Choke Point wi-9 Page 3

  “Get a grip,” he chided himself. “You’re acting like a goddamn ensign before his finals. You’re commander of Subgroup Nine, for Christ’s sake. C’mon, Walter!”

  He started when he heard the phone ring, and took it in the kitchen. “Admiral Jensen!”

  “Morgan here, sir. We have a Coast Guard cutter report. No anomaly.”

  “No spill.”

  “No spill. Fishheads.”

  “Dumping!” said Jensen, realizing now that the anomaly had probably been caused by one of the hundreds of fishermen — oops, fishers, if you were headed for CNO — who plied the Northwest’s waters. They often dumped thousands of fishheads from their catch to save valuable storage space in the boats’ freezer, which, given the price of fuel, cost them a small fortune to keep cold. Yes, it was pollution of a sort, he acknowledged, but small potatoes, the fish heads quickly devoured by the sea’s predators.

  Morgan could hear the admiral’s sigh of relief.

  “Very well,” said Jensen. “Everything’s fine then. Good night.” There was new buoyancy in his tone.

  But back in bed, pulling up the covers, residual anxiety stayed with him. “Everything’s fine,” he’d told Morgan. The very same phrase he’d used to assure Bill Gates et al. about the pristine waters of Puget Sound. It recalled the advice his uncle used to give him about voicing such blasé assurances. “Say that about your car,” his uncle had once cautioned, “and next day the goddamn wheels fall off!”

  Flinging aside the bedspread once more, Jensen walked softly back to the living room and called the base. “Morgan. Call Port Angeles. Send out a Bruiser with two divers. See if there’s any evidence of gas venting from the seabed.” It was the one phenomenon amid all the wacko Bermuda Triangle theories that had made a smidgen of sense to Jensen — the idea that at times enormous bubbles of hydrate gas, “like a fart in a bathtub,” as one chief had indelicately but accurately put it, were vented from the sea’s bottom. Lighter than air, the escaping gas would not only disturb the water-air interface, but would rise rapidly, and if there was a “sparker” in its path, such as an aircraft or boat engine, there’d be an enormous explosion, leaving nothing on the radar screen.

  “A Bruiser, two divers,” Morgan confirmed, adding, “It’ll be light in about an hour, Admiral. You want me to wait until—”

  “No, send ’em out right away,” cut in Jensen. “Besides, it’ll be dawn by the time they get there. Tell them that if they smell gas vapor, they’ll need to cut the motor for the last half mile and go in under paddle power.”

  “Yes, sir,” Morgan answered, adding, as he put down the phone, “They’ll like that.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  David Brentwood heard the deep brrr of the bulky Pave Low coming in over the ravine. He saw the dim outline of the chopper’s portside crash-resistant external auxiliary fuel tank as the pilot trimmed the craft. Then the tank’s silhouette in his NVGs was lost against the helo’s body, the pilot deciding against dropping antimissile “sucker” flares because a rain of incandescent decoys would announce to any hostile in the area that infidels had arrived. Rules of Engagement meant that David, in urgent need of first aid, would have to go up first. Next, the bodies of Jamal Hassim, Eddie Merton, and the four commandos killed in the cave would be hauled up, followed by Sanchez, the only other survivor besides Brentwood, whose job it would be to hook up the dead. It would take time, it would be dangerous, but Special Forces’ first commandment was: “Thou shalt not leave a comrade injured or dead.”

  Intuitively, David felt badly about insisting that he be the first in line for extraction, but common sense, together with SpecFor’s Rules of Engagement, had to overrule his better nature. If his arm could be saved, either by the 18D first response/trauma medic among the chopper’s six-man crew or at the battalion MASH unit at Tora Bora base, he could fight again, and go after Li Kuan before a dirty bomb appeared in an American or somebody else’s city.

  As he ran out to grab the rope lowered by the chopper into the ravine, the.50 caliber machine gunner on the Pave’s rear ramp door moved his weapon left to right on the pintle mount in concert with his NVG sweep of the razorback ridge that cut the night sky like a knife blade, no more than a hundred feet away. Sanchez, emerging from the cave’s entrance, knelt to cover Brentwood amid the onslaught of dust and pebbles kicked up by the helo’s downdraft. The ramp gunner saw a flash at one o’clock, swung his.50 hard left, and unleashed a full burst, the machine gun’s deafening staccato overriding the whack of the sniper’s armor-piercing round hitting the right auxiliary tank, whose sealant wall did not prevent a leak, but there was no flame. The pilot, wanting to jettison the tank but afraid it might strike Brentwood, who was still on the ground directly beneath the chopper, yelled through his mike, asking if he was hooked up to the SPIE line. The copilot, meanwhile, released a rain of orange antimissile flares.

  “Are you hooked up?” shouted the pilot. “Do you copy? Are you—”

  “Yes, I am! Go! Go! Go!” And the Pave’s bulbous-nosed radar dome and in-air refueling proboscis dipped in unison. The chopper’s rear rotor tilted as the Pave rose swiftly above the dark V-shaped cleft of the ravine, the helo’s rear ramp machine gunner laying down suppressing fire until the last possible moment, the ramp door closing like the mouth of some airborne flame-spitting dragon. David, still on the ground as the Pave Low took up the slack, clung to the rope with his left hand, his right dangling uselessly.

  Then suddenly he was off, his body and boots a tiny exclamation point to the pilot, the commando leader dangling over two hundred feet below the chopper. In fact, Brentwood was only ten feet off the ground, his illusion of height caused by the freezing air roaring into his lungs as wind currents buffeted him from side to side, dangerously close to the narrow ravine’s cliffs, like a pendulum’s bob. The vapor trail of the Russian-made rocket-propelled grenade streaked up from a razorback hide and was clearly visible to Sanchez at the cave’s entrance.

  Not being a heat-seeking missile, the RPG’s 1.7-kilogram high-explosive antitank round struck the helo below the right engine mount’s cowling. Black smoke poured out of the helo, which immediately began losing power. In an instantaneous decision, the pilot jettisoned the right auxiliary fuel tank that had already been hit by the range-finding sniper bullet. The tank dropped like a bomb, but the pilot was right to release it, for now he could see that the tank was afire. David felt the whoosh of hot air as the tank plummeted past him, no more than ten feet away, a second before the chopper rose another fifty feet. The burning tank, smashing into the ground, exploded, vomiting out an enormous pear-shaped orange flame that engulfed the cave’s entrance, incinerating Sanchez and Jam’s inert body.

  “I’m going down!” yelled the Pave’s medic, grabbing his trauma pack. The helo’s ramp was opening again, its.50 caliber now joined by the helo’s right-side 7.62 minigun.

  “Go!” yelled the pilot, who fought against the fierce winds coming up from the ravine, which had no doubt been strengthened by the auxiliary tank’s explosion. He realized, as the medic must have, that any attempt to winch Brentwood up farther would spell disaster, given the helo’s severe “rockabye” motion. Either Brentwood would be smashed against the rock face or, delaying the Pave, make the helo a sitting target.

  “Disengage!” the medic yelled at Brentwood.

  David didn’t have to be told twice, both men falling within seconds of one another from the SPIE line, ten feet to the ground. David rolled onto his injured arm, the pain shooting so fast to his brain that he momentarily passed out, the medic dragging him behind the cover of boulders twenty feet from the cave’s entrance. David’s pain was so intense, however, that a moan escaped him. “Shut up!” the medic told the Medal of Honor winner, injecting him with a vial of morphine. He taped David’s arm and started an IV drip, the wind almost blowing off his Kevlar helmet, which was pelted by small pebbles and dust as fine as talc. But all the medic could think of now was whether the Pave pilot had had time
to send a Mayday to Tora Bora, and if so, had they heard him?

  “Goddamn CIA,” he cursed. They’d given the Afghans hundreds of heat-seeking Stingers to fight the Soviets, and now the missiles were being used to kill Americans. The world was crazy. And now the Russians were helping the U.S. fight the terrorists.

  He checked Brentwood’s pulse. It wasn’t good. Why in hell had the helo stopped dropping flares to avoid Stingers? Probably, the medic guessed, because the copilot was conserving them for the run back over hostile areas to Tora Bora. It occurred to him then that if al Qaeda got to him and Brentwood, he could barter his medical skills and supplies for his survival. “You goddamned coward!” he berated himself aloud. “You’re Special Forces, for Christ’s sake. One of Freeman’s boys. Get a grip!”

  He saw David Brentwood struggling with his left hand for the mouthpiece to his camelback, but the water sack had been lacerated either by the firefight in the cave or by shrapnel from the explosions of the helo’s jettisoned fuel tank. The medic took off his own camelback but warned David, “Just a sip.”

  The helo, now free of any encumbrance, rose high and, barely missed by another RPG round, banked sharply to the left for twelve hundred meters, beyond the maximum range of an RPG. From there, the Pave, hovering, its machine guns roaring, aided by infrared searchlights, began raking the razorback, now that the helo had more freedom to move. “Winds are dying down,” noted the pilot. “Maybe we could have another go?”

  “Why not?” said the copilot, sounding braver than he felt.

  “Missile three o’clock low!” shouted the pilot, hauling hard on the Pave’s yoke, narrowly avoiding the RPG. The Pave’s gunners laid down suppressing fire left to right, the helo banking hard toward the ravine, the copilot warning the medic this would be the last attempt.

  The medic was frantically lashing himself to Brentwood when the weighted SPIE line thumped him in the back, sending his helmet flying, knocking him and Brentwood to the ground. “Jesus Christ!” But he was quick enough to grab the line and clip on. The line, now slacker, dragged past him. The Pave’s pilot tried to ease the Pave up, but despite the helo’s heavy enfilade, another RPG was coming straight at him. He dropped the helo abruptly, and the medic and Brentwood, who had been rising before, were now dumped. For a moment the medic thought the SPIE line had been jettisoned again to save the chopper. The RPG exploded high above them on the ravine’s cliff face, sending a rain of rock fragments down on the two men. The whack on Brentwood’s helmet was so loud that the helo’s winch man swore he heard it above the rotor slap. The baseball-size fragment that struck the helmetless medic wasn’t heard by anyone on the Pave as the helo rose quickly, simultaneously winching the two men up.

  The dust storm it created sent a gritty, eye-closing wind over the terrorists, who nevertheless kept firing, the Pave taking several hits, none fatal. The ramp machine gunner, shot in the right boot, was unaware of it until he felt the warmth of his foot, the boot filling with blood. Brentwood was dragged hard over the fuselage’s lip. The medic, though none of the crew realized it at the time, was dying from a massive hemorrhage in his brain.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  As the five-man crew of one of the Port Angeles Bruisers — as the thirty-foot-long rigid hull inflatable boats were unofficially known — readied to put to sea, the crew of the Utah, seventy miles to the west of Juan de Fuca Strait, braced for the explosions they expected against the suspected hostile target nineteen miles or so farther west. The hand on Rorke’s watch reached zero. Knowing that noise raced through seawater at three to four times the speed of sound in air, depending on the ocean’s salinity, the crew were aware it would take twenty-five to thirty seconds for the detonations to reach them — plus a few more for tide and current interference and for torpedo counterevasive tactics, should the hostile have seen the Utah’s torpedoes coming and tried to outmaneuver them. At zero plus twenty seconds, no one was worried. At zero plus thirty seconds, nothing. Forty …

  “Damn!” said the weapons officer. “Looks like we’ve got a lem—”

  Then they heard and felt the blast of the 650-pound high-explosive warheads, followed by the awful sound of bulkheads buckling and collapsing like the bones of some huge prehistoric animal in its death throes.

  How many were dying?

  Rorke could see the question written on the faces of his young crew, now that the excitement of the hit had passed.

  “Relax, gentlemen,” he announced, smiling. “We didn’t deep six anyone. Just a rusty target hulk rigged to emit hostile acoustics. You did the Utah proud.” He turned to Lieutenant Commander Ray Peel, this watch’s OOD. “Officer of the deck, emergency blow.”

  “Emergency blow, aye, sir.”

  The ballast control operator activated the two “mushrooms”—ballast control valves — the rapid gush of air from the sub’s air banks to her ballast tanks so alarming that it made her crew tense again. Utah broke surface nose first in an enormous rush of foaming white phosphorescence before she trimmed, her belly coming down on the sea like a broaching whale. The phosphorescence quickly faded, men releasing their hand holds.

  Alicia Mayne could see the men visibly relax. She felt it too. As one of the Navy’s preeminent torpedo researchers she’d known that at some point during Utah’s exercise patrol — her first aboard one of the $1.6 billion Virginia-class subs — there’d be a “shoot” in order for her to study postfiring telemetry data. But she hadn’t been told when or where it would take place.

  “Why couldn’t you have told me beforehand?” she asked Rorke pointedly, albeit with a smile.

  “Thought you might alert the crew,” he replied. “Take the edge off them.”

  Now she was offended, and Rorke knew it.

  “No, no,” he said, “not tip them off verbally. It’s a person’s body language. Just like you’re telling me now how pissed you are at me. Besides,” he added cheekily, “I thought you might enjoy the suspense.”

  “Enjoy? Not knowing if we were going to be fired on?”

  “I figured the experience would give you a greater appreciation of what a torpedo launch is like,” he said. “Telemetry is only one part of it. Your knowledge of the human factor could be just as valuable in improving the new Mark 50.” He paused. “You notice the strain on the men in combat control? In the weapons officer’s voice? When those boys — their average age is twenty-two — are sending out all that information through the wire, one slip, one nanosecond of lost focus, could mean our fish hits a hostile a second too late, giving the enemy time to launch. And that’d be the end of us.”

  Alicia knew he was right. She had felt the gut-tightening “human factor” when the ADCAP had been fired. Seeing how it was done on the sub rather than watching a launch in the lab tank ashore could help enormously in the design, in upgrading the Mark 50. A minute change could buy you that vital nanosecond. “I agree,” she told him. “That’s why I came along.”

  Rorke realized then why she was tops in her field. It wasn’t just because of her mastery of physics and ocean dynamics. She was quick to concede a point if she thought you were right, not pigheaded like some of her male colleagues. Though obviously proud to have been the first child of a “blue-collar family,” as the Navy Times had put it, to work her way through college — the “icing on the cake,” as her father said, a Ph.D. from MIT — it was clear that, unlike other aspiring postdoctoral students, she wouldn’t allow her pride to stand in the way of admitting to a better idea from colleagues. It was one of the reasons, Rorke concluded, that she had been appointed senior scientist in charge of upgrading the Mark 48 ADCAP torpedoes and the Mark 50, the revolutionary ship and air-launchable nine-foot-four-inch-long by 12.75-inch-diameter torpedo, which was half the size of the ADCAP and less than a quarter its weight.

  “Well, Captain,” she told Rorke, “when you start using the 50B, you can forget all about the problems of wire guidance. It’ll be strictly ’shoot and scoot.’ No hanging about.”

  “Grea
t, but don’t we already have that with the present Mark 50?”

  “Yes, but the 50B’ll give you fifteen more knots.”

  Which meant it would have twice the speed of the ADCAP.

  He was obviously impressed, and ushered her into the wardroom, where a sonar operator had taken in the reams of the two fired torpedoes’ telemetry printout for her perusal.

  “Like a coffee, Doctor?” Rorke asked. “Hot chocolate?”

  Alicia declined. The excitement and anxiety of the launch was all the stimulus she needed to stay awake. “May I ask,” she ventured coyly, “where we are?” Before he could answer either way, she added, “I’m guessing on the Nanoose range?” She was referring to the testing range east of Vancouver Island loaned to the U.S. Navy by Canada for firing and retrieval of dummy warhead torpedoes.

  “Nope!” he said good-naturedly. “The Nanoose range is so full of sh — er, crap, miles of used wire and other Navy debris. Bangor had to hire Oregon Oceanics to clean it up. We’re nowhere near it. We’re west of Cape Flattery.”

  “That’s off Washington State, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Most northwesterly point of the continental U.S.”

  He raised his coffee mug in salute. “Were you on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”

  “Oh no,” she laughed. “No — I couldn’t stand the strain.”

  “Ah, too bad.” He smiled. “I could have been your lifeline.” He said it jocularly but pointedly, sipping his coffee. Their eyes met. He saw her blush like a schoolgirl.