Choke Point

P.S. Maybe my mom and dad were right — at least for me.

Love, John

He read over it quickly — damn, too many “I guesses,” he thought. It made him sound like an “aw shucks” grade school kid. But at least he’d told her. Before leaving the States he had wrestled with the idea of telling Alicia that her burns would heal, that he’d be there for her, that it truly didn’t matter to him — and it didn’t. But he’d decided against it. It would have sounded as if he was loving her out of pity, out of a sense of responsibility for her terrible ordeal.

As the military transport Hercules landed under fighter escort in Okinawa, John Rorke looked out of the window to see if he could locate the sub base, but the Perspex was streaked with rain, the lush fields of the Japanese island a dark, greenish smudge. The roar of the Herk’s engines was so loud he wondered how the bus drivers could stand it. Much better, whatever the danger, to be on the standoff weapons platform, the USS Encino he’d been ordered to. The Los Angeles sub’s mission was to position itself in the Bashi Strait between the Philippines and Taiwan, well off the McCain’s carrier group’s eastern flank, which was coming out of the South China Sea.

It was only after he’d submitted the letter to the base censor, confident that the censor would not see any indication of where one of the U.S.’s supreme weapons platforms had been posted, that Rorke realized Alicia probably wouldn’t be able to read it without someone holding it for her, since her hands, like her entire upper torso, were swathed in bandages. Well, he thought, so what if someone had to read it to her? Better to have said it than not. If she didn’t feel the same about him … Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. He could see people saying he wanted to marry her out of pity, and how could a man want a woman who was so — well, disfigured? But all he knew was what he felt. He loved her. Now, all he had to do was survive.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

If the sub’s diesel-electric capability of attaining absolute silence made for evasion of sonar signals amid the cacophony of competing ocean noise, the four terrorists banging and otherwise working at the sub’s stern did exactly the opposite. Which was why the sub’s captain continued to exhort his men to hurry. Aussie could see that at this rate, by the time the patrol craft out of Keystone or an antisub plane from Whidbey Island reached the sub, it would have jettisoned the basket.

But neither the sub captain nor Freeman, who was totally occupied by the dangerous business of staying alive long enough to delay the sub, had factored Frank Hall’s Petrel into the equation. The moment his highly sensitive sensors, normally used to detect the whereabouts of dummy torpedoes fired on the test range, picked up the loud banging — vectoring in the sub’s exact location — Hall had decided to investigate, to see if it was friend or foe. If the latter, he would “lend a hand,” as he put it to his first mate and crew. Besides, as an ex-SEAL, Hall had a personal aversion to people who fired torpedoes at civilian vessels.

“Lend a hand?” asked the bosun hesitantly. “What exactly does that mean, Captain?”

“Don’t know exactly. But I’m working on it,” answered Frank, having already instructed the Petrel’s helmswoman to swing about, putting the vessel on a course for the banging noise that was still blipping as an amber dot on his sonar screen.

“It’s close inshore,” said the first mate. “Between Pillar and Slip Points.”

“This is voluntary?” pursued the bosun, adding quickly, “I’ll go, but some of the crew—”

“The crew’s American, aren’t they?” said Frank.

“Yes, but—”

“I want to be fair,” answered Frank. “If any of the crew want out, I’ll understand. They’re free to go overboard.”

“Into the RIB?” said the bosun.

“Five second fuses for the balloon-carried charges?” asked the first mate.

“No,” Hall corrected him. “If this bogey’s the terrorist sub — which I’m sure it is, given the location of that fish that was fired at us — we’re going to need our RIB and our whirly bird in—” He glanced up at Petrel’s chronometer. “—in about ten minutes at full speed. So batten all hatches and get the helo ready to fly.”

“Sir,” interjected the mate, “Doppler scope shows fog moving in quickly along the coast.”

Hall acknowledged the meteorological information. This time of year fog was always moving in, then out, then in. He turned back to the bosun. “I’ll fill in the pilot on the GPS, et cetera. While I’m doing that, I want you, six crew, and the chief,” by whom he meant Petrel’s chief engineer, a man of fertile imagination and outstanding mechanical aptitude, “to mold a dozen or so five-pound blocks of LOSHOK — five- second fuses — and jerry-rig four slingshots for them. Big slingshots. Got it?”

Before the bosun could respond, Hall turned to the first officer. “Mate, I want you to organize a few charges for our helo, about seven pounds apiece, then tell the pilot I want a word with him.”

The bosun’s earlier sense of excitement, gained from his skipper’s infectious enthusiasm, was suddenly arrested. He wasn’t concerned so much by the prospect of handling the packs of ammonia-dynamite cartridges, but by having to insert the fiddly, thumbnail-sized blasting caps used at the end of the fuse or primacord that would have to be attached to each LOSHOK’s primary charge. He’d never seen anyone killed by an accident with cartridges of LOSHOK, but he knew a few ex-Marine geology seismic technicians who were missing fingers from having to handle the tiny blasting caps under this kind of time pressure.

“Cut five-second fuses for the five-pound slingshot packs,” Frank told the bosun.

“How long for the helo packs?” asked the first mate.

“I don’t know,” said Frank. “We’ll have to cut them to order, depending on the wind.”

“No wind now,” said the mate. “Doppler shows—”

“Fog!” shot back Frank. “Yeah, I know — you told me before. We’ll just have to do the best we can.”

The bosun and mate exchanged worried glances. It was the first time Hall had implicitly confirmed that he was playing all this by ear, that he wasn’t at all sure that whatever he had in mind would work. Well, thought the bosun, he’ll have to explain his general idea in a couple of minutes, at the most. Short, if not so sweet, because in another six minutes they’d be closing on the sonar’s blip.

Hall grabbed the PA mike. “Attention all hands. This is the captain speaking …”

“A slingshot?” the chief engineer asked the bosun.

“Yeah,” said the bosun, making a skeptical “I know” face to the clutch of oilers who’d also been summoned. To his surprise, however, the chief turned casually to his engine room watch, raising his voice to compete with the thunder of Petrel’s 1,500 horses while the normally “off- watch” engine room crew attended to the engines’ glistening, oil-slicked pistons. They were pounding hard, to spin the prop to maximum revolution, the oceanographic vessel shaking so violently at fifteen knots that every rivet seemed on the verge of popping.

The chief was holding up two twelve-foot-long pieces of aluminum rod. “Take these to the pipe bender, guys. I want you to turn out four Y shapes. No soldering to get a single stem — haven’t got time. Means you’ll have a long, skinny U-handle for each slingshot. We’ll use some of our quarter-inch rubber tubing for the slings. Okay?”

“Yeah, Chief, but what’d we use for that part — you know — that’ll actually hold the LOSHOK as we pull it back?”

“For chrissake,” retorted the chief. “I have to tell you everything? I dunno — use your initiative. Cut sections of leather from your belt.” He pointed to “Tiny,” Petrel’s big, overweight diesel mechanic. “Use Tiny’s belt. Enough for twenty slingshots, right, Tiny?”

“Yeah, very funny!”

“Go!” commanded the chief. “I want you back in five. Fastest gets extra shore leave.”

“Gimme that friggin’ rod!” said one of his crew. A few seconds later he was spinning one of the vices’ handles, the jaws opening like a gopher.

“Hurry up!” his helper, Jimmy, said, adding, “You’re like an old woman.”