Ian Slater - Choke Point

“I heard two ships before,” said Aussie, returning with water to cool the rubber tires.

“So did I,” added Choir, who with Salvini’s help had now sealed the gash inside the boat, Dixon and Freeman still working as fast as they could on the keel.

The combination of odors from fires in the cave and the pungent, now empty diesel drums, their hand pumps still attached, mixed with the sweeter smell of burning pine and the lingering odor of cordite and expended tracer casings to create a cloying mix that made Choir feel as if someone had stuffed his nostrils with cotton batting, forcing him to breathe through his mouth. And the warmer atmosphere on the beach that had pushed the fog offshore for a while was gradually disappearing, adding to the general discomfort of the team.

“Let’s hurry this up, lad,” Choir told Dixon. “Sooner I get some fresh air—”

“Hey!” shouted Dixon. “Get off my back!”

Aussie and Salvini’s silence seemed to thunder up and down the beach. Peter Dixon did have an attitude.

“Anyone seen any weapons, ammo, lying about?” cut in Freeman.

“Saw an M-60,” put in Aussie, “where I came ashore, but it’s useless. They spiked it.”

“So,” said Freeman, “we make do with what we have.”

Dixon scrambled out from under the trailer. “Finished.”

“Outstanding,” the general told him, slapping him on the shoulder. “You stay here and hold the beach in case we need a hand when we return.”

“Right.” Dixon nodded, grabbing his camelback and taking a long drink through its flexi tube.

“Let’s go, SAC!” said the general, his acronym standing for Salvini, Aussie, and Choir.

It had once been BACS, but this was the first time Brentwood was missing from the roster, forced to stay behind at Fort Lewis, where Freeman knew that the only outlet for his frustration at not being with his old team — and for the guilt he felt over his failure to get Li Kuan in Afghanistan — was to spend hour after hour firing small arms on the practice range. But even then, Freeman guessed the ex-SpecFor warrior must be frustrated by the fact that his left hand couldn’t master anything bigger than a handgun. At Fort Lewis, his proficiency with the Colt .45 and HK 9mm pistol was so good it had earned him the moniker “Wyatt Earp.” But Brentwood, like Freeman, like everyone else in a modern army, knew that the day of the handgun was over in war — it was merely a backup piece rarely, if ever, used. In this world war against terrorism, sidearms were used only by pilots shot down behind enemy lines, if such a “line” could be found in a war marked by ever-shifting and remarkably fluid fronts.

As their aluminum boat glided over the kelp at the water’s edge, Freeman, standing up in the bow, bracing himself against the chop, fixed his binoculars on the fogbound sea beyond the roar of the falls, helping Choir navigate past the sandbars they’d seen when first entering the bay.

“Think he saw the sub?” Sal asked Aussie, both of them kneeling behind the boat’s midline.

“Got eyesight like a friggin’ eagle, the old man has,” said Aussie. “And ears. If he says he saw it, he saw it, mate.”

“Hush!” said Choir, also straining to hear.

“Hush?” Sal whispered to Aussie. “Hush!”

“It’s gone!” proclaimed Freeman.

“Maybe a chopper from that tub Jensen’s sending?” proffered Aussie.

Freeman shook his head, and without turning around, said, “No. Hurricane class doesn’t have a chopper. Could be a Navy chopper out of Whidbey, but they’re all but useless in this pea soup.”

No one answered. The fog was rolling in on them in huge banks of bone-chilling air, the warmer convection currents generated by the beach’s fires replaced by colder sea air. For Choir it felt as if someone had opened the doors to a gargantuan freezer, the resulting wind chill factor evicting any residual warmth the SpecFor warriors had absorbed from the numerous small fires while on the beach.

“Can’t hear those ships anymore,” said Choir.

In fact, they hadn’t heard the sub’s quiet, electric-smooth exit from the bay, but had all heard the unmistakable underwater throb of two approaching vessels.

“Cut the Merc!” ordered Freeman. “I’ll go over, have a listen.”

He went in and sank beneath the surface. Then Sal, Choir, and Aussie waited anxiously to see whether the general, taking advantage of the speed of underwater sound propagation, could pick up the sound of the two vessels. After a while, the three veterans in the boat grew worried. The fogbound sea was calmer than before, and there were no whirlpools to be seen in the twenty-foot radius of visibility around the boat. Maybe it was just their fatigue, but it seemed that the general should have popped back up by now. You either heard something or you didn’t.

“What now?” said Aussie disgustedly.

Sal, trying to see through the fog, shrugged. “That bastard Murphy again.” Their string of mishaps and near misses had been no different than in any other war they’d been in. Victory wasn’t a matter of “Rambos” going crazy, but of a team working through the screw-ups, having the will, equipment, and training — or “WET,” as the general called it — to see it through.

Then Freeman’s head popped up right beside Choir. “Jesus—” began the usually sanguine Welshman.

“Hide and seek,” said the general, spitting out a fringe of kelp. “Sound vectors coming at you from every direction down there.”

“Decoys?” suggested Aussie as he helped the general aboard.

“That’s my read,” replied Freeman. “Damn sub’s dropped sonar ’sub’ decoys along the way. Decoys are sending out sub engine noises all over. Our boys on Petrel and the Skate have obviously stopped and cut engines and are listening — trying to figure out which sub sound is the real one.”

“How long do those decoy batteries last?” asked Salvini.

“Two, three weeks,” said Choir.

“Oh shit! Meanwhile those Chinese are sitting all quiet and cozy on the bottom,” said Aussie.

The others ignored Aussie’s certainty that the terrorists were Chinese.

“They’re not so cozy,” said Freeman. “Their air’ll run out sooner or later.”

“But before the CO 2scrubbers are exhausted,” said Choir, “they could last what, three to four days?”

“Something like that,” agreed the general.

“Oh shit!”

“Wish you’d stop saying that, boyo,” said Choir.

“Oh hush !” said Aussie.

“Yeah,” joined in Sal. “ Hush , you little Welsh—”

“Knock it off,” the general ordered, which he rarely did. But even among the most resistant SpecFor teams, nerves could get frayed, fatigue and cold misconstruing friendly abuse. “Let’s head back to shore,” Freeman added. “I’d hoped we could tag that bastard midget, but we’re only spinning our wheels out here.”

As they returned through the ever-thickening fog, no one could see Dixon, not even when they were practically at the beach.

“He’s drying out,” said Aussie, “by one of the fires.”

“I can’t see him,” said Sal.

“Shouldn’t have left him alone,” said the general.

“He’s a big boy,” Sal assured him.

Choir said nothing, but, remembering how Dixon had been shaking so badly, feared what no SpecFor ever wanted to contemplate: that Dixon’s hand-to-hand combat had undone him; that, spooked by the beach, he’d decided to bolt instead of doing what Freeman had ordered — stay on the beach to lend a hand to his comrades upon their return. Choir, who’d seen it happen a few times before on special operations, was pretty sure Dixon was hiding somewhere in the cave, shivering uncontrollably from the twin demons of a combat swimmer’s lot — cold and unspeakable terror. The one thing you always remembered was the blood in the water, engulfing you in your sin as much as it did your dead foe, haunting some men for the rest of their lives.