Choke Point wi-9

by Ian Slater

  “Yes, sir.”

  Aide Davis saw that the admiral’s hand was trembling. Jensen’s cell phone rang. “Christ!” His aide walked discreetly away. “Jensen!” the admiral barked into the phone.

  “Duty officer, sir. Coast Guard reports nothing unusual. They suspect you’re right. Darkstar must have picked up a floating kelp bed. They say kelp can act like oil on water — smooths out a patch so it looks calm compared to the surrounding chop. That would register an anomaly.”

  “Very well,” said Jensen, his voice strained.

  “Everything all right, sir?” inquired his aide.

  “Yes,” answered the admiral. “Seems as though Darkstar gave us a false alarm. That damn thing’s too sensitive. Like the temperature gauge in my SUV. Damn thing changes every hundred yards.”

  His relief after the adrenaline surge caused by the German shepherd, together with the Coast Guard’s confirmation of his kelp theory, suddenly gave the admiral a burst of confidence, if not an unusually aggressive, almost arrogant air. During his inspection of one of the boomer’s exteriors, he pointed to an abrasion on the sub’s anechoic coating — the rubber sonar-absorbing layer applied to the hull to reduce the possibility of detection by enemy sonar pulses. “Make a note, Davis. I want that fixed.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Not ASAP,” the admiral added and, in his buoyant mood, added his favorite Churchillian phrase: “Action this day!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Churchill had been very popular since 9/11, the President and his speechmakers having borrowed freely from the great Englishman’s World War II speeches.

  By the time the shot-up Pave Low, heading south, taking sporadic small arms fire along the way, approached the sun-drenched airfield at Tora Bora, its engines sounded more like a harvester shucking wheat. Hydraulic fluid was bleeding from its belly against the blue Afghan sky and the snowcapped peaks of the Hindu Kush.

  Like all such snatch and grab missions, Brentwood’s had been a secret operation, but not now that fire trucks, ambulances, and padre were on Code Red, and with rumors flying about the Medal of Honor winner having screwed it up. The stories bandied about the camp temporarily put to flight the stagnant air of insufferable boredom that forms the interregnum between battles.

  “Poor bastard,” said a tank gunner as he watched Brentwood being stretchered through the blazing heat into the MASH unit, where the soft whirring of the air-conditioning unit delivered a different planet to the Afghan desert. It was a cool place where Brentwood fought the trauma team “heavies” who tried to strap him down in pre-op, the morphine now losing its battle with the invading horror of consciousness — a time-distorted frenetic attack on his conscience in which he wanted to rush back into the cave and save his buddies. And then the shot of sodium pentathol took over, the cave closing in, smaller by the millisecond, until all light was gone. The monitors’ whirring and the periodic alarms of intravenous pumps were heard only by the trauma team in their fight to first save his life and then, if possible, preserve the use of his right arm.

  They saved him and the shot-up arm, but the main brachial artery had been severed, and though sewn up with over thirty stitches, it was remarked by Surgeon Major Ainsleigh that this Captain Brentwood’s career in the military was now over.

  “Lucky bastard!” It was an OR orderly incognito behind his surgical mask, possibly a reservist who had signed up for the adventure of weekend bivouacs and the few extra bucks, not for full-time service in what the “ ’Ghanistan” troops called “Boring Boring.” Their hope was, now that the war on terrorism was winding down, at least in Afghanistan, they’d soon get news they were going home. Back home where a six-pack wasn’t against the will of Allah, where a girl was free to go out with whoever might ask her and let a man take off more than her veil.

  CHAPTER TEN

  General Chang was as good as his word, calling back by three-fifteen. “Mr. Riser, I have some information about your daughter,” he said. “As you probably are aware, my niece, Wu Ling, is — was, excuse me, please — a good friend of your daughter.”

  “Yes,” Riser said, though he had never personally met the general’s “niece.” “Has she any information?”

  The general wasn’t used to such directness. In China, one took longer to get to the point, and it was considered impolite to rush. But then again, the general told himself, if someone had murdered his daughter, he would be just as impatient for information as was the American. “Wu Ling said she was with your daughter at the Museum of Opera and Theater when she called you.”

  “Does she remember what my daughter said?”

  “A little, I think. That is why I’m calling. She told me it was very noisy. Tourists.” He added a lighthearted self-criticism of his fellow countrymen. “Chinese tourists. Very loud.” Riser had the will but lacked the energy to laugh openly. “Ah,” continued the general, “it may be helpful if you spoke to my niece.”

  “Is she with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I speak to her now?”

  “Of course.” There was a pause as the general summoned her.

  Wu Ling tried to be helpful, but it was hopeless; her English was poor, and she spoke a dialect of Cantonese, not Mandarin, the official language of government and of cultural attachés. And with Riser unable to see her body language, any attempt to splice Mandy’s segmented message into something cohesive was impossible. Could he meet her? he asked the general.

  “Unfortunately, we are in Suzhou for the next week. Perhaps when we return to Beijing we could arrange—”

  “No. Now,” said Riser. “I can fly down to Hangzhou then catch the train to Suzhou.” Riser heard a rapid, loud exchange between Chang and his “niece.” He had never gotten used to the din of Chinese conversation; at times it felt like being assaulted by a human ghetto blaster.

  “Wu Ling,” Chang apologized, “is very saddened by Miss Riser’s death. She does not want to dwell upon it.”

  “I understand,” said Riser, “believe me—” Charles paused to regain his composure. “—but I wouldn’t take much of her time. I would be grateful for even a half hour. I’ll catch the early morning flight.” Riser heard Wu Ling agree, albeit reluctantly.

  “Perhaps,” added Chang, clearly sensitive to Riser’s mood, “we could meet somewhere quiet. The Garden of the Master of the Nets. You know it?”

  “Yes,” said Riser. “Tell Wu Ling I appreciate it. This is very kind of you, General. I won’t forget it. Neither will my government.”

  The truth was, his government didn’t know about him going to Hangzhou because Riser knew there was no way his boss and the American ambassador would sanction a trip to Hangzhou tomorrow. It was the day of the Moon Festival, an important all-China, mid-autumn celebration during which cultural attachés posted in Beijing should have remained in the capital, not traveled six hundred miles away to the south, no matter what personal reasons they might have. Besides, China and the U.S. were not on good terms. As usual, there was the perennial tension over the human rights issue in Chinese-occupied Tibet, the ever potentially explosive issue of Taiwan, and now Beijing struggled with the problem of the “Stans”—the countries of central Asia that bordered China. They included Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Pakistan, with their huge Muslim populations. In particular, there was the problem of Muslim terrorists in China’s far northeast region of Xinjiang. In that vast province, almost four times the size of Texas, many of the terrorists were believed to have been financed by al Qaeda.

  Charlie Riser, forgetting that he was still on the phone with the general, was surprised to hear Chang speaking. It was a kind of absentmindedness that had frequently overtaken him since Mandy’s death.

  “Wu Ling,” said the general, “tells me that your daughter desired it very much — the garden.”

  Desired? thought Charlie. It was such a beautiful, albeit unusual, way of putting it.

  “Yes,” Riser said. “I look forward to
it.” The thought that he would be walking in a place where his daughter had so recently been was strangely comforting and saddening at the same time.

  As usual, China Air was running late. En route to Hangzhou, Riser, irritated by the surliness of a flight attendant, recalled how the nascent airline used to test applications for the job. “Honest to God,” the embassy military attaché, Bill Heinz, had told him, “four turns in a swivel chair. If you didn’t get dizzy you were in.” It was the only airline Charlie knew — from a flight he’d once made to Xian to see the famed buried Stone Warriors — that had landed the aircraft with food trays still down and not cleared. On one flight, both pilot and copilot managed to lock themselves out of the cockpit and, drawing the curtain separating flight deck from passengers, proceeded to bash their way back in by means of a fire axe.

  He was relieved when he saw the early morning lights of Hangzhou, still sparsely lit by Western standards. Most of them were clustered east of the West Lake, a long string of lanterns marking the Sudi Causeway, which seemed to be running uphill north to south across the four-square-mile lake as the plane banked, the blackness of the lake dotted here and there by the firefly dots of ferries and sampans.

  After the gritty Mongolian dust storms that perennially blanketed Beijing and irritated his contact lenses, it was the fresh, sweet air of Hangzhou’s surrounding hills that first struck Charles as he stepped off the plane. The second thing he noticed was the abundance of colored lanterns — Hangzhou would of course be required to celebrate the anniversary of Mao’s revolution, but much of the bustle in the city was in preparation for the Moon Festival.

  At the Hangzhou rail station there were no soft-seat-class tickets left. Envisaging riding “hard seat,” jammed in with masses of “cawking,” spitting comrades in a blue haze of cigarette smoke and shouted dialects, Riser told a taxi driver the price he was prepared to pay in yuan for the eighty-mile cab ride to Suzhou. The driver snorted as if the proposed price was ridiculously low. Riser began walking to the next cab in line when the first driver relented. Even so, he wrote down the amount so there could be no “misunderstanding” when they reached Suzhou. “Ni hùi shuo yingwen ma?” he asked the driver. Do you speak English?

  “Bu shuo,” the driver said, shaking his head.

  “Zhèci lüxing yào hua duochang shíjian?” How long does it take?

  “Two … maybe forty hours,” the driver told him in English, grinning in the rearview mirror. A comedian.

  Charles gave him a smile, though he didn’t feel like it. The fact that the teeming life of China, of the world, was going on outside without the slightest concern for his daughter’s death seemed monstrous to him. But part of the reason he put his Walkman earphones on again was not so much to shut out the world, but to try to make sense of Mandy’s urgent, static-saturated message that he’d taped and replayed at least twenty times. And to hear her voice. And, yes, in part, to black out the teeming, uncaring world, to close his eyes to the passing fields of morning, to retreat like a migraine sufferer, withdrawing from his pain into the cave of darkness. In drawing the shades against the indifference of the world, against its harshness and unrelenting glare, he could see her again, hear her voice. His memory of her and his need for vengeance were the only things that made it possible for him to go through these China days. But he couldn’t escape the urgency in her tone.

  “Daddy … Wu Ling … loaded … as usual … told me Chang… tralize … or … wes … kind of deal … the mill …”

  He only hoped Bill Heinz could help.

  At first Riser had resisted passing on a copy of the garbled conversation to the military attaché. It seemed to him like giving up something, his daughter’s last words, an intensely private thing, to a stranger. But maybe the appropriate agencies could make something of it? Since 9/11, the atmosphere in the embassy had been as paranoid as that in America itself. And so, while not yet recovered from the mind-numbing shock of Mandy’s murder, he sought what the media called “closure,” while knowing there could never really be any following your child’s death. Which was when he had typed out a memo, including the message, to Heinz.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  At the surface, the tough fiberglass Kirvy-Morgan diving helmets that Frank Hall’s Petrel crew had gotten for Rafe Albinski and Peter Dixon were a bright canary yellow atop the SEALs’ black neoprene dry suits. Under the suits, they wore their Navy-issue clothing as they dove to reinvestigate Darkstar’s first reported anomaly, only this time they would be going much deeper, literally trying to get to the root of the problem.

  Within fifteen feet, the canary yellow diving helmets were a light pastel. Another twenty feet, and Frank Hall — his right hand wheeling clockwise, telling the two adjacent winch men to keep lowering — could no longer see the helmets. His eyes shifted instead to the two blocks at the apex of the square A-shaped derrick, the depth needle on each block moving smoothly, registering the two divers’ descent. Each of the SEALs’ umbilical cords consisted of a half-inch black air, or Kluge, hose, a thin communication wire and nylon tethering rope. They had passed easily over the block’s wheel, a coarse, chalky white powder rising from both divers’ cables as dried salt particles were spat out by the uncoiling tether rope.

  In the nether world 180 feet down, the two SEALs saw the high intensity light of their halogen lamps suddenly speared by a sixty-foot-high forest of kelp moving in a strangely beautiful yet Quixotic ballet, parts of it swaying gracefully side to side in the main east-west current, other strands of the amber plant quivering rebelliously, the rasping sound of frond upon frond faintly audible to the divers’ external mikes. Dixon, though the junior of the two, wasn’t at all fazed by the sight of the massive kelp barrier, which was so wide their halogen beams couldn’t find a perimeter around which they might circumscribe the forest. In fact, Dixon thought it a “cool” diversion, and he radioed Rafe Albinski, “Man, that’s pretty!”

  Albinski agreed, but he’d lost colleagues to this “pretty” stuff. Like fishing line that could entrap divers, he’d seen this mesmerizing ballet of giant shadow and light turn ugly, the vertical forest breaking up in intertidal flux, collapsing in a morass of interweaving vines. It could be a huge mesh in which men had became quickly entangled, their air used up much faster than normal if they’d succumbed to panic, and then ended up suffering, gasping as hopelessly as a fish trapped in a net.

  But they passed through the kelp, turning their mikes’ volume down to drown out the irritating abrasive sound of the kelp chafing itself. The immediate drop in the noise level was a welcome respite, so much so that when Albinski felt a juddering sensation against his umbilical air hose, he assumed he’d merely swum against an unseen stalk on the kelp perimeter, and guessed that the impact registered all along the snaking air hose, communication wire, and rope to Petrel’s compressor, over 180 feet above them. Then he felt a tug, more like a yank, on his umbilical, causing him to rise several feet before descending again.

  Something also sent a shudder down Dixon’s air umbilical, but it had not been nearly so strong. “You feel that, Rafe?” Dixon asked his dive buddy. But all he heard was a faint noise like a tap left running. Remembering that he’d squelched the volume button against the kelp, he turned it up. Now he heard a roaring sound as if a dam had burst — perhaps the noise of a bubble cascade picked up by Albinski’s mike — so loud it would surely drown out any sound of Albinski confirming a sudden and potentially fatal imbalance of pressure caused by whatever had whacked his umbilical and been thwarted by his helmet’s nonreturn valve automatically shutting off, preventing a surge of water into his air hose.

  The vibration in Albinski’s umbilical’s communications wire was so intense that Frank Hall, standing on Petrel’s aft deck, saw the A-frame’s block bucking violently. He could also hear the splitting of individual strands of the umbilical’s tether rope, throwing off droplets from the visible part of the tether line with such force that the shower of water particles hissed as they peppe
red the waves. The tension meter needle on the A-frame’s block was shivering ominously, its point in the red “overload” zone.

  Hall turned to Albinski’s winch man. “Bring him up!” Dixon’s umbilical looked all right.

  The fact that Albinski didn’t answer Hall’s radio call wasn’t necessarily conclusive, because Hall knew that Albinski was a pro and might be breathing in air from his Bail bottle, the small, one-hour auxiliary tank that working divers strapped to their back. But without the insulation of air that kept Albinski warm earlier in the dry suit, there was a pressing danger of irreversible hypothermia.

  “Rafe!” Frank shouted again, trying to penetrate any semiconscious barrier that might be closing in on the diver, the ex-SEAL oceanographer thinking reflexively to give the diver that extra shot of hope that sometimes made the difference of a few lifesaving seconds.

  “All right, Pete,” Frank informed Dixon. “We’re bringing you up too.”

  “Copy that.”

  Petrel’s officer of the watch turned the vessel further into the wind to prevent her from rolling too much in the “ball-freezing wind,” as the bosun referred to the easterly.

  Fourteen miles to the west, Captain Rorke was overseeing his deck party, including Alicia Mayne, carefully descending Utah’s vaneless sail down to its base from which to take the water sample requested by Admiral Jensen. It would show no unusual seasonal temperature variation, confirming Jensen’s hypothesis, at least in his own mind, that the problem had been current-driven kelp beds, the huge sea plants’ own salt and other chemical constituents causing both anomalies sighted by Darkstar.