Ian Slater: Choke Point

Aussie wordlessly passed the phone he’d taken from the waiter to the silent Welshman, who was obviously upset.

“Tell him your number!” the general ordered the waiter, who, dry-mouthed and trembling, was barely able to speak. “Try calling the number from the other phones,” Freeman ordered, indicating the half-dozen or so cell phones that had been left, as per his orders, on the café’s hastily vacated tables.

Within a minute the team all had working phones.

“Give me the one with the best battery,” Freeman told the others, his schoolyard bully’s tone not going over well with David Brentwood. It wasn’t an aspect of Freeman he’d seen before.

While Choir carried the bloodied, pain-wracked woman outside, the others began to climb aboard the Humvee. Then they heard a police cruiser’s siren and saw its flashers approaching, a group of the previously ejected diners huddled across the street like homeless waifs, waiting anxiously to see what the police did about what one man in the group angrily and correctly described as the “grossest violation of civil liberties” he’d ever seen in America.

Freeman holstered his sidearm as the other four helped Choir to carry the wounded woman toward the police cruiser.

“Spray and Wash’s not gonna get that out!” said a callow adolescent who, with some other teenagers, had been drawn by the gunshot and was now pointing at the blood on her blouse.

“Hey,” a portly sheriff called out as he lumbered out of the cruiser, his partner grabbing the first aid box. “You kids move along.”

“What happened, Wally?” asked the teenaged boy in an overly familiar tone.

The sheriff’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t you sass me, George Daley. You get on home. From what I hear, your grades need all the help they can get.”

There was a burst of laughter from the gaggle of young girls in the group. “You tell ’im, Sheriff,” someone shouted, and George Daley sullenly moved off.

The general and sheriff conferred hastily by the cruiser, the sheriff hitching his belt several times and nodding, Sal hearing him say, “You betcha,” and “Wish we had more time to get enough guys up here to …”

“I figure,” the general told him, “that those bastards’ll be reloading with torpedoes and restocking after sinking that minesweeper.”

The sheriff knew the general was right, and agreed that the first thing the SpecFor team had to do was get to the tunnel that the waiter and others had been using to service the second sub. Second, they were to find the tunnel used to service the sub that had already sunk, to make sure both tunnels could never be used again.

Freeman called out to Salvini, “You go get Grandma. Frisk her. Put her in a cab and catch up with us. The cab driver can wait here. And Sal, cuff her.”

Sal merely nodded.

Seeing Sal’s resentment — a resentment apparently shared by the rest of the team — Freeman pushed the waiter roughly aside. “Salvini, you hear me? You have a problem with my orders?”

“No — sir,” said Sal, helping the waiter up, the prisoner looking up pleadingly at Sal, his eyes betraying some sympathy for these four American soldiers who he saw had to serve under such a brutal commander — one as tough as Li Kuan, even though the smaller Kuan bore no physical resemblance to the big American. But Li Kuan had the same hard eyes as this man whom the sheriff had called “General Free-man.”

The waiter understood English well enough to realize the full intent of the ruthless general’s orders: that his aged mother, contemptuously referred to by the American as “the old bitch,” would be forced to follow the general’s Humvee in the cab so that if her son balked at revealing the tunnel’s entrance, they would kill her. No, no, he wouldn’t kill her. If she were dead, then what would he bargain with?

No, the waiter concluded, this crazed general would do what Li Kuan would do in such a situation, what he’d done to the American girl in Suzhou who’d overheard the plans between Beijing and Kazakhstan — that Beijing would supply the experienced Vietnamese and Chinese tunnelers for the Muslim terrorists’ continuing Holy War against America, and Li Kuan would arrange the logistical support via “sleepers” in and around the Olympic peninsula. This supply tunnel complex, not nearly as elaborate as the giant two-hundred-mile underground complex at Cu Chi in the sixties, would be ingenious nevertheless. No, the waiter told himself, one had to face reality. This American general who’d shown not the slightest hesitation in shooting his beloved My-Duyen, whom the whites called “Sally,” would not kill his mother outright, he would torture her, as Li Kuan had tortured the young American girl in Suzhou to find out what she knew before he’d killed her. The waiter, now in the passenger seat of the Humvee, wanted to bury his head in his hands, but the tight nylon strip binding his hands behind his back prevented him from doing so.

Freeman was driving — Choir, Aussie, and Brentwood in the back.

“Once the fog lifts we’ll call in cavalry troops, soon as we locate the position,” Freeman told them.

No one responded. Aussie wanted to, but held his tongue. Knowing their silence denoted disapproval, Freeman elbowed the waiter in the side. “How many people you reckon you and your sub buddies have killed, Mao?”

The waiter stared sullenly through the fog that was rushing toward them in huge gray billows.

“How many so far?” Freeman asked his prisoner. “Would you say around ten thousand? In an undeclared war?”

“World is at war,” said the waiter. “You Americans invaded Iraqis.”

“Oh,” said Freeman, swinging the Humvee around a pothole, but not fast enough, jolting Choir out of his nap. “You think we didn’t give those towel heads enough warning? Six months not long enough? Who’s in charge of this operation, Mao?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who gave you orders in Port Angeles?”

“E-mail.”

“Li Kuan’s e-mail or from bin Laden’s leftovers — who?”

“I don’t know.”

“You serve on the sub, Mao? Or you strictly a tunneler?”

“Tunnel.”

“Same tunnel for both subs? Or did they have to take their turn, Mao? Or did each sub have its own garage?”

“I don’t know this.”

“Aha,” said Freeman accelerating. “You just know about the tunnel you’re taking us to, right? You bring the supplies — what, in a van? — and just drop them off.”

“Yes.”

“You lying bastard,” said Freeman, braking hard as he swerved to miss a fallen branch, barely visible in the fog. “You’re a hauler! Look at your throat, Mao. You’re a goddamn hauler of everything from rice to outboards to ammunition to kill Americans!”

Now Aussie, Choir, and Brentwood were more attentive. What they’d seen as the general’s “over-the-line” behavior in the East-West Café was now temporarily mitigated by their outrage at the horrendous loss of life, to say nothing of the loss in ships, caused by the midget submarine. Still the four SpecFor warriors, unlike Freeman, were not convinced there was a second sub, believing that the minesweeper, if it hadn’t gone down from natural causes, had most probably been destroyed by a mine.

The general’s questioning of “Mao” was reminding them, however, just how horrific the terrorist submarine attacks had been. And if the general was right about a second sub, there would be more to come.

The fog lifted with the rapidity of a stage curtain. What had been a gray, damp world along eerily deserted Highway 112 as the Humvee sped west toward the inland point five miles south of the Strait of Juan de Fuca that marked the big bend between Pillar and Slip Points — the latter seven miles farther west — was now a world so bereft of fog that every tree and bush was clearly visible. The longitudinal reading Aussie had taken earlier on the winding cliff-face path as he’d climbed high enough to see over the fog had given them the exact position of the cave behind the falls, the cave in which Peter Dixon had been so gruesomely tortured and murdered.