Choke Point

“Be quiet!” Hall told the lookout. “Keep a sharp watch. There could be a pair.”

“Jesus!” said the lookout, despite Hall’s admonition. He was whey-faced, as was the portside lookout, the latter’s eyes big as saucers, staring down at the sea.

“Hey!” It was the cook on the intercom. “That fucker was a dummy, right, Captain?”

“Don’t know,” said Frank. “Weren’t notified. Could be a communication screw-up.”

Down aft on the stern deck, several off-watch crew who’d been observing the Zodiac fading away in the distance as Petrel closed on the anomaly two miles away were also arguing vociferously about the torpedo.

“It wasn’t live, for chrissake,” asserted the winch man who’d hauled up Albinski’s grisly remains. “It was one of ours.”

“How do you know?” an oiler buddy challenged, throwing a wipe rag at him. “You were asleep, you fat fart!” Laughter erupted from the group; a little too hysterical, the bosun thought. It was the kind of response he’d heard while serving aboard a fleet replenishment ship during Desert Storm, the sort of laughter that was more a release of tension after a close miss than because of anything funny.

Hall appeared on the bridge’s starboard wing, immediately recognizable by his Navy toque, yellow wet- weather jacket, and hailer. “Everybody back to work! I want six additional lookouts, two for’ard, two midships, two aft. It’s possible there might be more survivors.”

“Yes, sir. Any news from the Zodiac about the zip-up?”

“No, not yet.”

“Was that a live torpedo, sir?” asked an oiler emerging from the galley.

“I don’t know,” replied Frank. I’ll find out.” With that, he returned to the bridge.

“ ’Course it was live,” said one of the deck crew as they began to disperse. “That’s why he wants more lookouts, right?”

“Don’t sweat it. He told us he’s on to it. He’ll tell us as soon as he knows. He’s a straight shooter.”

“Yeah,” mumbled the departing oiler. “Like the guy who fired that damn torpedo.”

“Can barely see our Zodiac now,” commented the first mate, his binoculars back on the Zodiac. “But it looks as if they’re hauling someone aboard.”

“Anomaly one thousand yards,” reported the first mate.

“Prepare for station,” Frank announced on the ship’s PA while punching in SLOW AHEAD on the computer console.

Petrel’s third mate’s voice crackled into the chart room aft of the bridge, her voice of exhaustion and depression giving way to an oxymoronic report to Hall: “Survivor — dead!”

“Bring ’im in,” said Frank, who now made a GPS check. It showed that due to winds and tidal shift, Petrel was a quarter mile west of the oil spill — if that’s what the anomaly was. He corrected course, watching the sweep arm on his amber radar screen picking up the tiny blip that was the despondent third mate and the two crewmen returning to Petrel with the bright Day-Glo survival suit. The corpse was of a dark-complexioned man, late forties or perhaps younger, looking older because of the bluish pallor of his skin. A man whom no one on the Petrel recognized, like so many of the dead they and the Coast Guard had fished out from the strait in the last forty-two hours.

For a moment, as he thought about all those who had died in the frigid waters, Frank remembered his granddad’s favorite hymn: “Oh hear us when we cry to Thee/for those in peril on the sea.”

His thoughts were suddenly put to flight by a voice invading Petrel on the radio’s shipping channel for ferries, the voice screaming for help. It was the first officer aboard the Georgia Queen, one of the five-deck-high, five-hundred-vehicle, two-thousand-passenger ferries that daily plied the waters of Georgia Strait on the thirty-mile run between Vancouver Island and Vancouver on the Canadian mainland.

Perhaps the Canadians, whose west coast ferry fleet was bigger than the entire Canadian navy, had believed that all the attacks so far had taken place in American waters, he thought, and believed they would not fall victim to whoever was wreaking havoc with their neighbor. Theoretically, their assumption might have been well-founded. After all, though some Canadians were killed in the 9/11 assault on America, Canada itself had remained untouched.

But no longer, for as the torpedo fired at Petrel missed the oceanographic ship, it continued on at fifty-plus knots, by Frank Hall’s guesstimate, and in apparent free running, rather than active or passive acoustic mode, for another fourteen miles, crossing the U.S.-Canada line, passing through a pod of Orcas that fifty or so passengers on the ferry had braved the foul weather to see.

Among the whale watchers, a retired British naval petty officer who’d seen action in the Falklands war of 1982, witnessing the sinking of the Argentine battleship Belgrano by torpedo, raced along the ferry’s upper deck to the bridge, yelling, “Torpedo, starboard beam!” The mate, on the bridge of Georgia Queen, against all intention and training with the ferry corporation, became so rattled by the radio officer’s hysterical Mayday that he failed to turn the vessel in time. The torpedo struck the ferry starboard aft, the force of the explosion lifting her stern clear of the water, over a hundred cars, SUVs, and eighteen-wheeled freight trucks sliding en masse, smashing into a hill of cars.

Trailways buses and motorcycles piled up against the huge curving doors and ramp, a flood of gasoline and diesel fuel from ruptured tanks suddenly reversing course, rushing aft as the ferry’s stern fell back into the sea. This in turn lifted the bow at a precipitous angle moments before the vessel broke in half, the two sections drifting apart, hundreds of passengers on each of the three decks spilling into the sea from the violence of the separation.

It was as if a buzz saw had neatly cut through the model of a ship, only here the avalanche of toy-size figures and vehicles dropping into the ocean were not toys. The sickening thuds the Coast Guard and 911 operators were hearing in the background of frantic cell phone calls for help were the sound of men, women, and children, some of whom had jumped, striking the hard metal of either sinking vehicles or the metal of the lower decks.

Among the two square miles of oily flotsam and debris, the bodies of a baby Orca and several sea otters could be seen along with dozens of drowned cats and dogs that, by regulation, had been required to be kept below in their owners’ vehicles during transit. Dead guide dogs were also among the animals hauled aboard by the crews of rescuing Coast Guard cutters. Only one guide dog, a black lab, survived, swimming for all its might, vainly trying to drag its owner, an elderly woman, to safety aboard an upturned Beaufort raft. The exhausted dog, unable to get purchase on the oil-slicked rubber surface, kept falling back into the water, the earlier lustrous sheen of her coat now looking like an oil-matted pelt as she drifted further away.

It was CNN’s shot of this dog, taken by Marte Price’s cameraman after they’d left the hospital, that arrested Charles Riser’s attention, along with that of millions of other viewers. For Charlie Riser, the dog’s black, matted coat bore an uncanny resemblance to the photographs showing Mandy’s hair after she’d been pulled from the Suzhou canal. It galvanized his determination to press Bill Heinz to find out where Chang was imprisoned.

Aboard Petrel, now within a hundred yards of the tadpole-shaped oil slick picked up earlier by Darkstar, the third officer, Sandra Riley, whose discovery of the dead man in the Day-Glo survival suit had badly shaken her, nevertheless felt duty bound to ask Hall, “Shouldn’t we turn about, sir? Go help the Coast Guard pick up survivors from the ferry?”

“No,” said Frank. “Not till we get that water sample for Freeman. That could be crucial.”

“To whom?” the mate snapped. “Freeman. That guy’s just like Patton an’ all those other glory hounds. They only care about—”

“Calm down!” Hall said, just as sharply. “The water sample could save a lot more lives than those lost on that ferry. If we don’t find an international isotope fingerprint in this slick, it means that the oil’s an outside batch and belongs to some vessel that doesn’t want to be identified. Like a midget sub. Got it?”

“Sorry, Captain.”

“No need. You’re tired. We all are. Go down to the galley, grab a cup of java, take a breather and—”

Frank stopped talking and cut the Petrel’s engines. She was in the slick, and from the starboard fold-out platform just big enough for a man to stand on, he saw his bosun hook up the safety chain rail and raise his right hand, moving it in a clockwise circular movement, the signal for the winch man to start lowering the fifty-pound, quarter-inch cable through the block above the platform. Frank heard the whine of the winch, saw the lead weight penetrate the sea’s choppy surface and the bosun give the stop signal as he reached out from the platform and affixed the Neilsen reversing sample “bottle” to the wire. Satisfied that the bottom wing