by David Poyer
A reddish-bearded man beside the elder stirs. “Why should the infidels want our land? There’s much rain where they live. ‘Accept gifts when they are in the offerer’s hand.’ ”
“What is the price of these gifts?” Ghedi asks him. But he’s silent. “What is it, this price?” he asks them all. “Come, I do not hear an answer. We have the true faith, but Shaitan gives the foreigners cunning. What wise man buys a camel the price of which he does not know? Or purchases a wife from one who says, I will tell you the bride-price next year?”
The clearing of throats, the ruminative slurp of coffee. Again Ghedi glances not at the seated graybeards, but at those behind them.
“Your people hunger? Let us make a bargain. I have no wish for anything but peace with the fierce and renowned Gilhirs. Without the help of God, could I have captured the convoy, guarded by the best of your fighters? I think not.”
The eldest strokes his beard. “What is your price for this food? Gold we have none, and the old money’s worthless.”
“Then say what you have.”
The reddish-bearded one says, “Camels and a few sheep. But we will not let those go, or we cannot rebuild the flocks when the rain returns.”
“What else?”
Grudgingly he says, “Cannon and explosives. From the regiment at Malakat.” He nods at a younger man. “Those who guarded it were of our clan when the army dissolved.”
“What sort of cannon?”
For answer the elder waves. The younger man comes forward with a book. Ghedi can’t read foreign writing. Only a little Arabic, enough to puzzle out the Qu’uran. Still, the picture’s clear enough. “How many like this do you have?”
“Five, hidden in the hills. Shells, too.”
Ghedi considers. From the picture, they’re very large. Artillery would make his force powerful, but could his men move it, over the mountains? And what a wonderful target it would make for the American airplanes.
Perhaps not. “You mentioned explosives.”
“We have that too, a great deal.”
He glances at Juulheed, gets a nod. He tells the old man, “We will take your explosives, in exchange for half the food.”
A buzz. “This is partially our grain already,” the red-bearded elder points out. “The Americans distribute it to all who come.”
“It was theirs, honored one. Now it is the Waleeli’s, glory to God.” He raises his voice. “Truly God is generous to those who fight in His name. This is a new day, brothers. There’s no more evil government. Only Ashaarans, and invaders.
“It is said: ‘He who is truly weak finds a foreigner as a protector.’ Do you know what’s happening in the city? Foreigners search from house to house for weapons. They give those they find to their puppets. Soon they will come to ask for yours. What will you do? Turn your naked rumps to them, whimper and lick their hands? In our brotherhood there’s no longer any reckoning of ancestors, to set man against man. Only those who believe and fight. Do you have brave fighters? We need them with us.”
The air hangs still. No one moves. Neither the elders, nor the young men who stand like so many concrete pillars behind them.
Finally the redbeard uncoils. “We need these explosives to protect our clan,” he says. Ghedi sees the man he thought was the elder is not. He is only the oldest. “I do not think we should make this bargain. Nor should our young men join you. Thus we will continue to receive food for our grandchildren.” He does not look at them, but the other elders murmur concurrence. “This is the way of wisdom, of peace and milk. We will not hinder you, but we will not join you. The Gilhirs will stand apart.”
There’s a stir in the back. Ghedi raises his voice. “Stand apart, you say. Meaning, let the strangers rule?”
“If we wage war, they’ll kill us with helicopters. And send no more food.”
Ghedi considers killing the redbeard. There’s a pistol inside his pants. But the man stares back with disdain.
“You’re old,” he tells them. “Old and afraid. But Ghedi disciple of Nassir does not fear their machines. The great blind sheekh declares to you jihad, for your country and for God. The Waleeli will unite all Ashaarans and eject the foreigners. Then we will form a government. But this time, not of this clan against that. Nor will it teach evil to our children and women. A righteous government, enforcing the holy law.”
The middle-aged men stir, but don’t speak. The stubborn elder rises, gathers his robes. “This is what Sheekh Nassir says? Attack the foreigners?”
“Yes.”
“Obey mullahs, not the ergada? The clan elders?”
“Sharia law is greater than clan law. Islam unites; kinship law divides.”
“Then your sheekh is mad as well as blind. Clan law is the Ashaari way. You talk like an Arab. Wait till the rains return. Then, if the khawayat don’t leave, we can make war when we have eaten and are strong. Our young men will not join you.”
Ghedi reaches for his weapon, but Juulheed’s hand stops him. He smiles, as he sees what he’s expected outside. It’s Hasheer, giving him the signal.
He stands, dusts off his clothing, bows. “As you say, honored one. I thank you for your hospitality.” He backs toward the entrance. “But for your safety, stay within the tent.”
The elders glance up. “What do you mean?”
“Only that I have no wish to kill you. Your young men are already mine. They’ll come back heroes, to shame the cowards who tried to keep them from battle.” Ghedi laughs in their faces and turns on his heel.
Outside the young men of the Gilhir are gathered in the blazing sun and eddying dust. Already they’re mixed in with his men. “Make sure they bring their weapons,” he snaps to Hasheer.
“Yes, Maahdi. Weapons and blankets.”
“Don’t call me Maahdi, and punish with rods those who do. Where are the explosives?”
“Hidden above the town. I’ve sent a truck and loading crew with guides. And they have armored cars.”
None of the elders mentioned this, but it’s welcome news. “Let those who cared for them drive the armored cars. Leave one truck of rice here. Drive the others as close to our camp as they can get, then unload and camouflage. We’ll ransom them back to the Pakistanis for ammunition, like the last convoy.”
“Yes, Orcharder.”
He walks around a barefoot girl lazily switching a sheep and raises his hand to the recruits. “Greetings, warriors of Ashaara and God. Forget your mothers and fathers, and follow me. Ours is the God of Battles. God is great.”
“God is great,” they shout, waving their rifles. “God is great. God is great.”
Their eyes are like the sun at dawn. The cheers are strong wine in his veins. Holding up a hand, he swings into the Land Cruiser. As the young men scramble into the trucks he sees the elders standing by the tent. The eldest stretches out his hands, but they ignore him. They’re the clan’s no longer. They’re Waleeli now. They’re his. Glory to God, the whole southern mountains are his.
He nods to Juulheed to start the engine.
17
USS Shamal
TEDDY was cleaning his carbine in the hooch when the news came down. Parts and patches all over, the oil and burnt powder all over their hands after their range session that afternoon. “I don’t use anything but CLP,” he was saying to the big Hawaiian. “What the fucking manual says, that’s what I fucking use.”
“Man, got to run that bolt greasy. The recoil spring, too. Or you get that sproing, sounds like a fucking toy gun.”
“You don’t need all that fucking grease.” Teddy pulled the bolt carrier out of the black weapon broken-backed on the table. He fingernailed out the retaining pin, shook out the firing pin, took out the cam pin. The bolt fell into his hand. “Just collects moon dust. Keep it clean, this fucker’ll shoot.”
The SEAL “hooch” was one of the prefabs at the international airport. The Marines had renamed it Camp Rowley, after the private killed at the embassy gate. The SEALs were part of an on-call reac
tion force, formed since someone had started raiding convoys. They’d gone out twice, but both times too late to do much but police up the dead. Fortunately or not, there hadn’t been many. Oberg suspected that was because the skinnies riding shotgun had deserted to join the bandits.
A disturbing trend, but sooner or later they’d catch up to whoever was raiding the shipments. Running a last oil-soaked patch through the bore—it was chromed, but he never left a bore unoiled—he reflected on how nice it would be to pop a few primers on them. With the perfect excuse: they were stealing food from starving people.
Not that he gave a shit. The blade of his Glock grated as he scraped carbon off the bolt face. He pulled the extractor and cleaned it, looking for cracks and wear. Kaulukukui was going on about some gee-whiz dry lube the GrayWolf armorer had given him. Teddy grunted. Usually he was good for hours arguing about weapons, but right now he was thinking about the Offer.
A friend of his mom’s wanted him in on an action picture. The guy was a schmuck and a liar, but who wasn’t in LA. He’d sent Teddy the spec script. Silly shit, but it came cheap from a new screenwriter, and with Teddy on board, he could make “an authentic picture of SEALs in action.” Teddy would get a cameo, shared credit, maybe even a point of gross.
Unspoken so far was that the guy expected him to put money in, too.
Oh, he had it. All it’d take was a call to his mom’s lawyers. Cavanaugh, Sillinger & Sukkar, the firm she’d banked her A-list earnings with for twenty years. But he’d grown up in that scene. Gone round the world to get away from it. Did he want to go back?
He didn’t think so. Still, it might be fun to make a picture. He reassembled the bolt, cleaned the buffer assembly, scrubbed down the locking lugs. Spritzed everything and wiped it dry. He snapped the charging handle in, ran the bolt in, pivoted upper and lower back together. Pushed the takedown pin in and snatched the bolt and snapped the trigger. Good.
Just in time. The speaker outside said, “REACTION TEAM ALFA, REACTION TEAM ALFA, MUSTER ON PAD SIX, ON THE DOUBLE.”
SUMO steered the Humvee around two camels fucking in the road, like big tangled sawhorses. Bare-legged kids fished in tide pools. Each time he braked to let a convoy rumble by, the beggars closed in. “Sir! Sir!” they yelled, thrusting their deformities through the windows. “On the eighth day God said, ‘Crap, I forgot’ . . . and created Ashaara,” Kaulukukui muttered.
Fat flies echeloned in like attacking Stukas as the team rolled out at the terminal. Two ships were discharging. The little pusher boats were butting another out of the basin. Trucks waited under the discharge chutes of silos. Drifts of chaff and broken rice lay crisscrossed with tire tracks. Shamal’s engines shook the air with the familiar school-bus rumble, venting an apricot cloudbank that drifted straight up. Teddy and Sumo Man and Arkin and Kowacki, two more Team Eight guys fresh in-country from ops in Yemen—the former, “Barkin’ Arkin” or “Bitch Dog,” the latter inevitably christened “Whacker”—humped lumpy duffels and soft-cased weapons up the brow, across the afterdeck, and down into the SEAL prep area. The twenty-by-thirty steel-walled compartment was studded with hydraulic tanks and compressors, its overhead v-indented by the launch ramp for the RHIB.
When he bumped his gear down the ladder the first thing that hit him was the smell. It was rank, raw piss and shit. The second was the heat. Had to be 130, maybe 140, so hot his eyes burned. The black CO, Geller, was standing in blue coveralls dark with sweat, fists on hips, a chief behind him, watching Kaulukukui and Arkin stow their gear in the aft magazine locker. Since the engines were clamoring a few feet away, Oberg had to shout. “Alleycat, how you doing?” he yelled, tossing a salute. Jesus, he’d almost called the guy Jelly Man, Sumo’s nickname for him. “Ever find that machine gun, sir?”
Geller’s eyes crimped. “The one you lost overboard?”
“Not us, Skipper. Your guys. Teddy Oberg, team leader, reporting aboard. You know Sumo. This is Whacker and Bitch Dog. Jesus, what’s that stink? Like a sheep’s asshole down here.”
The chief enlightened them: the level switch in the contaminated holding tank had failed. The pump had run and run, burning out the motor. Meaning, the heads were shut down. “Until we get that pump swapped out, everybody uses those five-gallon buckets in the corners. Lug ’em topside and dump ’em, but don’t wait till they’re full or they’ll slop all over the ladders. Then we’ll really have a mess.”
Geller said, “What’s the word, Petty Officer Oberg? What’ve you heard about this hijacking?”
“Sir, all they told us, pirates took down one of the aid ships. Up the north coast, lookin’ for ransom. You and me, we have to get up there and see can we spring ’em. That jibe with what you got?”
Geller said that was about right. A Malaysian chemical tanker had reported being shadowed by speedboats that morning. One had cut in front and thrown objects into the water. Fearing mines, the ship had stopped her engines, whereupon the second boat aimed a burst of machine-gun fire at the bridge. She’d hove to and the pirates had boarded.
The captain had gotten off Inmarsat calls to Ashaara Port Control and the Piracy Reporting Center before the boarders made it to the bridge. JTF immediately tightened security on other ships en route, requesting an S-3 to fly patrols and assigning Firebolt to join up two hundred miles out and accompany each incoming delivery to the sea buoy at Ashaara City. Shamal was tasked to rescue the hostages.
“We’ll talk plan once we get under way. I’m looking at twelve hours transit, so we’ll get there about 0200.” Geller stared as if daring him to make another crack.
“We’ll work something up, sir.”
“Rescued hostages before?”
“Couple times, sir. Just need to get up there, see the setup. And go over whatever intel you’ve got, whatever they can shoot to us. Pictures and layout would be nice.”
Geller nodded and went forward. The engines gunned, reversed, fell back to idle, gunned again. The shrill whistle of “under way” piped over the 1MC.
TEDDY had them rig for swim-and-climb, though it was conceivable they could assault from RHIBs, backed by the ship’s guns. It was also possible everything would be settled peacefully, but he preferred not to think about that. The engines were vibrating the bulkheads and hazing the air. He sent the team to the mess decks, except for Arkin, whom he left in the space in case the CO called down.
Spaghetti and meatballs and apple pie, shoulder to shoulder with Shamal’s crew in the tight little mess decks. Whacker was telling about a teammate in Bosnia who’d come across a Serbian truck filled with loot from local villages. A cluster bomb had perforated everybody in the cab. Along with furs and silver, he’d found a small, heavy leather bag filled, when he opened it, with gold. Watches, rings, bracelets, coins, irregular lumps he’d been afraid to examine too closely.
“D’he turn it in?” Kaulukukui asked.
“Who to?”
“I don’t know. The Bosnians?”
“They were fucking dead. No names on those teeth. No, he got it out of the country and sold it in Istanbul. Opened a Swiss account.”
“I heard this story before,” Oberg said. “Dateline, Vietnam. Or, no—that George Clooney movie, something about kings—”
“Three Kings.”
“Sharpe’s Gold,” a Shamal sailor put in. The other guys at the table were throwing in more titles when they looked up and quieted.
“XO?”
“Petty Officer Oberg? Captain’d like you on the bridge.”
Topside sunset was salmon and carmine beyond low mountains. He stared out. Over there was a blank space on the map. The patrols came back with empty eyes and weathered skin. They said there was nothing there, which made him curious. How could a SEAL get himself sent into the Empty Quarter?
Shamal davened over a slowly undulating sea, throwing up a rooster-tail and a big white bow wave. Geller stood spread-legged at the chart table studying a clipboard. “Obie? Some hard info. Pictures, too, but the resolution sucks. We�
�re not comm heavy. Most of this is CUDIXS and UHF satcom.”
He studied them while the skipper summarized what the comm-oh had boiled out of the message traffic and chatter on the Red Sea airwaves. “They’re taking it inside the twelve-mile limit.”
Teddy bent over the chart. Still hours away even at full speed, the scattered islets of the Sawakin Group freckled the coast. Looking closer, he saw most weren’t actually islands, but reefs, awash at low tide and submerged at high. “I’d anchor inside this largest shoal,” Geller mused, fingering a horseshoe shape. It resembled an atoll, though Teddy hadn’t thought there were any in the Red Sea. “That’d give me a lee against storms, and make it tougher to get in at me.”
“They know we’re coming?”
“They’ve got to figure somebody’s on his way.”
“Anything from the shipping company?”
“JTF’s trying to get in touch. Owner’s Malaysian, flag’s Panamanian, charterer’s Danish, crew’s Russian and Filipino.”
“The usual. Uh, you said it was a chemical tanker?”
“Correct. Tahia. But not chemical chemicals. Just cooking oil. Still flammable, though, I guess.”
Teddy adjusted his balls, checking out the photos. They were grainy and didn’t show much. Standard tanker layout: deck house aft, no booms, lots of piping on a long foredeck.
“Word is we gotta bounce these guys hard,” Geller told him. “There’s hundreds of fishermen along this coast who’ll turn pirate if they see they can get away with it. Guns aren’t hard to get. Nip this hard and it’ll save trouble down the line.”
“No problem,” Teddy said. “We’ll put ’em down.”
Geller got that funny look again. “I think they meant take them into custody and free the hostages.”
“I only got four dudes, Skipper. We gotta work close on this. If I call for thirty rounds from that twenty-five-mil of yours, I gotta have ’em right away. No fucking around asking for clearance.”
Geller shook his head. “Can’t promise, Petty Officer. Not till we get some kind of ROE. See, we’ll be inside territorial waters, but we won’t have host country authorization.”