Ian Slater - Choke Point

“Bosun?” Hall said. “Have you made up that hundred-pound pack?”

“Just about finished, sir,” the bosun replied, busy recounting the fuse length for the LOSHOK pack that would serve as an ad hoc depth charge to be dropped atop the sub — if it was the sub. “I made it about seventy pounds, Captain,” the bosun added. “That leaves us with about half a dozen slingshot charges of—”

“Better call than mine, Bosun,” cut in Frank. “Well done.”

Hall’s admission to the bosun impressed Jimmy, Malcolm, Tiny, and the other slingshot party on deck.

“Captain!” The side-scan’s squealing had stopped, the stylus busy again converting Petrel ’s ping echoes into more dull gray lines, the flat section that might either be a slab of sheared coastal rock or the midget sub’s sail still standing alone, as if anchored in mud. There were no sound echoes that would signify anything else but ooze.

The thump of the flare gun made Tiny jump. “Did you fart?” Jimmy asked Malcolm.

But Malcolm was too wound up to see anything remotely humorous in Jimmy’s comment. No doubt Jimmy wanted to appear cool, but he didn’t mind voicing his fear of the boat, the radar’s dot, coming in from the starboard aft position at about five o’clock. If the terrorist sub had been damaged by the SpecFor team, flooded maybe, and some terrorists were making a run for it in the sub’s inflatable — well, everyone knew how fanatical terrorists were — fight to the end. And what terrorists would want to be captured by the Americans after what the CIA boys did to their al Qaeda prisoners at the U.S. Bagram base in Afghanistan? As the CIA guy had told Marte Price on CNN, “There was before 9/11, and after 9/11. After 9/11 the gloves came off.”

The first parachute flare had deployed and was slowly descending, the fiercely burning flare suffusing the fog around the Petrel with a flickering orange light, the thump of the second flare making Tiny jump again. No jokes from Jimmy now, because the light from the second flare, allied with that of the first, had illuminated the approaching boat. Not a dory, as was thought, but a long, twenty-four-foot inflatable.

Up on Petrel ’s bridge, Hall’s first mate looked through his binoculars at the approaching craft and rang down to the dry lab, where Frank took the call.

“Captain,” the first mate informed him, “it’s an RIB, about three hundred yards off. Barely visible but looks like a landing party.”

“Uniforms?” Hall asked.

“Greenish khaki.”

“That’s not Coast Guard.”

“No. Could be that SpecFor team.”

“They armed?”

“Like Pancho Villa,” answered the mate. “Bandoliers.”

“Can you make out their faces?”

“No, only war paint. Camouflage.”

“Caucasian, Hispanic, what?” pressed Hall, knowing the moment he said it that it was a silly question. Canada and the United States were full of minorities, particularly in the Northwest. Racial features wouldn’t prove a damn thing. But they sure as hell weren’t SEALs. All that bandolier crap looked good for the media and in the movies, but was scorned by all Special Forces. Bandoliers in a firefight, as Hall’s old buddy Aussie Lewis used to put it, were about as useless as “tits on a bull.” By the time you unraveled the macho crisscross bandoliers to reload, you’d be meat.

“If they’re ours,” said the first mate, “why haven’t they tried to radio us on sixteen? They’re moving slowly.”

“I’m coming up,” Frank told the mate. He took the short route, straight up the ladder from Petrel ’s stern deck to its Little Bird hangar deck, then up the four steps to the chart room immediately aft of the bridge.

“Doesn’t add up,” Frank told the mate, taking up the binoculars. “If they’re terrorists and they don’t know sixteen’s the open channel in these waters, they haven’t done their homework. But they’ve caused more damage to us since Pearl Harbor and 9/11, so they sure as hell must have done their homework.”

“Well, who the hell—”

“They’re within hailing distance now,” cut in Frank. Snatching the megaphone’s mike, he moved quickly to the bridge’s starboard wing, the first flare now fizzling out in the fog. “Stop your vessel! Identify yourself!”

“Wanna bet they speak Arabic?” said the helmsman.

The megaphone response startled everyone on Petrel . “We’re Coast Guard from the USS Skate . Stand by for boarding!”

“Screw you!” came the voice of one of Petrel ’s crew, audible to Hall but probably not to the inflatable carrying what looked to be six or seven men.

“What are we going to do?” asked the first mate, then answered his own question with a nervous laugh. “Let ’em board, I suppose.”

“Not yet,” said Hall, whose great-grandfather had regaled him with tales of the awful Pacific war after Pearl, when American-educated Japanese who spoke American English had on more than one occasion duped gullible young GIs into coming out into the open. The Nazis had done the same thing even more effectively, since they were Caucasians, dressed up in American uniforms, penetrating the American perimeter in the fierce counterattack through the Ardennes in 1944.

All right, so Hall knew it would sound corny, but better safe than—

“Prepare to be boarded!” came the insistent voice from what was now 150 yards away, the RIB a black shadow in the fibrous fog.

“Screw you!” yelled one of Petrel ’s crew.

Hall strode back to the stern edge of the hangar deck. “Shut up!” he warned his crew. “Get ready to fire those LOSHOKS when I give the word.”

“Stand by to be—”

Hall raised his megaphone. “You come any further and we’ll ram you!” To make the point, he ordered the chief to bring engines to full power, but as yet did not engage the prop, hoping the sudden rumble of the engines would produce the desired effect.

“Looks like they’ve stopped!” the mate said, unsure and wondering aloud what sort of trouble Petrel would be in afterward if it was a Coast Guard officer who’d hailed them, and not an English-speaking terrorist.

Frank brushed the mate’s concern aside. “Navy trumps the Coast Guard!”

Frank pressed the megaphone’s button and asked, “Who won the last World Series?”

There was silence from the stopped boat, and Frank uncharacteristically turned to the mate with a self-indulgent smile of victory, but the mate’s puzzled expression killed his smile, Hall seeing that the mate didn’t know the answer. Confounding his corny tactic further, Hall could hear what sounded like an argument on the stern deck, someone yelling, “It was the Yankees, goddammit!”

“Was it?” asked the mate. “I mean, the Yankees?”

“Yes,” said Frank, his cocky assurance of a few minutes ago quickly evaporating. Apart from the improvised LOSHOK packs, the Petrel was unarmed. Yes, it was much bigger than the other vessel, but it had no armor whatsoever. Plus, despite his threat to ram them, Frank and everyone else aboard, including the cook’s helper, knew an RIB could easily outmaneuver the bigger Petrel .

“Dry lab to bridge.”

“Come in, Lab,” said the mate.

“We’re picking up some funny spots on the side-scan since we changed the paper!”

Frank spoke into the intercom, an edge to his voice. “What do you mean, funny ?”

“Echoes — not many, but some sort of square-ish.”

“Aft of that slab we saw?”

“Yes, sir, like I said — after we changed the paper roll.”

Frank noticed that the inflatable off the starboard quarter had stopped, for the moment, gyrating slowly in the offshore currents.