Choke Point

Malcolm shrugged. “We’ll soon find out.”

Frank wasn’t going to second guess his first mate. After all, the officer had good intentions in bringing the Petrel forward. But he knew the underwater ruckus made by Petrel’s props would destroy any hope of a clear side-scan trace for a while. And so the only comments he made, climbing up to Petrel’s deck following the short, fierce firefight on the water, were directed at the bosun.

“Thanks for the weapon, Tom,” he said, handing the white bundle up to him.

The bosun gave the bundle to Tiny to hold. A second later a full-bodied oath greeted Frank Hall, Tiny dropping the .38 he’d noisily retrieved from the cloth. “Jesus — it’s hotter’n a two-dollar shotgun.”

“How’d it go?” the bosun asked solemnly. “The gun?”

“Oh,” lied Frank, “went great. Sure as hell glad I had it, I can tell you. One of those bastards holed our Zodiac. Couldn’t pick up anyone.” Frank was on the deck phone now, the mate telling him he was arranging a deck party to help Freeman’s team with the floaters. The Skate was back on channel 16, the jamming by the unknown craft having ceased the moment Freeman had finished off the six attacking his tin boat.

The bosun was beaming. Hell, he hadn’t been able to do much to help out in the firefight and was glad his .38 had been of some use, confiding proudly to Tiny and Malcolm, “It was probably our skipper who dropped a couple of those bastards.”

Tiny watched the bosun walk into the dry lab to join Frank, anxiously standing by the side-scan recorder.

“What’s he worried about?” asked Cookie, smoking beneath the A-frame. He sounded nonchalant, but Malcolm noticed that his legs were trembling so much that his stained white apron was shaking as well. Cookie saw that Malcolm had noticed.

“Cold?” Malcolm asked.

“Huh, what? Oh, yeah. Freezing.”

“What you expect, Cookie? You haven’t got enough on, for chrissake. Put on a windbreaker.”

“Cook doesn’t like me wearing ’em around the mix.”

“Fuck the cook! Put on a windbreaker.”

“Yeah …” He’d obviously forgotten about what was worrying the captain.

Malcolm put his arm on the young man’s shoulder. “We’re all cold, Cookie. You’ll be all right.”

Cookie nodded sharply, tossing the cigarette overboard, which was just as well, Malcolm told Jimmy, who was standing over by portside rail. At the moment, Hall was preoccupied in the dry lab by the fact that the Petrel had lost over three hundred yards of trace due to the first mate’s “Full Ahead” order. But if he came out on deck and found Cookie smoking anywhere near the LOSHOK, he’d likely shoot him with the bosun’s .38.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” began Malcolm, he and Jimmy trying to keep out of the way of the guys who were putting over the rope ladder for the approaching SpecFor team, the ropes and wooden steps whacking the side of the ship.

“What’s amazing?” asked Jimmy.

“Tommy. First rate bosun. Knew just what to do. He wanted to use the slingshot LOSHOK to try to help the old man, but he knew one slip and he’d kill the old man or these SpecFor guys we’re gonna take aboard. But the same guy thinks that dinky .38 he’s been haulin’ around is accurate.”

“It’s a piece of crap,” agreed Jimmy. “Couldn’t hit a barn door at two feet.”

“Maybe it saved his life one time,” Malcolm mused, out of a sense of fair play.

“Maybe,” conceded Jimmy, watching the urgent preparations on the increasingly crowded stern deck while safeguarding the pallet of LOSHOK charges by the A-frame. “Maybe he used it as an oven. Fire three shots out of that thing and you could cook a three-course meal.”

Malcolm grinned broadly. It was hardly the time or place for a joke — even a weak one — but sometimes it just happened like that. “I’m gonna tell ’im you said that,” he kidded Jimmy. “Put you in the shit!”

“Thanks!” Jimmy kicked the half-dozen small packs of LOSHOK. “Think we’ll ever get to—”

“Hey!” said Malcolm, stepping away. “Don’t do that!”

“What?” inquired Jimmy, feigning doltlike innocence. “Oh, you mean don’t do this?” whereupon he again kicked the seventy-pound mother of all depth charges.

“Jesus, Jimmy, knock it off!”

“Relax, mah boy. Friggin’ midget’s skedaddled by now under cover of all our prop wash and that Coast Guard tub steaming toward us.”

The Skate was now only two hundred yards to the east but slowing, its own prop wash slopping forward to overtake and mix with its decelerated bow wave. Along with the Petrel, it created a localized chop in which Freeman, Sal, and Aussie found it difficult to haul the dead aboard their commandeered aluminum boat, their outrage at what had happened to Dixon having cooled somewhat by the possibility that they’d perhaps been involved in an unavoidable “friendly fire” incident. It had been unavoidable to them, the men on the spot, but they knew it never appeared as unavoidable to the media or the armchair critics who always knew what you should have done in the millisecond you had to decide.

Freeman was understandably tight-jawed as they hauled in the third of the six bodies. “Look,” he said sternly. “No identification!”

Aussie wondered if the general’s cryptic comment was a criticism of the dead men for not having identified themselves before opening fire, or whether he was commenting on the fact that none of those hauled in so far had any ID whatsoever. One of them looked Central Asian to him, another Chinese, and the third was racially unidentifiable, having been hit in the upper chest and face.

“Where in hell did they come from?” asked Salvini. “I mean, were they sent from the sub to run interference?”

“Maybe they came out of that cave,” said Choir.

“I’ll bet—” Aussie began, and paused for breath as he braced his feet against the inside of the tin boat’s starboard drop seat and, aided by Freeman, began hauling in the fourth floater. “—I’ll bet Choir’s right, that these pricks are the same ones who did the sicko job on young Dixon. Probably came down out of the cave then dragged their RIB from a hide on the beach and came out in the fog to do the Petrel ’fore she could find their mates in the sub.” The fourth floater, another Asian, now tumbled into the boat, which rocked precariously.

“Watch it!” cautioned Choir. “I’ve had enough dunking for one day.” He added, “Why not let Petrel haul these shit bags out?”

No one answered his question, but their silence was a reply. Their earlier guesstimates notwithstanding, they were not sure whether these bodies were hostiles or U.S. Special Forces like themselves, caught up in a tragic blue on blue. Aussie’s hypothesis that the bodies were those of the hostiles who so savagely murdered and tortured Dixon was no more than that — a hypothesis. Special Forces, like Freeman’s, like David Brentwood’s failed team in Afghanistan, always went on foreign operations without any identification that might cause political embarrassment should they be captured or killed. And the fact that two different branches of the armed services often sent out their own without telling one another was no help. Plus, as Choir acknowledged, foreign terrorists teams would certainly use someone fluent in English.

“What’s this one?” Aussie asked as they hauled in another body. “Chinese?”

“No,” said Freeman.

“Japanese?” proffered Choir.

“Vietnamese?” suggested Aussie. “They’re heavy as a brick in the water, but you can see they’re all in pretty good shape. No extra weight. Damn, look at that! Fog’s rolling in again.” It came in like a giant billow of smoke, and within a minute the Petrel and the Skate, each vessel’s radar allowing them to maintain station two hundred yards apart, were at times completely hidden from view. With the sixth body nowhere to be seen, Choir sped up the Mercury before they lost sight of Petrel.

Unintentionally, just as Petrel’s and Skate’s engineers had done, he further sabotaged Petrel’s side-scan outgoing sonar waves. Not surprisingly,