Ian Slater - Choke Point

“Keep your eyes peeled,” Freeman told them.

“We’re not gonna miss her, General,” Sal assured him.

“I know that,” Freeman replied, “but keep your eyes on the water as well — see if that sub jettisoned anything. Remember we hit her quite a few times. Nothing substantial other than buckling the prop basket, I agree, but we sure as hell chipped her paint and tiles — stuff that’d float.”

Aussie shook his head, smiling to himself in sheer admiration of the general’s attention to tactical detail, which he’d fused to his philosophy of audacious strategy.

The Petrel was proceeding so slowly that her props barely created a wake, all her off-duty crew out on deck. Frank Hall was on the bridge, the oceanographic ship’s two side-scan sonar technicians in the aft dry lab two decks below. The side scan’s pictures did not come in via the clear color TV screens so beloved by Hollywood producers to make them more visual, and more believable, but rather in a dull, monochromatic series of dark gray lines on lighter grayish-white paper. Each line recorded the depth of the sea bottom, which at times was flat and at other times creviced by canyons formed millions of years ago. The end result was a two-dimensional view of the sea bottom, as if someone with a very sharp pencil — in this case the recorder’s stylus — had drawn a look-down sketch of the strait’s seabed.

Nothing but seabed was turning up on the return pings , the echoes of the sound strikes sent down from the electrically buckled plates in Petrel ’s “fish”—a squashed and single-finned, tear-shaped transponder towed astern, its fin barely visible in the huge breaths of sea fog that one second seemed to swallow the Petrel , only to release her moments later. Cookie, the cook’s helper, en route to delivering a late lunch sandwich to Jimmy and Tiny on the stern deck, sneaked into the aft dry lab, manned by the two sonar technicians, to take a peek at the side-scan profile. “Any sub, guys?”

“Six so far,” one of the technicians replied dryly. “How ’bout bringing us some coffee ’stead of asking us dumb questions?”

Cookie sullenly retreated.

“Shouldn’t piss him off,” the other technician told his colleague.

“He’s a dumb ass.”

“I don’t care. You get on the wrong side of these guys, they can make you sick — piss in your coffee. I know one skipper — grumpy old bastard — all he did was criticize, so one day when Cook was making custard, this kid grabbed a Playboy centerfold, took the old man’s bowl, and went to—”

“Hey!”

“What?”

“You see what I see?” His colleague watched the stylus racing back and forth with the speed of a weaving machine’s shuttle, giving them a profile from thirty-two fathoms—180 feet. Stuck in the background of a mud slope and looking like a blurred double exposure was an outline of what could conceivably be a slab of metal — either that or a slab of rock.

One of the “techies” called the bridge. “Captain, you better come down and see this.”

Frank Hall walked in less than a minute later, took one look at the profile, and told the technicians, “Zoom in. High resolution.” The zoom made it bigger, but not as sharp as they’d hoped.

“There’s no base to it, sir. I mean, it looks like it’s a slab sticking up from the mud. Maybe an old bulkhead — a wreck?”

Hall thought that the technician was right; the Strait of Juan de Fuca was littered with the metallic skeletons of marine disasters from long ago. And it would be much worse if Navy salvage and retrieval ships such as the Petrel didn’t clear the massive hulks of the ships sunken by the terrorist sub.

“Its base could be a sub,” proffered Frank, looking at the slab profile. “Some anechoic tiles could have fallen off the sub’s sail. Water flow is powerful at that depth — at any depth in the strait. If the tiles on the rest of the hull are still intact, sucking up our sonar signals, we wouldn’t see the base of this slab.”

The recorder’s stylus never ceased, but the machine’s amber light was flashing, the roll of paper almost used up.

“Not now !” said one of the technicians, his exasperation echoed by his colleague, who ran toward the lab’s paper locker situated high up to avoid any possibility of water damage, in the event of the ship’s scuppers overflowing on deck and flooding over the dry lab’s sill and into the lower cabinets.

Frank said nothing, calmly watching the stylus keeping up its busy work, dashing from one side of the recorder to the other like some frenzied, animate being. Sometimes it had made him smile, like the busy little “office assistant” in the corner of his computer. But the oceanographer wasn’t amused now, his eyes focused on the profile, his heart punching the wall of his chest. “What are the dimensions of that slab?” he asked the attending technician, who quickly worked the recorder’s control panel.

“It’s about the size of a garage door. Not very big, Captain. For a sub, I mean.”

“No,” Frank agreed, hands behind his back in what the crew, he knew, referred to as his “Horatio Nelson” bit. “Slab isn’t big for a full-sized sub.”

The truth was, neither of them knew how big the sail of a midget sub would be. They’d never seen one up close. Few people had.

“Where’s that friggin’ paper?” the technician called out. “We’re almost out here!”

“Easy,” said Frank. “Let’s not get excited.” That’s what Nelson would have said, he knew, but like the two technicians, he knew too that when they changed the paper, which had only about four inches of lateral scroll remaining, they would have no picture at all for ten to fifteen seconds. Frank calmly summoned the bosun, telling him to cut a length of fuse for a hundred-pound pack of LOSHOK set to detonate at thirty-two fathoms.

“Sheesh, Skipper, that’s about all we have on the ship!”

It had been a measure of the men’s discipline, and perhaps their distance from Little Bird’s demise, that it had not preyed on their minds. Instead, they’d done what they were supposed to do without either protest or second-guessing the captain. Even so, now was not the time for the bosun to point out what he must know the captain already knew: that a hundred-pound charge would just about exhaust their supply of the explosive. And so, instead of commenting either verbally or by facial expression, Frank maintained his steady gaze on the stylus. It helped that the stylus had a mesmerizing effect, like watching highway lane reflectors at night.

“ ’Bout two minutes of paper to go, Captain,” said the technician next to him.

“When the amber goes to red,” Frank instructed quietly, his voice barely audible above the sherp, sherp of the stylus.

“Amber to red,” said the technician, “right,” his lips so dry that not even the moisture of the ghostly invasions of fog could prevent them from cracking, the faint metallic taste of blood in his mouth.

“Captain?” It was the mate on Petrel ’s bridge, looking quickly from the radar out into the late evening fog and calling down to the aft dry lab. “We have a surface blip — small, no bigger’n a dory. Coming in on the starboard aft quarter, five o’clock.”

At that moment, Frank saw the side-scan recorder’s light go from amber to red, the machine emitting a piercing squeal. It was a sound some of the LOSHOK slingshot party outside the dry lab hadn’t heard before, and they momentarily thought it might be a fire alarm.

“Fire flares! Starboard aft!” ordered Hall, his voice so loud that it seemed to those on deck as if the whole world could hear, including the crew of a submerged sub. “Have slingshot packs ready to—” Damn, he remembered he’d told the bosun to pack a hundred-pound charge for what might be the sub. The insistent squeal of the recorder had panicked him, something he’d always believed his SEAL training would override. Admonishing himself to “get a grip,” and, on the verge of telling the side-scan operator to “Hurry the fuck up” and finish changing the damn paper, he paused. Then, with a face suffused with self-assurance, he strode briskly to the lab door, hands behind his back.