by Ian Slater
Peter Dixon, only a few feet away on Aussie’s right, was more comfortable, because of the frequent shower of rain that peppered the surface and the surface disturbance created by the local whirlpools from the turbulence of the waterfall. He knew that all of this would make it difficult for anyone swimming on the surface to see more than several feet below them. Once he was through the thunder and caldronlike fury of the falls churning beneath the surface, Dixon indicated they go up to recon. Aussie was unable to see his swim buddy’s arm signal at first, blocked as it was by the effusion of bubbles that momentarily rendered their bubbleless Draeger units redundant. Dixon’s signal had also been hidden by a silvery gray school of Chinook salmon, their fluid beauty pocked here and there by grumpy-mouthed rockfish who refused to move out of the way of their more numerous and streamlined cousins.
By the time Aussie saw the second signal from Dixon, whose thumbs were jerking impatiently upward, Dixon was already four or five feet above him. He broke surface first, deafened by the thundering of the waterfall about ten feet directly behind him. When Aussie surfaced, he found himself amid such a profusion of bubbles and the mist they created, it took him, like Dixon, ahead of him, a while to adjust his vision. It was as if they’d moved from a dull, winter-lit room to an even dimmer one, the water behind the falls significantly darker because of the overhang of the cliff’s face, the waterfall’s effervescent mist also “blooming” out their infrared lenses. Still, in the gloomy light between the falls and the edge of the bay, Dixon saw something few men had ever seen. Seeing it too, Lewis actually gasped in surprise.
It was a midget sub, docked a hundred feet in from them by a natural rock wall that formed part of the crescent bay and was curtained by the falls. Dixon counted four guards, two at the bow and two at the sub’s stern.
In his mind’s eye, Aussie had thought of this midget sub, first reported by Dixon’s deceased swim buddy, as being like the Japanese navy’s small midget sub, three of which had slipped through Sydney Harbor’s defenses in May 1942, torpedoing the ferry Kuttabul and killing nineteen. But what he was looking at now was considerably bigger — a long cigar shape, over a hundred feet in length, its diameter about twelve feet, and the conning tower around eight feet high. But after he and Dixon swam back underneath the turbulent cover of the sea-waterfall interface to reach the rocky islet a hundred yards away, their descriptions of the midget differed. Dixon, his weathered, war-painted face grimacing with the effort of shucking off the weight of his Draeger rebreather, flippers, and other kit, thought that the bow was not so much spherical, but a tad wider than it was high.
“Maybe it is a tad wider,” riposted Aussie. “So what? Must be only a difference of a few inches, at that.”
“If it’s spherical,” said Freeman, “it could be nuclear. That’s the difference, Aussie.”
Choir raised his eyebrows, but Sal gave no indication that he’d heard the general, concentrating on checking his M-16, one cartridge in the chamber, his finger resting on the safety. If anyone so much as poked their snout around the western edge of the falls, he told Choir, “I’ll take their fuckin’ head off!” The “boy from Brooklyn,” as Aussie often called him, had no intention of ending up like the once valiant Medal of Honor winner, one arm as useless as “a spent dick,” to be left dangling by his side for the rest of his life.
For Salvini, the shock of what had purportedly happened during the ODA mission to take out terrorist chief Li Kuan troubled him nightly, like his persistent dream of not having passed his high school exams, which tormented him with the endlessly recurring scene in which he was barred from entering the final examination room — American history — because he was late, having wasted time at a crosswalk, bending down while the rest of his buddies caught the light and crossed the street. By the time he’d tied up the lace of his Nike “Just Do It” sneaker, the pedestrian signal had changed back to “Don’t Walk,” the red signal’s blink morphing into a stream of paralysis-inducing red tracer.
“So what if it’s nuclear-powered?” Aussie challenged the general in a tone that surprised Dixon, who, used to the “Yes sir, no sir” exchanges between officers and men, was taken aback by the lively sense of equality in Freeman’s team.
“Because,” Freeman answered Aussie patiently, “if it’s nuclear powered, what’s it doing needing a dock? A nuclear boat doesn’t need recharging for fifteen to twenty years.”
“Needs rearming though,” said Aussie matter-of-factly, seeing the point and adding, “Nukes can also go a long time without replenishing freeze-dried food — but not munitions, not at the rate this sucker’s been sinking our boats.”
Aussie’s comment made such an obvious yet important point that the general realized just how sleep deprived he was. With that, Freeman did something he normally tried to avoid. From his load vest he pulled out a small, watertight Ziploc bag of dark chocolate-covered roasted coffee beans, took four by way of example, and offered the rest to the team.
Without looking up, Sal said, “Two for me, sir.” Aussie also took two, Choir and Dixon declining. The frigid water had been more than sufficient to wake them up.
“How many guards?” Freeman asked Aussie and Dixon.
“Four that I saw,” said Dixon. “But I couldn’t see shit in there for a while — water fogged my IR.”
“Aussie?”
“Four. And that doesn’t make any sense. Where’s everybody else? No sign of a crew.”
“Aboard the sub,” suggested Choir.
“Fine,” acknowledged Aussie. “But where are the supply donkeys?”
Dixon mentioned that he’d seen something that looked a bit like a dark canvas awning extending back from the sub’s conning tower to the base of the cliff. “But maybe it only covered a gangway that went as far as the rock landing. It was so damned gloomy.”
“I never saw it,” answered Aussie. “Probably ’cause I broke surface at right angles to the conning tower. Could have been a stream of guys coming and going under a tarp and I wouldn’t have seen ’em.”
“Would’ve thought they’d be out in force,” Choir said. “After that bugger took a shot at us?”
“Damn!” began the general.
Had the caffeine from the chocolate-coated java beans jolted him that fast? wondered Choir.
“That’s why we didn’t see a crowd,” Freeman continued. “Bastards are frantically loading the whore so it can cast off and run riot again in the strait. We’re going in!”
Aussie Lewis had known, ever since he was a small boy, that he was brave — always ready to “stand on his dig,” as the Australian prospectors used to call it, refusing to give up their claim in the gold field. But refusing to give ground and dashing off half cocked were two different things.
“General,” countered Aussie, “the moment our RIB pokes its nose around either end of the friggin’ waterfall, those lookouts are gonna have us cold, dead in their sights from either end of the sub. And they’ll be firing from solid ground. If we do get a chance of return fire, we’ll be bobbing around like a cork. Brooklyn here couldn’t even hit ’em with his scatter gun.” Aussie took a breath and said something SpecFor warriors seldom say. “It’s too risky. They’ll take us all out, and then what? No one knows where we are. No backup. Nada. And we’re out of radio contact — no cavalry.”
“NR-1B should be on its way,” said Choir.
“So’s Christmas!” retorted Aussie. “ ’Sides, all that Jensen has is our general area.”
“Air strike possible?” asked Dixon, his own question answered as he looked about at the sea mist and fog hugging the coast like a coat, not a single tree visible atop the cliff from which the falls cascaded.
“Weather’s socked us in,” said Freeman, raising his voice again over the sound of the falls. “Anyway, by the time Whidbey got any ASW birds airborne, the sub’d be outta here.”
For several moments no one spoke, and in the dreary gray world that had enveloped the crescent bay and surrounding coastlin
e, all they could hear was the continuing thunder of the falls and the ocean’s unceasing attack against their rocky islet. Freeman’s mind was racing like a computer, drawing on all his past experiences — from the steamy jungles of Southeast Asia to the bone-cold engagements on the north German plain and the forays of his SpecFor teams in the snow-packed mountains of the Pacific Northwest itself, where he, Choir, Aussie, Sal, and David Brentwood had gone toe-to-toe against white supremacist militias.
“There is one way,” Freeman announced, his eyes fixed on Aussie Lewis.
“Damn,” said Lewis. “I think you want me to get wet again, General.”
Freeman’s weathered face turned to Dixon. “How ’bout you and Aussie strap on those Draegers and go under the falls again — only this time come up shooting. It’ll be the last thing they’ll expect.”
Dixon nodded, slowly, either from a distinct lack of enthusiasm or because of his failure to envision the whole plan. “You want us to pin them down?”
“No,” said Freeman. “I want you to kill them.”
“While you three make an end run around the end of the falls in the RIB,” Aussie said. “Right?”
“No,” said Freeman. “We three’ll do something else they won’t expect.”
“You’re going to attack through the falls,” said Aussie.
“Affirmative,” confirmed Freeman. “Full bore through the middle.” The general slapped Choir on the shoulder. “Think you can handle that, my friend?”
“Piece o’ cake,” said Choir.
“Jesus!” put in Sal. “Those falls’ll sink us.”
“Not if we hit ’em at full power,” the general assured them, with more confidence than he felt. True, the falls were no more than three or four feet through, but with the tumbling force of thousands of gallons a second, the impact would be tremendous. It would be, in the parlance of his British SpecFor compatriots, “a close run thing.” If Choir couldn’t master the wheel in the crushing wall of water, if the good Welshman allowed the inflatable to veer slightly one way or the other away from a right angle impact, the skew torque, as Aussie Lewis so eloquently warned them, would send the RIB “ass over tit,” upending it, dumping the legendary general, Salvini, and coxswain Choir into the swirling water moat between the falls and the midget sub.
“Sitting ducks,” Aussie told them.
“Thank you,” riposted Choir, “for your vote of confidence.”
“Biggest thing you’ve steered,” said Aussie, “is one of those dorky piss pots you Welsh paddle across a creek!” He was referring to a Welsh coracle, the ancient basketlike and portable one-man boat made from the small branches of shrubs and trees and still used by quiet water fishermen.
“Hurry up with those Draegers,” the general told Aussie and Dixon, “before they cast off.”
Dixon easily put the Draeger on, he and Albinski having gotten used to donning their rebreather units with the same ease and confidence of long practice with which Aussie Lewis handled his Heckler & Koch MP submachine gun. “These weapons are waterproof, right?” Dixon asked Lewis.
“Well,” began Aussie, “if you—”
“Quiet!” It was Salvini, his concentration so focused that he was the first to hear the sound. A faint but distinct rumbling.
“A diesel?” proffered Dixon anxiously. “So much for it being nuclear powered.”
“Synchronize watches,” ordered Freeman. “We hit the falls at 0814, in five minutes.”
“Five minutes, at 0814,” acknowledged Dixon, followed by Aussie, who, like Dixon, was spitting into his face mask, quickly rubbing the saliva about to guard against condensation. It reminded Dixon of his dives with Rafe Albinski.
“Go!” Freeman ordered, and both Aussie and Dixon dropped backward into the sea.
“Into the RIB,” Freeman told Choir and Salvini. “Lash the tarp tight over the gear.”
Choir was already priming the outboard’s gas pump, while Salvini, anticipating the interval between the rise and fall of the Bruiser, adroitly jumped to the inflatable and immediately began securing the weapons, ammo, and other equipment.
Freeman quickly handed his HK submachine gun down to Sal to have it clipped into its rack. It was a race before the midget sub cast off and submerged, free to resume its unseen control of the strait’s choke point.
Freeman’s gung-ho body language exuded confidence, and the instant he was on the prow of the boat, he was taken back to the exact moment in which his desire to be a leader had crystallized, the moment when, as a young boy, he’d first gazed upon Emmanuel Leutze’s famous painting of Washington crossing the ice-floe-choked Delaware, the revolutionary general standing proudly in the boat’s prow.
Freeman’s confidence, however, was qualified by his own surprise at the terrorists not having already followed up on the burst of fire by their lookout, whose vigilance had unwittingly given away their position. It had only been fifteen minutes ago, but Freeman knew that if he’d been in command on the other side of the falls, he would already have had his men launch some kind of follow-up attack against the five Americans. Why hadn’t the enemy done so?
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
As Freeman tried using his satellite phone, to no avail — the atmospherics still dominated by the frying-fish sound of interference in the ionosphere — he caught sight of Aussie Lewis’s flippers. Aussie had momentarily surfaced to get his bearings before making a deep tumble dive to get well below the underwater turbulence of the falls before swimming the hundred feet or so to the sub. The fact that the general, Choir, and Sal all agreed it was Aussie, although his gear was exactly the same as Dixon’s, bore testimony to how closely they had worked over the years. They were like friends distinguishing each other from a crowd not by physical features, but merely by the way they moved, reading one another’s body language with an unconscious certainty that amazed Dixon, the newcomer.
The Coast Guard diver, having more experience in the strait than Aussie Lewis, had not felt the need to surface to make sure of his bearings. Now, he was waiting on the other, landward, side of the falls, in the darker water that served as a moat between the falls’ deafening torrent and the sub — whose type, other than it being a midget, was still a matter of speculation. Not even the identity of the balaclava-masked terrorist he and Aussie had spotted earlier was known, though Dixon was confident that he and the rest of the SpecFor team would soon find out. It was three minutes since he and Aussie had left the islet. Another two minutes and Freeman, Choir, and Sal should come through the falls like gangbusters, and then the five of them would open up.
Aussie, for his part, estimated that Freeman, Sal, and Choir should reach the sub in short order. A couple of HE grenades down the hatch from either Sal or the general would do nicely, he thought, certainly enough to delay the bastards until either the NR-1B or a Coast Guard gunboat could arrive for the coup de grace. Relying on the waterfall’s turbulence, now a mere fifty feet behind them, neither Aussie nor Dixon anticipated any problem surfacing.
Any anxiety Freeman might have had about the fog rolling in, now completely obscuring the falls, was not evident in his brisk, eager preparations. He assisted Sal in mounting the stripped-down SEAL version M-60 on the bow’s pivot mount as the noise of the falls smothered all sounds save the deep, pulsating rumble that he and the other four men assumed was the sub’s diesel-electric warming up, readying for imminent departure.
“Two minutes!” shouted Choir, keeping the RIB’s Volvo Penta inboard purring, while Sal, the M-60 now secure, took the fourteen-foot spiked pike from its quick-release rack that ran along the port side, pushing the pole against the islet to keep the RIB clear of the dangerous, barnacle-clad projection of rock that appeared and disappeared threateningly with each suck and surge of the sea.
For Sal, the kind of vigilance needed to keep the sixteen-foot boat from being tipped over through contact with the protruding ledge proved more stressful than combat, and he remembered that for David Brentwood, the most trying part
of a mission had always been going over the Rules of Engagement. The Medal of Honor winner was always concerned that he might commit a blue on blue — an attack on his own forces. Sal knew it was a different source of tension than he felt, but the effect was the same: They almost welcomed combat as a release, not only from the immediate anxiety of the situation, but from the tension of life itself.
As Choir gave the RIB engine its head, the waterfall speeding toward them, Sal quickly left his roll bar position to reach the bow-mounted M-60. “Hold on and duck!” yelled Choir. The RIB struck the waterfall at thirty-five miles an hour, all three men fighting against instinctively closing their eyes, the ice-white thunder collapsing all around, slamming them into the swirling maelstrom of foam on the deck. Then they were through.
Freeman heard the unmistakable rip of Kalashnikov bullets peppering the whirlpools about the RIB, the craft’s series of neoprene inflatable cells along the starboard midships section exploding like popcorn. Choir, seeing the team’s hoped-for surprise popped along with the inflatable cells, opened up the Volvo Penta, the RIB’s bow fairly leaping out of the salt chuck, hitting 35 knots as it sped past the sun-sparkling curtain of falls, with only ninety feet to go to the sub.
“Turning!” Choir yelled, then, “Hard right!” so loudly there was no possibility of either Freeman or Sal not hearing him, despite the rip of the M-60’s one-in-three tracer, almost a red line at that close range.
With barely forty feet to go, Sal’s M-60 fire was wild and unavoidably inaccurate in the RIB’s hard, brain-pummeling progress against the relatively calmer but still rough water between the RIB and the sub. Choir dropped the speed to twenty knots, simultaneously wrenching the wheel astarboard, further confounding the enemy’s aim. Salvini, given forewarning of the turn and having seen that his previous M-60 bursts were too high, dropped the barrel down an inch or so and raked the upper lip of a dark, thirty-foot-wide cave mouth he could now discern immediately behind the docked sub. He also raked the long, black “floating log” of a sub. The midget’s ten-foot-long sail, or conning tower, was a black lump that sparked with the fiery orange hits of his sustained burst, which was completely ineffective, as Sal knew it would be, against the high-tensile steel. But his firing had at least forced the sub’s AK-47-armed lookouts to run for cover.
