Ian Slater - Choke Point

“Call him, Aussie,” Freeman said. “He’ll be back at Fort Lewis by now. Tell him to sign out an antitank launcher with HE rounds — just in case we bump into the bastards. It’ll give him a sense of lending a hand — well, at least doing something.”

“I’m on to it,” said Aussie, dialing Brentwood’s cell. He hoped he wouldn’t answer. Who wanted to be a gofer?

“Might piss him off,” said Salvini.

“Oh, thanks for that, Sal. That really helps.”

“We’ll see,” said Choir, all of which left Aussie wondering why Freeman wasn’t calling his protégé.

To Aussie’s relief, David didn’t answer, so Lewis left him a quick but succinct message to bring them the antitank launcher from Fort Lewis.

Despite the assistance rendered by a Coast Guardsman who volunteered, on his own time, to accompany him to satisfy U.S. Coast Guard regulations, Dixon had trouble getting the RIB out of Port Townsend harbor on his way to pick up Freeman’s team at Port Angeles.

It wasn’t so much the gut-slamming chop created by the incoming tide that delayed the RIB’s departure, but the disturbing number of oil-matted seabirds that had been washed into the harbor. Dixon had seen enough dead wildlife, and the possibility that some of the gulls, cormorants, and other birds might still be alive haunted him. Accordingly, he slowed down to no more than two knots, while the Coast Guard volunteer filled the time by double-checking what few provisions he’d been able to second from the already drained USCG quartermaster’s supplies and the antitank launcher that Captain Brentwood had dutifully brought up from Fort Lewis.

Unaware of Brentwood’s injury, Dixon had been about to ask David, whom he’d seen on CNN touring the hospital, if he’d like to come along on the investigation of Darkstar’s anomaly when Dixon noticed the difficulty the Medal of Honor winner had lifting the relatively light fifteen-pound AT-4 rocket launcher unit.

As if reading young Dixon’s mind, David had stayed to help push the sixteen-foot-long Bruiser off from shore, but his Vibram boot slipped on an oil-slicked rock, throwing him off balance. His immobile right arm instinctively flew out to regain balance, but instead he went, as Aussie Lewis would have said, “A over tit,” and fell into the oily muck at the water’s edge, able to use only his left hand to push himself to the kneeling position. The injured right arm that had failed him with the new ambidextrous Bullpup was draped in oil-slicked kelp washing ashore amid an offal of other diesel-soaked detritus. Out of respect, an embarrassed Dixon and the Guardsman had looked quickly away.

“What’s wrong with him?” the Coast Guard man inquired, looking back.

“Dunno,” Dixon replied, his attention arrested by the realization that the antitank launcher Brentwood had brought to the Bruiser was a Swedish disposable launcher/rocket. Once you fired it, that was it.

“Scuttlebutt,” said the Coast Guard crewman, “is that he screwed up on some gig in ’Ghanistan?”

Dixon took offense at the green crewman adopting “ ’Ghanistan” instead of “Afghanistan.” That was the right of warriors who had been there — or was he simply overreacting under the stress of the situation and the nagging doubt that he had somehow screwed up in failing to look out for Rafe Albinski, his swim buddy who’d literally had the life squeezed out of him? The bloody toothpastelike ooze had been so repellant that Frank Hall, after talking with Albinski’s wife, had the diver’s remains cremated at Port Townsend’s hospital and scattered in a quick burial at sea from Petrel ’s stern.

Freeman, Aussie, Salvini, and Choir were waiting at the Port Angeles wharf, loaded for bear. By the time Dixon arrived, they were already in their wet suits, with Draeger rebreathers and extra pouches of ammunition for Freeman, and Aussie’s grenade-launcher-equipped Heckler & Koch submachine guns, as well as Kevlar vests, stun, smoke, and HE grenades, “7” flashlight — with its right-angle shape — Dakine hydrater camelback, plus night vision goggles with flip-down infrared visor, and what they called “other assorted goodies.”

For Salvini, the weapon of choice was a waterproofed stripped-down lightweight “crap tolerant” laser dot, night-scoped M-16, and a hip-holstered sawed-off shotgun. In the unlikely event of an enemy in the distance, a trawler perhaps, this customized M-16 would give the team of six men, which included Dixon and the Coast Guard crewman, a reach far beyond the shorter but lethal HK submachine guns packed by the general and Aussie. And Choir, with his pistol-grip, Mossberg twelve-gauge shotgun, its pump-action mag loaded with alternate, double-ought and steel/flechette dart rounds, would provide additional firepower.

Freeman knew it was probably too much to expect that they would actually make visible contact with the midget sub. Then again, he remembered the astronomically high odds against the winning numbers of the New York lottery being 911 exactly a year after 9/11. All he could reasonably hope for was to find the general area from which the midget sub was operating and then call in for one of the 170-foot Mk IV Hurricane B class Coastal Patrol ships. These had a dash speed of 35 knots and bristled with heavy machine guns, chain guns, and pedestals for Stinger SAMs, plus a 30mm Gatling canon with the same armor-piercing power as the famously ugly and deadly A-10 Thunderbolt. The latter was a high-set, twin-engined tank buster that wiped the grins of derision from its uppity fighter cousins when it virtually destroyed Saddam Hussein’s tank corps and anything else that moved in the Iraqi desert in the war of 2003. But when he’d suggested to Coast Guard HQ in Seattle that they keep a Hurricane craft on standby to assist his team should they find any signs of the midget sub’s base of operations, the reply was polite but firm. Like all Coast Guard stations, they were swamped, and the Coast Guard admiral took the opportunity to get a load off his chest.

“General, there’s no way I can release a CP ship. We’ve only three in the whole Puget Sound area, and we’re using them with everything else we’ve got to try to bring some sort of minimal control — and I emphasize minimal —in every marina from Seattle to the San Juans. It’s sheer unmitigated panic out there. Do you have any idea how many marinas there are in the Puget Sound, the San Juan Islands, and Juan de Fuca Strait area?”

“Yes, I under—” began Freeman, trying to get into the one-way conversation, but he realized the Coast Guard admiral was as much an ear-basher as himself.

“Over six hundred,” the admiral went on, giving Freeman no time to reply. “And it’s a mob scene at each one. Our refugees aren’t listening to our assurances about tolerable levels of radiation, and are bidding like crazy for transport across the sound to the safety of Interstate 5. They want out — south to Oregon, Idaho, Nevada, Utah — as long as it’s away from the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Local cops are overwhelmed. Washington, D.C., is trying to get the National Guard in to maintain order, but the arteries are jammed solid. Besides, Washington doesn’t understand that the Northwest is waterways. We need coast guards more than the National Guards. Add to that the fact that the Pentagon is calling up reserves all over.”

“But dammit, Admiral, the White House surely wants me to—”

“General, we’ve been caught with our pants down. We’re getting hit on three fronts. There’s a resurgence of terrorism in Afghanistan, terrorism in our own swimming pool here, and now we’re on a knife edge with this Taiwan-ChiCom shit. We’ve got a new kind of world war on three fronts, General. Have you seen CNN — they’re calling the refugees in the Northwest ’America on the Run’!”