“Must have been kelp,” he assured Davis. Though Davis said nothing, the admiral sensed that his assistant wasn’t convinced, which uncaged his obsessive streak once again. “All right, then,” he told Davis. “Call the DO. Have him send a burst UHF message to the Utah and have Captain Rorke pick up a sample of that damned kelp from the site on his way into base.”
It was 1100 hours when the admiral’s Humvee pulled up at the Trident Refit Facility. It would be hours yet before he’d hear anything from Petrel. He glanced at the forest on the other side of the 2.5 mile-wide canal, and the Olympic Mountains beyond. Wild and beautiful. Inside the TRF shed there was no sub, but a search periscope that carried cameras and radar sensors was being tested along with a smaller attack periscope. Nearby, a boomer’s 8J scope was having its hermetic seal checked for any possible water, air, or gas leakage.
Looking at the boomer, preoccupied with thoughts about his own days at sea during the Gulf War and the mixed emotions he used to experience on his way out from the base during the eight-hour, fifty-five-mile-long transit up through the canal and the strait into the Pacific, Jensen didn’t see the Marine guard and his German shepherd dog coming around the corner of the building. The dog suddenly lunged at him, snarling, baring his teeth. Jensen stopped dead in his tracks. The guard, jerking the dog’s leash, apologized. Jensen swallowed hard. “It’s all right, soldier. Good to see you doing your job.”
“Yes, sir.”
Aide Davis saw that the admiral’s hand was trembling. Jensen’s cell phone rang. “Christ!” His aide walked discreetly away. “Jensen!” the admiral barked into the phone.
“Duty officer, sir. Coast Guard reports nothing unusual. They suspect you’re right. Darkstar must have picked up a floating kelp bed. They say kelp can act like oil on water — smooths out a patch so it looks calm compared to the surrounding chop. That would register an anomaly.”
“Very well,” said Jensen, his voice strained.
“Everything all right, sir?” inquired his aide.
“Yes,” answered the admiral. “Seems as though Darkstar gave us a false alarm. That damn thing’s too sensitive. Like the temperature gauge in my SUV. Damn thing changes every hundred yards.”
His relief after the adrenaline surge caused by the German shepherd, together with the Coast Guard’s confirmation of his kelp theory, suddenly gave the admiral a burst of confidence, if not an unusually aggressive, almost arrogant air. During his inspection of one of the boomer’s exteriors, he pointed to an abrasion on the sub’s anechoic coating — the rubber sonar-absorbing layer applied to the hull to reduce the possibility of detection by enemy sonar pulses. “Make a note, Davis. I want that fixed.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Not ASAP,” the admiral added and, in his buoyant mood, added his favorite Churchillian phrase: “Action this day!”
“Yes, sir.”
Churchill had been very popular since 9/11, the President and his speechmakers having borrowed freely from the great Englishman’s World War II speeches.
By the time the shot-up Pave Low, heading south, taking sporadic small arms fire along the way, approached the sun-drenched airfield at Tora Bora, its engines sounded more like a harvester shucking wheat. Hydraulic fluid was bleeding from its belly against the blue Afghan sky and the snowcapped peaks of the Hindu Kush.
Like all such snatch and grab missions, Brentwood’s had been a secret operation, but not now that fire trucks, ambulances, and padre were on Code Red, and with rumors flying about the Medal of Honor winner having screwed it up. The stories bandied about the camp temporarily put to flight the stagnant air of insufferable boredom that forms the interregnum between battles.
“Poor bastard,” said a tank gunner as he watched Brentwood being stretchered through the blazing heat into the MASH unit, where the soft whirring of the air-conditioning unit delivered a different planet to the Afghan desert. It was a cool place where Brentwood fought the trauma team “heavies” who tried to strap him down in pre-op, the morphine now losing its battle with the invading horror of consciousness — a time-distorted frenetic attack on his conscience in which he wanted to rush back into the cave and save his buddies. And then the shot of sodium pentathol took over, the cave closing in, smaller by the millisecond, until all light was gone. The monitors’ whirring and the periodic alarms of intravenous pumps were heard only by the trauma team in their fight to first save his life and then, if possible, preserve the use of his right arm.
They saved him and the shot-up arm, but the main brachial artery had been severed, and though sewn up with over thirty stitches, it was remarked by Surgeon Major Ainsleigh that this Captain Brentwood’s career in the military was now over.
“Lucky bastard!” It was an OR orderly incognito behind his surgical mask, possibly a reservist who had signed up for the adventure of weekend bivouacs and the few extra bucks, not for full-time service in what the “ ’Ghanistan” troops called “Boring Boring.” Their hope was, now that the war on terrorism was winding down, at least in Afghanistan, they’d soon get news they were going home. Back home where a six-pack wasn’t against the will of Allah, where a girl was free to go out with whoever might ask her and let a man take off more than her veil.
CHAPTER TEN
General Chang was as good as his word, calling back by three-fifteen. “Mr. Riser, I have some information about your daughter,” he said. “As you probably are aware, my niece, Wu Ling, is — was, excuse me, please — a good friend of your daughter.”
“Yes,” Riser said, though he had never personally met the general’s “niece.” “Has she any information?”
The general wasn’t used to such directness. In China, one took longer to get to the point, and it was considered impolite to rush. But then again, the general told himself, if someone had murdered his daughter, he would be just as impatient for information as was the American. “Wu Ling said she was with your daughter at the Museum of Opera and Theater when she called you.”
“Does she remember what my daughter said?”
“A little, I think. That is why I’m calling. She told me it was very noisy. Tourists.” He added a lighthearted self-criticism of his fellow countrymen. “Chinese tourists. Very loud.” Riser had the will but lacked the energy to laugh openly. “Ah,” continued the general, “it may be helpful if you spoke to my niece.”
“Is she with you?”
“Yes.”
“May I speak to her now?”
“Of course.” There was a pause as the general summoned her.
Wu Ling tried to be helpful, but it was hopeless; her English was poor, and she spoke a dialect of Cantonese, not Mandarin, the official language of government and of cultural attachés. And with Riser unable to see her body language, any attempt to splice Mandy’s segmented message into something cohesive was impossible. Could he meet her? he asked the general.
“Unfortunately, we are in Suzhou for the next week. Perhaps when we return to Beijing we could arrange—”
“No. Now,” said Riser. “I can fly down to Hangzhou then catch the train to Suzhou.” Riser heard a rapid, loud exchange between Chang and his “niece.” He had never gotten used to the din of Chinese conversation; at times it felt like being assaulted by a human ghetto blaster.