Choke Point wi-9

by Ian Slater

  He said hello to Mrs. Tse, his ayi, who cleaned and made dinner for him. Mandy had left two messages: one that Charles realized he’d forgotten to erase from last evening, which said she and fellow “totally stressed-out” students — as she put it in her wonderfully mellifluous voice — taking a break from Beijing Culture and Language University in Haidan district, had finally reached Suzhou after a terrible flight on China Air to Hangzhou. They would be in Suzhou for two or three days, depending on the vicissitudes of China Air.

  A later second message, obviously from her cell phone, given its broken-up transmission, sounded urgent: “Daddy … Wu Ling … loaded … as usual … told me Chang …” A rush of static, like fish frying, then: “—tralize … or … wes … kind of deal … the mill …” More static. Then silence. She sounded frightened.

  For his “little girl,” as he still called her, to risk the call instead of waiting to tell him whatever it was in person, meant that she must have known she was being followed — or worse, that she might not reach home. Mrs. Tse handed Charles his evening scotch and Evian. He took it like an automaton, didn’t say, “Thank you,” something he’d never failed to do before, and ran the message back to note the time of her call: 2:00 P.M.

  He rang the Beijing Culture and Language University. “Our general office is closed for the day and will reopen …” Charles Riser tried to recall her teacher’s name. Damn! He should have paid more attention to what she’d told him whenever she came home to visit on the weekend. Where was she staying in Suzhou? All he remembered was that the students had to take a flight to Hangzhou first because there was no airport in Suzhou. Darn it, what was her teacher’s surname? But then, how would a name help him? As cultural attaché, he was only too aware of the massive problem China had with surnames, there being basically only five, creating a nightmarish problem for bureaucrats and businesses alike. One of the few ways overseas Chinese had overcome this problem, and one Riser had encouraged as cultural attaché to the U.S., was to adopt a variety of Anglicized first names so that they became “Homer Wong” or “Irene Li,” and the like.

  At nine-twenty that evening Charles received a visit from a Gong An Bu man who read a note aloud saying that the Suzhou coroner’s office regretted to inform him that his daughter “Amanda”—he pronounced her surname as “Wiser”—“has drowned dead in Suzhou Canal.”

  Stunned, Charles could only ask frantically, “Where is she?” If he’d thought about it for a moment, the answer was obvious — the Suzhou morgue — but the shock had hit him like a battering ram.

  “I do not know,” answered the Gong An Bu man, who added after a few seconds, “Offices will be closed now in Suzhou.”

  Within seconds of the man leaving, Charles was calling the wai shi—the foreign affairs branch of the Gong An Bu — using whatever influence he thought his status as American cultural attaché might exert. The Chinese government, despite all their blather about equality among the people, were, after the Japanese, the most status-conscious crowd Riser had encountered in Asia. While waiting interminably on the phone, he was stressed both by the tension of waiting for the next official up the ladder to respond to him and by the knowledge that someone, maybe one of Mandy’s friends, was trying to get through to him. God Almighty! What was happening to his family?

  First, his wife Elizabeth had died just two years before. Why? Charles never found out. Mandy, then seventeen, had been inconsolable. All they were told was that it had been a hit and run at night, on the rain-drenched New Jersey Turnpike. Though running late to meet Charles for Mandy’s high school graduation in Rockville, Elizabeth had apparently seen a car ahead of hers pulling off to the side, taillights flashing, an elderly woman slumped over the wheel. She pulled off to the shoulder, used her cell phone to call 911, then getting out to help was struck by another vehicle. The impact hurled her over the guardrail and thirty feet down an embankment. A witness, another motorist, said it was a Jeep that had hit her, a Jeep with a gun rack attached to the cabin, trying to pass the vehicle in front on the inside, crossing the shoulder’s safety line. In the downpour there’d been no chance for anyone to see the killer’s license number, and given the volume of graduation traffic on the turnpike, there’d been no hope of a trace. All that Charlie Riser, graduate of Yale majoring in Fine Arts, could think of then was that it had been a Jeep with a gun rack. Hunters. Guns. Violence in America. All the high school shootings. It was one of the reasons he’d applied for the Beijing posting after Mandy graduated from college, to give her a year or two abroad in another culture, without guns.

  The operator came back on the line — no one from the university could be reached. The whole of China, it seemed, was asleep. The operator, however, perhaps because she felt some empathy for the Big Nose, added, “Suzhou is really under Nanjing Military District’s 12th Army.”

  Charles phoned 12th Army’s headquarters and was told its commanding officer, General Chang, would not return till tomorrow. Stymied, he ran the message again. He skipped “Daddy”—it was too painful — and tried to concentrate on what he thought were the key words. “Wu Ling … loaded … as usual … told me … tralize … or … wes … kind of deal … the mill.”

  Wu Ling and Chang were no mystery. One of Mandy’s friends, Wu Ling was the mistress of General Chang, a man in current disfavor in the eyes of the Chinese government because of a bungled high-seas attempt by him and rogue Russian cohorts under the Russian General Kornon to hijack the prototype of the U.S. superfast RONE computer. The attempt had been just barely thwarted by U.S. oceanographer Frank Hall and the former Special Forces SALERT buddies of General Freeman.

  After Charles had been introduced to Chang during the annual Moon Festival, he discovered that Chang’s mistress, Wu Ling, just happened to be enrolled in the same international relations and language courses at BCLU as Mandy. No surprise — every American official’s kin were routinely targeted by the Gong An Bu, to be befriended in an effort to gather information about American attachés — spies — in Beijing. Riser knew, of course, that the CIA did precisely the same thing to Chinese college students in America whose parents worked in the Chinese Embassy and consulates throughout the U.S. Like his Chinese counterparts in Washington, he also forwarded anything of interest he picked up at unofficial functions. But his daughter — that was out of bounds. Thinking about the message, he wondered if “or” was part of “either or” or was “or … west” northwest? Was “mil” military? It was the first thing he thought of in the post-9/11 world. Or was it a grain “mill,” a meeting where some kind of massive trade fraud deal was about to be consummated?

  Ten minutes later his phone rang and he snatched it up. It was General Chang expressing “deepest sympathy for your loss” and promising the assistance of Nanjing’s 12th Army, whose command included Suzhou, in finding the “antisocial elements responsible” for Mandy’s death. There was a terrible silence in Charles’s apartment, the home where he and Mandy had laughed and cried and held each other when, after he’d brought her to China, their loss of wife and mother sometimes overwhelmed them.

  “So you believe,” Charles said slowly, “that she was murdered?”

  “Of course,” replied Chang, his bluntness at once appreciated and resented by Riser. “This police report from Suzhou,” continued the general, “is — how do you Americans say? — a cover-lift?”

  “Cover-up.”

  “Yes, a cover-up. The Suzhou police don’t want to admit the murder of a foreigner. Bad for tourists. Suzhou depends heavily on tourists.”

  Riser found himself nodding without speaking, a wave of nausea engulfing him.

  Chang said, “Forgive me for prying at this time, Mr. Riser, but was your daughter carrying valuables?”

  Charlie Riser was about to throw up. “A robbery? I mean, you think it was a robbery gone bad?” Somehow, not that it made any real difference, Charles found it easier to consider a robbery gone wrong than a straight-out murder.

  “Suzhou says no,�
�� answered the general, “her xue-sheng zheng”—her green card—“was still on her, but perhaps it was still a murder for money, the thief not knowing what to do with the green card. No matter that there is much more tourism these days, the fact is, Mr. Riser, very few Chinese have ever seen a foreigner in the flesh and they would not know what the green card was. Even if they did, they would have to sell it to a foreigner. This is very dangerous.”

  Chang had a point.

  “Leave it to me, Mr. Riser. I will investigate further.”

  “Thank you, General.”

  Perhaps, he thought, Chang’s offer of assistance was purely self-serving. After Chang’s failure with the Russian Kornon to get the RONE supercomputer, the general was probably trying to rehabilitate himself in the hierarchy of Chinese intelligence, to prevent the kind of international strain the murder of an American official’s daughter would undoubtedly place on Chinese-American relations — relations which were never good at best, and worse than usual right now because of Taiwan’s ever-growing assertive industrial and military strength. Though unlike Kornon he hadn’t been “transferred”—that is, exiled to Xinjiang, China’s Siberia, as punishment for his failure to grab the latest American technological breakthrough — Chang, like Kornon, would no doubt have to do something spectacular to get back into the good graces of his superiors. Helping Beijing avoid American charges of China’s ineptitude in the matter of solving the murder of a young American woman would certainly do the trick. It might put Chang firmly back on the road toward becoming party chairman, head man of China.

  In any event, Charlie Riser didn’t care about the fact Chang might be helping him just to ingratiate himself with Beijing. The point was, Chang was the one party official who was at least trying to get to the bottom of it. And for that, God bless him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Bangor, Washington State

  While Admiral Jensen anxiously waited for the result of Albinski’s and Dixon’s second dive, he filled in time with an unannounced inspection tour of the submarine base on Hood Canal, instructing his driver/aide Davis to begin with the “James Bond” house. He meant the huge Magnetic Silencing Facility shed built over water, at the base of which the Trident Boomers and Hunter Killer subs entered in order to be degaussed. This process wiped off their magnetic signature through rows of enormous electrical coils, thus reducing their vulnerability to enemy detection.

  Jensen was also inspecting his base’s Explosive Handling Wharf, another enormous shed built over water. In this one the forty-four-foot-long, seven-foot-wide Trident D-5 missiles, with their distinctive royal-blue fiberglass protective domes, were being loaded into each of two football-field-long, 18,000-ton Tridents, or boomers. Each boomer held two rows of twelve missiles. Atop each missile sat fourteen five hundred — kiloton reentry vehicles, each housing a thermonuclear warhead. Thus, each boomer was capable of striking, over a range of eight thousand miles, 192 different targets, all of which could be hit from just one U.S. submarine. And each of these 192 bombs was ten times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. Now, of course, Japan was one of the U.S.’s most reliable allies in Asia. And China, which had once fought with the U.S. against Japan’s imperial expansionism, was considered by Washington to be its biggest single threat, notwithstanding America’s ongoing war against terrorism.

  Satisfied with the efficiency level at both the MSE and the Explosive Handling Wharf, the admiral was driven the mile or so south along the shoreline road to the triangular-shaped Delta Refit Pier, with its docking facilities for two boomers and room for another one in its dry dock. Jensen, continuing to reassure himself that all was well — as it needed to be for a prospective CNO — headed for the “mange,” the deforested clear-cut areas in the otherwise heavily forested seven-thousand-acre site where the stocks of C-4 and D-5 missiles were housed deep underground. He worried about the vulnerability of the area, despite the presence of the heavily alarmed security fence that ran around the huge base. He’d assured Washington after 9/11 that even though the “manges” were as visible from the air as any clear-cut area in a commercially logged forest, they were safe. The protective sheath around the missiles was so far underground that no bomb — not even their own state-of-the-art guided bunker-busting GBU-15s — could penetrate. Except a nuke.

  The secure phone in his Humvee rang. It was the 0800 to noon watch duty officer reporting another anomaly. It spooked the admiral, though he took care not to show it as he waved nonchalantly to the skipper of the sleek tug that was gently nudging a boomer into position in the azure blue water that lapped peacefully against the Delta Refit pier.

  Switching to open voice so his aide in the Humvee could hear him, Jensen asked the duty officer for more details of this latest Darkstar photograph.

  “It’s in the same general area as before, Admiral — a bit farther north, in the direction of our San Juan Islands.”

  “Where exactly?” Jensen demanded as his aide brought up the Canadian Hydrographic Service 1:80,000 scale chart of Juan de Fuca Strait. It showed the waters between the Olympic Peninsula and Admiralty Inlet to the southeast, and north to the edge of the 172 San Juan Islands.

  “Exact position,” reported the duty officer, “latitude forty-eight degrees twenty-two minutes and three seconds, longitude 123 degrees and four minutes.”

  Jensen’s aide punched in the coordinates and immediately had a red circle on the map, depth reading plus or minus 364 feet.

  “How big an area?” asked Jensen.

  “Irregular shape — discoloration—’bout two hundred yards in diameter—”

  “Wait a minute,” said the admiral. How the idea came to him, he didn’t know. Maybe it was the jolt of his breakfast coffee, waking him up after the long night. “Enter ’Kelp beds location,’ “ he instructed the aide, explaining how such discoloration could be caused by large vessel traffic through the strait, ships’ bow waves pushing brown kelp before it was scattered again by wind and current.

  In milliseconds the laptop’s screen was pockmarked with brown splotches along the long western coastline of Whidbey Island north of Hood Canal and in the funnel-shaped area of sea bounded by Whidbey in the west and narrowing eastward into the long Juan de Fuca Strait between Vancouver Island and the Olympic peninsula. Still, Jensen was so anxious about his possible promotion that he ordered the Coast Guard to check it out, and started imagining everything from a hostile sub being in the area to hostile antisubmarine mines being placed on the bottom — which, when he thought seriously about it, made no sense. For one thing, there was the extensive underwater SOSUS microphone array the U.S. Navy had in the area, as well as all around the Pacific. For another, this second anomaly’s location, which was now being investigated by Albinski and Dixon, was not in the egress channel for his subs, unlike the first location. But to be absolutely sure, he demanded that the Coast Guard do a depth-sounding run of this new anomaly, as well as a visual check. Yes, he told himself, admittedly it was a very small area. The duty officer said it was a hundred yards or so across in the 625-square-mile area. But again he thought of Admiral Kimmel, C in C Pacific, who hadn’t been given the report of a radar anomaly north of Oahu on the morning of December 7, 1941.

  He called the duty officer. “Any report yet from the deep dive at anomaly one?”

  “Not yet, sir. Petrel is on station now.”

  “Very well,” said the admiral. “I still think—”

  He was interrupted by the DO. “Sir, Coast Guard has seen kelp in the vicinity of anomaly two.”

  “By God,” said Jensen, turning to his aide. “Why didn’t anyone else think of kelp beds before me, Davis?”

  The aide shrugged. “Not as smart as you, Admiral.”

  Jensen laughed, the first time he’d done so in over forty-eight hours. “You sucking up, Davis?”

  “I’d like a posting to Hawaii, sir.”

  “Well, you’re not gonna get it.” They both laughed. Ahead was the Explosives Handling Wharf. At its
apex, two fully armed Marines manned an M16 machine gun behind sandbags. Another two stood guard as line handlers, in their orange life preservers, as tugs secured boomer SSBN 659, the USS Will Rogers, into which one of the big, white, tree-trunk-diameter D-5 missiles was about to be lowered. Jensen was once again aware of the awesome responsibility he had. Little wonder he worried about everything, from the safety of the missiles to the guards on his sub base’s perimeter.

  “Must have been kelp,” he assured Davis. Though Davis said nothing, the admiral sensed that his assistant wasn’t convinced, which uncaged his obsessive streak once again. “All right, then,” he told Davis. “Call the DO. Have him send a burst UHF message to the Utah and have Captain Rorke pick up a sample of that damned kelp from the site on his way into base.”

  It was 1100 hours when the admiral’s Humvee pulled up at the Trident Refit Facility. It would be hours yet before he’d hear anything from Petrel. He glanced at the forest on the other side of the 2.5 mile-wide canal, and the Olympic Mountains beyond. Wild and beautiful. Inside the TRF shed there was no sub, but a search periscope that carried cameras and radar sensors was being tested along with a smaller attack periscope. Nearby, a boomer’s 8J scope was having its hermetic seal checked for any possible water, air, or gas leakage.

  Looking at the boomer, preoccupied with thoughts about his own days at sea during the Gulf War and the mixed emotions he used to experience on his way out from the base during the eight-hour, fifty-five-mile-long transit up through the canal and the strait into the Pacific, Jensen didn’t see the Marine guard and his German shepherd dog coming around the corner of the building. The dog suddenly lunged at him, snarling, baring his teeth. Jensen stopped dead in his tracks. The guard, jerking the dog’s leash, apologized. Jensen swallowed hard. “It’s all right, soldier. Good to see you doing your job.”