Choke Point

“I’m embarrassing the department.”

“Well — yes.”

“All right,” he sighed. What else could he do? He’d been trained in diplomacy. It was all he knew. “I’ve done my best,” he said.

The tall girl from State could have sworn he wasn’t talking to either her or himself. It was as if someone else was in the room.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

Freeman’s “jimmy leg,” as his team had always referred to the sudden jerks the general’s limbs would make while he was asleep, was getting worse — and alarming to anyone who’d never seen the medical condition.

“Is he okay?” one of the side-scan techs asked Frank Hull.

“He’ll be fine,” responded Frank, whose eyes were glued to the profile coming up on the new roll of paper.

“Geez, I wouldn’t want anyone to see me like that.”

“He always wants to be near the action,” said Frank. “Besides, I don’t think anyone’s told him. You could, if you want.”

“I don’t think so.”

The other technician, like Hall, was watching the slowly emerging outline of the sea bottom, never tiring of the side-scan sonar’s magic. You sent down an invisible sound wave, and back it came, morphed into a visible line that formed a part in the larger jigsaw pattern of echoes whose overall picture should soon tell them if there was a sub down there or not. The tech hoped not — he’d witnessed enough action for a lifetime, the sight of the terrorists that Freeman had killed ironically more troubling to him because, unlike the American dead from the multiple sinkings, rigor mortis had not yet set in. The one Freeman had been staring down at looked as if he was still alive, eyes open. The penny-on-the-eyelids thing one of Petrel’s crew had tried failed to keep the eyelids shut, the coins falling off because of residual muscle movement that had sent the pennies running across the deck, which Tiny confessed had “totally freaked” him.

“Those hydrofoil sub chasers Jensen’s sending up to Everett,” the tech said to Frank, “they should be here soon, right?”

“Half an hour, maybe more,” replied Frank, eyes still on the trace. “Everyone goes slow in the fog.”

“And,” put in the other technician unhelpfully, “it’ll soon be dark.”

Freeman’s leg shot out.

“Jesus Christ—”

“Settle down,” Frank told the tech. “If that slab we saw earlier was the sub lying low, it might be gone by now, under cover of our prop disturbance during the firefight.”

“Looks like we’re back at the site, Captain!” one of the techs said excitedly.

Frank nodded.

Freeman’s “Jimmy leg” had started up again, which caught young Cookie’s attention. Overloaded with a tray bearing thick white mugs of coffee and hot chocolate for dry lab and stern watches, he stepped over the lab’s door. “No beer, I’m afraid, gents,” he announced cheerfully, resolved to show that corpses on deck didn’t scare him. He could handle it.

“Thanks,” said Frank, without looking up. “Away from the recorder, son.”

“Don’t have to worry, Cap—”

“Stop engines!” Frank shouted into the intercom. Barely any movement resulted, but in the slight yaw of the ship, Cookie lost his balance, an avalanche of white mugs spilling chocolate and coffee crashing onto the dry lab’s floor.

“Wha …?” Freeman was up, one arm around Cookie’s neck, the other holding the K-bar’s blade an inch from the man’s throat.

“Could be the sub!” Hall said loudly, the small, black sound-reflective six-by-six-inch squares on the mud bottom, just a few feet east of the “slab.” The squares were not rubberized anechoic tiles, or they would not have reflected the sonar signals. Like the gaps seen on the space shuttle that had shown where the heat-shield tiles had fallen off, Frank believed he was seeing bare metal squares on the sub, that the tiles had either fallen off through wear and tear or been shot off earlier by Freeman’s team during the fight at the falls.

Freeman had sheathed his knife, quickly apologized to Cookie, and stepped to the left of the recorder. The stylus was flashing back and forth now under the lab’s night lights. He said nothing, his attention riveted on the profile.

“Bosun!” Frank called. “You have a weight on that LOSHOK pack?”

“Yes, sir. It’s ready to go. Same depth, sir?”

“Yes. Thirty-two fathoms. Stern party, stand by to lower. Minimum noise. They can hear us, but I don’t want their Passive to pick up the splash when we drop the LOSHOK. I’ll start Petrel slow ahead — make them think we’ve found nothing and decided to go on.”

“Yes, sir.” The bosun strode out onto the stern. “Jimmy, Mal, Tiny — over here.”

Frank called Sandra Riley on the bridge. “I think we’ve found the sub,” he said. “Can you see the Skate?”

“No, sir. Fog’s too thick. But I’ve got her on radar. She’s about a mile to starboard on the north-south leg of her search grid.”

“Any sign of those two hydrofoils?” Frank asked, conscious of the fact that while the Skate was heavily deck-armed, she had no depth charges of any sort. “I don’t want to use the radio to contact Skate,” he continued. “If it is the sub down there, it could be trailing an aerial — to pick up our transmission.”

“I assumed that it would have made a run for it under cover of our engine noise during the—”

“Yes,” agreed Frank. “I don’t know why they haven’t.”

Freeman cut in, telling Sandra, “I think we winged the son of a bitch, sweetheart. Not on the hull proper, but its ballast tanks. Like having puncture holes in your inflatable. You can still move, but slowly, and you’d have to send a swimmer out through the sub’s air lock to repair the holes. You can’t do that quietly.”

Frank was nodding his agreement.

“Anyway,” the general concluded, “this LOSHOK of yours should do it. Rip the damn boat open like a can o’ sardines!”

On deck, Tiny was on standby, ready to lower the seventy-pound pack of explosive overboard once Frank gave him the order. He didn’t like it. The captain’s assumption that it was definitely the sub, and the flamboyant general’s talk of what “should” happen, made him nervous. So did the dynamite. “Truth is,” he told Jimmy, “you don’t know from one minute to the next what’s gonna—”

“Hey!” cut in the bosun. “Rain-in-the-Face, knock it off. You have that LOSHOK chain weight taped down? I don’t want that friggin’ chain to rattle and roll on the way down.”

“It won’t,” Tiny assured him, lifting the combined weight of 130 pounds with one hand as if it was a bunch of grapes.

Jimmy checked the fuse length for the sixth time, the primacord calculated to assure detonation of the LOSHOK just above its hull, if in fact it was the sub.

“What’d you call me?” Tiny asked the bosun.

“Rain-in-the-Face.”

“Yeah, well, I don’t care. I’m tellin’ you guys, I don’t think that profile is the sub. It’s a slab of limestone and a few flakes fell off. Slab of limestone’s like assholes in these parts — everyone’s got one.”

“What about those loose tiles they’re talking about?” countered Jimmy.

“Tiles, smiles — BS!” said Tiny. “I had a peek at that trace when Cookie lost our drinks. I didn’t see anything. Those spots the old man saw could be anything. This strait’s full of shit that people’re chucked overboard. You know how many Coke cans and crap we pick up on sonar?”