Choke Point

Heidelberg. “Whenever there is the catastrophe on the circuit,” he had told his American hosts, most of them officers from armored units, “you must never watch — you understand? You must watch your bottom, because in that moment when you are watching the catastrophe in front of you, the driver on your rear will take advantage of your lack in concentration and — voila!—will attack from behind and win the race. Yes?” There had been a lot of Belgian beer drunk that night, and a lot of drunks, bored with the routine of guarding the Fulda Gap through which Soviet armor was expected to pour if the Communist Warsaw Pact attacked. No one had even heard of Jihad, bin Laden, or Li Kuan in those peaceful cold war days. But Douglas Freeman, then due for his “bird,” his promotion to colonel, had remembered every word that the “Bottom Belgian,” as he was called, had said. And now Freeman, though sorry for the pilot, watched his rear, turning seaward, and caught a glimpse of the sub as the thick fog in the bay momentarily thinned, burned off by the heat from the helo and beach fires.

Though Freeman, now swimming to catch up to the others, couldn’t hear the sound of the prop yet, the sub seemed to be moving, perhaps using its battery power, not wanting to be heard leaving the bay.

“Sub’s escaping!” he yelled. Yet he felt a surge of hope. The fact that the sub was still on the surface could only mean she hadn’t yet reached water deep enough to submerge, and the fog was too thick to permit the terrorists to see the landmarks they’d used as channel markers.

By the time Freeman had called to his comrades above the noises of the beach inferno and crashing waves, the sub had vanished. No one except Dixon doubted him, the raw-nerved diver remembering, as Freeman did, something he had been told at the beginning of his career and seen verified by his own experience: that under high stress, combatants become powerfully predisposed to see what they expect. Perhaps Freeman had projected the image of the sub, in his mind’s eye, out into the fog. After all, Dixon had seen two terrorist underwater swimmers in the kelp that turned out to be peripheral trails of submerged kelp.

“You sure, sir?” he called.

“Yes—”

“General!” It was Sal, hauling himself ashore. “On the beach, one o’clock.”

It was a small, fifteen-foot aluminum boat, on pushcart wheels. A golf-cart-like handle stuck up from under the bow, a good-size cream-colored outboard was on the stern, and the paint was blistering from a combination of radiant heat from the fires to the left and from the Little Bird’s crash. The helo’s explosion had created a firebreak in the scattered line of burning debris, a break without which the aluminum boat, its wooden trailer already smoldering, would itself have been engulfed in flame.

“Time we got a friggin’ break!” shouted Aussie, unconscious of his pun until after he’d said it. In any event, no one laughed, the pilot’s torso now a cinder block toppling forward into the taffylike blob that had been the Little Bird’s plexiglass bubble.

Salvini being closest to the beach, about ten yards off, and having deflated his Mae West, struck out in an Australian crawl toward the trailer and boat, his powerful strokes testimony to the superb training that Freeman insisted upon and was so proud of.

“Dixon!” the general commanded, between intakes of air. “Check out the beach. We still don’t know where these bastards are. Choir, you, me, and Aussie into that tin boat.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

Salvini emerged from the sea in a tangle of kelp that had formed a wide, dark margin around the bay. Exhausted, running on adrenaline alone, he lumbered across a thin sliver of sand, up over a waist-high rock ledge, and across more sand to the aluminum boat. Cupping his hands, he then began dousing its trailer’s flames with sand. He worked hard and fast and had the fire snuffed out in less than five minutes, by which time Choir, the general, the kelp-covered Aussie, and Peter Dixon had all reached the beach fifty yards east of Sal’s superb one- man fire brigade.

Sal could feel his knees hot, about to buckle. As a distance runner in his off-duty hours, he knew this was a dangerous sign, realizing he’d have to stop for a few minutes and rehydrate, or he’d be of no use to anyone for the next twenty-four hours.

“Taking a little nap, are we?” Aussie asked him. “Brooklyn’s bust!” Aussie told the general and Choir while leaning on the boat’s gunwale to take a rest himself and eat some of the emergency rations they’d managed to salvage from the sinking RIB.

“All right,” said Freeman, shifting the weight of his MP5. “Let’s see if this outboard’s still alive.”

After just one pull of the Mercury’s starter cord, the engine purred like a sweet old tabby, the most welcome sound the SpecFor warriors had heard since picking up the far-off sounds of the approaching Petrel from which Little Bird must have been launched.

The aluminum boat had become a junk drop for fishing tackle, used pop cans, paint cans and brushes, the latter’s bristles now stiffened, the failure to have soaked them evidence of the haste with which the sub’s quick patch-up jobs had been done, the minor repairs no doubt speeded up by the appearance of Freeman’s team.

“Mother of God!” It was Choir, unusually profane, and all work stopped. The bundle of paint rags he’d just tossed out of the boat revealed a long, rough-edged gash in the bottom, about four inches wide and a foot long, as if an axe had been used to frantically sabotage the bottom of the boat.

“Tape!” shouted Freeman, intolerant of the slightest delay. “C’mon, move!”

Aussie’s roll of the super-strong military-issue duct tape had been badly slashed by his fight with the underwater terrorists, but Sal, Choir, Dixon, and Freeman’s waterproofed rolls were intact. “Cut rubber slices to fit off the trailer’s tires,” Freeman continued. “Stuff ’em into the gash and tape the whole lot, inside and outside the keel.”

“Won’t last more’n an hour,” opined Dixon, whose hands were shaking from the cold, despite the insulation provided by his wet suit. He was retrieving the rags, tossing them on the beach fire to warm up the team.

“Half an hour’s all we need,” said Freeman.

Choir’s K-bar made short work of the boat trailer’s tires, the rubber still so hot from the beach fires’ heat that it couldn’t be handled with bare hands. “Get some water, Aussie,” he said, Lewis heading down toward the line of kelp that fringed the fogbound beach. Choir cut the engine, and now they could hear the low, pulsating sound of a vessel three to four miles off in the fog. It was either the oceanographic vessel Petrel, Freeman told them, or the bigger and faster Hurricane-class patrol ship, the Skate, that Admiral Jensen had told him was being dispatched from its Keystone station. Despite having to travel almost twice the distance to the Darkstar anomaly, the 170-foot-long Skate’s speed of forty miles per hour against Petrel’s fifteen would mean they should both arrive around the same time.

“I heard two ships before,” said Aussie, returning with water to cool the rubber tires.

“So did I,” added Choir, who with Salvini’s help had now sealed the gash inside the boat, Dixon and Freeman still working as fast as they could on the keel.

The combination of odors from fires in the cave and the pungent, now empty diesel drums, their hand pumps still attached, mixed with the sweeter smell of burning pine and the lingering odor of cordite and expended tracer casings to create a cloying mix that made Choir feel as if someone had stuffed his nostrils with cotton batting, forcing him to breathe through his mouth. And the warmer atmosphere on the beach that had pushed the fog offshore for a while was gradually disappearing, adding to the general discomfort of the team.

“Let’s hurry this up, lad,” Choir told Dixon. “Sooner I get some fresh air—”

“Hey!” shouted Dixon. “Get off my back!”

Aussie and Salvini’s silence seemed to thunder up and down the beach. Peter Dixon did have an attitude.

“Anyone seen any weapons, ammo, lying about?” cut in Freeman.

“Saw an M-60,” put in Aussie, “where I came ashore, but it’s useless. They spiked it.”

“So,” said Freeman, “we make do with what we have.”

Dixon scrambled out from under the trailer. “Finished.”

“Outstanding,” the general told him, slapping him on the shoulder. “You stay here and hold the beach in case