by Ian Slater
The stench of feces and urine choked the air, then Brentwood heard a sound like running water — pebbles continuing to spill from the terrorists’ shattered ammunition boxes, which had served as their ad hoc sandbags. With Sanchez, who’d thrown the illuminating flash-bang, covering the captive, Brentwood and Jam Hassim quickly checked the seven terrorists on the ground, feeling for a pulse with one hand, the other holding their weapons’ barrels against each enemy’s throat. The play-dead technique was as old as combat itself, but in the confusion of battle it still worked occasionally, taking a would-be victor, especially a new hand, by surprise. There was a flash in Brentwood’s NVGs — the one survivor throwing a knife at Sanchez. As it shot past Bentwood’s helmet, Hassim pumped two sabot slugs into him, rendering the man’s head mush on the cave’s back wall. Now all eight terrorists were dead. And when they checked, none of the men was Chinese. Bad intel? And what to show for it? Brentwood asked himself. Two Americans dead, and the brains of seven al Qaeda splattered against ancient rock. And no Li Kuan.
He took a moment to bend down and do up a loose bootlace. For a moment in this subterranean hellhole of death and gagging smells, he smiled to himself, recalling his dad who, like all parents, occasionally drove their kids nuts by repeating a favorite story or warning ad nauseam. In this case it was the memory of his dad telling him repeatedly how dangerous a loose shoelace could be. Again, the story of the German tenor, Fritz Wünderlich in the 1960s. Coming downstairs one evening in his home to answer his doorbell, Wünderlich, ignoring a loose shoelace, tripped, tumbled down the stairs, and broke his neck. “Just like that,” David’s father had told him. “Never ignore a loose lace, son.”
“No, Dad,” he’d replied.
Now, Brentwood heard a sound like tarpaper tearing — a SAW light machine gun. Two bursts. Then a sharp crack like a bull whip.
“Shit!” Jam said, moving fast, back past David and Sanchez toward the tunnel entrance to help Eddie. David followed. But neither of them ran. They knew that an escaping Li Kuan, or whoever it was, could have activated a booby trap somewhere along the six-foot-wide tube that was the cave, which rushed at them in their NVGs, the snaking, gun-smoke-filled enclosure now widening to ten feet, where they could finally stand up. There was another crack!
“Down!” shouted Jam, Brentwood instinctively dropping to the rock floor a few feet from the cave’s entrance. His flex Kevlar elbow pads absorbed most of the shock, and he smelled the sharp odor of burned cordite issuing from Merton’s now silent SAW drifting up like an errant fog out into the pristine mountain air outside the cave. Unlike the cloying perspiration- and rat-soured atmosphere behind them in the cave, the blast of oxygen was at once ice cold and invigorating, though it was laden with fine dust particles that in the NVGs’ magnified starlight looked to David like white tracer.
Jam Hassim he saw, was dead, facedown, the back of his head blown off by what must have been the sniper’s second shot. Eddie Merton had been killed by the first. What had been Eddie’s left eye was now a gaping void, the blood-filled socket a jagged-edged white hole on David’s NVGs, rapidly losing its intensity as the snow-cold wind moaning through the Hindu Kush caused the dead commando’s body temperature to plummet and his blood to coagulate. David used his infrared night sight to scan the razorback ridge that formed the other wall of the deep ravine. There was a residual heat signature, but no body except the one David was using as a weapon rest — Jam’s still warm corpse.
And why? David asked himself angrily. Because he’d bent down to fix a goddamn bootlace. What the hell had happened? Had the man who somehow escaped from the tunnel and shot Merton from behind been Li Kuan? And had he also fired the second shot, which killed Jam? Or had the second shot been fired by whoever had been on the ridge? It was the fog of war — no one would really know until they had the luxury of hindsight, the Monday morning quarterback’s clear-eyed view. All David knew for sure now, as he tried to piece it together, was that one of the best buddies he’d ever had was dead because of that goddamn shoelace.
He cussed his old man, then felt guilty and extraordinarily weak, the effect of the blood he’d lost from his right arm overtaking the adrenaline rush of the face-to-face combat in the claustrophobic killing zone in the cave. One thing was for damn sure, he thought. Somehow, somewhere, he was going to nail that son of a bitch Kuan.
He reached for Merton’s SATCOM mike lying inert on the ground, only now realizing that it would be touch-and-go as to whether a medevac helo would make it in time.
CHAPTER THREE
The Utah was nearing periscope depth. In combat control, Rorke ordered, “Stand by to shoot four and three.”
“Stand by to shoot four and three,” confirmed the OOD.
“Up scope!”
“Scope’s breaking,” announced the watchman.
Now speed was everything. Rorke, cap reversed, eyes glued to the scope’s rubber cups, flicked down the column’s arms. The cups weren’t supposed to be there, the design of the new Virginia-class attack sub having replaced the captain’s “old-fashioned” scope, the scope’s view through the cups now seen as pictures on TV monitors in the combat control center. However, finding the physical detachment from what they were viewing too unnatural, Rorke and some captains of other Virginia-class subs had insisted on retaining the old drill. His arms draped over the handles, he rotated with the scope, then stopped, his senses super alert, the new-car-showroom smell of the CCCs more powerful than usual. “Bearing. Mark! Range. Mark! Down scope.”
Above the soft whine of the retracting search scope, his reflection distorted in its oil-glistening column, Rorke reported, “I have one visual contact.” His confident tone, however, masked the fact that, given the northwesterly chop and spray, it was difficult for him to discern the suspected hostile clearly. “Range?” he asked.
“Eighteen miles,” came the response. It was four miles short of the torpedo’s maximum range.
“Sonar,” Rorke called. “Acoustic signature still hostile?”
“Signature still hostile by nature of sound.”
“Very well.” The automatic sonar modules on Virginia-class subs didn’t need operators, but Rorke liked to have a hands-on sonarman on his watch.
“Solution ready,” announced the weapons officer.
“Ship ready,” added the assistant WO.
“Ship ready, aye,” acknowledged Rorke. “Match sonar bearings and shoot.”
The firing officer now took over. “Shoot four and three.”
Every man in the Utah heard the rush of compressed air blasting the two Mark 48 torpedoes out of their tubes, their propulsor jets quickly taking over. Each fish trailed guidance wire from the first of its two compact ten-mile-capacity spools. The existence of guidance wires, Alicia Mayne knew, was a surprise for visiting VIPs, who expected wireless torpedoes in the twenty-first century.
“Four and three running,” announced the WO.
“Very well,” acknowledged Rorke, having already started the stopwatch that hung about his neck. “TTI?” Time to impact?
“Nineteen minutes, twelve seconds.”
As per standard procedure, no one aboard, except the captain and his navigating officer, knew where their sub was, let alone the target. All the Utah’s crew knew was that they had left Bangor base over a day before, passing through the retracting section of the Hood Canal Bridge. By now they could be off the Alaskan panhandle, or heading for Hawaii. The pressing question on the minds of most of the young crew was whether a crazy Ivan or third world hostile had come to test their potential adversary’s state of readiness or to land “illegals”—agents. That was standard procedure for all blue water navies, including that of the U.S. Or, as was part of every U.S. submariner’s lore, was it readying to launch a surprise attack, as the Japanese sub I-17 had when it suddenly surfaced off the California coast on the night of February 23–24, 1942, and shelled the strategic oil installations at Santa Barbara? Plus, every U.S. submariner, like the U.S. Navy at
large, like America itself, carried the memory of having been taken utterly unawares on December 7, 1941, and on September 11, 2001, the Navy in particular vowing that neither its surface nor submarine fleet would ever be taken by surprise again.
Bangor Submarine Base, Washington State
“Are you ready?” Admiral Jensen’s wife asked him playfully as she slipped into bed beside him. Her plumeria perfume washed over him, her diaphanous peach-colored nightie catching the light teasingly before she switched off the lamp. It was 3:00 A.M., and the fifty-three-year-old admiral, Walter Jensen, Commander of U.S. Submarine Group 9, and his wife Margaret were tired but relaxed. They had returned from a successful if long Navy-hosted reception for over two hundred northwest VIPs, including everyone from Bill Gates to the Greenpeace representatives. With Margaret in tow, the admiral had reassured the movers and shakers of the Northwest, and Seattle in particular, that the U.S. Navy was conscious of its environmental responsibility in the pristine waters of Puget Sound, especially the fifty-three-mile-long, 2.5-mile-wide Hood Canal waterway through which the admiral’s nuclear-armed subs egressed into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the open Pacific. Among the guests were several Canadian politicians from the nearby province of British Columbia, where the southern tip of Vancouver Island formed the northern flank of the vitally strategic strait, Washington State’s ruggedly beautiful Olympic peninsula forming the southern flank. Even the “environuts,” as they were deridingly called by some in the Navy, seemed satisfied that the admiral was doing everything in his power to assure the environmental integrity of the clear, cold cobalt-blue waters whose emerald islands had attracted urban refugees from throughout America.
The admiral switched off the light. “In all, a good night’s work, Chief,” he told Margaret.
“We’re not finished yet,” she replied, reaching lustily for him, squeezing hard, her perfume even stronger now.
“Permission to come alongside?” he joshed eagerly.
“I’d rather you came aboard,” she said.
“Very well. Permission to come aboard?”
“Permission granted.”
He’d begun his roll to port when the phone jangled in the darkness, its red light showing it was from the base. Damn. “Jensen.”
“Admiral, sorry to disturb you, sir. This is Duty Officer Morgan.”
“Yes?”
“Sir. Star has spotted an anomaly.” The duty officer’s voice was even, unhurried, thoroughly professional. But the admiral knew that at three in the morning it had to be important. “Star” was base shorthand for “Darkstar,” the resurrected unmanned aerial vehicle which, along with the Navy’s undersea hydrophone Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, was used for COMSUBPAC-GRU 9’s real-time security surveillance of Puget Sound and environs. This had been particularly important since the terrorist “Ressam” had been caught at Port Angeles in 2000 crossing over from Canada with a truckload of explosives, intending to blow up Los Angeles Airport.
“Anomaly on land or water?” the admiral inquired, sitting up.
“Water, sir.”
“Vessel wake or sub venting?” the admiral pressed.
“None reported in the area, sir. We have the Utah out but she’s much farther west.”
Which meant the anomaly could be a patch of upwelling, a common occurrence on the West Coast, where fresh water leaked upward from seabed springs through fissures in Juan de Fuca’s ever-shifting tectonic plate. Because of the fresh water’s different salinity, and thus slightly different color, it often showed up as an anomaly, like a slick of oil, readily visible by Darkstar’s God’s-eye view. Or the anomaly could be the first sign of an environmental disaster. An oil spill.
“You check with Coast Guard Air at Port Angeles?” asked the admiral. With that, his wife turned on her bedside lamp, resignedly sliding over a copy of Time from her nightstand.
“All right,” she heard her husband tell the duty officer, “keep me posted…. No, no, you did the right thing. When the Coast Guard gets back to you, let me know what they say. Perhaps it’s just some weird local phenomenon … Yes, absolutely, call me either way.”
Margaret Jensen, scanning the Time interview, knew that her husband’s “either way” meant he wouldn’t be able to relax enough to have sex, at least not the kind she wanted. He was in line for CNO — Chief of Naval Operations, the U.S.’s highest naval rank — and the smallest “screw-up,” as he’d so often reminded her, could scuttle the promotion. He looked apologetically at Margaret. “Sorry about this kafuffle.”
She shrugged, trying not to look annoyed but knowing there’d be no orgasmic relief until Walt knew exactly what the damned anomaly was.
“Morgan’ll get back to me soon,” he assured her.
“Don’t think so,” she said, still reading.
“Why?”
She turned the page. “Weather channel said there’s a low closing in from the Pacific. Fog. Coast Guard planes won’t see anything.”
“Damn! You’re right.” He lifted the phone, about to punch the preprogrammed button for the base, then decided against it. Best to wait for the Coast Guard report. Don’t overreact. A potential CNO never panics. Pray God it was a simple case of upwelling, and not the first trace of an oil spill from some Liberian-registered vessel having illegally discharged its bilges under cover of darkness to save a few bucks having it pumped off in port.
Fifteen minutes later the phone jangled again. The admiral let it ring twice. “Jensen here.”
“Admiral, Duty Officer Morgan. No reports from Coast Guard Air, and their vessels report nothing but the usual run of boater accidents, general assistance calls, et cetera. But they’re sending a cutter out to have a look-see. It’s dark as sin out in the strait — they’ll use infrared.”
“Infrared wouldn’t show a spill in this weather,” the admiral pointed out. “If it is a spill.”
“No, sir,” agreed Morgan. “But they can take water samples.” Then the DO posited an entirely different but quite plausible explanation for the anomaly Darkstar had spotted: “It could be a NAWID.” He meant a natural air-water interface disturbance caused by a hard rain shower or a school of fish in a frenzy of feeding on plankton near the surface.
The admiral was nodding, thinking about requesting a “side-scan” sonar profile of the sea bottom rather than settling for the ordinary sonar depth reading that as a matter of standard procedure would be taken by the Coast Guard cutter. But to request a side-scan radar profile that would reveal any venting or other anomaly on the sea bed was a costly proposition for the Navy, ergo the taxpayers. And he could be accused of making a mountain out of a molehill. He decided to wait.
“All right,” he told Morgan. “Let me know if you hear any more. Request another Darkstar run tomorrow.”
“Aye aye, sir. Good night.”
The admiral replaced the phone. Maybe the anomaly had been nothing more than a sudden squall of wind. He’d seen that often enough — anybody who’d been on any kind of boat had seen it, an area of water disturbed by a phantom gust ruffling the water, causing it to momentarily take on a different shade of blue, green, or gray, depending on the color of the sky. But Margaret saw that he was worried.
“Go to sleep,” she urged, pulling the bedspread playfully up over his head.
“You think I’m overreacting?” came the muffled voice beneath the cover.
She put the magazine aside and switched off her bedside lamp. “Well, you have made a bit of a meal out of it.”
He cast off the cover. “A meal out of it? I’ve never heard you use that before.”
There was silence.
“You’ve never used that phrase before,” he repeated.
“I don’t know,” she said in the penumbra of his bedside light. “I must have read it somewhere.”
“I’ve heard it before,” the admiral said accusingly. “It’s a limey expression. That limey admiral, the Brit liaison guy at the base. He’s always using it.”
“M
aybe,” she said tiredly.
“But you’re never on the base. How would you know?”
There was another long silence before she spoke. “Don’t start with me, Walter.”
“Start what?”
“Obsessing.”
“Goddammit, all I said was that you’re never on the base. Are you?” Now he could hear the alarm clock ticking. “Answer me, Margaret … Margaret.”
She wouldn’t.
Dammit! He sat up, couldn’t sleep. But she could — through a tornado. Perhaps she’s right, he thought. He was obsessing again, his Darkstar anxiety expressing itself in veiled accusations about a suspected attraction between her and the limey liaison officer. Like a dog with an old bone, he told himself, his obsessive streak made worse throughout his career by the Navy’s insistence, particularly the nuclear navy’s near paranoid insistence, that you do everything by the book. Or else. Check, double-check, and check again. Lives depended on it. Oh, use your initiative by all means, but only after you know the rules well enough to know the ones you can break. Of course there were renegades, “cowboys,” like the SEALs and Freeman’s now-disbanded SALERTs — Sea Air Land Emergency Response Team — who thought they could operate under their own rules. But sooner or later the service — Army, Air Force, Navy, or Marine — reined them in, and they sure as hell didn’t make flag rank.
The problem, he knew, was that he was so close to becoming CNO. Settle down, he told himself. This was simply an attack of nerves and self-doubt that at times assailed even the most self-assured individuals, who momentarily, with sweating palms, heartbeat racing out of control, are seized by the unshakable conviction that they’re about to be found out, the veneer stripped away, the naked self revealed, warts and all. Jensen wondered if that was why Mike Borda, the Navy’s most beloved admiral — a “mustang,” a man who’d worked all the way up from the deck to admiral — ended up blowing his brains out in 1998, ostensibly for wearing a medal to which he wasn’t entitled.
His eyes now accustomed to the darkened room, Jensen made his way quietly into the living room, past the smell of hothouse roses, past the faintly visible outline of the model of the new Virginia-class sub, and poured himself a stiff Jack Daniel’s, eschewing ice for fear of the dispenser waking Margaret. Or was she just pretending to be asleep? Thirty years of marriage, and there were still times like this when he wasn’t sure whether she was genuinely asleep or using it as a means of escape.
