Ian Slater - Choke Point

He was relieved when he saw the early morning lights of Hangzhou, still sparsely lit by Western standards. Most of them were clustered east of the West Lake, a long string of lanterns marking the Sudi Causeway, which seemed to be running uphill north to south across the four-square-mile lake as the plane banked, the blackness of the lake dotted here and there by the firefly dots of ferries and sampans.

After the gritty Mongolian dust storms that perennially blanketed Beijing and irritated his contact lenses, it was the fresh, sweet air of Hangzhou’s surrounding hills that first struck Charles as he stepped off the plane. The second thing he noticed was the abundance of colored lanterns — Hangzhou would of course be required to celebrate the anniversary of Mao’s revolution, but much of the bustle in the city was in preparation for the Moon Festival.

At the Hangzhou rail station there were no soft-seat-class tickets left. Envisaging riding “hard seat,” jammed in with masses of “cawking,” spitting comrades in a blue haze of cigarette smoke and shouted dialects, Riser told a taxi driver the price he was prepared to pay in yuan for the eighty-mile cab ride to Suzhou. The driver snorted as if the proposed price was ridiculously low. Riser began walking to the next cab in line when the first driver relented. Even so, he wrote down the amount so there could be no “misunderstanding” when they reached Suzhou. “Ni hùi shuo yingwen ma? ” he asked the driver. Do you speak English?

“Bu shuo,” the driver said, shaking his head.

“Zhèci lüxing yào hua duochang shíjian?” How long does it take?

“Two … maybe forty hours,” the driver told him in English, grinning in the rearview mirror. A comedian.

Charles gave him a smile, though he didn’t feel like it. The fact that the teeming life of China, of the world, was going on outside without the slightest concern for his daughter’s death seemed monstrous to him. But part of the reason he put his Walkman earphones on again was not so much to shut out the world, but to try to make sense of Mandy’s urgent, static-saturated message that he’d taped and replayed at least twenty times. And to hear her voice. And, yes, in part, to black out the teeming, uncaring world, to close his eyes to the passing fields of morning, to retreat like a migraine sufferer, withdrawing from his pain into the cave of darkness. In drawing the shades against the indifference of the world, against its harshness and unrelenting glare, he could see her again, hear her voice. His memory of her and his need for vengeance were the only things that made it possible for him to go through these China days. But he couldn’t escape the urgency in her tone.

“Daddy … Wu Ling … loaded … as usual … told me Chang… tralize … or … wes … kind of deal … the mill …”

He only hoped Bill Heinz could help.

At first Riser had resisted passing on a copy of the garbled conversation to the military attaché. It seemed to him like giving up something, his daughter’s last words, an intensely private thing, to a stranger. But maybe the appropriate agencies could make something of it? Since 9/11, the atmosphere in the embassy had been as paranoid as that in America itself. And so, while not yet recovered from the mind-numbing shock of Mandy’s murder, he sought what the media called “closure,” while knowing there could never really be any following your child’s death. Which was when he had typed out a memo, including the message, to Heinz.

At the surface, the tough fiberglass Kirvy-Morgan diving helmets that Frank Hall’s Petrel crew had gotten for Rafe Albinski and Peter Dixon were a bright canary yellow atop the SEALs’ black neoprene dry suits. Under the suits, they wore their Navy-issue clothing as they dove to reinvestigate Darkstar’s first reported anomaly, only this time they would be going much deeper, literally trying to get to the root of the problem.

Within fifteen feet, the canary yellow diving helmets were a light pastel. Another twenty feet, and Frank Hall — his right hand wheeling clockwise, telling the two adjacent winch men to keep lowering — could no longer see the helmets. His eyes shifted instead to the two blocks at the apex of the square A-shaped derrick, the depth needle on each block moving smoothly, registering the two divers’ descent. Each of the SEALs’ umbilical cords consisted of a half-inch black air, or Kluge, hose, a thin communication wire and nylon tethering rope. They had passed easily over the block’s wheel, a coarse, chalky white powder rising from both divers’ cables as dried salt particles were spat out by the uncoiling tether rope.

In the nether world 180 feet down, the two SEALs saw the high intensity light of their halogen lamps suddenly speared by a sixty-foot-high forest of kelp moving in a strangely beautiful yet Quixotic ballet, parts of it swaying gracefully side to side in the main east-west current, other strands of the amber plant quivering rebelliously, the rasping sound of frond upon frond faintly audible to the divers’ external mikes. Dixon, though the junior of the two, wasn’t at all fazed by the sight of the massive kelp barrier, which was so wide their halogen beams couldn’t find a perimeter around which they might circumscribe the forest. In fact, Dixon thought it a “cool” diversion, and he radioed Rafe Albinski, “Man, that’s pretty!”

Albinski agreed, but he’d lost colleagues to this “pretty” stuff. Like fishing line that could entrap divers, he’d seen this mesmerizing ballet of giant shadow and light turn ugly, the vertical forest breaking up in intertidal flux, collapsing in a morass of interweaving vines. It could be a huge mesh in which men had became quickly entangled, their air used up much faster than normal if they’d succumbed to panic, and then ended up suffering, gasping as hopelessly as a fish trapped in a net.

But they passed through the kelp, turning their mikes’ volume down to drown out the irritating abrasive sound of the kelp chafing itself. The immediate drop in the noise level was a welcome respite, so much so that when Albinski felt a juddering sensation against his umbilical air hose, he assumed he’d merely swum against an unseen stalk on the kelp perimeter, and guessed that the impact registered all along the snaking air hose, communication wire, and rope to Petrel ’s compressor, over 180 feet above them. Then he felt a tug, more like a yank, on his umbilical, causing him to rise several feet before descending again.

Something also sent a shudder down Dixon’s air umbilical, but it had not been nearly so strong. “You feel that, Rafe?” Dixon asked his dive buddy. But all he heard was a faint noise like a tap left running. Remembering that he’d squelched the volume button against the kelp, he turned it up. Now he heard a roaring sound as if a dam had burst — perhaps the noise of a bubble cascade picked up by Albinski’s mike — so loud it would surely drown out any sound of Albinski confirming a sudden and potentially fatal imbalance of pressure caused by whatever had whacked his umbilical and been thwarted by his helmet’s nonreturn valve automatically shutting off, preventing a surge of water into his air hose.

The vibration in Albinski’s umbilical’s communications wire was so intense that Frank Hall, standing on Petrel ’s aft deck, saw the A-frame’s block bucking violently. He could also hear the splitting of individual strands of the umbilical’s tether rope, throwing off droplets from the visible part of the tether line with such force that the shower of water particles hissed as they peppered the waves. The tension meter needle on the A-frame’s block was shivering ominously, its point in the red “overload” zone.