Choke Point wi-9 Page 4

  “Ah,” she stammered, “how long will it take to clean up Goose — I mean Nanoose — Island?”

  He laughed; an open, breezy laugh. “Nanoose Bay.”

  “What — oh yes, of course. Bay.”

  Rorke shrugged. “Month or two. Hall, the guy who runs Oregon Oceanics, works pretty fast. Unlike most government contractors, he doesn’t soak the taxpayer. Ex-SEAL and SALERT. One of Freeman’s boys.”

  Rorke could see Alicia hadn’t heard of either Freeman, the retired general, or Frank Hall, oceanographer extraordinaire. Or was she still trying to find her feet after his subtle but unmistakable pass?

  “Freeman’s a tough old buzzard,” explained Rorke. “Ex-SpecFor warrior. Very unpopular in Washington, D.C. Has a nasty name for bureaucrats.”

  “Oh?” Then, to show him she was no neophyte, blushing notwithstanding, she asked, “Well, aren’t you going to tell me?”

  “No, ma’am. It’s not for the likes of you.”

  “You mean I’m a goody-two-shoes.”

  He paused, putting down the coffee mug. “Yes, ma’am, you are. You’re a lady.”

  She was shocked. On a sub, she’d expected to be treated as an equal by the officers — she had a Ph.D. to make the point. But a lady. For a man who captained the most technologically advanced “weapons platform”—that is, “killing ship”—in the world, “lady” struck Alicia as delightfully old-fashioned. “Thank you, kind sir.”

  He nodded appreciatively. “I’ll leave you to your work.” He glanced at his watch, as if in sudden need of an excuse to go. “We’ll be heading through the Juan de Fuca Strait soon, back to base.”

  “Fine.” She hesitated, then followed him briskly down the corridor. “Thank you for letting me use your stateroom. I’d expected to have to—” She was flustered again. “Actually, I don’t know what I expected.”

  “Doss down with the crew? Now that would’ve taken the edge off them.”

  With that, he was gone, leaving her in the wardroom, staring at the seemingly endless printout of telemetry. She made a mental note that when she got back to the lab ashore, she needed to do another security check on all her lab personnel — a mandatory requirement for all department heads, ever since Hansen of the FBI had avoided such regular checkups to become the most infamous Russian spy in America’s history. And it would be a good excuse to check Captain Rorke’s file. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. But was he engaged? Estranged? It wasn’t the sort of question you could ask the crew.

  Though it had been a short exercise patrol, Alicia, toiling back in the wardroom with her telemetric data, had become attuned to the slight variation of sound in the sub that indicated a change in speed. Now it felt as if the Utah was barely moving. “Are we stopping?” she asked a steward who was cleaning up the wardroom.

  “No, ma’am. We’re still underway, but we’re entering Juan de Fuca Strait. It’s always busy, but especially now that it’s fall.”

  “How’s that?”

  “There’s a lot of shipping,” he answered.

  “There’s always a lot of shipping,” Alicia said, nonplussed, as she put down her marker pen to take a break from the rows of oceanographic data. “It’s one of the busiest waterways in the world.”

  “Well, you know, it’s snakehead time. Asian smugglers bringing illegals across into Canada and the U.S. They try their luck starting springtime. Too cold in the winter. They’d freeze to death in those containers. It’s bad enough for ’em being locked in there for three weeks, with other containers stacked on top of them and all around them.” The steward picked up empty mugs and swiped the wardroom table with a chamois. “Some don’t come in container ships — try to sneak in on some rust bucket during the night with no navigation lights, no lights period. Figure that once they’re through the strait and get to where it widens into the funnel of Puget Sound, they’re home and away, get lost amid the myriad islands.”

  Amid the myriad islands. Alicia was taken more by the steward’s vocabulary than by what he was telling her. She knew about the ongoing problem of illegals trying to slip into North America, with Canada being particularly known as the softest touch in the world for immigrants. It had harbored everyone from genuine refugees to Nazi war criminals and terrorists, but a steward who used a phrase such as “amid the myriad islands” was intriguing.

  “Forgive me if I’m prying,” she said, “but have you always been in the Navy?”

  “Yes, ma’am. From high school on.” He could see where she was headed — he’d been asked the same kind of question before. “I like what I do,” he explained. “I’m not really a people person. In this job I know exactly what I have to do. At the end of my watch, that’s it. Gives me lots of time to read. That’s what I like doing best.”

  “Aha!” she said, smiling, folding her arms and sitting up straight-backed against the bulkhead in a mildly triumphant mood. It was a moment of exuberant empathy. “You’re one of us.”

  “I’m no scientist, ma’am.” But Alicia knew he knew what she meant, and she knew she was flirting. She was surprised at herself, even mildly disapproving, but she was enjoying it. She didn’t lack confidence in her job, but she was essentially a shy person, her white lab coat ashore evoking a more impersonal, reserved impression — that of the cool, objective scientist who, if not devoid of emotions, kept them under tight rein. That is, until Rorke had showed up and—

  The G sharp sounded again.

  “Man battle stations! Man battle stations!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Heading out fast from the Coast Guard station at the end of Ediz Hook in Port Angeles into the fogbound darkness of the fifteen-mile-wide, seventy-mile-long strait, the five-man, thirty-foot rigid hull inflatable Bruiser bucked its way northwest toward the dark, brooding mass of Vancouver Island. Six miles out, the coxswain of the Bruiser began a wide left turn, setting a westward course just south of the “line”—the maritime boundary that divided the west to east strait between the U.S. and Canada.

  The twin diesels’ “Jacuzzi” propulsion system now at full throttle, the Bruiser headed into the swells that came funneling in from the Pacific, the breakers’ first landfall Tatoosh Island off Cape Flattery. The coxswain and his observer, though seated behind the steering console’s protective windscreen, were as drenched in spray as the diving-cum-medical/mechanical technician and the two other divers, Rafe Albinski and Peter Dixon. Aft of the platform, they held their air tanks and other equipment while clutching the grab rail against the sea’s incessant pounding. Though almost opaque with salt particles, their fall masks nevertheless afforded some protection against the biting wind. There was little conversation, the effort required to be heard above wind, sea, and the RIB’s body-bashing progress against the swells at thirty miles per hour being conserved for the dive, which was always a tricky proposition, given the often heavy maritime traffic, the state of the sea, and the strong currents in the strait. Fortunately, Admiral Jensen’s request had come at the tide’s ebb, giving Albinski and Dixon reasonably stable underwater conditions before the incoming tide made conditions above and below hazardous for both RIB and divers alike.

  The coxswain, his observer, and the technician strained to pick up any sign of shipping. Despite the strait being the conduit to Seattle to the south, Vancouver to the north, and much of the Pacific Northwest in between, it was notoriously difficult to pick up the pinpoints of starboard and portside navigation lights, given the sprinkling of shore lights on the U.S. Olympic peninsula or on the equally sparsely populated west coast of Vancouver Island. Besides, in the predawn fog the RIB would be virtually impossible to see by shipping traffic, despite the light the coxswain had rigged atop the boat’s air-filter-shaped radar dome seven feet above the stern. On a reasonably calm sea, day or night, the radar’s sweep would pick up oncoming traffic, but in this kind of chop, the radar’s outgoing signals were often bounced back by high swells and covered the radar screen with “ground pepper” sea clutter. The men’s biggest
fear was the presence of an oil tanker coming through the strait, en route to Washington’s Cherry Point refinery. The quarter-million-ton behemoths, pushing an enormous bow wave before them, were incapable of stopping in under seven miles, despite using full reverse thrusts and their props, and thus obliterating anything and anybody in their path.

  Twenty-six-year-old SEAL Peter Dixon, one hand on the grab rail, edged toward the coxswain, asking loudly, “How long?”

  “Longer than yours!” yelled the coxswain, grinning in the faint glow of the instrument panel. Dixon’s response: a short, loud obscenity.

  “A half hour,” the technician answered.

  “My kidneys are rupturing!” put in Rafe Albinski, Dixon’s diving buddy.

  “You shouldn’t have any by now!” joshed Dixon, a reference to the thirty-five-year-old Albinski’s long list of gut-jarring missions, one of the most dangerous being during Desert Storm when Albinski, Dixon, and other SEALs, inserted by low silhouette fast boats, had sneaked ashore, planting timer-equipped explosives and assorted machine gun and small arms noisemakers. When these went off, the Iraqis panicked. Believing that the U.S. Marines in the hovercrafts and other vessels offshore were about to land troops, they called for reinforcements—52,000 of them. The SEAL’s colossal feint had thus diverted four Iraqi divisions away from the real Allied offensive.

  It had been a tough, exhausting mission, but the truth was, Albinski would have preferred to be on another such covert op than here in the strait. The thirty-foot Bruiser was more than living up to its name, the craft’s lower fiberglass hull and nylon neoprene upper hull taking the kind of punishment en route to Darkstar’s anomaly site unknown to most surface sailors, even to the old-timers of World War II’s Corvette navy, most of them Canadian. They would have recalled the constant battering of the sea against their small ships during the bitter do-or-die Battle of the Atlantic against German U-boats. At sustained periods from thirty to forty miles per hour, the punishment taken by the human body was so severe that more often than not men came back from the high-speed, cold, numbing missions literally bruised black and blue, to say nothing of the long-term effects on their internal organs. Ironically, Dixon and Albinski were relatively warm, the quarter-inch foam beneath their neoprene wet suits having trapped any water entering the suit, their body heat then warming this to create an insulated layer.

  Twenty minutes later, as dawn’s light suffused the fog and began burning off the mist, the coxswain turned to the two divers, shouting, “Making good time! Be there in five minutes!” Double-checking his console’s GPS, he told the technician, “Make ready marker buoy,” checked that the RIB’s diving light array was working, and quickly switched it off — all lights working as they should. The next time he turned them on, they’d be on station. Dixon reached forward for his black attack board, the size of a child’s flotation board, only heavier, embedded with a depth gauge, shockproof digital watch and compass, a four-inch-diameter handgrip slot cut on either side of the board. Counting each kick while watching the dials, Dixon and Albinski would be able to estimate how far they were going on their search pattern of the anomaly grid. As Dixon grabbed for the board, the Bruiser was punched hard midships in a cross swell, flinging him against the grab rail, the attack board clattering onto the platform.

  “That’ll help it,” said Albinski wryly.

  Abruptly, the motors died to slow/idle, the RIB’s diving lights on.

  “After all this,” said Dixon, adjusting his face mask, “I hope we find something.”

  The RIB technician was busy helping the divers with their tanks, weight belts, and the rest, and the coxswain maneuvered the boat to provide as stable a platform as possible against the incoming tide. But once the divers were over, he knew there’d be nothing to do but sit. And wait. For the mechanic, the pitch and yaw of the boat by the marker buoy on station was much more likely to make him feel queasy than the bruising run out from Port Angeles.

  In the next minute both divers checked their flashlights and spat on the inside of their face masks, rubbing the spittle about as a condensation preventative, ready to go over the starboard side. Dixon would lead with the attack board.

  The crew of the Utah were no longer on battle stations, a sonar man having mistaken the sound of a Canadian sub — indeed, the only sub the Canadians had on their west coast — as that of a possible hostile. Alicia had returned to the wardroom, working on the torpedoes’ telemetry data, when Rorke reentered and poured himself a coffee. “Hope we didn’t frighten you with that latest alert?”

  “I wasn’t frightened.”

  He seemed not to hear, continuing, “Repairs to the sub’s diving planes changed the Canadians’ sound signature as it egressed from Esquimalt. That’s Vancouver Island’s southeastern harbor.”

  She knew where it was. It was a big Canadian naval base, full of obsolete warships. “Shouldn’t that have been in your listening mike SOSUS computers?” she asked. “I mean, shouldn’t the microphones have picked up the sub’s new signature?”

  “Murphy’s Law,” he answered.

  “On the most sophisticated WP in the world?” she countered with mock severity, her use of WP for “weapons platform” telling him she knew more than he might think.

  “Yes,” he answered quietly, defensively. It was the first time Alicia had seen Utah’s captain look anything like sheepish as he added, “Canucks should have notified us.”

  “Perhaps they did?” Why was she doing this? she asked herself, her tone with him becoming almost accusatory when what she really wanted to do was endear herself to him. Was it her professional curiosity overriding her amorous intent? Or was it some latent feminist aggressive streak in her that had driven her to the top of her field in a world still overwhelmingly dominated by men? But she didn’t like feminists. In her opinion, they were pushy and shrill.

  “Perhaps they did notify us,” Rorke conceded. “Anyway,” he added tersely, “I’m responsible.”

  Oh damn, she thought, no he’s not. But he was adopting the Navy’s time-honored stance that whoever was in command was responsible. If a seaquake, which happened often enough near the Juan de Fuca plate, swallowed up his sub, he would still be held responsible as far as the Navy was concerned.

  “I’m sorry,” Alicia said hastily. “I didn’t mean to imply—”

  “Captain!” It was the officer of the deck, Ray Peel, on the speaker. “Bogey on screen.”

  “Coming,” Rorke replied, striding out of the wardroom.

  Now she’d missed the opportunity to apologize, she realized. What had begun as a simple tease had ended in an absolute muddle, precisely the opposite of what she’d intended. She knew a lot about telemetry, but men?

  “What’s your best guess, gentlemen?” Rorke asked his sonar operators, each one working the scores of vertical lines on his green “waterfall” screen, each wiggle representing a different sound from the cacophony in what most people erroneously imagined was a silent underworld. “Whales?” Rorke suggested. “Shrimp? Distant volcanic—”

  “Definitely not a sub,” the senior sonar man replied, the others readily agreeing. “It’s very weak, sir. But it’s there.”

  “Distant Ivan?” Rorke pressed, meaning the noise might be the remnants of a faraway active pulse from a Russian sub.

  “No, sir. Not a sub. No way.”

  “Very well,” said Rorke, his eyes scanning the arc of green falls to his right. “Keep tracking it. Officer of the deck, no change of watch for sonar men while we’re on this.”

  “No change of watch, aye, sir,” Ray Peel acknowledged.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The two divers fell back in unison, the cold, backward plunge hitting Dixon’s forehead with the force of an ice cream headache in high summer, startling his senses into high alert. Rafe Albinski’s reaction was more sanguine. Long experience plus his naturally more relaxed nature allowed him to absorb the facial shock as little more than one experienced during a dramatic change of temperat
ure while taking a shower. It was something which happened to him frequently whenever his seventeen-year-old son, Dirk, against house rules, turned on the hot water tap in his basement shower, momentarily freezing Rafe in the upstairs shower, where Rafe would thump the wall. “Goddammit, Dirk!” Albinski smiled when he thought of Dirk. They were close — except when he turned on the basement tap.

  The attack board, its outline surprisingly sharp in the flashlight’s beam because of the renowned clarity of the waters in the Pacific Northwest, was already registering temperature, depth, and direction as the two divers began their search. Within five minutes of beginning the grid, the fog-filtered dawn that had afforded them initial light, allowing them to see the variegated colors of marine life passing by, grew faint as they went deeper. Midway along the northern perimeter of their search grid, Dixon, through dim flashes of silver herring, saw the temperature on both the attack board and on the mercury thermometer built into the Coke-can-sized water bottle sampler on the board’s right-hand side registering an increase of three degrees. It was a big jump from the norm for that time of year. His left hand on the board’s side grip, and letting his flashlight temporarily dangle from his wrist, he used his right hand to scratch 3 degree jump @ 31 feet on the board’s slate, and pointed at the board’s thermometer for Albinski to see. Albinski was signaling them up for a surface temperature check.

  As they broke through the undulating gray mirror above them that was the sea’s surface, they noticed a drop in temperature here too, of half a degree, which they knew would have been enough to register as an anomaly. Dixon gave the thumbs-up to the mechanic on the Bruiser fifty yards away, then both divers descended again.

  At forty-five feet they saw that the temperature had changed from three degrees at thirty-one feet to four degrees. Dixon tripped the water bottle through an arc of 180 degrees. Both spring-loaded rubber stoppers at either end clamped shut, trapping the water sample at that depth, the 180-degree fall breaking the mercury column so that the temperature reading now registered on the thermometer would remain the same, no matter how deep or shallow they dived. Dixon scratched the slate board, 45 feet, bottle tripped. As they went deeper, the temperature rose another degree, though it should have been falling, but the lateral dimension of the anomalous patch at this depth was small, no more than twenty yards across. The whole anomaly grid took the shape of a dumbbell, about fifteen yards wide at its waist and fifty to sixty yards long, the ends of the dumbbell each about thirty yards across. They went deeper still, and the temperature became hotter relative to the surrounding ocean, the diameter of the dumbbell’s waist now decreasing to no more than five yards across. From this they were able to deduce that whatever effluent was at work, it was pluming up from the ocean bottom in a conical shape, narrow at its source, widest at the surface, like a double ice cream cone. Albinski hypothesized that the source point of the plume was only a few yards or even feet wide. The one thing they were sure of was that whatever was bubbling up from the depths, its relative salinity compared to the surrounding ocean had no doubt produced the different color effect seen from on high by Darkstar. It was definitely not oil.