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Choke Point wi-9 Page 37

by Ian Slater


  “I just meant that with all the noise the Skate’s engines are making, screwing up our side scan, it would be a good time for a sub in trouble to surface—”

  “Yes, I know. Make a run for it in the fog.”

  “Exactly!” It was said in a gutsy, uncompromising tone.

  Frank turned to watch the work crew bringing aboard the general and his three comrades, all of them old friends who’d trained at one time or another in SpecOps at Elgin in Florida as well as at the SEALs’ school at Coronado in California. They’d all carried the monstrous logs at Coronado, running along the public beach while young beach beauties Sandra’s age, only a few feet away, sunbathed in the scantiest thong bikinis the sweating, grunting SEAL trainees had ever seen. “What beauties?” the SEALs’ instructors had barked, their faces masks of incredulity. “Ain’t no women here. You’re hallucinating. Pick it up, Salvini. Hup, two, three …”

  Frank made a mental note to apologize to Sandra later. But now, her self-assertiveness, her tone, which some skippers could easily have convinced themselves was bordering on insubordination, was too recent for him to humble himself. It was a trait which he did not admire in himself. “We’ll need to be right on the spot,” he continued, businesslike. “We spotted a slablike shape against a slope. Unless we’re on the southern side of it, our scan’ll miss it — the sandy slope’ll wall it off from us.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “Very well. I’ll be down in the lab. Once we’re there, I’ll give you helm instructions from the lab.”

  “Very well.”

  Very well. Was she sticking it to him?

  He saw Freeman, who entered the dry lab, strode over, and shook hands vigorously. “Good to see you, Frank! I need room for my men to rest. That goddamn sub is still here. I know it. Get that Coast Guard ship to do a search grid, but no overlap with yours. Can’t afford to waste time.”

  That’s the general, thought Frank. Hasn’t seen you in ages, and right off the bat he’s telling you, the ship’s master — no, ordering you — what to do.

  “You’re assuming Petrel’s going to do a grid,” said Frank.

  “Of course. Aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I agree with you. Those people are still—”

  “People?” Freeman cut in crossly, his body odor dominating the dry lab. “They aren’t people. They’re goddamn animals!”

  As yet Hall hadn’t heard about what had happened to Dixon, who, he remembered, had aged overnight after his swim buddy’s death. Frank didn’t press the general for any details of what exactly had taken place. It wasn’t the time. Freeman left Frank to it and turned his attention back to the five bodies laid out on the stern, pulling back the blanket from each one, squatting down, staring at them.

  “I think he’s enjoying it,” Malcolm commented to the bosun, who was looking down at Petrel’s barely visible wake as it proceeded slowly into the general area of the problematic slab. Sal and Choir, also on the stern deck, were wondering aloud what had happened to the missing floater, still lost in the fog.

  “I think that floater was a swimmer,” cut in Aussie. “Faked us out. Big bloody drama, clutching his chest and falling from that RIB. Bastard’s probably ashore by now, draggin’ ’imself up that S trail.”

  “Possible,” said Freeman, but the general, as Sal, Choir, and an equally perplexed Malcolm looked on, was still looking at the five whose floating days were over. Aussie, meanwhile, carefully went through the dead men’s sodden camouflage-pattern uniforms for any ID.

  “Definitely not all Chinese,” said Choir, glancing over at Aussie from the portside rail. “You’ve lost your bet, boyo.”

  “The hell I have. They all look Chinese to me.”

  “Guy looks like he tried to hang himself,” said Sal, leaning over and pointing to a dark bruise ringing one of the dead men’s throats.

  “Should have,” said Aussie as Sal let the blood-soaked blanket fall back over the corpse’s face. “Would’ve saved us the trouble.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Sal, standing up, arching and massaging his back, yawning.

  Malcolm couldn’t tell whether it was the way Salvini arched his back that angered him or the SpecFor warrior’s yawn, the soldier’s manner appearing to him and Jimmy as inappropriately cavalier, downright disrespectful in the presence of the dead. Freeman was now pulling the fog-shrouded blanket back from the man Sal had referred to.

  “I know they’re terrorists,” Malcolm told Jimmy, “but Jesus — know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said, lowering his voice and looking across the deck toward Freeman. “He’s supposed to be a legend. Tiny says his troops used to call him ’George C. Scott.’ “

  Malcolm looked blank.

  “You know — General Patton.”

  “Oh. Yeah?”

  “Scuttlebutt is that he’s been sidelined ever since Clinton. Apparently criticized Bill in ’ninety-eight. Told him the White House didn’t know dick about handling a terrorist situation. Said they were wasting their time, firing a cruise instead of sending in helo snatch-and-grab squads — take some of the towel heads up an’ tell ’em, ’Talk or you’ll be the first A-rabs to walk in space.’ “

  “So Clinton canned him?” asked Malcolm.

  “No, the Pentagon did. Said Freeman was a loose cannon. Now they’re beatin’ the crap out of towel heads.”

  “So how come Freeman’s still sidelined?” pressed Malcolm.

  Jimmy shrugged. “Pentagon’s like anywhere else, I guess. Once you’re out, you—” Jimmy stopped as Freeman made his way to the stern’s A-frame and, standing by them, stared thoughtfully into the fog, as if willing his tired, deep blue eyes to see farther.

  “Where’d you say the Skate was?” Malcolm asked Jimmy, in case the general suspected they’d been talking about him.

  The general remained staring intently astern. He turned, looked directly at the two men, frowned darkly, then resumed staring out into the fog.

  The two men moved away toward the dry lab. “He must have heard us,” said Malcolm softly.

  Jimmy, turning for a last look at Freeman, almost tripped on the dry lab’s doorsill. “No,” he told Malcolm, “I don’t think he heard us.”

  “C’mon, Jimmy. Did you see that frown?”

  “It wasn’t meant for us,” replied Jimmy. “Something’s bothering him.”

  Jimmy was right. Something was bothering Freeman, something he’d seen but couldn’t identify. Whatever it was, it was like a wasp hovering about, worrying you, when all you wanted to do was rest.

  Right now, however, his first priority was to secure sleeping space for Sal, Aussie, and Choir and order them to rest, as if the three veterans of a dozen foreign wars needed a command to sleep after their grueling hours afloat and ashore. And the general’s second priority was to get rest himself. Besides, the last thing he wanted was to discuss with Hall or anyone else his failure to stop the sub in the crescent bay.

  His team’s failure, everyone’s failure so far, stalked his sleep as he lay on a mattress brought to the dry lab, his snoring so loud that one of the side-scan technicians put on a pair of cranials.

  “Goddamn,” the technician muttered, “I can still hear him.”

  As a sailor, one of whose qualifications is the ability to live 24/7 with constant close-quarter noise, the tech’s complaint about Freeman’s train-whistle breathing was evidence, Frank thought, of the extraordinary tension aboard the Petrel.

  In Washington, D.C., public opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of taking out Penghu. Both the Joint Chiefs and the Taiwanese government pointed out the extraordinary danger of allowing China to have a massive air base only fifteen miles from the island nation — two and a half minutes away by fighter-bomber. And, as many other American leaders and newspapers pointed out, most noticeably the New York Times, “If Taiwan, the only other democratic bulwark in Asia besides Japan, were to be lost, American power and influence, as well as its strategic and economic interests, would suf
fer irreparable harm.”

  And the French were gloating, Le Monde commenting in an editorial that “once again Washington has to recognize that in its war against terrorism, in a conflict of such elasticity, its conventional force is passé and its navy has become what the Chinese call a ’paper tiger.’ “

  The President said he didn’t give a damn what the foreign press said, especially France and Germany. The American people, however, did give a damn, and together with the Penghu military danger being pressed home with increasing fervor by the Pentagon, State, and Taipei, the President sought and received Congressional approval to “neutralize” the Penghu threat.

  And so as Petrel approached the halfway mark of its search grid, the President ordered all battle groups to stand by, “pending imminent action against Penghu — collateral damage notwithstanding.” Which meant that whoever was to be tasked with the action would not allow the presence of Taiwanese hostages to impede the mission.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Admiral Jensen and Admiral Crowley had something in common. Jensen had been plunged further into depression over the promise of the NR-1B failing to materialize to rescue his all but fatally wounded reputation. Crowley, on the McCain, watching CNN’s report on the mounting public pressure, dared to hope that he might now have the chance to redeem his reputation as a superior decision maker, following what had already become known among those who’d survived the kamikaze attack on their beloved boat as “Crowley’s clanger.”

  In the McCain’s blue-tile inner sanctums, officers and other ranks quietly wondered aloud whether they’d get a chance to avenge their dead with whatever the boat had left in her vault. Situated deep in the boat, these vaults or fortified ammunition magazines held over four million pounds of “payback.” There was everything down there from sparkling “virgins”—Standoff Land Attack Missiles-Expanded Response, or SLAMERs — to C-model air-to-ground, joint standoff missiles, each armed with a five-hundred-pound warhead with a mid-course accuracy of plus or minus fifty-two feet.

  “That would do it,” said an ordnance chief petty officer in the vault. “Got enough here to turn that friggin’ Paygoo—”

  “Penghu,” one of his fellow red jackets corrected him.

  “Paygoo,” continued the CPO, looking about at the bright metal “coffins” that contained the “virgins” and the plethora of other land attack and air-to-air ordnance. As yet none of it was armed, but they were ready to go.

  “If we get the call,” said the other red jacket.

  “We’ll get the call,” the CPO said confidently. “That CNN skirt — one with the hooters — said there’s protest mobs outside the White House demanding we do somethin’.”

  “Protests for war. Man, that’s a new one.”

  The CPO was still thinking about “Paygoo.” “Could turn it into a parking lot after we’re finished with it.”

  “After they fill in the craters, Chief,” said a green-shirted cargo handler.

  “Yeah.” The CPO smiled.

  “Yeah,” joined in the ordnance tracker. “If we get the order.”

  “We’ll get it,” the CPO replied, his tone not brooking any dissent. “Who else is there? We’re Johnny on the spot. Besides, we’re the ones who got whacked.”

  Admiral Crowley, anticipating, knowing, he’d soon be called in to launch America’s counterattack against Penghu, retired to what the Navy grandly called his “stateroom” for his daily ten-minute deep-diaphragm breathing, taking advantage of the lull in the normally thunderous roar of the “roof” directly above him. He switched on the TV, pressed “mute,” and lay flat on his back, his pillow under his knees. His son had got him doing the “destressor” routine, the admiral rejecting the idea at first, huffing and puffing about New Age cults.

  “It’s not a cult, Dad,” his son had said. “Deep breathing, meditative techniques, are as old as the hills. Will you just try it? You’ll feel better when you do it.”

  So the admiral was trying it, but with the door closed. He didn’t want the crew to think he was one of those damn yogis. And it was relaxing him — he could feel the tension of this terrible day abate somewhat. Of course, he had yet to write the families of all the men and women who had died, and that wouldn’t help his tension level. John Cuso had offered to help, and Crowley had accepted. They both agreed there would be no computer-generated crap, or fake “original” signatures. They’d write every one of the letters. Shipmates of those killed would, as usual, be a big help — providing personal details and, where appropriate, a humorous little anecdote to give the letters a more human touch. The padre would help too, but right now he was giving last rites to the dying and preparing for what would be the massive burial at sea.

  CNN was doing its entertainment section. “Hollywood celebs caution a rush to judgment” was about one well-known singer-actor who’d apparently “terrified her fans” by threatening to leave America if Bush invaded Iraq. She was now threatening to do it again, a mob of screaming adolescents jabbing the air with “Peace for Penghu” and burning Old Glory near the perimeter rope in Lafayette Park across from the White House. Another smaller but just as vocal group was holding signs promising to pay the singer’s fare to the Penghu. “Neither group,” Marte Price reported, “is clear on exactly where Penghu is.”

  The McCain was sailing into night as the show was broadcast, the ship darkened, all lights below rigged for red. Admiral Crowley entered the Combat Information Center and in a voice as calm as ice told John Cuso, “I’ve been thinking, John. If I were terrorists, I’d attack us at first light.”

  The incoming secret three-letter-coded message was received by John Rorke’s USS Encino at four hundred feet below the surface of Bashi Strait via the attack boat’s extremely low frequency aerial, which it periodically played out hundreds of yards behind it from a keel-flush integrated spool set on its port side. ELF was secure, being out of view of aerial reconnaissance or other shipping that might be in the area, but it was so slow — its transmission rate this morning one letter every twenty-six seconds — that it was used more often than not to instruct a submarine to come to periscope depth and raise its communications mast in what Encino’s crew called “the quick pop-out.” At periscope depth, Encino’s radio mast quickly pierced the sea/air interface and, hopefully before any hostile got a chance to discover the mast by satellite infrared recon, received a three-second burst message from COMSUBPAC HQ in Hawaii.

  “Must be urgent,” Encino’s executive officer said.

  “It had better be,” said John Rorke. “I don’t like exposing myself for anything less.”

  “How ’bout your honey, Skipper?” quipped the navigator.

  Rorke gave an obligatory grin, but when the navigator had said “your” honey rather than “a” honey, it made him inwardly wince, and he saw that the executive officer sensed it. A certain amount of sexual innuendo was part of a Navy man’s life — hell, any man’s life, he thought — but cooped-up men sometimes went over the line. It wasn’t the words they used — Rorke knew the lexicon from Bangor, Maine, to Bangor, Washington, and he was no prude, but he’d found that whenever he’d started getting serious about a woman, the innuendos and unending sexual “jokes” made him feel defensive — no, protective — about her. Alicia evoked in him a respect for women that usually waned when he was simply chasing “poontang.”

  The XO had shot the navigator a warning glance, but the latter was busy confirming Encino’s position, having taken advantage of the brief “pop-out” of the ultrahigh frequency mast to get a fix before the masts were retracted into the sub’s sail. This would allow him to correct for the ship’s inertial navigation system, which, despite twenty-first-century computers’ linked gyroscopes and movement-sensitive accelerometers, could often drift up to 1,700 yards. It was an important correction, enabling the sub’s captain and the handful of officers privy to such information on the boat to know exactly where Encino was. This was especially useful, as Rorke’s mentor, Admiral Jensen,
had once said, “if you actually want to hit something with a torpedo.”

  Once submerged well below periscope depth, Rorke and the XO watched as two weapons officers from the sub’s missile department simultaneously opened two small green combination safes. Both officers extracted one of a half-dozen black plastic capsules from each, with the number on each of the nontransparent capsules received via the UHF burst message being the same. The code phrase within each of the two extracted capsules was also the same, in this case BLAIR KEITH.

  The fact that both capsules contained the same name, as duly witnessed by Rorke and his XO, allowed all four officers to concur that the President’s order for Encino to fire all twelve of its Tomahawk land attack missiles at the target identified only by coordinates was valid. None of the crew would know what the target was, not even the weapons officer, who now, with deliberate yet unhurried pace, punched the given coordinates into his red-eyed firing procedures console. Only the navigator, his computer verifying his manual chart plot, knew the coordinates were for an island off southwestern Taiwan. But he did not know exactly what on that island was being targeted. In this war, as in peacetime patrols, the sub had remained submerged, cut off from the world and news of it for months at a time, night and day distinguished only by whether sections of the sub were rigged for red. Not even the coveted fifty-word familygrams, whose delivery could give the sub’s position away, were being received. Only Rorke, who’d been rushed from the plane to the sub’s dock to take command of Encino after the sub’s captain had unexpectedly died at sea from a heart attack, knew about the present situation between the two Chinas.

  His mind no longer on Alicia, on women, on anything but the care he must take to arrive secretly at the launch point an hour away, Rorke reviewed all the known idiosyncrasies of the Encino. The crew was already in “ultraquiet” mode, signaled by simple voice command from Rorke. No klaxon had sounded his order, and no klaxon would sound “Battle Stations” at launch point. There would be no noise on the sub that might alert hostiles. All mixing machines in the galley, all washer-dryers, and so on, no matter how quiet their rubber mountings, were to be turned off. In the galley the cook’s menu changed to ground prime beef hamburgers — better than any in the civilian world — ready to be quickly cooked in a silent microwave, its ear-piercing “done” alarm permanently silenced, replaced by a colored light indicator. Those not on duty had to be in their bunks, and, if using Discmans, Walkmans, and the like, were allowed the use of only one earpiece. The chief of the boat, otherwise known on Encino as “Old Testament,” ritually informed every newcomer to the boat, “God help the man I find curtained in his bunk who doesn’t hear an order because his eardrums are being bombarded by some rap crap!”

 

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