Choke Point wi-9

by Ian Slater

  Seeing the same insouciance, the general admiringly muttered, “By God,” as he helped Sal and Dixon secure the RIB to the stack’s barnacle-crusted hide. “I’d decorate those sons of bitches — every one of them!”

  “I’d rather shoot ’em, General,” said Sal.

  The general slapped Salvini heartily on the shoulder. “So would I, Brooklyn, so would I. But all we have to do is worry them for another ten minutes — then we should have close air support. Sink the bastards!”

  “That’s for me,” said Choir.

  Dixon said nothing, the delayed shock of his underwater fight now hitting him full force, leaving him unable to join in the banter that seemed to come so naturally to these combat-hardened warriors. The loss, too, of his mentor and friend Albinski was still too recent, along with the scenes of floating, often eviscerated dead he’d seen littering the strait east of the U.S.-Canadian choke point. And the smell of the dead, something that none of the training films or movies had managed to convey, a stink that evoked feelings of revulsion, then guilt for feeling such revulsion. All this had at once frightened and confused him. If only he had the guts to dive, he thought, to swim out and pop up close enough to the sub’s stern.

  “Dixon,” Freeman said, the general’s left hand acting as a pike for the RIB against the stack.

  “Sir?”

  “You see what nationality the guy was?”

  “No, sir. Was all I could do to stop the bastard from killing—”

  They both instinctively ducked, together with Choir and Salvini, the sub’s machine gun punching its heavy caliber rounds into the stack. The wind behind them made their impact so loud, it sounded as if they were going to come straight through the rock. The ricochets went every which way, one of them clipping the RIB’s defunct radio mast, which the man on the sub could see now and then as the inflatable rode up and down in the chop.

  “Nothing particular about his weapons?” Freeman asked Dixon, the general’s cool under fire remarkable to Dixon, whose first kill had happened only a half hour or so before.

  “Nothing particular that I saw on him, General.”

  “Knife?” Freeman pressed.

  “Son of a—” began Dixon in surprise, when another of the.50’s bursts found its target, keeping the Americans’ heads down, buying time.

  “What was it you saw?” demanded Freeman.

  “It was a TAK — ten-inch blade, with a — yeah, a drop point. I recognized it because some of the Canuck JTF-9 guys use ’em.” JTF-9 was the Canadians’ select antiterrorist commando force. “Canvaslike grip,” continued Dixon. “A cutting edge — I dunno — about four or five inches.”

  “I know it,” said Freeman.

  “What we need to know,” said Choir, “is what kind of sub it is.”

  “Oh, I know that,” said Freeman. “It’s a midget!”

  “Shit,” said Sal, shaking his head.

  This time the three veterans’ laughter was joined by Dixon’s. He liked these guys. A hell of a situation they were in, unable to stop what might have been the biggest threat to American security in the history of the republic, and these guys could crack a joke — a weak joke, sure, but a joke. This, he thought, was what the drill instructors meant about “staying calm under fire.”

  “For my money,” said Freeman, still talking about the TAK knife, “it means this damned sub might be supplied locally from across the line. From terrorists in Canada. Not the sub’s ordnance — that’s been dropped off. Probably the same freighter that dropped off the midget in the first place.”

  “So?” pressed Sal, his tone of cheeky informality still capable of surprising Dixon, the outsider; a welcome one, but an outsider nevertheless.

  “Whoever those bastards are on the sub,” Freeman said to Dixon, “you think you could get close enough to delay them a bit longer?”

  The general’s question was just that — a question, not a command. The sub’s.50 paused for a moment. “Barrel probably getting too hot!” said Freeman, adding, “Remember, son, l’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace!”

  “It means—” began Sal.

  “I know what it means, goddamn it!” replied Dixon hotly. “Yeah, I might get close enough with a swim buddy, but I haven’t seen Aussie. Have you?”

  None of them had.

  “Yeah,” said Sal, keeping his head low, “you’re right, Pete. It’d be pretty dicey. That’d be just what they’d be looking for.”

  Two hundred yards away, Aussie cinched the strap on his flippers and, descending below the undulating and sunlit surface beneath the falls, went deeper, but not so deep that he couldn’t see his HE and flash-bang grenades and his MP5. He swung the submachine gun around to his front and loosened the sling so if they spotted him as he surfaced, he could squeeze off a burst — get the bastards’ heads down long enough for him to toss a couple of the grenades at the work party.

  By now he’d seen that they had two of the bolts off the prop’s basket, one of the terrorists working so hard and fast he’d slipped on one of the anechoic tiles and into the sea. He was quickly jerked back up to the deck, monkey wrench still in hand, resuming work in seconds.

  The next deep thumping sounds of the sub’s machine gun and the crackle of lighter AK-47 fire echoed off the stack, the base of which absorbed several hits. Fist-sized chunks flew off, some smacking loudly into the water, other fragments tearing into the RIB’s stern, which, despite Choir’s best efforts, had been caught in the constant wash behind the stack and sucked out from it long enough to make it at times a clearly visible target. Rock fragments from the stack had already taken out three or four feet of the inflatable flotation cells, and the resulting holes immediately flooded with seawater.

  Then Freeman was knocked back into the stern and Sal crashed into Choir. The general, temporarily underwater, was spluttering obscenities as he surfaced. “Goddammit — that’s enough! Dixon!”

  There was no answer.

  “Dixon?”

  “He’s gone,” said Sal, nodding in the direction of ten o’clock, at a point about twenty feet out. “He’s under, General. He slipped under during our scramble.”

  Freeman was dragging himself aboard. “Can you still see him, Sal?”

  “No.”

  “Was he hit?”

  Sal and Choir considered the question. They realized they didn’t know. Maybe he hadn’t dived in at all.

  “Son of a — goddammit!” It was the general holding pieces of what used to be a functioning cell phone. “Goddamn it, that’s unreasonable!”

  Sal was checking Dixon’s gear bag to see if there was any blood on it. There wasn’t, but he saw that the bag contained what was immediately recognizable as a three-foot-long spear gun. Collapsible.

  “So,” put in Choir, “that’s how the laddie took care of his underwater nemesis. Never said a word, did he?”

  “No,” said Sal. “He didn’t. Where the hell’s Aussie?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Charles Riser was going home. Sent home by Ambassador Rogers, who had been his staunch defender at the embassy, more willing than most to “cut Charlie some slack,” as he put it, after the tragedy of Mandy Riser’s murder by Li Kuan’s terrorists in Suzhou. It wasn’t so much Charles’s behavior at the embassy in Beijing, but his unauthorized forays into Chinese officialdom, such as his pestering General Chang, which had resulted in a plethora of complaints from the Chinese. Beijing used the complaints to deflect the U.S. ambassador’s enquiries about why the PLA air force, under the guise of Red-Cross-flagged ships supposedly supplying the people of Penghu with urgently needed food supplies and rebuilding materials, had in fact been unloading more crates of MiG-29s Sukhoi 30 Flanker fighter-bombers.

  Charlie was fuming, but in those rare moments of objectivity he forced upon his grieving soul, he knew that the ambassador had made the correct decision for the embassy as a whole.

  While waiting for the China Air flight to Seattle via Narita, he took the photograph of Aman
da from his wallet. There was something important about actually holding it. Merely looking at framed pictures of her had never been enough. Intellectually absurd, he told himself, but nevertheless it somehow drew her closer. The only photo of her that he kept in his wallet was one of her with their chocolate-colored spaniel. Mandy had called him “Truffles,” because of the dog’s ears. Truffle had habitually refused to surrender a grungy old rag Charlie’s wife had used to wipe the dog down when he’d rolled ecstatically in the piles of bitch-scented fall leaves from the border collie next door. Everyone said it was because of the collie’s scent that Truffles had refused to give up the disgusting old rag, but Charlie knew it was because of the dog’s memory of his wife. Truffles had held on to that rag until the day he died of grand old age, everyone fondly remembering the faint deathbed growl as the vet tried to move it during his final examination. The family, in fact, had erupted in laughter, and it had smoothed the beloved pet’s passing.

  But nothing could ease Mandy’s passing in his mind. There was never so-called “closure,” but at least he’d hoped and prayed for the possibility of justice. And now even that seemed lost.

  It was meager solace, but Charles Riser had treated himself, paying the substantial difference between the embassy’s economy allowance and first class. It didn’t make being sent home to the doghouse any easier, but at least it allowed him to be miserable in comfort. He did not mind airline food, though as a cultural attaché in the foreign enclave of Beijing, it was mandatory for him to voice detestation of airline — and especially American — fast food, particularly at a French-hosted soiree. In fact, it was mandatory for cultural attachés never to offend any other culture. But going home had its compensations.

  To hell with the French, he thought now, and their pompous posing as the moral arbiter of European interests. They’d sell their mother for a sou as quickly as Pétain caved in to the Nazis. To hell with the whole anti-American lobby and their “root causes” aid and comfort to the terrorists. Only the British and the Aussies had immediately allied themselves with America in Iraq. Even Canada, once America’s dependable ally, had degenerated under what he considered an unbelievably incompetent and fence-sitting anti-American government into one of the undependables, all the time secure under the protective American umbrella. What was it Barzun had said so well? “Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it.” Well, to hell with them. All that mattered now in his life was seeing Li Kuan and his terrorist legions, who had murdered Amanda, who were attacking America right now, punished.

  On China Air’s screens, however, CNN’s “War in America” held little hope, the updates from Homeland Defense Director Hawthorne admitting they still hadn’t found the terrorist submarine. The department had received so many false reports and predictions of the sub’s whereabouts from rumor-rife refugees that, Hawthorne said — sensibly, thought Riser — the only “updates” about the midget sub from now on would be of its “confirmed demise.” Clever, too, Charlie acknowledged as he washed down another of the cerulean-blue Zopiclone pills that would take him out of the savage world, at least for the duration of the flight, back to the happy world of his sweet Mandy.

  His recurring image was of her shrieking with delight as he took her on a horse ride along the wide, white strand of Cannon Beach. The breeze in their faces, the white-slashed blue of the Oregon surf pounding down, exhausting itself in floods of lacy foam that swirled about his feet, the gulls screeching, were so real, he believed he could smell the sea as Mandy laughed, urging him on, “C’mon, Daddy, giddy-up, fast twot, faster!”

  By the time the flight attendant had begun to distribute the first-class section’s meal, Charles was asleep, smiling, to the unspoken amusement of the attendant who switched off his TV console, the faces of wanted terrorists gone in an instant.

  “If only it was that easy,” said the passenger in the seat adjacent Riser’s.

  “Pardon?” said the attendant.

  The passenger pointed at the blank screen. “If only we could get rid of those bastards so easily.”

  It was a strict government policy, adopted by all the airline and other industries these days, that employees not become involved in any “dialogue that might offend specific religious, political, and/or minority groups.”

  The flight attendant looked at the passenger. “I’m afraid I can’t comment, sir. Have you ever heard of Cofer Black?”

  “No, who’s he?”

  “Used to be one of George Bush’s inner circle at the White House, and he said when we’re finished with those terrorists, they’re gonna have flies walking across their eyeballs.”

  “I like it!” said the passenger, passing his menu back to her.

  “I should tell you,” she said, “it’s not on the menu, but if you prefer we have a vegetarian casserole.”

  “Fuck the vegetarian. I’ll have the steak. Where’s it from?”

  “Nebraska. U.S. First grade.”

  “There you go!”

  As Charles Riser was heading back to the United States, Commander John Rorke was leaving it on a military transport, not a commercial airline, his thoughts for the moment not on the coming mission but on Alicia Mayne, whom he decided to write.

  Dear Alicia,

  I hope you’re feeling a lot better than when I visited you in the hospital. I feel a terrible sense of responsibility for what happened to you, wracking my brains for what I could have done differently. My mom and dad were fond of saying, “Everything works out for the best.” Can’t say I feel that way — sure as heck don’t feel that way after the last little while. Seems like the roof has fallen in on us. My uncle Leroi in Panama City (the city in Florida) called the other night on my way to L.A. and said he was a boy when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and after that he grew up thinking nothing worse could happen to America! I guess I’ll never get over the shock of what’s happened since 9/11—so many good men and women lost — and then what’s happened to you. One thing it’s taught me, Alicia, and I guess a lot of others, is that life really is short, and we shouldn’t put things off till tomorrow and should tell people who mean a lot to us just how much they mean to us, before it’s too late.

  Which brings me to thinking about you. Truth is, I’ve been thinking about you all the time. I love you. There, I’ve said it. I used to laugh at those guys who said they knew it right away — the moment they saw her, etc. Well, I knew it the day you set foot on the boat. I’d heard about this knockout woman scientist we were going to have to take aboard, and at first I thought, “Right, that’s all I need, a boatful of horny guys and a good-looking woman — I’ll have to walk around with a bucket of water.” And then, like the old Beatle song says, “When I saw her standing there.” Sounds corny, I know, but I hope you can make allowances. I’m trained to run a boat, not write love letters, but I guess that’s what this is — a love letter. I’ve never written one before — I guess that shows — but I wanted to get this down before I get to my new posting. You’ll understand I can’t tell you where it is — except it’s out of the States. Big clue!

  I’ve got to hurry this up — we’re about to land and, knowing the Navy, I’ll be expected to get right to my job. It’s true, Alicia. I’ve never written anyone like this in my life. Okay, I’ve had a few girlfriends, some pretty serious, I guess, but you’re the one. I love you, and if you’ll have me, I want to tie the knot. How original is that (!), but I’m rushed at the moment and I have to submit this to the unit censor, it being wartime and all, so I really can’t tell you about where or when we’ll see each other again, honey, but hold tight — God willing, I’ll be back.

  All my love, John

  P.S. Maybe my mom and dad were right — at least for me.

  Love, John

  He read over it quickly — damn, too many “I guesses,” he thought. It made him sound like an “aw shucks” grade school kid. But at least he’d told her. Before leaving the States he had
wrestled with the idea of telling Alicia that her burns would heal, that he’d be there for her, that it truly didn’t matter to him — and it didn’t. But he’d decided against it. It would have sounded as if he was loving her out of pity, out of a sense of responsibility for her terrible ordeal.

  As the military transport Hercules landed under fighter escort in Okinawa, John Rorke looked out of the window to see if he could locate the sub base, but the Perspex was streaked with rain, the lush fields of the Japanese island a dark, greenish smudge. The roar of the Herk’s engines was so loud he wondered how the bus drivers could stand it. Much better, whatever the danger, to be on the standoff weapons platform, the USS Encino he’d been ordered to. The Los Angeles sub’s mission was to position itself in the Bashi Strait between the Philippines and Taiwan, well off the McCain’s carrier group’s eastern flank, which was coming out of the South China Sea.

  It was only after he’d submitted the letter to the base censor, confident that the censor would not see any indication of where one of the U.S.’s supreme weapons platforms had been posted, that Rorke realized Alicia probably wouldn’t be able to read it without someone holding it for her, since her hands, like her entire upper torso, were swathed in bandages. Well, he thought, so what if someone had to read it to her? Better to have said it than not. If she didn’t feel the same about him … Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. He could see people saying he wanted to marry her out of pity, and how could a man want a woman who was so — well, disfigured? But all he knew was what he felt. He loved her. Now, all he had to do was survive.