The waiter understood English well enough to realize the full intent of the ruthless general’s orders: that his aged mother, contemptuously referred to by the American as “the old bitch,” would be forced to follow the general’s Humvee in the cab so that if her son balked at revealing the tunnel’s entrance, they would kill her. No, no, he wouldn’t kill her. If she were dead, then what would he bargain with?
No, the waiter concluded, this crazed general would do what Li Kuan would do in such a situation, what he’d done to the American girl in Suzhou who’d overheard the plans between Beijing and Kazakhstan — that Beijing would supply the experienced Vietnamese and Chinese tunnelers for the Muslim terrorists’ continuing Holy War against America, and Li Kuan would arrange the logistical support via “sleepers” in and around the Olympic peninsula. This supply tunnel complex, not nearly as elaborate as the giant two-hundred-mile underground complex at Cu Chi in the sixties, would be ingenious nevertheless. No, the waiter told himself, one had to face reality. This American general who’d shown not the slightest hesitation in shooting his beloved My-Duyen, whom the whites called “Sally,” would not kill his mother outright, he would torture her, as Li Kuan had tortured the young American girl in Suzhou to find out what she knew before he’d killed her. The waiter, now in the passenger seat of the Humvee, wanted to bury his head in his hands, but the tight nylon strip binding his hands behind his back prevented him from doing so.
Freeman was driving — Choir, Aussie, and Brentwood in the back.
“Once the fog lifts we’ll call in cavalry troops, soon as we locate the position,” Freeman told them.
No one responded. Aussie wanted to, but held his tongue. Knowing their silence denoted disapproval, Freeman elbowed the waiter in the side. “How many people you reckon you and your sub buddies have killed, Mao?”
The waiter stared sullenly through the fog that was rushing toward them in huge gray billows.
“How many so far?” Freeman asked his prisoner. “Would you say around ten thousand? In an undeclared war?”
“World is at war,” said the waiter. “You Americans invaded Iraqis.”
“Oh,” said Freeman, swinging the Humvee around a pothole, but not fast enough, jolting Choir out of his nap. “You think we didn’t give those towel heads enough warning? Six months not long enough? Who’s in charge of this operation, Mao?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who gave you orders in Port Angeles?”
“E-mail.”
“Li Kuan’s e-mail or from bin Laden’s leftovers — who?”
“I don’t know.”
“You serve on the sub, Mao? Or you strictly a tunneler?”
“Tunnel.”
“Same tunnel for both subs? Or did they have to take their turn, Mao? Or did each sub have its own garage?”
“I don’t know this.”
“Aha,” said Freeman accelerating. “You just know about the tunnel you’re taking us to, right? You bring the supplies — what, in a van? — and just drop them off.”
“Yes.”
“You lying bastard,” said Freeman, braking hard as he swerved to miss a fallen branch, barely visible in the fog. “You’re a hauler! Look at your throat, Mao. You’re a goddamn hauler of everything from rice to outboards to ammunition to kill Americans!”
Now Aussie, Choir, and Brentwood were more attentive. What they’d seen as the general’s “over-the-line” behavior in the East-West Café was now temporarily mitigated by their outrage at the horrendous loss of life, to say nothing of the loss in ships, caused by the midget submarine. Still the four SpecFor warriors, unlike Freeman, were not convinced there was a second sub, believing that the minesweeper, if it hadn’t gone down from natural causes, had most probably been destroyed by a mine.
The general’s questioning of “Mao” was reminding them, however, just how horrific the terrorist submarine attacks had been. And if the general was right about a second sub, there would be more to come.
The fog lifted with the rapidity of a stage curtain. What had been a gray, damp world along eerily deserted Highway 112 as the Humvee sped west toward the inland point five miles south of the Strait of Juan de Fuca that marked the big bend between Pillar and Slip Points — the latter seven miles farther west — was now a world so bereft of fog that every tree and bush was clearly visible. The longitudinal reading Aussie had taken earlier on the winding cliff-face path as he’d climbed high enough to see over the fog had given them the exact position of the cave behind the falls, the cave in which Peter Dixon had been so gruesomely tortured and murdered.
“Tunnel entrance near here,” Mao told Freeman, who slowed the vehicle to sixty, waist-high brush, sandy, loamy soil, and burned-out forest racing by. To their left, looking south, they could see the grandeur of Mount Olympus and the sun-drenched snowcaps of its surrounding peaks. The general fixed his eyes on the waiter, who, despite the general calling him “Mao,” looked only partly Chinese to Aussie.
“Further,” said Mao sourly.
“How much further?” snapped Choir, his finger jabbing the man’s neck. Choir still didn’t approve of the old man crossing the line, shooting the woman like that, but if he was right and there was a second sub, time would be running out before it either struck again or decided to flee.
“Aussie?”
“General?”
“Call Sal. Tell him we’re—”
A loud pop from the right rear wheel was followed by the roar of the Humvee taking rounds, Aussie realizing that Freeman and his team would have been dead or badly shot up if the general had not immediately sped up.
“Five o’clock!” yelled Aussie. “Hundred yards. Light PK. Three men.” He grabbed the handhold, Freeman swinging the Humvee off the road and into the loamy ground, mowing bushes down before the vehicle that was back up to sixty miles an hour. Aussie and Choir were returning fire as Freeman swung hard left, enabling his men to get off a quick broadside before he just as violently swung the Humvee back hard right, driving, accelerating, straight for the light machine-gun post that Freeman barely saw through the narrow slit between the rim of his Fritz and the Humvee’s bulletproof glass. The machine-gun post was now only twenty yards in front, seconds away, rising and falling with the Humvee’s passage over the rough ground.
“L’audace!” Freeman shouted. “Toujours l’audace!”
Aussie’s next burst hit one of them in the shoulder. The trio broke and ran, the gunner, frantically hauling the PLA light machine gun, jumping over a log.
“Hold!” yelled Freeman, the Humvee hitting the log. The vehicle’s high clearance easily, if shudderingly, passed over it, momentarily throwing Freeman’s steering off, the Humvee clipping the fleeing gunman with the right fender. He was down, the gun thrown four feet away. Freeman braked, shoved the stick into reverse and backed up. They heard a sound like a branch cracking. Then he was off after the other two. Fog was moving in again.
“IR!” Freeman shouted.
Aussie reached over and, given the bumpy ride, deftly managed to “crown” the general with the infrared goggles.
“Ah — there they are, the bastards! Three o’clock, hundred yards!” With that, Freeman again abruptly changed course, the vehicle fishtailing then suddenly straightening, Mao’s head smacking the right door’s glass, the windshield not as peppered as Aussie expected. The general had no doubt put the fear of Allah into the machine-gun trio by unhesitatingly attacking without pause.