by Ian Slater
The tension increased when the two side-scan technicians reported that the roar of Petrel’s engines being brought to full power to bluff the interlopers had scrambled the side-scan’s signals to the sea bottom and the return echoes. All they could see now was a massive earthquakelike trace, as if the stylus had lost its head.
“I’ll get back to you in ten minutes or so,” Hall told them, then ordered the bosun to have the crew lower Petrel’s Zodiac inflatable.
Despite Frank’s somber mood, a mood that pervaded the entire vessel, Frank, calling the bosun by his first name, tried to inject a little morale-raising humor. “Jesus, Tommy,” he said, “I’ll be back for dinner!”
There was forced laughter from the crew, the cook’s helper the only one to think it was a contender for Petrel’s “Best Joke of the Month.”
“You take care,” the bosun said.
Frank shoved off, the Zodiac’s outboard a little rough, spitting now and then as he headed straight for the other, bigger inflatable. Of course they wouldn’t be terrorists. Everyone was becoming too paranoid, as if America had been invaded. Looking back, as sailors always do, to the vessel from which he’d just departed, he saw the bosun standing alone on the hangar deck holding up a white rag, pointing downward.
Frank looked down and saw a white rag tucked into the space between the Zodiac’s gunwale and floor. It contained a suspiciously generic-looking .38 revolver.
A small, hastily scrawled note said, “Hollow points — remember, hold your breath and squeeze. Don’t pull.”
Frank didn’t know whether to be furious or grateful. He’d told these jokers, now only a hundred yards away, that he’d come unarmed. Squeeze. Don’t pull. Who the hell did Tommy think he was talking to? Some first-weeker at Coronado? He stuck the gun between his thigh and the Zodiac’s floor. The outboard was spitting again. Frank gave it a little more throttle. It choked and stopped, dead in the water. What had he learned at Coronado? “All outboards will fail precisely when they are most needed.”
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Freeman had his nose in the air like a bloodhound. “Smell ’em?” he asked softly.
Aussie and Sal nodded, Choir’s sense of smell sabotaged by the exhaust of the Mercury engine and the bad air mix he’d been inhaling back on the beach. But for his SpecFor comrades, the faint yet distinctive odor of aftershave, cologne, and underarm deodorant told them someone was upwind of them in the fog-shrouded sea, probably no more than two or three hundred yards. The odors were the kind that had betrayed a younger generation of Americans in the jungles of Vietnam, making the same “give-away” mistake as David Brentwood had made by not ordering his team to eat only Arab food. Freeman now went to hand signals, his acute sense of smell indicating there must be at least four of them or maybe half a dozen, up ahead.
Then Choir detected the hushed slurr sound of another motor. He tapped Sal on the shoulder, Sal doing the same to Freeman, the general hoping that the invisible “perfume boys” somewhere up ahead had not yet detected them. Freeman made a throat-cutting gesture and Choir killed the engine, everyone silent, motionless, listening intently, the current taking them forward. Which way were the bogeys heading?
It was then that Petrel’s Tiny saw it happen. The sky opened, the fog riven by sunlight, “Like bloody Moses!” said Tiny. Indeed, the sky suddenly seemed to expand, the common optical illusion at sea when land-generated thermals win the ever-shifting battle with the ocean’s air currents. The speed was such that just as during Freeman’s battle tour in Iraq, when an artillery round had collapsed a battalion’s row of showers to reveal a line of astonished naked bodies, his aluminum boat, Frank Hall’s Zodiac, and the sweet-smelling visitors circling near the Petrel in their RIB all suddenly saw one another and, a half mile to the east, the Coast Guard’s Skate.
For a frozen moment no one did anything, not even Freeman, who had experienced a similar unexpected standoff with a Republican Guard platoon when a dust storm had suddenly lifted near Hindiya. Then, he’d fired first; now, he hesitated, the nanosecond lost perhaps because of a fear of committing blue on blue. Friendly fire had caused more than half the coalition’s casualties in Iraq.
The 7.62mm burst from one of the six “fake Skate” war party unzipped the deadlock, the rounds hitting the sea only three feet in front of Freeman, shocking the general and his team. Choir, making a crucially correct decision, steered at full speed toward the enemy inflatable’s bow. Only Freeman was firing, since there wasn’t enough room in the boat to permit either Aussie or Sal to shoot.
Choir knew that the slightest variation in the their course would give the enemy RIB a broadside target. His quick action confounded the war-painted crew, now only fifty yards off. Their coxswain, instead of calling Choir’s bluff and going full speed at the approaching boat, intuitively but imprudently steered hard astarboard, trying to avoid Freeman’s shots. But the general’s tracered 9mm hit the front two men, their collapse abruptly shifting the weight in the inflatable so its left gunwale was momentarily submerged, the other four men trying frantically to regain balance. One got off a skyward burst before Freeman’s continuing enfilade punched him out of the boat, which heeled farther to port, the remaining three attackers trying to right themselves. It was only two seconds before the three were on their feet, or rather their knees, and stable enough to return Freeman’s fire.
But it was too late, for in those two breath-seizing seconds — an eternity in a firefight or car crash — Freeman had ample time to change mags, the steam rising from his HK barrel seen by Frank Hall, who had been banging away with the bosun’s gift of the Saturday Night Special. Reopening fire at twenty yards, Freeman pierced the trio’s chests with such rapidity it was like a madman frenetically stabbing his victim with an ice pick, the jets of bright arterial blood macabre and, Freeman thought, beautiful against the green of the men’s uniforms and beneath the cerulean-blue sky.
Petrel’s first mate rang Petrel’s telegraph for “Full Ahead” to assist Frank and the men firing from the aluminum boat at the interlopers. Now, as Petrel’s bow wave creased the otherwise calm sea, the first mate and his crew braced for what they thought might be a storm of fire from the Skate. If, in a terrible blue on blue, Petrel’s skipper and the aluminum boat men had mistakenly opened fire on a genuine landing party from the Skate, the guns on the Coast Guard vessel would open up.
“Well, shit!” opined Cookie. “What were those guys with the tin boat supposed to do? Those guys in the RIB started shootin’ first. It was self-defense, man! If it was me—”
“Shut up!” the bosun said, but Tommy knew the kid had a point.
“Jesus,” Jimmy told Malcolm, indicating the floating bodies from the RIB as well as the oncoming Coast Guard vessel. “Maybe they were from the Coast Guard patrol boat — I mean, the guys who opened up first. Old man on that Coast Guard probably didn’t fire back ’cause it’d be killing Americans for killing Americans, if you know what I mean.”
“You mean two wrongs don’t make a right?” Malcolm answered.
“Yeah,” said Jim, appreciative of the phrase. “That’s exactly what I mean. Geez,” he added, not wanting to watch the floaters but unable to look away, “you think they were from the Skate?”
Malcolm shrugged. “We’ll soon find out.”
Frank wasn’t going to second guess his first mate. After all, the officer had good intentions in bringing the Petrel forward. But he knew the underwater ruckus made by Petrel’s props would destroy any hope of a clear side-scan trace for a while. And so the only comments he made, climbing up to Petrel’s deck following the short, fierce firefight on the water, were directed at the bosun.
“Thanks for the weapon, Tom,” he said, handing the white bundle up to him.
The bosun gave the bundle to Tiny to hold. A second later a full-bodied oath greeted Frank Hall, Tiny dropping the .38 he’d noisily retrieved from the cloth. “Jesus — it’s hotter’n a two-dollar shotgun.”
“How’d it go?” t
he bosun asked solemnly. “The gun?”
“Oh,” lied Frank, “went great. Sure as hell glad I had it, I can tell you. One of those bastards holed our Zodiac. Couldn’t pick up anyone.” Frank was on the deck phone now, the mate telling him he was arranging a deck party to help Freeman’s team with the floaters. The Skate was back on channel 16, the jamming by the unknown craft having ceased the moment Freeman had finished off the six attacking his tin boat.
The bosun was beaming. Hell, he hadn’t been able to do much to help out in the firefight and was glad his .38 had been of some use, confiding proudly to Tiny and Malcolm, “It was probably our skipper who dropped a couple of those bastards.”
Tiny watched the bosun walk into the dry lab to join Frank, anxiously standing by the side-scan recorder.
“What’s he worried about?” asked Cookie, smoking beneath the A-frame. He sounded nonchalant, but Malcolm noticed that his legs were trembling so much that his stained white apron was shaking as well. Cookie saw that Malcolm had noticed.
“Cold?” Malcolm asked.
“Huh, what? Oh, yeah. Freezing.”
“What you expect, Cookie? You haven’t got enough on, for chrissake. Put on a windbreaker.”
“Cook doesn’t like me wearing ’em around the mix.”
“Fuck the cook! Put on a windbreaker.”
“Yeah …” He’d obviously forgotten about what was worrying the captain.
Malcolm put his arm on the young man’s shoulder. “We’re all cold, Cookie. You’ll be all right.”
Cookie nodded sharply, tossing the cigarette overboard, which was just as well, Malcolm told Jimmy, who was standing over by portside rail. At the moment, Hall was preoccupied in the dry lab by the fact that the Petrel had lost over three hundred yards of trace due to the first mate’s “Full Ahead” order. But if he came out on deck and found Cookie smoking anywhere near the LOSHOK, he’d likely shoot him with the bosun’s .38.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” began Malcolm, he and Jimmy trying to keep out of the way of the guys who were putting over the rope ladder for the approaching SpecFor team, the ropes and wooden steps whacking the side of the ship.
“What’s amazing?” asked Jimmy.
“Tommy. First rate bosun. Knew just what to do. He wanted to use the slingshot LOSHOK to try to help the old man, but he knew one slip and he’d kill the old man or these SpecFor guys we’re gonna take aboard. But the same guy thinks that dinky .38 he’s been haulin’ around is accurate.”
“It’s a piece of crap,” agreed Jimmy. “Couldn’t hit a barn door at two feet.”
“Maybe it saved his life one time,” Malcolm mused, out of a sense of fair play.
“Maybe,” conceded Jimmy, watching the urgent preparations on the increasingly crowded stern deck while safeguarding the pallet of LOSHOK charges by the A-frame. “Maybe he used it as an oven. Fire three shots out of that thing and you could cook a three-course meal.”
Malcolm grinned broadly. It was hardly the time or place for a joke — even a weak one — but sometimes it just happened like that. “I’m gonna tell ’im you said that,” he kidded Jimmy. “Put you in the shit!”
“Thanks!” Jimmy kicked the half-dozen small packs of LOSHOK. “Think we’ll ever get to—”
“Hey!” said Malcolm, stepping away. “Don’t do that!”
“What?” inquired Jimmy, feigning doltlike innocence. “Oh, you mean don’t do this?” whereupon he again kicked the seventy-pound mother of all depth charges.
“Jesus, Jimmy, knock it off!”
“Relax, mah boy. Friggin’ midget’s skedaddled by now under cover of all our prop wash and that Coast Guard tub steaming toward us.”
The Skate was now only two hundred yards to the east but slowing, its own prop wash slopping forward to overtake and mix with its decelerated bow wave. Along with the Petrel, it created a localized chop in which Freeman, Sal, and Aussie found it difficult to haul the dead aboard their commandeered aluminum boat, their outrage at what had happened to Dixon having cooled somewhat by the possibility that they’d perhaps been involved in an unavoidable “friendly fire” incident. It had been unavoidable to them, the men on the spot, but they knew it never appeared as unavoidable to the media or the armchair critics who always knew what you should have done in the millisecond you had to decide.
Freeman was understandably tight-jawed as they hauled in the third of the six bodies. “Look,” he said sternly. “No identification!”
Aussie wondered if the general’s cryptic comment was a criticism of the dead men for not having identified themselves before opening fire, or whether he was commenting on the fact that none of those hauled in so far had any ID whatsoever. One of them looked Central Asian to him, another Chinese, and the third was racially unidentifiable, having been hit in the upper chest and face.
“Where in hell did they come from?” asked Salvini. “I mean, were they sent from the sub to run interference?”
“Maybe they came out of that cave,” said Choir.
“I’ll bet—” Aussie began, and paused for breath as he braced his feet against the inside of the tin boat’s starboard drop seat and, aided by Freeman, began hauling in the fourth floater. “—I’ll bet Choir’s right, that these pricks are the same ones who did the sicko job on young Dixon. Probably came down out of the cave then dragged their RIB from a hide on the beach and came out in the fog to do the Petrel ’fore she could find their mates in the sub.” The fourth floater, another Asian, now tumbled into the boat, which rocked precariously.
“Watch it!” cautioned Choir. “I’ve had enough dunking for one day.” He added, “Why not let Petrel haul these shit bags out?”
No one answered his question, but their silence was a reply. Their earlier guesstimates notwithstanding, they were not sure whether these bodies were hostiles or U.S. Special Forces like themselves, caught up in a tragic blue on blue. Aussie’s hypothesis that the bodies were those of the hostiles who so savagely murdered and tortured Dixon was no more than that — a hypothesis. Special Forces, like Freeman’s, like David Brentwood’s failed team in Afghanistan, always went on foreign operations without any identification that might cause political embarrassment should they be captured or killed. And the fact that two different branches of the armed services often sent out their own without telling one another was no help. Plus, as Choir acknowledged, foreign terrorists teams would certainly use someone fluent in English.
“What’s this one?” Aussie asked as they hauled in another body. “Chinese?”
“No,” said Freeman.
“Japanese?” proffered Choir.
“Vietnamese?” suggested Aussie. “They’re heavy as a brick in the water, but you can see they’re all in pretty good shape. No extra weight. Damn, look at that! Fog’s rolling in again.” It came in like a giant billow of smoke, and within a minute the Petrel and the Skate, each vessel’s radar allowing them to maintain station two hundred yards apart, were at times completely hidden from view. With the sixth body nowhere to be seen, Choir sped up the Mercury before they lost sight of Petrel.
Unintentionally, just as Petrel’s and Skate’s engineers had done, he further sabotaged Petrel’s side-scan outgoing sonar waves. Not surprisingly, the disturbance angered Hall, who, as tired as everyone else on the oceanographic vessel, now learned from the Skate’s captain that the five unidentified dead men killed by Freeman had definitely not been sent from the Skate.
This told Frank that the six-man commando unit sent so cunningly to board Petrel would not have been dispatched unless the sub was still in the area, lying low. “Mate,” he ordered the first officer, “get the GPS coordinates for that slab we had a trace of a while back. GPS, as good as it is, has a possible error margin of a hundred feet. That’s not much on land, but out here it can be like looking for your car on the wrong parking level and—”
“Like the Seinfeld show,” said the mate, “when Kramer—”
“I don’t watch TV,” Frank cut in abruptly. “Ta
ke your steering directions from the dry lab. I’ll stay down here.”
“Sir?”
“Yes?
“I have to take a dump!”
“Where’s the third mate?”
“Feeling sick. She’s pretty upset.”
“About what?”
“Well, you know,” began the mate awkwardly. “She told me she signed on to do, you know, retrieval, oceanographic work, not a war. Guess she wasn’t ready for this?” He indicated the bodies being hauled up from the tin boat by the stern’s hydraulic arm.
“New York wasn’t ready for 9/11,” retorted Frank, punching the intercom bar for the third mate’s cabin.
A groggy, sickly voice barely managed to say, “Yes?”
“Riley. It’s the captain speaking. Get your ass up to the bridge. Now!”
The third mate’s silence was a tacit recognition of Hall’s zero tolerance for malingerers, Frank telling her everyone on the ship was needed. If the fog kept socking them in, it would be an ideal opportunity for an injured sub awaiting its chance to make a run for it come nightfall.
When the third mate dragged herself up to relieve the first mate, she was whey-faced. A tall, lithe young woman who normally looked as if she could handle anything, her male counterparts could see that Sandra Riley looked bedraggled after her ordeal, dazed by the bridge glass’s reflection of the bright shaded stern light that formed a sharply defined cone in the swirling fog.
Frank, who had just come up from the dry lab, tapped the GPS coordinates on the chart. “Soon as we get those bodies aboard, Sandra, we’ll come about and backtrack to this GPS location. See what we get in the trace. We lost a gob of it during a damn paper change.”
Sandra took Hall’s use of her first name as a good sign — more often than not he simply called her Riley. “If it’s the sub,” she mused aloud, “maybe they’ll take advantage of all this noise.”
Frank’s usual equanimity was edgy with fatigue. “You an authority on antisubmarine warfare now?” He knew better, but the perversity that runs with bad temper and the feeling of his own impotence regarding the sub was venting itself.
