by Ian Slater
“What’s with him?” said Sal.
Aussie shrugged. “Don’t think he knows.”
“Maybe,” said Choir, laughing and quoting an old detergent jingle, “he doesn’t like ’ring around the collar’?”
“There’s definitely a bee in his bonnet,” began Choir, then stopped. Freeman was standing at the corridor doorway again, having reentered the ship’s passageway directly from the A-frame, out of view of those in the dry lab.
“It’s not a bee,” said the general. “It’s a goddamn wasp, and I don’t know where the hell it’s coming from.” With that, he moved off.
“So?” asked Choir. “Where’s his wasp coming from, my hearties?”
Neither Sal nor Aussie knew.
The question was finally answered at precisely 3:00 P.M.
a mile west of Port Angeles, when the Petrel, in thinning but still persistent fog, received the news — as did the rest of the world — that the USS Harold Ward, a fiberglass-keeled minesweeper of 895 tons, had just sunk between Cape Flattery and Vancouver Island. “A Coast Guard patrol boat was sighted in the area, but it’s doubtful if it was able to rescue any of the survivors, as the minesweeper sank so quickly that—”
“Suffering Jesus!” exclaimed Freeman.
In that serendipitous confluence of forces where unconnected links are finally connected, the general had it: Choir’s offhand joke about “ring around the collar” and the general’s obsession about the bruise ring about the collar, or neck, of the terrorist on deck came together in the shock of yet another ship going down.
Frank Hall told Freeman it would take another hour at least, at Petrel’s present crawl of one of two knots, until they reached Port Angeles.
“Frank,” said the general, his eyes alive with urgency. “For God’s sake, let me have the Zodiac!”
“General, I had no intention of refusing it. You and the boys take it, but the news guy said that that minesweeper had sunk—nothing about an explosion. Media’s so hot to trot these days they’re automatically assuming it’s been torpedoed or something. Ships do sink for a host of other—”
“It’s been torpedoed, Frank,” said the general. “There’s another goddamn sub! Don’t you see? That’s why there were so many goddamn sinkings in a few days. It was a goddamn duo at work!”
“Then where the hell’s it come from?” asked Frank. “I mean you — Darkstar’s gone over the whole coast.”
“I don’t know, Frank. That’s why I need the Zodiac.”
Frank let Freeman have the Zodiac, Aussie meanwhile cursing the fact that there were no boots on the Petrel to replace the pair he’d lost on the sub after diving off to help the general. He ended up borrowing a pair of young Cookie’s runners.
“Move it, Aussie!” shouted Freeman, already in the Zodiac as Jimmy and the bosun lowered it from the davit.
One of the side-scan technicians gave Freeman a sonar tracking beeper he’d requested. It was used on occasion by the technicians to test their hydrophones in the lab.
“Bring combat packs!” Freeman called out.
“He’s keen,” said Jimmy, watching the general using the Zodiac’s pike to keep the inflatable from crashing into the side as the Petrel engaged a strong offshore current.
“He lives on adrenaline,” replied the bosun, his muscles stiffened from the Petrel’s last tension-filled twenty-four hours. “I want a massage.”
“So do I,” said Aussie, lacing up the runners and pulling on his gloves. He threw over a line down then, so he, Sal and Choir could rappel into the Zodiac, its outboard already spitting, coughing, then roaring to life, the general checking the gas level. “Full?” inquired Aussie.
“We’re only going into Port Angeles,” said the general.
“Well hell — couldn’t we have waited till Petrel—”
“No! Now listen to me, Aussie. Go get the first mate, tell him I want him to get some syringes from the ship’s first aid kit and take a blood sample from each of those damn terrorists.”
“DNA samples?” said Aussie.
“Right,” replied the general. “We’ll take them with us. We might be able to ID them through Interpol.”
“You think so?” said Aussie dubiously.
“Well, it’s worth a try,” said the general, adding, tongue-in-cheek, “Might help you win your bet.”
Aussie grinned. “They’re not all Chinese. I’m not that stupid.”
“Go on,” said the general. “Hurry up. Tell him to get those samples fast and put ’em in a cooler. I want to be off this tub in ten minutes.”
While the Zodiac, bow up, skimmed the gray water through varying densities of fog, Freeman’s brain was racing, his chain of connected memories now complete, his penchant for detail at the fore, his mental files rapidly flipping back to the café, the waiter’s dirty fingernails and the angry ring of irritated flesh around the throat and wrists taking him back to remembrances of his long days and nights in Vietnam, especially in the South, where, as he was now reminding Aussie, the Viet Cong, having gotten dangerously close to Saigon right under the noses of the Americans and their own fellow South Vietnamese, had executed one of the greatest military maneuvers of all time.
“Cu—” he began, then stopped, swerving the boat, heeding Sal’s shouted warning that there was a deadhead in front of them, one of the many floating logs that were always breaking loose from the huge timber rafts hauled across the strait, or the fallout from storm-uprooted trees along the coast.
“Cu Chi,” the general told Aussie as the Zodiac straightened out on its fast run into the harbor.
“Gotcha!” Aussie shouted above the outboard, the engine markedly noisier than when he and the general had used it to approach the sub. “This Merc needs a tune-up,” he told the general.
Freeman took no notice, telling Aussie instead that it would be his job to drive the Humvee that he’d told Hall to book ahead by radio.
“Hope it’s there!” shouted Aussie. “Everyone’s probably left town by now.”
“It’ll be there,” the general assured him, though Aussie was certain Freeman had no way of being that sure.
“Sal,” the general called out. “I’ve been thinking. Soon as we hit the beach, you call Fort Lewis. Tell Brentwood to grab a Huey and get his ass up here. Tell him we’ll meet him at Laurel and Railroad.”
“You want him to bring that Bullpup?”
“Hell, no. Better his sidearm.”
“Roger.”
“There’s the Humvee,” said Freeman, slowing the Zodiac to twenty knots, well in excess of harbor approach regulations. A purse seiner loomed ahead in the fog, one of its crew giving them a frantic “slow down” signal.
“Sea rage,” quipped Aussie, waving at the purse seiner, the man’s shouting eliciting a full stiff-arm Italian response from Salvini.
The Humvee driver was waiting for them. “General Freeman?” he asked, unsure of just who was whom, since none of the four Special Forces team wore any insignia or rank. But it was Freeman who had the leader look.
“That’s me,” he told the driver.
“Sir, a Captain Brentwood is waiting at—”
“Guess he got your message,” cut in Aussie.
“Good,” answered Freeman, without breaking his stride, turning to Sal. “Don’t worry about making that call. Brentwood’s here.”
Sal looked about the fog-wreathed beach. “Where?”
“In town, you dork,” said Aussie.
“Well, least he could do was bring us an ale,” put in Choir.
“Son,” Freeman told the Humvee driver, “you can wait here — take a little unofficial furlough, or head back to Fort Lewis.”
The driver was nonplused, not knowing whether to be grateful or insulted at not being needed.
“Ah, yes, sir. Fine.”
Freeman sensed his disappointment. “I’d love to have you along. Fort Lewis tells me you’re a real Andretti.” The general smacked him affectionately on the shoulder. “Maybe
next time.”
“Ah, yes, General.”
As the four SpecFor warriors piled into the Humvee, the egalitarian Aussie commented pompously, “He didn’t know who Andretti was.”
“Who is he?” asked Sal.
Aussie pushed the starter button. “You’re jerkin’ me off.”
“No,” said Sal. “Who was Andretti?”
“Race driver,” said Aussie.
“Yeah,” said Sal. “Mario. I know.”
“You’re gonna get it, Brooklyn. Right up the ass!”
“Promises!” responded Sal.
“Go to the hospital after we pick up Brentwood,” Freeman cut in abruptly, his tone signaling an end to Sal and Aussie’s banter. “I want you people on your toes. If I’m right about the minesweeper, this is going to be dicey.”
In the back, Sal glanced at Choir. Whenever the general said “you people,” it was a warning that the mission could be extraordinarily tough. The problem for Choir was that he thought the general was getting ahead of himself, so he made a side wager with Sal that the minesweeper hadn’t been sunk by a hostile.
The onetime Medal of Honor recipient looked even thinner than when Aussie and Freeman had last seen him on the firing range. He was standing at the deserted junction of Laurel and Railroad in full combat gear, and, even with its bulk, looked as if he’d lost weight. The sidearm on his right hip, Aussie noticed, was holstered back to front so that his still-functioning left hand could cross-draw it if necessary. Why on earth had the general asked him to come along? he wondered.
Brentwood had to use his left hand to get aboard the Humvee, his right arm still a stiff L-shape, its hand a perennially bunched fist.
Choir asked him anxiously, “What happened to that minesweeper, David? You hear anything?”
“It sank.”
“He knows that, you dodo,” Aussie told Brentwood. “But how’d it sink?”
“Don’t know,” said David, who then asked Freeman, “Where we going, General?”
“Hospital first.”
When they got there, Freeman asked Aussie to grab the five terrorist samples. Obviously in a hurry, he strode ahead to the front desk to arrange for immediate testing of the samples. Aussie came in a minute later, looking concerned.
“It’s all arranged,” Freeman told him. “Dr. Ramon here will do it for us soon as he can.”
The doctor nodded to Aussie, who exchanged greetings.
Returning to the Humvee, Aussie, in trepidation, told the general, “Petrel’s mate has screwed up. He only took four samples.”
The general frowned. “Didn’t you check ’em?”
“I thought there were — but you know, sir, we were in such a damn hurry.”
“Not good enough, Aussie!”
Back at the Humvee, the general was all business. “Listen up. We’re going to the East-West Café. We’ll be there in five minutes. There’ll be no time for dessert, so here’s the drill….”
Freeman was wrong — it took them eleven minutes to reach the café because of the traffic lights in the town. Not that many people were out and about; most of the refugees hadn’t returned yet. As Aussie waited on the second-to-last red, fingers tapping impatiently on the Humvee’s wheel, David Brentwood asked him, “Do you mind not doing that?”
“Doing what?”
“Drumming your fingers,” he said, causing Sal and Choir to look straight ahead and not risk a “What’s eating him?” glance.
Then the general said, “Don’t censure me, boys. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think it was necessary.”
Their silence told Freeman that he was the only one in the team convinced there was a second sub in the choke point.
The light turned green.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
“Shock and awe, gentlemen,” Freeman told them as the Humvee dropped Choir off in the alley behind the East-West Café. Aussie then made a sharp turn to bring the wide, stocky, no-nonsense vehicle to a pronounced stop in front of the café. Freeman, armed only with his HK 9mm sidearm, strode in, Aussie immediately behind him, HK at the ready. He was followed by Brentwood, then Sal, who, with his shotgun turned about, stood guard at the door.
About a dozen diners, including some with young children — one in a high chair — looked up, startled. Everyone had stopped eating. They were obviously refugees returning to the town, hungry and exhausted. At first they had been reassured by the sight of the Special Forces team, but then were suddenly terrified by Freeman’s thunderous order: “Everyone out! Now! Leave your cell phones on the table. Write down the number. If you lie, we’ll backtrack through the phone company and you’ll be in violation of the Emergency War Powers Act. Move!”
Only one elderly man, with stubby beard and no teeth, refused to leave his steaming wonton soup. “I’m too old to be frightened of guys who—”
He had to finish his sentence outside, Sal having taken a firm grip of the man’s worn lumberjack collar and literally dragging him out, the old man’s hands flailing, spittle-sprayed obscenities filling the air. “Be safer out here, buddy,” Sal told him, and Sal was telling the truth, for when Salvini reentered the restaurant, he heard a high-pitched Oriental voice in the kitchen beyond the string bead curtain screaming to someone back of the kitchen, “Cor 911! Cor 911!”
“Good idea!” said Aussie evenly.
“She the same waitress as before?” Freeman asked Brentwood.
“Yes,” confirmed Brentwood.
Aussie checked two side rooms without taking his eyes off the Vietnamese woman who was yelling beyond the curtain. He was struck by the fact that though she was clearly frightened, she wasn’t cowed. There was fight in her eyes.
“What are you afraid of, ma’am?” asked the general. “We’re Americans, not terrorists.”
“Soldiers!” she said contemptuously.
The restaurant’s back door, about six feet beyond the kitchen at the end of a passageway cluttered with piled boxes of noodles, burst open. It was Choir pushing one of the waiters ahead of him, Aussie immediately relieving the waiter of the cell phone he was in the process of using.
“Over here!” ordered Freeman, standing in the kitchen, the young woman glaring at him from the kitchen’s chopping block. The man looked more frightened than the woman, who had obviously been the object of dispute between the two waiters Freeman had seen when he and Brentwood had been in the café. Among all the other SpecFor training courses, one had been about quickly ascertaining who the alpha male was in any hostage-taking situation. Freeman, though a stickler for multilayered training, had always been skeptical of the course. “A ten-year-old kid can tell you in two seconds who’s the boss in a room,” he used to say. Here, the woman was clearly the alpha. Aussie heard a noise directly above, looked up and saw a trapdoor opening.
“No, please!” shouted the man. “My mother!”
“Jesus Christ!” said Aussie, a nanosecond away from wasting her. The old woman said something in Vietnamese and withdrew.
“No pickup till after six, I think,” joked Aussie. No one laughed, but his attempt clearly infused the man with more terror of the unpredictable.
The young woman was retreating farther back, almost touching the wall-suspended array of ladles, noodle strainers, and other utensils. No knives, Freeman noticed — they were to her left in a wooden rack near a kitchen stool and corner chopping block. The SpecFor team had been in the restaurant for less than two minutes — a fast entrance, a quick push to see who was whom, and to clear out those Freeman had decided were innocent bystanders. Now he strode up to the waiter and told him to show his wrists. The irritated skin rash had almost vanished. Freeman reached up to the man’s collar. “Stay still!” The bruised ring, or more accurately, half ring, around the waiter’s throat was not nearly as dark as when the general had seen it when he and Brentwood had eaten in the café.
Freeman turned from the waiter and in a move whose speed and violence surprised even Aussie, advanced on the woman, who seemed to sh
rink in size beneath him. He grabbed her by her left ear and wrenched her toward him. She gasped in pain, but nothing more, her eyes glinting with hatred and determination. He pulled her out from the wall of appliances.
“Don — Don’t hurt her please, sir!” implored the waiter.
Brentwood’s eyes avoided the scene, focusing on the bubbling vat of fat by the chopping block.
“I won’t hurt her!” bellowed the general, his eyes maniacal. “I’ll kill the bitch if you don’t take me to the tunnels!”
The waiter’s pale face turned gray and he tried to speak but couldn’t.
“Then I’ll kill Granny upstairs!” shouted Freeman. His voice had taken over the café like a storm. “You bastards think I don’t know what’s going on? Eh? Eh? Those collar marks, the ones on your wrists. Your filthy damn fingernails. Your ring around the collar, buddy, comes from hauling your buddies out of cave-ins in the tunnels. Only way you could get in and out in Cu Chi — only way you can get a tunneler out in a cave-in — two ropes from your wrists to his feet — gotta get ’im out before he suffocates. Then you put the pull collar ’round your neck, lie down, roll over and haul him out. Or maybe it wasn’t your buddies, eh? Maybe a torpedo warhead you were hauling down to the cave, with all your other supplies, eh? That’s why we didn’t get any infrared spots on the ground. You terrorist bastards were all underground like goddamn rats!”
The man had said nothing, but the rest of the team, except for Sal at the front door, looked at one another with something akin to awe. They realized they were witnessing the stuff of the Freeman legend. Aussie alone, however, knew that the general’s shock was not over with.
“Well?” Freeman thundered. “You going to tell me?”
The waiter caught the woman’s eye, as did Aussie. Her message was clear: “Stand your ground! Don’t tell them!” The waiter, however, probably habituated by a lifetime of running slavishly from the exhausting kitchen through the beaded curtain to serve the class to which he aspired, and despised, was torn between reality and hope, his mind obviously a tumult of indecision.
