The Med

by David Poyer

  But not as much as he loved his family.

  Shore duty, then? He was due it after three tours at sea. But the sea was where a smudged career could be made white again, where advancement was won, where a line officer, an Annapolis man, belonged. Ashore … there was only one way to go ashore for good.

  His mind backed away from the thought. It was too final, too frightening, worse to face than the flash of wings.

  21

  Ash Shummari, Syria

  She was half asleep—hunger made her drowsy—when her dreams were penetrated by a scuffle, a scraping noise, and a moan.

  Things were so pleasant in dreams. She struggled to stay where she was, aware in some redoubt of consciousness that it was better than what she was returning to. But that suspicion made her aware that she was dreaming; and with it the sleep-world unraveled, and she found, looking back, that she had already crossed into waking. She rolled over and snaked out her arms without opening her eyes.

  Nan wasn’t there.

  The mattress creaked as she sat up. The wan light of an overcast dusk filtered through closed shutters, over Moira and Michael, who had twined themselves together fully clothed on the floor. Their hoarse breathing, Moira’s familiar snore, were more ominous, somehow, than silence.

  “Nan?” she murmured.

  She got up sluggishly, feeling and smelling her own sodden staleness, and looked into the connecting bath. The watercloset lid, a shelf of heavy porcelain, lay where she had moved it, reflecting the watershimmer from inside the tank. Nan was not using it. Susan remembered how welcome that achievement had been. But then she felt alarmed. She went quickly to the door, but paused on the threshold. They had been told not to go out. The guard on this floor had made that plain with gestures. They were to stay in their assigned rooms.

  She thrust her head into the corridor, surveying it from end to end with one swift turn of her eyes. It was empty. She took a breath, remembering. Punishment for disobeying any of my orders is death. She glanced back once more into the room, making certain the child was not there. Well, she thought then, if they catch me I will explain. I was looking for my child. They’ll understand. Wouldn’t they?

  They would have to. She had no choice.

  Her bare feet were soundless on the carpet. She passed open doors, looking in. The other hostages did not look out as she passed. Many were asleep. A few talked in subdued voices, or stared out their windows. One couple was telling fortunes, the Tarot spread between them over the bare ticking of their bed.

  She began to feel frightened.

  At the next room she paused. When the occupants looked up she said quickly, “Excuse me. Did a little girl come in here to you, or go past your door? A little girl with dark hair and glasses?”

  They shook their heads, too surprised to speak.

  She asked at several more rooms. No one had seen a child. The fear grew inside her. It was as if cotton stuffed her throat, turned her mouth dry and wadded the used air inside her lungs. She went on, walking more rapidly. At last the rooms were empty, but still doors gaped ahead along a corridor that disappeared dreamlike into hot and airless gloom.

  When her feet whispered between the silent walls she realized she was running. Her breath roared in her ears. Where could Nan be? Where was their guard? Room after room rushed by. The hallway turned, grew darker. It was a submarine dimness, dusky blue, and from somewhere the memory came of another time she had felt this same terrible and growing fear: deep beneath the sea, her hands tearing desperately at the resisting dark for a small body. But no, that had been a dream, and this was real. Then another bend, and she was running hard, sobbing aloud, her hair slapping her back. There was a humming ahead; light, voices, people … she had circled the floor and returned to her own room. But now people stood in the hallway; there was a swell of excited talk.

  From outside, clearly audible through the opened windows, came a new sound, a distant thunder.

  She didn’t stop to listen. Sobbing, she pushed at the people who turned at her approach, fell back from her, reached out half-heartedly as if to help or stop her. One woman murmured something to another. For a moment Susan refused to make sense of the words; they seemed meaningless, as incomprehensible as the Arabic of their captors. Then she did.

  “Poor woman. She’s lost her child…”

  She stopped dead in the hallway, put her fists to her mouth, and screamed.

  From down the corridor, somewhere, came a faint answering cry.

  “Nan?” she screamed again. “Nan!”

  Michael’s hand closed on her arm. “Betts. Get hold! Was that her?”

  “Oh, God, I think it was! Did you hear her?”

  “Where’s the guard? Anybody see him?” Cook asked the other hostages. They moved back, several shaking their heads.

  “Come on,” said Moira.

  When they opened the closed door they saw the two of them together. It was the short one, the man Michael called “Snaggletooth.” Nan sat across from him, on a blanket he had spread across the bed.

  “How you?” he said, turning his grin to the door. Lazily, he tossed aside a scrap of cloth and reached for the pistol he had laid aside.

  The archaeologist was moving, but Susan was faster. She thrust him against the still-opening door and was on the man with her fists. Screaming, but there were no words to it. Nancy, still crying, crawled across the bed, away from the adults.

  “Okay, let him up,” she heard Michael say. Over the guard’s shoulder she saw him pick up the pistol. “Get back. Get away from him, Susan!”

  There was more shouting behind them in the hall, a great deal more. She ignored it, she ignored Cook. She had her hands on one of them at last. Grappling close, her teeth searching for a hold, she gasped as his decaying breath seared her face. He was strong but an animal in her, stronger than she, had been unleashed. His face tore under her fingernails and she panted and dug in again. He screamed and tried to roll; she got in a knee, drove it in again, and then hit him in the face backhanded, dragging her ring across flesh. She could feel it tear. The breath went out of him with a grunt and he doubled and rolled away and fell to the worn carpet on the far side of the bed.

  “Shoot him,” she said, backing away and wiping her hands on her shorts. They left bloody streaks. “Do it. Do it now, Michael!”

  The terrorist lay motionless. Facing a gun instead of holding one, he had melted, too hurt or too frightened to move. Blood ran from his cheeks and dripped from his open mouth onto the carpet. Susan circled around him to the corner where Nan huddled, her arms over her eyes. She bent and pulled her up. The little girl whimpered once, then wrapped herself round her mother.

  Susan turned then, holding her, to face him. Something far back in her mind had drawn her lips into a primeval rictus. There was no man or husband to protect them now. She was the mother alone with her child. And like any animal that guards its young she would bite, she would claw, she would kill if anyone touched her child again, regardless of the risk or cost to herself. And now she wanted this man’s life. “Michael—give it here. I’ll do it.” She reached for the pistol.

  “Khal’lis haydeh,” said a voice behind her.

  The small man’s expression changed. He scrabbled backward on the floor, a retreating crab, till he fetched up against the wall. His extremity of terror was not for her, she saw, or even for Cook. Susan turned.

  It was the dark man, the leader, the one they called the Majd. The one she had seen in firelight, leading his men in the ferocity of attack. Now he stood still in the doorway, surrounded by silence and heat. Black hair fell over his forehead, damp-looking, over opaque eyes. The automatic rifle—she had never yet seen him without it—he held at his waist, pointed at the three of them.

  “Put it down,” he said to Cook. “I will deal justice here.”

  She saw the archaeologist measuring the odds. “Michael, don’t,” she murmured.

  “You’ll see that this man is punished?” Cook said.

&n
bsp; “If I decide.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means no bargains! I do not punish for you or make promises to you. Put down the gun or all in this room will die.”

  His voice was iron, and the catch on the weapon snapped as it went off safe. When he moved a step to the side she saw that several others, also armed, stood behind him at the door. More of them came running up the stairwell. “Ha’ded,” he said, and they lifted their weapons. “Put it down now! My next word orders them to fire.”

  Cook held the pistol pointed at the seated man, who was holding himself and groaning, for a moment longer. Then he tossed it on the bed. It bounced once on the dirty ticking and lay still, and Susan saw again how ugly guns were.

  “There, good,” said the Majd.

  He rubbed his fingers slowly along the stock of the rifle; and then his eyes swung to hers. His hand stopped. They looked straight at each other, gaze into gaze.

  Too long, a part of her mind told her. This means something different here. Drop your eyes now—look away—

  But she couldn’t.

  Some eyes, when you met them for the first time, were flat and foreign. Others were friendly, there was that spark that passes instantaneous and warm, not a shutter-flicker long, and you know that you have found a friend.

  These eyes were soft as obsidian and friendly as the eyes of serpents. They were warm as some icy-flowing limestone sinkhole lost to the sun for a million years. Not so much hostile as inhumanly detached, inhumanly determined, they locked into hers like a bayonet onto a rifle across ten feet of space, across a room filled with frightened people.

  It was no more than half a second, but it felt as long as years. With a sob, she drew her fist to her mouth. Only when Nan began to cry, beside her, could she drag her eyes away and look down.

  The Majd spoke angrily in their language to the huddled man. He scrambled up quickly, holding his genitals in one hand and his face with the other, and ran crablike toward the door. The Majd spoke sharply again, one word, and he turned back hurriedly. He did not look at the leader, but as he passed her and reached out to retrieve the gun she saw his eyes glitter briefly at her, feral and enraged in the bloody mask.

  When he went out again Susan exhaled raggedly. She had expected some punishment. At least, to see him disarmed. But it hadn’t happened. He was dangerous now. He would wait and watch for his chance, for his revenge on her, on Michael, perhaps even on Nan.

  That was when she realized, fully, where she was, and under whose power.

  When the small man was gone the leader let his rifle sag. With a graceful motion he leaned it by the doorway, flashing a glance to one of the men behind him. He came into the room and knelt beside her where she held Nan. Susan tightened her grip, but he only put out his hand and smoothed the child’s forehead. He was slighter close up than Susan had expected. She smelled tobacco. She expected Nan to draw back, but the child stared upward at him, her mouth open.

  She feels it too, Susan thought.…

  “Put his shirt back on,” he ordered. She hastened to comply. He brought his face close to Nan’s. “Did the man hurt you, boy?”

  “She’s too frightened to talk. But I think we came in time. He only scared her. And she’s been sick.”

  “Oh, she is a girl … she has been sick long?”

  His voice was direct, hard, though he had tried to gentle it. It stirred something on the back of her neck. She remembered the marines. Faces turned upward, sightless, rainwater smoothing their cheeks like tears. She saw that again, and at the same moment she smelled him as he bent closer to Nan. This time she huddled back, into Susan’s arms. Susan moved instinctively to protect her.

  “No. Don’t touch her. Leave us alone.”

  “Do you have medicine for her?”

  “Medicine! Don’t make me laugh.” The question made her forget her fear, made her angry all over again. “We don’t even have food. Or water. As you know well.”

  “I’m sorry. We were not prepared to make you comfortable,” he said, and smiled.

  She almost gasped. His whole face had changed. There was such cheerfulness in it, such life, that her own lips moved in unconscious imitation. Nan opened her eyes and laughed a little.

  “You’re a pretty little girl. And your mother, too, is most attractive. You say,” he went on, lifting his eyes to hers, “she is ill. I see that for myself. Fever, yes, it is plain in her eyes. You tell me what she needs. We are not animals. Some of us have children, too. Say it, we will try to get it.”

  “Food. A doctor. Water. And some privacy.”

  He made a wry face. “Some of those are easy, some are not … Daouk!” He fired Arabic at one of the men at the door, who nodded halfway through, then disappeared. The Majd turned to her. “We will have some food here soon, probably after dark. Something to drink we will get for you now.”

  “Thank you,” she said. Hearing the stiffness in her voice, the fear transmuted into suspicion, she found herself wondering Why do I sound like that? So angry?

  Then she remembered. The smile, the pretense of caring meant nothing. They were prisoners, and this was the man who kept them here. Who had murdered, and was no doubt at that moment threatening to kill again if his demands were ignored.

  He had turned to the others while she was thinking this. “You are comfortable?” he was asking Michael.

  “Comfortable enough,” said Cook warily.

  “I’d like to ask you something, though,” said Moira.

  The Majd looked at her, and Susan saw him narrow his eyes as if to see better.

  “—If I’m permitted.”

  “I am listening.”

  “You’re the leader—the one they call the Majd.”

  “That is what they call me, yes. I am the za’im—the one who leads. My full name, Hanna Abu Harisah.” He said it carefully, slowly, as if to give them time to memorize it. The “r” he pronounced hard, like a “d.”

  “I see. What we want to know is, what’s going on? What’s that noise outside?”

  His eyebrows lifted. “You don’t recognize it? No, you grew up in peace. It is artillery. Cannons. It is Christians killing Arabs, with guns and shells supplied by America and Israel. It is Beirut.”

  “So we’re in Lebanon.”

  “Syria. But not far from the border.”

  “All right. What I wanted to ask—why are you holding us?”

  “We are preparing to bargain,” said Harisah. His face had closed, now, into the look they had once seen by the light of torches. “But to deal with capitalists one needs something they want. What do we have? Nothing—all we owned was stolen. So you are what we will trade.”

  “Trade for what? What do you want?”

  “I think you must have some idea,” said Harisah. He went to the window, looked down; Susan noted the furrows at the corners of his eyes, the way he sagged his tallness into the casement, not for support, but as if for reassurance that solidity existed. He searched his pockets but came up empty. “Do any of you have cigarettes? I am out of Luckies.”

  “No.”

  “You?” he asked Cook.

  “Don’t do it, sorry.”

  “Very good Americans, health-conscious, none of you smoke.” He snapped at one of the others, and took the pack the man held out. He lit one and sucked smoke in angrily, still gazing out over the little courtyard that made a space between the buildings. “Look,” he said, taking the cigarette from his mouth and pointing over the square with it, toward the hill. “They don’t come near the building.”

  “The soldiers? We saw them. Who are they?”

  “Syrians.”

  “Your allies?”

  He threw a look of contempt over his shoulder, but said only, “They are Russian dogs. No more, no less.”

  “You won’t tell us why you’re holding us?” Moira asked him.

  Harisah shrugged, his back to them. The distant rumble lent weight to his next words, as if he were speaking in thunder. “S
ure, I’ll tell you. Why shouldn’t I? It will be more helpful if you understand us, so we can work together. Perhaps I will have you to make tape recordings later on. To prove at least that you are alive, and to speak through your words to the many.”

  Susan caught Moira’s narrowing eye. No, Ox, she thought. Just listen. If she flew off the handle now …

  “A little background for the Americans. Background—the right word? Good. English comes back as you speak it.

  “Our party is called the Wihdah. The Unity Party. We are freedom fighters, for our own land first, but also for all the countries under Zionist-imperialist domination. Your diplomats know of us. We have made ourselves known by our steadfast battle.

  “The Turks, your country’s friends, have in prison several members of our party. We want their release. Beyond that, we want an end to America’s arming of the Zionists. We want our country back, to build a progressive democratic state.”

  “Your country?”

  “Yes. The country we lived in for a thousand years, and were ejected from in one. Our land sold by the landowners to the Zionist rich, the poor driven out into the desert at gunpoint to make room for the Jews. Palestine.”

  “You mean Israel,” said Moira.

  The Majd stared at her again. “You seem very interested in ‘Israel,’” he said.

  She shrugged. “That’s what we call it in America.”

  “Here we call it by its true name.”

  Moira fell silent. The younger man came back, carrying a plastic bowl. Harisah motioned, and he set it on the bed. Nan looked toward it. Susan lifted it, took a cautious sip—it was warm but welcome, pure water—and held it to her daughter’s lips.

  The Majd watched her, his face still. “Anyway,” he continued after a moment, turning again to the window, “I will perform my assignment. I would like to do that without hurting any of you. I don’t want to do that unless I am forced. Or unless you disobey. You tell your daughter that. Maybe it will all come out all right.”