“CNO’s saying midget sub hasn’t got enough speed or range,” Freeman replied, his eyes still fixed on Darkstar’s feed. “Damn Piranha-class midget can do near ten knots and run for over a thousand miles. If it’s one of those, it could be halfway to Japan by now.”
“So you think the midget’s taken off, General?” put in Aussie.
“No. Why should it? Last kill less than twenty-four hours ago. Still undetected. Son of a—” Freeman pointed at Darkstar’s feed. “Get a load of this, boys.” The general pulled his head back from the screen to give them a better look. There was a knock on the door, a pause, then four sharp, rapid taps. Freeman pushed back his chair, strode quickly to the door, looked through the spy hole, and opened the door a crack, but left the chain on. “I gave at the office!” he quipped, then slid off the chain and opened the door fully.
“What we got, General?” It was Salvini.
“Trouble,” said Freeman, shaking hands with the “Brooklyn Bad Ass,” as he called Salvini.
Choir Williams, following, smiled. “General.”
The three men walked over to the laptop, David and Aussie exchanging greetings with the two newcomers, Aussie asking Salvini, “Who’s your fat friend?”
Choir Williams was in fact the slimmest Aussie had ever seen him, as trim as all of them except the general, who, as an inveterate jogger, was in remarkably good shape for his age, despite a slight post-middle-age paunch which he insisted was “hereditary muscle.” There was an awkward moment as Sal and Choir realized David Brentwood could shake only with his left hand.
“Well,” pressed the general, his impatience and wish to avoid any further embarrassment to David disallowing his four ex-SpecFor boys any opportunity to catch up on what each other had been doing in “peacetime”—a word they habitually uttered with the same contempt as did a grounded fighter pilot, “what d’you make of these?” He’d asked Salvini and Choir before they even put down their bags and heavy Draeger rebreathers. “Feed is coming in from south of Cape Flattery.”
“Piloted recon?” asked Sal.
“UAV,” explained Freeman. “Hot-spot feed. And we got a lot of small hot spots — the salt shaker effect on Tatoosh Island — off Flattery. Birds, yes, but other big hotspots that Aussie thinks are media news trucks, among other things. More big hotspots down on the Pacific coast. Must be over forty so far, and we haven’t reached Father and Son yet.”
“Seals,” said Salvini.
For a moment the general, tired, thought he meant “SEALs.”
“That so?” said Aussie doubtfully.
“Yeah,” said Salvini confidently, looking about the motel room for something to drink. “Surprised you haven’t got more of ’em on that trace.”
“Seals?” said Freeman, whose vanity habitually denied he was surprised by anything.
“Yeah,” repeated Salvini, his hands flapping in a bad imitation of the sea mammal. “You know, Flipper? Caves must be full of ’em.”
Seldom had Sal, Choir, Aussie, or David seen Freeman so taken by surprise.
“Sea caves are full of ’em,” continued Salvini. “That’s why the IR hot spots you’re seeing are so big.”
“Well,” Freeman began, “that’s no damn good! I figured on having you guys swim in and check out anything that might be the size of midget sub, but dammit — we haven’t enough people to investigate every damn cave up and down the coast.” He paused, fixing an anxious brow on Salvini. “How in God’s name do you know this, Sal?
“The zoo,” said Sal. “Not seals but sea otters. Used to take my sister’s kids in the evening. Took my squad IR goggles for fun so the kids could see the critters all nestled up in their lairs. Big white blobs just like on your IR feed right there. They huddle together.”
“Aw,” said Aussie, “you don’t know dick! Could be anything in those sea caves.”
“Yeah,” conceded Sal nonchalantly. “But if you look at the feed’s scale—” He leaned closer. “—two inches to the mile. It’s got to be some pretty big mammals.” He paused, joshing Aussie, “Maybe they’re elephants!”
“Oh, very droll, Sal,” said Aussie. “Ha! Ha!”
“Wait a minute,” interjected David. “Sal could be right, General. The midget sub could be using a seal colony as infrared cover.”
Choir good-naturedly dismissed the idea of the enemy, whoever they were, using the collective heat signature of mammals as IR cover.
“And what d’you know about mammals, Choir?” challenged Aussie. “ ’Cept for those Welsh tarts you used to bed.”
“I’ll ignore your
“Antipodean. I’m an American citizen, you Welsh turd!”
Freeman, ignoring Aussie’s joshing, pressed Choir for his explanation of why terrorists wouldn’t use such a cave.
“Noise,” answered Choir. “Ever hear the racket those creatures make? It’s worse than Aussie’s snoring.”
“So,” proffered the general, “what we need to look at are the caves
“Maybe,” suggested David, “that’s why the Navy hasn’t seen any signs of the midget surfacing for air replenishment.”
“Darkstar saw it,” Freeman corrected him. “That’s why Jensen dispatched that RIB with those divers Albinski and—” He thought for a moment. “—Dixon.” He sighed in exasperation. That General Blackmore had been right when he told the West Point graduates that nowadays you’d have to be part detective to be a good soldier.
Freeman played back the stored IR feed, looking now for cold caves, those whose residual daytime-stored heat signatures were so slight he’d passed them over. It was a dispiriting exercise. The cold cave count rose to 278, and Darkstar hadn’t yet reached the big Father and Son sea stacks south of Cape Flattery. Would the Navy have enough time to search them all before the sub attacked again? Or was Larry King’s suggestion accurate, that perhaps the terrorists’ sub had had its fill of death and destruction now that the decimated battle group had retreated.
“Cold caves, gentlemen,” he said, “with an anomaly near them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
In the Hindu Kush, more fighting had broken out as a resurgent Taliban battalion, financed out of Pakistan, was infiltrating back into Afghanistan to destabilize the nascent U.N.-protected government in Kabul, which in fact was mainly a U.S. operation. The Taliban leaders’ timing was brilliant — to strike when the U.S. Homeland Defense was consumed by a massive public panic attack even greater than that of 9/11. If the terrorists, or whoever, could easily attack America’s guardians, who could guard the guardians? The one qualified hope, media pundits such as CNN’s Marte Price were saying, was that “as terrible as the attack on our Navy is, it’s so far been confined to military targets and not defenseless citizens.”
“Silly woman!” opined Freeman, one ear listening to CNN, the other to the suggestions of his four SpecFor warriors brainstorming about how to narrow the search for where the sub might be hiding. “Marte should know better than that. Some poor son of a bitch civilian’s probably dead already, caught in that rain of shrapnel when the Aegis blew up.”
The general was right and wrong. A civilian night watchman, Carlito Vincennes of Cherry Point, had died three and a half minutes after he’d seen a light, which he thought was either out in the strait or in the woods across the bay. It had looked to him like a camera flash. Then he saw that it was a narrower beam of white light. A missile coming straight for him. “Incoming!” he screamed into his walkie-talkie. “Twelve o’clock low!”
The ensuing line of explosions that engulfed the Cherry Point refinery, as row upon row of storage tanks blew,
