keen to press beyond the normal safety limit, but for veteran Albinski, there was no sense in risking your life if people weren’t in danger. This was strictly a recon grid for COMSUBPAC-9, and recon in peacetime wasn’t worth risking the bends for. That way, you stayed alive, lived long enough to collect a veteran’s full pension and no-exception catastrophic medical coverage for you and your family. Besides, Albinski thought he had a damn good idea what was causing the anomaly.

  The RIB’s coxswain, his observer, and the mechanic strained to help the two divers aboard the RIB. Albinski and Dixon streamed with water in the gray dawn, like two harbor seals sliding over the gunwales, the Bruiser bobbing up and down in the increasingly aggressive chop.

  “Find anything?” asked the coxswain as he turned the Bruiser downwind for the run back to Port Angeles.

  “Temperature anomaly,” replied Dixon, pulling up his face mask. “No oil, though.”

  “Upwelling?” the coxswain asked. “Freshwater spring?”

  “Can’t tell till we do a chemical analysis of the water sample,” Albinski replied. “I think it’s probably a water tank or refrigeration unit leaking from some old wreck. Not very big. Probably an old trawler. Something relatively small.”

  “Wouldn’t it have leaked out by now, whatever it is?” asked the coxswain.

  “No,” replied Albinski. “The Arizona in Pearl Harbor is still leaking oil from when it was sunk in ’forty-one.”

  The coxswain shook his head, his voice rising against the brisk wet wind and the noise of spray splattering the RIB’s salt-encrusted windscreen. “Coast Guard says they did a sonar run over it. Saw nothing.”

  “Could’ve missed it,” countered Dixon, dropping his flippers onto the equipment slab. “A hundred yards either way and you’d see zilch.”

  This possibility, the coxswain knew, would have been more than likely in the old pre-GPS days, but not now. Albinski and Dixon had been given precisely the same coordinates as the Coast Guard vessel.

  “Maybe it is a simple upwelling,” conceded Albinski. “Freshwater or saline from an undersea aquifer?”

  “But even the Coast Guard sonar trace saw nothing,” countered Dixon. “So how come we get a temperature anomaly and the CG doesn’t?”

  That had Albinski and everyone else on the Bruiser stumped.

  As the Bruiser returned to Port Angeles, the coxswain radioed ahead to base. “How long will we have to wait until we get the results of our water bottle analysis?”

  “Two hours. Admiral Jensen’s given this one top priority.”

  “It’s nothing,” opined the mechanic as the coxswain ceased transmission. “Jensen’s a worry gut. Glass half empty — all the time. Admiral Gloomboots.”

  They all laughed at “Gloomboots,” a name that stuck for a full hour and forty-three minutes until the Coast Guard’s Seattle lab e-mailed Port Angeles the chemical analysis of Albinski’s water bottle sample. Highly toxic, and proof positive that whatever the source material was that had reacted with the supersaturated saline solution of the sea, it had generated a “significantly high temperature differential of plus or minus four degrees.”

  Everyone was suddenly a Gloomboots. First question: Why hadn’t the Coast Guard water sample revealed any toxicity? Even if the Coast Guard vessel had not passed exactly over the dumbbell zone and somehow missed a clear sonar profile of the sea bottom there, the surrounding water surely would have been toxic enough to have been measured by a Coulter counter that could identify minute parts per million. Second question: Were there any known naturally occurring toxicities of this type on the sea bottom in that part of the strait?

  The answer to the second question was no. Oceanographic charts showed no wrecks in that location that might be leaking toxic materials.

  Albinski, however, reflecting on his long SEAL experience of invasion beach surveys, was able to offer a reasonable explanation for the Coast Guard vessel not discerning any temperature anomaly. Its prop would have been churning the sea’s surface so violently, he said, and sucking in such a flood of colder water from outside the dumbbell perimeter, that any temperature difference could have been so small as to be virtually undetectable, given the mix.

  “All right,” Jensen told Duty Officer Morgan at Bangor. “Order a side-scan sonar.” The expense was now warranted, for he knew that if Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, or any of the other environmental organizations got wind of this anomaly — it didn’t bear thinking about. And that very morning the Chief of Naval Operations in Washington, D.C., had e-mailed a request for Jensen to forward an updated résumé vis-à-vis his estimation of COMSUBPAC-9’s liaison with Puget Sound residents. The CNO was doubtless gearing up in the search for a successor who rated high in PR skills. In the same e-mail the CNO asked Jensen to rate his own performance on a scale of one to ten. Jensen e-mailed that he was a nine. He told Margaret he believed he was a ten but it was prudent to show a little humility.

  “Have our two SEALs go back and do a deep dive,” he ordered Duty Officer Morgan. Morgan suggested the divers use Frank Hall’s oceanics vessel Petrel II. The oceanographic ship had all the required equipment for a deep dive, even LOSHOK explosive to send sound waves down for its side-scan sonar should the sonar’s electric transponder malfunction. Plus Petrel II, more commonly known as Petrel, was a civilian ship and a common sight in Northwest waters. A simple press release from Bangor could claim Petrel was moving farther west of Nanoose Bay, where it was usually employed to retrieve practice torpedo debris. The release could emphasize the Navy’s zero tolerance for scrap metal, especially the miles of torpedo guidance wire that, since the thousands of practice firings during World War II, had until now been permitted to pollute the strait.

  “Damn good PR, Morgan,” said the admiral.

  “And it’ll be the truth,” Morgan added, elated by the admiral’s appreciation. “I mean, this anomaly is polluting. Have to clean it up.”

  “Precisely.”

  There was silence on the line. “Admiral?”

  “Why didn’t the CG water sample show anything?” the admiral asked. “This water bottle would have been taken below the prop wash that Albinski was talking about?”

  “Faulty equipment?” proffered Morgan.

  “Perhaps.” But the admiral didn’t sound convinced.

  “Want the Coast Guard to do it again, sir?” suggested Morgan. “Same vessel. Tell them not to change any of the equipment. Do it just as they did the first time. A double check.”

  “Good idea.”

  The Coast Guard steamed over the “dumbbell” in the morning fog and took another sample. It showed a three-degree difference in the water and high toxicity.

  “What in hell’s going on?” Jensen asked Morgan from his study, his voice tired. He hadn’t had a wink of sleep since Morgan called in the first situation report. Before the duty officer could answer, Jensen continued, “Where’s the Utah? Could it have anything to do with this?”

  “No way, sir. Last SITREP says that it’s heading into the strait as we speak. Over twenty miles to the west. It had a practice target firing. And one false alert. Nowhere near the anomaly.”

  The admiral paced his office, gazing out at the cobalt blue of the Hood Canal and the wildly beautiful mountains of the snow-topped Olympic peninsula beyond. Something was odd about the Coast Guard not getting any anomalous reading the first time around. No salinity change. No temperature change. “Weird,” he muttered. Then the admiral had a burst of inspiration, his voice suddenly losing its fatigue. “It’s an old torpedo, Morgan! By God, why didn’t I think of it before? Leaking. Those two divers reported it’s a small source area, right? Cone-shaped?”

  “Yes,” agreed Morgan.

  “Damn torpedo’s buried in mud, Morgan, that’s why Coast Guard sonar didn’t pick up a profile! How long will i
t take those two divers from the RIB to reach Petrel?” he asked impatiently. “They would need the ship’s special salvage deeper diving gear.”

  “They could be there within half an hour, sir — it’d only be a short helo hop from Port Angeles to the ship.”

  “Do it.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s going on?” Margaret Jensen asked her husband as he appeared, bleary-eyed, at the kitchen table.

  “I don’t know,” he answered truthfully, less sure about his idea of the torpedo now. Sonar penetrated mud. Still, whether you got a profile did depend on the angle of approach. He knew about Ballard’s difficulty in finding the Titanic. Still … God, he wished life was simpler. She slid the Seattle Post Intelligencer toward him. “Dammit, Margaret, just once I’d like to get the paper in one piece. After you’re finished with it I can’t find a damn thing.”

  She poured him coffee. “It’s probably nothing.”

  “It’s something,” he said, turning the paper inside out until he finally found the social section.

  “There’s a good photo of you,” Margaret told him, “on page two.”

  He grunted, but turned to it nevertheless. She was right. Both of them looked good — though she’d never admit it. He couldn’t remember Margaret ever saying she’d taken a good photo. Couldn’t remember any woman saying she liked her photo. Something always wrong with their damned hair. But there they both were, standing next to the wonder boy Gates himself. “It’s something toxic,” he told her.

  “How long before you know the cause?” she asked, without looking up from the funnies.

  “Tonight possibly. Divers are going down.”

  “Again?’

  “To the bottom. Civilian research vessel.”

  “I should hope it’s before nightfall.”

  He said nothing, turning the paper noisily back to the front page. China and Taiwan were on the boil again. Beijing, resurrecting the confrontations of the fifties and sixties, when the PLA had shelled the Taiwanese islands of Matsu and Quemoy, was warning Taipei not to proclaim independence. If it did, Beijing said there’d be war. The admiral shook his head. The U.S. should never have agreed to defend Taiwan, he thought. If push came to shove, there’d be a war against China as well as the war against terror. War on two fronts — any military’s worst nightmare.

  “Isn’t that dangerous?” Margaret pressed. “Sending them to the sea bottom in those conditions?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll say a prayer.”

  “Thanks.”

  Margaret folded her hands and closed her eyes. He envied her faith. He’d lost his long ago. Some commanders, like the retired nuisance, General Freeman, hadn’t, but even Freeman’s faith was qualified, his adage being, “Love thy neighbor and keep the son of a bitch in your sights.”

  As Jensen worried and his wife prayed, the oceanographic ship Petrel was casting off from Nanoose Bay and Albinski and Dixon’s chopper was heading for it, to land directly on the upper deck’s helo pad.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Suzhou, China

  Over Suzhou, the ancient canal city of eastern China, the morning mist and smog had turned the autumn sun into a hazy saffron ball, but apart from this, the October dawn had begun much like any other. From around the algae-streaked arch of Wumen Bridge and the myriad hutongs—the alleys leading away from the Grand Canal — came the usual sounds of people on their way to work: the crush of jangling bicycles, shouted greetings, the noise of children and the sound of bird sellers. The smoggy air was heavy with the vinegary odor of urine on damp earth and the stench of feng che, the night soil carts, mingling with the warm, sweet aromas of the sidewalk stalls selling fresh mantao buns, hot soybean drink, and the oil-fried breakfast twists of youtiao.

  The hunched rider of one of the feng che carts passed an old man in a faded blue Mao suit, his chin stubbled, teeth brown and crooked, a homemade cigarette dangling from his lips as he sat on his haunches on the dirt sidewalk outside a dingy, clay-walled house. A small boy, emerging from the dark interior of the house, watched the old man spreading an oil-stained rag before him on the sidewalk and placing on it an odd assortment of screws, small levers, and tire puncture kits. The old man’s sinewy hands sifted through the bits and pieces like some aged carrion bird picking over a carcass. Now and then he made a strangled coughing noise, took the drooping cigarette from his mouth, spit, wiped the dribble from his mouth with his wrist, and looked up at the endless river of bicycles streaming to and from the arch of the Wumen Bridge. As always, the cyclists heading to the bridge slowed as they drew level with the old man, for it was here they dismounted and began filing off to the right. There, instead of having to lift and carry their “Flying Pigeon” or “Forever” bicycles up over the stone stairs, they used the narrow, gutter-deep troughs running up and down the arc of the bridge, enabling the dismounted riders to wheel their bikes next to them as they climbed the stairs up and over the arch of the bridge down toward Panmen Gate. High above the gate, red-flagged battlements towered forbiddingly over the crumbling ruins of nearby Rugang Pagoda.

  It happened when a small boy, one of the many children who were now running and laughing through the crowded alleys, dashed past the old man and down the embankment steps to the right of the bridge. For a few seconds, urinating into the fetid green water, he was unaware of the commotion that was beginning up on the bridge. A clump of cyclists, head and shoulders barely visible above the bridge’s stone balustrade, began shouting, gesticulating wildly down at the him. “Gan kuai! Gan kuai!” Grab a pole!

  Only then did the boy look up and out at the canal and see the floating lump gyrating slowly in the shadowed eddies beneath the arch. At first he thought it was the body of an infant girl, the infanticide of baby girls as common in Suzhou as in any other province of China, whose strictly enforced policy of one child per couple gave preference to males.

  A crowd of onlookers was gathering quickly about the embankment, and as they pulled the body ashore, its sodden Mao suit now an inky blue, the head lolled down like a wet, black mop. Some of the more curious onlookers bent low, peering between the legs of others. A noisy khaki motorcycle and sidecar pulled up, its two traffic policemen in crumpled, baggy white uniforms. They walked over importantly beneath the shade of the sycamore trees, ordering the crowd of drab blue- and gray-clad workers aside. While appearing to move away, the crowd merely moved around, staying more or less where they were until a small blue Jinlin truck arrived, carrying four members of the People’s Liberation Army. They were from General Chang’s Nanjing Military District’s 12th Army, and along with new olive-green uniforms and medals for valor in Tiananmen Square and against the mass protests of the Falun Gong sect, their uniforms sported the new gold shoulder boards of rank.

  The soldiers, bearing AK-47s, started shouting orders, but even then the crowd moved reluctantly, some sullenly, to let the soldiers through. One man well back in the crowd asked aloud whether the People’s Liberation Army had come armed because they intended killing more of their fellow Chinese or because they were afraid to come among the people unarmed. Someone else, incensed at the comment, shouted that he didn’t blame the soldiers for defending themselves these days. Another two of them had been found garroted in the hutongs in just the past week, presumably by Xinjiang/Kazakhstan terrorists or members of the “counterrevolutionary” Liu Si Minzhu Yundong — the June 4 democracy movement. Or by the Falun Gong.

  As the two policemen searched the body’s sodden Mao suit, the four soldiers found it increasingly difficult to keep the onlookers from pressing in, and the soldiers’ officer, a young lieutenant, told the policemen to hurry things up. After a quick glance at the dead girl’s green identification card, one of the policemen handed it up to the PLA lieutenant.

  “Da bizhi!” he said. A Big Nose, a foreigner.

  The photograph showed a young woman, eighteen years old, five feet four inches, hazel eyes and brown hair now turned black by the water, the enga
ging smile of the identification card in marked contrast to the gruesome matted hair and bloated corpse that had just been dragged from the canal. The PLA lieutenant showed the photo to his gawking comrades, announcing loudly, “Meiguoren xuesheng.” American student. He was disgusted. It was common knowledge that foreign students and “rebellious antisocial elements” among the Chinese students often had postexamination “five-star” beer parties, got blind drunk, fell into the canal, and drowned.

  After finishing work, Charles Riser, the attaché for cultural affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, returned to his apartment in the diplomatic compound near the Friendship Store on Jianguomenwai Daijie. He smiled when he saw the red light blipping on the message machine as he walked in. He’d insisted that Amanda—“Mandy,” as he always called his daughter — leave any messages on the home tape machine because the voice mail at the embassy, which like all voice mail was stored on computer chip, could be tapped at leisure by China’s feared Gong An Bu — the Public Security Bureau. But because of the relatively old-fashioned message machine he’d had installed at his residence, the Gong An Bu wouldn’t be able to retrieve a call once it had been made, unless the they were actually tapping his home line twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But he knew he wasn’t that important.