by Ian Slater
“Time we got a friggin’ break!” shouted Aussie, unconscious of his pun until after he’d said it. In any event, no one laughed, the pilot’s torso now a cinder block toppling forward into the taffylike blob that had been the Little Bird’s plexiglass bubble.
Salvini being closest to the beach, about ten yards off, and having deflated his Mae West, struck out in an Australian crawl toward the trailer and boat, his powerful strokes testimony to the superb training that Freeman insisted upon and was so proud of.
“Dixon!” the general commanded, between intakes of air. “Check out the beach. We still don’t know where these bastards are. Choir, you, me, and Aussie into that tin boat.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Salvini emerged from the sea in a tangle of kelp that had formed a wide, dark margin around the bay. Exhausted, running on adrenaline alone, he lumbered across a thin sliver of sand, up over a waist-high rock ledge, and across more sand to the aluminum boat. Cupping his hands, he then began dousing its trailer’s flames with sand. He worked hard and fast and had the fire snuffed out in less than five minutes, by which time Choir, the general, the kelp-covered Aussie, and Peter Dixon had all reached the beach fifty yards east of Sal’s superb one-man fire brigade.
Sal could feel his knees hot, about to buckle. As a distance runner in his off-duty hours, he knew this was a dangerous sign, realizing he’d have to stop for a few minutes and rehydrate, or he’d be of no use to anyone for the next twenty-four hours.
“Taking a little nap, are we?” Aussie asked him. “Brooklyn’s bust!” Aussie told the general and Choir while leaning on the boat’s gunwale to take a rest himself and eat some of the emergency rations they’d managed to salvage from the sinking RIB.
“All right,” said Freeman, shifting the weight of his MP5. “Let’s see if this outboard’s still alive.”
After just one pull of the Mercury’s starter cord, the engine purred like a sweet old tabby, the most welcome sound the SpecFor warriors had heard since picking up the far-off sounds of the approaching Petrel from which Little Bird must have been launched.
The aluminum boat had become a junk drop for fishing tackle, used pop cans, paint cans and brushes, the latter’s bristles now stiffened, the failure to have soaked them evidence of the haste with which the sub’s quick patch-up jobs had been done, the minor repairs no doubt speeded up by the appearance of Freeman’s team.
“Mother of God!” It was Choir, unusually profane, and all work stopped. The bundle of paint rags he’d just tossed out of the boat revealed a long, rough-edged gash in the bottom, about four inches wide and a foot long, as if an axe had been used to frantically sabotage the bottom of the boat.
“Tape!” shouted Freeman, intolerant of the slightest delay. “C’mon, move!”
Aussie’s roll of the super-strong military-issue duct tape had been badly slashed by his fight with the underwater terrorists, but Sal, Choir, Dixon, and Freeman’s waterproofed rolls were intact. “Cut rubber slices to fit off the trailer’s tires,” Freeman continued. “Stuff ’em into the gash and tape the whole lot, inside and outside the keel.”
“Won’t last more’n an hour,” opined Dixon, whose hands were shaking from the cold, despite the insulation provided by his wet suit. He was retrieving the rags, tossing them on the beach fire to warm up the team.
“Half an hour’s all we need,” said Freeman.
Choir’s K-bar made short work of the boat trailer’s tires, the rubber still so hot from the beach fires’ heat that it couldn’t be handled with bare hands. “Get some water, Aussie,” he said, Lewis heading down toward the line of kelp that fringed the fogbound beach. Choir cut the engine, and now they could hear the low, pulsating sound of a vessel three to four miles off in the fog. It was either the oceanographic vessel Petrel, Freeman told them, or the bigger and faster Hurricane-class patrol ship, the Skate, that Admiral Jensen had told him was being dispatched from its Keystone station. Despite having to travel almost twice the distance to the Darkstar anomaly, the 170-foot-long Skate’s speed of forty miles per hour against Petrel’s fifteen would mean they should both arrive around the same time.
“I heard two ships before,” said Aussie, returning with water to cool the rubber tires.
“So did I,” added Choir, who with Salvini’s help had now sealed the gash inside the boat, Dixon and Freeman still working as fast as they could on the keel.
The combination of odors from fires in the cave and the pungent, now empty diesel drums, their hand pumps still attached, mixed with the sweeter smell of burning pine and the lingering odor of cordite and expended tracer casings to create a cloying mix that made Choir feel as if someone had stuffed his nostrils with cotton batting, forcing him to breathe through his mouth. And the warmer atmosphere on the beach that had pushed the fog offshore for a while was gradually disappearing, adding to the general discomfort of the team.
“Let’s hurry this up, lad,” Choir told Dixon. “Sooner I get some fresh air—”
“Hey!” shouted Dixon. “Get off my back!”
Aussie and Salvini’s silence seemed to thunder up and down the beach. Peter Dixon did have an attitude.
“Anyone seen any weapons, ammo, lying about?” cut in Freeman.
“Saw an M-60,” put in Aussie, “where I came ashore, but it’s useless. They spiked it.”
“So,” said Freeman, “we make do with what we have.”
Dixon scrambled out from under the trailer. “Finished.”
“Outstanding,” the general told him, slapping him on the shoulder. “You stay here and hold the beach in case we need a hand when we return.”
“Right.” Dixon nodded, grabbing his camelback and taking a long drink through its flexi tube.
“Let’s go, SAC!” said the general, his acronym standing for Salvini, Aussie, and Choir.
It had once been BACS, but this was the first time Brentwood was missing from the roster, forced to stay behind at Fort Lewis, where Freeman knew that the only outlet for his frustration at not being with his old team — and for the guilt he felt over his failure to get Li Kuan in Afghanistan — was to spend hour after hour firing small arms on the practice range. But even then, Freeman guessed the ex-SpecFor warrior must be frustrated by the fact that his left hand couldn’t master anything bigger than a handgun. At Fort Lewis, his proficiency with the Colt .45 and HK 9mm pistol was so good it had earned him the moniker “Wyatt Earp.” But Brentwood, like Freeman, like everyone else in a modern army, knew that the day of the handgun was over in war — it was merely a backup piece rarely, if ever, used. In this world war against terrorism, sidearms were used only by pilots shot down behind enemy lines, if such a “line” could be found in a war marked by ever-shifting and remarkably fluid fronts.
As their aluminum boat glided over the kelp at the water’s edge, Freeman, standing up in the bow, bracing himself against the chop, fixed his binoculars on the fogbound sea beyond the roar of the falls, helping Choir navigate past the sandbars they’d seen when first entering the bay.
“Think he saw the sub?” Sal asked Aussie, both of them kneeling behind the boat’s midline.
“Got eyesight like a friggin’ eagle, the old man has,” said Aussie. “And ears. If he says he saw it, he saw it, mate.”
“Hush!” said Choir, also straining to hear.
“Hush?” Sal whispered to Aussie. “Hush!”
“It’s gone!” proclaimed Freeman.
“Maybe a chopper from that tub Jensen’s sending?” proffered Aussie.
Freeman shook his head, and without turning around, said, “No. Hurricane class doesn’t have a chopper. Could be a Navy chopper out of Whidbey, but they’re all but useless in this pea soup.”
No one answered. The fog was rolling in on them in huge banks of bone-chilling air, the warmer convection currents generated by the beach’s fires replaced by colder sea air. For Choir it felt as if someone had opened the doors to a gargantuan freezer, the resulting wind chill factor evicting any
residual warmth the SpecFor warriors had absorbed from the numerous small fires while on the beach.
“Can’t hear those ships anymore,” said Choir.
In fact, they hadn’t heard the sub’s quiet, electric-smooth exit from the bay, but had all heard the unmistakable underwater throb of two approaching vessels.
“Cut the Merc!” ordered Freeman. “I’ll go over, have a listen.”
He went in and sank beneath the surface. Then Sal, Choir, and Aussie waited anxiously to see whether the general, taking advantage of the speed of underwater sound propagation, could pick up the sound of the two vessels. After a while, the three veterans in the boat grew worried. The fogbound sea was calmer than before, and there were no whirlpools to be seen in the twenty-foot radius of visibility around the boat. Maybe it was just their fatigue, but it seemed that the general should have popped back up by now. You either heard something or you didn’t.
“What now?” said Aussie disgustedly.
Sal, trying to see through the fog, shrugged. “That bastard Murphy again.” Their string of mishaps and near misses had been no different than in any other war they’d been in. Victory wasn’t a matter of “Rambos” going crazy, but of a team working through the screw-ups, having the will, equipment, and training — or “WET,” as the general called it — to see it through.
Then Freeman’s head popped up right beside Choir. “Jesus—” began the usually sanguine Welshman.
“Hide and seek,” said the general, spitting out a fringe of kelp. “Sound vectors coming at you from every direction down there.”
“Decoys?” suggested Aussie as he helped the general aboard.
“That’s my read,” replied Freeman. “Damn sub’s dropped sonar ’sub’ decoys along the way. Decoys are sending out sub engine noises all over. Our boys on Petrel and the Skate have obviously stopped and cut engines and are listening — trying to figure out which sub sound is the real one.”
“How long do those decoy batteries last?” asked Salvini.
“Two, three weeks,” said Choir.
“Oh shit! Meanwhile those Chinese are sitting all quiet and cozy on the bottom,” said Aussie.
The others ignored Aussie’s certainty that the terrorists were Chinese.
“They’re not so cozy,” said Freeman. “Their air’ll run out sooner or later.”
“But before the CO2 scrubbers are exhausted,” said Choir, “they could last what, three to four days?”
“Something like that,” agreed the general.
“Oh shit!”
“Wish you’d stop saying that, boyo,” said Choir.
“Oh hush!” said Aussie.
“Yeah,” joined in Sal. “Hush, you little Welsh—”
“Knock it off,” the general ordered, which he rarely did. But even among the most resistant SpecFor teams, nerves could get frayed, fatigue and cold misconstruing friendly abuse. “Let’s head back to shore,” Freeman added. “I’d hoped we could tag that bastard midget, but we’re only spinning our wheels out here.”
As they returned through the ever-thickening fog, no one could see Dixon, not even when they were practically at the beach.
“He’s drying out,” said Aussie, “by one of the fires.”
“I can’t see him,” said Sal.
“Shouldn’t have left him alone,” said the general.
“He’s a big boy,” Sal assured him.
Choir said nothing, but, remembering how Dixon had been shaking so badly, feared what no SpecFor ever wanted to contemplate: that Dixon’s hand-to-hand combat had undone him; that, spooked by the beach, he’d decided to bolt instead of doing what Freeman had ordered — stay on the beach to lend a hand to his comrades upon their return. Choir, who’d seen it happen a few times before on special operations, was pretty sure Dixon was hiding somewhere in the cave, shivering uncontrollably from the twin demons of a combat swimmer’s lot — cold and unspeakable terror. The one thing you always remembered was the blood in the water, engulfing you in your sin as much as it did your dead foe, haunting some men for the rest of their lives.
Circumventing the floating kelp bed, Choir almost ran aground on a sandbar. Along the shoreline, an army of wine-dark kelp crabs moved en masse, ready to swarm any detritus trapped by the kelp. It was one of the ugliest things Choir had ever seen.
Choir was right. Dixon was in the cave. There were no distinctive footprints to guide the SpecFor team. The sandy apron below the cave had obviously been “Main Street,” as the team habitually referred to the main trail or thoroughfare used by the enemy — in this case, by the terrorists to hurriedly replenish the sub. Dixon’s eyes widened when he saw Choir, who had followed the speckled trail of blood from the beach, and his intake of air made an annoying, laborious sound, as if he were inhaling through straw. What neither Choir nor his three comrades had seen in the cave’s dripping gloom was the duct tape across Dixon’s mouth, which they now saw while approaching.
“This’ll hurt, boyo!” Choir told him as the Welshman, resting his HK against the nearby boulder, knelt down to unbind Dixon. Freeman, Aussie, and Salvini, as if by instinct rather than training, formed a protective C around them.
“Mother of God!” It was Choir, in shock, realizing that Dixon’s strained breath had been his last, that the damp sand the Welshman was kneeling in was wet with blood. “Boys,” Choir said softly in a tone of a sadness that physically seemed heavier than his pack.
“What’s up?” asked Aussie, eyes still to the front. There was no answer from Choir, and Aussie glanced back, froze, then looked away — at anything rather than the young swimmer whose mouth had been stuffed with what remained of his blood-sodden genitals.
He had choked to death. Aussie, who would later chastise himself for his morbid curiosity — or had it been the simple human need to confirm what he thought he’d seen? — looked down in the gloom at the dead man’s groin area. Jesus … Dixon’s corpse voided, the stench vile. Even Freeman, who’d seen his share of death, felt as if he would throw up. But as usual, he maintained command and control of himself, and before he gave any order to the others, turned and, steeling himself, went over to the dead American, and took off the warrior’s dog tags. “Sal, you and Aussie wrap him up. Place him on one of the beach fires. No one should see their loved one like this.”
Sal, being Catholic, had an aversion to cremation, and funeral pyres in particular, but right here, right now, he agreed with the other three.
“Those bastards!” said Aussie. “That’s pure evil.”
No one disagreed, and as Freeman led them in a short prayer, they piled the fire with any other wood they could find from what had obviously been torpedo crates.
For several minutes afterward no one spoke, each counseled by his own thoughts as they desultorily checked the splintered wood on the pyre. But each of the four were ready to exact revenge. The general was standing at the water’s edge, listening. He heard no sound of ships moving or the earlier chopper. He looked up into the gray sky and saw and heard nothing but the continuing roar of the bisected falls in front of them.
“Sal, you and Choir stay by the boat,” he finally said, breaking the silence. “Whoever was here has probably gone by now, but keep a sharp eye. Aussie, you and I’ll recon the beach.”
Halfway along the rock and crushed-shell shore, Freeman stopped several times to stare up into the fog and around the bay.
“Hear something, General?” asked Aussie, whose tone still conveyed his anger over what had happened to young Dixon.
“No,” answered the general, and stopped walking. “You ever been to San Francisco?”
“One summer,” answered Aussie, his dark mood momentarily arrested by Freeman’s inquiring tone, a giveaway to those who had fought with him that he was mentally flicking through the thumb-worn codes, the precomputer card index files that held his vast repository of what sometimes seemed to others useless and unrelated information.
“I lived down by the bay for a few years,” Freem
an continued. “Sometimes the fog would come in like this, roll in and lie there for hours in a layer right across the bay. It was so layered you could drive right over it on the bridge.”
“Well, General, there’s no bridge here we can drive — oh, you mean the fog mightn’t be as high as we think.”
Freeman had turned around, craning his neck to look up at the dark-green-sheathed cliff face, veiled in an ever-changing curtain of fog and fire smoke. A lost world, a remote enough part of America in normal times, but now even more so as a result of the panicky evacuation of entire populations in the Northwest to all points south. Fog, cold and lonely. “See that line, kind of an S shape about eleven o’clock?”
Aussie looked to the left and saw the trail winding up the eastern end of the cliff, away from the falls and about two hundred feet east of where the Little Bird had come down, pieces of its tail rotor assembly faintly visible in the ghostly fog that rolled down over the cliff face.
“You want me to have a go?” said Aussie.
“I’ll go,” Freeman said.
“Ah, I’m still stiff as a prick from crouching in that damn tin boat. I could do with a stretch.”
“Think I’m past it?” Freeman said challengingly. “I can still press two hundred and—”
“Hell, General, you’re in better shape than anyone here.” It was close to the truth. “Like I said, I need the stretch.”
“Very well. Watch for mines, though I would think the last thing the terrorists would do is plant mines around — have some wild goat wandering about, getting blown up and drawing attention to the place.”
Aussie took off his pack, tightened the HK’s sling on his back, and put on his gloves.