Ian Slater - Choke Point

“No way, José!”

Frank Hall’s voice couldn’t be heard on the PA system in the engine room, and so he sent down a crewman to tell them. Petrel was bucking the incoming tide, reducing the ship’s speed by two to three knots. Even so, the ETA was about seven minutes.

“Can you finish in time?” inquired Frank’s anxious messenger.

Neither Malcolm nor Jimmy bothered answering him. Not a second could be wasted in superfluous conversation. “Tiny!” yelled Jimmy. “We need your—”

But the big oiler had already taken off his leather belt, and cut four six-inch-long strips from it.

“Atta boy!” Next, Jimmy turned to Malcolm. “Tubing, Mal!”

Malcolm handed him the flexi quarter-inch rubber hosing.

Jimmy, his face now streaming with perspiration, could’ve kissed Tiny when he saw that the big mechanic had already punched holes at either end of the four six-inch sections of belt leather, because all he had to do was slip the rubber tubing through both holes and tie a knot. He gave the completed slingshot to Frank’s messenger. “Try it out topside. Lose it and I’ll—”

“I won’t,” said the messenger, scuttling up the grated stairway.

“Use somethin’ that weighs about five pounds!” Jimmy hollered after him.

Meanwhile, Malcolm was halfway through the series of bends required for the second slingshot, his job made easier because a crewman had already cut the second twelve-foot rod into the required lengths.

Ten feet below the surface of the crescent bay and six feet ahead of him, in what would normally have been the crystal clear water of the bay, Peter Dixon saw a huge inky stain in the dull, fog-filtered light. Unlike an oil spill, it swayed back and forth in an underwater ballet. It was kelp, he realized, extending left and right of him as far as he could see. He couldn’t help but recall the bloody ooze that had once been Albinski, his swim buddy, and momentarily he panicked, turning to go back to the stack to rejoin Freeman, Sal, and Choir. Then he saw that an arm of the kelp had moved around in back of him. He might have to surface right here, at what he guessed was about fifty yards from the sub, and take his chances, knowing the MP5’s maximum effective range was fifty yards. Surface or run?

By feel alone, Dixon switched the safety off, selecting the automatic position, and pulled the cord on his CO 2cartridge to inflate his flotation vest, to relieve him of the necessity to tread water in the chop as he fired.

The moment he surfaced, the gunner’s feeder on the sub spotted him, the dark green kelp — black in the fog — having drawn his attention. What saved Dixon from the first burst was the height of the gunner. He was short, and the few seconds it took for the gunner to up his hand grips to sustain close-range fire, Dixon got off two three-round bursts. The 9mm thudded into the work party, two of the men splashing into the water. Dixon waited in a trough in the bay’s chop before firing again, and hit a third terrorist.

Freeman, manning the RIB’s bow-mounted M-60 as it now shot out from the sea stack’s protection to assist, opened up with one-in-five tracer, the white streaks flying high over the sail before he heard his rounds striking, sparking, on the sail’s port side. The M-60 failed to penetrate the high-tensile steel, but the tracer was worrying the sub’s gunner and his feeder, who pushed the ammunition belt so high above his head while ducking to avoid being hit that Freeman thought his gun would jam. It didn’t, the next burst from the.50 “cracking” in the air, missing Dixon but raking the peaked bow of the RIB another fifty yards to the west. It splintered the inflatable’s fiberglass keel, the disintegration at a chop-pounding thirty knots sounding like the multiple splitting of thawing spring lakes. Rather than chunks of ice disintegrating, however, the fiberglass came apart in lumps that bore an uncanny resemblance to cotton candy.

The RIB was sinking, but Freeman doggedly squeezed off a three-second burst even as the inflatable sank nose down into the choppy sea. The burst was so long that the M-60’s barrel turned dull red, as it was wont to do after a quick hundred rounds. Sal was convinced that if he’d been able, the general would have snatched and fired his MP5 or thrown a couple of his grenades at the sub, except for the fact that he was sinking.

“C’mon, General!” Sal shouted. “Head for the falls — three o’clock!” As the overheated barrel sizzled, releasing vapor into a fog that was quickly growing thicker, obscuring the sub, Choir and Sal saw the general with his hands still on the M-60, seawater spurting up through the multiholed deck. As Freeman was obscured from sight, the fog was pierced by tracer, which, given the RIB’s acute angle, had no possible chance of hitting the sub.

Aussie Lewis, hearing the noise of the firefight, along with the surge of the RIB’s prop as it raced through the water, dived and kicked furiously to clear the turbulence of the falls. Submerged and without an attack board, he was keeping the distance count in his head — usually a simple enough task, but under fire, demanding. When he judged he was within range, his vision blocked by the inky droop of what had become a bay-wide blanket of kelp, he came up, wiping kelp off his mask, glancing quickly to see whether Sal, Choir, Freeman, or Dixon was in his line of fire.

He saw nothing but fog and the dark stain of kelp off to his left, beyond which he then spotted his four SpecFor buddies. They were swimming toward the now deserted beach where discarded boxes and drums were afire, suffusing the fog with an orange glow. The fierce crackling noise of knotted pine packing cases going up in flames made it sound as if a distant firefight was in progress, when in fact no one could be seen in the cave or along the sand and rocky shoreline.

Like the others still swimming toward the shore, Aussie had lost sight of the sub in the dense fog that kept rolling in. All he was aware of now was the soft whir of a helicopter that was already above him before he recognized its telltale, muffled engine sound. It was a two-seater Little Bird, PETREL II stenciled along its tail boom. The chopper swooped over Freeman, Choir, and Sal, as well as Dixon, who was in the process of joining his comrades, still about forty yards from the bay’s shore. Aussie guessed, correctly, that the Little Bird’s infrared homer had been drawn into the bay by the heat of the fires on the beach.

He dove again and kicked hard for the beach, making better time submerged than his surface-borne comrades. He was slowed, however, by more kelp, and when he surfaced again, his ears were ringing from the noise of the two approaching ships that the others had also heard and also were as yet unable to see. As Aussie drew closer to the other four members of the team, he surfaced. His kelp-draped head startled the nerve-rattled Dixon, who was about to fire when he recognized the floppy SEAL hat above the mask of the “creature from the Black Lagoon,” as Salvini would later call Lewis.

Now, however, Salvini, the general, and Choir were not watching Aussie, but the cliff face. Like a motorist seeing an onrushing car too late, everything had slowed to breath-stopping slow motion as the Little Bird pilot, his helmet visible despite the fog, realized the fire his infrared had detected was just that — a fire on a beach and not a burst of radiant heat from a fleeing sub. He took the Little Bird up sharply, avoiding the cave’s mouth and most of the soaring green cliff face — but not its overhanging lip of vegetation-covered rock.

The helo’s blades sliced into the hidden underside of the overhang then dropped, tail rotor first, plummeting down to the beach. Freeman’s team involuntarily braced for the explosion they all expected, and it came a few seconds after impact, the flames belching upward, illuminating the cave mouth. For the first time, they saw an aluminum ladder, about twelve feet long, leading up from the beach to the cave, clearly visible as the heat of Little Bird’s conflagration, which included the three packs of LOSHOK, melted the ladder’s struts, the struts drooping like strips of spaghetti as the ladder collapsed into a whitish, stringy pile of molten metal.