The Med

by David Poyer

  He allowed Byrne to go on for some minutes, thinking darkly there was no way he could know this much on a few hours’ notice. It was a put-on, like his accent. At last the intel officer wound up. “At that point, twenty miles into Lebanon, we turn north and head up the Akroum Valley. Actual penetration of Syrian territory is both sudden and minimal with that route. The strike elements of the MAU only need to go in five miles to reach the old French hotel complex where they’re being held.

  “All in all, sir, it’s probably as good a plan as we could expect at short notice. We make the actual landing in Lebanon, instead of a frontal assault on the Syrian coast. The nice thing is that it’s relatively nonprovocative. Our political people can present it as clearly aimed only at the terrorists. If we can get the marines in and out fast enough they shouldn’t meet either the Syrians or the Soviets.” He hesitated. “Of course, that assumes that the Syrians are not actively supporting the group in the hotel.”

  “I’m more concerned right now with making it ashore at all. There’s a rough surf running.”

  “That could cause us casualties too, sir, that’s quite right.”

  Sundstrom grunted. That’s quite right, he mimicked in his mind. Jesus Christ! He dismissed the man and Byrne faded once more back into the now-shadowy bridge.

  The commodore writhed in his chair, under cover of the dark. Distances and advance rates crawled in his head. Then he froze: A figure loomed by his side. It was the radioman. He scanned the new message, using the man’s flashlight.

  It was Flash priority. Commander in Chief, U.S. Naval Forces Europe, wanted a status report. Was he going in or not? Representations had to be made to allies, to certain international authorities—

  Sundstrom groaned aloud.

  At last he asked for Haynes. The colonel came up at once, as if he had been waiting for the summons. His white hair gleamed in the faint light from instruments, and Sundstrom caught the smell of a cigar.

  “Evening, Ike.”

  “Hello, Steve. You seen this?” He waved the message.

  “Yes. I’m an information addressee.”

  “What do you think? Should we go in?”

  He saw the colonel’s head steady, saw the faint glow of the cigar-end describe a little circle, as if his teeth had taken hold; but the marine did not answer for a few seconds. At last he said, “That’s your decision, Ike, as commander of this task force. No one else can make it for you.”

  “I know that, Steve. I assure you, no one wearing khaki understands his responsibilities better than I do. I just wanted to scrub things down with you … see if there were any rough edges you could bring to my attention.” He paused, waiting, but the red glow did not move. “You’ve been through a hell of a lot more of these landings than I have. You’re a professional, Steve, you know the kind of position this message puts me in.”

  “The MAU is ready to go ashore.”

  “I know that, Steve. But this surf business worries me. We might not be able to support you, once you get inland.”

  “We can use the helos for logistical support,” said the colonel’s voice, in the dark. He sounded tired. “Since they’ve restricted us to light weapons, that will bring pounds per man per day way down. If we don’t hit resistance—”

  “But if you do! This could be a trap. And if we can’t support you, if the surf rises and we can’t get ammo ashore—”

  “Three-four MAU is ready to go if ordered,” Haynes said again, an edge to his voice. “That’s about all I can do for you, Ike. The decision is up to you.”

  Sundstrom saw suddenly what was going on. His mouth curled on itself. Haynes, too. He wasn’t going to commit himself. That way, if it ended in disaster, they could all point their fingers at him.

  “That’s all, Colonel,” he said, his voice distant. “I’ll let you know when I decide.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Alone once more, he stared out at the dark sea. He had to decide, and soon. COMSIXTHFLEET, and behind him those tall men sitting grimly in the War Room, wanted to know which way he would jump. Cancel, because of the weather—postpone—

  Or go in, and take the heat if any one of hundreds of things went wrong.

  Out of nowhere, he thought of the air attack. Of the paralyzing fear when the planes came for them. Of flame and sound. And of the corpses, drifting past the side of the ship, bobbing in the gray cold sea. Someone had made a decision for them. The wrong decision.

  If those fighters had been more heavily armed, he thought suddenly, I might have been one of them.

  Sitting in the dark, gripping the leather armrests, he all but whimpered aloud. This was not the way he operated. He should have staff work. He should have clear orders. But no one would commit himself. His career—twenty-three years of hard work, sacrifice, making himself useful and agreeable—they were making him bet it all on something he couldn’t control, couldn’t check out, on the whims of weather and an enemy he knew next to nothing about.

  On the other hand, if it worked out there could be a promotion in it. More likely than not, a decoration.

  It all came down to that. It was a bet.

  He could say no. What if he did? What if he sent back to Roberts, it’s too big a risk, the surf estimates are uncertain, I’m postponing until the weather improves? But no, goddammit—the situation ashore demanded action. With every passing hour this hostage thing would be heating up. Politically, back in Washington. And militarily, too. This terrorist gang could have reinforcements on the way. Worse, the instant they realized what was afoot the Soviets would get their whole Med fleet underway. They couldn’t let the U.S. invade one of their allies without putting up a fight. He could wait a day, maybe even two, for the weather to abate, but by then he might be sending Haynes into a war.

  Or, on the other hand, it might all have been planned this way. The breakdown of the ceasefire in Lebanon. The diversion of the hostages to southern Syria, so temptingly just in range of sea power. I worry too much, he thought, sweating. But just this once, the bastards really might have set us up. The big meatgrinder might already be oiled, sharpened, just waiting for the marines to wade ashore. It could be another Tarawa. Or worse.

  The ship throbbed through the night, vibrating, humming with machinery and life. His ships moved around him, a powerful engine of intervention, of force, but dependent on his will. He felt himself the center of things, the pivot, the one man whose decision would set this vast mechanism and its vast consequences into motion. He felt dimly that his whole career had pointed to this moment. Pointed to it, but it had not prepared him. He had followed orders for twenty-three years. Followed the book. The book had never disappointed him. But now it had no answers. Now, this night, he had to find the answer in himself.

  This is it, he thought. Luck, chance, had put the ball in his court at last. But now they were fencing him about, hoping to trip him up, waiting for him to slip. Then the wolves would come out of the bushes. But he wasn’t going to trip. Ike Sundstrom was in charge, and there would be no mistakes.

  He sat motionless, staring at the sea, and the two sheets of paper trembled lightly in his hands.

  * * *

  And some time later, eons or minutes, someone was shaking Lenson awake in the dark. “Lieutenant. You okay? Commodore wants you.”

  “What now,” he muttered, turning his face to the bulkhead.

  “He wants you bad,” said McQueen, and Lenson heard the shadow in his voice. He sat up, too quickly, and his head slammed into the overhead. Yet it did not hurt. He realized he had gone to sleep with his helmet on.

  “More planes?”

  “Almost wish it was,” said the quartermaster. He sounded grim. “No, he wants you to bring the operation order up. He says he doesn’t like it, he says it’s against his better judgment, but he’s got to do it. So it’s on.”

  “It? What?” he said. Then he knew. He had known for days.

  “The commodore’s ordered the rendezvous,” said McQueen. “For 0200. Arrival at o
parea at 0400.”

  “The landing?”

  “That’s right,” said the petty officer. He reached up, something clicked, and dazzling light flooded the room. “We’re going in tomorrow morning, sir, at dawn. I’d say you and me, we got a little work to do.”

  23

  U.S.S. Spiegel Grove

  And sixty miles distant over the night sea, the sea over which so many fleets and armies had sailed to battle, the two hundred men of Bravo Company crouched and lay and sat in the hull of a rolling ship.

  They waited. The ceaseless murmur of their steel mother surrounded them: the rush of sea as they pounded steadily eastward, the creaking groan of the metal fabric that alone sustained them, the hum and whisper of ventilation, the distant throb of a pump, as intimate and yet mysterious as the heart of a woman who sleeps beside you, no matter what the vow never yours inalienably, but only for a moment of inestimable duration.

  It’s so quiet, Will Givens thought, cradling his guitar. So filled with familiar sound, and yet, somehow, so silent.

  His fingers touched the strings so lightly that through the fresh callus he could barely feel them. Still, in the odd quietness of Spiegel Grove’s troop compartment that evening, he could hear the chord hum to him. As if all the music still to come from the old guitar was waiting, ready for him to release it, yet willing too to bide. Yielding itself to the future and to his will.

  Above him Liebo shifted his weight, and Givens looked up at the underside of his mattress. It shifted again, creaking.

  “What you doing up there, Dippy?” he asked the ticking.

  “I ain’t doing nothing, goddamn it. Let me alone.”

  “Don’t get uptight about it. I just wondered.”

  “Well, wonder to yourself, Oreo.”

  His fingers tightened on the frets. He sat up on one elbow, staring up at the close cotton striping, the dingy yellow fabric of Liebo’s fartsack.

  “What did you call me, man?” he said to the mattress.

  Silence, and then he heard: “Sorry, Will. I’m kind of on edge, I guess. I didn’t mean to call you that.”

  He waited, considered, and then lowered himself back into the embrace of his bunk, still feeling the pulse-hammer of arousal, but relieved that he didn’t have to face the private down. But there was disappointment, too. He wanted to say something angry, strike out, hurt someone. Yeah, on edge. We’re all on edge, he thought. That was why there was no sound in the compartment except the whine of the blowers, the distant throb of engines running at full speed, the omnipresent creak as the bunk frames warped under the weight of bodies and the steady batter of the storm. No mutter and sudden laughter of bull sessions, joking, cassette players, no grab-assing, none of the continual ritual murmur of card games.

  He glanced down at the table, below where he lay. The cards were out, but no one was playing. Harner was sitting with his boots planted square on the deck, head down, whittling slowly with his Ka-bar on a swab handle. Wash-man had his feet up on the bottom bunk, staring blankly at a full-page crotch shot in an Italian girlie magazine. He watched them for several minutes. Harner whittled on. Washman stared at the same page. Not even his eyes moved; only his thin chest, ratitic and sharp-edged beneath the thin cotton of his skivvy shirt, rose and fell, rose and fell.

  He tried another chord, but it seemed too loud. Liebo shifted nervously above him. He laid the guitar aside and pulled out the book, tried to read a page. The equations made no sense. They described somewhere else, some perfect universe of concepts and logic that had never existed, and never would. He laid it aside too after a few minutes and stared at the underside of the bunk frame for a while. At last he climbed down, taking the guitar with him. Harner and Washman looked up, jerked from their reveries by the scrape of his chair.

  “Good magazine?” he asked Washout.

  “Uh, yeah.” The private closed it, looking guilty.

  “Get that in Palermo?”

  “Yeah.” He hesitated, then held it out. “Want to check it out?”

  He didn’t. He had resolved not to look at such things again. He had prayed over what he had done, prayed over it and been, he felt, forgiven. He was clean now. But the glossy flash of white thigh as the page turned, a curve of brown into pink, had made the water start in his mouth.

  There is none righteous, no, not one …

  He took it, and flipped the stained pages. It was in Italian, but the pictures were self-explanatory.

  “Oreo,” said a familiar voice behind him, “what are you doing with that trash?”

  “Just looking at it, I—”

  Cutford’s arm came over his shoulder, so close he could smell him, and seized the magazine. He snatched for it, but he was too late, and the corporal too fast. Bits of paper fluttered down over his head. Washman started up, his eyes wide. “Hey! That’s my magazine, asshole! What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

  “Why you pushing it on this brother, then? He don’t want no cheap white cunt, nor no pictures of any, either.” The tearing came faster, and Washman flinched back as a wad of pages flew at his face.

  “Come off it, Cutford—”

  “Shut up.” The corporal finished his shredding and tossed the naked spine to the deck. He swung on Givens, his eyes whited. “Why you poison your mind with this toubab shit? It’s a trap for the true man, nigger. Don’t you know that?”

  Harner, silent, scooted his chair back. He put the chewed broomhandle behind him, holding the knife in his lap.

  “Goddamn it—” began Washman, getting up. His face had gone pale, the blotches standing out in red relief.

  “I’ll pay you for it, Washout,” said Givens, standing up, too. “Never mind.”

  “Fuck you will,” said Cutford, swaying dangerously ponderous as the ship heaved to a heavy sea. Under the thin dark fabric his chest bulged as he lifted his fists. “He give it to you. I tore it up. Anyone want to settle anything, he settle it with me.”

  Givens sighed. The corporal was hungry for a fight. There was no way around it. All he could do was show Washout and the others that he was on their side, not Cutford’s. The anger he had lit with Liebo, and then tamped down, licked up again. Anger was sin, but there was righteous anger, too. The long-built rage of being black yet not accepted as black, the truthlessness of stereotypes and the way men of hate like Cutford forced you into them despite yourself. And suddenly he was eager for it, too. Rage sang through his veins, tightened his calves and the long muscles of his arms. The weak points: groin, eyes, throat. The voice of the instructor at boot camp. “Like they say, troopers, you can build muscle, but not over eyes or knees.” But Cutford had been through boot camp, too. And a lot more. He stepped forward warily, knowing that his enemy was both bigger and more vicious. David had won in the Book, but only with the help of the Lord.

  The Lord seemed far away from Troop Berthing tonight.

  “You crazy—” he was beginning, when a cry from the next bay of bunks pivoted them all around. It was Hernandez, his voice high with surprise and insult.

  “What you doing in my locker, jerkoff?”

  “You owe me ten bucks, man. I’m takin’ it out in trade.”

  “Like shit you are, you goddamn thief.”

  “Fight! Fight!”

  Givens stumbled forward, catching an edge of the table. The guitar jangled a discord on the steel deck, but he didn’t stop. He rounded the bunks in time to bounce a red-haired man, one of the riflemen, head-on. There were four of them, all from the same squad. Hernandez, his back to his locker, was wrestling with the biggest. There was time only to see that before the redhead stiff-armed his head against the bunk frame. A dazzling pain shot forward between his eyes. All through the compartment, men leaped down from their racks, taking sides with instantaneous readiness. Unfortunately, that meant the mortar-men were outnumbered four to one.

  The white dazzle cleared, and he came away from the frame fighting mad. He grabbed the redhead in a half-nelson, tripped him down in the same motion,
and made for Hernandez. Two riflemen took him halfway, hammering him to the deck with punches in the ribs and back. They rolled in a melee around the feet of the bunk frames, he punching out at whomever he could reach, as above him the original fight dissolved in a free-for-all. Hernandez stubbornly defended his locker; Harner had his long arms around a lance corporal from the second platoon; Washout screamed shrilly as a black grunt twisted his wrist behind his back. Liebo was still going round atop that first biggest rifleman.

  Then he saw Cutford. The big corporal battered his way through three men in as many seconds, snarling, leaving them sitting on the deck holding bloody faces and moaning. His assault left the mortar team in possession of the narrow space for a minute or two, then the grunts got smart and scrambled across through the racks between them. Surrounded, the squad went down under a mass of shouting men. There were too many of them, and as if realizing it, the riflemen began to fight among themselves, without pretext, and the atmosphere suddenly changed with that, as if they all realized simultaneously that it was over. The skirmish eased off into slaps and pushes. Givens found himself in a corner with Hernandez. “What the fuck, hombre!” the little man said, grinning, a trickle of blood coming from his nose.

  “Too many of them, man.”

  “Ah, they want to fight, we fight, right?”

  “They think they can push mortarmen around, they going to end up with their asses in a sling,” panted Liebo.

  “The brass!” somebody shouted from the far end of the compartment. There was no officer, or else he wisely decided not to come in, but they broke apart. The riflemen drifted back toward their racks, leaving behind threats and lifted fingers. The mortarmen jeered after them, but not too loudly. Givens reached up to feel the back of his head. It hurt, but he didn’t seem to be bleeding. Probably leave me with a lump, he thought. It hurt when he breathed, too. Some bastards always had to go for the kidneys. But still he found himself grinning, the adrenaline happiness of a fight welling up, and he bent to help Hernandez pick up the clothes the riflemen had knocked from his locker.