Choke Point

the disturbance angered Hall, who, as tired as everyone else on the oceanographic vessel, now learned from the Skate’s captain that the five unidentified dead men killed by Freeman had definitely not been sent from the Skate.

This told Frank that the six-man commando unit sent so cunningly to board Petrel would not have been dispatched unless the sub was still in the area, lying low. “Mate,” he ordered the first officer, “get the GPS coordinates for that slab we had a trace of a while back. GPS, as good as it is, has a possible error margin of a hundred feet. That’s not much on land, but out here it can be like looking for your car on the wrong parking level and—”

“Like the Seinfeld show,” said the mate, “when Kramer—”

“I don’t watch TV,” Frank cut in abruptly. “Take your steering directions from the dry lab. I’ll stay down here.”

“Sir?”

“Yes?

“I have to take a dump!”

“Where’s the third mate?”

“Feeling sick. She’s pretty upset.”

“About what?”

“Well, you know,” began the mate awkwardly. “She told me she signed on to do, you know, retrieval, oceanographic work, not a war. Guess she wasn’t ready for this?” He indicated the bodies being hauled up from the tin boat by the stern’s hydraulic arm.

“New York wasn’t ready for 9/11,” retorted Frank, punching the intercom bar for the third mate’s cabin.

A groggy, sickly voice barely managed to say, “Yes?”

“Riley. It’s the captain speaking. Get your ass up to the bridge. Now!”

The third mate’s silence was a tacit recognition of Hall’s zero tolerance for malingerers, Frank telling her everyone on the ship was needed. If the fog kept socking them in, it would be an ideal opportunity for an injured sub awaiting its chance to make a run for it come nightfall.

When the third mate dragged herself up to relieve the first mate, she was whey-faced. A tall, lithe young woman who normally looked as if she could handle anything, her male counterparts could see that Sandra Riley looked bedraggled after her ordeal, dazed by the bridge glass’s reflection of the bright shaded stern light that formed a sharply defined cone in the swirling fog.

Frank, who had just come up from the dry lab, tapped the GPS coordinates on the chart. “Soon as we get those bodies aboard, Sandra, we’ll come about and backtrack to this GPS location. See what we get in the trace. We lost a gob of it during a damn paper change.”

Sandra took Hall’s use of her first name as a good sign — more often than not he simply called her Riley. “If it’s the sub,” she mused aloud, “maybe they’ll take advantage of all this noise.”

Frank’s usual equanimity was edgy with fatigue. “You an authority on antisubmarine warfare now?” He knew better, but the perversity that runs with bad temper and the feeling of his own impotence regarding the sub was venting itself.

“I just meant that with all the noise the Skate’s engines are making, screwing up our side scan, it would be a good time for a sub in trouble to surface—”

“Yes, I know. Make a run for it in the fog.”

“Exactly!” It was said in a gutsy, uncompromising tone.

Frank turned to watch the work crew bringing aboard the general and his three comrades, all of them old friends who’d trained at one time or another in SpecOps at Elgin in Florida as well as at the SEALs’ school at Coronado in California. They’d all carried the monstrous logs at Coronado, running along the public beach while young beach beauties Sandra’s age, only a few feet away, sunbathed in the scantiest thong bikinis the sweating, grunting SEAL trainees had ever seen. “What beauties?” the SEALs’ instructors had barked, their faces masks of incredulity. “Ain’t no women here. You’re hallucinating. Pick it up, Salvini. Hup, two, three …”

Frank made a mental note to apologize to Sandra later. But now, her self-assertiveness, her tone, which some skippers could easily have convinced themselves was bordering on insubordination, was too recent for him to humble himself. It was a trait which he did not admire in himself. “We’ll need to be right on the spot,” he continued, businesslike. “We spotted a slablike shape against a slope. Unless we’re on the southern side of it, our scan’ll miss it — the sandy slope’ll wall it off from us.”

“I understand, sir.”

“Very well. I’ll be down in the lab. Once we’re there, I’ll give you helm instructions from the lab.”

“Very well.”

Very well. Was she sticking it to him?

He saw Freeman, who entered the dry lab, strode over, and shook hands vigorously. “Good to see you, Frank! I need room for my men to rest. That goddamn sub is still here. I know it. Get that Coast Guard ship to do a search grid, but no overlap with yours. Can’t afford to waste time.”

That’s the general, thought Frank. Hasn’t seen you in ages, and right off the bat he’s telling you, the ship’s master — no, ordering you — what to do.

“You’re assuming Petrel’s going to do a grid,” said Frank.

“Of course. Aren’t you?”

“Yes, I agree with you. Those people are still—”

“People?” Freeman cut in crossly, his body odor dominating the dry lab. “They aren’t people. They’re goddamn animals!”

As yet Hall hadn’t heard about what had happened to Dixon, who, he remembered, had aged overnight after his swim buddy’s death. Frank didn’t press the general for any details of what exactly had taken place. It wasn’t the time. Freeman left Frank to it and turned his attention back to the five bodies laid out on the stern, pulling back the blanket from each one, squatting down, staring at them.

“I think he’s enjoying it,” Malcolm commented to the bosun, who was looking down at Petrel’s barely visible wake as it proceeded slowly into the general area of the problematic slab. Sal and Choir, also on the stern deck, were wondering aloud what had happened to the missing floater, still lost in the fog.

“I think that floater was a swimmer,” cut in Aussie. “Faked us out. Big bloody drama, clutching his chest and falling from that RIB. Bastard’s probably ashore by now, draggin’ ’imself up that S trail.”

“Possible,” said Freeman, but the general, as Sal, Choir, and an equally perplexed Malcolm looked on, was still looking at the five whose floating days were over. Aussie, meanwhile, carefully went through the dead men’s sodden camouflage-pattern uniforms for any ID.

“Definitely not all Chinese,” said Choir, glancing over at Aussie from the portside rail. “You’ve lost your bet, boyo.”

“The hell I have. They all look Chinese to me.”

“Guy looks like he tried to hang himself,” said Sal, leaning over and pointing to a dark bruise ringing one of the dead men’s throats.

“Should have,” said Aussie as Sal let the blood-soaked blanket fall back over the corpse’s face. “Would’ve saved us the trouble.”

“Yeah,” agreed Sal, standing up, arching and massaging his back, yawning.

Malcolm couldn’t tell whether it was the way Salvini arched his back that angered him or the SpecFor warrior’s yawn, the soldier’s manner appearing to him and Jimmy as inappropriately cavalier, downright disrespectful in the presence of the dead. Freeman was now pulling the fog-shrouded blanket back from the man Sal had referred to.

“I know they’re terrorists,” Malcolm told Jimmy, “but Jesus — know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” Jimmy said, lowering his voice and looking across the deck toward Freeman. “He’s supposed to be a legend. Tiny says his troops used to call him ’George C. Scott.’ “

Malcolm looked blank.

“You know — General Patton.”

“Oh. Yeah?”

“Scuttlebutt is that he’s been sidelined ever since Clinton. Apparently criticized Bill in ’ninety-eight. Told him