Choke Point

“So what happened?” pressed the cook’s assistant.

“What happened is he went nuts. Under pressure. Caved in. Paranoid. Talked to himself.”

The cook’s helper looked disquieted. “I do that sometimes.”

“Yeah, well, you’re nuts too.”

“Bosun,” called Frank. “Lower our runaround. I’m going out to talk to these jokers. See what the score is.”

“I dunno, sir,” said the bosun uneasily. “If you don’t mind my sayin’ so, they’re—”

“What would you suggest?” asked Hall. “If they’re terrorists, they probably wouldn’t try this caper unless they had antitank ordnance. One round of that could easily split us open at the waterline. You know, well as I do, that we haven’t an inch of armor on Petrel. We’d sink in minutes. I’ve seen enough dead Americans. More dead bodies than when I was on tour.”

The tension increased when the two side-scan technicians reported that the roar of Petrel’s engines being brought to full power to bluff the interlopers had scrambled the side-scan’s signals to the sea bottom and the return echoes. All they could see now was a massive earthquakelike trace, as if the stylus had lost its head.

“I’ll get back to you in ten minutes or so,” Hall told them, then ordered the bosun to have the crew lower Petrel’s Zodiac inflatable.

Despite Frank’s somber mood, a mood that pervaded the entire vessel, Frank, calling the bosun by his first name, tried to inject a little morale-raising humor. “Jesus, Tommy,” he said, “I’ll be back for dinner!”

There was forced laughter from the crew, the cook’s helper the only one to think it was a contender for Petrel’s “Best Joke of the Month.”

“You take care,” the bosun said.

Frank shoved off, the Zodiac’s outboard a little rough, spitting now and then as he headed straight for the other, bigger inflatable. Of course they wouldn’t be terrorists. Everyone was becoming too paranoid, as if America had been invaded. Looking back, as sailors always do, to the vessel from which he’d just departed, he saw the bosun standing alone on the hangar deck holding up a white rag, pointing downward.

Frank looked down and saw a white rag tucked into the space between the Zodiac’s gunwale and floor. It contained a suspiciously generic-looking .38 revolver.

A small, hastily scrawled note said, “Hollow points — remember, hold your breath and squeeze. Don’t pull.”

Frank didn’t know whether to be furious or grateful. He’d told these jokers, now only a hundred yards away, that he’d come unarmed. Squeeze. Don’t pull. Who the hell did Tommy think he was talking to? Some first-weeker at Coronado? He stuck the gun between his thigh and the Zodiac’s floor. The outboard was spitting again. Frank gave it a little more throttle. It choked and stopped, dead in the water. What had he learned at Coronado? “All outboards will fail precisely when they are most needed.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Freeman had his nose in the air like a bloodhound. “Smell ’em?” he asked softly.

Aussie and Sal nodded, Choir’s sense of smell sabotaged by the exhaust of the Mercury engine and the bad air mix he’d been inhaling back on the beach. But for his SpecFor comrades, the faint yet distinctive odor of aftershave, cologne, and underarm deodorant told them someone was upwind of them in the fog-shrouded sea, probably no more than two or three hundred yards. The odors were the kind that had betrayed a younger generation of Americans in the jungles of Vietnam, making the same “give-away” mistake as David Brentwood had made by not ordering his team to eat only Arab food. Freeman now went to hand signals, his acute sense of smell indicating there must be at least four of them or maybe half a dozen, up ahead.

Then Choir detected the hushed slurr sound of another motor. He tapped Sal on the shoulder, Sal doing the same to Freeman, the general hoping that the invisible “perfume boys” somewhere up ahead had not yet detected them. Freeman made a throat-cutting gesture and Choir killed the engine, everyone silent, motionless, listening intently, the current taking them forward. Which way were the bogeys heading?

It was then that Petrel’s Tiny saw it happen. The sky opened, the fog riven by sunlight, “Like bloody Moses!” said Tiny. Indeed, the sky suddenly seemed to expand, the common optical illusion at sea when land-generated thermals win the ever-shifting battle with the ocean’s air currents. The speed was such that just as during Freeman’s battle tour in Iraq, when an artillery round had collapsed a battalion’s row of showers to reveal a line of astonished naked bodies, his aluminum boat, Frank Hall’s Zodiac, and the sweet-smelling visitors circling near the Petrel in their RIB all suddenly saw one another and, a half mile to the east, the Coast Guard’s Skate.

For a frozen moment no one did anything, not even Freeman, who had experienced a similar unexpected standoff with a Republican Guard platoon when a dust storm had suddenly lifted near Hindiya. Then, he’d fired first; now, he hesitated, the nanosecond lost perhaps because of a fear of committing blue on blue. Friendly fire had caused more than half the coalition’s casualties in Iraq.

The 7.62mm burst from one of the six “fake Skate” war party unzipped the deadlock, the rounds hitting the sea only three feet in front of Freeman, shocking the general and his team. Choir, making a crucially correct decision, steered at full speed toward the enemy inflatable’s bow. Only Freeman was firing, since there wasn’t enough room in the boat to permit either Aussie or Sal to shoot.

Choir knew that the slightest variation in the their course would give the enemy RIB a broadside target. His quick action confounded the war-painted crew, now only fifty yards off. Their coxswain, instead of calling Choir’s bluff and going full speed at the approaching boat, intuitively but imprudently steered hard astarboard, trying to avoid Freeman’s shots. But the general’s tracered 9mm hit the front two men, their collapse abruptly shifting the weight in the inflatable so its left gunwale was momentarily submerged, the other four men trying frantically to regain balance. One got off a skyward burst before Freeman’s continuing enfilade punched him out of the boat, which heeled farther to port, the remaining three attackers trying to right themselves. It was only two seconds before the three were on their feet, or rather their knees, and stable enough to return Freeman’s fire.

But it was too late, for in those two breath-seizing seconds — an eternity in a firefight or car crash — Freeman had ample time to change mags, the steam rising from his HK barrel seen by Frank Hall, who had been banging away with the bosun’s gift of the Saturday Night Special. Reopening fire at twenty yards, Freeman pierced the trio’s chests with such rapidity it was like a madman frenetically stabbing his victim with an ice pick, the jets of bright arterial blood macabre and, Freeman thought, beautiful against the green of the men’s uniforms and beneath the cerulean-blue sky.

Petrel’s first mate rang Petrel’s telegraph for “Full Ahead” to assist Frank and the men firing from the aluminum boat at the interlopers. Now, as Petrel’s bow wave creased the otherwise calm sea, the first mate and his crew braced for what they thought might be a storm of fire from the Skate. If, in a terrible blue on blue, Petrel’s skipper and the aluminum boat men had mistakenly opened fire on a genuine landing party from the Skate, the guns on the Coast Guard vessel would open up.

“Well, shit!” opined Cookie. “What were those guys with the tin boat supposed to do? Those guys in the RIB started shootin’ first. It was self-defense, man! If it was me—”

“Shut up!” the bosun said, but Tommy knew the kid had a point.

“Jesus,” Jimmy told Malcolm, indicating the floating bodies from the RIB as well as the oncoming Coast Guard vessel. “Maybe they were from the Coast Guard patrol boat — I mean, the guys who opened up first. Old man on that Coast Guard probably didn’t fire back ’cause it’d be killing Americans for killing Americans, if you know what I mean.”

“You mean two wrongs don’t make a right?” Malcolm answered.

“Yeah,” said Jim, appreciative of the phrase. “That’s exactly what I mean. Geez,” he added, not wanting to watch the floaters but unable to look away, “you think they were from the Skate?”