Choke Point

rattling its frame. Now he wanted to go back to the mushroom sheds for refuge. He saw his wife coming out of the market crowd, counting her money, the red currency startlingly vibrant against the nondescript gray of the town square.

“Did you tell them?” she asked perfunctorily, without looking up from the bunch of hundreds.

“Yes.”

“What did they say?”

“Nothing.”

“You have to recharge your cell.”

“Yes,” Moh Pan agreed obediently. If his cell had been charged, he wouldn’t have had to walk all the way into town and get a chance to see the young beauty.

“They were probably ours anyway,” said his wife, stuffing the money into her purse, the sea wind billowing her scarf.

“Yes,” agreed Moh Pan. “A big waste of time trudging into town.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

After helping his deckhands extract what had been Albinski’s dry suit, now looking like a black, flattened toothpaste tube, oceanographer Frank Hall decided he had to take a core from the sea bottom — see if a hot vent’s plume of superheated water was responsible for the kind of turbulence that would have fatally loosened the two divers’ air hoses and twisted the kelp around the umbilicals.

Young Peter Dixon, whey-faced, being sick in one of the dry lab buckets, didn’t hear the ex-SEAL-cum- oceanographer approaching the bright island of the stern’s deck lights, seeing only Frank’s shadow looming over him.

“Where’s Albinski’s attack board, Bud?” he asked Dixon, putting his arm on the young diver’s shoulder.

Dixon looked up from the bucket, wiping his mouth, as if he hadn’t heard the Petrel’s captain, or rather, that he’d heard him but couldn’t believe the man’s insensitivity. “Piss off!”

Frank understood, but he was captain — he shouldn’t, couldn’t, let his emotion cloud the issue. “I need to see what the temperature variant was down there. It could tell us whether a sudden release of vent pressure or whatever had anything to do with it.”

“What’s the difference, man? He’s dead.”

“You’re not.” Dixon was supposed to be a SEAL, not a baby. “Where’s the board?”

“Guess it’s over there,” said Dixon, indicating the shining pile of brown vegetation beneath the A-frame, where the long tendrils of kelp had been cut away from what had been Albinski’s dry suit.

Frank gingerly extracted the attack board from the pile of water-slicked tendrils, cut the nylon fishing line by which it had been attached to Albinski’s arms, and handed it up to the bosun.

“Mother of—” began the bosun in shock.

Scrawled on the attack board’s slate was one word: Minisub.

Frank strode to the deck’s intercom mike midway between the winches. “Bridge?”

“Bridge here. Go ahead.”

“Call COMSUBPAC-9. Urgent. Send chopper immediately.” Next Frank turned to the bosun. “Assemble the crew. Dry lab. Everyone except watch personnel.”

It wasn’t until the bosun saw Frank working the tumblers on the dry lab’s safe that he realized why Hall hadn’t ordered the bridge to transmit the discovery of a hostile minisub in American waters directly to COMSUBPAC Jensen. The Petrel, as a civilian vessel — though contracted by the Navy and using a Navy transport helo in its hangar — had no coding computers aboard, and anyone could have picked up a plain language transmit, including those aboard the hostile. The helo would have to take the message.

This delay in getting the message to Admiral Jensen by chopper was to prove fatal, however. In retrospect, to some critics it was far more damaging to the United States in the near future than the not so sensible delay caused by the decision in December 1941 to send the warning of an imminent attack on Pearl Harbor to Admiral Kimmel by telegram.

In the next hour the President let it be known publicly, via the TV and cable networks, that in order to “calm down the rhetoric between”—He had wanted to say, “between China and Taiwan,” but Eleanor Prenty convinced him to change it. “—the People’s Republic of China and the people of Taiwan,” he had dispatched elements of the 7th Fleet to the Taiwan Strait — the McCain—and that because of commitments elsewhere in the ongoing war against terrorism, he considered it prudent to send the USS Turner and its battle group as well. This announcement, the President hoped, would send a clear message to both potential combatants to back off or risk the ire of the United States.

It was a monumentally bad decision because it was based on insufficient information: first, about who exactly was attacking whom, and second, on not yet having received the information, because of Petrel’s helo delay, that a hostile sub had apparently penetrated the “American littoral,” or coastal waters, well within the two-hundred-mile limit, a limit extended in modern times, updating the old three-mile limit derived from the fact that in the days of sail navies, the maximum range of a man-o’-war’s cannon had been three miles from shore.

The President was not the first occupant of the White House to have made a bad decision against the onrush of escalating developments, nor, because of the unforeseen consequences of his public address, would he be the only President — like JFK during the Cuban Missile Crisis — who would come to think that it might be his and America’s last decision.

There was harried activity aboard the Turner’s core battle group, which, under the overall command of Admiral J. Bressard, was made up of the Nimitz-class carrier itself, two guided missile Aegis cruisers, a four-ship destroyer squadron, the replenishment vessel Salt Lake City, plus two nuclear attack submarines — one of them Captain Rorke’s USS Utah. The battle group was ordered to maintain station, ready for immediate turnaround. Ten ships in all, nine of them already leaving Washington State’s naval base at Everett and the Bremerton yard, the group’s replenisher to follow as soon as she was “choc-a-bloc” with supplies, in the words of her highly efficient, no-nonsense captain, Diane Lawson. Fuel for the huge, 98,000-ton Turner was no problem, its two Westinghouse nuclear reactors having enough power to drive its four shafts for ten to fifteen years, or for a million nautical miles, before the fuel cores needed to be replaced.

Below, in the carrier’s garage-smelling hangar deck — nearly one and a third times bigger than a football field and three stories high — an army of mechanics of the carrier’s 2,800 air wing personnel were feverishly getting ready for the arrival of the air wing from Whidbey Island. This would consist of eighty-five aircraft, including twenty F-14 Tomcats, F-18 Hornets, A-6E Intruders, E2 Hawkeyes, EA-6B Prowlers, S-3 Vikings, and six Seahawk helos, the last of the urgently recalled ship’s personnel on leave having readied the ship only forty minutes before she’d cast off from the Bremerton yard.

The Turner’s CBG deployment to join McCain was seen by some young Americans on the liberal left as “excessive,” even “bullying,” in nature, but the beginning of the twenty-first century had taught many Americans, and not only those in the country’s armed services, that it was best to contain a danger rather than let it fester unchallenged as happened to the Taliban in Afghanistan. And 9/11, showing terrorists reaching into the heart of America itself, had certainly influenced people as well.

The White House, meanwhile, was receiving “Presidential Eyes Only” traffic from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, General Chang having advised Bill Heinz that the Gong An Bu believed Li Kuan’s terrorists might have penetrated American seaports, particularly on America’s west coast. Chang said that suspected Xinjiang and Kazakhstani terrorists “under questioning” by the Gong An Bu had revealed that small suicide inflatable boats and dirty bombs, possibly hidden in SeaLift containers, had been smuggled into American and possibly Canadian waters.

Aboard the USS Turner, in what at the time seemed an unrelated and banal incident, Admiral Bressard was told that the fan room located on the third deck, port side, was experiencing some