we need a hand when we return.”
“Right.” Dixon nodded, grabbing his camelback and taking a long drink through its flexi tube.
“Let’s go, SAC!” said the general, his acronym standing for Salvini, Aussie, and Choir.
It had once been BACS, but this was the first time Brentwood was missing from the roster, forced to stay behind at Fort Lewis, where Freeman knew that the only outlet for his frustration at not being with his old team — and for the guilt he felt over his failure to get Li Kuan in Afghanistan — was to spend hour after hour firing small arms on the practice range. But even then, Freeman guessed the ex-SpecFor warrior must be frustrated by the fact that his left hand couldn’t master anything bigger than a handgun. At Fort Lewis, his proficiency with the Colt .45 and HK 9mm pistol was so good it had earned him the moniker “Wyatt Earp.” But Brentwood, like Freeman, like everyone else in a modern army, knew that the day of the handgun was over in war — it was merely a backup piece rarely, if ever, used. In this world war against terrorism, sidearms were used only by pilots shot down behind enemy lines, if such a “line” could be found in a war marked by ever-shifting and remarkably fluid fronts.
As their aluminum boat glided over the kelp at the water’s edge, Freeman, standing up in the bow, bracing himself against the chop, fixed his binoculars on the fogbound sea beyond the roar of the falls, helping Choir navigate past the sandbars they’d seen when first entering the bay.
“Think he saw the sub?” Sal asked Aussie, both of them kneeling behind the boat’s midline.
“Got eyesight like a friggin’ eagle, the old man has,” said Aussie. “And ears. If he says he saw it, he saw it, mate.”
“Hush!” said Choir, also straining to hear.
“It’s gone!” proclaimed Freeman.
“Maybe a chopper from that tub Jensen’s sending?” proffered Aussie.
Freeman shook his head, and without turning around, said, “No. Hurricane class doesn’t have a chopper. Could be a Navy chopper out of Whidbey, but they’re all but useless in this pea soup.”
No one answered. The fog was rolling in on them in huge banks of bone-chilling air, the warmer convection currents generated by the beach’s fires replaced by colder sea air. For Choir it felt as if someone had opened the doors to a gargantuan freezer, the resulting wind chill factor evicting any residual warmth the SpecFor warriors had absorbed from the numerous small fires while on the beach.
“Can’t hear those ships anymore,” said Choir.
In fact, they hadn’t heard the sub’s quiet, electric-smooth exit from the bay, but had all heard the unmistakable underwater throb of two approaching vessels.
“Cut the Merc!” ordered Freeman. “I’ll go over, have a listen.”
He went in and sank beneath the surface. Then Sal, Choir, and Aussie waited anxiously to see whether the general, taking advantage of the speed of underwater sound propagation, could pick up the sound of the two vessels. After a while, the three veterans in the boat grew worried. The fogbound sea was calmer than before, and there were no whirlpools to be seen in the twenty-foot radius of visibility around the boat. Maybe it was just their fatigue, but it seemed that the general should have popped back up by now. You either heard something or you didn’t.
“What now?” said Aussie disgustedly.
Sal, trying to see through the fog, shrugged. “That bastard Murphy again.” Their string of mishaps and near misses had been no different than in any other war they’d been in. Victory wasn’t a matter of “Rambos” going crazy, but of a team working through the screw-ups, having the will, equipment, and training — or “WET,” as the general called it — to see it through.
Then Freeman’s head popped up right beside Choir. “Jesus—” began the usually sanguine Welshman.
“Hide and seek,” said the general, spitting out a fringe of kelp. “Sound vectors coming at you from every direction down there.”
“Decoys?” suggested Aussie as he helped the general aboard.
“That’s my read,” replied Freeman. “Damn sub’s dropped sonar ’sub’ decoys along the way. Decoys are sending out sub engine noises all over. Our boys on
“How long do those decoy batteries last?” asked Salvini.
“Two, three weeks,” said Choir.
“Oh shit! Meanwhile those Chinese are sitting all quiet and cozy on the bottom,” said Aussie.
The others ignored Aussie’s certainty that the terrorists were Chinese.
“They’re not so cozy,” said Freeman. “Their air’ll run out sooner or later.”
“But before the CO2 scrubbers are exhausted,” said Choir, “they could last what, three to four days?”
“Something like that,” agreed the general.
“Oh shit!”
“Wish you’d stop saying that, boyo,” said Choir.
“Oh
“Yeah,” joined in Sal. “
“Knock it off,” the general ordered, which he rarely did. But even among the most resistant SpecFor teams, nerves could get frayed, fatigue and cold misconstruing friendly abuse. “Let’s head back to shore,” Freeman added. “I’d hoped we could tag that bastard midget, but we’re only spinning our wheels out here.”
As they returned through the ever-thickening fog, no one could see Dixon, not even when they were practically at the beach.
“He’s drying out,” said Aussie, “by one of the fires.”
“I can’t see him,” said Sal.
“Shouldn’t have left him alone,” said the general.
“He’s a big boy,” Sal assured him.
Choir said nothing, but, remembering how Dixon had been shaking so badly, feared what no SpecFor ever wanted to contemplate: that Dixon’s hand-to-hand combat had undone him; that, spooked by the beach, he’d decided to bolt instead of doing what Freeman had ordered — stay on the beach to lend a hand to his comrades upon their return. Choir, who’d seen it happen a few times before on special operations, was pretty sure Dixon was hiding somewhere in the cave, shivering uncontrollably from the twin demons of a combat swimmer’s lot — cold and unspeakable terror. The one thing you always remembered was the blood in the water, engulfing you in your sin as much as it did your dead foe, haunting some men for the rest of their lives.
Circumventing the floating kelp bed, Choir almost ran aground on a sandbar. Along the shoreline, an army of wine-dark kelp crabs moved en masse, ready to swarm any detritus trapped by the kelp. It was one of the ugliest things Choir had ever seen.
Choir was right. Dixon was in the cave. There were no distinctive footprints to guide the SpecFor team. The sandy apron below the cave had obviously been “Main Street,” as the team habitually referred to the main trail or thoroughfare used by the enemy — in this case, by the terrorists to hurriedly replenish the sub. Dixon’s eyes widened when he saw Choir, who had followed the speckled trail of blood from the beach, and his intake of air made an annoying, laborious sound, as if he were inhaling through straw. What neither Choir nor his three comrades had seen in the cave’s dripping gloom was the duct tape across Dixon’s mouth, which they now saw while approaching.
“This’ll hurt, boyo!” Choir told him as the Welshman, resting his HK against the nearby boulder, knelt down to unbind Dixon. Freeman, Aussie, and Salvini, as if by instinct rather than training, formed a protective C around them.
“Mother of God!” It was Choir, in shock, realizing that Dixon’s strained breath had been his last, that the damp sand the Welshman was kneeling in was wet with blood. “Boys,” Choir said softly in a tone of a sadness that physically seemed heavier than his pack.
“What’s up?” asked Aussie, eyes still to the front. There was no answer from Choir, and Aussie glanced back, froze, then looked away — at anything rather than the young swimmer whose mouth had been stuffed with what remained of his blood-sodden genitals.
He had choked to death. Aussie, who would later chastise himself for his morbid curiosity — or had it been
