Choke Point wi-9

by Ian Slater

  “All right!” bellowed Freeman, drawing his sidearm. “Tell me!” He was holding her at point-blank range.

  The waiter was trembling but shook his head.

  The shot threw the woman back with such violence that her head slammed into hanging utensils, her shout of pain startling Sal, who quickly looked around from the front door, the crash of utensils like cymbals. He could smell the acrid cordite wafting through the beaded curtain.

  Brentwood and Choir, their previous awe now overcome by shock, stood literally open-mouthed at what the general had done. Aussie was for once speechless, seeing the woman writhing on the floor as Freeman grabbed her by her bullet-torn blouse, now covered in blood, and hauled her roughly into a sitting position against the wall.

  “All right!” Freeman yelled at Aussie. “Bring down that old bitch. I’ll shoot her too!”

  Aussie gave the waiter an “I don’t like it but what can I do, mate?” glance, footing the chopping block stool across the floor below the trapdoor.

  “Hurry up!” ordered Freeman. “Bring her down.”

  “No, no,” the waiter said, his voice cracking. “I show you.”

  “Right!” said Freeman, turning to Choir. “Choir! Over here!”

  Choir didn’t move. “But—” he began.

  “Goddammit!” Freeman roared. “Don’t but me. We’re a team. Work as a team. Get that bitch’s body out of here, give her to the cops. Then grab the old lady and stay in touch with me.” The general looked across at Aussie, who’d been about to assist the woman with his first aid kit. “Leave her alone,” barked the general. “She dies, she dies. Give Choir this joker’s cell phone.”

  Aussie wordlessly passed the phone he’d taken from the waiter to the silent Welshman, who was obviously upset.

  “Tell him your number!” the general ordered the waiter, who, dry-mouthed and trembling, was barely able to speak. “Try calling the number from the other phones,” Freeman ordered, indicating the half-dozen or so cell phones that had been left, as per his orders, on the café’s hastily vacated tables.

  Within a minute the team all had working phones.

  “Give me the one with the best battery,” Freeman told the others, his schoolyard bully’s tone not going over well with David Brentwood. It wasn’t an aspect of Freeman he’d seen before.

  While Choir carried the bloodied, pain-wracked woman outside, the others began to climb aboard the Humvee. Then they heard a police cruiser’s siren and saw its flashers approaching, a group of the previously ejected diners huddled across the street like homeless waifs, waiting anxiously to see what the police did about what one man in the group angrily and correctly described as the “grossest violation of civil liberties” he’d ever seen in America.

  Freeman holstered his sidearm as the other four helped Choir to carry the wounded woman toward the police cruiser.

  “Spray and Wash’s not gonna get that out!” said a callow adolescent who, with some other teenagers, had been drawn by the gunshot and was now pointing at the blood on her blouse.

  “Hey,” a portly sheriff called out as he lumbered out of the cruiser, his partner grabbing the first aid box. “You kids move along.”

  “What happened, Wally?” asked the teenaged boy in an overly familiar tone.

  The sheriff’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t you sass me, George Daley. You get on home. From what I hear, your grades need all the help they can get.”

  There was a burst of laughter from the gaggle of young girls in the group. “You tell ’im, Sheriff,” someone shouted, and George Daley sullenly moved off.

  The general and sheriff conferred hastily by the cruiser, the sheriff hitching his belt several times and nodding, Sal hearing him say, “You betcha,” and “Wish we had more time to get enough guys up here to …”

  “I figure,” the general told him, “that those bastards’ll be reloading with torpedoes and restocking after sinking that minesweeper.”

  The sheriff knew the general was right, and agreed that the first thing the SpecFor team had to do was get to the tunnel that the waiter and others had been using to service the second sub. Second, they were to find the tunnel used to service the sub that had already sunk, to make sure both tunnels could never be used again.

  Freeman called out to Salvini, “You go get Grandma. Frisk her. Put her in a cab and catch up with us. The cab driver can wait here. And Sal, cuff her.”

  Sal merely nodded.

  Seeing Sal’s resentment — a resentment apparently shared by the rest of the team — Freeman pushed the waiter roughly aside. “Salvini, you hear me? You have a problem with my orders?”

  “No — sir,” said Sal, helping the waiter up, the prisoner looking up pleadingly at Sal, his eyes betraying some sympathy for these four American soldiers who he saw had to serve under such a brutal commander — one as tough as Li Kuan, even though the smaller Kuan bore no physical resemblance to the big American. But Li Kuan had the same hard eyes as this man whom the sheriff had called “General Free-man.”

  The waiter understood English well enough to realize the full intent of the ruthless general’s orders: that his aged mother, contemptuously referred to by the American as “the old bitch,” would be forced to follow the general’s Humvee in the cab so that if her son balked at revealing the tunnel’s entrance, they would kill her. No, no, he wouldn’t kill her. If she were dead, then what would he bargain with?

  No, the waiter concluded, this crazed general would do what Li Kuan would do in such a situation, what he’d done to the American girl in Suzhou who’d overheard the plans between Beijing and Kazakhstan — that Beijing would supply the experienced Vietnamese and Chinese tunnelers for the Muslim terrorists’ continuing Holy War against America, and Li Kuan would arrange the logistical support via “sleepers” in and around the Olympic peninsula. This supply tunnel complex, not nearly as elaborate as the giant two-hundred-mile underground complex at Cu Chi in the sixties, would be ingenious nevertheless. No, the waiter told himself, one had to face reality. This American general who’d shown not the slightest hesitation in shooting his beloved My-Duyen, whom the whites called “Sally,” would not kill his mother outright, he would torture her, as Li Kuan had tortured the young American girl in Suzhou to find out what she knew before he’d killed her. The waiter, now in the passenger seat of the Humvee, wanted to bury his head in his hands, but the tight nylon strip binding his hands behind his back prevented him from doing so.

  Freeman was driving — Choir, Aussie, and Brentwood in the back.

  “Once the fog lifts we’ll call in cavalry troops, soon as we locate the position,” Freeman told them.

  No one responded. Aussie wanted to, but held his tongue. Knowing their silence denoted disapproval, Freeman elbowed the waiter in the side. “How many people you reckon you and your sub buddies have killed, Mao?”

  The waiter stared sullenly through the fog that was rushing toward them in huge gray billows.

  “How many so far?” Freeman asked his prisoner. “Would you say around ten thousand? In an undeclared war?”

  “World is at war,” said the waiter. “You Americans invaded Iraqis.”

  “Oh,” said Freeman, swinging the Humvee around a pothole, but not fast enough, jolting Choir out of his nap. “You think we didn’t give those towel heads enough warning? Six months not long enough? Who’s in charge of this operation, Mao?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who gave you orders in Port Angeles?”

  “E-mail.”

  “Li Kuan’s e-mail or from bin Laden’s leftovers — who?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You serve on the sub, Mao? Or you strictly a tunneler?”

  “Tunnel.”

  “Same tunnel for both subs? Or did they have to take their turn, Mao? Or did each sub have its own garage?”

  “I don’t know this.”

  “Aha,” said Freeman accelerating. “You just know about the tunnel you’re taking us to, right? You brin
g the supplies — what, in a van? — and just drop them off.”

  “Yes.”

  “You lying bastard,” said Freeman, braking hard as he swerved to miss a fallen branch, barely visible in the fog. “You’re a hauler! Look at your throat, Mao. You’re a goddamn hauler of everything from rice to outboards to ammunition to kill Americans!”

  Now Aussie, Choir, and Brentwood were more attentive. What they’d seen as the general’s “over-the-line” behavior in the East-West Café was now temporarily mitigated by their outrage at the horrendous loss of life, to say nothing of the loss in ships, caused by the midget submarine. Still the four SpecFor warriors, unlike Freeman, were not convinced there was a second sub, believing that the minesweeper, if it hadn’t gone down from natural causes, had most probably been destroyed by a mine.

  The general’s questioning of “Mao” was reminding them, however, just how horrific the terrorist submarine attacks had been. And if the general was right about a second sub, there would be more to come.

  The fog lifted with the rapidity of a stage curtain. What had been a gray, damp world along eerily deserted Highway 112 as the Humvee sped west toward the inland point five miles south of the Strait of Juan de Fuca that marked the big bend between Pillar and Slip Points — the latter seven miles farther west — was now a world so bereft of fog that every tree and bush was clearly visible. The longitudinal reading Aussie had taken earlier on the winding cliff-face path as he’d climbed high enough to see over the fog had given them the exact position of the cave behind the falls, the cave in which Peter Dixon had been so gruesomely tortured and murdered.

  “Tunnel entrance near here,” Mao told Freeman, who slowed the vehicle to sixty, waist-high brush, sandy, loamy soil, and burned-out forest racing by. To their left, looking south, they could see the grandeur of Mount Olympus and the sun-drenched snowcaps of its surrounding peaks. The general fixed his eyes on the waiter, who, despite the general calling him “Mao,” looked only partly Chinese to Aussie.

  “Further,” said Mao sourly.

  “How much further?” snapped Choir, his finger jabbing the man’s neck. Choir still didn’t approve of the old man crossing the line, shooting the woman like that, but if he was right and there was a second sub, time would be running out before it either struck again or decided to flee.

  “Aussie?”

  “General?”

  “Call Sal. Tell him we’re—”

  A loud pop from the right rear wheel was followed by the roar of the Humvee taking rounds, Aussie realizing that Freeman and his team would have been dead or badly shot up if the general had not immediately sped up.

  “Five o’clock!” yelled Aussie. “Hundred yards. Light PK. Three men.” He grabbed the handhold, Freeman swinging the Humvee off the road and into the loamy ground, mowing bushes down before the vehicle that was back up to sixty miles an hour. Aussie and Choir were returning fire as Freeman swung hard left, enabling his men to get off a quick broadside before he just as violently swung the Humvee back hard right, driving, accelerating, straight for the light machine-gun post that Freeman barely saw through the narrow slit between the rim of his Fritz and the Humvee’s bulletproof glass. The machine-gun post was now only twenty yards in front, seconds away, rising and falling with the Humvee’s passage over the rough ground.

  “L’audace!” Freeman shouted. “Toujours l’audace!”

  Aussie’s next burst hit one of them in the shoulder. The trio broke and ran, the gunner, frantically hauling the PLA light machine gun, jumping over a log.

  “Hold!” yelled Freeman, the Humvee hitting the log. The vehicle’s high clearance easily, if shudderingly, passed over it, momentarily throwing Freeman’s steering off, the Humvee clipping the fleeing gunman with the right fender. He was down, the gun thrown four feet away. Freeman braked, shoved the stick into reverse and backed up. They heard a sound like a branch cracking. Then he was off after the other two. Fog was moving in again.

  “IR!” Freeman shouted.

  Aussie reached over and, given the bumpy ride, deftly managed to “crown” the general with the infrared goggles.

  “Ah — there they are, the bastards! Three o’clock, hundred yards!” With that, Freeman again abruptly changed course, the vehicle fishtailing then suddenly straightening, Mao’s head smacking the right door’s glass, the windshield not as peppered as Aussie expected. The general had no doubt put the fear of Allah into the machine-gun trio by unhesitatingly attacking without pause.

  “Damn! They’re gone!”

  “The tunnel,” said Choir.

  “Where’s the entrance?” Freeman asked Mao.

  Mao was silent.

  “You think your buddies are trying to save you?” asked Freeman. “They’re trying to kill you, Mao. So tell me, where’s the entrance?”

  Mao remained silent.

  Freeman looked into the rearview mirror. “Aussie, tell Sal to bring Granny here.” The general glanced across at Mao, the waiter badly shaken by the attack. “See how much your buddies care, Mao. They wanted to kill you as much as they did us. Either way—” Freeman tapped his watch. “—you’ve got thirty seconds to show us exactly, I mean exactly, where the hidden entrance is. Otherwise I’ll shoot Granny.”

  Mao was stroking his face, beaded with perspiration. He shouted, “She not my granny. She my mother.” He began to sob.

  “Then,” said Freeman, eyes afire and drawing his 9mm, his face so close to Mao that their noses were all but touching, “I’ll shoot your goddamn mother!”

  Brentwood had a flashback to the portrayal of Patton drawing his ivory-handled pistol, about to shoot one of his soldiers who, trembling, said he couldn’t take it anymore. Brentwood felt revulsion. First the young woman, now the older—

  Mao was nodding so vigorously he looked as if he was suffering from an acute neurotic disorder. “I–I show you.”

  “Get ’im out!” said Freeman.

  Aussie, his adrenaline still up from the speeding firefight, hopped out the passenger door and hauled Mao after him. The fog was clearing as Mao, stumbling, barely able to walk, began dry retching.

  “No, no!” said Aussie. “You throw up on your own time. Show us the friggin’ entrance.” Aussie saw Brentwood’s jaw clench tightly. What the hell had happened to David anyway? he wondered. Did he hunker down in the Humvee just because he couldn’t fire from mid-seat, or was he scared, so scared that he wouldn’t have fired if he’d had the chance? And now David was giving everyone a censorious look. Well, the trouble with Davy, Aussie concluded, was that he hadn’t seen the sea literally red with American blood, pieces of goddamn meat, heads floating about, thousands more than were killed on 9/11. So he had a big trauma in ’Ghanistan. All soldiers in combat have traumas; warriors live with it — night sweats, the screaming, recurring nightmares. But Aussie knew that he himself had no compunction about pushing Mao to his limits. The bastards had killed the young Coast Guardsman Jorges Alvaro near the falls, his body still not found, and the SEAL diver Albinski, and poor, bloody Dixon. This lot was as cold-blooded as—

  “Jesus!” said the general, his blasphemy now a measure of his immediate if begrudging soldier’s admiration for the ingenuity of the tunnel’s camouflaged entrance.

  “Best I’ve ever seen,” concurred Aussie.

  Freeman ordered everyone back ten yards. “All right, Mao,” he said. “Go open it.”

  Mao looked blankly at him.

  “Work the combination safe,” added Aussie. “You know, the old booby trap.”

  “C’mon,” said Freeman impatiently, all of them startled by the ringing of Choir’s phone.

  “Son of a bitch!” said Aussie. “Put that friggin’ thing on vibration!”

  It was Sal informing them that he should be there in “about five.”

  Mao approached the camouflaged tunnel entrance, its trapdoor not horizontal, as one would expect, but vertical, a soil-impacted root end of a fallen, charred spruce. The roots’ four-by-four trapdoor had bee
n exquisitely carpentered so that any saw marks were invisible to the naked eye.

  Mao swung open the door and pointed inside the hollow tree trunk, the actual entrance to the tunnel being a second four-by-four trapdoor flush with the earth.

  “You all set, David?” Freeman asked Brentwood.

  As it dawned on Brentwood that the general expected him to go down into the tunnel, the cold-clammy feeling of incipient panic closed in and his head and neck felt feverishly hot.

  “Didn’t think I told you to bring your sidearm for nothing, did you?” said Freeman. “Fort Lewis CO says you can take out a dime at thirty feet. And you’re lean as a stick — like these guys.” He pointed at Mao. “You know what it was like in ’Nam. Most of us’d get stuck halfway down the damn shaft, never mind the damn tunnels, which are even narrower.” Freeman turned around, asking for a 7-flashlight. Aussie took out his from his combat pack.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  David Brentwood felt all eyes on him, even Mao’s.

  “In ’Nam,” Freeman told David quickly, “guys tried to take regular weapons down tunnels. Couldn’t move. Only thing that’d work was this.” He tossed Brentwood the 7-shaped flashlight. “Best shape for tunnel rats. That and a sidearm. It’s the only way.” Brentwood still hadn’t moved. Freeman walked closer to him. It was as if they were in a confessional. “There’s another goddamned sub on the coast, David. We could use a whole division like we did in ’Nam to search and destroy and we still wouldn’t find the damn hiding place. Only way to find it there — in ’Nam — and now here is to go down the tunnel. See where it leads. I’ll call in airborne cav once we find the hideaway.”

  But it was Mao, not the general, who would change Brentwood’s mind. The waiter, no longer shaking now that he’d given in, sneered at Brentwood, possibly in an effort to regain some dignity from his own capitulation to the general. The sneer was an unmistakable accusation of cowardice.