The young woman was retreating farther back, almost touching the wall-suspended array of ladles, noodle strainers, and other utensils. No knives, Freeman noticed — they were to her left in a wooden rack near a kitchen stool and corner chopping block. The SpecFor team had been in the restaurant for less than two minutes — a fast entrance, a quick push to see who was whom, and to clear out those Freeman had decided were innocent bystanders. Now he strode up to the waiter and told him to show his wrists. The irritated skin rash had almost vanished. Freeman reached up to the man’s collar. “Stay still!” The bruised ring, or more accurately, half ring, around the waiter’s throat was not nearly as dark as when the general had seen it when he and Brentwood had eaten in the café.
Freeman turned from the waiter and in a move whose speed and violence surprised even Aussie, advanced on the woman, who seemed to shrink in size beneath him. He grabbed her by her left ear and wrenched her toward him. She gasped in pain, but nothing more, her eyes glinting with hatred and determination. He pulled her out from the wall of appliances.
“Don — Don’t hurt her please, sir!” implored the waiter.
Brentwood’s eyes avoided the scene, focusing on the bubbling vat of fat by the chopping block.
“I won’t hurt her!” bellowed the general, his eyes maniacal. “I’ll kill the bitch if you don’t take me to the tunnels!”
The waiter’s pale face turned gray and he tried to speak but couldn’t.
“Then I’ll kill Granny upstairs!” shouted Freeman. His voice had taken over the café like a storm. “You bastards think I don’t know what’s going on? Eh? Eh? Those collar marks, the ones on your wrists. Your filthy damn fingernails. Your ring around the collar, buddy, comes from hauling your buddies out of cave-ins in the tunnels. Only way you could get in and out in Cu Chi — only way you can get a tunneler out in a cave-in — two ropes from your wrists to his feet — gotta get ’im out before he suffocates. Then you put the pull collar ’round your neck, lie down, roll over and haul him out. Or maybe it wasn’t your buddies, eh? Maybe a torpedo warhead you were hauling down to the cave, with all your other supplies, eh? That’s why we didn’t get any infrared spots on the ground. You terrorist bastards were all underground like goddamn rats!”
The man had said nothing, but the rest of the team, except for Sal at the front door, looked at one another with something akin to awe. They realized they were witnessing the stuff of the Freeman legend. Aussie alone, however, knew that the general’s shock was not over with.
“Well?” Freeman thundered. “You going to tell me?”
The waiter caught the woman’s eye, as did Aussie. Her message was clear: “Stand your ground! Don’t tell them!” The waiter, however, probably habituated by a lifetime of running slavishly from the exhausting kitchen through the beaded curtain to serve the class to which he aspired, and despised, was torn between reality and hope, his mind obviously a tumult of indecision.
“All right!” bellowed Freeman, drawing his sidearm. “Tell me!” He was holding her at point-blank range.
The waiter was trembling but shook his head.
The shot threw the woman back with such violence that her head slammed into hanging utensils, her shout of pain startling Sal, who quickly looked around from the front door, the crash of utensils like cymbals. He could smell the acrid cordite wafting through the beaded curtain.
Brentwood and Choir, their previous awe now overcome by shock, stood literally open-mouthed at what the general had done. Aussie was for once speechless, seeing the woman writhing on the floor as Freeman grabbed her by her bullet-torn blouse, now covered in blood, and hauled her roughly into a sitting position against the wall.
“All right!” Freeman yelled at Aussie. “Bring down that old bitch. I’ll shoot her too!”
Aussie gave the waiter an “I don’t like it but what can I do, mate?” glance, footing the chopping block stool across the floor below the trapdoor.
“Hurry up!” ordered Freeman. “Bring her down.”
“No, no,” the waiter said, his voice cracking. “I show you.”
“Right!” said Freeman, turning to Choir. “Choir! Over here!”
Choir didn’t move. “But—” he began.
“Goddammit!” Freeman roared. “Don’t but me. We’re a team. Work as a team. Get that bitch’s body out of here, give her to the cops. Then grab the old lady and stay in touch with me.” The general looked across at Aussie, who’d been about to assist the woman with his first aid kit. “Leave her alone,” barked the general. “She dies, she dies. Give Choir this joker’s cell phone.”
Aussie wordlessly passed the phone he’d taken from the waiter to the silent Welshman, who was obviously upset.
“Tell him your number!” the general ordered the waiter, who, dry-mouthed and trembling, was barely able to speak. “Try calling the number from the other phones,” Freeman ordered, indicating the half-dozen or so cell phones that had been left, as per his orders, on the café’s hastily vacated tables.
Within a minute the team all had working phones.
“Give me the one with the best battery,” Freeman told the others, his schoolyard bully’s tone not going over well with David Brentwood. It wasn’t an aspect of Freeman he’d seen before.
While Choir carried the bloodied, pain-wracked woman outside, the others began to climb aboard the Humvee. Then they heard a police cruiser’s siren and saw its flashers approaching, a group of the previously ejected diners huddled across the street like homeless waifs, waiting anxiously to see what the police did about what one man in the group angrily and correctly described as the “grossest violation of civil liberties” he’d ever seen in America.
Freeman holstered his sidearm as the other four helped Choir to carry the wounded woman toward the police cruiser.
“Spray and Wash’s not gonna get that out!” said a callow adolescent who, with some other teenagers, had been drawn by the gunshot and was now pointing at the blood on her blouse.
“Hey,” a portly sheriff called out as he lumbered out of the cruiser, his partner grabbing the first aid box. “You kids move along.”
“What happened, Wally?” asked the teenaged boy in an overly familiar tone.
The sheriff’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t you sass me, George Daley. You get on home. From what I hear, your grades need all the help they can get.”
There was a burst of laughter from the gaggle of young girls in the group. “You tell ’im, Sheriff,” someone shouted, and George Daley sullenly moved off.
The general and sheriff conferred hastily by the cruiser, the sheriff hitching his belt several times and nodding, Sal hearing him say, “You betcha,” and “Wish we had more time to get enough guys up here to …”
“I figure,” the general told him, “that those bastards’ll be reloading with torpedoes and restocking after sinking that minesweeper.”
The sheriff knew the general was right, and agreed that the first thing the SpecFor team had to do was get to the tunnel that the waiter and others had been using to service the second sub. Second, they were to find the tunnel used to service the sub that had already sunk, to make sure both tunnels could never be used again.
Freeman called out to Salvini, “You go get Grandma. Frisk her. Put her in a cab and catch up with us. The cab driver can wait here. And Sal, cuff her.”
Sal merely nodded.
Seeing Sal’s resentment — a resentment apparently shared by the rest of the team — Freeman pushed the waiter roughly aside. “Salvini, you hear me? You have a problem with my orders?”
“No — sir,” said Sal, helping the waiter up, the prisoner looking up pleadingly at Sal, his eyes betraying some sympathy for these four American soldiers who he saw had to serve under such a brutal commander — one as tough as Li Kuan, even though the smaller Kuan bore no physical resemblance to the big American. But Li Kuan had the same hard eyes as this man whom the sheriff had called “General Free-man.”