Ian Slater: Choke Point

Fifteen minutes later the phone jangled again. The admiral let it ring twice. “Jensen here.”

“Admiral, Duty Officer Morgan. No reports from Coast Guard Air, and their vessels report nothing but the usual run of boater accidents, general assistance calls, et cetera. But they’re sending a cutter out to have a look-see. It’s dark as sin out in the strait — they’ll use infrared.”

“Infrared wouldn’t show a spill in this weather,” the admiral pointed out. “If it is a spill.”

“No, sir,” agreed Morgan. “But they can take water samples.” Then the DO posited an entirely different but quite plausible explanation for the anomaly Darkstar had spotted: “It could be a NAWID.” He meant a natural air-water interface disturbance caused by a hard rain shower or a school of fish in a frenzy of feeding on plankton near the surface.

The admiral was nodding, thinking about requesting a “side-scan” sonar profile of the sea bottom rather than settling for the ordinary sonar depth reading that as a matter of standard procedure would be taken by the Coast Guard cutter. But to request a side-scan radar profile that would reveal any venting or other anomaly on the sea bed was a costly proposition for the Navy, ergo the taxpayers. And he could be accused of making a mountain out of a molehill. He decided to wait.

“All right,” he told Morgan. “Let me know if you hear any more. Request another Darkstar run tomorrow.”

“Aye aye, sir. Good night.”

The admiral replaced the phone. Maybe the anomaly had been nothing more than a sudden squall of wind. He’d seen that often enough — anybody who’d been on any kind of boat had seen it, an area of water disturbed by a phantom gust ruffling the water, causing it to momentarily take on a different shade of blue, green, or gray, depending on the color of the sky. But Margaret saw that he was worried.

“Go to sleep,” she urged, pulling the bedspread playfully up over his head.

“You think I’m overreacting?” came the muffled voice beneath the cover.

She put the magazine aside and switched off her bedside lamp. “Well, you have made a bit of a meal out of it.”

He cast off the cover. “A meal out of it? I’ve never heard you use that before.”

There was silence.

“You’ve never used that phrase before,” he repeated.

“I don’t know,” she said in the penumbra of his bedside light. “I must have read it somewhere.”

“ I’ve heard it before,” the admiral said accusingly. “It’s a limey expression. That limey admiral, the Brit liaison guy at the base. He’s always using it.”

“Maybe,” she said tiredly.

“But you’re never on the base. How would you know?”

There was another long silence before she spoke. “Don’t start with me, Walter.”

“Start what?”

“Obsessing.”

“Goddammit, all I said was that you’re never on the base. Are you?” Now he could hear the alarm clock ticking. “Answer me, Margaret … Margaret.”

She wouldn’t.

Dammit! He sat up, couldn’t sleep. But she could — through a tornado. Perhaps she’s right, he thought. He was obsessing again, his Darkstar anxiety expressing itself in veiled accusations about a suspected attraction between her and the limey liaison officer. Like a dog with an old bone, he told himself, his obsessive streak made worse throughout his career by the Navy’s insistence, particularly the nuclear navy’s near paranoid insistence, that you do everything by the book. Or else. Check, double-check, and check again. Lives depended on it. Oh, use your initiative by all means, but only after you know the rules well enough to know the ones you can break. Of course there were renegades, “cowboys,” like the SEALs and Freeman’s now-disbanded SALERTs — Sea Air Land Emergency Response Team — who thought they could operate under their own rules. But sooner or later the service — Army, Air Force, Navy, or Marine — reined them in, and they sure as hell didn’t make flag rank.

The problem, he knew, was that he was so close to becoming CNO. Settle down, he told himself. This was simply an attack of nerves and self-doubt that at times assailed even the most self-assured individuals, who momentarily, with sweating palms, heartbeat racing out of control, are seized by the unshakable conviction that they’re about to be found out, the veneer stripped away, the naked self revealed, warts and all. Jensen wondered if that was why Mike Borda, the Navy’s most beloved admiral — a “mustang,” a man who’d worked all the way up from the deck to admiral — ended up blowing his brains out in 1998, ostensibly for wearing a medal to which he wasn’t entitled.

His eyes now accustomed to the darkened room, Jensen made his way quietly into the living room, past the smell of hothouse roses, past the faintly visible outline of the model of the new Virginia-class sub, and poured himself a stiff Jack Daniel’s, eschewing ice for fear of the dispenser waking Margaret. Or was she just pretending to be asleep? Thirty years of marriage, and there were still times like this when he wasn’t sure whether she was genuinely asleep or using it as a means of escape.

“Get a grip,” he chided himself. “You’re acting like a goddamn ensign before his finals. You’re commander of Subgroup Nine, for Christ’s sake. C’mon, Walter!”

He started when he heard the phone ring, and took it in the kitchen. “Admiral Jensen!”

“Morgan here, sir. We have a Coast Guard cutter report. No anomaly.”

“No spill.”

“No spill. Fishheads.”

“Dumping!” said Jensen, realizing now that the anomaly had probably been caused by one of the hundreds of fishermen — oops, fishers , if you were headed for CNO — who plied the Northwest’s waters. They often dumped thousands of fishheads from their catch to save valuable storage space in the boats’ freezer, which, given the price of fuel, cost them a small fortune to keep cold. Yes, it was pollution of a sort, he acknowledged, but small potatoes, the fish heads quickly devoured by the sea’s predators.

Morgan could hear the admiral’s sigh of relief.

“Very well,” said Jensen. “Everything’s fine then. Good night.” There was new buoyancy in his tone.

But back in bed, pulling up the covers, residual anxiety stayed with him. “Everything’s fine,” he’d told Morgan. The very same phrase he’d used to assure Bill Gates et al. about the pristine waters of Puget Sound. It recalled the advice his uncle used to give him about voicing such blasé assurances. “Say that about your car,” his uncle had once cautioned, “and next day the goddamn wheels fall off!”

Flinging aside the bedspread once more, Jensen walked softly back to the living room and called the base. “Morgan. Call Port Angeles. Send out a Bruiser with two divers. See if there’s any evidence of gas venting from the seabed.” It was the one phenomenon amid all the wacko Bermuda Triangle theories that had made a smidgen of sense to Jensen — the idea that at times enormous bubbles of hydrate gas, “like a fart in a bathtub,” as one chief had indelicately but accurately put it, were vented from the sea’s bottom. Lighter than air, the escaping gas would not only disturb the water-air interface, but would rise rapidly, and if there was a “sparker” in its path, such as an aircraft or boat engine, there’d be an enormous explosion, leaving nothing on the radar screen.

“A Bruiser, two divers,” Morgan confirmed, adding, “It’ll be light in about an hour, Admiral. You want me to wait until—”

“No, send ’em out right away,” cut in Jensen. “Besides, it’ll be dawn by the time they get there. Tell them that if they smell gas vapor, they’ll need to cut the motor for the last half mile and go in under paddle power.”