Choke Point wi-9

by Ian Slater

  “Son of a—” began Dixon, abruptly cut off in mid-sentence during his ascent by the noise that, to Frank Hall’s ears, sounded like the sustained hiss of a water jet. He heard Dixon gasp, “Flooding!” followed by a gurgled “Got it! Nonreturn valve closed. Thank Christ!”

  “You on Bail bottle?” came Frank’s anxious inquiry.

  “No. I’m sucking my dick!”

  “Didn’t know you had one,” riposted Frank. It eased the tension momentarily, but why did both divers have trouble with the supposedly foolproof nonreturn valve? Damn thing should have closed immediately when water tried to enter the air lines.

  Hall raised his canvas-gloved right hand, moving his forefinger quickly clockwise through the salt air in the seaman’s traditional “up fast” signal to the hoist men, both winches now singing in unison. It would be six minutes till Albinski and Dixon were up, water spitting from the A-frame’s block and winch drum alike.

  Then, suddenly, both winches began to labor, the umbilicals of both divers under enormous strain, the tension meter needle on each winch having swung hard right into the red, quivering. The winch man for Albinski’s line donned protective goggles. If the line broke above the surface under the strain, it would come across the deck like a bullwhip. “We’re near overburn, Frank,” the winch man warned.

  Frank’s hand was still circling furiously. “Then fucking overburn! Go till there’s smoke!” He switched channels to the dry lab. “Lab, you getting this on the trace?”

  “Yes, sir. Sonar’s recording.”

  “Well?”

  “Two suits in a huge tangle.”

  “Both hoses severed?”

  “Can’t tell in all this kelp shit.”

  “As high density profile as you can.”

  “We’re on it, Captain.” The shift from “Hall” or “Frank” to “Captain” measured the mood of urgency that had taken over Petrel’s crew of sixteen. Several of them in off-duty wet gear, now that it had begun to rain, coffee mugs in hand, were gathering at center deck aft of the dry lab’s overhang, from where they could keep one eye on the A-frame’s two blocks and one on the stylus racing across the sonar trace paper. The glacially slow reverse spin of the depth meter told them the two SEALs should reach surface in about five minutes, a few grim side bets being made on Dixon’s and Albinski’s chance of survival. The onlookers tried to make some sense of the sonar image, but like untrained eyes looking at aerial recon photos, the black and gray shadings against the white paper seemed nothing more than that.

  “Smoke!” It was Dixon’s winch man. Everybody had expected Albinski’s winch to be the first to evidence malfunction since he’d been the first in trouble, but Frank recalled that the Dixon winch was older. The winch man slammed his foot down hard on the brake pedal.

  The A-block’s depth needle stopped abruptly and Frank screamed, “Slower, you idiot! Tap it!”

  Given the enormous weight of the kelp that had wrapped itself around the umbilical, such a sudden brake could exert enough torque to snap the cord as easily as an impatient fisherman jerking his line against a snag.

  Albinski’s winch man was standing up now in his tractor spring seat for a better view of the A-block meter.

  “Sorry, Captain!” said Dixon’s winch man. There was obviously nothing they could do till the block cooled.

  A crewman was rushing out of the dry lab toward the smoking winch with a foam-nozzle fire extinguisher. “No!” yelled Frank. “Get back in the lab!” Christ, that’s all he needed, foam on the winch drum — soap on a rope, lose the vitally needed friction grip of the cord against the drum. “Try it now!” Frank ordered Dixon’s winch man over the agonized scream of Albinski’s winch.

  Now the sonar showed the two divers at about the same depth, eighty-five feet, a “short dip” in the ocean compared to the dives Frank had supervised over the Marianas Trench, which was so deep it could swallow Mount Everest with another five thousand feet of water to spare. But right now the two SEALs, though in much shallower water, were in a much more dangerous situation — a dead weight lift.

  “Smoke!” Now it was Albinski’s umbilical, but this time the winch man pumped the brake pedal to a stop, the winch hauling up Dixon groaning, the umbilical taut, completely devoid of any slack.

  “Smoke!” Dixon’s line was overheating again, threatening to snap at any moment, the tether rope’s strands starting to “split ragged,” as the bosun explained to the cook’s young gofer. All bets as to how long it would take were now off. If both divers had gotten to their Bail bottle in time, there was still the question of their energy, nitrogen, oxygen, helium, and air running out.

  “Sir?” It was Petrel’s second officer. “COMSUBPAC-GRU-9’s on the line. They want to know—”

  “Not now.”

  “The admiral’s asking—”

  “Not now!”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Nai hao,” came the greeting. At first Riser didn’t recognize the general. The commander of Nanjing’s 12th Military District had donned the traditional drab blue workers’ Mao suit instead of his uniform. Wu Ling, also in the drab blue uniform, looked on shyly.

  “Ni hao,” replied Riser, extending his hand and nodding to Wu Ling. The general’s eyes smiled, and the sparse apology for a mustache momentarily became a straight line, his tobacco-stained teeth highlighted by expensive gold crown and bridge work, his breath so pungent it could have stopped the Shanghai Express. Riser wondered if his own breath was offensive. Mandy would, had, occasionally reminded him, “Daddy, I think you need a mint.” And since her death — the same thing had happened after Elizabeth’s fatal hit and run — he’d let personal habits slide, didn’t give a damn if he’d showered twice a day anymore, polished his shoes, or done the other things he habitually did.

  “I am sorry,” the general said, “that the flight to Hangzhou was delayed. China Air is not very punctuated.”

  “Punctual,” said Riser, immediately regretting the correction, which many Chinese, particularly higher-ups like Chang, often resented as typical of “Big Nose” arrogance. But Chang laughed easily at his mistake. “Punct-you-all?”

  “Yes.” Riser smiled, seizing upon the general’s good humor to get to the serious questions he wanted to ask, and for which he’d risked the wrath of his boss by foregoing the official Moon Festival festivities in Beijing. Wu Ling trailed behind them, so deferential that it was immediately obvious to Riser that she was not going to be the source of much helpful information.

  In the courtyard of the inner garden, Riser suddenly had a powerful sense of déjà vu, so much so that despite his impatience to find out what Chang knew about Mandy’s death, he stopped walking, staring at the lanterns and the master’s study with its distinctive Ming furniture. He had seen this before, with his wife, but he and Elizabeth had never been to China, let alone Suzhou, together.

  Chang was still talking. “I wanted to meet you here. One needs tranquility before—” He saw that Riser had fallen several paces behind him, the attaché’s face reminding the general of the British politician Tony Blair, creased with worry lines that momentarily gave him the appearance of a much older man, an effect highlighted by the bereaved cultural attaché’s uncharacteristically unkempt appearance.

  Riser turned his gaze from the master’s study in the garden to the general. “Yes?”

  “Perhaps you are not ready?” suggested Chang.

  “For what?”

  Obviously the American hadn’t heard him. “To go to the morgue.”

  Wu Ling, Riser saw, had tears in her eyes, fighting hard to control her emotion.

  “No,” Riser told Chang. “I’m not ready. But I have to, I suppose.”

  “Quite so. I thought the garden might give you a chance to revive your spirits first. Perhaps I should have arranged it the other way around.”

  “No, no, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude, but I’ve just — I feel as if I’ve been here before with my late wife.”

  “Yo
u are correct.”

  Riser stared at the general, completely nonplused.

  “Some years ago,” the general explained, “this courtyard was copied in every detail and displayed in New York at the Metropolitan Museum.”

  “When?” asked Riser, relieved by the possibility that his mind was not imagining things but merely remembering a real, happier time — his Sunday visits to the museum with Elizabeth and Mandy. “Going to church,” he used to call it, the highlight of their week, Mandy transfixed by Monet’s Haystacks.

  “I think,” replied the general, “it was before your daughter was born.”

  “Yes.” Charles forced himself to return to the present. “What have you found out?”

  “She was murdered, Mr. Riser, but I do not think it was for money.”

  Charles felt his bowels turning to ice. His doubts about Mandy’s death had been difficult enough to deal with, but confirmation of his suspicions that she had been randomly attacked — He had to sit down on the stone bench and take a deep breath.

  “Perhaps you should not go to the Suzhou coroner.” The general meant going to the morgue.

  “Yes,” said Charles. “I have to see her. Can we go now?”

  “If you wish,” said Chang, surprised by the energy of Riser’s request coming so quickly after what had clearly been a body blow.

  “I want to get it over with,” Riser told him, sensing the general’s surprise.

  Outside the Garden of the Master of the Nets, the general resorted to small talk in an effort to amortize the American’s pain, explaining to Charles how the garden had been named after a government official so fed up with bureaucracy that he’d decided to abandon his world and become a simple fisherman, casting his nets. Charles appreciated Chang’s efforts, and he did understand how the official had felt; how, like so many, he had yearned to be free of it all, as he himself did now — free not only of the bureaucratic world, but of the world itself.

  On their arrival at Suzhou’s morgue, Wu Ling remained in the car. The building was renovated but still bore all the elements of the brutal Soviet architecture of the 1950s. Chang and Riser passed through a small, cluttered, smoke-filled office. There were three computers, but no one at them, two of the female clerks staring at the “Big Nose,” the other preoccupied, doing her nails. The coroner, Mr. Wei, was out, one of them told General Chang, apparently not recognizing him out of uniform.

  It was the grim, overpowering smell of antiseptic that first struck Riser. Further inside, however, the morgue looked and sounded disconcertingly gay, with Moon Festival paper lanterns strung all about and Chinese opera wailing from Suzhou’s Chinese Central Television channel. Copies of Renmin Ribao — The People’s Daily—the country’s propaganda organ, outdated editions of the Shanghai Star, and several tabloids he’d never seen before, featuring front-page pictures of nudes soaking up the sun on some “unnamed” southern beach, were strewn about. Either there wasn’t much to do in the Suzhou morgue or it was overstaffed. Had the Gong An Bu seen these ideologically impure publications? Either that or they hadn’t been here at all.

  There was a short, sharp exchange in dialect between coroner Wei as he returned and the general, an assistant in a bloodstained lab coat quickly gathering up the tabloids and scurrying out to the cramped front office. As if by way of apology for the festive, rather lackadaisical air, or so Charles thought at first, Chang walked over to the TV, seemingly to turn it off, but he surprised Riser by turning the opera up even louder. The high, nasal whine of the dan—the female roles played by men — reached such a pitch that Riser was sure he was in for a splitting headache, even though he was more or less conditioned by now to the appalling noise pollution levels in which most of China carried on its business.

  “I like opera,” Chang told him loudly, while scribbling something on a piece of notepaper and waving Riser over toward the far bank of aluminum freezer trays. “I particularly like this one, ’The People’s Justice.’ Do you know it?”

  “No!” said Riser, so forcefully that it betrayed his irritation, though he’d no sooner said it than he realized that Chang was probably creating what in the embassy they called an ad hoc “special classified intelligence facility”—a rubber-mounted plastic bubble with anechoic coatings, from which no sound could be detected by either beam mikes aimed through glass from outside a building or from fixed mikes hidden in the room.

  The experience of having to identify Elizabeth’s body still vivid in his memory, Charles steeled himself to be ready when Wei pulled out the cold, calico-sheathed aluminum slab.

  There was a delicate lace of ice about her hair. Worried she’d be so cold, Charles gently brushed the frost back from her forehead. The opera was reaching hysterically high levels, and, already queasy from the overpowering antiseptic — a peculiarly sweetish, astringent odor which he knew he would never forget — he said nothing.

  Chang, indicating the bruising on her head, spoke quietly in English, as if not wanting any of the coroner’s staff to hear. “Say nothing. She was tortured. Raped. Massive internal bruising.” With that, the general stood up, pushed the slab in partway, and reaching up, drew down a fifteen-by twenty-four-inch paper bag, taking out a blue Mao suit and a smaller jeweler’s packet, spilling out a digital Casio watch and a locket. “Her personal effects. One watch, one locket. You must sign here. Ah—” added Chang awkwardly, “—there is a fee. I am sorry. Twenty yuan.”

  No doubt it was another foreigner rip-off, but Charles, rummaging beneath his shirt in his money belt, didn’t argue. He owed Chang a lot more for telling him the truth.

  “I think you need a drink,” said Chang.

  Charles nodded.

  In a small pavement restaurant near Barberry’s Pub Café on Liangxi Road, Chang told Charles, “I’ve found out more since I called you. We think she was tortured because of a message she was trying to get to you.”

  Charles wasn’t taking it in, unable to evict the sight of ice in her hair. So cold and final. Now the general was saying something about “stupid girl.” “What?”

  “Wu Ling,” answered Chang. “I’ve told her never to repeat anything she hears me discussing with Beijing, but I guess it was a—” Chang paused, trying to think of the English word. “—a juicy story. About Li Kuan.”

  The general saw the name meant nothing to Riser; understandably, given the fact that Kuan was a common enough name. Either that or the American cultural attaché was still deep in shock at just having confronted the bleak reality of his daughter’s death. She was — had been — a beautiful woman. “Li Kuan — the slag merchant,” Chang explained.

  Riser, his mind still with his daughter, looked across at the general, refocusing. “Yes.” Everyone at the embassy knew about Li Kuan, the slag — leftover radioactive waste — dealer who was hawking the deadly material reclaimed out of everything from spent fuel rods to medical waste, with which terrorists could make a cheap radioactive bomb. And not all of Li Kuan’s merchandise was slag. Some, Bill Heinz said, was high weapons grade material stolen from poorly monitored Soviet installations. Riser vaguely recalled Heinz telling him that some “HWG material,” as they called it, had been housed in buildings that lacked the most basic video surveillance. All of which made Li Kuan one of the world’s deadliest salesmen.

  “What’s he got to do with Wu Ling?” inquired Riser.

  “Wu Ling and her BCLU friends were having a drink at Barberry’s Pub. Very popular among—”

  “Big Nose students,” said Riser.

  “Wu Ling went to the ladies’ room,” explained Chang. “There was a lineup. She overheard a student from Xinjiang province — it’s our most northwesterly province. It borders on four of the seven Stans. Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Uzbeki—”

  “I know where it is,” said Riser.

  “Many Muslims in the area,” continued Chang. “Wu Ling heard this student say soon the American and Chinese infidels would pay for their ungodliness, that there would be military attacks in the Northw
est. You see, the Muslim fanatics believe anyone who isn’t Muslim—”

  “I know,” said Riser impatiently. “We remember 9/11.”

  “Yes, of course,” said Chang apologetically. “Well, these friends said this Li Kuan had done a deal with holy ones from Xinjiang to Taiwan, that soon their wrath would be unleashed against America and China, that the world would be run instead by the holy ones. I think in English you call them the ’moolas’?”

  “Mullahs,” said Riser. “So?”

  Chang leaned forward, his breath reeking of black bean sauce. “Wu Ling told your daughter and her other friends.”

  Riser could guess the rest. “The fanatic or his friend realized they’d been overheard and followed Wu Ling and Mandy out of the pub.”

  “Yes.”

  “But only Mandy was—”

  “Attacked, yes. Perhaps because she was the only American. The terrorists are more afraid of Americans than Chinese. They watched the Iraqi War on CNN. But I don’t doubt they intended to kill my Wu Ling and the other students who might have overheard them. But there was much confusion. Wu Ling said many other students came out of the pub. The assassins escaped. By now they are probably in Shanghai, or Xinjiang.” Which meant, Riser realized, they would never be found.

  “You think it was just beer talk?” Riser asked. “About attacks in the Northwest?” He was thinking of Mandy’s frantic phone message. “The Northwest of China or America?”

  Chang shrugged. “What puzzles me is, what were two Muslim fanatics doing in a pub?”

  Riser hadn’t thought of that. Muslims — fanatical Muslims — were forbidden to drink alcohol. “Terrorists have no patent on hypocrisy,” said Charles.

  “True,” agreed Chang.

  Riser got up from the table. “I’ll pass the information on to Washington.”

  “Good. It may be nothing,” said Chang, “but I will also pass it on to Beijing. The problem is, Mr. Riser, we must be careful.” The inflection Chang gave to “we” was clearly meant to refer to China, not America.