Ian Slater: Choke Point

“Go, Stan!” Marte instructed her cameraman.

“Slowly,” he said.

“Fine, but go.”

“Take off your panties,” the cameraman told her.

“What?”

“You’re wearing white panties. I think we’d better start waving them.”

“Pervert. Don’t turn around.”

He didn’t, but did look into the rearview mirror.

When the cab pulled up to him, Sal told Marte she’d have to turn back. No media. Too dangerous. As they spoke, he could hear firing, which he was sure must be echoing up from the sides of the cliffs. In fact, he was hearing the distant linoleum-ripping sound of Aussie’s HK.

With the morphine now wearing off, his pain returning, Lewis had been in no mood for the four terrorists he saw popping up out of the ground a hundred yards away from what was supposed to be a patch of skunk cabbage. All four were armed and in a clump, running for their lives through the brush toward him, heading for the road. Aussie flicked off the safety.

“Aw shit!” he murmured after his first burst, seeing that the four, though having been in a bunch, now had the sense to disperse.

Like every SpecFor warrior, Aussie Lewis knew “Stop!” in at least eight languages. “Zhàn zhù,” he called out now. “Claymore!” Every enemy of the United States knew what “claymore” meant. Aussie thought of it as the terror that had pulverized so many of Uncle Ho’s Viet Minh into “ground Minh.”

Three of the four were suddenly standing dead still. The fourth, in what Aussie called “obvious Freeman shock”—maybe he’d heard what had happened in the Port Angeles café—was walking around in circles, calling for someone.

Aussie cut them down without the slightest compunction. They had attacked his adopted country, his home, and besides, they were in civilian garb, and thus, he told himself, armed spies under the Geneva Convention.

“You should go back to Port Angeles,” Sal told Marte and her cameraman. “Put your panties back on and interview those people.”

“Don’t be a smartass!” Marte snapped. “What people?”

“People who got kicked out of the restaurant. They can give you a story.” He’d taken care not to mention the woman being shot, and he felt badly about having to steer the reporter in that direction. The shooting story was sure to come out, but it was the only way he could send her and the cameraman away from the firing. Anyway, seeing that some media type was going to get the story, it might as well be Price, whom he’d heard had once been buddy-buddy with the general.

“Who’s the old lady?” asked Marte, looking into Sal’s cab.

“Informant,” Sal said, before he had time to think. His job was fighting, not arguing.

The old lady was shaking her finger at the three of them.

“What’s she saying?” Marte asked. “Do you know?”

“Says you should go away. Big trouble up ahead.”

Marte looked disgusted. “Do one thing for me — what’s your name?”

“Mickey.”

“All right, Mickey. Will you at least tell the general — if he’s still alive — that I was here first and I’d appreciate it if he gave me first crack at his story.”

“I’ll do that.”

As their cab headed back, the cameraman told Marte, “His name’s not Mickey.”

“Gee,” said Marte, her voice cold with sarcasm. “I thought it was .” She asked him to toss back her panties. “And I’d appreciate it, Stan , if you didn’t perve at me in the rearview.”

“There might be a good story in town,” he said in a conciliatory tone.

She didn’t answer.

“You know,” Stan continued, “up at the hospital? That sub commander’s crush — what was her name, Elisha ?”

“Alicia,” said a somewhat mollified Marte. “Alicia Mayne.”

“Yeah, the one with the burns. You know, I heard that deeper burns aren’t as painful as first degree burns because third degree burns destroy all the nerve endings — you don’t feel the pain.”

“Still needs skin grafts by the dozen, that one.”

“Yeah, but they can work wonders now. Friend of mine told me they have this kind of synthetic skin that’s revolutionized burn recovery.”

“Well, she couldn’t look worse than some of those Hollywood bimbos,” said Marte. “Pay ten grand for a facelift and they look like they’re from a waxworks.”

“Boobs look real.”

“Just drive, Stan.”

If Murphy’s law had run amok through the Strait of Juan de Fuca during this disastrous week for America, Freeman thought, Murphy now seemed absent as he, Choir, and Mao, having successfully rappeled down the cliff face without incident, now reached the footpath-width ledge that ran across the base of the cliff. High tide was in, waves broaching the ledge here and there, disappearing behind the ragged bottom of the thick tangled-vine curtain.

Freeman was about fifty feet across from Choir and Mao, and both could see the entrance. There was a smaller curtain about fifteen feet wide and thirty feet high within the much larger curtain of vegetation, like a smaller door set within a hangar door.

Another outfit might have used Mao at barrel point to go ahead, to be first man inside, to take the first fire if surprise wasn’t achieved, but Freeman didn’t want to do it that way. Surprise was not gained by creeping approaches in his school, which taught that slow approaches bred defensive attitudes in what was supposed to be an offensive force. Freeman signaled to Choir to make a walk speed approach along the slippery ledge, then a fast entry. It suited his preference for audacity: L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace!

Choir gently pulled Mao back, cuffed him with a nylon strip, and turned his face into the cliff. Mao’s breathing was still labored but, Choir could tell, easing now. “Wait here,” Choir whispered.

He glanced down, checking his grenade array, Freeman already having done so. Then both of them began making their way along the ledge, Choir from the east side of the heavy vine door, Freeman from the west.

Freeman’s biggest worry, given the bright sunlight, was whether any part of their shadows would pierce the screen of vegetation, like that of someone passing by an ivy-covered trellis. Momentarily, he glanced up at the rim of the cliff, its overhang of fresh-smelling vegetation a vivid green fringe against the blue sky, and he saw why he and Choir hadn’t spotted any sentries, other than the tree-hidden sniper. A human form against such a wild, natural setting would at once arouse curiosity in anyone at sea. Anyway, he hoped he and the rest of the team had decimated the core of the supply unit in the firefight at the falls cave and against the six-man Zodiac near Petrel , along with everyone on the submarine they’d sunk.

He saw a cloud about to swallow the sun. Choir, seeing the general looking up, got the same message. They’d pause a second or two longer, the door still ten feet away, and then make their move in the shadow of the passing cloud.

They heard pulley chains then, and the two halves of the vegetation-screened door began opening like a stage curtain. No voices. The sun, hidden in cloud now, had not cast shadows, but neither did it illuminate anything more than a few yards of a semidark cave whose back wall neither Choir nor Freeman could distinguish. Some kind of gantry was faintly visible, and the first thing coming to Freeman’s mind as he and Choir dropped down on damp, ice-cold rock, was stage scaffolding. He couldn’t see anyone, but if the terrorists had escaped, then who was running the chain and pulley? Admittedly, it would require only one man, but where was he? Or she? Terrorists these days were equal opportunity employers.