Choke Point wi-9

by Ian Slater

  He saw a cloud about to swallow the sun. Choir, seeing the general looking up, got the same message. They’d pause a second or two longer, the door still ten feet away, and then make their move in the shadow of the passing cloud.

  They heard pulley chains then, and the two halves of the vegetation-screened door began opening like a stage curtain. No voices. The sun, hidden in cloud now, had not cast shadows, but neither did it illuminate anything more than a few yards of a semidark cave whose back wall neither Choir nor Freeman could distinguish. Some kind of gantry was faintly visible, and the first thing coming to Freeman’s mind as he and Choir dropped down on damp, ice-cold rock, was stage scaffolding. He couldn’t see anyone, but if the terrorists had escaped, then who was running the chain and pulley? Admittedly, it would require only one man, but where was he? Or she? Terrorists these days were equal opportunity employers.

  Then Choir glimpsed a faint wink of light.

  It was David’s 7-flashlight sweeping from about twenty feet inside the tunnel as he approached the tunnel’s exit that led directly into the cave. And it immediately drew fire, the last twenty feet of the tunnel suddenly exploding with tracer pouring from the back wall of the cave into the tunnel at the flashlight.

  The shooters had assumed the enemy tunnel rat was right behind it, holding it, but David was now at least five feet away, left of the flashlight. The long root handle, to which he’d taped it for just such an eventuality, was in the wooden grasp of his “useless” right hand. David’s left arm came up from his prone position, Compact in hand. His first shot imploded one of the two terrorists’ heads, and the second was just as accurate, born of constant practice on the Fort Lewis range, also killing its victim instantly. Choir and Freeman held their fire at the remaining terrorist, lest an errant round strike David, the bang of his Compact’s 9mm as distinct to Freeman as the sound of his own weapon.

  “David?” Freeman shouted.

  “General!” The exultation David felt, combined with the smell of the sea air that was now flushing out the stink of gunpowder, sent his adrenaline racing.

  The cave lit up then, and Freeman swung his HK up, its burst taking out the light, a hot glass rain showering down on him and Choir. But in that instant of light turned on by the terrorists, Freeman had glimpsed enough to know now that what he’d assumed was scaffolding was in fact a dry dock, and in it was a long, black-tented vessel, only its prop and prop guard visible.

  Choir had time only to glimpse it too, but he’d noticed something Freeman hadn’t — the prop had exactly the same number of blades and prop guard as the sub they’d sunk. For an instant Choir felt as if someone had walked over his grave, that the sub had been resurrected, but he told himself that was not possible. No way.

  Choir and Freeman, at the front of the cave, crawled quickly to the bottom beam of the dry dock. The two were about fifteen feet apart, with David just inside the tunnel exit at the cave’s rear forming the third point in an ad hoc triangle of fire. But to stay there, to wait, was to die. They had to get up.

  A shaft of light pierced the cave on Freeman’s right, and three men came out, firing wildly, their intent obviously to flush out the Americans. But having already glimpsed the layout, Freeman, Choir, and David, because of their training for instant memorization of hostile layouts, had no fear of blue on blue, and cut the terrorists down within seconds. What they weren’t prepared for was the utter surprise of seeing the black tent moving toward the front of the cave, two hydraulic launch rails sliding out ahead of the dry dock through the now open, vine-covered door into the high tide’s water, which was almost flush with the cave’s lip that was the ledge.

  The black tent moved slowly at first, its conical top plucked up by an overhead “fingers” claw that had been screwed into the cave roof. Freeman saw that on his right side of the cave there was a thick side spar, a short, canvas-covered walkway projecting out from the cave’s westerly wall, presumably coming out from either a natural or manmade antechamber in the rock wall adjacent to the black tent. Several terrorists — probably four, certainly no more than six, by the sound of their footfalls — had just entered the conical tent via this covered walkway as the tent was being raised higher and the vessel started to move. Freeman could see that once the as yet unrevealed bow hit the water and the camouflage tent was completely drawn off, the vessel would be into the water and away, like rescue boats that could be launched in seconds from rocky shorelines, sliding straight from dry dock to sea. Choir and David paired to maintain suppressing fire, but David’s ammunition was getting low.

  “Cover!” Freeman shouted, and dashed toward the rising tent that now, above the vessel’s waterline, revealed the shape not of a sub, but of a fast patrol boat with U.S. Coast Guard colors. Freeman pulled the pins of his grenades and lobbed one, two, three, forward and midships, the last one onto the stern deck. Three of them went off in quick succession, the craft aflame. The fourth HE grenade exploded as the vessel was only halfway out of the cave, its stern still inside and on fire.

  David, having located the pulley/chain button, pushed it, thus shutting the door, jamming the patrol boat half in and half out, because of the resistance of its high superstructure, aerials, and radar antennae.

  The vine curtain was now on fire, and fuel tanks began exploding, spewing out sheets of flame over the starboard deck’s canvas-shrouded torpedo tube, the concussion lifting Freeman off his feet, covering him in flame and throwing him back toward the center of the cave, where Choir quickly extinguished his burning clothes with a throw of “fire sand” from one of several contingency buckets lined up by the wall.

  Spitting and cursing, eyebrows singed, Freeman was up on his feet, facing seaward, when he saw a door burst open on the deck of the burning boat. Three terrorists emerged, firing furiously at David, who coolly returned fire, “heading” one of them, who fell back into the burning shroud of the tent. Choir felled the second. And then there was the general — not in uniform, of course, but General Chang nevertheless. As Freeman squeezed off another burst before Chang could hit him, he realized, with the force of a physical blow, seeing the Chinese general’s wig fly off like a blood-sodden pelt, revealing a pockmarked scalp, that he was looking at Li Kuan.

  The cave was an inferno, Freeman telling David and Choir to disengage, an unnecessary order, given that there was no more resistance, the downed terrorists scattered about the cave floor. Freeman knew the fight was over, but feared that the torpedo tubes — the warheads doubtless having been loaded to sink more minesweepers or anything else in the choke point — would explode, the cave instantly becoming an oven, consuming all the oxygen and everything within.

  “Move out!” he shouted. He couldn’t see David.

  Then Freeman heard a loud crack, saw Choir fall, and the dry-dock frame behind him engulfed in flames, knots in the wood exploding like more gunshots.

  Choir was all right, but had twisted his ankle. As he fell, he could have sworn that the body of the pockmarked terrorist leader on the fiery stern deck had twitched. Muscles contracting probably.

  Freeman, his right hand holding his HK, his finger on the trigger, thrust his left hand under Choir’s right shoulder to serve as a crutch, and the two made their way through black, toxic smoke that was now pouring out from the interior of the burning boat. They heard a tremendous crash behind them, the dry-dock’s front section having collapsed, the boat’s stern higher because of it. Choir saw a figure clinging to its rail. It was the pockmarked terrorist issuing forth such a feral scream of rage and pain that Choir knew he would never forget it.

  “Mother of God!” he blurted, the hot smoke scorching his throat. “He’s still alive. We should finish the poor devil off.”

  “Don’t bother,” said Freeman, glancing back at Li Kuan, a.k.a. General Chang.

  “Jesus!” said Choir. There was another ungodly scream. “He’s melting, General! His body’s—” Choir was coughing violently. “His body’s actually melting!”

  “
Let the bastard melt!” said Freeman, who was thinking about a young American woman called Amanda, so full of promise and hope, brutally tortured, then murdered and dumped in a stinking canal by Chang/Li Kuan’s thugs because she’d overheard what had now been revealed in the cave — the Communist Chinese government’s plan to quell rebel Muslim nationalist movements on its Xinjiang border by offering to oversee a Muslim attack on America. Chang, or Li Kuan, as young Mao knew him, had clearly blackmailed immigrants, just as Mao had told Freeman, to cooperate in providing the sub and torpedo boat with supplies, the Asiatic Muslims providing crews and gunmen.

  By the time the wokka wokka of the airborne cavalry units from Fort Lewis could be heard in the skies over the U.S. side of the Juan de Fuca Strait, the threat was over.

  For now.

  It would be the FBI’s and Homeland Defense’s joint responsibility to backtrack, to go through Seattle and Vancouver importers’ invoices and find out which importers bought which supplies and, just as important, who transported them to Port Angeles on the lonely Washington coast.

  Outside the smoke-filled cave, Mao, who’d had ample time to turn around carefully on the ledge and cut through the nylon cord cuffs by rubbing them against the barnacle-encrusted rocks, moved across the ledge, helping Freeman and a cordite-reeking David Brentwood assist Choir along the narrow ledge and then, in a painfully slow descent for Choir, down to the rocky foreshore.

  EPILOGUE

  “IT’S NAIVE,” FREEMAN told Marte Price Port Angeles during her “exclusive” hospital emergency room interview, “to believe that there aren’t more sleepers all over the country.”

  “You really believe that, General?” Marte pressed.

  “Marte—” he began, drawing back as the nurse applied a malodorous salve to his burns. “Smells like damn fish!”

  “Do you really believe that?” Marte asked again. “That there are sleepers all over the United States?”

  Freeman was sure she believed it too, her repetition of the question merely an attempt to have him answer in a form best suited for TV. This was Larry King grist. “I do,” said Freeman, asserting, “Most Americans — the experience of 9/11 and this last week notwithstanding — are far too sanguine about the extent of the sleeper danger.” There, she had her quote, and it was the truth. “And the Canadian border’s a walkthrough,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

  This last comment was the one that grabbed headlines and caused a diplomatic fracas between Ottawa and Washington, D.C. It drove the “modern miracle” stories of what was occurring daily in America’s hospitals off the front pages. The space age technology of these miracles, wherein radical DNA-based techniques had greatly reduced burn healing and recovery times to months rather than years, barely got a mention amid all the war news.

  Sal, as he put it, was “highly pissed off,” missing the action in the second cave, his day ending by having to return Mao’s mother to the restaurant, where she berated him again, in rapid-fire Vietnamese.

  Mao was turned over to the FBI for further questioning with an “In consideration — leniency” note from Freeman stating how helpful the blackmailed terrorist had been.

  Sal had joined Choir and David at the hospital to visit the general and Aussie. While David was waylaid by Marte Price, who wanted a follow-up interview with the Medal of Honor winner, Choir and Sal went to the second floor to see Aussie. They had to wait, the patient’s curtains closed as a harried nurse checked his wound and recorded his vital signs. Despite their relief that the military operation was over, Sal and Choir, now they had a chance to talk about it, were still troubled by Freeman’s behavior in the restaurant with the young woman and his actions en route to the second cave with Mao.

  “Maybe,” said Sal, checking to see that no one was within earshot, “he should give it up.”

  “Yes,” concurred Choir. “You fight these fanatics too much, you become like them. End justifies the means, right?”

  “Right.”

  And so one can only imagine the two men’s astonishment, indeed their shock, when they saw a gum-chewing sheriff’s deputy walking by with a young female patient, the woman in a washed-thin V-necked nightie. Sally — Mao’s would-be love — glared hatefully at them, a dark, saucer-sized bruise visible even through her nightie. She quickly drew the V of the nightie closed, as if rebuking two leering adolescents.

  Sal and Choir stared at each other. “Point-blank!” said Choir. “He fired point-blank!”

  “Shit!” said Sal. “He must have used a nonlethal round! A rubber bullet.”

  “But wait a minute — what about the blood?”

  “Fake, mate!” came an Aussie drawl from behind the curtains. “Those blood samples taken on Petrel from the terrorists we whacked. I told the general one of ’em was missing when I went to get ’em from the Humvee, that we only had four instead of five. Cheeky bastard bawled me out for it, and—”

  “He’d taken it,” put in Sal.

  “And after he’d fired the rubber round into Mao’s woman, who dragged her up, her blouse covered with blood?”

  “Cunning old prick,” said Sal.

  “Silly bitch thought she’d been hit,” continued Aussie. “Well, she had been. Those nonlethals hit hard, mate.”

  “You shit,” said Sal. “You—”

  “Ah, don’t get your balls in a knot,” continued Aussie. “I found the vial on the floor — guess he couldn’t do everything at once. If he tried to put it back into his pocket, we would have seen that. Anyway, once I confronted him, he ordered me to keep it quiet. If young Mao even suspected it’d been a put-up job to scare him witless, there’s no way he’d’ve told us about the tunnel. Everything was riding on that. Fuck, if we’d—”

  “Excuse me!” It was a burly head nurse, and even with the starched white uniform, she looked as if she’d stepped right out of the World Wrestling Federation’s ring after crushing Jesse Ventura. “We’ll not have any of that foul language here, thank you very much. There are children here, you know.”

  The SpecFor trio were utterly cowed. Terrorists, they could do. This, they couldn’t handle. “Sorry, ma’am,” they said contritely.

  As she left, there was a moment of silence, Sal and Choir feeling guilty for ever doubting the general.

  Down on the first floor, Freeman stood impatiently in the phone cubicle outside Emergency, the stiffness in his chest from the impact of the sub’s.50 round against his Kevlar spreading up to his neck and shoulders. He could tell that if he didn’t get something to relieve the discomfort, as the hospital staff referred to pain, he would be in for a Motrin-sized headache. Trouble was, to get a pill in Emergency required a consultation with an M.D. So instead he took a combat vial of morphine from his jacket and jabbed it into his upper arm.

  “Junkie!” exclaimed a disgusted young woman hurrying by with an open-mouthed teen. “In the hospital yet. I dunno.”

  Freeman felt badly — stupid thing to do — and was about to hang up the phone so he could go and explain, but then he heard Charles Riser’s voice on the other end.

  “Mr. Riser?”

  “Yes?”

  “General Freeman here. You’ve probably seen the news, Mr. Riser, about what’s been happening up here in the—”

  “The sub and that other boat, yes. Thank God.”

  “Mr. Riser, I hate to fall back on a cliché, but I can’t think of anything better than to say I’ve got some good news and bad news. Well, I guess it’s all bad for you. Li Kuan and General Chang are—were—the same person. Chang being in prison was a lie — just a smoke screen.”

  Freeman waited, giving Charles Riser a chance to absorb the shock. It was only seconds, but seemed infinitely longer, before Riser, whom Freeman imagined must have had to sit down, get his thoughts together, replied, “Is — Are they …?” his voice taut with tension.

  “He’s dead,” said Freeman. “Shot the son of a bitch myself.”

  There was another long pause before Riser inquired, “Yo
u’re sure he’s dead?”

  “Deader’n a fucking doornail — excuse my Latin.”

  “You actually saw him die?”

  “Mr. Riser, I saw the scumbag melt. I can go into details if you like, but I’m sure—”

  “Please do,” said Riser.

  Charles Riser’s next door neighbors were concerned for him. It was late, 1:00 P.M. on the East Coast, and they could still see him, in his tartan robe, roaming around his house, from kitchen to dining room to front hall and back to the kitchen, clutching a large, gilded portrait of his daughter to his chest.

  “He’s talking to her,” said the neighbor’s wife. “I think he’s crying.”

  “Don’t think so,” her husband said, peering over her shoulder at Riser. “Looks to me like he’s celebrating. Maybe both.”

  Marte Price, the embodiment of unflustered professionalism, was becoming flustered. She had just clipped on the Medal of Honor winner’s throat mike — the emergency room a terrific backdrop, as Stan told her — everything set to go, and what did she see? The elevator opening and John Rorke, the captain of the USS Encino, who the White House confirmed had launched the first blow against the PLA’s Penghu garrison. Together with the McCain’s air arm strike, it had forced Beijing to the cease-fire table with Taipei.

  As Freeman reentered the room, he heard Marte ask her cameraman, “Who’s the woman with him?”

  Stan was busy adjusting the tripod and the focus. “What?” he said.

  “The woman with Commander Rorke,” said Marte.