Choke Point wi-9

by Ian Slater

  “How far is the carrier from Port Townsend?” he inquired of no one in particular.

  “Fifteen, twenty miles west-nor’west in the strait.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Son of a— Who’s your man up there, Admiral?” he asked the CNO.

  “Admiral Keach was commander of the battle group.”

  “You heard anything from him that we don’t already know?”

  “No, sir. He’s missing.”

  “Missing? I thought he would have been up in the island.”

  “He was, Mr. President — over by the bridge’s starboard wing lookout. Word is, the force of the explosions flung them both overboard. Apparently, the lookouts on the fantail suffered the same fate. Rescue helos he’d sent out earlier to pick up any Utah survivors hadn’t yet returned to the Turner. Anyway, it was pitch-dark.”

  “They would have been wearing life jackets, though,” said the President.

  “The two lookouts at the stern, yes, sir, but I don’t know about the admiral.”

  A sky-blue folder with the presidential seal, containing a thick pile of pages, was placed in front of the President. On the first of the 230 pages was the heading CVN TURNER — PERSONNEL. There were six thousand names, a quarter of them asterisked with either KIAor MIA. The very battle group he’d intended to use to prevent a war in Asia, in a world already at war against terrorism, now lay immobile in the Juan de Fuca Strait. And for one overwhelmingly simple reason: the proudest and most powerful navy in the world had been grievously wounded and humiliated by a bunch of mines, weapons that, the U.S. mining of Haiphong notwithstanding, elicited the kind of contempt in naval officers as that accorded a backshooter in the Old West.

  “If terrorists can sink two of our capital warships before we can even reach our littoral seas,” wrote the Wall Street Journal’s editorial, “what possible defense can we expect from the Navy?”

  US SUB SUNK was the less erudite but more effective verdict of the tabloids.

  As first editions hit the street on the East Coast, it was 3:00 A.M.

  in the Straits of Georgia and Juan de Fuca, where the rescue effort of hundreds of small boats, together with a dozen U.S. Coast Guard patrol vessels and Canada’s two coast guard cutters, had begun.

  Mayhem quickly followed in the wake of good intentions, as congested sea traffic, strong tides, and fog combined to endanger the would-be rescuers. Indeed, the fog was so thick that it obscured even the monolithic carrier, which, with her power cut, the gash in her side expanding till it was now over eleven feet wide, seemed beyond saving. The crippled leviathan’s aft section, from Elevator 4 to stern, looked to Admiral Bressard as if it would detach itself from the rest of the ship at any moment. The bone-grinding sounds of more bulkheads giving way, mingled with the cries from sick bays now rendered useless as air flows in the carrier — superheated by burst steam pipes leading from the reactors — made it necessary to bring hundreds of the wounded, many already suffering from severe scalding, up onto the forward flight deck. There, as corpsmen and other medics performed triage, surgeons did what little they could under the circumstances, the navy chaplains all but overwhelmed administering last rites. And yet, as the CNO and everyone else knew, there had been no battle in the strait — no enemy sighted.

  During the massive if largely ad hoc rescue effort, which the media was referring to as “America’s Dunkirk,” the Turner’s captain, like all his fellow commanders in the CVBG, were ordered by the CNO to remain in DEFCON — Defense Condition—1. Maximum force readiness.

  “Cautious,” said the New York Times.

  “Scared,” said Le Monde.

  Everyone on the remaining ships of the CVBG was increasingly nervous following the fate of Utah and Turner. It seemed that both the Times and Le Monde were right, the ships not daring to proceed through the strait for fear of three possibilities that Aegis analysis sensors now suggested but could not confirm: simultaneous detonation of five mines, two against Utah, three against Turner, either combinations of pressure/acoustic mines or coil rod induction fused bottom mines; a much more advanced, highly sensitive and comparatively cheap triple-axis fluxgate magnetometer-triggered mine; and finally, that the Utah and the Turner had been blown up by sensor mines measuring the electric current sent into the sea by the electrochemical reaction generated when steel hulls slice through iron-rich salt water. This latter type of targeting, however, was considered least likely by the Aegis electronic warfare officers, given the presence of the anechoic coating on the Utah, which would have minimized the metal/seawater electrochemical reaction.

  For the Pentagon, the question of what type of mines had been used against the two warships was crucial to any planned defense in the future, because obviously neither of the comparatively sophisticated underwater defense systems aboard Utah and the Aegis cruisers had worked.

  All right, the CNO asked, but what or who had laid the mines? A “mini” or “midget” sub? If mines had been laid from an unmanned mini, where was the mini being controlled from? All U.S. and Canadian submersible companies had been cleared. And if it had been a manned mini or midget sub, then where was its “milch cow,” its mother supply ship?

  Amid the winking of scores of rescue boat lights in the mist-shrouded strait, the sailors, offloading wounded into a Coast Guard cutter, saw one of the lights for a second become as bright as a struck match. It was the backblast of a missile streaking toward the huge gash on Turner’s aft port side. The speed of the missile registered by the computers on the Aegis nearest Turner was Mach 1.9, which meant it reached the already gravely wounded carrier in.3 seconds, the blink of an eye. Even so, the Aegis’s Phalanx close-in weapons system, with its state-of-the-art, superfast radar-guided response, did intercept. It was disastrous however, the impact of the incoming missile and outgoing 20mm ordnance resulting in a fiery rain of white-hot debris that showered Turner’s island, knocking out its cluster of vital antennae and radar dishes. For this reason, a second missile, fired a millisecond later, was able to disappear into the cavernous V cut, exploding at the waterline. Six minutes later the order was given to abandon ship. She would not hold.

  At 0431 the 95,000-ton carrier, tow lines attached, began a twelve-second death roll to port. Two tugboats — one out of Vancouver, the other from Seattle — were unable to release their lines quickly enough. One was dragged under, and the other, its line already taut, whipped through the air like a toy as the Turner’s stern inverted, the oceangoing tug slamming into the carrier’s prop like a box of matchsticks, the tug’s crew flung into the maelstrom of the carrier’s immense propellers.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  From China’s coast province of Fukien, the PLA’s sixty Xian H-6 medium bombers that attacked the offshore Nationalist island of Kinmen, about one-eighth the size of Rhode Island, did not come directly from the west, as expected. Following the PLA’s thousand-gun artillery assault, a prelude to what Kinmen’s Nationalists anticipated would be the invasion, the ChiCom bombers, augmented by 120 Q-5 ground attack aircraft and protected by three hundred-plane swarms of PLA Shenyang J-5 Fresco interceptors, flew south of Fukien, not east toward Kinmen.

  The ChiCom pilots, using their own hilly Amoy Island, ten miles directly west of Kinmen, as a screen, turned their fighter-protected bombers westward in a sixty-mile crescent, sweeping in low over the arc of Liaolo Bay on the island’s forty-mile-long southern coast, thus attacking the Nationalists’ heavy fortifications on the island’s northern shore from behind. Only now did Taipei and Washington realize that the fast Chinese attack boats, seen earlier on SATPIX as white scratches heading east from the Chinese mainland, had been a feint, making the Nationalists on Kinmen think the ChiCom fast attack patrol boats were the forward elements of a head-on invasion of the island from the west. This had duped the Nationalists on Kinmen to rush the bulk of their north coast garrison to the southernmost shores, thus leaving their flank exposed.

  As Freeman and
the rest of the Army’s USO team packed up for their flight back to the States, the general sent an e-mail to David Brentwood, who was to be sent home from Tora Bora for R&R, telling him, “I’ll come to see you back in the States. Fort Lewis is pretty close to this Northwest chaos, and I’d like to have a look-see for myself. Washington sure as hell doesn’t know what’s going on. It just occurred to me that probably the best place to meet would be in Port Townsend, right on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Will confirm later. By the way, I don’t think the towelheads are behind this at all.”

  If that last phrase didn’t get him the attention of Homeland Defense, Freeman thought, he’d eat his Afrika Korps cap.

  Army surgeons at Tora Bora, eschewing the kind of false hope that some of their well-meaning civilian colleagues often felt compelled to give patients, told David bluntly that his military career was over. “The lower part of your nerve plexus in the right arm has been destroyed, unfortunately — so badly damaged that even the best vascular surgeon can’t repair your arm beyond forty percent of its function. Better to face that now, Captain,” said one of the specialists, who, as an afterthought, asked, “You a religious man, Brentwood?”

  “Foxhole convert,” David quipped, a little too flippantly, given his sardonic smile, for any of the three surgeons to believe him.

  “Religion sometimes helps patients to adjust,” the surgeon said.

  David resented his tone. He saw it as an atheistic condescension toward someone the doctor considered simpleminded. “I don’t believe in miracles,” he responded, and immediately regretted giving ground.

  “Well, I think you’ll enjoy your R and R at Fort Lewis.” An awkward silence ensued until the doctor added, “The Pacific Northwest is big timber country. Lots of logging — one of the most accident-prone jobs in the world. A lot of good surgeons and rehab right at Fort Lewis’s doorstep.”

  “Ah, I think he wanted his rehab in Hawaii!” joshed one of the other doctors. “Somewhere a little warmer.”

  David gave them the smile they expected.

  “You ever been in the Pacific Northwest, Brentwood?”

  David wondered where he should begin. Obviously they hadn’t read his military record. “Yes,” he said simply.

  Approaching Washington State, the military transport was escorted in from a hundred miles out by two F-18s out of McCord, the Northwest under the highest alert since the Cuban Missile and 9/11 crises.

  After landing at SeaTac, David walked past the Fort Lewis driver who was holding the BRENTWOOD sign, consulted “Surgeons” in Seattle’s yellow pages directory, and caught a cab downtown.

  Dr. Paul Gonzales, a surgeon from the famed Brazilian clinic used by many Hollywood celebrities, was more suave than the three doctors at Tora Bora and disagreed with their diagnosis. Surgery, he told David, could not be expected to restore more than a maximum of thirty percent use in his right arm—“in the fingers, no more than twenty-five percent.”

  “Shit!” said David, in an uncharacteristic outburst. “How about physiotherapy — you know, rehab and—”

  Gonzales shrugged. “You’ll have to do that just to maintain the minimum range of movement you have. If you don’t, you’ll lose it.”

  Brentwood knew the doctor meant his arm, but he already felt as if he’d lost everything. A one-armed soldier.

  “Of course,” Dr. Gonzales continued, “your left arm will take over some of the functions of your right. A squeeze ball will help somewhat. Keep exercising the stiff hand as much as possible to retain what motion remains.”

  “A squeeze ball?”

  A stunning print of Cot’s Storm hung on the doctor’s pastel-gray wall, the glances of apprehension on the faces of the two lovers fleeing through the foreboding and beautiful forest arresting David’s attention. Despite the danger all around them, there was hope in their eyes. And he needed hope now, the kind Melissa had given him through the long months of separation. He needed her now, but the nightmare of the cave, the death of his six comrades, was too heavy upon him to go to her yet.

  Gonzales’s second examination was merely an act of courtesy. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Douglas Freeman, true to his e-mail, turned up in Port Townsend’s East-West Café for lunch. It was the only place open since the scare. But David Brentwood wasn’t in the mood to eat, and neither was the general, beset by what seemed an endless MTV video blaring from the TV in the corner of the restaurant. Agitated, but trying not to show it, the general was convinced that Washington, D.C., was merely spinning its wheels while the West Coast burned, and that more attacks could be in the offing. “They think,” he told David, “that this damn minisub, or whatever the hell it is, has shot its bolt.”

  “Well,” said David, “they might be right, General. A carrier and a nuclear sub isn’t too bad.”

  Both men picked unenthusiastically at their appetizers, brought to them by a young, sullen Vietnamese woman who was complaining bitterly and loudly to a customer who looked like a regular, “… is because we Asian. FBI, Home Defense, come here. They think we terrorists. Blow up ships. We good citizens, Mr. Norman. We good citizens of United States.”

  “I know, Sally. They’re just checking everyone out.”

  “They check you out?” she asked, furiously wiping off a table at the back of the restaurant.

  “Well, I don’t—” began Mr. Norman.

  “See?” the woman said, using her white cloth as a pointer. “They no ask you. They think we terrorists. Not good for customers.”

  “Neither,” Freeman told David, “is yelling,” the general pleased to see that his and David’s main dishes were being happily delivered by one of the two Vietnamese waiters whose smiling dispositions were a welcome respite from “Sullen Sally.”

  The general, however, always a stickler for personal hygiene, scowled in disgust. “Did you see his fingernails?” he asked Brentwood, who, as unobtrusively as possible, pulled his right hand from the table, resting it in his lap, not sure of the state of his own fingernails. “Goddammit,” continued Freeman, “those two guys look as if they’ve been in a brawl.”

  “Maybe over Sally,” joked David, trying to find as many cashews as he could in the mixed vegetable, chicken, and rice dish.

  “Well, she roughed them up pretty good,” said Freeman. “Look at their wrists. And the one who served us — looks like she tried to strangle him. Either that or cut his throat. Great bloody welt around his neck.”

  “I wouldn’t like to tangle with her,” said David.

  Freeman hadn’t realized that Sally had overheard some of their comments, and she opened up on him. “I no beat anyone, mister. They,” she said, indicating the two waiters, “go down, help pull sailors from the sea. That how they get burn.”

  David was embarrassed. Hadn’t Freeman heard about the local Dunkirk effort? Hundreds of people coming from all points on the sparsely populated coast to help in the rescue of the survivors, often at great personal risk, many of the rescuers having to wade out into burning oil slicks to reach the victims.

  “Dey have burn all over body, helping sailors.”

  “I’m sorry,” Freeman said. “I didn’t realize. You’ve done a great job. Thank you.”

  Sally pointed back at the restaurant kitchen. “We give hot food to saved people. Many hours.”

  “Yes,” said an abashed Freeman. “I’m sorry, miss. I was way out of line.”

  David nodded, about to give his heartfelt thanks, but before he could respond further, they had visitors. Two morose-looking men in shades had entered the East-West Café and were walking toward their table.

  “FBI or Homeland Defense,” Freeman told David, who was taking a sip of his green tea.

  The agents identified themselves, and without any apology for interrupting the two men’s meal, explained that a NSA computer phone scan had picked up Freeman’s e-mail to Captain Brentwood, and would the general be good enough to explain his comment, of which they had a copy, that “I don’t think the towe
lheads are behind this at all.”

  “By ’towelheads,’ gentlemen, I meant Arabs,” Freeman told them. “Yes, I know that their 9/11 attack was brilliantly coordinated and executed. But they used our planes, our technology. But do you know how many people this strait thing up here would require — what kind of operation you would need for military targets? Not Trade Towers, gentlemen, but two capital ships. Scores of the bastards — that’s what it would take to pull it off.”

  “Who then, General?” asked one of the agents.

  “Don’t know, son,” Freeman replied. “But I’ve been reconnoitering the area on my own. Not enough towelheads around. Haven’t seen one damn A-rab on this coast. Not one.”

  “So you don’t think it’s Muslims?”

  “I didn’t say that. What I am saying is that with all our carrier groups already spoken for on so many different terrorist fronts — Middle East, East Africa, West Africa, the Philippines, et cetera — we’d only have the McCain’s battle group to referee the Taiwan Strait, because we’re boxed in here. The most powerful nation in the world can’t move its warships out of the Northwest through this choke point because we don’t know what the hell’s going on.”

  “What would you suggest we do?” asked the older of the two agents.

  “Tell the government to give me access to Darkstar. I’ll use my own team.”

  “Your team?”

  “SpecFor boys. You just get me the authority — tell this Admiral Jensen to let me use Darkstar. I’ve got a few ideas.”

  Once he’d heard this, all David could think of was getting back to Fort Lewis to see whether the endless exercising he had done since Afghanistan would prove the doctors wrong — whether through sheer will he could make his hitherto dead right arm, specifically its recalcitrant elbow, bend enough to support the front weight of the new F2000 bullpup rifle.

  It didn’t matter who had started the war in the Taiwan Strait, the PRC — People’s Republic of China — or the ROC — Taiwan. If Taiwan fell, the quake through the world’s financial markets, especially that of the U.S., was certain to plunge the West into its worst recession since the collapse of ’87.