Ian Slater: Choke Point

“Tunnel entrance near here,” Mao told Freeman, who slowed the vehicle to sixty, waist-high brush, sandy, loamy soil, and burned-out forest racing by. To their left, looking south, they could see the grandeur of Mount Olympus and the sun-drenched snowcaps of its surrounding peaks. The general fixed his eyes on the waiter, who, despite the general calling him “Mao,” looked only partly Chinese to Aussie.

“Further,” said Mao sourly.

“How much further?” snapped Choir, his finger jabbing the man’s neck. Choir still didn’t approve of the old man crossing the line, shooting the woman like that, but if he was right and there was a second sub, time would be running out before it either struck again or decided to flee.

“Aussie?”

“General?”

“Call Sal. Tell him we’re—”

A loud pop from the right rear wheel was followed by the roar of the Humvee taking rounds, Aussie realizing that Freeman and his team would have been dead or badly shot up if the general had not immediately sped up.

“Five o’clock!” yelled Aussie. “Hundred yards. Light PK. Three men.” He grabbed the handhold, Freeman swinging the Humvee off the road and into the loamy ground, mowing bushes down before the vehicle that was back up to sixty miles an hour. Aussie and Choir were returning fire as Freeman swung hard left, enabling his men to get off a quick broadside before he just as violently swung the Humvee back hard right, driving, accelerating, straight for the light machine-gun post that Freeman barely saw through the narrow slit between the rim of his Fritz and the Humvee’s bulletproof glass. The machine-gun post was now only twenty yards in front, seconds away, rising and falling with the Humvee’s passage over the rough ground.

“L’audace!” Freeman shouted. “Toujours l’audace!”

Aussie’s next burst hit one of them in the shoulder. The trio broke and ran, the gunner, frantically hauling the PLA light machine gun, jumping over a log.

“Hold!” yelled Freeman, the Humvee hitting the log. The vehicle’s high clearance easily, if shudderingly, passed over it, momentarily throwing Freeman’s steering off, the Humvee clipping the fleeing gunman with the right fender. He was down, the gun thrown four feet away. Freeman braked, shoved the stick into reverse and backed up. They heard a sound like a branch cracking. Then he was off after the other two. Fog was moving in again.

“IR!” Freeman shouted.

Aussie reached over and, given the bumpy ride, deftly managed to “crown” the general with the infrared goggles.

“Ah — there they are, the bastards! Three o’clock, hundred yards!” With that, Freeman again abruptly changed course, the vehicle fishtailing then suddenly straightening, Mao’s head smacking the right door’s glass, the windshield not as peppered as Aussie expected. The general had no doubt put the fear of Allah into the machine-gun trio by unhesitatingly attacking without pause.

“Damn! They’re gone!”

“The tunnel,” said Choir.

“Where’s the entrance?” Freeman asked Mao.

Mao was silent.

“You think your buddies are trying to save you?” asked Freeman. “They’re trying to kill you, Mao. So tell me, where’s the entrance?”

Mao remained silent.

Freeman looked into the rearview mirror. “Aussie, tell Sal to bring Granny here.” The general glanced across at Mao, the waiter badly shaken by the attack. “See how much your buddies care, Mao. They wanted to kill you as much as they did us. Either way—” Freeman tapped his watch. “—you’ve got thirty seconds to show us exactly , I mean exactly , where the hidden entrance is. Otherwise I’ll shoot Granny.”

Mao was stroking his face, beaded with perspiration. He shouted, “She not my granny. She my mother.” He began to sob.

“Then,” said Freeman, eyes afire and drawing his 9mm, his face so close to Mao that their noses were all but touching, “I’ll shoot your goddamn mother !”

Brentwood had a flashback to the portrayal of Patton drawing his ivory-handled pistol, about to shoot one of his soldiers who, trembling, said he couldn’t take it anymore. Brentwood felt revulsion. First the young woman, now the older—

Mao was nodding so vigorously he looked as if he was suffering from an acute neurotic disorder. “I–I show you.”

“Get ’im out!” said Freeman.

Aussie, his adrenaline still up from the speeding firefight, hopped out the passenger door and hauled Mao after him. The fog was clearing as Mao, stumbling, barely able to walk, began dry retching.

“No, no!” said Aussie. “You throw up on your own time. Show us the friggin’ entrance.” Aussie saw Brentwood’s jaw clench tightly. What the hell had happened to David anyway? he wondered. Did he hunker down in the Humvee just because he couldn’t fire from mid-seat, or was he scared, so scared that he wouldn’t have fired if he’d had the chance? And now David was giving everyone a censorious look. Well, the trouble with Davy, Aussie concluded, was that he hadn’t seen the sea literally red with American blood, pieces of goddamn meat, heads floating about, thousands more than were killed on 9/11. So he had a big trauma in ’Ghanistan. All soldiers in combat have traumas; warriors live with it — night sweats, the screaming, recurring nightmares. But Aussie knew that he himself had no compunction about pushing Mao to his limits. The bastards had killed the young Coast Guardsman Jorges Alvaro near the falls, his body still not found, and the SEAL diver Albinski, and poor, bloody Dixon. This lot was as cold-blooded as—

“Jesus!” said the general, his blasphemy now a measure of his immediate if begrudging soldier’s admiration for the ingenuity of the tunnel’s camouflaged entrance.

“Best I’ve ever seen,” concurred Aussie.

Freeman ordered everyone back ten yards. “All right, Mao,” he said. “Go open it.”

Mao looked blankly at him.

“Work the combination safe,” added Aussie. “You know, the old booby trap.”

“C’mon,” said Freeman impatiently, all of them startled by the ringing of Choir’s phone.

“Son of a bitch!” said Aussie. “Put that friggin’ thing on vibration!”

It was Sal informing them that he should be there in “about five.”

Mao approached the camouflaged tunnel entrance, its trapdoor not horizontal, as one would expect, but vertical, a soil-impacted root end of a fallen, charred spruce. The roots’ four-by-four trapdoor had been exquisitely carpentered so that any saw marks were invisible to the naked eye.

Mao swung open the door and pointed inside the hollow tree trunk, the actual entrance to the tunnel being a second four-by-four trapdoor flush with the earth.

“You all set, David?” Freeman asked Brentwood.

As it dawned on Brentwood that the general expected him to go down into the tunnel, the cold-clammy feeling of incipient panic closed in and his head and neck felt feverishly hot.

“Didn’t think I told you to bring your sidearm for nothing, did you?” said Freeman. “Fort Lewis CO says you can take out a dime at thirty feet. And you’re lean as a stick — like these guys.” He pointed at Mao. “You know what it was like in ’Nam. Most of us’d get stuck halfway down the damn shaft, never mind the damn tunnels, which are even narrower.” Freeman turned around, asking for a 7-flashlight. Aussie took out his from his combat pack.

David Brentwood felt all eyes on him, even Mao’s.

“In ’Nam,” Freeman told David quickly, “guys tried to take regular weapons down tunnels. Couldn’t move. Only thing that’d work was this.” He tossed Brentwood the 7-shaped flashlight. “Best shape for tunnel rats. That and a sidearm. It’s the only way.” Brentwood still hadn’t moved. Freeman walked closer to him. It was as if they were in a confessional. “There’s another goddamned sub on the coast, David. We could use a whole division like we did in ’Nam to search and destroy and we still wouldn’t find the damn hiding place. Only way to find it there — in ’Nam — and now here is to go down the tunnel. See where it leads. I’ll call in airborne cav once we find the hideaway.”