Choke Point wi-9

by Ian Slater

“And we took a sample of the leak,” cut in Aussie, “we’d think it was from this Bermuda Star. Only our terrorists,” he elaborated, “didn’t figure on the cruise ship coming down with a bug, having to stay quarantined in Hawaii.”

  Freeman was on the phone to the Coast Guard station at Port Townsend, which was known to have the best supply of rigid inflatables. He wanted a twenty-four-man RIB for his team and any available Coast Guard divers.

  “General,” the duty officer told him, “we’ve had to prioritize. This war’s being fought on so many fronts. The best we can do is a sixteen-footer. And we haven’t got any spare divers.”

  “Prioritize! We’ve found the sub! — well, at least where it’s been. If we can trace the tail on that tadpole spill before it’s sucked out or chopped up by the tides, we may be able to backtrack it to the bastards’ operating base.”

  “General, I’m following orders,” said the duty officer. “You find a sub base and I’ll request antisub aircraft from Whidbey.”

  “That’s no damn good if it’s a cave. Can’t drop depth charges into a cave. I need more divers — SpecFor guys like mine. I’ve only got three,’sides myself. If you can—”

  “Hold on, General.”

  Freeman could hear someone interrupting in the background, then the Coast Guard DO came on again. “Young Peter wants to go with you.”

  “Peter—”

  “Dixon,” said the DO. “We’ll send him over with an RIB. Sixteen-footer.”

  “Fine,” said Freeman, who knew the duty officer was right. Everyone was spread thin.

  It was obvious to Aussie, Choir, and Sal that the general, for all his prodigious memory, didn’t recognize Dixon’s name.

  “Dixon’s the swim buddy of that guy Albinski,” said Aussie. “Albinski was the one they winched up on Petrel, smothered in kelp.”

  “Good,” said Freeman. “He’ll be keen to smoke those bastards out.”

  “How ’bout David?” asked Aussie. “Maybe he can help.”

  Choir and Sal looked uneasily at the general. They were glad it was his decision, not theirs.

  He surprised them, however, by asking, “What d’you boys think?”

  “Well …” Sal began awkwardly, becoming tongue-tied.

  He deferred to Choir, the Welshman’s shrug, like Sal’s silence, also a diplomatic abstention.

  “Aussie?” the general pressed. “You know the answer, same as these two ninnies. Don’t you?” He said “ninnies” with the rough affection born of long team membership.

  “He could be a liability,” said Aussie quietly.

  Freeman nodded, then looked at Salvini. “You asked from loyalty, Sal. I understand that. I admire that, but we all know that David’s gammy right arm can barely hold the Bullpup he’s been struggling with. Handling an RIB in this sea would be a hell of a lot more difficult than that.” He paused. “Brentwood would make the same decision.”

  The three others agreed, but Aussie wasn’t so sure. David Brentwood was the kind of leader who, probably to a fault, would take a chance, having great faith in the power of will. He had often cited the extraordinary determination of the Vietnamese against all odds. Morale might not move mountains, as Freeman himself was often wont to say, but “it can sure as hell climb them.” Then again, the general’s responsibility was to the team, not any one individual.

  “Call him, Aussie,” Freeman said. “He’ll be back at Fort Lewis by now. Tell him to sign out an antitank launcher with HE rounds — just in case we bump into the bastards. It’ll give him a sense of lending a hand — well, at least doing something.”

  “I’m on to it,” said Aussie, dialing Brentwood’s cell. He hoped he wouldn’t answer. Who wanted to be a gofer?

  “Might piss him off,” said Salvini.

  “Oh, thanks for that, Sal. That really helps.”

  “We’ll see,” said Choir, all of which left Aussie wondering why Freeman wasn’t calling his protégé.

  To Aussie’s relief, David didn’t answer, so Lewis left him a quick but succinct message to bring them the antitank launcher from Fort Lewis.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Despite the assistance rendered by a Coast Guardsman who volunteered, on his own time, to accompany him to satisfy U.S. Coast Guard regulations, Dixon had trouble getting the RIB out of Port Townsend harbor on his way to pick up Freeman’s team at Port Angeles.

  It wasn’t so much the gut-slamming chop created by the incoming tide that delayed the RIB’s departure, but the disturbing number of oil-matted seabirds that had been washed into the harbor. Dixon had seen enough dead wildlife, and the possibility that some of the gulls, cormorants, and other birds might still be alive haunted him. Accordingly, he slowed down to no more than two knots, while the Coast Guard volunteer filled the time by double-checking what few provisions he’d been able to second from the already drained USCG quartermaster’s supplies and the antitank launcher that Captain Brentwood had dutifully brought up from Fort Lewis.

  Unaware of Brentwood’s injury, Dixon had been about to ask David, whom he’d seen on CNN touring the hospital, if he’d like to come along on the investigation of Darkstar’s anomaly when Dixon noticed the difficulty the Medal of Honor winner had lifting the relatively light fifteen-pound AT-4 rocket launcher unit.

  As if reading young Dixon’s mind, David had stayed to help push the sixteen-foot-long Bruiser off from shore, but his Vibram boot slipped on an oil-slicked rock, throwing him off balance. His immobile right arm instinctively flew out to regain balance, but instead he went, as Aussie Lewis would have said, “A over tit,” and fell into the oily muck at the water’s edge, able to use only his left hand to push himself to the kneeling position. The injured right arm that had failed him with the new ambidextrous Bullpup was draped in oil-slicked kelp washing ashore amid an offal of other diesel-soaked detritus. Out of respect, an embarrassed Dixon and the Guardsman had looked quickly away.

  “What’s wrong with him?” the Coast Guard man inquired, looking back.

  “Dunno,” Dixon replied, his attention arrested by the realization that the antitank launcher Brentwood had brought to the Bruiser was a Swedish disposable launcher/rocket. Once you fired it, that was it.

  “Scuttlebutt,” said the Coast Guard crewman, “is that he screwed up on some gig in ’Ghanistan?”

  Dixon took offense at the green crewman adopting “ ’Ghanistan” instead of “Afghanistan.” That was the right of warriors who had been there — or was he simply overreacting under the stress of the situation and the nagging doubt that he had somehow screwed up in failing to look out for Rafe Albinski, his swim buddy who’d literally had the life squeezed out of him? The bloody toothpastelike ooze had been so repellant that Frank Hall, after talking with Albinski’s wife, had the diver’s remains cremated at Port Townsend’s hospital and scattered in a quick burial at sea from Petrel’s stern.

  Freeman, Aussie, Salvini, and Choir were waiting at the Port Angeles wharf, loaded for bear. By the time Dixon arrived, they were already in their wet suits, with Draeger rebreathers and extra pouches of ammunition for Freeman, and Aussie’s grenade-launcher-equipped Heckler & Koch submachine guns, as well as Kevlar vests, stun, smoke, and HE grenades, “7” flashlight — with its right-angle shape — Dakine hydrater camelback, plus night vision goggles with flip-down infrared visor, and what they called “other assorted goodies.”

  For Salvini, the weapon of choice was a waterproofed stripped-down lightweight “crap tolerant” laser dot, night-scoped M-16, and a hip-holstered sawed-off shotgun. In the unlikely event of an enemy in the distance, a trawler perhaps, this customized M-16 would give the team of six men, which included Dixon and the Coast Guard crewman, a reach far beyond the shorter but lethal HK submachine guns packed by the general and Aussie. And Choir, with his pistol-grip, Mossberg twelve-gauge shotgun, its pump-action mag loaded with alternate, double-ought and steel/flechette dart rounds, would provide additional firepower.

  Freeman knew it was probably t
oo much to expect that they would actually make visible contact with the midget sub. Then again, he remembered the astronomically high odds against the winning numbers of the New York lottery being 911 exactly a year after 9/11. All he could reasonably hope for was to find the general area from which the midget sub was operating and then call in for one of the 170-foot Mk IV Hurricane B class Coastal Patrol ships. These had a dash speed of 35 knots and bristled with heavy machine guns, chain guns, and pedestals for Stinger SAMs, plus a 30mm Gatling canon with the same armor-piercing power as the famously ugly and deadly A-10 Thunderbolt. The latter was a high-set, twin-engined tank buster that wiped the grins of derision from its uppity fighter cousins when it virtually destroyed Saddam Hussein’s tank corps and anything else that moved in the Iraqi desert in the war of 2003. But when he’d suggested to Coast Guard HQ in Seattle that they keep a Hurricane craft on standby to assist his team should they find any signs of the midget sub’s base of operations, the reply was polite but firm. Like all Coast Guard stations, they were swamped, and the Coast Guard admiral took the opportunity to get a load off his chest.

  “General, there’s no way I can release a CP ship. We’ve only three in the whole Puget Sound area, and we’re using them with everything else we’ve got to try to bring some sort of minimal control — and I emphasize minimal—in every marina from Seattle to the San Juans. It’s sheer unmitigated panic out there. Do you have any idea how many marinas there are in the Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands, and Juan de Fuca Strait area?”

  “Yes, I under—” began Freeman, trying to get into the one-way conversation, but he realized the Coast Guard admiral was as much an ear-basher as himself.

  “Over six hundred,” the admiral went on, giving Freeman no time to reply. “And it’s a mob scene at each one. Our refugees aren’t listening to our assurances about tolerable levels of radiation, and are bidding like crazy for transport across the sound to the safety of Interstate 5. They want out — south to Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Utah — as long as it’s away from the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Local cops are overwhelmed. Washington, D.C., is trying to get the National Guard in to maintain order, but the arteries are jammed solid. Besides, Washington doesn’t understand that the Northwest is waterways. We need coast guards more than the National Guards. Add to that the fact that the Pentagon is calling up reserves all over.”

  “But dammit, Admiral, the White House surely wants me to—”

  “General, we’ve been caught with our pants down. We’re getting hit on three fronts. There’s a resurgence of terrorism in Afghanistan, terrorism in our own swimming pool here, and now we’re on a knife edge with this Taiwan-ChiCom shit. We’ve got a new kind of world war on three fronts, General. Have you seen CNN — they’re calling the refugees in the Northwest ’America on the Run’!”

  “How about the NR-1B?” cut in Freeman. “It should be here by now, and—”

  “There you’re in luck, General. My 2IC tells me it’s arrived on Whidbey, only five to six miles from the Keystone ferry ramp. Its crew’ll be the next flight in. I’m sure Admiral Jensen’ll get it launched as quickly as possible and send it out to you the moment the crew’s aboard.”

  Keystone, Freeman knew, was approximately sixty miles to the east, on Whidbey Island. He also knew that, despite the wondrous gizmology of the relatively small 146-by-12.5-foot-diameter, nuclear-powered sub run by a crew of only two officers, three enlisted men, and two scientists, its maximum speed was said to be no more than eight knots on the surface and ten knots submerged. The general had learned from his contacts, however, that for the NR-1B it was closer to 25 knots surface speed, thirty submerged.

  Even so, that would mean at least a two-hour wait, if all went well, before it could reach his SpecFor team.

  “Do we go on or wait?” he asked the team.

  “I say go,” said Dixon, who’d remained silent to this point, somewhat overawed by the general’s reputation, though less so now that he was seeing him in his wet suit, a little paunchier than the rest of them. Dixon was also surprised by the fact that a general would put an operational decision to a vote, the young SEAL making the mistake of so many who didn’t understand that supremely confident leadership was unafraid to put it to a vote if time allowed, and that it was only the insecure machos who needed to be making unilateral decisions all the time.

  “If we wait,” said Aussie, “that oil tail could disappear, dispersed to hell and gone by the riptide. Then we’ll have bugger all to show the NR-1B and all its superduper sensors!”

  “Choir, Sal?” asked the general, who then turned to the Coast Guard crewman and Dixon. “Lieutenant Dixon, Jorge?”

  Jorge Alvaro was astonished that his opinion — that of an ordinary seaman — was being sought by none other than the legendary “George C. Scott.” Nobody, including his wife, asked him his opinion. Everyone, from his mother-in-law to USCG brass, was always telling him what to do. He heard the Welshman, Choir Williams, and the guy from Brooklyn — Salvatore, or something like that — say they might as well wait for the NR-1B, and the guy they called Aussie and his USCG comrade, Dixon, still arguing that they might save time by pursuing the oil spill now. The general wasn’t saying anything, Jorge realizing that for once his opinion was not only being sought, but that Jorge Alvaro, the son of migrant Mexican farm laborers, held the deciding vote. He didn’t want to court danger, but it was unlikely they’d see the sub. They’d just trace the spill, then call in the NR-1B. Besides, what if the midget struck again — this morning — and it became known he and the others had been bobbing around, waiting for the NR-1B?

  “I say we go look for where that oil came from.”

  It was obviously what Freeman wanted. “All right, cox-swain,” he told Alvaro. “Get this RIB moving.”

  In seconds the sixteen-foot rigid inflatable’s twin caterpillar diesels roared to 830 horsepower, the twin water jets thrusting the boat forward against the wind, the console’s speedometer needle shaking at 28 knots. Every one of the six-man team, except Coxswain Alvaro, who stood at the Perspex-shielded control panel, was sitting on the fiberglass seats, one hand firmly gripping the aluminum steady bar, their weapons, stocks first, in the quick-release gun rack beside them. Freeman felt the painful arthritic jab in his left knee, an old war wound aggravated by the intense cold of the strait, and Peter Dixon had an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu.

  “They’re Chinese!” Aussie shouted into the breath-robbing wind. “Five bucks, Choir.”

  “Big spender!” retorted Choir, immediately drenched by a five-footer slamming hard amidships.

  “All right!” Aussie yelled back. “Ten bucks!”

  Choir seemed to nod, but in the kidney-whacking ride, Aussie couldn’t be sure.

  “You hear me, you little Welsh bastard?”

  “Ten dollars!” confirmed Choir.

  “Ooh, lah de bloody lah! Ten dollars! Anyone else?”

  “Al Qaeda!” shouted Salvini.

  “You’re on, Brooklyn!”

  Reboarding the Kiowa Scout for the early morning hop back to Fort Lewis, David Brentwood was shivering so badly from his dunking in the oily scum of Port Angeles that the pilot, a quiet young redhead who obviously felt sorry for him, could hear his teeth chattering. She tried some small talk as they gained height above the waters of the strait and the wide slab of Admiralty Inlet, but David, clutching an Army-issue blanket about his oil-reeking body, had closed his eyes, the bunker-C fuel absorbed by the blanket stinging them, his anger at the human and environmental havoc caused by the terrorists inflamed by his inability to join his life-long buddies in striking back. The David he knew was not with him; instead it was a morose, uncharacteristically sullen Brentwood who curtly thanked the pilot and ducked beneath the Kiowa’s still-whirling blades, scurrying away like some bedeviled pilgrim for whom the storm had proved too much, and hating himself for his sullenness and self-pity.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  A quarter mile from the Keystone ferry, from which the
NR-1B would slide into the strait where its somewhat cumbersome-looking conning tower and bow would come into their own, the advance outriders heard a rushing sound. It was as if, one said, a stream of water from a hose had struck a pile of fallen leaves. It was a fuse.

  The blacktop erupted with such a bang that the sound reverberated through the NR-1B on its trailer as if it had been struck with some enormous sledgehammer, the “singing” of the metal continuing for several seconds after the last of the black pebble-encrusted bitumen had fallen back down on and about the road, one lump felling an outrider, another two blown off their motorcycles.

  Admiral Jensen had already said, “Jesus!” at least five times, this followed by an incoherent rage of profanity as, leaping from his Humvee, he raced towards the NR-1B against the advice of his traumatized driver. The Marine escorts fanned out speedily in U formation toward the launch point, laying down a hail of automatic fire that after six seconds all but denuded the surrounding salmonberry and blackberry bushes, only a leaf or two remaining after the savage onslaught of the Marines’ small arms fire.

  There were no bodies to be found, only the bullet-flayed remains of the detonation cord that had been craftily buried, running from the salmonberry bushes through the sodden earth to the road. The long slit in which the det cord had been buried was patched and dusted in places with crushed gravel to make it look indistinguishable from a thousand other cracks on Highway 20.

  “No one there, sir,” the Marine CO told Admiral Jensen, who was fighting to regain self-control as several Marines, rushing from the Humvee with its fire extinguisher, doused some small fires on the sub’s wooden trailer frame.

  “No one?” said Jensen.

  “No, sir. Must have been a remote detonation.” The Marine swept his M-16 across the panorama of gently rolling hills north of the ferry landing that they could now see. The big metal stanchions bracing the docking area were turning golden in the early morning sun that was burning off the mist that had crept inland across the fields and cranberry bogs. “Somewhere up there, probably,” said the Marine CO, now signaling his heavily armed men to secure the quarter mile of road that curved gently ahead to the deserted ferry terminal, the small waiting room, washrooms, and chained red pop machine appearing particularly forlorn.