“What’s with him?” said Sal.
Aussie shrugged. “Don’t think he knows.”
“Maybe,” said Choir, laughing and quoting an old detergent jingle, “he doesn’t like ’ring around the collar’?”
“There’s definitely a bee in his bonnet,” began Choir, then stopped. Freeman was standing at the corridor doorway again, having reentered the ship’s passageway directly from the A-frame, out of view of those in the dry lab.
“It’s not a bee,” said the general. “It’s a goddamn wasp, and I don’t know where the hell it’s coming from.” With that, he moved off.
“So?” asked Choir. “Where’s his wasp coming from, my hearties?”
Neither Sal nor Aussie knew.
The question was finally answered at precisely 3:00 P.M.
a mile west of Port Angeles, when the Petrel, in thinning but still persistent fog, received the news — as did the rest of the world — that the USS Harold Ward, a fiberglass-keeled minesweeper of 895 tons, had just sunk between Cape Flattery and Vancouver Island. “A Coast Guard patrol boat was sighted in the area, but it’s doubtful if it was able to rescue any of the survivors, as the minesweeper sank so quickly that—”
“Suffering Jesus!” exclaimed Freeman.
In that serendipitous confluence of forces where unconnected links are finally connected, the general had it: Choir’s offhand joke about “ring around the collar” and the general’s obsession about the bruise ring about the collar, or neck, of the terrorist on deck came together in the shock of yet another ship going down.
Frank Hall told Freeman it would take another hour at least, at Petrel’s present crawl of one of two knots, until they reached Port Angeles.
“Frank,” said the general, his eyes alive with urgency. “For God’s sake, let me have the Zodiac!”
“General, I had no intention of refusing it. You and the boys take it, but the news guy said that that minesweeper had sunk—nothing about an explosion. Media’s so hot to trot these days they’re automatically assuming it’s been torpedoed or something. Ships do sink for a host of other—”
“It’s been torpedoed, Frank,” said the general. “There’s another goddamn sub! Don’t you see? That’s why there were so many goddamn sinkings in a few days. It was a goddamn duo at work!”
“Then where the hell’s it come from?” asked Frank. “I mean you — Darkstar’s gone over the whole coast.”
“I don’t know, Frank. That’s why I need the Zodiac.”
Frank let Freeman have the Zodiac, Aussie meanwhile cursing the fact that there were no boots on the Petrel to replace the pair he’d lost on the sub after diving off to help the general. He ended up borrowing a pair of young Cookie’s runners.
“Move it, Aussie!” shouted Freeman, already in the Zodiac as Jimmy and the bosun lowered it from the davit.
One of the side-scan technicians gave Freeman a sonar tracking beeper he’d requested. It was used on occasion by the technicians to test their hydrophones in the lab.
“Bring combat packs!” Freeman called out.
“He’s keen,” said Jimmy, watching the general using the Zodiac’s pike to keep the inflatable from crashing into the side as the Petrel engaged a strong offshore current.
“He lives on adrenaline,” replied the bosun, his muscles stiffened from the Petrel’s last tension-filled twenty-four hours. “I want a massage.”
“So do I,” said Aussie, lacing up the runners and pulling on his gloves. He threw over a line down then, so he, Sal and Choir could rappel into the Zodiac, its outboard already spitting, coughing, then roaring to life, the general checking the gas level. “Full?” inquired Aussie.
“We’re only going into Port Angeles,” said the general.
“Well hell — couldn’t we have waited till Petrel—”
“No! Now listen to me, Aussie. Go get the first mate, tell him I want him to get some syringes from the ship’s first aid kit and take a blood sample from each of those damn terrorists.”
“DNA samples?” said Aussie.
“Right,” replied the general. “We’ll take them with us. We might be able to ID them through Interpol.”
“You think so?” said Aussie dubiously.
“Well, it’s worth a try,” said the general, adding, tongue-in-cheek, “Might help you win your bet.”
Aussie grinned. “They’re not all Chinese. I’m not that stupid.”
“Go on,” said the general. “Hurry up. Tell him to get those samples fast and put ’em in a cooler. I want to be off this tub in ten minutes.”
While the Zodiac, bow up, skimmed the gray water through varying densities of fog, Freeman’s brain was racing, his chain of connected memories now complete, his penchant for detail at the fore, his mental files rapidly flipping back to the café, the waiter’s dirty fingernails and the angry ring of irritated flesh around the throat and wrists taking him back to remembrances of his long days and nights in Vietnam, especially in the South, where, as he was now reminding Aussie, the Viet Cong, having gotten dangerously close to Saigon right under the noses of the Americans and their own fellow South Vietnamese, had executed one of the greatest military maneuvers of all time.
“Cu—” he began, then stopped, swerving the boat, heeding Sal’s shouted warning that there was a deadhead in front of them, one of the many floating logs that were always breaking loose from the huge timber rafts hauled across the strait, or the fallout from storm-uprooted trees along the coast.
“Cu Chi,” the general told Aussie as the Zodiac straightened out on its fast run into the harbor.
“Gotcha!” Aussie shouted above the outboard, the engine markedly noisier than when he and the general had used it to approach the sub. “This Merc needs a tune-up,” he told the general.
Freeman took no notice, telling Aussie instead that it would be his job to drive the Humvee that he’d told Hall to book ahead by radio.
“Hope it’s there!” shouted Aussie. “Everyone’s probably left town by now.”
“It’ll be there,” the general assured him, though Aussie was certain Freeman had no way of being that sure.
“Sal,” the general called out. “I’ve been thinking. Soon as we hit the beach, you call Fort Lewis. Tell Brentwood to grab a Huey and get his ass up here. Tell him we’ll meet him at Laurel and Railroad.”
“You want him to bring that Bullpup?”
“Hell, no. Better his sidearm.”
“Roger.”
“There’s the Humvee,” said Freeman, slowing the Zodiac to twenty knots, well in excess of harbor approach regulations. A purse seiner loomed ahead in the fog, one of its crew giving them a frantic “slow down” signal.
“Sea rage,” quipped Aussie, waving at the purse seiner, the man’s shouting eliciting a full stiff-arm Italian response from Salvini.
The Humvee driver was waiting for them. “General Freeman?” he asked, unsure of just who was whom, since none of the four Special Forces team wore any insignia or rank. But it was Freeman who had the leader look.
“That’s me,” he told the driver.
“Sir, a Captain Brentwood is waiting at—”
“Guess he got your message,” cut in Aussie.
“Good,” answered Freeman, without breaking his stride, turning to Sal. “Don’t worry about making that call. Brentwood’s here.”
Sal looked about the fog-wreathed beach. “Where?”