Ian Slater: Choke Point

By the time the wokka wokka of the airborne cavalry units from Fort Lewis could be heard in the skies over the U.S. side of the Juan de Fuca Strait, the threat was over.

For now.

It would be the FBI’s and Homeland Defense’s joint responsibility to backtrack, to go through Seattle and Vancouver importers’ invoices and find out which importers bought which supplies and, just as important, who transported them to Port Angeles on the lonely Washington coast.

Outside the smoke-filled cave, Mao, who’d had ample time to turn around carefully on the ledge and cut through the nylon cord cuffs by rubbing them against the barnacle-encrusted rocks, moved across the ledge, helping Freeman and a cordite-reeking David Brentwood assist Choir along the narrow ledge and then, in a painfully slow descent for Choir, down to the rocky foreshore.

EPILOGUE

“IT’S NAIVE,” FREEMAN told Marte Price Port Angeles during her “exclusive” hospital emergency room interview, “to believe that there aren’t more sleepers all over the country.”

“You really believe that, General?” Marte pressed.

“Marte—” he began, drawing back as the nurse applied a malodorous salve to his burns. “Smells like damn fish!”

“Do you really believe that?” Marte asked again. “That there are sleepers all over the United States?”

Freeman was sure she believed it too, her repetition of the question merely an attempt to have him answer in a form best suited for TV. This was Larry King grist. “I do,” said Freeman, asserting, “Most Americans — the experience of 9/11 and this last week notwithstanding — are far too sanguine about the extent of the sleeper danger.” There, she had her quote, and it was the truth. “And the Canadian border’s a walkthrough,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

This last comment was the one that grabbed headlines and caused a diplomatic fracas between Ottawa and Washington, D.C. It drove the “modern miracle” stories of what was occurring daily in America’s hospitals off the front pages. The space age technology of these miracles, wherein radical DNA-based techniques had greatly reduced burn healing and recovery times to months rather than years, barely got a mention amid all the war news.

Sal, as he put it, was “highly pissed off,” missing the action in the second cave, his day ending by having to return Mao’s mother to the restaurant, where she berated him again, in rapid-fire Vietnamese.

Mao was turned over to the FBI for further questioning with an “In consideration — leniency” note from Freeman stating how helpful the blackmailed terrorist had been.

Sal had joined Choir and David at the hospital to visit the general and Aussie. While David was waylaid by Marte Price, who wanted a follow-up interview with the Medal of Honor winner, Choir and Sal went to the second floor to see Aussie. They had to wait, the patient’s curtains closed as a harried nurse checked his wound and recorded his vital signs. Despite their relief that the military operation was over, Sal and Choir, now they had a chance to talk about it, were still troubled by Freeman’s behavior in the restaurant with the young woman and his actions en route to the second cave with Mao.

“Maybe,” said Sal, checking to see that no one was within earshot, “he should give it up.”

“Yes,” concurred Choir. “You fight these fanatics too much, you become like them. End justifies the means, right?”

“Right.”

And so one can only imagine the two men’s astonishment, indeed their shock, when they saw a gum-chewing sheriff’s deputy walking by with a young female patient, the woman in a washed-thin V-necked nightie. Sally — Mao’s would-be love — glared hatefully at them, a dark, saucer-sized bruise visible even through her nightie. She quickly drew the V of the nightie closed, as if rebuking two leering adolescents.

Sal and Choir stared at each other. “Point-blank!” said Choir. “He fired point-blank!”

“Shit!” said Sal. “He must have used a nonlethal round! A rubber bullet.”

“But wait a minute — what about the blood?”

“Fake, mate!” came an Aussie drawl from behind the curtains. “Those blood samples taken on Petrel from the terrorists we whacked. I told the general one of ’em was missing when I went to get ’em from the Humvee, that we only had four instead of five. Cheeky bastard bawled me out for it, and—”

“He’d taken it,” put in Sal.

“And after he’d fired the rubber round into Mao’s woman, who dragged her up, her blouse covered with blood?”

“Cunning old prick,” said Sal.

“Silly bitch thought she’d been hit,” continued Aussie. “Well, she had been. Those nonlethals hit hard, mate.”

“You shit,” said Sal. “You—”

“Ah, don’t get your balls in a knot,” continued Aussie. “I found the vial on the floor — guess he couldn’t do everything at once. If he tried to put it back into his pocket, we would have seen that. Anyway, once I confronted him, he ordered me to keep it quiet. If young Mao even suspected it’d been a put-up job to scare him witless, there’s no way he’d’ve told us about the tunnel. Everything was riding on that. Fuck, if we’d—”

“Excuse me!” It was a burly head nurse, and even with the starched white uniform, she looked as if she’d stepped right out of the World Wrestling Federation’s ring after crushing Jesse Ventura. “We’ll not have any of that foul language here, thank you very much. There are children here, you know.”

The SpecFor trio were utterly cowed. Terrorists, they could do. This, they couldn’t handle. “Sorry, ma’am,” they said contritely.

As she left, there was a moment of silence, Sal and Choir feeling guilty for ever doubting the general.

Down on the first floor, Freeman stood impatiently in the phone cubicle outside Emergency, the stiffness in his chest from the impact of the sub’s.50 round against his Kevlar spreading up to his neck and shoulders. He could tell that if he didn’t get something to relieve the discomfort, as the hospital staff referred to pain, he would be in for a Motrin-sized headache. Trouble was, to get a pill in Emergency required a consultation with an M.D. So instead he took a combat vial of morphine from his jacket and jabbed it into his upper arm.

“Junkie!” exclaimed a disgusted young woman hurrying by with an open-mouthed teen. “In the hospital yet. I dunno.”

Freeman felt badly — stupid thing to do — and was about to hang up the phone so he could go and explain, but then he heard Charles Riser’s voice on the other end.

“Mr. Riser?”

“Yes?”

“General Freeman here. You’ve probably seen the news, Mr. Riser, about what’s been happening up here in the—”

“The sub and that other boat, yes. Thank God.”

“Mr. Riser, I hate to fall back on a cliché, but I can’t think of anything better than to say I’ve got some good news and bad news. Well, I guess it’s all bad for you. Li Kuan and General Chang are— were —the same person. Chang being in prison was a lie — just a smoke screen.”

Freeman waited, giving Charles Riser a chance to absorb the shock. It was only seconds, but seemed infinitely longer, before Riser, whom Freeman imagined must have had to sit down, get his thoughts together, replied, “Is — Are they …?” his voice taut with tension.

“He’s dead,” said Freeman. “Shot the son of a bitch myself.”

There was another long pause before Riser inquired, “You’re sure he’s dead?”

“Deader’n a fucking doornail — excuse my Latin.”

“You actually saw him die?”

“Mr. Riser, I saw the scumbag melt . I can go into details if you like, but I’m sure—”