Ian Slater - Choke Point

“Could be the sub!” Hall said loudly, the small, black sound-reflective six-by-six-inch squares on the mud bottom, just a few feet east of the “slab.” The squares were not rubberized anechoic tiles, or they would not have reflected the sonar signals. Like the gaps seen on the space shuttle that had shown where the heat-shield tiles had fallen off, Frank believed he was seeing bare metal squares on the sub, that the tiles had either fallen off through wear and tear or been shot off earlier by Freeman’s team during the fight at the falls.

Freeman had sheathed his knife, quickly apologized to Cookie, and stepped to the left of the recorder. The stylus was flashing back and forth now under the lab’s night lights. He said nothing, his attention riveted on the profile.

“Bosun!” Frank called. “You have a weight on that LOSHOK pack?”

“Yes, sir. It’s ready to go. Same depth, sir?”

“Yes. Thirty-two fathoms. Stern party, stand by to lower. Minimum noise. They can hear us, but I don’t want their Passive to pick up the splash when we drop the LOSHOK. I’ll start Petrel slow ahead — make them think we’ve found nothing and decided to go on.”

“Yes, sir.” The bosun strode out onto the stern. “Jimmy, Mal, Tiny — over here.”

Frank called Sandra Riley on the bridge. “I think we’ve found the sub,” he said. “Can you see the Skate ?”

“No, sir. Fog’s too thick. But I’ve got her on radar. She’s about a mile to starboard on the north-south leg of her search grid.”

“Any sign of those two hydrofoils?” Frank asked, conscious of the fact that while the Skate was heavily deck-armed, she had no depth charges of any sort. “I don’t want to use the radio to contact Skate ,” he continued. “If it is the sub down there, it could be trailing an aerial — to pick up our transmission.”

“I assumed that it would have made a run for it under cover of our engine noise during the—”

“Yes,” agreed Frank. “I don’t know why they haven’t.”

Freeman cut in, telling Sandra, “I think we winged the son of a bitch, sweetheart. Not on the hull proper, but its ballast tanks. Like having puncture holes in your inflatable. You can still move, but slowly, and you’d have to send a swimmer out through the sub’s air lock to repair the holes. You can’t do that quietly.”

Frank was nodding his agreement.

“Anyway,” the general concluded, “this LOSHOK of yours should do it. Rip the damn boat open like a can o’ sardines!”

On deck, Tiny was on standby, ready to lower the seventy-pound pack of explosive overboard once Frank gave him the order. He didn’t like it. The captain’s assumption that it was definitely the sub, and the flamboyant general’s talk of what “should” happen, made him nervous. So did the dynamite. “Truth is,” he told Jimmy, “you don’t know from one minute to the next what’s gonna—”

“Hey!” cut in the bosun. “Rain-in-the-Face, knock it off. You have that LOSHOK chain weight taped down? I don’t want that friggin’ chain to rattle and roll on the way down.”

“It won’t,” Tiny assured him, lifting the combined weight of 130 pounds with one hand as if it was a bunch of grapes.

Jimmy checked the fuse length for the sixth time, the primacord calculated to assure detonation of the LOSHOK just above its hull, if in fact it was the sub.

“What’d you call me?” Tiny asked the bosun.

“Rain-in-the-Face.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t care. I’m tellin’ you guys, I don’t think that profile is the sub. It’s a slab of limestone and a few flakes fell off. Slab of limestone’s like assholes in these parts — everyone’s got one.”

“What about those loose tiles they’re talking about?” countered Jimmy.

“Tiles, smiles — BS!” said Tiny. “I had a peek at that trace when Cookie lost our drinks. I didn’t see anything. Those spots the old man saw could be anything. This strait’s full of shit that people’re chucked overboard. You know how many Coke cans and crap we pick up on sonar?”

“Ah,” said Jimmy dismissively. “You’re just scared, Tiny.”

“You bet your ass I’m scared. Those hydrofoils hear a bang, what’re they gonna do? Everyone’s so trigger happy these last few days. Did you see the sonar trace?”

Jimmy shook his head.

“Malcolm?” asked Tiny.

“No.”

“Lower and cut,” called out Frank. “Carefully.”

The bosun lit the fuse and Tiny played out the charge’s line, the weight barely causing a ripple as it broke the foggy sea’s surface and was released in free fall.

“Full ahead,” ordered Frank calmly.

The Petrel ’s sonar immediately picked up the echoes from the bunched chain weight going down directly below the LOSHOK, and it seemed off course. Had the turbulence of Petrel ’s engines combined with the deep currents to create a side push? Frank wondered. Would it make any difference? Was it the sub or—

The detonation sent the stylus crazy. A second later the sea’s surface exploded in an enormous eruption of green bottom ooze, sand, and pebbles whooshing high into the fog, sending a shock wave against the Petrel . The profusion of dead fish and other marine life that rose to the surface added to everyone’s surprise as they watched intently for signs of a sub’s wreckage. The Skate , now notified by radio about what Frank had assumed was the sub, reported she was steaming toward the oceanographic vessel to assist, but at only one-third of full speed, in the event of striking unseen wreckage in the fog. Frank could feel his heart racing in expectation, but the only thing identifiable in the dirty slurry so far was the mass of crustaceans and rock cod.

“There’s something!” shouted young Cookie.

“Calm down!” Tiny snarled. “There’s nothing but—”

“No, I see it too,” said Malcolm. “Starboard aft.”

“Me too!” added Jimmy, snatching one of the slingshots and one of the baseball-size lumps of short-fuse LOSHOK packs.

Sandra focused her binoculars in the direction the crew were pointing. An irregular shape with a metallic appearance could be seen, despite the muddied sea that was spreading like a huge blanket in the chop created by the LOSHOK’s explosion. Sandra called the dry lab. “It’s a ray,” she told Frank. “A manta ray. A cephalic fin missing.”

Relief and disappointment swept through the crew. Cookie suddenly began throwing up. Frank, hearing him, dispatched one of the techs to help the youth. “But don’t let him mope around. Tell Cook I said to go easy on him but to keep him occupied — light duties.”

“Yes, sir.”

Soon the chaos of sound from the LOSHOK’s bang subsided and the Petrel , having turned about, headed back a hundred yards or so, Sandra doing an excellent job of using the ship’s bow thrusters to relocate the exact GPS position.

The slab was gone.

Then there was another metal-like sheet in the fog. It was vertical, and from mere inches above the sea’s surface, it suddenly rose to four feet high, then six.

“Holy — Sub astern!” Tiny shouted so loudly that third mate Sandra on the bridge heard him clearly, as did Frank, in the dry lab. Intuitively, Sandra brought the Petrel sharply about in a tight U-turn, the ship heeling hard aport, toppling Aussie, Sal, and Choir against their bunks’ side boards and bringing the Petrel face-to-face with the ominous-looking and fog-shrouded black sub surfacing a hundred yards off.

Frank quickly organized one of the most primitive and ancient defenses known to man on the stern of his state-of-the-art oceanographic vessel. “Grab the six slingshot packs and run up to the bow!” he hollered to the stern work party.