other than the legendary “George C. Scott.” Nobody, including his wife, asked him his opinion. Everyone, from his mother-in-law to USCG brass, was always
“I say we go look for where that oil came from.”
It was obviously what Freeman wanted. “All right, cox-swain,” he told Alvaro. “Get this RIB moving.”
In seconds the sixteen-foot rigid inflatable’s twin caterpillar diesels roared to 830 horsepower, the twin water jets thrusting the boat forward against the wind, the console’s speedometer needle shaking at 28 knots. Every one of the six-man team, except Coxswain Alvaro, who stood at the Perspex-shielded control panel, was sitting on the fiberglass seats, one hand firmly gripping the aluminum steady bar, their weapons, stocks first, in the quick-release gun rack beside them. Freeman felt the painful arthritic jab in his left knee, an old war wound aggravated by the intense cold of the strait, and Peter Dixon had an uncomfortable sense of deja vu.
“They’re Chinese!” Aussie shouted into the breath-robbing wind. “Five bucks, Choir.”
“Big spender!” retorted Choir, immediately drenched by a five-footer slamming hard amidships.
“All right!” Aussie yelled back. “Ten bucks!”
Choir seemed to nod, but in the kidney-whacking ride, Aussie couldn’t be sure.
“You hear me, you little Welsh bastard?”
“Ten dollars!” confirmed Choir.
“Ooh, lah de bloody lah! Ten
“Al Qaeda!” shouted Salvini.
“You’re on, Brooklyn!”
Reboarding the Kiowa Scout for the early morning hop back to Fort Lewis, David Brentwood was shivering so badly from his dunking in the oily scum of Port Angeles that the pilot, a quiet young redhead who obviously felt sorry for him, could hear his teeth chattering. She tried some small talk as they gained height above the waters of the strait and the wide slab of Admiralty Inlet, but David, clutching an Army-issue blanket about his oil-reeking body, had closed his eyes, the bunker-C fuel absorbed by the blanket stinging them, his anger at the human and environmental havoc caused by the terrorists inflamed by his inability to join his life-long buddies in striking back. The David he knew was not with him; instead it was a morose, uncharacteristically sullen Brentwood who curtly thanked the pilot and ducked beneath the Kiowa’s still-whirling blades, scurrying away like some bedeviled pilgrim for whom the storm had proved too much, and hating himself for his sullenness and self-pity.
CHAPTER THIRTY
A quarter mile from the Keystone ferry, from which the NR-1B would slide into the strait where its somewhat cumbersome-looking conning tower and bow would come into their own, the advance outriders heard a rushing sound. It was as if, one said, a stream of water from a hose had struck a pile of fallen leaves. It was a fuse.
The blacktop erupted with such a bang that the sound reverberated through the NR-1B on its trailer as if it had been struck with some enormous sledgehammer, the “singing” of the metal continuing for several seconds after the last of the black pebble-encrusted bitumen had fallen back down on and about the road, one lump felling an outrider, another two blown off their motorcycles.
Admiral Jensen had already said, “Jesus!” at least five times, this followed by an incoherent rage of profanity as, leaping from his Humvee, he raced towards the NR-1B against the advice of his traumatized driver. The Marine escorts fanned out speedily in U formation toward the launch point, laying down a hail of automatic fire that after six seconds all but denuded the surrounding salmonberry and blackberry bushes, only a leaf or two remaining after the savage onslaught of the Marines’ small arms fire.
There were no bodies to be found, only the bullet-flayed remains of the detonation cord that had been craftily buried, running from the salmonberry bushes through the sodden earth to the road. The long slit in which the det cord had been buried was patched and dusted in places with crushed gravel to make it look indistinguishable from a thousand other cracks on Highway 20.
“No one there, sir,” the Marine CO told Admiral Jensen, who was fighting to regain self-control as several Marines, rushing from the Humvee with its fire extinguisher, doused some small fires on the sub’s wooden trailer frame.
“No one?” said Jensen.
“No, sir. Must have been a remote detonation.” The Marine swept his M-16 across the panorama of gently rolling hills north of the ferry landing that they could now see. The big metal stanchions bracing the docking area were turning golden in the early morning sun that was burning off the mist that had crept inland across the fields and cranberry bogs. “Somewhere up there, probably,” said the Marine CO, now signaling his heavily armed men to secure the quarter mile of road that curved gently ahead to the deserted ferry terminal, the small waiting room, washrooms, and chained red pop machine appearing particularly forlorn.
A Marine corporal took his squad to make sure the building wasn’t occupied or booby-trapped, everyone shaken, whether they showed it or not, by the sabotaged road. The admiral was confused, because the Marines were proceeding as if the explosion hadn’t damaged the NR-1B, until, in a joyous moment, he saw that, despite the sandy soil and lumps of straw-colored passpalum grass that partially covered the sub’s nose and the elongated conning tower, there was no hole or even a dent evident. But he knew that if even a hairline fracture was discovered, it would mean the integrity of the vessel would be violated. This would prevent the Navy’s state-of- the-art research sub, capable of going to three thousand feet, from diving to even a few feet below the surface.
Feeling as if his heart was pushing an obstruction up into his throat, his breathing becoming increasingly difficult, Jensen approached the craft in a state of incipient panic. With the help of four Marines and his driver, he began brushing off the dirt, sand, and passpalum. “Look carefully,” he enjoined them. “Each of us take a section and go over it with—” He paused, his breathing shallow and rapid. “Carefully,” he said.
“You all right, sir?” asked the Marine CO.
“Carefully,” Jensen repeated.
“Pricks made a hash of it, sir,” said the Marine. “Looks fine. They didn’t use enough C-4. Beat up the truck cabin and the trailer some. But everything else looks hunky dory.”
The admiral heard him but didn’t answer, as if any positive response would jinx his inspection of the one vessel that might find the midget sub and salvage his reputation. He closed his eyes for a moment, the Marine CO thinking he was in pain when in fact he was praying. He remembered what his mother had told him: “Never ask God for anything for selfish reasons — ask that
“You morons!” Jensen’s driver shouted at the amphitheater of fields and hills to the north. “You screwed up, you al Qaeda bastards!” The admiral felt duty bound to tell him to be quiet, but said nothing. The truth was, his driver was expressing the same surge of relief that the admiral and his Marine escort were now feeling: a release from the pent-up tension wrought by the slow, painstaking drive down from the Naval Air Station near Oak Bay toward the ferry.
Jensen, however, was too experienced a commander to leave anything to chance. He didn’t ream out the Marines as he’d wanted to do when he heard the road explode under the vessel — it would have been virtually impossible to detect the fake road repair that had allowed the saboteurs to feed the det cord and C4 under the bitumen’s surface. Instead he simply told the Marine commander to secure the small ferry terminal, and now decided that he’d send a dive pair down to check the water in and around the dock. For all they knew, the road
