Aussie and Sal’s enfilade wasn’t the wild, sweeping cover fire seen in movies, where it seems the good guys have an endless supply of ammunition. Instead it was concentrated, well-aimed fire not meant to simply keep the enemy’s heads down but to take them out.
By the time the opposition — Aussie and Sal guesstimated there must be a group of five or six of them — had taken cover from the two SpecFors’ on-target fire, Zodiacs 1 and 2 were in thick reeds only ten yards from the woods. Freeman, the other five men, and Prince were ashore, but by now the terrorists had recovered from the surprise of Sal’s and Aussie’s heavy and accurate bursts of fire and raked the Zodiacs, putting both out of action. Prince was growling.
Freeman could see the boat first detected on the helo’s radar disappearing from view about two to three miles up the lake, close in to the northwestern shore. And he knew that with the sound of the crash, even the relatively few people who had cabins near or around the lake would raise an alarm which, he hoped, would bring police reinforcements and local reservists from Sandpoint. But the town was fifty miles away by road, and by the time any reinforcements might arrive, the terrorists in the boat would have gotten beyond the lake proper and entered the two-and-a-half-mile-long channel that would take them into Priest Lake. All of which rapidly brought Freeman to the conclusion that there was only one thing to do. His six-man squad would have to do a marathon — minimal-ration, ammunition pack, forty pounds to a man — along the lone fifteen-mile section of the secondary road, an old logging trail that ran more or less parallel to the lake at a distance of a quarter of a mile in places, four miles in others, from the water. There was no chance that he and his five could outrun the terrorists fleeing in a boat, but he might be able to reach another boat or vehicle to catch up with them or head them off.
The general hoped that meantime the Hawkeye would be frequency scanning, and, while he would be unable to make contact with the helo any longer, that it would keep him updated via his modular infantry radio. Freeman had one asset that would save some time: Prince. With the terrorists’ scent firmly impressed upon his olfactory sense, he should be able to help them avoid any time-consuming, deadly ambushes by the five or so rearguard terrorists who had been firing from the edge of the woods at the helo. These scumbags would almost certainly cut back through the dense woods and rush to the road. Then Freeman suddenly realized his advantage. If he, Choir, Ruth, Gomez, Johnny Lee, and Eddie Mervyn could run to the secondary road a mile and a quarter to the west of where they were at present, they might be able to beat these rearguard terrorists who, he saw on his tactical map, were at the foot of a densely forested slope. The terrorists were three miles from the secondary road rather than the one mile his team had to cover before reaching it.
“Right,” said Freeman quickly. “We go. Fast!” Adding, “Now we’ll see who’s been spending too much time with Mommy!” Freeman thought of Margaret, but immediately pushed her out of his mind. Gomez, Eddie Mervyn, and Tony Ruth exchanged grins.
The team headed off, Freeman on point, through the thick woods and the ubiquitous salal brush, its green, mist-polished leaves pushing against them at shoulder height with the same kind of determination, it seemed, as the plant used whenever it invaded a new area, crowding out all other vegetation in its way. They were violating the first rule of the Special Forces: be quiet. The salal in particular, while not prickly, had leaves that were rigid enough to resist a mere brushing aside as one could do with sword ferns and the like, and the six men and dog created so much noise that it sounded to Choir as if a tank was moving through. But Choir knew that the general knew when to break the rules, and besides, Prince was nearby, ready to stop and stiffen at the merest whiff of a terrorist’s scent.
Then they got a break. They had reached a hiker’s trail, presumably one that linked the secondary road and the lakeshore through the forbidding woods. A hard, pushing slog suddenly became a run, and someone’s camelback was sloshing, for which, at the appropriate time, Freeman would ream out the offender in no uncertain terms. Running, it made no difference, but if and when they were forced to close on the enemy quickly, silently, even the greenest cadet knew that the smallest sound could give him away.
It wasn’t the fastest mile in history, but for men weighed down with arms, ammo, and essential war wares, it was exemplary. In another five minutes they saw the road and slowed, senses on high alert. They walked quickly, quietly now, until they could see that the road was clear, then split into two teams: the general, Johnny Lee, and Choir, with Prince leading, on the eastern side of the northbound road, Ruth, Eddie Mervyn, and Gomez on the opposite, western, side. They were running again, resolute in their intention to bypass the terrorist group that had been firing on them and to keep going until they found a cabin or one of the few small marinas scattered around the lake’s seventy-mile-long shoreline. With luck, they could get either a boat or a vehicle in which to hightail it to the northern end of the lake before the “disk” party disembarked into the woods and followed one of the creek beds on the twenty-to thirty-mile hike to the border and the equally wild country of the Canadian forests.
Prince, panting, growled at a rush of sound that suddenly burst from the bush, sending all six men to ground until they realized the noise was that of squirrels, not men. Prince stopped to look back at them with what seemed to Freeman an expression of mild contempt for their unwarranted belly flops.
They were running again, and from their GPSs they knew that soon they would be adjacent to the general area from which the rearguard terrorist squad had been firing.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A world away, the White House was learning just how important, indeed critical, it was to recover the DARPA ALPHA disk. The prospect of any country, even the tried-and-true allies Great Britain and Australia, having possession of America’s revolutionary Flow-In-Flight technology was, as Eleanor Prenty told the president, sending shock waves through the Pentagon. She placed an 8½-by-11-inch scaled-down drawing of the “gas in nose cone” torpedo before him. “It’s downright traumatizing the chief of naval operations. It would mean a sub having the ability to fire at an enemy ship two hundred miles away. The DARPA ALPHA people say there would be no wake, no warning.”
“Wouldn’t the targeted ship hear it?” posed the president. “I mean, on its sonar?”
“At a mile a second, it would be like—” She consulted the notes she’d taken from the CNO. “DARPA ALPHA scientists tell us that—” She had to turn several pages, her hand trembling. After being on her feet this long, and stoked with coffee since the crisis broke, she was beyond exhaustion. “The scientists say that at ten miles, for example, the sonar noise from the super-cavitating torpedo would last no longer than a quick jab on a door buzzer. But if you think the CNO’s in near-coronary mode, you should read the stuff I’ve been getting from the Joint Chiefs. The army is piss — sorry, sir. I mean—”
“The army’s pissed that they hadn’t heard of DARPA ALPHA until today?”
“Yes, Mr. President.” Eleanor moved her laptop so he could see the map of Washington state’s Kitsap Peninsula. “The army knew about DARPA’s Division of Naval Surface Warfare up here at Bayview and about the Keyport testing lab and torpedo range on the Kitsap perimeter. But DARPA ALPHA was — is — completely different in intent and in staffing from the DARPA installation we knew back in 2006.”
The president shrugged. “Can’t blame them. These things have to be run on a strictly need-to-know basis. Black ops. We can’t all know what everybody else is doing.”