Ian Slater - Choke Point

But now it was time to get a detailed map of the area and to call the team — or, as he liked to refer to them, the old Special Forces “gang.” There would be no small talk now that Freeman was sure that the Navy — indeed the United States — was in even more danger than it feared.

Aussie Lewis in Los Angeles was the first to get the call.

“You in for a job?” Freeman asked him.

“Location?” replied the laconic Aussie Lewis, refusing as always to admit surprise.

“Washington State,” Freeman said. “Picking apples. You fit?”

“A mile with full kit, in under ten. How’s that?”

“Adequate.” It was part of the code. “Now this is crucial: What’s your current waist?”

“Thirty-one. Thirty-two after lunch at Hooters.”

So he was fit. “One more thing …” said Freeman.

“I’m waiting.”

“Will Mommy let you go?”

Lewis ignored the taunt. “When?”

“Tomorrow, 1600. You have your own Draeger?” He meant the special chest-mounted rebreather unit and air tank which, unlike other diving gear, would not release telltale bubbles that could betray your position to the enemy.

Next, Freeman called Sal Salvini in Brooklyn, asking the same question. The answer was, “I’m packing now.”

Choir Williams, who had settled in the quiet little town of Winthrop, nestled in eastern Washington’s Cascades, the wilderness mountain chain that ran south of Mount Baker near the Canadian-U.S. border, received the last call. But by the time the general dialed him, the Welsh-American who’d never lost his accent had already been contacted by Aussie Lewis.

“Williams here!” he answered the phone. “A fine lick of a lad I am. Fit as a rugby fly-half and a devil with the ladies!”

There was a polite pause. “Mr. Williams. It’s Pastor Keenheart here. Perhaps I’ve caught you at a bad time?”

“Ah yes — well, ah, no — Pastor.”

“The choir at Winthrop St. Andrews wondered if you’d be so kind as to lend us your fine eisteddfod tenor voice for our Thanksgiving service.”

“Ah yes, of course. Sorry, Pastor, I thought — I thought you were an old pal of mine. Yes, of course I’d be happy to assist, though I could be out of town.”

“Oh, that’d be a pity, because two of our soprano ladies wanted you to bang them!”

“General?”

Choir answered Freeman’s questions, including giving his waist size, and as he had with Aussie and Salvini, Freeman told him to bring “Draeger” along, as if the latter were a person. Choir inquired about David Brentwood, the other member of the old team. Would he be going also?

“No!” It was so emphatic that Choir was taken aback — they had always worked as a team. He didn’t press further. And, being a single man, there was no “Mommy” consideration for Choir.

When Eleanor Prenty heard a message on her answering machine from Freeman—“I know what’s going on”—she called him immediately, her earlier reluctance to return his calls or seek his advice having vanished in light of — or rather, the darkness of — the Utah and Turner having been sunk. No one in COMSUBPAC-9 seemed to know anything other than what oceanographer Frank Hall had informed them: that SEAL diver Rafe Albinski had apparently spotted a mini — or could it be a midget? — sub before his suspicious death, and that Admiral Jensen had therefore requested an airlift of the Navy’s small NR-1B research sub from the Atlantic coast to Whidbey Island, where it could be launched to help in the investigation.

Freeman explained to Eleanor Prenty where he thought the sub was by referring to what he called the reverse-seven shape of the Olympic peninsula’s coastline, which appeared in the Cape Flattery quadrant of the 1:110,000 maritime chart of the Juan de Fuca Strait where he’d spotted the simple four-word entry “Hole in the Wall.” It referred to a sea cave in the extraordinarily rock-pitted coastline.

“A cave!” Eleanor said, struck by the general’s perspicacity. But she immediately pointed out to him the difficulty of getting enough divers to search almost one hundred miles of some of the wildest coastline in North America. All available divers were already needed to scout every port and dock—

“I’ve already made calls,” Freeman cut in, “to three or four of the best SEAL SpecOp guys in the country.”

“ Three or four? It’d take hundreds more,” she said.

“You’re right,” Freeman replied.

Eleanor was taken aback by his agreeing with her and his friendly tone. “So,” she said, “I suppose you have an alternate plan.”

“Yes ma’am.” This was the problem he’d solved in the bath. “COMSUBPAC Group 9’s UAV.”

She thought for a moment — military types were always throwing around their acronyms for equipment, and it gave her pleasure to surprise him. “Unmanned aerial vehicle?”

“Right.”

The National Security Advisor felt elated.

“I want to have Darkstar do an infrared run west from Pillar Point to Cape Flattery, then south to a place called Father and Son. Fifty-seven miles in all.”

Eleanor was trying to locate the place names on her wall map. No luck, but she’d already grasped Freeman’s idea. “Hot spots,” she said. “The UAV photographs the fifty-seven miles of coast, and any hot spots indicating human habitation can be investigated by our divers. Right?”

“You’ve got it. Darkstar’s pix are digital disc so we can get real-time feed.”

“I’ll have the CNO contacted right now to order—”

“Ah,” cut in the general, “maybe you could have your Admiral Jensen call the CNO.”

Eleanor hesitated. It’d make more sense for her to—“You want Admiral Jensen to get the credit.”

“Well, hell,” Freeman said, “poor bastard could use some. Media, everyone, wants someone to blame. Someone to crucify. Maybe he was derelict. I don’t know. None of us’ll know till we have time to investigate. Time for that later. Right now we need to go after the sub and its hideaway.”

She was beginning to like the gruff, bluff legend they sometimes called George C. Scott because of his uncanny resemblance to the Oscar-winning actor who had made such an indelible impression with his acclaimed portrayal of Patton, one of Freeman’s boyhood heroes. “That’s very generous of you, General.”

He mumbled something about “there but for the grace of God go I,” and asked her to let him know when Darkstar was airborne and to give him a password for his laptop’s entry to the UAV’s real-time IR transmits of its surveillance flight.

At the firing range at Fort Lewis outside Tacoma, the setting sun had thrown pine and spruce trees into stark relief. Over Puget Sound, the strait, and the symphony of mountains, cumulus, and seacoast, there was a pink-lavender beauty so redolent with the smell of forests and pure air from the perennially snowcapped Olympics that it would have seemed the wild imaginings of some fantastical painter but for the fact that it was real.

America remained traumatized, its Navy humiliated, its self-esteem bombarded by the unrelenting anti-American foreign press scoffing at the Navy’s continuing embarrassment about what to do in the strait. With two capital vessels gone, the Turner ’s battle group, or what was left of it, was “like a man caught in a minefield,” the New York Times editorialized. “He can neither go forward nor retreat, having seen his most forward comrades on the Utah and those behind him on the Turner blown up. In short, the Navy is paralyzed.”

But on the firing range at Fort Lewis, David Brentwood’s only concern at the moment wasn’t what the editorialists were saying but that his lame right hand was refusing to play its part, its fingers bunched in an immovable, stubborn fist. The Humvee’s driver, who had brought the Medal of Honor winner to the range, opened the back door to grab the only new ambidextrous F2000 assault rifle at Fort Lewis.