Ian Slater: Choke Point

Then Choir glimpsed a faint wink of light.

It was David’s 7-flashlight sweeping from about twenty feet inside the tunnel as he approached the tunnel’s exit that led directly into the cave. And it immediately drew fire, the last twenty feet of the tunnel suddenly exploding with tracer pouring from the back wall of the cave into the tunnel at the flashlight.

The shooters had assumed the enemy tunnel rat was right behind it, holding it, but David was now at least five feet away, left of the flashlight. The long root handle, to which he’d taped it for just such an eventuality, was in the wooden grasp of his “useless” right hand. David’s left arm came up from his prone position, Compact in hand. His first shot imploded one of the two terrorists’ heads, and the second was just as accurate, born of constant practice on the Fort Lewis range, also killing its victim instantly. Choir and Freeman held their fire at the remaining terrorist, lest an errant round strike David, the bang of his Compact’s 9mm as distinct to Freeman as the sound of his own weapon.

“David?” Freeman shouted.

“General!” The exultation David felt, combined with the smell of the sea air that was now flushing out the stink of gunpowder, sent his adrenaline racing.

The cave lit up then, and Freeman swung his HK up, its burst taking out the light, a hot glass rain showering down on him and Choir. But in that instant of light turned on by the terrorists, Freeman had glimpsed enough to know now that what he’d assumed was scaffolding was in fact a dry dock, and in it was a long, black-tented vessel, only its prop and prop guard visible.

Choir had time only to glimpse it too, but he’d noticed something Freeman hadn’t — the prop had exactly the same number of blades and prop guard as the sub they’d sunk. For an instant Choir felt as if someone had walked over his grave, that the sub had been resurrected, but he told himself that was not possible. No way.

Choir and Freeman, at the front of the cave, crawled quickly to the bottom beam of the dry dock. The two were about fifteen feet apart, with David just inside the tunnel exit at the cave’s rear forming the third point in an ad hoc triangle of fire. But to stay there, to wait, was to die. They had to get up.

A shaft of light pierced the cave on Freeman’s right, and three men came out, firing wildly, their intent obviously to flush out the Americans. But having already glimpsed the layout, Freeman, Choir, and David, because of their training for instant memorization of hostile layouts, had no fear of blue on blue, and cut the terrorists down within seconds. What they weren’t prepared for was the utter surprise of seeing the black tent moving toward the front of the cave, two hydraulic launch rails sliding out ahead of the dry dock through the now open, vine-covered door into the high tide’s water, which was almost flush with the cave’s lip that was the ledge.

The black tent moved slowly at first, its conical top plucked up by an overhead “fingers” claw that had been screwed into the cave roof. Freeman saw that on his right side of the cave there was a thick side spar, a short, canvas-covered walkway projecting out from the cave’s westerly wall, presumably coming out from either a natural or manmade antechamber in the rock wall adjacent to the black tent. Several terrorists — probably four, certainly no more than six, by the sound of their footfalls — had just entered the conical tent via this covered walkway as the tent was being raised higher and the vessel started to move. Freeman could see that once the as yet unrevealed bow hit the water and the camouflage tent was completely drawn off, the vessel would be into the water and away, like rescue boats that could be launched in seconds from rocky shorelines, sliding straight from dry dock to sea. Choir and David paired to maintain suppressing fire, but David’s ammunition was getting low.

“Cover!” Freeman shouted, and dashed toward the rising tent that now, above the vessel’s waterline, revealed the shape not of a sub, but of a fast patrol boat with U.S. Coast Guard colors. Freeman pulled the pins of his grenades and lobbed one, two, three, forward and midships, the last one onto the stern deck. Three of them went off in quick succession, the craft aflame. The fourth HE grenade exploded as the vessel was only halfway out of the cave, its stern still inside and on fire.

David, having located the pulley/chain button, pushed it, thus shutting the door, jamming the patrol boat half in and half out, because of the resistance of its high superstructure, aerials, and radar antennae.

The vine curtain was now on fire, and fuel tanks began exploding, spewing out sheets of flame over the starboard deck’s canvas-shrouded torpedo tube, the concussion lifting Freeman off his feet, covering him in flame and throwing him back toward the center of the cave, where Choir quickly extinguished his burning clothes with a throw of “fire sand” from one of several contingency buckets lined up by the wall.

Spitting and cursing, eyebrows singed, Freeman was up on his feet, facing seaward, when he saw a door burst open on the deck of the burning boat. Three terrorists emerged, firing furiously at David, who coolly returned fire, “heading” one of them, who fell back into the burning shroud of the tent. Choir felled the second. And then there was the general — not in uniform, of course, but General Chang nevertheless. As Freeman squeezed off another burst before Chang could hit him, he realized, with the force of a physical blow, seeing the Chinese general’s wig fly off like a blood-sodden pelt, revealing a pockmarked scalp, that he was looking at Li Kuan.

The cave was an inferno, Freeman telling David and Choir to disengage, an unnecessary order, given that there was no more resistance, the downed terrorists scattered about the cave floor. Freeman knew the fight was over, but feared that the torpedo tubes — the warheads doubtless having been loaded to sink more minesweepers or anything else in the choke point — would explode, the cave instantly becoming an oven, consuming all the oxygen and everything within.

“Move out!” he shouted. He couldn’t see David.

Then Freeman heard a loud crack , saw Choir fall, and the dry-dock frame behind him engulfed in flames, knots in the wood exploding like more gunshots.

Choir was all right, but had twisted his ankle. As he fell, he could have sworn that the body of the pockmarked terrorist leader on the fiery stern deck had twitched. Muscles contracting probably.

Freeman, his right hand holding his HK, his finger on the trigger, thrust his left hand under Choir’s right shoulder to serve as a crutch, and the two made their way through black, toxic smoke that was now pouring out from the interior of the burning boat. They heard a tremendous crash behind them, the dry-dock’s front section having collapsed, the boat’s stern higher because of it. Choir saw a figure clinging to its rail. It was the pockmarked terrorist issuing forth such a feral scream of rage and pain that Choir knew he would never forget it.

“Mother of God!” he blurted, the hot smoke scorching his throat. “He’s still alive. We should finish the poor devil off.”

“Don’t bother,” said Freeman, glancing back at Li Kuan, a.k.a. General Chang.

“Jesus!” said Choir. There was another ungodly scream. “He’s melting, General! His body’s—” Choir was coughing violently. “His body’s actually melting!”

“Let the bastard melt!” said Freeman, who was thinking about a young American woman called Amanda, so full of promise and hope, brutally tortured, then murdered and dumped in a stinking canal by Chang/Li Kuan’s thugs because she’d overheard what had now been revealed in the cave — the Communist Chinese government’s plan to quell rebel Muslim nationalist movements on its Xinjiang border by offering to oversee a Muslim attack on America. Chang, or Li Kuan, as young Mao knew him, had clearly blackmailed immigrants, just as Mao had told Freeman, to cooperate in providing the sub and torpedo boat with supplies, the Asiatic Muslims providing crews and gunmen.