Choke Point wi-9

by Ian Slater

  A Marine corporal took his squad to make sure the building wasn’t occupied or booby-trapped, everyone shaken, whether they showed it or not, by the sabotaged road. The admiral was confused, because the Marines were proceeding as if the explosion hadn’t damaged the NR-1B, until, in a joyous moment, he saw that, despite the sandy soil and lumps of straw-colored passpalum grass that partially covered the sub’s nose and the elongated conning tower, there was no hole or even a dent evident. But he knew that if even a hairline fracture was discovered, it would mean the integrity of the vessel would be violated. This would prevent the Navy’s state-of-the-art research sub, capable of going to three thousand feet, from diving to even a few feet below the surface.

  Feeling as if his heart was pushing an obstruction up into his throat, his breathing becoming increasingly difficult, Jensen approached the craft in a state of incipient panic. With the help of four Marines and his driver, he began brushing off the dirt, sand, and passpalum. “Look carefully,” he enjoined them. “Each of us take a section and go over it with—” He paused, his breathing shallow and rapid. “Carefully,” he said.

  “You all right, sir?” asked the Marine CO.

  “Carefully,” Jensen repeated.

  “Pricks made a hash of it, sir,” said the Marine. “Looks fine. They didn’t use enough C-4. Beat up the truck cabin and the trailer some. But everything else looks hunky dory.”

  The admiral heard him but didn’t answer, as if any positive response would jinx his inspection of the one vessel that might find the midget sub and salvage his reputation. He closed his eyes for a moment, the Marine CO thinking he was in pain when in fact he was praying. He remembered what his mother had told him: “Never ask God for anything for selfish reasons — ask that His will be done, not yours.” Jensen prayed that the NR-1B’s structural integrity remained sound. There was no gash in the nose or nacelle that housed the sophisticated side-scan array sonar. No sign of damage on the small conning tower or the mast array housing. “Thank Christ,” he murmured. “Amen.”

  “You morons!” Jensen’s driver shouted at the amphitheater of fields and hills to the north. “You screwed up, you al Qaeda bastards!” The admiral felt duty bound to tell him to be quiet, but said nothing. The truth was, his driver was expressing the same surge of relief that the admiral and his Marine escort were now feeling: a release from the pent-up tension wrought by the slow, painstaking drive down from the Naval Air Station near Oak Bay toward the ferry.

  Jensen, however, was too experienced a commander to leave anything to chance. He didn’t ream out the Marines as he’d wanted to do when he heard the road explode under the vessel — it would have been virtually impossible to detect the fake road repair that had allowed the saboteurs to feed the det cord and C4 under the bitumen’s surface. Instead he simply told the Marine commander to secure the small ferry terminal, and now decided that he’d send a dive pair down to check the water in and around the dock. For all they knew, the road explosion could be a cover to divert the Marines’ attention away from the dock, where earmuff charges could be placed on the pilings and exploded once the NR-1B was in the water. High-temperature oxyacetylenelike cuts from muff charges could easily sever H-shaped dock pilings and supports, causing them to come crashing down onto the superstructure of the 146-foot-long sub.

  Unfortunately, his call to the Coast Guard ended in frustration. The last of their standby divers, Peter Dixon, was with General Freeman, and like all other divers in the strait, Puget Sound, and adjacent waters, he was doing triple time, trying to cope with the most pressing of the myriad diving tasks created by the recent rash of sinkings, including that of the Georgia Queen, most of whose passengers had died. The other thing that frustrated Jensen was the news that apparently Douglas Freeman had gone out without assist from the NR-1B. “I’d’ve thought Freeman would’ve waited for the NR-1B,” Jensen told the USCG admiral in Seattle.

  “Maybe, Walt, but you know how Doug Freeman is. Charge!”

  Jensen held his tongue. Freeman was a glory hound, but he was also the one who had told Marte Price that it was his — Admiral Jensen’s — idea to send out Darkstar for a “close-in” run along the reverse seven of the Olympic peninsula’s northern Juan de Fuca shore and down south from Cape Flattery to the national wildlife refuge. It had been an unselfish act, Jensen knew, on Freeman’s part to help a disgraced admiral regain something of his reputation after the disastrous loss of the Utah.

  “Any of you fellas swim?” Jensen asked the Marines, his question clearly a request for volunteers.

  Four Marines immediately stepped forward.

  “Just in for a few minutes, guys — long enough to check the pilings. Okay?”

  The four men stripped to their skivvies, taunted good-naturedly by their comrades, “Brass monkey balls in there! You won’t last more’n three minutes, cowboy!”

  The remaining Marines used their compact field glasses to zoom in on the pilings and launch ramp, seeing nothing suspicious, while the four ad hoc divers plunged in. They were immediately struck by the extraordinary clarity of these Northwest waters. They saw thick clumps of barnacles, oysters, and other marine crustaceans, any of which could hide explosive, which was infamously easy to camouflage. Still, they could see no wires, no det cord. The four Marines’ lips were soon dark blue, bodies shivering as uncontrollably as David Brentwood’s had the previous evening at Port Angeles.

  “Looks clear, sir,” the Marine CO informed the admiral, adding a caveat for his own protection. “ ’Course, you never know.”

  Jensen hesitated, wondered and worried. Apart from anything else, this was a billion-dollar machine in his charge.

  “What’s that?” asked one of the Marines, pointing to a dot, obviously some kind of vessel, coming from the direction of Port Townsend, ten miles southwest across Admiralty Inlet.

  The dot on the inlet’s cobalt blue was Washington State’s Port Townsend — Keystone ferry, due to arrive at Keystone in twenty-five minutes.

  “What the hell’s it doin’?” asked a gum-chewing Marine.

  It was the question on everyone’s mind. Surely the carnage unleashed in the last seventy-six hours argued against any resumption of normal ferry traffic.

  “What if they’ve taken over the ferry, Admiral?” the Marine CO asked.

  “Using it to stop our launch,” said the admiral, “now that they’ve seen their road mining didn’t work.”

  No one knew who “they” might be, but the sinking of billions of dollars of U.S. naval ships clearly had been done with the aid of damn good intelligence. They’d known precisely where the ships would be and when. And it was more than likely that the same HUMINT who had informed the terrorists of this would know the “road-blow” had failed to perforate the high-tensile steel of the NR-1B.

  Jensen wasted no time and ordered one of his COMSUBPAC-9’s two 170-foot Coastal Patrol ships that normally serviced Hood Canal and Puget Sound to intercept the suspect Townsend-Keystone ferry with all possible haste, to stop the ferry and have a boarding party investigate.

  “Any resistance,” Jensen instructed the Coastal Patrol ship’s captain and thirty-two-man crew, “is to be met with deadly force. I say again, deadly force.”

  The two Hurricane-class Coastal Patrol Ships, unlike the three Hurricanes commanded by USCG Seattle, were on picket duty in Hood Canal, their sole responsibility to guard the entrance to Admiralty Inlet and the waters north and south of the Hood Canal bridge. It was through the Hood Canal’s retractable section that Jensen’s U.S. Hunter Killer and Boomer ballistic missile subs had to pass during their egress from Bangor Base, through the strait, on their way to open, rolling ocean west of Cape Flattery. While one of COMSUBPAC-GRU-9’s two Hurricanes remained on station at the sabotage-susceptible bridge, the other, the USS Skate, primarily responsible for the waters north of the bridge, set off immediately into the Prussian blue stretch of Admiralty Inlet, toward the suspect ferry eighteen miles to the north.

  With a fu
el-guzzling “dash” speed of 35 knots, the Skate’s estimated time of interdiction with the ferry was fourteen minutes, at a point plus or minus three miles from Keystone. The Skate’s captain and third officer, their binoculars glued to them, devoutly hoped that there would be no more “floaters,” whom they’d feel they should stop to pick up. The best the Skate’s skipper could do, similar to what Frank Hall had done on Petrel, was to have one of their two inflatables ready with a paramedic and three other able seamen standing by.

  “Anything, lookouts?” called the captain.

  “No, sir,” came the answer from starboard and port. “Just a lot o’ dead fish. They smell somethin’—”

  “Very good. Keep sharp.”

  “Twelve minutes fourteen seconds till ETI,” responded the third mate.

  “Very good.”

  By now the Skate’s radio officer, like Jensen’s Marine guard contingent, was trying unsuccessfully to make contact with the ferry. No response.

  “Something’s wrong,” opined the patrol ship’s mate. “Twelve minutes ETI.”

  Every skipper in the Northwest was on edge, to put it mildly, and the Skate’s captain sounded Action Stations.

  Suddenly the ship came alive with dozens of crew who only minutes before had been comfortably in the rhythm of their watch. They were now running along with off-watch personnel, pulling on helmets and flak jackets, manning their stations from the stern’s Mk 38 gun and Stinger launcher pedestal to the ship’s two.50 caliber machine guns, its two 7.6mm machine guns, grenade launchers, and, up forward, another Mk 38 25mm chain gun.

  Yet despite all this armament, many of the Skate’s crew felt uncomfortably vulnerable. The 170-foot-long, twenty-five-foot-wide ship was, in their view, grossly undergunned for its size, and presented a big enough target for surface-to-surface or air-launched missiles of the kind that had killed the night watchman at Cherry Point and set the whole complex ablaze.

  “Don’t sweat it,” a petty officer assured the young chain gunner. “It’s only a friggin’ ferry we’re coming to. People and cars, ol’ buddy. That’s all.”

  “Yeah, but what nut would take a ferry out when there’s a midget sub still around?” He was thinking of the Canadian ferry Georgia Queen.

  The petty officer shrugged. “Ah, he’s probably taking stores over for Whidbey’s Naval Air Station.”

  “Without an escort? Gimme a break!”

  “ETI nine minutes thirty seconds,” the captain’s voice boomed out. “Stay focused. Stay alert. ROE — no firing unless I give the word. I say again, no firing unless I give the word.”

  “Yeah yeah,” said one of the gunners. “I get it.” But the captain would repeat his order, knowing that, given the ongoing trauma of the past few days, everyone was on edge. No one on Skate had been sleeping well. It was also a common complaint ashore.

  “ETI nine minutes.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  When Wu Ling heard the knock on her door in Beijing’s Haidan District, it was near midnight, and she feared it was the Gong An Bu. Instead it was a neighbor, an elderly woman who had lost a son in the fighting against the terrorists in Kazakhstan. A member of the PLA Corrections Service, she came to Wu Ling in civilian clothes and gave her a well-worn postcard. The card, Wu Ling thought, looked as if it had been carried around for some time, an assumption borne out by the fact it had been postmarked two weeks earlier. Wu Ling gave the uninspiring picture of one of the Forbidden City’s 9,999 rooms only a cursory glance.

  The corrections officer left quickly, disappearing into one of the maze of hutongs.

  The note from Chang wasn’t long: twelve lines. He wrote that he was fine, the prison food bad, and the Central Committee blaming him for the setbacks the army was experiencing in Kazakhstan. Li Kuan’s terrorists had more sophisticated weapons than anyone had anticipated. He missed her, but he had friends, “and tell as many of them as you can what’s happened to me.” He was sure his 12th Army and the other PLA divisions would soon regain the offensive, and then they’d have to let him out of jail. He missed her and “bamboo in the wind,” the last a sexual reference to something he’d taught her when she first became his concubine, then his lover.

  It was his writing, all right. She made a photocopy and sent it to Charlie Riser, Cultural Attaché, U.S. Embassy, Xiu Shui Bei Jie 3, Chaoyang District, Beijing. Maybe Mandy’s father could use the information to embarrass Beijing and the Nanjing Military District into admitting the ridiculous lie that her lover and protector wasn’t in perpetual conference but was being used as a “scapegoat”—she remembered the word from Mr. Riser — for Beijing’s failures in Kazakhstan. She wasn’t a fool — she also sent copies of the postcard, in good quality, opaque envelopes, to those who were still General Chang’s friends in the Politburo.

  Riser took his copy straight to the military attaché, Bill Heinz. “Bill, I knew they were lying,” he said. “Look at this.”

  Heinz didn’t immediately look, preoccupied as he was with the two-China war. It still wasn’t possible to nail it down — who’d actually started it. Not that it mattered now that the typhoon’s atrocious weather put pay to the idea of any ChiCom invasion of Taiwan, at least for the foreseeable future. But Beijing now had a foothold on Penghu as well as Matsu, a fact that for now the United States, preoccupied as it was with the catastrophe in its own waters, wasn’t disposed to remedy. The home front had priority.

  Finally he looked at Riser’s copy of the postcard sent to Wu Ling. “So?”

  “Well, it proves I was right. Chang is in jail. And if I can see him — I mean he talks about Li Kuan being in Kazakhstan — and get more details about—”

  “You want me to use my connections to find out what prison he’s in.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ve got to use our informants sparingly, Charlie. It’s like capital. You can’t spend it on—”

  “You think it’s frivolous?”

  “No, no, no. Hell, no. But right now we’ve just had a war across the strait.”

  “Which one?”

  “Exactly. I’ve got orders from Washington to spend 24/7 on future PRC-ROC relations. Nothing else.”

  “You won’t help?”

  “Of course I will, Charlie; but it’s gonna have to be on the fly. Can’t promise more than that. I can ask questions about Kazakhstan.” There was an awkward pause. He knew Riser was still hurting over Mandy, but Riser would always be hurting, and the reality was, Riser would never see Li Kuan. Never get near him.

  “I’ll ask questions,” he told Riser. “Something might come up.”

  But Riser could tell his embassy colleague held no hope, and the truth was, despite his own resolve to see Li Kuan brought to justice, he felt hopeless too.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  “Eti three minutes,” advised the Skate’s third mate.

  The Port Townsend — Keystone ferry was five miles from the Keystone dock. “Still no radio response, Admiral,” Skate’s captain reported to Jensen. “We’re going to siglamp.”

  “Very well.”

  Only a handful of Skate’s thirty-five officers and crew had ever seen a signal lamp in action, the brisk, sharp, louvered flashes of light in Morse alien and amusingly old-fashioned in their nanotech computer age. Still, a young able seaman who’d volunteered for the course in signal lamp communication — or “dinosaur blinking,” as it was derisively referred to by Navy nerds — suddenly found himself the center of attention on Skate. If the ferry skipper — they were almost always retired Coast Guard captains — understood the “dinosaur blinker” and hove to as he was being ordered, it might prevent some ugly stuff.

  As Skate’s signal lamp flashed golden above the blue of Admiralty Inlet and the patrol ship drew closer, only a quarter mile from the ferry, several gunners checking their laser-aiming point boxes were surprised to see that there were no vehicles on any of the ferry’s three decks. And no one on deck.

  “Damn ghost ship!” said a starboard gunner.r />
  “On autopilot,” suggested an increasingly nervous second mate, the third mate organizing the boarding party.

  “Damn peculiar!” conceded Skate’s captain. “Slow to twelve knots.”

  “Slow to twelve knots, aye, sir.”

  The sudden decrease from dash speed to twelve knots created a surge of water from the stern that broached the afterdeck. But there was none of the gusto of a wave breaking over the bow, exiting quickly, foaming through the scuppers. Instead, the water sloshing against Skate from astern seemed markedly lethargic.

  The starboard door of the ferry’s bridge flew open and a heavy, bearded individual stepped out, bullhorn in hand. “What in hell are you doin’?”

  “What is your cargo?” asked Skate’s captain.

  “Classified,” came the reply. “Headed for Keystone.”

  “Stop your engines and prepare to receive a boarding party from USS Skate.”

  “What in hell for?”

  “Prepare for boarding,” Skate’s captain instructed the first officer, who gave the winch man the signal to lower the RIB.

  Few reporters had qualms about using their sex appeal and charm to get a story, but Marte Price did it better than most. She had even bedded the formidable Freeman once because, she’d confided to a friend, she liked his gruff intelligence and manly disposition, so much more attractive than the petty, self-indulgent young studs of the entertainment world. Most were more interested in their coiffed hair and makeup than what was going on in the real world, where men like Freeman and his Spec Ops warriors were at the sharp end of things. So that Bel Air brats could pout over multimillion-dollar contracts, she thought, and America’s kids could go to school without living in the perpetual chaos of hatred that marked the totalitarianism of much of the non-Western world.