by Ian Slater
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Douglas Freeman heartily despised the media in general, regarding them in an infamous address to a graduating class at Emory as “a bunch of lily-livered liberals” who should be told about wars only when they were over. On CNN, Marte Price had reported his comments as an “antiliberal tirade,” noting that he’d been booed by the student body. The general laughed it off. He and Marte were old friends, though diametrically opposed politically. As he once commented to Norman Raft, his 2nd Army quartermaster, with uncharacteristic embarrassment, he and Marte Price, who had been a reporter in the field during several of his wars, were “what you might call, ah, chemically aligned.”
“What the hell’s that mean, Douglas?” Raft replied. “You screwed her?”
“Damn woman was going to write some nasty stuff about my Sea Air Land Emergency Response Team,” Freeman said, “and for reasons of national security, I had to launch a, ah …”
“Preemptive strike.”
“There you go. For the good of the Army.”
“Was she a good fit?” asked Raft.
“Like a 105 in the breech.”
“A 105!”
“Metaphorically speaking,” Freeman responded.
“Oh, then it was more like small caliber—”
“That’s enough, Norman. Don’t you have to order some water pumps?”
It was an old joke between them, a reference to the tragic failure of a five-dollar cooling component in the British army’s tanks during the initial and disastrous campaign against Rommel in the Western Desert. The small, defective part had been responsible for terrible losses as overheated engines conked out and became sitting ducks for the Afrika Korps 88s. It was one of the reasons that Freeman, to the disapproval of fellow senior commanders past and present, occasionally sported his distinctive khaki Afrika Korps cap — the swastika removed. The cap reminded him of the two vital attributes of any country’s great lieutenants: first, the ability to get inside your opponent’s head, to think like him tactically as well as strategically; and second, to remember that God is in the details, the water pumps, for instance, without which an entire armored division could grind to a halt. These were details most overburdened generals left to their army’s quartermaster and Freeman always attended to himself.
But now it was time to get a detailed map of the area and to call the team — or, as he liked to refer to them, the old Special Forces “gang.” There would be no small talk now that Freeman was sure that the Navy — indeed the United States — was in even more danger than it feared.
Aussie Lewis in Los Angeles was the first to get the call.
“You in for a job?” Freeman asked him.
“Location?” replied the laconic Aussie Lewis, refusing as always to admit surprise.
“Washington State,” Freeman said. “Picking apples. You fit?”
“A mile with full kit, in under ten. How’s that?”
“Adequate.” It was part of the code. “Now this is crucial: What’s your current waist?”
“Thirty-one. Thirty-two after lunch at Hooters.”
So he was fit. “One more thing …” said Freeman.
“I’m waiting.”
“Will Mommy let you go?”
Lewis ignored the taunt. “When?”
“Tomorrow, 1600. You have your own Draeger?” He meant the special chest-mounted rebreather unit and air tank which, unlike other diving gear, would not release telltale bubbles that could betray your position to the enemy.
Next, Freeman called Sal Salvini in Brooklyn, asking the same question. The answer was, “I’m packing now.”
Choir Williams, who had settled in the quiet little town of Winthrop, nestled in eastern Washington’s Cascades, the wilderness mountain chain that ran south of Mount Baker near the Canadian-U.S. border, received the last call. But by the time the general dialed him, the Welsh-American who’d never lost his accent had already been contacted by Aussie Lewis.
“Williams here!” he answered the phone. “A fine lick of a lad I am. Fit as a rugby fly-half and a devil with the ladies!”
There was a polite pause. “Mr. Williams. It’s Pastor Keenheart here. Perhaps I’ve caught you at a bad time?”
“Ah yes — well, ah, no — Pastor.”
“The choir at Winthrop St. Andrews wondered if you’d be so kind as to lend us your fine eisteddfod tenor voice for our Thanksgiving service.”
“Ah yes, of course. Sorry, Pastor, I thought — I thought you were an old pal of mine. Yes, of course I’d be happy to assist, though I could be out of town.”
“Oh, that’d be a pity, because two of our soprano ladies wanted you to bang them!”
“General?”
Choir answered Freeman’s questions, including giving his waist size, and as he had with Aussie and Salvini, Freeman told him to bring “Draeger” along, as if the latter were a person. Choir inquired about David Brentwood, the other member of the old team. Would he be going also?
“No!” It was so emphatic that Choir was taken aback — they had always worked as a team. He didn’t press further. And, being a single man, there was no “Mommy” consideration for Choir.
When Eleanor Prenty heard a message on her answering machine from Freeman—“I know what’s going on”—she called him immediately, her earlier reluctance to return his calls or seek his advice having vanished in light of — or rather, the darkness of — the Utah and Turner having been sunk. No one in COMSUBPAC-9 seemed to know anything other than what oceanographer Frank Hall had informed them: that SEAL diver Rafe Albinski had apparently spotted a mini — or could it be a midget? — sub before his suspicious death, and that Admiral Jensen had therefore requested an airlift of the Navy’s small NR-1B research sub from the Atlantic coast to Whidbey Island, where it could be launched to help in the investigation.
Freeman explained to Eleanor Prenty where he thought the sub was by referring to what he called the reverse-seven shape of the Olympic peninsula’s coastline, which appeared in the Cape Flattery quadrant of the 1:110,000 maritime chart of the Juan de Fuca Strait where he’d spotted the simple four-word entry “Hole in the Wall.” It referred to a sea cave in the extraordinarily rock-pitted coastline.
“A cave!” Eleanor said, struck by the general’s perspicacity. But she immediately pointed out to him the difficulty of getting enough divers to search almost one hundred miles of some of the wildest coastline in North America. All available divers were already needed to scout every port and dock—
“I’ve already made calls,” Freeman cut in, “to three or four of the best SEAL SpecOp guys in the country.”
“Three or four? It’d take hundreds more,” she said.
“You’re right,” Freeman replied.
Eleanor was taken aback by his agreeing with her and his friendly tone. “So,” she said, “I suppose you have an alternate plan.”
“Yes ma’am.” This was the problem he’d solved in the bath. “COMSUBPAC Group 9’s UAV.”
She thought for a moment — military types were always throwing around their acronyms for equipment, and it gave her pleasure to surprise him. “Unmanned aerial vehicle?”
“Right.”
The National Security Advisor felt elated.
“I want to have Darkstar do an infrared run west from Pillar Point to Cape Flattery, then south to a place called Father and Son. Fifty-seven miles in all.”
Eleanor was trying to locate the place names on her wall map. No luck, but she’d already grasped Freeman’s idea. “Hot spots,” she said. “The UAV photographs the fifty-seven miles of coast, and any hot spots indicating human habitation can be investigated by our divers. Right?”
“You’ve got it. Darkstar’s pix are digital disc so we can get real-time feed.”
“I’ll have the CNO contacted right now to order—”
“Ah,” cut in the general, “maybe you could have your Admiral Jensen call the CNO.”
Eleanor hesitated. It’d make more sense
for her to—“You want Admiral Jensen to get the credit.”
“Well, hell,” Freeman said, “poor bastard could use some. Media, everyone, wants someone to blame. Someone to crucify. Maybe he was derelict. I don’t know. None of us’ll know till we have time to investigate. Time for that later. Right now we need to go after the sub and its hideaway.”
She was beginning to like the gruff, bluff legend they sometimes called George C. Scott because of his uncanny resemblance to the Oscar-winning actor who had made such an indelible impression with his acclaimed portrayal of Patton, one of Freeman’s boyhood heroes. “That’s very generous of you, General.”
He mumbled something about “there but for the grace of God go I,” and asked her to let him know when Darkstar was airborne and to give him a password for his laptop’s entry to the UAV’s real-time IR transmits of its surveillance flight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
At the firing range at Fort Lewis outside Tacoma, the setting sun had thrown pine and spruce trees into stark relief. Over Puget Sound, the strait, and the symphony of mountains, cumulus, and seacoast, there was a pink-lavender beauty so redolent with the smell of forests and pure air from the perennially snowcapped Olympics that it would have seemed the wild imaginings of some fantastical painter but for the fact that it was real.
America remained traumatized, its Navy humiliated, its self-esteem bombarded by the unrelenting anti-American foreign press scoffing at the Navy’s continuing embarrassment about what to do in the strait. With two capital vessels gone, the Turner’s battle group, or what was left of it, was “like a man caught in a minefield,” the New York Times editorialized. “He can neither go forward nor retreat, having seen his most forward comrades on the Utah and those behind him on the Turner blown up. In short, the Navy is paralyzed.”
But on the firing range at Fort Lewis, David Brentwood’s only concern at the moment wasn’t what the editorialists were saying but that his lame right hand was refusing to play its part, its fingers bunched in an immovable, stubborn fist. The Humvee’s driver, who had brought the Medal of Honor winner to the range, opened the back door to grab the only new ambidextrous F2000 assault rifle at Fort Lewis.
“I’ll get it,” said David, subdued, his tone devoid of any trace of sullenness or ill-temper, but characteristically quiet, showing as much concern for the other man’s embarrassment as for his own.
“Oh, sure,” said the driver, stepping back.
First problem: The assault rifle had no mag. Rules of the range: no weapon to be loaded until shooters were in the stalls or on the mound.
But even the simplest job — snapping in the mag — proved harder than David had anticipated. As his sister, an Army nurse, had so often said, “The things you take for granted!” her work with the wounded having relentlessly driven home the point.
The F2000, constructed of molded polymer and modern in appearance, wasn’t a pretty weapon. It was thoroughly ugly, in fact. Though ergonomically correct, its modular design looked more like a child’s stubby gray Lego construction. Despite its aesthetic shortcomings, however, it had been the Bullpup’s carrying handle, allowing the well-balanced Bullpup to be carried with equal facility by left and right handlers, that gave David hope. He should be able to grip the weapon tightly enough, by jamming it between his left arm and side, to control its three-round bursts. After considerable sweat and remonstrations against his dangling, uncooperative right arm, he was able to cradle the weapon for burst fire. Then, in an act of sheer will, using his good left hand to literally drag the dead lump of fingers that had been his right hand across to the front underside and through the loop formed by a half-inch-wide rubber band suspended from the gun’s barrel, he managed to lift the relatively light eight-pound weapon high enough to assume a shoulder firing position, should he be tested for single-shot accuracy.
He fired four three-round bursts from the waist position, the driver watching the man-size target through the range binoculars. While the group of three 5.56mm bullets all hit the target, they were too widespread. Still …
David readied for the shoulder shot, trying gamely to camouflage his pain beneath a forced grin. “Good to be shooting again!” he told the driver.
“Uh-huh.” The driver’s attention had shifted from the line of targets to the arrival of another Humvee. “Son of a — it’s George Patton!”
Freeman, as usual, was well turned out, khaki shirt and trousers immaculately pressed. Together with the snappy peak of his khaki Afrika Korps cap, his gear made him look ten years younger. But the general was not a happy camper, and his driver, loaned by Fort Lewis’s CO, wisely remained in his Humvee. David’s driver came to attention, giving the retired general a smart salute. Freeman returned in kind without breaking stride, as if arriving to inspect the 2nd Army. “A word with Captain Brentwood.”
“Yes, sir,” David’s driver replied, quickly absenting himself, heading toward the other Humvee.
“General?” said David, slipping on the safety.
“We’ve got bad news. You’re a diver, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good. Need your advice.”
That was something David liked about Freeman. He never hesitated to seek the counsel of others — those below him in rank, particularly those who, like him, had been in the field.
“What’s the problem?” David asked, grateful for the chance to lower the 2000, resting it against the gnarled trunk of a ponderosa pine.
“Told National Security Advisor Prenty that maybe the sub had its lair in a cave or some other indentation in the coast from Port Angeles down past Father and Son.”
David knew about Port Angeles, of course, but, apart from the Bible, not Father and Son.
“ ’Father and Son’ are a couple of sea stacks off the Olympic Peninsula’s west coast. I suggested Jensen, COMSUBPAC-GRU-9, run his UAV Darkstar along the coastal sea caves.”
“For IR hot spots,” David said, immediately extrapolating from Freeman’s remark that what would be needed was a diver-capable SpecFor team to either execute a swim investigation or an abseil insertion from a helo, as Brentwood and his team had done in the Hindu Kush.
“Exactly,” confirmed Freeman, his hand flashing out with surprising speed, capturing a fly, which he then flung ferociously against the ponderosa. “Anyway, Darkstar is in pieces. Overhaul. Won’t by flyable till tonight, 2100.”
David glanced at his Swiss issue watch. “That’s only four and a — no, five hours away. Not long.”
The general gave the grunt of a man whose rationality was losing to his impatience. “Turner’s battle group — what’s left of it — is still sitting out there in the strait.”
“How many planes’d we lose on the Turner?”
“A few — none of the fighters, thank God. Hadn’t flown out from Whidbey Island. Carrier only takes ’em aboard once the boat’s clear of the strait and in the open sea.”
“If I were the terrorists, I would’ve waited,” opined David. “Hit the carrier at sea — likely to get most of the fighters in the hangar deck and topside.”
“I agree,” said Freeman, taking off his Afrika Korps cap, running his fingers through a shock of silvery gray hair. The general slapped his thigh with the cap. “Got any ideas of what to do while we’re sitting on our bums waiting for Darkstar to be reassembled?”
“Hovercraft,” said David. “They’re equipped with IR scopes for night searches. Helos too — but I’d go for the hovercraft. Low flying helos — even by pilots from the Coast Guard familiar with the coasts — aren’t as good as hovercraft. Hovers are at eye level with any cave or indentation. Helos have to avoid sea stacks. Especially hard to see at night.”
Freeman nodded in full agreement, already striding back to his Humvee, grabbing its phone. Coast Guard HQ in Seattle told him they could let him have three hovercraft, the remainder of the squadron still busy searching for survivors among the more than 389 MIAs still unaccounted for.
“When?” asked
the general over the phone.
“We’ll need authorization from Admiral—”
“Hey!” David could hear the general’s sharp retort. “You jokers listen to me. We’ve lost a Nimitz carrier, a state-of-the-art Virginia, and most of the people aboard them, and you want some goddamn piece of paper so you can go look for the sons of bitches who did this? If we lose any more because you—”
“Orders are going out now, General,” cut in the duty officer’s voice. “As we speak.”
“Good, I’ll need real-time digital feed of any hot spots the hovercraft get on their video.”
“No video, I’m afraid, General. Strait’s too rough.”
Like most people who hadn’t ridden aboard one, the general, despite his extensive military exposure, harbored the illusion that a hovercraft traveled smoothly over the water on the air cushion.
“Well — hell, then, have them notify me if they see anything that looks suspicious.”
“Roger.”
“Let’s hope,” Freeman told David when he put down the phone, “that nothing hits the fan between now and midnight.”
“Amen to that,” said David. Having rested during Freeman’s tête-à-tête with the Coast Guard, he now clicked a new mag into the F2000, keen to show his old boss just how well he could handle the Bullpup with one good arm.
