Choke Point

He was going to send this message himself.

Charlie could still see the spidery white frost in Mandy’s hair, covering her once lustrous sheen with a web of old age, years before her time. If anything good could possibly come of her death, maybe it would be Beijing’s messages to Washington, D.C., via his conversation with General Chang, to give Beijing a free hand against Li Kuan, to hunt him down and kill him.

On Petrel, the afterdeck, an island of light in the evening darkness, was illuminated by the arc light atop the A-frame. Albinski’s and Dixon’s umbilicals, which had earlier been groaning through the A- frame’s left block, now had to be stopped every few minutes to clear kelp from them as fast as possible. Then Albinski’s winch man called, “Thirty feet to surface.” A murmur of excitement passed through the dozen crewmen huddled around the dry lab, only Frank Hall’s work party of six men, including the bosun, allowed on the apron of steel directly beneath the A-frame’s block.

“Twenty feet to surface.”

“How ’bout Dixon?” asked one of the deck party.

“Another sixty-four,” answered the diver’s winch man, at once grateful for the cooling that each kelp-clearing stop afforded his winch’s motor, but worried too, like everyone else, whether the divers — if they were still alive — had enough air left in their Bail bottles to wait out the seemingly never-ending kelp clearance, the weed at times so thick about the umbilical that it wouldn’t pass through the block.

“In sight!” announced Albinski’s winch man. There was a loud cheer as bubbles erupted in an undulating circle of light that moved up and down the choppy surface like a sodden white sheet, the rain sweeping over it.

“Steady!” Frank cautioned the winch man. Sometimes in the excitement of a surfacing, the winch man miscalculated the rate of hoist during the final seconds of haul in which a diver emerged from the density of sea. His weight in air, if the winch man hadn’t geared down fast enough, could suddenly cause him to swing like a freed pendulum, smashing into the ship’s stern. “Steady! Steady!” said Frank.

“Holy shit!” It was one of the work party, literally taken aback when instead of the fiberglass helmet he’d expected to see, what was emerging from the sea was like something out of a horror movie: a huge, glistening mass of kelp. Some said afterward it was the size of a VW Beetle — an exaggeration, but it was big, the enormous fronds looking like the tentacles of the giant squids that other oceanographers had found off New Zealand. As yet, no sign of Albinski.

“Don’t just stand there!” bellowed the Petrel’s bosun. “Get the pikes onto it.”

Frank Hall switched his mike channels. “Sonar?” he asked. “What else do you see besides the kelp?”

“Nothing sir. We’re too close to it. No definition — just a big blob of kelp obscuring the whole damn trace.”

Four of the work party had thrust out their pikes, the long-handled boat hooks grasping Albinski’s umbilical four to five feet below the A-frame’s starboard block. The men prevented a dangerous pendulum by using counterforce, pulling the umbilical in as Petrel’s stern dipped in the swells, pushing against it as the stern rose atop the next swell. Two of the deck party were slicing at the kelp, torn between going so fast that they’d sever the umbilical or so cautiously that they’d lose the race against what they knew must be Albinski’s emergency air supply in his Bail bottle. And all the while, Dixon’s umbilical was moving at an agonizing snail’s pace through the A-frame’s portside block, its “smoke” stops and quivering tension meter needle testimony to the winch operator that he too was hauling in a massive load of kelp.

“You know,” said an off-duty crewman standing anxiously by the dry lab, “they use kelp to smooth out ice cream?” The outrageously inappropriate comment was presumably the only way he could deal with his own mounting anxiety.

Dixon’s winch man didn’t bother to respond. All his attention was on Albinski’s umbilical, which was swaying port to starboard and back like a hanged man’s rope, the umbilical’s thin communication wire missing, the black air hose, though, looking intact.

“Good!” he said aloud.

“What?” said the “ice cream” man, his shadow cutting across the winch drum. “Oh yeah. Amazing stuff, eh?”

“Get outta my light!”

Suddenly, there was a tremendous splash astern, foaming seawater cascading down on the work party, swirling and running out about their feet through the scuppers with furious speed. Two men were sprawled on the deck, cursing and trying to get their wind, when Frank, grasping Petrel’s starboard rail, shouted, “Bring ’im in slowly.” Albinski’s neoprene suit looked bigger than it should have been, his helmet still obscured by an errant swath of kelp that took on a bright cherry color in the arc light.

“Mother of God!” said the bosun, his tone immediately casting a pall over the deck crew.

Frank was helping up one of the men who had been downed in the splash caused by the enormous ball of kelp that had suddenly given way under the pike’s probing and plunged back into the sea. “In easy,” he said in a tone as gentle as the soft rain that continued to fall, its shadows slicing the deck lamp’s light like a black snow.

The cherry-colored helmet contained all that remained of Rafe Albinski. The tremendous sea pressures, set upon him when his one-way nonreturn valve failed to shut, had crushed his body, expelling the ninety-eight percent that was water, pulverizing the remaining two percent of bone, skin, and organs into a paste that was forced by the indifferent laws of physics up the ruptured tube that had been his dry suit into his helmet. What had been his dry suit was now an obscenely bloated Michelin-tire-man figure that, having expanded as it rose to the surface, was disgustingly urinating from a hundred different pin-sized holes.

Two of the deck party had dropped their pikes and run back amidships, being sick over the side, for which Frank Hall would dock them five hundred dollars each. If he’d still been in the Navy, he would have insisted on formally charging them. He knew that ex-SEAL Albinski would have understood his fellow SEAL’s action. By deserting the afterdeck, albeit in shock, they had left the work party short-handed with a fellow SEAL’s umbilical cord still ascending, when every man in the work party was needed in order to tear off block-choking kelp that Frank fully expected to see wrapped about Dixon’s line.

“In sight!” called out the bosun.

“Shit,” said the ice cream man. “This bastard’s bigger’n the other one.” Fortunately he meant the kelp entanglement and not Dixon’s dry suit which, once the kelp was cut off, was revealed, unlike Albinski’s, to be as form-fitting as it should have been. Even so, with seawater pouring off it, it wasn’t certain whether it was puncture-free. It was only when they saw Dixon’s eyes, exhausted-looking yet obviously cognizant of what was going on, that they knew his nonreturn valve had continued to function properly.

As Frank disengaged Dixon’s fiberglass helmet from its O-ring neck assembly, Dixon was shivering so badly he couldn’t speak, his lips purple. But Frank knew the young SEAL desperately wanted to say something: to ask whether his diving buddy was okay. And if not, why?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

When the machine-chattering newsroom at CNN headquarters in Atlanta received the report from its Kabul correspondent of a bomb having exploded northwest of Jinhe, no one had any idea where it was. Besides, bombings by terrorists, separatists, freedom fighters, whatever they called themselves, were a dime a dozen, and unless an incident seemed to have any direct bearing on the U.S.’s wider world war against terrorism, it simply didn’t make the cut for the news. But a professional sifter in the newsroom was paid to keep tabs on the location of all place names coming in on the media feed, in the event that some out-of-the-way hole in the wall suddenly became prominent. The sifter, clacking away on his computer, heard one of the anchorwoman’s assistants add, “Kabul guy reports Chinese troop movement along the border.”

“What border?”

The Kabul correspondent spelled it for her; all these “Stans” that sounded alike in central Asia had never meant anything to the American public. Before the wars on terrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq, such countries were ignored by the world in general, relatively few people even knowing they were breakaway republics from the old Soviet Union.