“In town, you dork,” said Aussie.
“Well, least he could do was bring us an ale,” put in Choir.
“Son,” Freeman told the Humvee driver, “you can wait here — take a little unofficial furlough, or head back to Fort Lewis.”
The driver was nonplused, not knowing whether to be grateful or insulted at not being needed.
“Ah, yes, sir. Fine.”
Freeman sensed his disappointment. “I’d love to have you along. Fort Lewis tells me you’re a real Andretti.” The general smacked him affectionately on the shoulder. “Maybe next time.”
“Ah, yes, General.”
As the four SpecFor warriors piled into the Humvee, the egalitarian Aussie commented pompously, “He didn’t know who Andretti was.”
“Who is he?” asked Sal.
Aussie pushed the starter button. “You’re jerkin’ me off.”
“No,” said Sal. “Who was Andretti?”
“Race driver,” said Aussie.
“Yeah,” said Sal. “Mario. I know.”
“You’re gonna get it, Brooklyn. Right up the ass!”
“Promises!” responded Sal.
“Go to the hospital after we pick up Brentwood,” Freeman cut in abruptly, his tone signaling an end to Sal and Aussie’s banter. “I want you people on your toes. If I’m right about the minesweeper, this is going to be dicey.”
In the back, Sal glanced at Choir. Whenever the general said “you people,” it was a warning that the mission could be extraordinarily tough. The problem for Choir was that he thought the general was getting ahead of himself, so he made a side wager with Sal that the minesweeper hadn’t been sunk by a hostile.
The onetime Medal of Honor recipient looked even thinner than when Aussie and Freeman had last seen him on the firing range. He was standing at the deserted junction of Laurel and Railroad in full combat gear, and, even with its bulk, looked as if he’d lost weight. The sidearm on his right hip, Aussie noticed, was holstered back to front so that his still-functioning left hand could cross-draw it if necessary. Why on earth had the general asked him to come along? he wondered.
Brentwood had to use his left hand to get aboard the Humvee, his right arm still a stiff L-shape, its hand a perennially bunched fist.
Choir asked him anxiously, “What happened to that minesweeper, David? You hear anything?”
“It sank.”
“He knows that, you dodo,” Aussie told Brentwood. “But how’d it sink?”
“Don’t know,” said David, who then asked Freeman, “Where we going, General?”
“Hospital first.”
When they got there, Freeman asked Aussie to grab the five terrorist samples. Obviously in a hurry, he strode ahead to the front desk to arrange for immediate testing of the samples. Aussie came in a minute later, looking concerned.
“It’s all arranged,” Freeman told him. “Dr. Ramon here will do it for us soon as he can.”
The doctor nodded to Aussie, who exchanged greetings.
Returning to the Humvee, Aussie, in trepidation, told the general, “Petrel’s mate has screwed up. He only took four samples.”
The general frowned. “Didn’t you check ’em?”
“I thought there were — but you know, sir, we were in such a damn hurry.”
“Not good enough, Aussie!”
Back at the Humvee, the general was all business. “Listen up. We’re going to the East-West Café. We’ll be there in five minutes. There’ll be no time for dessert, so here’s the drill….”
Freeman was wrong — it took them eleven minutes to reach the café because of the traffic lights in the town. Not that many people were out and about; most of the refugees hadn’t returned yet. As Aussie waited on the second-to-last red, fingers tapping impatiently on the Humvee’s wheel, David Brentwood asked him, “Do you mind not doing that?”
“Doing what?”
“Drumming your fingers,” he said, causing Sal and Choir to look straight ahead and not risk a “What’s eating him?” glance.
Then the general said, “Don’t censure me, boys. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think it was necessary.”
Their silence told Freeman that he was the only one in the team convinced there was a second sub in the choke point.
The light turned green.
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE
“Shock and awe, gentlemen,” Freeman told them as the Humvee dropped Choir off in the alley behind the East-West Café. Aussie then made a sharp turn to bring the wide, stocky, no-nonsense vehicle to a pronounced stop in front of the café. Freeman, armed only with his HK 9mm sidearm, strode in, Aussie immediately behind him, HK at the ready. He was followed by Brentwood, then Sal, who, with his shotgun turned about, stood guard at the door.
About a dozen diners, including some with young children — one in a high chair — looked up, startled. Everyone had stopped eating. They were obviously refugees returning to the town, hungry and exhausted. At first they had been reassured by the sight of the Special Forces team, but then were suddenly terrified by Freeman’s thunderous order: “Everyone out! Now! Leave your cell phones on the table. Write down the number. If you lie, we’ll backtrack through the phone company and you’ll be in violation of the Emergency War Powers Act. Move!”
Only one elderly man, with stubby beard and no teeth, refused to leave his steaming wonton soup. “I’m too old to be frightened of guys who—”
He had to finish his sentence outside, Sal having taken a firm grip of the man’s worn lumberjack collar and literally dragging him out, the old man’s hands flailing, spittle-sprayed obscenities filling the air. “Be safer out here, buddy,” Sal told him, and Sal was telling the truth, for when Salvini reentered the restaurant, he heard a high-pitched Oriental voice in the kitchen beyond the string bead curtain screaming to someone back of the kitchen, “Cor 911! Cor 911!”
“Good idea!” said Aussie evenly.
“She the same waitress as before?” Freeman asked Brentwood.
“Yes,” confirmed Brentwood.
Aussie checked two side rooms without taking his eyes off the Vietnamese woman who was yelling beyond the curtain. He was struck by the fact that though she was clearly frightened, she wasn’t cowed. There was fight in her eyes.
“What are you afraid of, ma’am?” asked the general. “We’re Americans, not terrorists.”
“Soldiers!” she said contemptuously.
The restaurant’s back door, about six feet beyond the kitchen at the end of a passageway cluttered with piled boxes of noodles, burst open. It was Choir pushing one of the waiters ahead of him, Aussie immediately relieving the waiter of the cell phone he was in the process of using.
“Over here!” ordered Freeman, standing in the kitchen, the young woman glaring at him from the kitchen’s chopping block. The man looked more frightened than the woman, who had obviously been the object of dispute between the two waiters Freeman had seen when he and Brentwood had been in the café. Among all the other SpecFor training courses, one had been about quickly ascertaining who the alpha male was in any hostage-taking situation. Freeman, though a stickler for multilayered training, had always been skeptical of the course. “A ten-year-old kid can tell you in two seconds who’s the boss in a room,” he used to say. Here, the woman was clearly the alpha. Aussie heard a noise directly above, looked up and saw a trapdoor opening.
“No, please!” shouted the man. “My mother!”
“Jesus Christ!” said Aussie, a nanosecond away from wasting her. The old woman said something in Vietnamese and withdrew.
“No pickup till after six, I think,” joked Aussie. No one laughed, but his attempt clearly infused the man with more terror of the unpredictable.