Ian Slater: Choke Point

The general, though his line of sight was obscured by the wind-bent treeline along the cliff’s edge fifty yards away, was recalling the view of the falls and cliffs from the sea farther down the coast. “I’d say it’s about a hundred and fifty, two hundred feet down to the rocks,” he continued. “You take us right to this friggin’ ledge you’re talking about, and you make any noise— any fucking noise — and I’ll push you off myself! Then we’ll have Grandma join you, you traitorous son of a bitch. Go on, get up!” Freeman grabbed him by his collar. “We let you people come into this country and this is the way you repay us. Attacking America. By God, I ought to—” Freeman shoved him back, Mao falling and bashing his head against the fallen log, only the moss saving him from cracking his skull.

Choir helped him to his feet, color now flooding back into the man’s face.

“We forced to do this,” said Mao with unexpected passion. “Otherwise Li Kuan kill all our families in China, in Kazakhstan. Kill everyone.”

Freeman jabbed his finger hard into Mao’s chest. “You’re a terrorist. I’ll give you three minutes to get that gear on.” Freeman turned to Choir. “Cut him loose. I’ll rappel down the west side, you and Mao go down over there by that big arbutus.”

“Which one’s that?” asked Choir.

“Jesus Christ, man! The red bark — twenty paces.”

Freeman had a parting comment for Mao. “If my boy down there is dead — which I think he is — I’ll cut your fucking throat!”

It had been only seven minutes since the sniper’s fire, and about ten since the beeper had died, but to Choir it seemed no more than two or three seconds, everything having happened so fast. He was about to ask the general whether it wouldn’t be better to call Fort Lewis in now when Freeman turned to Aussie. “You up to calling Fort Lewis? Get their airborne cav over here.”

“No sweat,” answered Aussie, dragging himself over to a small copse of cypress for good cover, now having only his Kevlar vest to keep him warm, his load vest as well as his helmet having been given to Mao.

“Maybe we should wait for them, General?” said Choir.

“Hell, no! By that time these bastards’ll have burned all their codes and vanished. Then,” he indicated Mao, “all we’ll have is this bag of shit. The cav can mop up.”

Choir was tugged by conflicting emotions. Freeman, whatever else you might think of him, was “guts personified,” and in SpecOps command that was the ultimate accolade. But the point-blank shooting of the young woman in the café, who might have already succumbed to her massive chest wound, was clear evidence that Freeman would have no hesitation killing Mao’s aged mother as well. There was a line, even for Special Forces, that Choir knew you didn’t cross. He recalled the SAS Brit who gave up his and his team’s position rather than shoot a little Iraqi shepherd boy who’d wandered into their hide. Freeman had surely crossed the line with his behavior in the restaurant, and, as Choir readied the nylon line for his and Mao’s rappel from the cliff’s top to the ledge that led across the face of the vine-curtained cave, the Welsh American found himself adopting a fatherly, almost friendly, tone with the terrorist as he gagged him with the duct tape.

“Now just calm down,” he said. “Breathe through your nose. Don’t panic. But I’m telling you, laddie, you make any noise, you do anything wrong, and he’ll …” Choir couldn’t bring himself to say it, so alien was it to all his experience fighting by the general’s side.

Mao understood and nodded, his labored breathing producing a faint nasal whistle that didn’t worry Choir because of the overriding noise of the crashing sea below and the wind through the thickly vined vegetation of the cliff that Mao had assured them screened another cave. The same Mao, Choir reminded himself, who had sworn he was telling the truth earlier.

Freeman signaled to Choir to synchronize watches, then both of them began feeding the rope through their gloves over the cliff’s edge. Mao began his rappel.

In the tunnel below them and back from the cliff, David was still hunched, his neck and leg muscles taut with the pain that radiated up and down his back. He was trying to regain his hearing, his ears still ringing from the three shots he’d fired from his Compact. He felt a warm wash of air from the radiant heat of its barrel. It felt good in the dripping wet cold of the left-hand tunnel he’d entered through the narrow gap in the rubble of the tunnel that led to the waterfall cave. He wondered if the two terrorists were still in the tunnel or if they’d reached what he guessed must be a second lair in the cliff face. If they were still around, he hoped they didn’t have IR goggles that would pick up the Compact’s residual heat. Stupid , he told himself. If the terrorists had IRs, they would see his body heat anyway if he advanced down the tunnel. He could only hope they’d be more interested in escaping than trapping him, because they must have heard the shooting above them. It had sounded as if a sniper had gotten two shots off before the replying stutter of an HK.

David placed his Compact into the wooden, lifeless grip of his injured hand, and felt for his 7-flashlight. He pulled its head hard against him, slid the on switch forward, saw a pinpoint of light and switched it off, returning the Compact to his good left hand. The danger, he thought, was that if the two terrorists he was following had reached the second lair, at least one of them might be waiting at the tunnel’s exit, under the lair, to finish him off, while the other busied himself with the means of escape. They could have a Zodiac, possibly one of the “big jobs,” as Aussie referred to the thirty-foot RIBs, that in a pinch could quickly ferry away twenty or more sardine-packed personnel. That would rapidly take them eastwards, back into the protective shroud of fog where they could then land, melting back into the perennially green canopy of the peninsula, to later reassemble and launch yet another attack.

David stopped, noticing that one of the five-foot-high joists lining the tunnel had come loose from the wall, bringing down what appeared to be a candlestick holder with it. A butterfly mine underneath? The fallen joist seemed to have been pushed out over time by an inch-thick root growing horizontally along the tunnel, the root itself about three or four feet in length.

He slid his Compact into his waistband and quickly made two cuts with his K-bar, resheathing it and extracting the root, rubbing the root hard back and forth against his trousers to remove the slippery mud coating. Then he made several small nicks on one end of the root so he would have a better grip. With the Compact, which had eight shots left, and the thick three-foot-long root in the wooden grasp of his injured hand like an officer’s swagger stick, he started moving cautiously again down the tunnel. It took a slight curving turn to the left, the wide angle of the turn obviously designed to accommodate much longer containers than the cardboard boxes of food; perhaps crated segments of torpedoes, he thought.

He paused again, the persistent ringing in his ears now joined by a sound like wind in trees. The falls? They were possibly only two hundred yards or so to the east, and if he was that close to the coastal cliffs, he knew the tunnel would soon end. Infrared spots of residual heat, like those captured by IR cameras showing the images of parked cars that in fact were no longer there, speckled his IR glasses. Slowly , he counseled himself. Above him, outside somewhere, Freeman, Aussie, and Choir, and maybe Sal too, would be moving fast, coming down a trail on the cliff face, or some such thing. Exactly how, he couldn’t be sure, because unlike them, he’d never seen the cliffs in the area. He’d only heard about them secondhand from news reports of the sinking of the sub.