Freeman, Sal, and Choir had returned to the islet, ignobly but sensibly taking cover behind the small, jagged six-foot-long, five-foot-high rock wall. The guano that had remained undisturbed atop the wall now rose like chalk dust as the sub’s defenders—“About fourteen of ’em,” Sal told Freeman — continued to rake the rock with light and heavy machine-gun fire.
“Where the—” began Sal, his words drowned out by such an enfilade of heavy caliber and light machine-gun fire that the salt air above the small islet sang with the discordant noise of ricocheting rounds which, had it not been for the small rock wall, would have literally chopped the general and his two compatriots to pieces.
“You see Dixon or Aussie?” It was Choir, his Welsh accent always more pronounced in the taut, crackling air of a firefight.
“I don’t like this,” said Sal, in one of his more memorable understatements. “I don’t like it at all.”
Choir, crawling along on his belly, ignominiously peeked an inch or two around the end of the rock wall. “Shite! The sub’s moving.”
“Goddammit, Sal!” bellowed Freeman, pointing to the lashed-down hump of equipment in the RIB, which slapped noisily and annoyingly against the protected sea side of the islet. “Gimme that AT!”
“Won’t stop it with that, General!” Sal said as he passed the one-shot, self-contained antitank launcher Freeman had eschewed using earlier from the islet because it would have been a wasted shot, given the impediment to his line of sight formed by the falls. He’d also known that had he tried a blind shot, the Swedish-built rocket would have exploded in transit the second its warhead struck the water wall. But now the sub’s fifty-foot-long forward section from sail to bow was nosing out beyond the edge of the waterfall.
“Got that AT round ready?” Freeman shouted, answering Salvini’s skepticism about being able to hit anything worthwhile, given the impediment of the sub. “Countdown from ten to fire!” he told Salvini and Choir.
“Ten to fire,” confirmed Sal, ready to heave up the stripped-down but still substantial M-60, the terrorists’ fire increasing, as if they had divined Freeman’s intentions. The general, his left side hugging the western edge of the islet’s rock wall, was ready to swing the AT-4 launcher around as Choir and Sal prepared, at great risk, to lay down covering fire, the enemy’s enfilade whacking loudly into the islet’s protective rock wall and surrounding water, other rounds whistling ominously overhead.
“Ten,” Freeman began, “nine, eight, seven — son of a — hold it!”
Sal, crouched, poised to come up with the M-60 firing before its folded bi-pod even had time to rest on the top of the islet’s protective wall, gave a snort of suppressed laughter. Despite the precariousness of their situation, the sub nosing out from its cliff-bottom berth behind the waterfall, and despite the worrisome fact that none of the three had seen any sign of Aussie or Dixon since the two divers had disappeared under the fall, the fact that in the middle of this murderous encounter Freeman should be so conditioned by modern technology that he stopped his countdown because his cell phone’s vibration had put him off his count struck Sal as singularly hilarious. Yet part of the reason Freeman answered the cell so promptly was that it was obviously working now, the atmospherics having improved sufficiently for communication to be reestablished.
“It might be Jensen,” said Choir, hoping the NR-1B was en route.
That the news wasn’t good from Jensen’s end was evidenced by Freeman cursing above the sound of the terrorists’ fire and the increasing bass of the midget sub’s diesel engine. “The goddamned NR-1B’s kaput!” he yelled.
“The only thing that might be available,” Jensen had told him, “is the patrol craft,” adding, “What’s all that noise?”
“A damned firefight!” Freeman bellowed, his voice whipped away by gusts that were turning the previously calm blue bay into a spindrift-veined caldron. “We’ve found the goddamned midget sub — only it’s not such a midget after all. Better send your patrol boat, send anything you’ve got — fast as you can, Admiral!” With that, Freeman gave Jensen the GPS coordinates on his cell.
“Sub’s coming through the falls, General,” Sal warned. “Bow at eleven o’clock.”
It told Freeman, still holding the AT launcher, that the bow had now moved away from its earlier two o’clock berth position to a point a hundred yards left of the islet. Which in turn told him that if he didn’t fire soon, the sub would be through, past the falls, and heading unhindered out to sea. And that the protected space behind the islet’s six-foot-high wall would then be exposed to unhindered lateral fire from the sub at virtually point-blank range.
Freeman shouldered the launcher. “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one …” A vicious gust punched the islet, combining with the ferocious backblast of the rocket motor as the cone-shaped 84mm warhead shot out from its fiberglass tube at sixty-four miles an hour.
Metal whacked metal, the sub’s progress so inhibited by the buckled steel basket around its prop that Freeman estimated its speed at no more than a knot. With its steering likewise affected, it was crabbing toward the eastern sandbank of a twenty-foot-wide exit channel. Choir, reading the situation as clearly as Freeman and Sal, was already in the RIB, the three warriors anticipating the consternation in the sub and preferring to take their chances in the RIB as a fast, mobile target rather than remaining on the islet. Freeman’s shot disabling the sub, ironically, had also exposed the islet as a target, should any of the terrorists mount the midget sub’s sail to pay back the Americans for their audacity.
“Where the hell’s Aussie and Dixon?” called Sal as Choir gunned the RIB, calling on all its horsepower.
“I see Dixon,” yelled Choir. “He’s stuck on that sea stack over there.” Choir indicated a stubby, Dumpster-sized, starfish-cluttered sea stack fifty yards west of them. The SEAL diver, having clung to the sea side of the stack, had now inched his way farther around it. While it didn’t afford any flat areas upon which he might rest, it was nevertheless scabrous enough with crustaceans that he had no difficulty hanging on to it out of the sub’s line of fire.
Heading for him, the RIB began taking fire from a dozen or so of the hooded terrorists who positioned themselves along the “dock”—a crescent of crushed shell and sand to the left of the cave. Inaccurate though it was, given the fast-moving RIB, neither Freeman, Sal, nor Choir had much more success at hitting their terrorist targets once they’d “looped” Dixon aboard. One second they were firing from atop a four-foot chop, the next they were shooting on the downslide, the loud, crackling firefight coming from both sides unable to exact any serious punishment. Then Aussie, having successfully sought the turbulence of the waterfall-sea interface to hide in, saw the sail of the midget, which had appeared much larger from the water, coming alive with men wearing black balaclavas and overalls.
Like soldier ants erupting from their hive, half a dozen of the terrorists were already on deck, another cramped four remaining in the sail. Two of the latter, Aussie could see, were a machine gunner and his feeder. Of the other duo, one was obviously what U.S. military attachés around the world colloquially called the TIC — terrorist in charge — his authority evident as he directed a work party hurriedly toward the stern. The other man held an AK-47.
While the TIC continued to instruct his minions aft via what Aussie guessed must be a throat mike, two of the six soldier ants opened up with Kalashnikovs, the sound augmenting the tarpaper-ripping noise of the sail’s heavy.50 caliber machine gun, whose fan-shaped sweep of fire moved unhurriedly but with relentless intensity through a seventy-to-ninety degree arc, from the RIB that had picked up Dixon across to the interface of the waterfall and the open sea. It was as if the TIC had anticipated that the remaining American diver — Aussie — possibly wounded, would seek the camouflage of the falls, perhaps using its noise as a cover in the event that he was so badly hurt he could not silence his pain.