Choke Point

“Ah,” said Jimmy dismissively. “You’re just scared, Tiny.”

“You bet your ass I’m scared. Those hydrofoils hear a bang, what’re they gonna do? Everyone’s so trigger happy these last few days. Did you see the sonar trace?”

Jimmy shook his head.

“Malcolm?” asked Tiny.

“No.”

“Lower and cut,” called out Frank. “Carefully.”

The bosun lit the fuse and Tiny played out the charge’s line, the weight barely causing a ripple as it broke the foggy sea’s surface and was released in free fall.

“Full ahead,” ordered Frank calmly.

The Petrel’s sonar immediately picked up the echoes from the bunched chain weight going down directly below the LOSHOK, and it seemed off course. Had the turbulence of Petrel’s engines combined with the deep currents to create a side push? Frank wondered. Would it make any difference? Was it the sub or—

The detonation sent the stylus crazy. A second later the sea’s surface exploded in an enormous eruption of green bottom ooze, sand, and pebbles whooshing high into the fog, sending a shock wave against the Petrel. The profusion of dead fish and other marine life that rose to the surface added to everyone’s surprise as they watched intently for signs of a sub’s wreckage. The Skate, now notified by radio about what Frank had assumed was the sub, reported she was steaming toward the oceanographic vessel to assist, but at only one-third of full speed, in the event of striking unseen wreckage in the fog. Frank could feel his heart racing in expectation, but the only thing identifiable in the dirty slurry so far was the mass of crustaceans and rock cod.

“There’s something!” shouted young Cookie.

“Calm down!” Tiny snarled. “There’s nothing but—”

“No, I see it too,” said Malcolm. “Starboard aft.”

“Me too!” added Jimmy, snatching one of the slingshots and one of the baseball-size lumps of short-fuse LOSHOK packs.

Sandra focused her binoculars in the direction the crew were pointing. An irregular shape with a metallic appearance could be seen, despite the muddied sea that was spreading like a huge blanket in the chop created by the LOSHOK’s explosion. Sandra called the dry lab. “It’s a ray,” she told Frank. “A manta ray. A cephalic fin missing.”

Relief and disappointment swept through the crew. Cookie suddenly began throwing up. Frank, hearing him, dispatched one of the techs to help the youth. “But don’t let him mope around. Tell Cook I said to go easy on him but to keep him occupied — light duties.”

“Yes, sir.”

Soon the chaos of sound from the LOSHOK’s bang subsided and the Petrel, having turned about, headed back a hundred yards or so, Sandra doing an excellent job of using the ship’s bow thrusters to relocate the exact GPS position.

The slab was gone.

Then there was another metal-like sheet in the fog. It was vertical, and from mere inches above the sea’s surface, it suddenly rose to four feet high, then six.

“Holy — Sub astern!” Tiny shouted so loudly that third mate Sandra on the bridge heard him clearly, as did Frank, in the dry lab. Intuitively, Sandra brought the Petrel sharply about in a tight U-turn, the ship heeling hard aport, toppling Aussie, Sal, and Choir against their bunks’ side boards and bringing the Petrel face-to-face with the ominous-looking and fog-shrouded black sub surfacing a hundred yards off.

Frank quickly organized one of the most primitive and ancient defenses known to man on the stern of his state-of-the-art oceanographic vessel. “Grab the six slingshot packs and run up to the bow!” he hollered to the stern work party.

But there were only four packs left, Freeman having grabbed two of the baseball-size lumps and quickly stuffed them into his battle vest. With a sharp tug on the bow-knotted davit lines holding the Zodiac to Petrel’s side, the general rapidly played out the line, lowering the Zodiac.

A sleep-dazed Aussie appeared on deck, holding his MP5. “What’s going—”

“Get in the boat!” Freeman said. “We’re going fishing!”

“Be careful!” Frank cautioned Freeman. “It might be surrendering.”

“It’s turning!” Petrel’s bow lookout shouted, and everyone, including the approaching Skate a mile off, which Sandra had alerted, heard the noise. It was a tortuous creaking sound of metal against metal, the kind Aussie and Freeman had heard when they faced the Russian-made T-72 main battle tanks in the Iraqi desert. It made the four slingshot crewmen even more nervous.

Through his binoculars, the bosun, who’d momentarily given Freeman a hand by passing down the general’s gun, could now see the source of the nerve-grating sound: the submarine’s prop rubbing against its tapered metallic sheath, which had collapsed under the pressure wave of the seventy-pound LOSHOK depth charge.

“Where the hell’s the Skate?” someone shouted, another startled by the sputtering then quickly ensuing purr of their Zodiac’s runabout.

“Skate’s coming!” the bosun assured the crew.

She was, but on her radar the two blips were so close together, the captain couldn’t tell which was which, and it was too risky to open fire in the fog and noisy confusion. The Skate’s heavy machine-gun operators, however, were itching to fire, so much so that the captain repeated his earlier order, “Hold your fire!” Following the sub’s carnage in the strait, everyone wanted so badly to get even that blue on blue remained a constant danger.

One of Petrel’s side-scan technicians ran to the dry lab’s door. No one was there. “Son of—” He realized they must all be up at the bow. Though hanging on to the lab’s roll bar at the time, he’d forgotten the violent U-turn, glued as he was to the trace. He snatched the PA mike from the wall. “Captain, dry lab. A bubbling sound from the sub, as well as the prop noise. Could be flooding her tubes.”

“Maybe,” answered Frank. But what should he do? he wondered. It would be impossible to see a torpedo running at them in the fog. Anyway, the sub was only a hundred yards off, now nose-to-nose with his boat. Even if the Petrel moved left or right, the sub could get an angled shot, or if she opened up with small arms fire, the Petrel would be virtually defenseless.

“Get the packs ready,” he told Jimmy, Malcolm, and Tiny, while taking up one of the slingshots himself. Then he shouted up to the bridge to Sandra, “Go full ahead, close as you can for us — then veer away!”

She signaled with a thumbs-up.

Frank asked, “Where’s the Bic?”

Tiny handed him the cigarette lighter. “High tech!”

The small orange light that the Skate’s captain, now half a mile away, saw through his binoculars, was not the flicker of Tiny’s Bic, however, but the flame from the.50 protruding from the sub’s sail like a short, stubby stick in the fog. Its burst ricocheted off Petrel’s forward deck bulkhead like supersonic stones thrown against a steel door. One of the.50’s rounds struck Malcolm in the back of his neck, felling him in a pool of blood that neither Jimmy, Frank, or Tiny saw, the three busy tossing their LOSHOK packs, the force of their thrusts reduced by the nerve-shattering fire of the heavy machine gun, as the trio hit Petrel’s deck. They crawled forward, tight up against the protection of the capstan as several rounds from the sub struck the spool of anchor chain, creating a shower of sparks as Petrel heeled hard aport at full speed. The wash of Petrel’s prop was now clearly visible to the sub’s machine-gun crew, who kept pouring their fire into the big target as it withdrew.

Seeing Malcolm and dragging him into the forward lab, Frank then reached the bridge, where he saw a pale- faced helmsman, the bridge glass a milky spiderweb of bullet holes, the sparkling glass fragments crunching under his boot. Hall was surprised that he hadn’t heard the glass being hit. “Where’s Sandra?” he asked.

“Chart room!” answered the helmsman, his voice a strangled whisper.