Ian Slater: Choke Point

“Freeman’s a tough old buzzard,” explained Rorke. “Ex-SpecFor warrior. Very unpopular in Washington, D.C. Has a nasty name for bureaucrats.”

“Oh?” Then, to show him she was no neophyte, blushing notwithstanding, she asked, “Well, aren’t you going to tell me?”

“No, ma’am. It’s not for the likes of you.”

“You mean I’m a goody-two-shoes.”

He paused, putting down the coffee mug. “Yes, ma’am, you are. You’re a lady.”

She was shocked. On a sub, she’d expected to be treated as an equal by the officers — she had a Ph.D. to make the point. But a lady . For a man who captained the most technologically advanced “weapons platform”—that is, “killing ship”—in the world, “lady” struck Alicia as delightfully old-fashioned. “Thank you, kind sir.”

He nodded appreciatively. “I’ll leave you to your work.” He glanced at his watch, as if in sudden need of an excuse to go. “We’ll be heading through the Juan de Fuca Strait soon, back to base.”

“Fine.” She hesitated, then followed him briskly down the corridor. “Thank you for letting me use your stateroom. I’d expected to have to—” She was flustered again. “Actually, I don’t know what I expected.”

“Doss down with the crew? Now that would’ve taken the edge off them.”

With that, he was gone, leaving her in the wardroom, staring at the seemingly endless printout of telemetry. She made a mental note that when she got back to the lab ashore, she needed to do another security check on all her lab personnel — a mandatory requirement for all department heads, ever since Hansen of the FBI had avoided such regular checkups to become the most infamous Russian spy in America’s history. And it would be a good excuse to check Captain Rorke’s file. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. But was he engaged? Estranged? It wasn’t the sort of question you could ask the crew.

Though it had been a short exercise patrol, Alicia, toiling back in the wardroom with her telemetric data, had become attuned to the slight variation of sound in the sub that indicated a change in speed. Now it felt as if the Utah was barely moving. “Are we stopping?” she asked a steward who was cleaning up the wardroom.

“No, ma’am. We’re still underway, but we’re entering Juan de Fuca Strait. It’s always busy, but especially now that it’s fall.”

“How’s that?”

“There’s a lot of shipping,” he answered.

“There’s always a lot of shipping,” Alicia said, nonplussed, as she put down her marker pen to take a break from the rows of oceanographic data. “It’s one of the busiest waterways in the world.”

“Well, you know, it’s snakehead time. Asian smugglers bringing illegals across into Canada and the U.S. They try their luck starting springtime. Too cold in the winter. They’d freeze to death in those containers. It’s bad enough for ’em being locked in there for three weeks, with other containers stacked on top of them and all around them.” The steward picked up empty mugs and swiped the wardroom table with a chamois. “Some don’t come in container ships — try to sneak in on some rust bucket during the night with no navigation lights, no lights period. Figure that once they’re through the strait and get to where it widens into the funnel of Puget Sound, they’re home and away, get lost amid the myriad islands.”

Amid the myriad islands . Alicia was taken more by the steward’s vocabulary than by what he was telling her. She knew about the ongoing problem of illegals trying to slip into North America, with Canada being particularly known as the softest touch in the world for immigrants. It had harbored everyone from genuine refugees to Nazi war criminals and terrorists, but a steward who used a phrase such as “amid the myriad islands” was intriguing.

“Forgive me if I’m prying,” she said, “but have you always been in the Navy?”

“Yes, ma’am. From high school on.” He could see where she was headed — he’d been asked the same kind of question before. “I like what I do,” he explained. “I’m not really a people person. In this job I know exactly what I have to do. At the end of my watch, that’s it. Gives me lots of time to read. That’s what I like doing best.”

“Aha!” she said, smiling, folding her arms and sitting up straight-backed against the bulkhead in a mildly triumphant mood. It was a moment of exuberant empathy. “You’re one of us .”

“I’m no scientist, ma’am.” But Alicia knew he knew what she meant, and she knew she was flirting. She was surprised at herself, even mildly disapproving, but she was enjoying it. She didn’t lack confidence in her job, but she was essentially a shy person, her white lab coat ashore evoking a more impersonal, reserved impression — that of the cool, objective scientist who, if not devoid of emotions, kept them under tight rein. That is, until Rorke had showed up and—

The G sharp sounded again.

“Man battle stations! Man battle stations!”

Heading out fast from the Coast Guard station at the end of Ediz Hook in Port Angeles into the fogbound darkness of the fifteen-mile-wide, seventy-mile-long strait, the five-man, thirty-foot rigid hull inflatable Bruiser bucked its way northwest toward the dark, brooding mass of Vancouver Island. Six miles out, the coxswain of the Bruiser began a wide left turn, setting a westward course just south of the “line”—the maritime boundary that divided the west to east strait between the U.S. and Canada.

The twin diesels’ “Jacuzzi” propulsion system now at full throttle, the Bruiser headed into the swells that came funneling in from the Pacific, the breakers’ first landfall Tatoosh Island off Cape Flattery. The coxswain and his observer, though seated behind the steering console’s protective windscreen, were as drenched in spray as the diving-cum-medical/mechanical technician and the two other divers, Rafe Albinski and Peter Dixon. Aft of the platform, they held their air tanks and other equipment while clutching the grab rail against the sea’s incessant pounding. Though almost opaque with salt particles, their fall masks nevertheless afforded some protection against the biting wind. There was little conversation, the effort required to be heard above wind, sea, and the RIB’s body-bashing progress against the swells at thirty miles per hour being conserved for the dive, which was always a tricky proposition, given the often heavy maritime traffic, the state of the sea, and the strong currents in the strait. Fortunately, Admiral Jensen’s request had come at the tide’s ebb, giving Albinski and Dixon reasonably stable underwater conditions before the incoming tide made conditions above and below hazardous for both RIB and divers alike.

The coxswain, his observer, and the technician strained to pick up any sign of shipping. Despite the strait being the conduit to Seattle to the south, Vancouver to the north, and much of the Pacific Northwest in between, it was notoriously difficult to pick up the pinpoints of starboard and portside navigation lights, given the sprinkling of shore lights on the U.S. Olympic peninsula or on the equally sparsely populated west coast of Vancouver Island. Besides, in the predawn fog the RIB would be virtually impossible to see by shipping traffic, despite the light the coxswain had rigged atop the boat’s air-filter-shaped radar dome seven feet above the stern. On a reasonably calm sea, day or night, the radar’s sweep would pick up oncoming traffic, but in this kind of chop, the radar’s outgoing signals were often bounced back by high swells and covered the radar screen with “ground pepper” sea clutter. The men’s biggest fear was the presence of an oil tanker coming through the strait, en route to Washington’s Cherry Point refinery. The quarter-million-ton behemoths, pushing an enormous bow wave before them, were incapable of stopping in under seven miles, despite using full reverse thrusts and their props, and thus obliterating anything and anybody in their path.