Ian Slater - Choke Point

About a dozen diners, including some with young children — one in a high chair — looked up, startled. Everyone had stopped eating. They were obviously refugees returning to the town, hungry and exhausted. At first they had been reassured by the sight of the Special Forces team, but then were suddenly terrified by Freeman’s thunderous order: “Everyone out! Now! Leave your cell phones on the table. Write down the number. If you lie, we’ll backtrack through the phone company and you’ll be in violation of the Emergency War Powers Act. Move!”

Only one elderly man, with stubby beard and no teeth, refused to leave his steaming wonton soup. “I’m too old to be frightened of guys who—”

He had to finish his sentence outside, Sal having taken a firm grip of the man’s worn lumberjack collar and literally dragging him out, the old man’s hands flailing, spittle-sprayed obscenities filling the air. “Be safer out here, buddy,” Sal told him, and Sal was telling the truth, for when Salvini reentered the restaurant, he heard a high-pitched Oriental voice in the kitchen beyond the string bead curtain screaming to someone back of the kitchen, “Cor 911! Cor 911!”

“Good idea!” said Aussie evenly.

“She the same waitress as before?” Freeman asked Brentwood.

“Yes,” confirmed Brentwood.

Aussie checked two side rooms without taking his eyes off the Vietnamese woman who was yelling beyond the curtain. He was struck by the fact that though she was clearly frightened, she wasn’t cowed. There was fight in her eyes.

“What are you afraid of, ma’am?” asked the general. “We’re Americans, not terrorists.”

“Soldiers!” she said contemptuously.

The restaurant’s back door, about six feet beyond the kitchen at the end of a passageway cluttered with piled boxes of noodles, burst open. It was Choir pushing one of the waiters ahead of him, Aussie immediately relieving the waiter of the cell phone he was in the process of using.

“Over here!” ordered Freeman, standing in the kitchen, the young woman glaring at him from the kitchen’s chopping block. The man looked more frightened than the woman, who had obviously been the object of dispute between the two waiters Freeman had seen when he and Brentwood had been in the café. Among all the other SpecFor training courses, one had been about quickly ascertaining who the alpha male was in any hostage-taking situation. Freeman, though a stickler for multilayered training, had always been skeptical of the course. “A ten-year-old kid can tell you in two seconds who’s the boss in a room,” he used to say. Here, the woman was clearly the alpha. Aussie heard a noise directly above, looked up and saw a trapdoor opening.

“No, please!” shouted the man. “My mother!”

“Jesus Christ!” said Aussie, a nanosecond away from wasting her. The old woman said something in Vietnamese and withdrew.

“No pickup till after six, I think,” joked Aussie. No one laughed, but his attempt clearly infused the man with more terror of the unpredictable.

The young woman was retreating farther back, almost touching the wall-suspended array of ladles, noodle strainers, and other utensils. No knives, Freeman noticed — they were to her left in a wooden rack near a kitchen stool and corner chopping block. The SpecFor team had been in the restaurant for less than two minutes — a fast entrance, a quick push to see who was whom, and to clear out those Freeman had decided were innocent bystanders. Now he strode up to the waiter and told him to show his wrists. The irritated skin rash had almost vanished. Freeman reached up to the man’s collar. “Stay still!” The bruised ring, or more accurately, half ring, around the waiter’s throat was not nearly as dark as when the general had seen it when he and Brentwood had eaten in the café.

Freeman turned from the waiter and in a move whose speed and violence surprised even Aussie, advanced on the woman, who seemed to shrink in size beneath him. He grabbed her by her left ear and wrenched her toward him. She gasped in pain, but nothing more, her eyes glinting with hatred and determination. He pulled her out from the wall of appliances.

“Don — Don’t hurt her please, sir!” implored the waiter.

Brentwood’s eyes avoided the scene, focusing on the bubbling vat of fat by the chopping block.

“I won’t hurt her!” bellowed the general, his eyes maniacal. “I’ll kill the bitch if you don’t take me to the tunnels!”

The waiter’s pale face turned gray and he tried to speak but couldn’t.

“Then I’ll kill Granny upstairs!” shouted Freeman. His voice had taken over the café like a storm. “You bastards think I don’t know what’s going on? Eh? Eh? Those collar marks, the ones on your wrists. Your filthy damn fingernails. Your ring around the collar, buddy, comes from hauling your buddies out of cave-ins in the tunnels. Only way you could get in and out in Cu Chi — only way you can get a tunneler out in a cave-in — two ropes from your wrists to his feet — gotta get ’im out before he suffocates. Then you put the pull collar ’round your neck, lie down, roll over and haul him out. Or maybe it wasn’t your buddies, eh? Maybe a torpedo warhead you were hauling down to the cave, with all your other supplies, eh? That’s why we didn’t get any infrared spots on the ground. You terrorist bastards were all underground like goddamn rats!”

The man had said nothing, but the rest of the team, except for Sal at the front door, looked at one another with something akin to awe. They realized they were witnessing the stuff of the Freeman legend. Aussie alone, however, knew that the general’s shock was not over with.

“Well?” Freeman thundered. “You going to tell me?”

The waiter caught the woman’s eye, as did Aussie. Her message was clear: “Stand your ground! Don’t tell them!” The waiter, however, probably habituated by a lifetime of running slavishly from the exhausting kitchen through the beaded curtain to serve the class to which he aspired, and despised, was torn between reality and hope, his mind obviously a tumult of indecision.

“All right!” bellowed Freeman, drawing his sidearm. “Tell me!” He was holding her at point-blank range.

The waiter was trembling but shook his head.

The shot threw the woman back with such violence that her head slammed into hanging utensils, her shout of pain startling Sal, who quickly looked around from the front door, the crash of utensils like cymbals. He could smell the acrid cordite wafting through the beaded curtain.

Brentwood and Choir, their previous awe now overcome by shock, stood literally open-mouthed at what the general had done. Aussie was for once speechless, seeing the woman writhing on the floor as Freeman grabbed her by her bullet-torn blouse, now covered in blood, and hauled her roughly into a sitting position against the wall.

“All right!” Freeman yelled at Aussie. “Bring down that old bitch. I’ll shoot her too!”

Aussie gave the waiter an “I don’t like it but what can I do, mate?” glance, footing the chopping block stool across the floor below the trapdoor.

“Hurry up!” ordered Freeman. “Bring her down.”

“No, no,” the waiter said, his voice cracking. “I show you.”

“Right!” said Freeman, turning to Choir. “Choir! Over here!”

Choir didn’t move. “But—” he began.

“Goddammit!” Freeman roared. “Don’t but me. We’re a team. Work as a team. Get that bitch’s body out of here, give her to the cops. Then grab the old lady and stay in touch with me.” The general looked across at Aussie, who’d been about to assist the woman with his first aid kit. “Leave her alone,” barked the general. “She dies, she dies. Give Choir this joker’s cell phone.”