Freeman heard the unmistakable rip of Kalashnikov bullets peppering the whirlpools about the RIB, the craft’s series of neoprene inflatable cells along the starboard midships section exploding like popcorn. Choir, seeing the team’s hoped-for surprise popped along with the inflatable cells, opened up the Volvo Penta, the RIB’s bow fairly leaping out of the salt chuck, hitting 35 knots as it sped past the sun-sparkling curtain of falls, with only ninety feet to go to the sub.
“Turning!” Choir yelled, then, “Hard right!” so loudly there was no possibility of either Freeman or Sal not hearing him, despite the rip of the M-60’s one-in-three tracer, almost a red line at that close range.
With barely forty feet to go, Sal’s M-60 fire was wild and unavoidably inaccurate in the RIB’s hard, brain- pummeling progress against the relatively calmer but still rough water between the RIB and the sub. Choir dropped the speed to twenty knots, simultaneously wrenching the wheel astarboard, further confounding the enemy’s aim. Salvini, given forewarning of the turn and having seen that his previous M-60 bursts were too high, dropped the barrel down an inch or so and raked the upper lip of a dark, thirty-foot-wide cave mouth he could now discern immediately behind the docked sub. He also raked the long, black “floating log” of a sub. The midget’s ten-foot-long sail, or conning tower, was a black lump that sparked with the fiery orange hits of his sustained burst, which was completely ineffective, as Sal knew it would be, against the high-tensile steel. But his firing had at least forced the sub’s AK-47-armed lookouts to run for cover.
Two of them were hit as they raced from the sub’s bow along its deck, heading for the narrow, covered walkway that led inshore from the sub’s sail toward the cave. Salvini’s M-60 rounds kept coming, and he cut them down, one man toppling into the water, thrashing about in an agony that ceased with a quick burst from Freeman’s HK, the other one up and running again until the general’s 9mm bullets finished his desperate sprint. Normally, the parabellum rounds he’d just fired had less stopping power, particularly when sprayed at obtuse angles, but the general had fired a tight group of three rounds more or less straight in over the forty-foot range. The other reason the bullets had proved so deadly and weren’t “bee stings,” as Freeman was wont to say, was that — in direct contravention of the Geneva Accords — he’d used HydroShok ammo rather than legal “hard ball.” The frangible head of the HydroShok expanded inside the recipient’s body the nanosecond he was struck.
“Where the hell are our swimmers?” Sal shouted.
“Underwater!” replied Freeman. “Where I’d be with all this crap flying—” His sentence went unfinished as Choir drove the RIB through a dangerously unstable S pattern, which further confounded the enemy’s aim and forced Freeman to grab the roll bar, letting forth a burst of obscenities which only a longshoreman and Aussie Lewis, if he was still alive, could have fully interpreted.
At the moment, however, Aussie Lewis and Dixon were fighting for their lives. They’d seen two dark shapes diving from the sub’s deck, both bearing knives — not the standard K-bar blades or expensive Randalls, but eighteen-inch bayonets that would pass right through a man, with steel to spare. Alarmed, Dixon glanced across at Aussie, who pointed down and drew his hand across his throat, a move that caused Dixon to gulp and swallow a huge bubble from the fierce “wash cycle” churned up by Choir’s effective but bone-busting evasive antics. The Welshman’s “crazy pattern” wake all but covered the moat area with bubbles, which temporarily kept both pairs of divers from each other as well as from their respective surface combatants.
The RIB, careening successfully at first, crisscrossing the moat behind the falls and sub, now came under steady and heavy automated fire from the cave behind the sub. Below, the two pairs of divers engaged, without circling each other or using any of the fancy energy-wasting tricks and turns imagined by some who have never been swimming for their lives. In the sand-stirred undersea world bounded by the falls and the submarine, the soft sound of rubber fins was obliterated by the high whine of the RIB’s engine and the increasing rumble of the sub’s diesel.
Aussie, intending to take the initiative, closed with his opposite number, who kicked hard in a burst of speed, trying to drive home the overreach of his bayonet through Lewis’s chest. Aussie slowed, trading speed for accuracy of impact. The enemy’s first right-handed bayonet thrust was short, a feint that drew in Aussie’s K-bar, which Aussie’s opponent smartly deflected with a smaller blade that had suddenly materialized in his left hand. Aussie, against all logic, released his grip on his parried right hand, gripping the enemy’s knife wrist instead, the enemy diver driving his bayonet in a flurry of effervesced water hard toward Aussie’s chest. Aussie twisted, the bayonet slicing clean through his Draeger’s left-side hose and ricocheting off the Draeger’s chest-mounted housing. Then Aussie kicked once, bringing up his free left hand, thrusting hard, striking the other swimmer’s mask with such force it was knocked away from the man’s face, the expelled air momentarily blinding both him and Aussie. But with his mask still on, Aussie had the better of it. When his opponent turned frantically to retrieve his own mask, Aussie brought his right knee up hard into the man’s scrotum. The man’s mouth agape with the shock of the hit, he involuntarily gulped in seawater, which Lewis knew would drown all discipline and training his opponent might have.
In an intuitive act of survival, Aussie’s opponent rose quickly toward the surface for air. Any breath his lungs might have had in reserve was now depleted, the bubbles rising from his transit to the surface joining those coming from Aussie’s left hand as Lewis grabbed the man’s right leg as it passed in front of him and, with one savage slash of his K-bar’s blue steel, sliced through the man’s neoprene sheath with such fury that it cut to the bone. A cloud of cherry-red blood obscured Aussie’s view before it was quickly diluted to a watermelon pink, through which Aussie glimpsed the tail end of a school of salmon, which he now realized had been all around them and were fleeing — perhaps, Aussie thought, because of approaching sharks. He kicked with all the energy he had, his fins propelling him fast toward the surface, the whine of the RIB engine piercing his eardrums as he crashed into the frenzied body of his opponent at the surface. The wounded man, gulping in the icy, pristine air above the roiling blue, had realized he was no longer able to swim.
To Aussie’s astonishment, he and his opponent were no more than twenty feet away from an enormous floating log, which Lewis quickly realized was the midget sub. His vision impaired by the turmoil created by the other man’s panic, Aussie grabbed at a black orb that was his opponent’s head, stabbing it repeatedly with his K- bar. Aussie’s enemy, meanwhile, charged with fear and adrenaline, was like a writhing swordfish and still dangerous. So instead of going for his heart, as ancient Greek warriors had — and would have been his preference — Aussie did it the most effective if messy way — puncturing him wherever contact could be made. He dragged his opponent under and stabbed him repeatedly, until the man’s body went limp. Exhausted, Aussie then released him, the only sound he could hear, apart from the falls, being the rapid fire of machine guns.
He’d seen a dozen or so men casting off lines from stakes that had been driven into crevices along the rock shelf in front of the cave and here and there in a crushed-shell beach just east of the rock ledge. But he couldn’t contact the RIB. He looked around for Dixon, but all he could see was the sub moving out, and beyond it, on the rocky ledge in front of the cave, a pile of discarded cardboard boxes, large sheets of torn paper, plastic wrap and assorted rubbish littering the beach, the paper alternately billowing and collapsing from phantom breezes that seemed to be coming out of the cave.
Freeman, Sal, and Choir had returned to the islet, ignobly but sensibly taking cover behind the small, jagged six-foot-long, five-foot-high rock wall. The guano that had remained undisturbed atop the wall now rose like chalk dust as the sub’s defenders—“About fourteen of ’em,” Sal told Freeman — continued to rake the rock with light and heavy machine-gun fire.
“Where the—” began Sal, his words drowned out by such an enfilade of heavy caliber and light machine-gun fire that the salt air above the small islet sang with the discordant noise of ricocheting rounds which, had it not been for the small rock wall, would have literally chopped the general and his two compatriots to pieces.
“You see Dixon or Aussie?” It was Choir, his Welsh accent always more pronounced in the taut, crackling air of a firefight.
“I don’t like this,” said Sal, in one of his more memorable understatements. “I don’t like it at all.”
Choir, crawling along on his belly, ignominiously peeked an inch or two around the end of the rock wall. “
“Goddammit, Sal!” bellowed Freeman, pointing to the lashed-down hump of equipment in the RIB, which slapped noisily and annoyingly against the protected sea side of the islet. “Gimme that AT!”
“Won’t stop it with that, General!” Sal said as he passed the one-shot, self-contained antitank launcher Freeman had eschewed using earlier from the islet because it would have been a wasted shot, given the impediment to his line of sight formed by the falls. He’d also known that had he tried a blind shot, the Swedish-built rocket would have exploded in transit the second its warhead struck the water wall. But now the sub’s fifty-foot- long forward section from sail to bow was nosing out beyond the edge of the waterfall.
