Choke Point

“But you’re never on the base. How would you know?”

There was another long silence before she spoke. “Don’t start with me, Walter.”

“Start what?”

“Obsessing.”

“Goddammit, all I said was that you’re never on the base. Are you?” Now he could hear the alarm clock ticking. “Answer me, Margaret … Margaret.”

She wouldn’t.

Dammit! He sat up, couldn’t sleep. But she could — through a tornado. Perhaps she’s right, he thought. He was obsessing again, his Darkstar anxiety expressing itself in veiled accusations about a suspected attraction between her and the limey liaison officer. Like a dog with an old bone, he told himself, his obsessive streak made worse throughout his career by the Navy’s insistence, particularly the nuclear navy’s near paranoid insistence, that you do everything by the book. Or else. Check, double-check, and check again. Lives depended on it. Oh, use your initiative by all means, but only after you know the rules well enough to know the ones you can break. Of course there were renegades, “cowboys,” like the SEALs and Freeman’s now-disbanded SALERTs — Sea Air Land Emergency Response Team — who thought they could operate under their own rules. But sooner or later the service — Army, Air Force, Navy, or Marine — reined them in, and they sure as hell didn’t make flag rank.

The problem, he knew, was that he was so close to becoming CNO. Settle down, he told himself. This was simply an attack of nerves and self-doubt that at times assailed even the most self-assured individuals, who momentarily, with sweating palms, heartbeat racing out of control, are seized by the unshakable conviction that they’re about to be found out, the veneer stripped away, the naked self revealed, warts and all. Jensen wondered if that was why Mike Borda, the Navy’s most beloved admiral — a “mustang,” a man who’d worked all the way up from the deck to admiral — ended up blowing his brains out in 1998, ostensibly for wearing a medal to which he wasn’t entitled.

His eyes now accustomed to the darkened room, Jensen made his way quietly into the living room, past the smell of hothouse roses, past the faintly visible outline of the model of the new Virginia-class sub, and poured himself a stiff Jack Daniel’s, eschewing ice for fear of the dispenser waking Margaret. Or was she just pretending to be asleep? Thirty years of marriage, and there were still times like this when he wasn’t sure whether she was genuinely asleep or using it as a means of escape.

“Get a grip,” he chided himself. “You’re acting like a goddamn ensign before his finals. You’re commander of Subgroup Nine, for Christ’s sake. C’mon, Walter!”

He started when he heard the phone ring, and took it in the kitchen. “Admiral Jensen!”

“Morgan here, sir. We have a Coast Guard cutter report. No anomaly.”

“No spill.”

“No spill. Fishheads.”

“Dumping!” said Jensen, realizing now that the anomaly had probably been caused by one of the hundreds of fishermen — oops, fishers, if you were headed for CNO — who plied the Northwest’s waters. They often dumped thousands of fishheads from their catch to save valuable storage space in the boats’ freezer, which, given the price of fuel, cost them a small fortune to keep cold. Yes, it was pollution of a sort, he acknowledged, but small potatoes, the fish heads quickly devoured by the sea’s predators.

Morgan could hear the admiral’s sigh of relief.

“Very well,” said Jensen. “Everything’s fine then. Good night.” There was new buoyancy in his tone.

But back in bed, pulling up the covers, residual anxiety stayed with him. “Everything’s fine,” he’d told Morgan. The very same phrase he’d used to assure Bill Gates et al. about the pristine waters of Puget Sound. It recalled the advice his uncle used to give him about voicing such blase assurances. “Say that about your car,” his uncle had once cautioned, “and next day the goddamn wheels fall off!”

Flinging aside the bedspread once more, Jensen walked softly back to the living room and called the base. “Morgan. Call Port Angeles. Send out a Bruiser with two divers. See if there’s any evidence of gas venting from the seabed.” It was the one phenomenon amid all the wacko Bermuda Triangle theories that had made a smidgen of sense to Jensen — the idea that at times enormous bubbles of hydrate gas, “like a fart in a bathtub,” as one chief had indelicately but accurately put it, were vented from the sea’s bottom. Lighter than air, the escaping gas would not only disturb the water-air interface, but would rise rapidly, and if there was a “sparker” in its path, such as an aircraft or boat engine, there’d be an enormous explosion, leaving nothing on the radar screen.

“A Bruiser, two divers,” Morgan confirmed, adding, “It’ll be light in about an hour, Admiral. You want me to wait until—”

“No, send ’em out right away,” cut in Jensen. “Besides, it’ll be dawn by the time they get there. Tell them that if they smell gas vapor, they’ll need to cut the motor for the last half mile and go in under paddle power.”

“Yes, sir,” Morgan answered, adding, as he put down the phone, “They’ll like that.”

CHAPTER FOUR

David Brentwood heard the deep brrr of the bulky Pave Low coming in over the ravine. He saw the dim outline of the chopper’s portside crash-resistant external auxiliary fuel tank as the pilot trimmed the craft. Then the tank’s silhouette in his NVGs was lost against the helo’s body, the pilot deciding against dropping antimissile “sucker” flares because a rain of incandescent decoys would announce to any hostile in the area that infidels had arrived. Rules of Engagement meant that David, in urgent need of first aid, would have to go up first. Next, the bodies of Jamal Hassim, Eddie Merton, and the four commandos killed in the cave would be hauled up, followed by Sanchez, the only other survivor besides Brentwood, whose job it would be to hook up the dead. It would take time, it would be dangerous, but Special Forces’ first commandment was: “Thou shalt not leave a comrade injured or dead.”

Intuitively, David felt badly about insisting that he be the first in line for extraction, but common sense, together with SpecFor’s Rules of Engagement, had to overrule his better nature. If his arm could be saved, either by the 18D first response/trauma medic among the chopper’s six-man crew or at the battalion MASH unit at Tora Bora base, he could fight again, and go after Li Kuan before a dirty bomb appeared in an American or somebody else’s city.

As he ran out to grab the rope lowered by the chopper into the ravine, the.50 caliber machine gunner on the Pave’s rear ramp door moved his weapon left to right on the pintle mount in concert with his NVG sweep of the razorback ridge that cut the night sky like a knife blade, no more than a hundred feet away. Sanchez, emerging from the cave’s entrance, knelt to cover Brentwood amid the onslaught of dust and pebbles kicked up by the helo’s downdraft. The ramp gunner saw a flash at one o’clock, swung his.50 hard left, and unleashed a full burst, the machine gun’s deafening staccato overriding the whack of the sniper’s armor-piercing round hitting the right auxiliary tank, whose sealant wall did not prevent a leak, but there was no flame. The pilot, wanting to jettison the tank but afraid it might strike Brentwood, who was still on the ground directly beneath the chopper, yelled through his mike, asking if he was hooked up to the SPIE line. The copilot, meanwhile, released a rain of orange antimissile flares.

“Are you hooked up?” shouted the pilot. “Do you copy? Are you—”

“Yes, I am! Go! Go! Go!” And the Pave’s bulbous-nosed radar dome and in-air refueling proboscis dipped in unison. The chopper’s rear rotor tilted as the Pave rose swiftly above the dark V-shaped cleft of the ravine, the helo’s rear ramp machine gunner laying down suppressing fire until the last possible moment, the ramp door closing like the mouth of some airborne flame-spitting dragon. David, still on the ground as the Pave Low took up the slack, clung to the rope with his left hand, his right dangling uselessly.

Then suddenly he was off, his body and boots a tiny exclamation point to the pilot, the commando leader dangling over two hundred feet below the chopper. In fact, Brentwood was only ten feet off the ground, his illusion of height caused by the freezing air roaring into his lungs as wind currents buffeted him from side to side, dangerously close to the narrow ravine’s cliffs, like a pendulum’s bob. The vapor trail of the Russian-made rocket- propelled grenade streaked up from a razorback hide and was clearly visible to Sanchez at the cave’s