by Ian Slater
“Damn!” said Freeman, “they must have split up. We can’t use the Zodiacs on the lake. They’ll pick us off like flies. Captain,” he enjoined the chopper pilot, “can you stay here and give us their bearing for as long as possible?”
“Will do.”
“Good man. Aussie, you and Sal have got the longest-range weapons. Stay with the two pilots. Hunker down, return fire. We’re going to have to wade through the marsh to the shoreline, get through the woods to that road, and hit those bastards from the rear. No other way.”
“I’ll radio for reinforcements,” said the pilot, “if the helo’s box is still working.”
“Good,” said Freeman, who then ordered everyone to lighten their packs. The copilot informed him that while the radar was still functional, the chopper’s radio was out. The best the pilots could do was keep Aussie and Sal informed of the getaway boat’s position so that as well as being able to return fire with their longer-range weapons, the SpecFor commandos could notify the rest of Freeman’s team via their MIR headsets.
“Good enough,” said Freeman. “So, Aussie, you and Sal are CNN.”
“Roger that,” confirmed Sal.
The volume of incoming fire zipping above their heads and tearing into the fuselage was increasing and, despite his enthusiasm, Freeman realized that there was no way he could have his team wade through the marsh and expect any of them to be alive by the time they reached the shore, let alone the edge of the woods.
“We’ll use the Zodiacs after all,” he told them. “Aussie, you and Sal get ready to throw everything you can at that bunch in the woods. The rest of us’ll drive the Zodiacs across the marsh toward the line of woods. Reeds’ll screw up the outboards’ props, but they should get us there.” The reeds, Freeman hoped, would also dampen the outboards’ noise.
The general shifted his AK-74 to his left hand and grabbed hold of the Zodiac’s pull cord, as Choir, with Prince at his side, came over the gunwale. Ruth, Johnny Lee, Gomez, and Eddie Mervyn were already in the second Zodiac. The best they could hope for was to use the body of the helo for cover, keeping it between them and the enemy’s position as they headed for shore.
Aussie reached for his G36 and Sal positioned his heavy-hitting machine gun with his sling.
“Go!” yelled the general. Aussie and Sal opened up, aiming at the winks of the enemy’s small-arms fire coming from about two hundred yards away to the northwest, the hot gases from Aussie and Sal’s weapons bending the reeds close to the helo, the two Zodiacs, on full power, speeding across the fifty yards of thigh-deep marsh between the downed chopper and the line of pine, fir, and golden-yellow larch. Aussie and Sal’s fire was not only loud but accurate, and in the melee of return fire, Aussie’s “Fritz” was almost knocked off by a ricochet caught in the helo’s rotor. He and Sal heard a cry as one of the enemy “winks” was suddenly eclipsed.
Aussie and Sal’s enfilade wasn’t the wild, sweeping cover fire seen in movies, where it seems the good guys have an endless supply of ammunition. Instead it was concentrated, well-aimed fire not meant to simply keep the enemy’s heads down but to take them out.
By the time the opposition — Aussie and Sal guesstimated there must be a group of five or six of them — had taken cover from the two SpecFors’ on-target fire, Zodiacs 1 and 2 were in thick reeds only ten yards from the woods. Freeman, the other five men, and Prince were ashore, but by now the terrorists had recovered from the surprise of Sal’s and Aussie’s heavy and accurate bursts of fire and raked the Zodiacs, putting both out of action. Prince was growling.
Freeman could see the boat first detected on the helo’s radar disappearing from view about two to three miles up the lake, close in to the northwestern shore. And he knew that with the sound of the crash, even the relatively few people who had cabins near or around the lake would raise an alarm which, he hoped, would bring police reinforcements and local reservists from Sandpoint. But the town was fifty miles away by road, and by the time any reinforcements might arrive, the terrorists in the boat would have gotten beyond the lake proper and entered the two-and-a-half-mile-long channel that would take them into Priest Lake. All of which rapidly brought Freeman to the conclusion that there was only one thing to do. His six-man squad would have to do a marathon — minimal-ration, ammunition pack, forty pounds to a man — along the lone fifteen-mile section of the secondary road, an old logging trail that ran more or less parallel to the lake at a distance of a quarter of a mile in places, four miles in others, from the water. There was no chance that he and his five could outrun the terrorists fleeing in a boat, but he might be able to reach another boat or vehicle to catch up with them or head them off.
The general hoped that meantime the Hawkeye would be frequency scanning, and, while he would be unable to make contact with the helo any longer, that it would keep him updated via his modular infantry radio. Freeman had one asset that would save some time: Prince. With the terrorists’ scent firmly impressed upon his olfactory sense, he should be able to help them avoid any time-consuming, deadly ambushes by the five or so rearguard terrorists who had been firing from the edge of the woods at the helo. These scumbags would almost certainly cut back through the dense woods and rush to the road. Then Freeman suddenly realized his advantage. If he, Choir, Ruth, Gomez, Johnny Lee, and Eddie Mervyn could run to the secondary road a mile and a quarter to the west of where they were at present, they might be able to beat these rearguard terrorists who, he saw on his tactical map, were at the foot of a densely forested slope. The terrorists were three miles from the secondary road rather than the one mile his team had to cover before reaching it.
“Right,” said Freeman quickly. “We go. Fast!” Adding, “Now we’ll see who’s been spending too much time with Mommy!” Freeman thought of Margaret, but immediately pushed her out of his mind. Gomez, Eddie Mervyn, and Tony Ruth exchanged grins.
The team headed off, Freeman on point, through the thick woods and the ubiquitous salal brush, its green, mist-polished leaves pushing against them at shoulder height with the same kind of determination, it seemed, as the plant used whenever it invaded a new area, crowding out all other vegetation in its way. They were violating the first rule of the Special Forces: be quiet. The salal in particular, while not prickly, had leaves that were rigid enough to resist a mere brushing aside as one could do with sword ferns and the like, and the six men and dog created so much noise that it sounded to Choir as if a tank was moving through. But Choir knew that the general knew when to break the rules, and besides, Prince was nearby, ready to stop and stiffen at the merest whiff of a terrorist’s scent.
Then they got a break. They had reached a hiker’s trail, presumably one that linked the secondary road and the lakeshore through the forbidding woods. A hard, pushing slog suddenly became a run, and someone’s camelback was sloshing, for which, at the appropriate time, Freeman would ream out the offender in no uncertain terms. Running, it made no difference, but if and when they were forced to close on the enemy quickly, silently, even the greenest cadet knew that the smallest sound could give him away.
It wasn’t the fastest mile in history, but for men weighed down with arms, ammo, and essential war wares, it was exemplary. In another five minutes they saw the road and slowed, senses on high alert. They walked quickly, quietly now, until they could see that the road was clear, then split into two teams: the general, Johnny Lee, and Choir, with Prince leading, on the eastern side of the northbound road, Ruth, Eddie Mervyn, and Gomez on the opposite, western, side. They were running again, resolute in their intention to bypass the terrorist group that had been firing on them and to keep going until they found a cabin or one of the few small marinas scattered around the lake’s seventy-mile-long shoreline. With luck, they could get either a boat or a vehicle in which to hightail it to the northern end of the lake before the “disk” party disembarked into the woods and followed one of the creek beds on the twenty-to thirty-mile hike to the border and the equally wild country of the Canadian fore
sts.
Prince, panting, growled at a rush of sound that suddenly burst from the bush, sending all six men to ground until they realized the noise was that of squirrels, not men. Prince stopped to look back at them with what seemed to Freeman an expression of mild contempt for their unwarranted belly flops.
They were running again, and from their GPSs they knew that soon they would be adjacent to the general area from which the rearguard terrorist squad had been firing.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A world away, the White House was learning just how important, indeed critical, it was to recover the DARPA ALPHA disk. The prospect of any country, even the tried-and-true allies Great Britain and Australia, having possession of America’s revolutionary Flow-In-Flight technology was, as Eleanor Prenty told the president, sending shock waves through the Pentagon. She placed an 8½-by-11-inch scaled-down drawing of the “gas in nose cone” torpedo before him. “It’s downright traumatizing the chief of naval operations. It would mean a sub having the ability to fire at an enemy ship two hundred miles away. The DARPA ALPHA people say there would be no wake, no warning.”
“Wouldn’t the targeted ship hear it?” posed the president. “I mean, on its sonar?”
“At a mile a second, it would be like—” She consulted the notes she’d taken from the CNO. “DARPA ALPHA scientists tell us that—” She had to turn several pages, her hand trembling. After being on her feet this long, and stoked with coffee since the crisis broke, she was beyond exhaustion. “The scientists say that at ten miles, for example, the sonar noise from the super-cavitating torpedo would last no longer than a quick jab on a door buzzer. But if you think the CNO’s in near-coronary mode, you should read the stuff I’ve been getting from the Joint Chiefs. The army is piss — sorry, sir. I mean—”
“The army’s pissed that they hadn’t heard of DARPA ALPHA until today?”
“Yes, Mr. President.” Eleanor moved her laptop so he could see the map of Washington state’s Kitsap Peninsula. “The army knew about DARPA’s Division of Naval Surface Warfare up here at Bayview and about the Keyport testing lab and torpedo range on the Kitsap perimeter. But DARPA ALPHA was — is — completely different in intent and in staffing from the DARPA installation we knew back in 2006.”
The president shrugged. “Can’t blame them. These things have to be run on a strictly need-to-know basis. Black ops. We can’t all know what everybody else is doing.”
“Well, the army’s particular worry is that they see the super-cavitation technology in a smaller, bullet-sized projectile that could pierce the armor of the Abrams M1. More important, it could penetrate the armor of our new lighter, faster Stryker vehicles, which have gained so much favor in the Pentagon after the army brass realized just how—‘constipated’ is the word General Freeman once used — the big M-1 is when trying to travel on non-American roads. The tank weighs in at seventy tons, and on any other highway system than our own or on the German Autobahns, it becomes a dinosaur, no matter how well armored and upgunned it is. Which is why we need to get that disk back. And quickly.”
“How’s Freeman’s team doing?”
“FBI says that the sheriff at Sandpoint has told them that there’ve been reports of a helo going down in the area, possibly brought down by a MANPAD shoulder-fired missile, but—” She paused, exhausted, so much so she asked the president if she might sit for a moment.
“What — oh, of course.” But Eleanor had no sooner sat, her feet resting on the border of the plush round blue oval carpet that bore the Great Seal of the United States, than the president was asking, “Freeman’s team okay? Functional?”
“Yes, sir,” Eleanor replied, catching her breath. “The moment the Navy’s Hawkeye lost contact with the helo and tracked its down position, the local sheriffs and air rescue in Coeur d’Alene were alerted. Then Freeman’s team came through on their infantry radios. Freeman says it’s well in hand, and he doesn’t want more troops in there confusing the issue. Says it’s a case of ‘too many cooks spoil the broth.’ Says he’s closing in on the beeper via the radar contact the downed helo still has with the beeper that was planted in the disk.”
“Okay,” said the president. “I’d prefer to send in more men, but Freeman’s the man on the ground. If he feels he’s closing, there’s no point in us getting in his way.” The president turned to the large map of the Idaho panhandle that had been wheeled into his office. “I can see Freeman’s point. Must be some of the densest part of the country up there. Even so, I want the nearest army battalion on standby just in case he needs a last-minute assist.”
“That’s already been taken care of,” said Eleanor.
The president turned from the map to her. “Next thing, Eleanor, is for you to be driven home and not come back here for twelve hours. That’s an order. Got it?”
“Yes, sir,” she said gratefully, but not without a feeling of guilt that she should stay.
“Go on now,” he ordered. “Scram.”
“Yes, Mr. President.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Everyone on the team — Choir, Johnny Lee, and Freeman on the eastern side of the road, Tony Ruth, Gomez, and Murphy on the western side — saw Prince stop short, pine cones flying in front of his paws. The weight of his armored vest was starting to tell, his panting more rapid than it had been when they left the helo, but the rest of him was rigid. He was pointing. They froze. Freeman knelt on the soft earth and fallen leaves on the road’s shoulder, and Tony Ruth could see the general’s gloved right hand switch his AK-74 from the “off” position. Everybody else had done the same.
The disquieting noise of their controlled breathing could be heard above the stillness of the forest from which a white mist bled. Prince was pointing into the woods from the road at a barely discernible opening in the wall of trees and brush only a few yards from the road’s shoulder. Had the terrorists’ rear guard anticipated his move, wondered Freeman, and also raced through the woods from the lakeside to reach the road? Both sections of Freeman’s team had automatically adopted CAF, covering arcs of fire, so that they could engage the enemy and guard each other.
He saw the silhouette of an AK-47’s front sight above the trail and fired. Both of his sections opened up, using the falling corpse, a U.S. Army uniform, as their central aiming point. The air was ripped apart by the sudden fury of the firefight, but it was all one-way, the enfilade from Freemen’s men having the crucial advantage. Anyone behind the first man they’d killed would be unable to get past him easily on the narrow trail and forced to ground amid timber and brush that was now the recipient of concentrated fire, 7.62 mm and 5.56 mm rounds pouring into the woods in a narrow cone. If the screams and Arabic curses of the dying were anything to go by, all six of the terrorists were either down, dead, or badly wounded, Prince growling ferociously at the mere gall of the interlopers.
“Johnny, Tony, Choir!” Freeman shouted. “Come with me.” He then told Eddie Mervyn and Gomez to “clean up then catch up,” as he and the other three, with Prince leading, continued their forced march north on the deserted road. Freeman, on point as usual, spotted a faint gleam of metal in the woods off to his left. It was a downpipe from a creeper-covered cabin set well back, about a hundred feet, in the forest. The general led his men in through shoulder-high salal that formed the perimeter of a small clearing, mist enveloping the surrounding timber like malevolent layers of swamp gas. A thin, lazy plume of smoke issued from the cabin’s stone chimney. A beat-up Ford Explorer, its left rear fender badly rusted and strips of duct tape holding in a rectangle of transparent plastic that had replaced the back window, stood forlornly a few yards from the rear of the cabin, its tires’ tracks disappearing into the overcast green of salal.
Freeman extracted one of DARPA’s “products”—or “goodies,” as the Special Forces called them. It was a matchbox-size scanner-remote-key that, upon activation with one push of a man’s thumb, scans for the solenoid opening frequency of a vehicle and unlocks it. A more civil approach, knock
ing on the cabin door, explaining the dire need for the vehicle to catch up with the terrorists, to overtake them, had occurred to the general, but the very thought of the disk being in enemy hands was chilling enough, the possibility of Americans being attacked by such weapons evicting any idea of social niceties.
A woman inside the cabin was screaming and a man in a tie-dyed nightshirt came running out with a baseball bat.
“Stop!” yelled Freeman. “U.S. Army Special Forces. We need your vehicle. We’ll pay you compensation. Give me the keys.”
“What the—”
“The keys! Quickly!”
The man, dropping the bat, ran back into the dimly lit cabin, followed by Freeman. The general watched him go past a potbellied stove to a small table by a creeper-covered window. “Here!” He tossed the SUV’s keys to Freeman.
“Thank you, sir,” said Freeman as they came out. “Stay inside. Bad day to be out.”
“You’re as bad as the guys you’re after!”
Freeman lobbed the keys to Choir, and glanced back at the man. “What other guys?”
“Guys who done the same as you to Mick Sutter.”
“When?
The man’s sense of outrage was increasing. “’Bout twenty minutes ago. Busted into his shed, stole his car. Tried to call the cops but they’d cut his line. Smashed his cell too. Just charged in like you guys.”
“If his phones were taken out, how come you know about it?”
“He walked down the road a ways to a neighbor’s. He called us.”
“You have any description?” Freeman asked him, adding, “We’re on your side.”
“Huh,” said the man derisively. “Funny way of showin’ it.” But Freeman could tell the man believed him. “They was dressed like you guys. Battle gear. Dark eyes, Mick’s wife said. Middle Eastern guys. Like A-rabs. They looked wet — like they’d been out on the lake.”
