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  Choke Point

  ( WW III - 9 )

  Ian Slater

  The fight against terrorism has reached the next level — and now America will really go to war.

  A series of cataclysmic events is exploding around the world. Two divisions of Chinese ground troops move against a neighboring Muslim nation, while a provocation unleashes generations of pent-up violence between the mainland and Taiwan. With U.S. troops still on the ground in the Middle East and “Ganistan,” and an American president forced by rapidly unfolding events to make decisions on the fly, the most dangerous threat is the one no one sees.

  For off the fog-shrouded coast of Washington State, a staggering attack will flood the Northwest with American refugees and force the bravest and the best of U.S. Special Forces under the toughest of the tough, General Douglas Freeman, into a pitched, desperate battle to find a shadow enemy — before he strikes the next terrifying blow against the United States.

  Ian Slater

  CHOKE POINT

  CHAPTER ONE

  Direct Action Mission A039

  2:00 a.m., Khyber Pass, northeastern Afghanistan

  Fast-roping down from the hot, oily smell of the Pave Low chopper into the Stygian darkness of a frigid ravine, seven U.S. Special Force commandos ran quickly out of the downblast over snow-dusted rocks toward a six-foot-high, three-foot-wide fissure in the sheer rock face — the mouth of the suspect cave. Pausing fifty feet from the entrance, the Alpha strike trio, with veteran commander and Medal of Honor winner Captain David Brentwood on point, checked out the closet-sized opening through the thermal sights of their Heckler & Koch flame- and sound-suppressed machine guns. Bravo, the backup squad of four commandos, was comprised of Eddie Merton, armed with the team’s Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW), two men carrying M-4 carbines, and Jamal “Jam” Hassim, the only Muslim-American in the team, toting a shotgun. The seven-man team of Alpha and Bravo waited two minutes, an eternity in the gritty, dust-smelling darkness. Radiant heat seeping from the cave showed up as white splotches against the emerald green of the commandos’ night vision goggles, as did the infrared ID tape on their helmets, sleeves, and ankles.

  There was no sign of guards. The seven men waited until they were sure that no one in the area had been unduly aroused by the sound of the Pave Low; that any al Qaeda present would, it was hoped, dismiss it as yet another of the Allied helos that periodically skirted the towering peaks of the Hindu Kush, flying westward through the Khyber Pass into Kapisa Province and on to the armor-friendly plains north of Kabul. Even in the icy wind chill, several of the commandos were sweating beneath the weight of their mission-specific gear, which included ammo load/assault vest packs, flash bang grenades, additional mags, flashlight pouch, camelback water bladder, night vision goggles, black Nomex gloves, balaclava, Beretta 9mm sidearms, and the beloved miscellaneous gadget bags attached to each man’s load vest.

  Satisfied there was no movement nearby, six of the seven-man team — three on either side — entered the cave. The seventh man, Eddie Merton, armed with the SAW and responsible for operating the team’s HF radio, SATCOM unit, and cell phone, took up position as planned at the entrance to the cave. Thermal Satscans, in satellite overflights, had shown that the entry widened immediately beyond its opening, snaking its way for four hundred feet into the rock below a razorback ridge. As the two three-man squads moved cautiously forward in the cave, Eddie placed his SAW against a two-foot-high rock by the entrance and popped his “baby umbrella”—the black double crisscross SATCOM antenna. He then took cover behind the boulder, from where he could best serve as the DA team’s rear guard during the snatch and grab. For a while, at least, he could maintain communications with Brentwood and the other five, each equipped with Saver FM radio and earphone.

  Inside the cave, the air was damp, sour, the rock floor strewn with thousands of marble-sized pebbles blown in throughout the ages by the fiercely frigid winds that swirled through the mountain fastness of the Hindu Kush. Despite the weight of their packs, the commandos’ footsteps were all but silenced by the U.S. Special Forces’ state-of-the-art overboots. Made of black, oil-impregnated leather, Spandex, and slow-recovery foam, they muffled the sound of the commandos’ approach. David Brentwood knew that soon there would be no reliable radio contact with Merton because of the serpentine nature of the cave. He glanced at his watch and whispered into his throat mike. They had been down for three minutes. “Exfil 0230.”

  “Exfil 0230,” confirmed Merton. It meant they had exactly twenty-seven minutes before the Pave Low returned to exfiltrate the team. Now that the ambient starlight that had been boosted over three million times by their night vision goggles was no longer available, the green monochrome faded, and the Direct Action Team switched on the tiny infrared light at the front of the helmet-mounted monocular unit.

  Coming to a dogleg where the cave suddenly narrowed, Bravo held back so as not to crowd Brentwood’s strike trio, whose sole purpose was to find Li Kuan — if he was there. A former and corrupt middle manager from NORINCO, the Chinese government’s arms export company, Kuan’s sole purpose was to sell Osama bin Laden’s successors depleted uranium for a dirty anti-Satan bomb, a conventionally exploded nuclear waste device that would spew out deadly uranium dust over the terrorist’s American city of choice. Li Kuan, the commandoes had been told, should be easily identifiable from a pockmarked scalp, reportedly the result of a sulfuric acid-tube timer for a nitrate bomb that had prematurely exploded when he was instructing his al Qaeda clients.

  In fact, Brentwood had been one of the thirty-eight Americans who’d had the misfortune of witnessing both the nitrate bomb explosion in Oklahoma City in 1995 and, on furlough in New York City in 2001, the first of the 9/11 hits on the World Trade Center. His sister’s husband, a bosom buddy, had been one of the scores of firefighters cremated alive when the South Tower imploded. And Jam Hassim had lost a cousin, a U.S. Army sergeant, in the attack on the Pentagon. Knowing this, General Oakley, of Special Operations Command, told David’s team that their anger was “a good motivator. But remember,” he’d added, “the mission isn’t to waste this prick Li. It’s to snatch him, bring him back so Intel can have a ’quiet’ word with the bastard. The Chinese say he’s also trying to sell his dirty bomb stuff to terrorists in the province of Xinjiang. So you’ll save a lot more people if we get him alive. Understood?”

  They had, and they’d studied the computer-enhanced photo of Li that Beijing had sent, the only one available. It seemed to them, however, that, aside from the pockmarked bald head, the face was so indistinguishable, it could have belonged to any one of a billion Asians or Eurasians. The team had completed their refresher “run-throughs” at Delta Force’s “killing house” at Special Operations facilities at Fort Bragg, where they had also undergone — no, survived, Brentwood would have said — the forty-meter inverted crawl in twenty-five seconds; the thirty-three pushups in a minute; the grueling two-mile, seventeen-minute runs in full gear; and the “lovely” hundred-meter swim while fully clothed and in assault boots. Only then would they have met the exacting standards laid down for them by the legendary, now retired, General Douglas Freeman.

  Only thirty feet into the cave, Brentwood paused, sensing movement, his hand signals taking over the job of whispered throat mike instructions. Rats scuttled left and right, the stench of the cave now laced with the odor of roasting goat. Jam Hassim could feel warm eddies of air gently brushing the sliver of exposed skin between his NVGs and balaclava. But as yet there was no wood or charcoal odor, no whiff of kerosene, and no white splotch in the NVGs that would indicate the source of the warmth. Perhaps the eddies he’d felt were body heat, Hassim thought. But whose?

  The team was trained for speed and daring, but, when n
eeded, caution — all seven commandos were alert for booby traps. He motioned the team forward. They had been down from the Pave Low for only eight minutes. Nineteen to go, and lots to do. Satisfied that the only noise he’d heard was that of the rodents, he checked his watch. After ten paces, though, he thought he heard voices, faint, maybe twenty feet farther in, and signaled the men to stop.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Northeast Pacific

  On the far side of the world, moving from “quiet” to “ultraquiet,” the 377-foot-long Virginia-class USS Utah, the fastest and deadliest attack submarine ever built, was speeding beneath gray seas at sixty miles an hour when one of the four sonar operators in its blue-lit control room spotted an anomaly on his green waterfall screen.

  “Contact on surface,” he said. “Bearing zero six three degrees. Fifteen thousand yards.”

  The attack sub’s sonar library computer, containing the acoustic signature of every ship afloat, immediately printed: HOSTILE BY NATURE OF SOUND.

  “Officer of the deck,” ordered Captain John Rorke. “Man battle stations.”

  “Man battle stations, aye, sir.”

  The “G-sharp” sounded throughout the Utah, and the 134 officers and men scrambled to assigned positions, their Vibram-soled sneakers barely audible, all nonessential equipment quickly “powered down.” The deep, gurgling sound of torpedo tubes flooding could be heard by some as the plotting officer’s computer crunched the numbers — water salinity, sea temperature, angle on the bow, and the other myriad variables necessary to solve the complex mathematical equations that preceded firing the sub’s Advanced Capability Mark 48 torpedoes. The torpedomen removed the WARNING WARSHOT LOADED cards from the notification slots of the two tubes selected for firing. Each tube housed a sleek, black-nosed, 1.5-ton Mark 48 “fish” capable of running at sixty miles per hour for a distance of twenty miles. The warhead was designed not to hit the target dead on, but below an enemy’s keel, in order to create a vacuum into which the doomed ship would collapse and sink within minutes.

  “Steer course zero six five,” said the weapons officer.

  “Very well, Weapons,” Captain Rorke replied.

  The plotting officer checked the proposed vectors on his computer chart. “Shot looks good on plot.”

  “Very well, Plot,” acknowledged Rorke. “Officer of the deck, secure for battle stations.”

  “Secure for battle stations, aye.”

  Alicia Mayne, the lone civilian scientist aboard, sat on the flip-down stool just outside the entrance to the Combat Control Center. She was struck once again by the Navy’s ritual of dogged repetition, designed to avoid the kind of catastrophic error that had lead to the USS Greeneville’s accidental sinking of the Japanese trawler Ehime Maru off Hawaii in February 2001. The board of inquiry investigating the Greeneville’s grievous mistake had pointedly noted that civilians aboard the sub had crowded the boat’s Combat Control Center, and so Alicia was now careful to stay out of the way. She enjoyed simply listening to the vocal confirmation of each order. It evoked a sense of teamwork honed under all kinds of conditions. It was reassuring. And she enjoyed watching Captain Rorke, a lean six-footer — in his early thirties, she guessed — so absorbed by his task that he was oblivious to her presence. Or perhaps so disciplined that he knew she was there but was able to focus entirely on his job anyway.

  “Prepare to come to periscope depth,” commanded Rorke.

  “Prepare to come to periscope depth, aye.”

  Seconds later, Rorke ordered, “Officer of the deck, proceed to periscope depth.”

  “Proceed to periscope depth, aye.” Everyone was tense; battle stations could last for a minute or an hour. Either way, they were approaching the moment of truth: Was it a drill or would it be an actual firing? Only the navigating officer and the captain knew for sure. In the torpedo room an auxiliaryman bet ten bucks it was a drill.

  David Brentwood hand signaled his five DA commandos forward again; the voices he thought he’d heard were gone. His men had all heard the phantom sounds before on other missions. The wind moaning through the Hindu Kush could play on the imagination, a fact well known for a hundred years by the British regiments who had tried to pacify the wild Afghani tribesmen.

  Jam Hassim, with his beloved Remington pump-action at the ready, moved up, but he wasn’t happy. There hadn’t been any al Qaeda guards posted at the cave’s entrance. Then again, why should there be? It was a top secret operation, and the commandos’ fast rope infiltration had gone by the book, the noise of the chopper only transitory — by now the most common sound in the war against terror. Besides, the fact that there were no guards could mean that the cave was deserted. The heat signature the team had seen through the NVGs at the mouth of the cave could be hours old, heat ghosts of the kind that remained even after a parked car had left the parking lot, its residual infrared signature like a mirage on a hot day — still extant, though invisible to the naked eye. And Jam knew how many times the Special Forces had been fed rumor rather than hard intelligence because of the now retired CIA boss Admiral Stansfield Turner’s obsession with signal intelligence and other gizmology, as his archcritic General Freeman had repeatedly pointed out to the Pentagon. Instead of cultivating more human intelligence, spies around the world, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies had relied too heavily on satellite reconnaissance.

  Afghanistan, for example, had only a handful of U.S. agents, unlike Britain, whose long colonial experience in the Near and Far East had yielded more informants. And most of the handful had been hunted down, caught, and tortured to death during the Taliban’s reign of terror before 9/11, when reliance on electronic eyes and ears had been able to yield only so much. Since 9/11 the situation been changing, but human spies took time to cultivate, train, and infiltrate.

  Now, it struck Jam, as it had Brentwood up ahead, that they could well be on a wild goose chase. Whoever had been ensconced in the farthest recesses of the winding subterranean fissure was probably there only during one of the allied air strikes.

  Through his NVGs, Brentwood, on point, discerned a perfectly straight thin white line a few inches above the cave. It passed from one side of this eight-foot-wide section to the other. It was high-tech in a low-tech environment — a photoelectric beam. His hand shot up again, and the other five commandos froze.

  Good for Dave, Jam thought. Had he broken the beam, an alarm would have sounded. Al Qaeda and the Taliban belonged to the Stone Age, but bin Laden had taught them to go high-tech wherever possible, and he’d provided the funds. Then again, all allied Special Forces, including the Aussies and Brits, used such early warning devices, and Jam realized that if the cave hadn’t been abandoned, they might be closing on another allied SpecOp team taking temporary refuge from the bitter cold. Bad intel? No. He dismissed the thought as wild surmise. It couldn’t be.

  The cave now narrowed to a six-foot-wide, five-foot-high tunnel that split into a Y. The six commandos, dividing into two three-man squads, bent low, crouching over their weapons as they proceeded farther into the tar-black interior. Brentwood had elected to lead his strike trio into the left spar of the Y, remembering that the satellite heat signature pictures suggested the left-hand fork had been bleeding heat. Jam’s trio, including a rifleman, Julio Sanchez, took the right branch of the Y, which Jam guessed might soon peter out. He was right. He signaled his team to backtrack to join the other squad, which meant he was now tail-end Charlie, with Brentwood still on point.

  There were fourteen minutes to go when Brentwood glimpsed a baseball-size white blur coming at him from the left flank. “Down!” he yelled, pivoting, swinging his HK and unleashing a burst of 9mm fire. The ear-dunning crash of the grenade’s explosion, its purplish white cross combining with the fiery tongue from his weapon, “bloomed out” his NVGs, the white on white temporarily blinding him as his HK sent red-hot rock fragments ricocheting off the cave’s walls, over his five prostrate comrades. Three commandos returned fire, pocking the Y’s left branch
, where Jam now saw a clutch of terrorists.

  There were at least eight of them, momentarily illuminated by the detonation of a flash-bang stun grenade tossed by Sanchez on Jam’s right. The two commandos to Jam’s left were literally shot to pieces as the fire erupting from the terrorists’ AK-47s threw them in sharp relief against the rock that formed the cave’s cul-de-sac. The terrorists hid behind a shoulder-high barricade of expended ammunition boxes filled with pebbles.

  One of Brentwood’s trio fell dead, and his right arm was split from below his elbow to his shoulder, streaming blood, as he continued to fire at the terrorists twenty feet away, his HK tucked tightly between his left arm and Kevlar-protected waist. The hydraulic shock of the rounds knocked down al Qaeda as if they were being felled with a sledgehammer. Jam pumped his Remington four times, its 12-gauge sabot slugs smashing through the terrorists’ barricade. The force of the slugs was so powerful that three of the four not only shattered the stone-packed ammo boxes and killed three of the terrorists, but also created a deadly hail of pebbles that hit the remaining four terrorists with the equivalent of a hundred or more stones.

  Within seconds all but one of the eight were down, the thudding booms of the Remington’s enfilade momentarily deafening the three remaining commandos. Smoke and the acrid stench of cordite engulfed the cul-de-sac, then spread out slowly in ethereal layers, wafting like lazy swamp gas out toward the cave’s entrance where Eddie Merton, unable to make radio contact with his buddies, wondered what the hell was going on. Only one terrorist was still on his feet, one hand thrust up in surrender, the other trying vainly to stem the spill of his entrails, the red spaghetti-like clump taking on the luminescence of melting ice cream in the four remaining commandos’ NVGs.