Ian Slater: Choke Point

There were at least eight of them, momentarily illuminated by the detonation of a flash-bang stun grenade tossed by Sanchez on Jam’s right. The two commandos to Jam’s left were literally shot to pieces as the fire erupting from the terrorists’ AK-47s threw them in sharp relief against the rock that formed the cave’s cul-de-sac. The terrorists hid behind a shoulder-high barricade of expended ammunition boxes filled with pebbles.

One of Brentwood’s trio fell dead, and his right arm was split from below his elbow to his shoulder, streaming blood, as he continued to fire at the terrorists twenty feet away, his HK tucked tightly between his left arm and Kevlar-protected waist. The hydraulic shock of the rounds knocked down al Qaeda as if they were being felled with a sledgehammer. Jam pumped his Remington four times, its 12-gauge sabot slugs smashing through the terrorists’ barricade. The force of the slugs was so powerful that three of the four not only shattered the stone-packed ammo boxes and killed three of the terrorists, but also created a deadly hail of pebbles that hit the remaining four terrorists with the equivalent of a hundred or more stones.

Within seconds all but one of the eight were down, the thudding booms of the Remington’s enfilade momentarily deafening the three remaining commandos. Smoke and the acrid stench of cordite engulfed the cul-de-sac, then spread out slowly in ethereal layers, wafting like lazy swamp gas out toward the cave’s entrance where Eddie Merton, unable to make radio contact with his buddies, wondered what the hell was going on. Only one terrorist was still on his feet, one hand thrust up in surrender, the other trying vainly to stem the spill of his entrails, the red spaghetti-like clump taking on the luminescence of melting ice cream in the four remaining commandos’ NVGs.

The stench of feces and urine choked the air, then Brentwood heard a sound like running water — pebbles continuing to spill from the terrorists’ shattered ammunition boxes, which had served as their ad hoc sandbags. With Sanchez, who’d thrown the illuminating flash-bang, covering the captive, Brentwood and Jam Hassim quickly checked the seven terrorists on the ground, feeling for a pulse with one hand, the other holding their weapons’ barrels against each enemy’s throat. The play-dead technique was as old as combat itself, but in the confusion of battle it still worked occasionally, taking a would-be victor, especially a new hand, by surprise. There was a flash in Brentwood’s NVGs — the one survivor throwing a knife at Sanchez. As it shot past Bentwood’s helmet, Hassim pumped two sabot slugs into him, rendering the man’s head mush on the cave’s back wall. Now all eight terrorists were dead. And when they checked, none of the men was Chinese. Bad intel? And what to show for it? Brentwood asked himself. Two Americans dead, and the brains of seven al Qaeda splattered against ancient rock. And no Li Kuan.

He took a moment to bend down and do up a loose bootlace. For a moment in this subterranean hellhole of death and gagging smells, he smiled to himself, recalling his dad who, like all parents, occasionally drove their kids nuts by repeating a favorite story or warning ad nauseam. In this case it was the memory of his dad telling him repeatedly how dangerous a loose shoelace could be. Again, the story of the German tenor, Fritz Wünderlich in the 1960s. Coming downstairs one evening in his home to answer his doorbell, Wünderlich, ignoring a loose shoelace, tripped, tumbled down the stairs, and broke his neck. “Just like that,” David’s father had told him. “Never ignore a loose lace, son.”

“No, Dad,” he’d replied.

Now, Brentwood heard a sound like tarpaper tearing — a SAW light machine gun. Two bursts. Then a sharp crack like a bull whip.

“Shit!” Jam said, moving fast, back past David and Sanchez toward the tunnel entrance to help Eddie. David followed. But neither of them ran. They knew that an escaping Li Kuan, or whoever it was, could have activated a booby trap somewhere along the six-foot-wide tube that was the cave, which rushed at them in their NVGs, the snaking, gun-smoke-filled enclosure now widening to ten feet, where they could finally stand up. There was another crack!

“Down!” shouted Jam, Brentwood instinctively dropping to the rock floor a few feet from the cave’s entrance. His flex Kevlar elbow pads absorbed most of the shock, and he smelled the sharp odor of burned cordite issuing from Merton’s now silent SAW drifting up like an errant fog out into the pristine mountain air outside the cave. Unlike the cloying perspiration- and rat-soured atmosphere behind them in the cave, the blast of oxygen was at once ice cold and invigorating, though it was laden with fine dust particles that in the NVGs’ magnified starlight looked to David like white tracer.

Jam Hassim he saw, was dead, facedown, the back of his head blown off by what must have been the sniper’s second shot. Eddie Merton had been killed by the first. What had been Eddie’s left eye was now a gaping void, the blood-filled socket a jagged-edged white hole on David’s NVGs, rapidly losing its intensity as the snow-cold wind moaning through the Hindu Kush caused the dead commando’s body temperature to plummet and his blood to coagulate. David used his infrared night sight to scan the razorback ridge that formed the other wall of the deep ravine. There was a residual heat signature, but no body except the one David was using as a weapon rest — Jam’s still warm corpse.

And why? David asked himself angrily. Because he’d bent down to fix a goddamn bootlace. What the hell had happened? Had the man who somehow escaped from the tunnel and shot Merton from behind been Li Kuan? And had he also fired the second shot, which killed Jam? Or had the second shot been fired by whoever had been on the ridge? It was the fog of war — no one would really know until they had the luxury of hindsight, the Monday morning quarterback’s clear-eyed view. All David knew for sure now, as he tried to piece it together, was that one of the best buddies he’d ever had was dead because of that goddamn shoelace.

He cussed his old man, then felt guilty and extraordinarily weak, the effect of the blood he’d lost from his right arm overtaking the adrenaline rush of the face-to-face combat in the claustrophobic killing zone in the cave. One thing was for damn sure, he thought. Somehow, somewhere, he was going to nail that son of a bitch Kuan.

He reached for Merton’s SATCOM mike lying inert on the ground, only now realizing that it would be touch-and-go as to whether a medevac helo would make it in time.

The Utah was nearing periscope depth. In combat control, Rorke ordered, “Stand by to shoot four and three.”

“Stand by to shoot four and three,” confirmed the OOD.

“Up scope!”

“Scope’s breaking,” announced the watchman.

Now speed was everything. Rorke, cap reversed, eyes glued to the scope’s rubber cups, flicked down the column’s arms. The cups weren’t supposed to be there, the design of the new Virginia-class attack sub having replaced the captain’s “old-fashioned” scope, the scope’s view through the cups now seen as pictures on TV monitors in the combat control center. However, finding the physical detachment from what they were viewing too unnatural, Rorke and some captains of other Virginia-class subs had insisted on retaining the old drill. His arms draped over the handles, he rotated with the scope, then stopped, his senses super alert, the new-car-showroom smell of the CCCs more powerful than usual. “Bearing. Mark! Range. Mark! Down scope.”

Above the soft whine of the retracting search scope, his reflection distorted in its oil-glistening column, Rorke reported, “I have one visual contact.” His confident tone, however, masked the fact that, given the northwesterly chop and spray, it was difficult for him to discern the suspected hostile clearly. “Range?” he asked.