Choke Point

explosion could be a cover to divert the Marines’ attention away from the dock, where earmuff charges could be placed on the pilings and exploded once the NR-1B was in the water. High-temperature oxyacetylenelike cuts from muff charges could easily sever H-shaped dock pilings and supports, causing them to come crashing down onto the superstructure of the 146-foot-long sub.

Unfortunately, his call to the Coast Guard ended in frustration. The last of their standby divers, Peter Dixon, was with General Freeman, and like all other divers in the strait, Puget Sound, and adjacent waters, he was doing triple time, trying to cope with the most pressing of the myriad diving tasks created by the recent rash of sinkings, including that of the Georgia Queen, most of whose passengers had died. The other thing that frustrated Jensen was the news that apparently Douglas Freeman had gone out without assist from the NR-1B. “I’d’ve thought Freeman would’ve waited for the NR-1B,” Jensen told the USCG admiral in Seattle.

“Maybe, Walt, but you know how Doug Freeman is. Charge!”

Jensen held his tongue. Freeman was a glory hound, but he was also the one who had told Marte Price that it was his — Admiral Jensen’s — idea to send out Darkstar for a “close-in” run along the reverse seven of the Olympic peninsula’s northern Juan de Fuca shore and down south from Cape Flattery to the national wildlife refuge. It had been an unselfish act, Jensen knew, on Freeman’s part to help a disgraced admiral regain something of his reputation after the disastrous loss of the Utah.

“Any of you fellas swim?” Jensen asked the Marines, his question clearly a request for volunteers.

Four Marines immediately stepped forward.

“Just in for a few minutes, guys — long enough to check the pilings. Okay?”

The four men stripped to their skivvies, taunted good-naturedly by their comrades, “Brass monkey balls in there! You won’t last more’n three minutes, cowboy!”

The remaining Marines used their compact field glasses to zoom in on the pilings and launch ramp, seeing nothing suspicious, while the four ad hoc divers plunged in. They were immediately struck by the extraordinary clarity of these Northwest waters. They saw thick clumps of barnacles, oysters, and other marine crustaceans, any of which could hide explosive, which was infamously easy to camouflage. Still, they could see no wires, no det cord. The four Marines’ lips were soon dark blue, bodies shivering as uncontrollably as David Brentwood’s had the previous evening at Port Angeles.

“Looks clear, sir,” the Marine CO informed the admiral, adding a caveat for his own protection. “ ’Course, you never know.”

Jensen hesitated, wondered and worried. Apart from anything else, this was a billion-dollar machine in his charge.

“What’s that?” asked one of the Marines, pointing to a dot, obviously some kind of vessel, coming from the direction of Port Townsend, ten miles southwest across Admiralty Inlet.

The dot on the inlet’s cobalt blue was Washington State’s Port Townsend — Keystone ferry, due to arrive at Keystone in twenty-five minutes.

“What the hell’s it doin’?” asked a gum-chewing Marine.

It was the question on everyone’s mind. Surely the carnage unleashed in the last seventy-six hours argued against any resumption of normal ferry traffic.

“What if they’ve taken over the ferry, Admiral?” the Marine CO asked.

“Using it to stop our launch,” said the admiral, “now that they’ve seen their road mining didn’t work.”

No one knew who “they” might be, but the sinking of billions of dollars of U.S. naval ships clearly had been done with the aid of damn good intelligence. They’d known precisely where the ships would be and when. And it was more than likely that the same HUMINT who had informed the terrorists of this would know the “road-blow” had failed to perforate the high-tensile steel of the NR-1B.

Jensen wasted no time and ordered one of his COMSUBPAC-9’s two 170-foot Coastal Patrol ships that normally serviced Hood Canal and Puget Sound to intercept the suspect Townsend-Keystone ferry with all possible haste, to stop the ferry and have a boarding party investigate.

“Any resistance,” Jensen instructed the Coastal Patrol ship’s captain and thirty-two-man crew, “is to be met with deadly force. I say again, deadly force.”

The two Hurricane-class Coastal Patrol Ships, unlike the three Hurricanes commanded by USCG Seattle, were on picket duty in Hood Canal, their sole responsibility to guard the entrance to Admiralty Inlet and the waters north and south of the Hood Canal bridge. It was through the Hood Canal’s retractable section that Jensen’s U.S. Hunter Killer and Boomer ballistic missile subs had to pass during their egress from Bangor Base, through the strait, on their way to open, rolling ocean west of Cape Flattery. While one of COMSUBPAC-GRU-9’s two Hurricanes remained on station at the sabotage-susceptible bridge, the other, the USS Skate, primarily responsible for the waters north of the bridge, set off immediately into the Prussian blue stretch of Admiralty Inlet, toward the suspect ferry eighteen miles to the north.

With a fuel-guzzling “dash” speed of 35 knots, the Skate’s estimated time of interdiction with the ferry was fourteen minutes, at a point plus or minus three miles from Keystone. The Skate’s captain and third officer, their binoculars glued to them, devoutly hoped that there would be no more “floaters,” whom they’d feel they should stop to pick up. The best the Skate’s skipper could do, similar to what Frank Hall had done on Petrel, was to have one of their two inflatables ready with a paramedic and three other able seamen standing by.

“Anything, lookouts?” called the captain.

“No, sir,” came the answer from starboard and port. “Just a lot o’ dead fish. They smell somethin’—”

“Very good. Keep sharp.”

“Twelve minutes fourteen seconds till ETI,” responded the third mate.

“Very good.”

By now the Skate’s radio officer, like Jensen’s Marine guard contingent, was trying unsuccessfully to make contact with the ferry. No response.

“Something’s wrong,” opined the patrol ship’s mate. “Twelve minutes ETI.”

Every skipper in the Northwest was on edge, to put it mildly, and the Skate’s captain sounded Action Stations.

Suddenly the ship came alive with dozens of crew who only minutes before had been comfortably in the rhythm of their watch. They were now running along with off-watch personnel, pulling on helmets and flak jackets, manning their stations from the stern’s Mk 38 gun and Stinger launcher pedestal to the ship’s two.50 caliber machine guns, its two 7.6mm machine guns, grenade launchers, and, up forward, another Mk 38 25mm chain gun.

Yet despite all this armament, many of the Skate’s crew felt uncomfortably vulnerable. The 170-foot-long, twenty-five-foot-wide ship was, in their view, grossly undergunned for its size, and presented a big enough target for surface-to-surface or air-launched missiles of the kind that had killed the night watchman at Cherry Point and set the whole complex ablaze.

“Don’t sweat it,” a petty officer assured the young chain gunner. “It’s only a friggin’ ferry we’re coming to. People and cars, ol’ buddy. That’s all.”

“Yeah, but what nut would take a ferry out when there’s a midget sub still around?” He was thinking of the Canadian ferry Georgia Queen.

The petty officer shrugged. “Ah, he’s probably taking stores over for Whidbey’s Naval Air Station.”

“Without an escort? Gimme a break!”

“ETI nine minutes thirty seconds,” the captain’s voice boomed out. “Stay focused. Stay alert. ROE — no firing unless I give the word. I say again, no firing unless I give the word.”

“Yeah yeah,” said one of the gunners. “I get it.” But the captain would repeat his order, knowing that, given the ongoing trauma of the past few days, everyone was on edge. No one on Skate had been sleeping well. It was also a common complaint ashore.

“ETI nine minutes.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE