The Command (47 page)

“You can take it, Commander. Or else do a damn good imitation.”

“That's all it is. A fucking imitation.” She laughed again, shakily. Her hair had come undone and hung over her cheek. “See, I know you don't want to hear this, but—”

He put a finger over her lips. “Don't say it, Claudia.”

“You know what I'm going to say?”

“I've got a good idea.”

They were whispering, of course. He could smell her breath. Clean, like balsam, or pine scent. An inane voice in his head prattled about pheromones and chemical receptors. He got a breath in and out, but couldn't look away. In the red light, flushed, eyes wide, with her shirt coming undone, she was as desirable as it was possible for a woman to be. All he had to do was reach out and she was his. And his prick kept popping up out of the buttonless fly of his Uniform Shop yellow-label boxers. Making him fear that any moment she'd bend over and very slowly and delicately slide those parted warm lips down over it.

In which case, he'd be well and truly lost, because his inhibitions were holding forty million years of heartily copulating primates back now only by the barest fingernail.

He cleared his throat again. “Don't go there, Claudia. We wouldn't give McCall and Richardson the seal of approval. Or Konow and Hurst, in the paymaster's office. So how's it look if we do what we punished them for?”

She didn't say anything, just adjusted something under her shirt and looked away from him. He felt uneasy, like he always did when women didn't speak.

“You're probably right,” she said, almost listlessly. “Anyway, thanks for listening.”

“I'll take it as a compliment.”

“Not as a lapse of professional conduct?”

“Maybe a misstep,” he said. “But I'm guilty, too. Whatever you want, Claudia, I want, too. And I might have communicated that on some subverbal level. But let's get one thing straight. You're finishing your tour, and you're going on to screen for command and get your own ship and have a sterling career. Is that clear?”

“Aye, aye, sir,” she said, and he honestly couldn't tell what her tone was actually saying.

She was at the door when he remembered and got up quickly. “Wait a minute.”

“What?”

“Let me look first.”

She stood back as he cracked it, peering out, feeling the insane weirdness of having to check the passageway. But they couldn't let somebody spot her going out at this time of night. Perceptions mattered, sometimes more than what really happened.

Which had been nothing. Right?

The passageway lay empty, a disturbing scarlet-lit vacancy that always seemed to him like some midnight knife-murderer should be prowling it. “The coast is clear,” he whispered back, feeling like a teenager getting his girlfriend out of the house before his parents heard them.

She was about to go when she turned back. “I guess I'll read about this, right?”

She meant, on her fitness report. And he saw again her keen hard ambition, and knew this moment would vanish soon enough from her memory. Or maybe that was cruel. But he knew what she meant.

“I already addressed that issue, Claudia. We're all feeling our way through this thing. Let's call this a free throw. If it doesn't happen again.”

She chuckled. “I don't think you have to worry about that.”

At that moment they both heard a watertight door scrape and bang open. Someone coughed at the bottom of the ladder. He let go her hand just as, inside his stateroom, the buzzer went off.

“Shit,” he muttered, and closed the door as her steps faded. “Captain,” he said into the phone, tucking his still obstreperous member back with his other hand.

“Sir, Lieutenant McCall. I took over TAO from Mr. Camill.”

“What you got, Kim?”

“Flash traffic from COMSIXTHFLT. The radioman's gonna be knocking on your door about now, but I thought I'd have the figures ready.”

Dan opened the door, revealing the radioman with fist in the air ready to knock. He looked surprised. Not as surprised, Dan thought, as you'd have been if you'd come up that ladder sixty seconds earlier. “Flash message, sir,” he said, holding the board out and looking away from his commanding officer's hard-on.

He scanned it, cradling the phone in one shrugged-up shoulder as McCall filled him in with short staccato statements. He heard her out. Then gave the word to come up to flank speed.

SHIFTING the heavy, clinking bag from hand to hand as he made his way down to the waterfront, the man in the loose-woven dishdasha thought this was not the most remote cranny of the world he'd ever seen. At least it had trees. Stores with refrigerators, though the flyblown goods smelled of dust and kerosene. It had mosques—true ones, not the elaborate and idolatrous Shi'a mockeries.

And turning the familiar corner he saw again through the eyes of a gangly boy running these dusty alleys, shouting to passing captains to take him on as a hand.

Because this rundown village of adobe mud was where he'd grown up.

Now, thirty years on, he walked the same narrow shaded alleys, mind weaving strangeness with familiarity into a loose fabric of past and present through which the incandescent sun burned with unvarying ferocity. Now he called himself Mahmoud. With his new identity he'd put on once more the voluminous cotton country Egyptians wore about their business. In the heat and light and sea wind its fluttering caress surrounded him like a cool flame as he neared a wooden pier that stretched out into the Nile.

Domiat, or Damietta, was eight miles upriver from the sea. This eastern branch of the great river was the poor relation. It met the Mediterranean through a tortuous, shallow way, almost choked at times by a shifting bar of sand. To the east lay Port Said. Far to the west, Al-Iskandariya. The land between slumbered in broiling heat, a sandy coast given over to dates and figs, goats, donkeys, and water buffaloes.

Even in his boyhood, though, it had based an intensive sardine fishery. Along the English-era stone quay, along the piers that groped out into the scum-flecked stream oozing at this low season at barely a
walking pace, rode scores of the nondescript, tough little craft that grazed the southern Mediterranean for the tiny fish that served not just as food but as fertilizer for the sandy fields.

And breathing in the river smell, the rich after odor of the fishery, he closed his eyes, behind gold-rimmed sunglasses such as a liberal cleric might wear, and for a moment was also in Cameron, in Calcasieu, in Cypremort and Grand Chenier and Bayou la Batre, listening to the chatter of Vietnamese. And the whine from a distant radio became the strange atonal music Vinh and Nguyen had played in the land of their exile.

And at the same time, a barefoot child squatted outside the coffeehouse, brushing flies from his lids as he hung openmouthed on the tales of graybearded seamen.

And at the same time his own fleet would be far out from Bir Sudan by this time of the morning; out where the water lay flat and lightless as oiled steel and the sky shifted with a pulsing ruddy haze, and the radios lilted with Mohammed Mounir and Ahabaan Abdul Rahim.

Was this, he wondered, what growing old meant? That you lived not just in the present, but in all the moments you'd inhabited? He'd heard once that the Sufis, may they be cursed, said man was only a thought in God's mind.

Yet even Damietta, remote as it was, bore the marks of the ceaseless struggle between Islam and the West. The ruined forts at the entrance testified to that. The Franks had controlled all this stretch of coast during the Crusades. Till Salah-ad-Din, the great prince of Islam, had thrown back the Westerners eight hundred years before. He stroked his newly grown beard, pondering that struggle. Which had never ended and never would until the last soul on earth bowed in submission to God.

But no man could fight forever.

He waved flies off his face, frowning. Unfortunately, he still had to settle with Salim. Where the Sheikh gave with open hand, his querulous advisor doubted and misered. No better than a Jew. But surely such an action as he was about to carry out would close his career with honor. Surely after it a tired, no-longer-young man with only one eye could retire to his boats, his company, his private devotions. To a quiet life in the Sudan.

When he called out, several men emerged into the sunlight, wiping their hands on cotton waste. He acknowledged their greetings with a
smile. Went down a rickety gangplank, clutching the bag to his chest, feeling the cool sweating roundnesses within with anticipation.

The boat smelled of years at sea. Its deck was patched with the paint the villagers had compounded of the oily fish from time out of mind. It was a hundred feet long, with a midships deckhouse and a stumpy pole mast to which the outrigger nets were hinged. Moored by a line to the stern, a smaller craft lay on the sluggish river: a beaten-up fiberglass-hulled sport fisherman with a tilted-up Yamaha outboard.

THE first team, in this same boat, had sailed from Domiat the month before, made the round trip to their target area, and returned. They'd been boarded and searched a few miles from their destination, but of course there'd been nothing in the hold but sardines.

The second group had been here a week. They'd overhauled the engines and installed steel plates shielding the wheel and the fuel tanks. They'd installed another bank of batteries, a second generator, and two more bilge pumps, and had scrubbed down, decked in, and run lighting to the hold. They'd bought bottled water, new mattresses, a butane stove, rice, couscous, dates, tea, coffee, chocolate, and canned meat.

Then, the night before, they'd driven the truck in from the warehouse in Port Said. Under cover of darkness, they'd swayed the heavy crated package down into the hold. Where it rested now beneath closed hatches, snuggled into its cocoon of the other material.

He spoke briefly with them, saying all would be as God willed, but he had hopes of success and victory. Then stood watching as they filed up the gangplank. From the pier, one of them—the Sheikh was very media-savvy—held up a video camera. Shielding his face with his sleeve, he bowed deeply to all those who would see and thus be moved to follow in the path. The cameraman panned over the boat, then out toward where the river met the sea. Then the red light went out, and they waved, and he waved back to them.

Then he was alone.

The third crew, the final crew, would not board for a few hours yet. He went below and checked the hold again. Running his hands over the sacks stacked close against the bomb, their contents slowly warming in the dim heat of the hold.

The bomb itself was not so much. A small charge, as such things went. It was the heavy plastic-covered sacks stacked around it that made him smile. They were covered with writing in many languages. Most also bore colorful pictures of healthy robust sheep and goats, for the benefit of purchasers who couldn't read. Products of India, for the most part, though some came from China and other countries as well. The Sheikh's men had purchased the material in small lots here and there throughout the Middle East, from various agricultural suppliers and commercial growers.

Sheep grazed on pastures without trace amounts of certain rare elements lost their appetite. Their skin grew scaly. They became anemic, and the lambs did not thrive or grow. Most of the sacks contained cobalt sulphate, a heavy sand the color of dried blood. Others contained cobalt chloride. A few contained cobalt carbonate, which potters used in blue glazes, but as this was the most expensive form of the element, they numbered only a few.

He snapped a padlock behind him, then looked into the engine room. Humming quietly, he checked the battery charge, fuel level, oil level, through-hull fittings. All secure. He went topside again and looked across at the dusty streets.

Almost against his will, he went slowly up the gangplank. Checked the lines.

He hesitated there for a moment, a white-clad figure alone in the burning sun, on the hot stone of the quay. Then began walking, with firm, steady steps, on into town.

SHE was heavier than he remembered; shorter than he recalled. She stared at his shoes from the barely opened door with no sign of recognition, a fold of cloth drawn across all but her eyes.

“Haleemah?” he asked, not even sure it was her.

“Who … You are not him. Who are you? Who sent you here?”

Did she know him? Had he, too, changed so much? Or did her dull tired gaze no longer see? He remembered her beside a fountain, the day they were married. The radiance of her smile, her slender body in the night… “It's me. Your husband.”

Her eyes came up, flickered on his face. Recognition came. And with it, something that looked like shame. “Ahmed. You didn't write me you were coming.”

“I'm here on business. Let me in.” He glanced down the narrow,
stinking hallway. A state apartment, built not long before but already its concrete flaking, the halls smelling of urine.

Unwillingly, it seemed, she opened the door. Closed it immediately, and stood wringing her hands as he looked around.

“You have been well?”

“Well, well… God has given us health … but this is not a very big place,” she murmured tensely. He noticed her front teeth were blackened, rotten. Furrows of worry had engraved her face. “The government lets me stay here because of Badriyah. But they only give us twenty-five piasters a month to live on, and the
baladi
keeps getting smaller, and it's five piasters now—there's no fish or rice anymore on the green card—and I can't go out, I can't leave her here—it's been five years! Five years!”

He patted her shoulder. She was weeping, clawing her face. He said, “Things will be better now.”

“What do you mean?”

“We're going to Sudan. I have a business. A fishing business.”

She said wonderingly, “You always loved boats.”

“I have eight. Every day they go out. Fifty men work for me. You will both live in my house.”