“Cover!” Freeman shouted, and dashed toward the rising tent that now, above the vessel’s waterline, revealed the shape not of a sub, but of a fast patrol boat with U.S. Coast Guard colors. Freeman pulled the pins of his grenades and lobbed one, two, three, forward and midships, the last one onto the stern deck. Three of them went off in quick succession, the craft aflame. The fourth HE grenade exploded as the vessel was only halfway out of the cave, its stern still inside and on fire.
David, having located the pulley/chain button, pushed it, thus shutting the door, jamming the patrol boat half in and half out, because of the resistance of its high superstructure, aerials, and radar antennae.
The vine curtain was now on fire, and fuel tanks began exploding, spewing out sheets of flame over the starboard deck’s canvas-shrouded torpedo tube, the concussion lifting Freeman off his feet, covering him in flame and throwing him back toward the center of the cave, where Choir quickly extinguished his burning clothes with a throw of “fire sand” from one of several contingency buckets lined up by the wall.
Spitting and cursing, eyebrows singed, Freeman was up on his feet, facing seaward, when he saw a door burst open on the deck of the burning boat. Three terrorists emerged, firing furiously at David, who coolly returned fire, “heading” one of them, who fell back into the burning shroud of the tent. Choir felled the second. And then there was the general — not in uniform, of course, but General Chang nevertheless. As Freeman squeezed off another burst before Chang could hit him, he realized, with the force of a physical blow, seeing the Chinese general’s wig fly off like a blood-sodden pelt, revealing a pockmarked scalp, that he was looking at Li Kuan.
The cave was an inferno, Freeman telling David and Choir to disengage, an unnecessary order, given that there was no more resistance, the downed terrorists scattered about the cave floor. Freeman knew the fight was over, but feared that the torpedo tubes — the warheads doubtless having been loaded to sink more minesweepers or anything else in the choke point — would explode, the cave instantly becoming an oven, consuming all the oxygen and everything within.
“Move out!” he shouted. He couldn’t see David.
Then Freeman heard a loud
Choir was all right, but had twisted his ankle. As he fell, he could have sworn that the body of the pockmarked terrorist leader on the fiery stern deck had twitched. Muscles contracting probably.
Freeman, his right hand holding his HK, his finger on the trigger, thrust his left hand under Choir’s right shoulder to serve as a crutch, and the two made their way through black, toxic smoke that was now pouring out from the interior of the burning boat. They heard a tremendous crash behind them, the dry-dock’s front section having collapsed, the boat’s stern higher because of it. Choir saw a figure clinging to its rail. It was the pockmarked terrorist issuing forth such a feral scream of rage and pain that Choir knew he would never forget it.
“Mother of God!” he blurted, the hot smoke scorching his throat. “He’s still alive. We should finish the poor devil off.”
“Don’t bother,” said Freeman, glancing back at Li Kuan, a.k.a. General Chang.
“Jesus!” said Choir. There was another ungodly scream. “He’s melting, General! His body’s—” Choir was coughing violently. “His body’s actually melting!”
“Let the bastard melt!” said Freeman, who was thinking about a young American woman called Amanda, so full of promise and hope, brutally tortured, then murdered and dumped in a stinking canal by Chang/Li Kuan’s thugs because she’d overheard what had now been revealed in the cave — the Communist Chinese government’s plan to quell rebel Muslim nationalist movements on its Xinjiang border by offering to oversee a Muslim attack on America. Chang, or Li Kuan, as young Mao knew him, had clearly blackmailed immigrants, just as Mao had told Freeman, to cooperate in providing the sub and torpedo boat with supplies, the Asiatic Muslims providing crews and gunmen.
By the time the
For now.
It would be the FBI’s and Homeland Defense’s joint responsibility to backtrack, to go through Seattle and Vancouver importers’ invoices and find out which importers bought which supplies and, just as important, who transported them to Port Angeles on the lonely Washington coast.
Outside the smoke-filled cave, Mao, who’d had ample time to turn around carefully on the ledge and cut through the nylon cord cuffs by rubbing them against the barnacle-encrusted rocks, moved across the ledge, helping Freeman and a cordite-reeking David Brentwood assist Choir along the narrow ledge and then, in a painfully slow descent for Choir, down to the rocky foreshore.
EPILOGUE
“IT’S NAIVE,” FREEMAN told Marte Price Port Angeles during her “exclusive” hospital emergency room interview, “to believe that there aren’t more sleepers all over the country.”
“You really believe that, General?” Marte pressed.
“Marte—” he began, drawing back as the nurse applied a malodorous salve to his burns. “Smells like damn fish!”
“Do you really believe that?” Marte asked again. “That there are sleepers all over the United States?”
Freeman was sure she believed it too, her repetition of the question merely an attempt to have him answer in a form best suited for TV. This was
This last comment was the one that grabbed headlines and caused a diplomatic fracas between Ottawa and Washington, D.C. It drove the “modern miracle” stories of what was occurring daily in America’s hospitals off the front pages. The space age technology of these miracles, wherein radical DNA-based techniques had greatly reduced burn healing and recovery times to months rather than years, barely got a mention amid all the war news.
Sal, as he put it, was “highly pissed off,” missing the action in the second cave, his day ending by having to return Mao’s mother to the restaurant, where she berated him again, in rapid-fire Vietnamese.
Mao was turned over to the FBI for further questioning with an “In consideration — leniency” note from Freeman stating how helpful the blackmailed terrorist had been.
Sal had joined Choir and David at the hospital to visit the general and Aussie. While David was waylaid by Marte Price, who wanted a follow-up interview with the Medal of Honor winner, Choir and Sal went to the second floor to see Aussie. They had to wait, the patient’s curtains closed as a harried nurse checked his wound and recorded his vital signs. Despite their relief that the military operation was over, Sal and Choir, now they had a chance to talk about it, were still troubled by Freeman’s behavior in the restaurant with the young woman and his actions en route to the second cave with Mao.
“Maybe,” said Sal, checking to see that no one was within earshot, “he should give it up.”
“Yes,” concurred Choir. “You fight these fanatics too much, you become like them. End justifies the means, right?”
“Right.”
And so one can only imagine the two men’s astonishment, indeed their shock, when they saw a gum-chewing sheriff’s deputy walking by with a young female patient, the woman in a washed-thin V-necked nightie. Sally — Mao’s would-be love — glared hatefully at them, a dark, saucer-sized bruise visible even through her nightie. She quickly drew the V of the nightie closed, as if rebuking two leering adolescents.
Sal and Choir stared at each other. “Point-blank!” said Choir. “He fired point-blank!”
“Shit!” said Sal. “He must have used a nonlethal round! A rubber bullet.”
“But wait a minute — what about the blood?”
“Fake, mate!” came an Aussie drawl from behind the curtains. “Those blood samples taken on
“He’d taken it,” put in Sal.
“And after he’d fired the rubber round into Mao’s woman,
