Ian Slater - Choke Point

“How about the NR-1B?” cut in Freeman. “It should be here by now, and—”

“There you’re in luck, General. My 2IC tells me it’s arrived on Whidbey, only five to six miles from the Keystone ferry ramp. Its crew’ll be the next flight in. I’m sure Admiral Jensen’ll get it launched as quickly as possible and send it out to you the moment the crew’s aboard.”

Keystone, Freeman knew, was approximately sixty miles to the east, on Whidbey Island. He also knew that, despite the wondrous gizmology of the relatively small 146-by-12.5-foot-diameter, nuclear-powered sub run by a crew of only two officers, three enlisted men, and two scientists, its maximum speed was said to be no more than eight knots on the surface and ten knots submerged. The general had learned from his contacts, however, that for the NR-1B it was closer to 25 knots surface speed, thirty submerged.

Even so, that would mean at least a two-hour wait, if all went well, before it could reach his SpecFor team.

“Do we go on or wait?” he asked the team.

“I say go,” said Dixon, who’d remained silent to this point, somewhat overawed by the general’s reputation, though less so now that he was seeing him in his wet suit, a little paunchier than the rest of them. Dixon was also surprised by the fact that a general would put an operational decision to a vote, the young SEAL making the mistake of so many who didn’t understand that supremely confident leadership was unafraid to put it to a vote if time allowed, and that it was only the insecure machos who needed to be making unilateral decisions all the time.

“If we wait,” said Aussie, “that oil tail could disappear, dispersed to hell and gone by the riptide. Then we’ll have bugger all to show the NR-1B and all its superduper sensors!”

“Choir, Sal?” asked the general, who then turned to the Coast Guard crewman and Dixon. “Lieutenant Dixon, Jorge?”

Jorge Alvaro was astonished that his opinion — that of an ordinary seaman — was being sought by none other than the legendary “George C. Scott.” Nobody, including his wife, asked him his opinion. Everyone, from his mother-in-law to USCG brass, was always telling him what to do. He heard the Welshman, Choir Williams, and the guy from Brooklyn — Salvatore, or something like that — say they might as well wait for the NR-1B, and the guy they called Aussie and his USCG comrade, Dixon, still arguing that they might save time by pursuing the oil spill now. The general wasn’t saying anything, Jorge realizing that for once his opinion was not only being sought, but that Jorge Alvaro, the son of migrant Mexican farm laborers, held the deciding vote. He didn’t want to court danger, but it was unlikely they’d see the sub. They’d just trace the spill, then call in the NR-1B. Besides, what if the midget struck again — this morning — and it became known he and the others had been bobbing around, waiting for the NR-1B?

“I say we go look for where that oil came from.”

It was obviously what Freeman wanted. “All right, cox-swain,” he told Alvaro. “Get this RIB moving.”

In seconds the sixteen-foot rigid inflatable’s twin caterpillar diesels roared to 830 horsepower, the twin water jets thrusting the boat forward against the wind, the console’s speedometer needle shaking at 28 knots. Every one of the six-man team, except Coxswain Alvaro, who stood at the Perspex-shielded control panel, was sitting on the fiberglass seats, one hand firmly gripping the aluminum steady bar, their weapons, stocks first, in the quick-release gun rack beside them. Freeman felt the painful arthritic jab in his left knee, an old war wound aggravated by the intense cold of the strait, and Peter Dixon had an uncomfortable sense of déjà vu.

“They’re Chinese!” Aussie shouted into the breath-robbing wind. “Five bucks, Choir.”

“Big spender!” retorted Choir, immediately drenched by a five-footer slamming hard amidships.

“All right!” Aussie yelled back. “Ten bucks!”

Choir seemed to nod, but in the kidney-whacking ride, Aussie couldn’t be sure.

“You hear me, you little Welsh bastard?”

“Ten dollars!” confirmed Choir.

“Ooh, lah de bloody lah! Ten dollars ! Anyone else?”

“Al Qaeda!” shouted Salvini.

“You’re on, Brooklyn!”

Reboarding the Kiowa Scout for the early morning hop back to Fort Lewis, David Brentwood was shivering so badly from his dunking in the oily scum of Port Angeles that the pilot, a quiet young redhead who obviously felt sorry for him, could hear his teeth chattering. She tried some small talk as they gained height above the waters of the strait and the wide slab of Admiralty Inlet, but David, clutching an Army-issue blanket about his oil-reeking body, had closed his eyes, the bunker-C fuel absorbed by the blanket stinging them, his anger at the human and environmental havoc caused by the terrorists inflamed by his inability to join his life-long buddies in striking back. The David he knew was not with him; instead it was a morose, uncharacteristically sullen Brentwood who curtly thanked the pilot and ducked beneath the Kiowa’s still-whirling blades, scurrying away like some bedeviled pilgrim for whom the storm had proved too much, and hating himself for his sullenness and self-pity.

A quarter mile from the Keystone ferry, from which the NR-1B would slide into the strait where its somewhat cumbersome-looking conning tower and bow would come into their own, the advance outriders heard a rushing sound. It was as if, one said, a stream of water from a hose had struck a pile of fallen leaves. It was a fuse.

The blacktop erupted with such a bang that the sound reverberated through the NR-1B on its trailer as if it had been struck with some enormous sledgehammer, the “singing” of the metal continuing for several seconds after the last of the black pebble-encrusted bitumen had fallen back down on and about the road, one lump felling an outrider, another two blown off their motorcycles.

Admiral Jensen had already said, “Jesus!” at least five times, this followed by an incoherent rage of profanity as, leaping from his Humvee, he raced towards the NR-1B against the advice of his traumatized driver. The Marine escorts fanned out speedily in U formation toward the launch point, laying down a hail of automatic fire that after six seconds all but denuded the surrounding salmonberry and blackberry bushes, only a leaf or two remaining after the savage onslaught of the Marines’ small arms fire.

There were no bodies to be found, only the bullet-flayed remains of the detonation cord that had been craftily buried, running from the salmonberry bushes through the sodden earth to the road. The long slit in which the det cord had been buried was patched and dusted in places with crushed gravel to make it look indistinguishable from a thousand other cracks on Highway 20.

“No one there, sir,” the Marine CO told Admiral Jensen, who was fighting to regain self-control as several Marines, rushing from the Humvee with its fire extinguisher, doused some small fires on the sub’s wooden trailer frame.

“No one?” said Jensen.

“No, sir. Must have been a remote detonation.” The Marine swept his M-16 across the panorama of gently rolling hills north of the ferry landing that they could now see. The big metal stanchions bracing the docking area were turning golden in the early morning sun that was burning off the mist that had crept inland across the fields and cranberry bogs. “Somewhere up there, probably,” said the Marine CO, now signaling his heavily armed men to secure the quarter mile of road that curved gently ahead to the deserted ferry terminal, the small waiting room, washrooms, and chained red pop machine appearing particularly forlorn.