Ian Slater - Choke Point

He noticed a young couple in from his neighboring village sniggering at him, the girl cupping her hand in front of her mouth, whispering to her boyfriend, then trying unsuccessfully to stop her giggling. Moh saw the boyfriend staring at him, saying something, which sent the girl into another fit of giggles, the boyfriend sniffing the air as if there was something malodorous in the room. Moh realized they were probably laughing at the smell of the fungi fertilizer, the couple looking down on him in his overalls as if he was a pig farmer. The two idiots didn’t deserve defending, he thought. He had a good mind to forget it, to walk out. But he stayed, and not just to enjoy the sight of the pretty clerk. He’d do it for his son stationed on Kinmen and for all the other young men and women who were worth defending and who were putting their lives on the line. Still, it irked him — the couple were the kind of college-educated yuppies whom Mao had sent out to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution and made work, the communes puncturing their arrogant self-assurance with real labor so they’d respect those who’d built the Revolution. Moh didn’t like the Communists, but sometimes …

Anger had overtaken his normal passivity, but now the loyal mushroom grower concentrated on the girl’s breathing again, his eyes closed from fatigue and the fantasy of having her in the dark, cool shed. From outside, a gust of gale-force wind rattled the office door. She would cling to him, frightened of the storm, the howling winds, the electric-blue lightning crashing around them, and he’d hold her, comforting her, telling her all would be well.

By the time Moh Pan reached the Civil Defense counter, his fantasies about the beautiful clerk had been sabotaged by the young couple sniggering at the smell of his work clothes. When he reported to the clerk that he’d seen some kind of aircraft or ships off the north cape, any confidence he might have had that they were Chinese Communists evaporated. She thanked him for the information and gave him a smile, but there was nothing remotely sexual in it, merely a young woman’s courtesy toward an older man. He was old enough to be her father, his son Ahmao on Kinmen young enough to be her husband. Moh felt dejected — immeasurably old — exacerbated by the feeling that the world had passed him by. Outside, a gust hit him with such force it blew him back against the glass, rattling its frame. Now he wanted to go back to the mushroom sheds for refuge. He saw his wife coming out of the market crowd, counting her money, the red currency startlingly vibrant against the nondescript gray of the town square.

“Did you tell them?” she asked perfunctorily, without looking up from the bunch of hundreds.

“Yes.”

“What did they say?”

“Nothing.”

“You have to recharge your cell.”

“Yes,” Moh Pan agreed obediently. If his cell had been charged, he wouldn’t have had to walk all the way into town and get a chance to see the young beauty.

“They were probably ours anyway,” said his wife, stuffing the money into her purse, the sea wind billowing her scarf.

“Yes,” agreed Moh Pan. “A big waste of time trudging into town.”

After helping his deckhands extract what had been Albinski’s dry suit, now looking like a black, flattened toothpaste tube, oceanographer Frank Hall decided he had to take a core from the sea bottom — see if a hot vent’s plume of superheated water was responsible for the kind of turbulence that would have fatally loosened the two divers’ air hoses and twisted the kelp around the umbilicals.

Young Peter Dixon, whey-faced, being sick in one of the dry lab buckets, didn’t hear the ex-SEAL-cum-oceanographer approaching the bright island of the stern’s deck lights, seeing only Frank’s shadow looming over him.

“Where’s Albinski’s attack board, Bud?” he asked Dixon, putting his arm on the young diver’s shoulder.

Dixon looked up from the bucket, wiping his mouth, as if he hadn’t heard the Petrel ’s captain, or rather, that he’d heard him but couldn’t believe the man’s insensitivity. “Piss off!”

Frank understood, but he was captain — he shouldn’t, couldn’t , let his emotion cloud the issue. “I need to see what the temperature variant was down there. It could tell us whether a sudden release of vent pressure or whatever had anything to do with it.”

“What’s the difference, man? He’s dead.”

“You’re not.” Dixon was supposed to be a SEAL, not a baby. “Where’s the board?”

“Guess it’s over there,” said Dixon, indicating the shining pile of brown vegetation beneath the A-frame, where the long tendrils of kelp had been cut away from what had been Albinski’s dry suit.

Frank gingerly extracted the attack board from the pile of water-slicked tendrils, cut the nylon fishing line by which it had been attached to Albinski’s arms, and handed it up to the bosun.

“Mother of—” began the bosun in shock.

Scrawled on the attack board’s slate was one word: Minisub.

Frank strode to the deck’s intercom mike midway between the winches. “Bridge?”

“Bridge here. Go ahead.”

“Call COMSUBPAC-9. Urgent. Send chopper immediately.” Next Frank turned to the bosun. “Assemble the crew. Dry lab. Everyone except watch personnel.”

It wasn’t until the bosun saw Frank working the tumblers on the dry lab’s safe that he realized why Hall hadn’t ordered the bridge to transmit the discovery of a hostile minisub in American waters directly to COMSUBPAC Jensen. The Petrel , as a civilian vessel — though contracted by the Navy and using a Navy transport helo in its hangar — had no coding computers aboard, and anyone could have picked up a plain language transmit, including those aboard the hostile. The helo would have to take the message.

This delay in getting the message to Admiral Jensen by chopper was to prove fatal, however. In retrospect, to some critics it was far more damaging to the United States in the near future than the not so sensible delay caused by the decision in December 1941 to send the warning of an imminent attack on Pearl Harbor to Admiral Kimmel by telegram.

In the next hour the President let it be known publicly, via the TV and cable networks, that in order to “calm down the rhetoric between”—He had wanted to say, “between China and Taiwan,” but Eleanor Prenty convinced him to change it. “—the People’s Republic of China and the people of Taiwan,” he had dispatched elements of the 7th Fleet to the Taiwan Strait — the McCain —and that because of commitments elsewhere in the ongoing war against terrorism, he considered it prudent to send the USS Turner and its battle group as well. This announcement, the President hoped, would send a clear message to both potential combatants to back off or risk the ire of the United States.

It was a monumentally bad decision because it was based on insufficient information: first, about who exactly was attacking whom, and second, on not yet having received the information, because of Petrel ’s helo delay, that a hostile sub had apparently penetrated the “American littoral,” or coastal waters, well within the two-hundred-mile limit, a limit extended in modern times, updating the old three-mile limit derived from the fact that in the days of sail navies, the maximum range of a man-o’-war’s cannon had been three miles from shore.

The President was not the first occupant of the White House to have made a bad decision against the onrush of escalating developments, nor, because of the unforeseen consequences of his public address, would he be the only President — like JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis — who would come to think that it might be his and America’s last decision.