Choke Point

Aussie glimpsed the Petrel, her stern’s hydraulic arm silhouetted against the oil slick’s fire. Having heard the rasping of the sub’s snorkel being raised, Frank Hall had no doubt decided to move the oceanographic vessel in quickly to pick up as many Skate survivors as possible.

Freeman, meanwhile, reached for the waterproof matches in his vest and flushed. It was his usual physiological reaction upon realizing he’d uncharacteristically forgotten a vital detail. This time it was the short fuse on each of the fist-sized LOSHOK packs he’d given Aussie, which would allow only two seconds. No way you could duct-tape, light the fuse, and get clear. There was no time to convey his concern to Aussie other than by speaking. And they were only ten feet from the sub’s starboard fairing, which Aussie would have to board to place the charge. “Cut the second pack’s fuse and tape it to the first,” the general whispered hoarsely. “That’ll give us more time.”

Four seconds, Aussie thought, to tape and run.

Their Zodiac bumped gently against the sub’s side.

A beam of light struck out from Petrel’s foredeck toward the Skate’s burning oil spill, looking quickly for survivors. Aussie and Freeman heard a dull thud, then saw a head appear above the sub’s stubby conning tower, followed by a quick order in a language neither Aussie nor the general understood. Then they heard another, more excited, voice, and saw a.50 caliber barrel poking up from the interior of the conning tower and sticking straight out in the direction of the Skate. The gunner appeared next, and then whoever was giving the orders, either the sub’s captain or the officer of the deck.

Good God, Freeman thought. The bastards were going to shoot the Coast Guard survivors as well as the men on the Petrel who were trying to rescue them.

A long, ragged flame spat into the fog from Freeman’s HK, the 9mm rounds chopping into the sub gunner’s head and into the officer’s right shoulder. But the officer managed to swing the.50 around and squeeze off a loud burst. A bullet struck Freeman in the chest, knocking him out of the Zodiac as Aussie, already on the sub’s fairing below the conning tower, plunged his K-bar into the officer. The officer grabbed at his throat in a vain effort to stop the pulsing jets of blood that showered Aussie’s face, then the officer’s body crumpled noisily, the wooden stock of the.50 falling back with a whack against the sub’s collar.

Aussie heard a commotion below. One more step up the side of the conning tower and he glimpsed the ruby-colored glow of the sub’s small control room, the body of the sub’s gunner slumped awkwardly, blocking the hatch. Seeing a bald head below the dead gunner, and arms desperately tugging at the gunner’s feet, trying to clear the hatch, Aussie fired a burst down the hatch well, the man’s head exploding. Then he lit the first fuse and dropped it, the reverberation of the LOSHOK’s explosion so severe that it momentarily stunned Aussie, though he was still outside the conning tower and unable to hear anything.

The charge, he realized, must have either bounced off the body-stoppered hatch or the open hatch cover itself. He’d have to heave himself up, drop down into the conning tower, and clear the body. But one glance into the smoke-choked hatch — the LOSHOK fumes rising up, stinging his eyes, throat, and nose, told him another burst was unnecessary. What had been the enemy’s decapitated body, or rather, what was now an indistinguishable bloody pile, had fallen down through the hatch onto the control room’s floor. He squeezed another burst off anyway, for insurance, dropped the second two-second charge down and slammed the hatch shut. This explosion was a muffled whoomp, no smoke emerging from the tightly sealed sub, except for a white puff rising from the snorkel.

“A new Pope!” he shouted, his outburst a mixture of adrenaline and anger, wondering if the general was still alive, and sure that no one in the midget sub had survived. An explosion like that, he knew, would create a dense and toxic mix even in a full-sized attack boat.

The pinhead of light automatically activated by the saltwater showed Aussie where the general, dead or alive, was drifting, about twenty or thirty feet off the sub’s starboard bow, not far from the Zodiac. Aussie slung his HK tightly to his back, discarded his boots, and dived in, swimming with all his strength to the Zodiac. He hauled himself aboard, pushed the outboard’s starter and, hungry for air, gasped as he steered the Zodiac toward Freeman, cutting the motor almost as soon as he’d started it.

“Fire a goddamn flare!” the general was shouting, his voice imperious. “Don’t you know anything?!”

In fact, Freeman’s bonhomie in the freezing water helped the general to tolerate the painful bruising that was spreading across his chest, the round from the sub’s.50 MG not a dead-on hit, but a powerful angled shot all the same, and one that had shredded all but the last two of the Kevlar’s sandwiched layers.

The Petrel saw the flare, as did the two closing hydrofoils, one of which approached the Zodiac with a suspicion underscored by an array of weaponry that was as impressive as it was late.

“Well, at least they can help Petrel pick up those poor bastards from Skate,” Aussie told Freeman, who was now hurting badly.

The general was not given to hyperbole regarding his enemies, but what occurred next he would describe as simply “astonishing.” From the mini Vesuvius that was the submarine’s conning tower, there emerged three ghostly figures in the flare lights, their clothing steaming with white smoke that clung to them like dry ice, their faces hidden by maniacal-looking goggles and the snouts of gas masks.

“Son of a bitch!” shouted Tiny, thunderstruck. “Pricks are still alive!” Two of them were manning the.50.

“Everyone inside,” shouted Hall from Petrel’s bridge, as Aussie and Freeman were being helped aboard. “Secure all hatches. Lights out!”

“Secure all hatches!!” repeated Frank. “And stay inside!” With that, he pushed Petrel’s Full Ahead button, shouting into the down pipe to the engine room, “Everything you’ve got, Chief!”

The crew, bodies involuntarily trembling with the thunderous reverberations, had never felt anything like it.

Frank snatched up the bridge’s microphone. “Stand by to ram!”

“Shit!” It was Cookie. In the blacked-out galley, it suddenly dawned on him what Hall intended. “The hydrofoils should—”

The bosun’s attempt to explain to young Cookie how hydrofoils were like jet boats on water — very fast in clear weather but too delicate for this — was cut short by a firecracker noise forward, the sound of Petrel’s already multipunctured bridge glass collapsing in a resounding crash. Now all firing from the hydrofoils ceased, the Petrel, at fifteen knots, having to cross their lines of fire.

The 110-foot-long sub and its conning tower were rendered momentarily visible with each burst of the.50, only one man remaining at the gun.

Frank was steering by the flashes of the.50. He wasn’t watching the sub through the fog-inhaling hole that had been Petrel’s bridge, but by lying on his back, guided by the image of the.50’s spitting flame in the mirror from Sandra’s compact. He held it up for several seconds at a time, and could alter his course with a tap on the “sensitouch” joystick.

“Hold on!” he shouted over the PA. But with the PA’s wiring, among other things, now severed in the hail of the sub’s machine-gun fire, no one heard him beyond the bridge.

The shock of the Petrel hitting the sub aft of the conning tower was so severe that it flung several crew members across the mess. The bosun’s cheek split against the bulkhead stiffener, and young Cookie literally tore the big electric motor off its mount as a flying avalanche of broken crockery and foodstuffs injured him and five other crewmen amid an outburst of profanities and alarm so loud Hall heard them coming up through the stairwell.

The Petrel’s bow was so high now, after smashing into the sub’s conning tower, that the broken plates and other debris began sliding back. But just as quickly, everything began to subside, Petrel’s forward half coming down as it slid off the sub’s deck. As Hall leaped up, running to the bridge’s starboard wing, he saw that the sub’s aft was severely creased — cracks appearing — heard the machine gunner and dropped to the deck. Aussie, racing along the Petrel’s port side, came out firing on its forward deck, not taking his finger off the trigger, killing the begoggled and black-snouted gunner before the terrorist could swing the.50 from Frank on the upper starboard side to him.

Then, in place of the unrelenting gunfire, there was relative calm. But not silence, as the oceanographic crew,