Choke Point wi-9

by Ian Slater

  “I thought Beijing’s policy was to be tough on terrorists.”

  “Yes,” said Chang as they walked back out to rejoin Wu Ling, “we agree with your President. But Beijing must be careful. If it were to attack the terrorists in Taiwan, for example, it could be accused by Washington of using antiterrorism as an excuse, a pretext, to take over Taiwan.”

  Riser nodded and extended his hand. “You’ve been very kind to tell me all this, General. I won’t forget it.”

  The general brushed it aside. “If it was my daughter—”

  “Yes,” said Riser, more sharply than he intended, but he was already thinking of revenge for Mandy’s murder. The scum had tortured her.

  For a man who was his country’s cultural attaché, a man presumably more sensitive to the finer things in life, he was taken aback by the depths of his hatred, by his seething desire for vengeance against whoever had killed his daughter. But the more he listened to Mandy’s last call, to the fear in her voice, its urgency, the evidence of her courage, the less he cared about the propriety of his thirst for revenge. He wanted the killer or killers — what would be the best he could hope for? Execute them the way the Chinese did it — a shot in the back of the neck? No, that was too quick.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  In Beijing, the U.S. military attaché, or “MA,” as Bill Heinz was called, was trying not to be curt. He was naturally sympathetic to Riser’s loss, but dammit, didn’t the cultural attaché realize the possible import of Mandy Riser’s last message? “You should’ve told me about this right away, Charlie.”

  “I did,” responded Riser, his voice echoing in the embassy’s enclosed security bubble. “I left you that memo before I flew down to Hangzhou.”

  “Memo? A few words — something about a ’Wu Ling … nor … wes…. ’ C’mon, Charlie, I can’t send this to the agency. They’ll think I’ve gone China cuckoo. Too long away from the States.”

  “How about the notes I left you about what General Chang told me?”

  “Shit, Charlie, don’t you remember the flap in five-oh-two?”

  Charlie had to think, military attachés preferring “Milspeak” to English. Five-oh-two? “May, two thousand and two — what about it?” said Charlie.

  “Jesus, Charlie,” Heinz said more cordially. “What do you CAs do all day anyway? Listen to Peking Opera?”

  Before Riser could answer the jest, the military attaché hurried on. “May two thousand and two, Charlie. Congressional hearing on the security gaps before 9/11? How come al-Midhar and Alhamzi, two of the pricks who took over American Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon, had been identified by the Agency in Kuala Lumpur as al Qaeda operatives — as far back as January oh-two — but we didn’t pass the info on to the FBI or State Department? And how come the FBI itself failed on one of its own agent’s tips to find out why so many Arabs were taking flight training courses in the U.S.? How come our own Navy secretly builds research vessels and doesn’t tell brother agencies about it?”

  Heinz answered his own long-winded question. “Interservice rivalry, yes, but just as often, Charlie, it’s because people simply don’t pass on the intel in time!”

  Charles looked nonplused.

  “What I’m saying, Charlie, is that soon as Chang told you about those terrorists talking about slag in—” Heinz glanced down at Charlie’s notes. “—Borberry’s Pub—”

  “Barberry’s.”

  “Yeah, well, Charlie, for a cultural attaché your handwriting sucks. Point is, old buddy, you should have called me on the hotline immediately. Like, right away! Xinjiang’s back-to-back with K-stan,” continued the military attaché, meaning Kazakhstan. “And Kazakhstan, Charlie, is oil. Three hundred million barrels a year. Most of it’s been piped to Russia, but that’s changing — fast. China’s Petroleum Corp. wants in on the tit. New deposits in the Caspian Sea puts Kazakhstan’s reserves to eighteen billion barrels. That, old buddy — now remember this, Charlie — equals three-quarters of the U.S.’s total reserves. So we want into K-stan too — cut our dependence on Saudi Arabia et al. A lot of U.S. companies have already invested there. Problem is, among the 228 million people who inhabit the Stans, there are a lot of Muslim fanatics, and not just al Qaeda. Some of these terrorist crazies are stirring it up in K-stan. With one dirty bomb—”

  “I’m not that dumb,” Riser told his colleague. “No one wants them to set the oil wells on fire.”

  “Or the pipelines. You let one martyr get away with blowing himself up next to a pipeline and it starts a trend.”

  “You can’t punish him,” Riser said wryly, “if he’s dead.”

  “Correct. Which is why your info from Chang is red hot, because it’s telling us, Washington, D.C., that if there’s any sign of Li Kuan, who one of our SpecFor Direct Action teams was supposed to waste in Afghanistan but failed—” Heinz took a breath. “—if there’s any sign that Li Kuan and his henchmen are stirring the pot along the Chinese/K-stan border, Beijing’s going to kick ass and take names. And Uncle Sam had best stay out of it. Let the PLA get Li Kuan and his mob.”

  So now Charlie Riser saw something he hadn’t before — that while it was nice of Chang to help him cut through the red tape and tell him what happened to Mandy, the general, and thus Beijing, had also seen it as an opportunity to use him as a conduit to the U.S.’s Beijing military attaché, thus informing Washington that Li Kuan, who’d given this SpecFor team the slip, was now headed for the K-stan — Chinese border and/or Taiwan to trigger chaos in China and the oilfields. But hopefully not chaos in America.

  “So,” proffered Charles, “the Chinese don’t want the U.S. to interfere, should they have to wield a bit of stick.”

  “Correct,” said the military attaché. “Oh, in case you’re tempted to get a big head about being the chosen messenger, don’t. The Chinese have been feeding us this line for a while through other channels. Not officially — too much danger of leaks to pain-in-the-ass human rights types who’d march on the U.N. if they knew. But if Chang’s right about Li Kuan moving to K-stan, we could see SMA there any minute.”

  “SMA?” Riser asked, knowing it was the MA’s acronym for substantial military action, but wanting his colleague to explain it in English.

  “Substantial—”

  “War,” cut in Riser. “In Central Asia — or even Taiwan, if that’s where Beijing thinks the terrorists are about to strike. Beijing still sees Taiwan as a province of China.”

  “Taiwan’s a long shot,” said the MA, climbing out of the embassy’s ICB bubble on the way to the code room. He was going to send this message himself.

  Charlie could still see the spidery white frost in Mandy’s hair, covering her once lustrous sheen with a web of old age, years before her time. If anything good could possibly come of her death, maybe it would be Beijing’s messages to Washington, D.C., via his conversation with General Chang, to give Beijing a free hand against Li Kuan, to hunt him down and kill him.

  On Petrel, the afterdeck, an island of light in the evening darkness, was illuminated by the arc light atop the A-frame. Albinski’s and Dixon’s umbilicals, which had earlier been groaning through the A-frame’s left block, now had to be stopped every few minutes to clear kelp from them as fast as possible. Then Albinski’s winch man called, “Thirty feet to surface.” A murmur of excitement passed through the dozen crewmen huddled around the dry lab, only Frank Hall’s work party of six men, including the bosun, allowed on the apron of steel directly beneath the A-frame’s block.

  “Twenty feet to surface.”

  “How ’bout Dixon?” asked one of the deck party.

  “Another sixty-four,” answered the diver’s winch man, at once grateful for the cooling that each kelp-clearing stop afforded his winch’s motor, but worried too, like everyone else, whether the divers — if they were still alive — had enough air left in their Bail bottles to wait out the seemingly never-ending kelp clearance, the weed at times so thick about the umbilical that it wouldn’t pass
through the block.

  “In sight!” announced Albinski’s winch man. There was a loud cheer as bubbles erupted in an undulating circle of light that moved up and down the choppy surface like a sodden white sheet, the rain sweeping over it.

  “Steady!” Frank cautioned the winch man. Sometimes in the excitement of a surfacing, the winch man miscalculated the rate of hoist during the final seconds of haul in which a diver emerged from the density of sea. His weight in air, if the winch man hadn’t geared down fast enough, could suddenly cause him to swing like a freed pendulum, smashing into the ship’s stern. “Steady! Steady!” said Frank.

  “Holy shit!” It was one of the work party, literally taken aback when instead of the fiberglass helmet he’d expected to see, what was emerging from the sea was like something out of a horror movie: a huge, glistening mass of kelp. Some said afterward it was the size of a VW Beetle — an exaggeration, but it was big, the enormous fronds looking like the tentacles of the giant squids that other oceanographers had found off New Zealand. As yet, no sign of Albinski.

  “Don’t just stand there!” bellowed the Petrel’s bosun. “Get the pikes onto it.”

  Frank Hall switched his mike channels. “Sonar?” he asked. “What else do you see besides the kelp?”

  “Nothing sir. We’re too close to it. No definition — just a big blob of kelp obscuring the whole damn trace.”

  Four of the work party had thrust out their pikes, the long-handled boat hooks grasping Albinski’s umbilical four to five feet below the A-frame’s starboard block. The men prevented a dangerous pendulum by using counterforce, pulling the umbilical in as Petrel’s stern dipped in the swells, pushing against it as the stern rose atop the next swell. Two of the deck party were slicing at the kelp, torn between going so fast that they’d sever the umbilical or so cautiously that they’d lose the race against what they knew must be Albinski’s emergency air supply in his Bail bottle. And all the while, Dixon’s umbilical was moving at an agonizing snail’s pace through the A-frame’s portside block, its “smoke” stops and quivering tension meter needle testimony to the winch operator that he too was hauling in a massive load of kelp.

  “You know,” said an off-duty crewman standing anxiously by the dry lab, “they use kelp to smooth out ice cream?” The outrageously inappropriate comment was presumably the only way he could deal with his own mounting anxiety.

  Dixon’s winch man didn’t bother to respond. All his attention was on Albinski’s umbilical, which was swaying port to starboard and back like a hanged man’s rope, the umbilical’s thin communication wire missing, the black air hose, though, looking intact.

  “Good!” he said aloud.

  “What?” said the “ice cream” man, his shadow cutting across the winch drum. “Oh yeah. Amazing stuff, eh?”

  “Get outta my light!”

  Suddenly, there was a tremendous splash astern, foaming seawater cascading down on the work party, swirling and running out about their feet through the scuppers with furious speed. Two men were sprawled on the deck, cursing and trying to get their wind, when Frank, grasping Petrel’s starboard rail, shouted, “Bring ’im in slowly.” Albinski’s neoprene suit looked bigger than it should have been, his helmet still obscured by an errant swath of kelp that took on a bright cherry color in the arc light.

  “Mother of God!” said the bosun, his tone immediately casting a pall over the deck crew.

  Frank was helping up one of the men who had been downed in the splash caused by the enormous ball of kelp that had suddenly given way under the pike’s probing and plunged back into the sea. “In easy,” he said in a tone as gentle as the soft rain that continued to fall, its shadows slicing the deck lamp’s light like a black snow.

  The cherry-colored helmet contained all that remained of Rafe Albinski. The tremendous sea pressures, set upon him when his one-way nonreturn valve failed to shut, had crushed his body, expelling the ninety-eight percent that was water, pulverizing the remaining two percent of bone, skin, and organs into a paste that was forced by the indifferent laws of physics up the ruptured tube that had been his dry suit into his helmet. What had been his dry suit was now an obscenely bloated Michelin-tire-man figure that, having expanded as it rose to the surface, was disgustingly urinating from a hundred different pin-sized holes.

  Two of the deck party had dropped their pikes and run back amidships, being sick over the side, for which Frank Hall would dock them five hundred dollars each. If he’d still been in the Navy, he would have insisted on formally charging them. He knew that ex-SEAL Albinski would have understood his fellow SEAL’s action. By deserting the afterdeck, albeit in shock, they had left the work party short-handed with a fellow SEAL’s umbilical cord still ascending, when every man in the work party was needed in order to tear off block-choking kelp that Frank fully expected to see wrapped about Dixon’s line.

  “In sight!” called out the bosun.

  “Shit,” said the ice cream man. “This bastard’s bigger’n the other one.” Fortunately he meant the kelp entanglement and not Dixon’s dry suit which, once the kelp was cut off, was revealed, unlike Albinski’s, to be as form-fitting as it should have been. Even so, with seawater pouring off it, it wasn’t certain whether it was puncture-free. It was only when they saw Dixon’s eyes, exhausted-looking yet obviously cognizant of what was going on, that they knew his nonreturn valve had continued to function properly.

  As Frank disengaged Dixon’s fiberglass helmet from its O-ring neck assembly, Dixon was shivering so badly he couldn’t speak, his lips purple. But Frank knew the young SEAL desperately wanted to say something: to ask whether his diving buddy was okay. And if not, why?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  When the machine-chattering newsroom at CNN headquarters in Atlanta received the report from its Kabul correspondent of a bomb having exploded northwest of Jinhe, no one had any idea where it was. Besides, bombings by terrorists, separatists, freedom fighters, whatever they called themselves, were a dime a dozen, and unless an incident seemed to have any direct bearing on the U.S.’s wider world war against terrorism, it simply didn’t make the cut for the news. But a professional sifter in the newsroom was paid to keep tabs on the location of all place names coming in on the media feed, in the event that some out-of-the-way hole in the wall suddenly became prominent. The sifter, clacking away on his computer, heard one of the anchorwoman’s assistants add, “Kabul guy reports Chinese troop movement along the border.”

  “What border?”

  The Kabul correspondent spelled it for her; all these “Stans” that sounded alike in central Asia had never meant anything to the American public. Before the wars on terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq, such countries were ignored by the world in general, relatively few people even knowing they were breakaway republics from the old Soviet Union.

  “Along the border with Kaz-akh-stan,” said the sifter.

  “Here it is,” put in another assistant. “Jinhe — some burg ’bout eighty to ninety miles from the Chinese border with Kazakhstan. Looks like it’s on the only rail link between the two countries.”

  “U.S. have anything near it?”

  The sifter enlarged the computer map. Jinhe was in Kyrgyzstan, immediately below southeastern Kazakhstan. “Apparently we have a big air base there. Let’s see.” He tapped the mouse. “At someplace called Manas. Three and a half thousand of our guys.”

  “Personnel,” the anchor told the sifter.

  “Yeah, right. Base has been there since 2002—puts us in range of Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Iran…. Man, who’d believe it? Most of these Stans used to belong to the Ruskies. Two hundred and thirty million, more than one and a half times the population of Russia. Now we’ve got a base there — fighters, transporters, and tanker planes.”

  “Hey,” added the anchor during a commercial break. “Russia is now a member of NATO. Chew on that.”

  “World war against terrorism,” said the sifter, by way of explanation. “Politics makes strange bedfello
ws.”

  “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” said someone else.

  “All right,” joshed the anchor. “Enough with the proverbs. How big was this bomb attack in this Jinhe?” He glanced at his recessed computer screen.

  “Our guy in Kabul,” replied the sifter, “says it blew apart the rail tracks for a mile or so.”

  “Any American citizens killed or injured?” It was the news producer in the booth.

  “Don’t know yet,” said the anchor, shuffling his papers, ready to move on to the next item, but not before hearing a staff member voicing his curiosity about the explosion being so large as to have taken out a mile or so of track.

  Within a half hour of the predawn bomb attack on the rail link northwest of Jinhe, between China’s far northwestern province and oil-rich Kazakhstan, two Chinese Group Armies, 112,000 men — a fraction of the PLA’s three million — crossed the one-thousand-mile-long border on a three-mile front northeast of Jinhe, each army of 56,000 men with their own air engineering and artillery support. In Urumqi, Xinjiang’s drab smokestack capital of 1.5 million, 270 miles east of where the two armies were crossing into Kazakhstan, another bomb exploded in a mailbox outside the Holiday Inn, killing three people and injuring a dozen laborers on their way to work early in the morning. This bomb, authorities suspected, was probably meant to explode later, in the morning rush hour. As sirens wailed through the city, the Gong An Bu began rounding up the list of usual suspects, Muslim separatists from among the Muslim Urghurs, who made up 7.3 million of the province’s seventeen million inhabitants and had always considered the Han Chinese to be invaders, since as recently as 1955 over ninety percent of Xinjiang’s inhabitants were non-Chinese. But now over half the population were Chinese, sent westward in droves by Beijing, who wanted to secure the province, in part to use the salt lake Lop Nur, in the vast area of Xinjiang’s Turpan Basin, for further nuclear testing.