Nasser leaned over the gunboat’s bulwark railing. “Board that ship, you cowards!” Nasser pointed at the frigate, but the men kept swimming towards the two small gunboats.
“Nasser, my friend, let us recover,” yelled Hassad over the gunfire. “She won’t be free of the reef!”
Nasser pushed Hassad away and waved to the two gunships providing cover fire. “Attack,” he yelled.
———————
Mudawar had just pulled two men on board when the musketeers on the frigate’s stern started aiming for his boat. A torrential volley of rounds thumped into the thick wooden deck planks and he heard a horrific scream behind him. A scream not like a man’s, but that of a child. Mudawar turned to see the powder crumpled on the deck against the gunship’s short bulwark.
The boy’s scream turned to a whimper and then a wet gurgle. He was still shaking, but now it was his whole body instead of only his legs. He grabbed hold of his stomach and writhed in pain. He looked at Mudawar and then down at his blood-covered hands. In the moonlight, the blood that soaked through his thawb looked shiny and black. He dropped his bloody hands to his side and looked helplessly at Mudawar, and then up at the stars. He took a deep, labored breath and then an expression of peaceful calm washed over his face.
Mudawar reached for his flintlock pistol and turned toward the frigate. Soldiers were leaning out gun ports to aim and fire their muskets at the men still swimming in the water. Mudawar aimed his pistol at a soldier in the nearest gunport and fired. The man disappeared, but his musket slipped from his grip and fell into the water.
“Fire!” Mudawar loaded his pistol and walked to the bow of his ship, oblivious to the cannon fire from the fort and the musket shots from the frigate. By the time he got to the bow of his boat, his pistol was ready to fire. Another shot and another musket fell into the water.
Mudawar looked at the water and saw no more men swimming towards his boat. Instead, he saw five—six—seven corpses of his brothers floating in the water. Their arms and legs spread the cloth of their tunics and thawbs open like winged angels flying slowly out of the harbor in the receding tide. The surface rippled as a breeze grew into a gentle wind to the southeast. A wind, Mudawar knew, that would push them all safely home.
A musket round burst the railing just to his right, sending splinters and hot sawdust into his face. He looked up and saw musketeers on top of the frigate’s forecastle aiming down at his boat. “Regroup at the docks!” he yelled to Hassad.
“Nonsense! Board the boat,” yelled a voice from Hassad’s boat.
Mudawar recognized his father’s voice. Mudawar pointed to the two ships providing cover behind them. “They can’t help us. We are in the line of fire, father! We would be a dozen against hundreds!”
“You coward!” Nasser waved to the other two ships and signaled them to come closer.
Mudawar rammed another round into his pistol and looked up at the frigate. The musketeers would pop up from the forecastle bulwark, fire, then hide to reload. He held his pistol up and waited for a target.
Two musketeers appeared, then a third, and then six were taking aim at his ship.
Mudawar steadied his pistol at one of the men in the middle and shot, just as all six of the muskets fired.
The deck around him exploded into splinters of wood and lead. He felt a stinging fire below his knees, but he didn’t fall. He spun and jumped to the side. “Turn, Ather! Return to port! We must reassemble the fleet.”
“Mudawar!” yelled Nasser from Hassad’s gunboat. “Attack them now!”
Mudawar looked over just as a single musket fired from the ship and Nasser cried out. His left arm went limp and he reached over to cover it just below the shoulder. Hassad guided him to sit against the forecastle.
“Return to port,” Hassad called out and waved to Mudawar.
Mudawar waved back and saw Nasser grab Hassad by the tail of his thawb.
Nasser looked at Mudawar’s boat. “You are all cowards!”
———————
“Fatin.” Mudawar didn’t want to wake the neighbors, so he spoke softly through the home’s curtained entrance. “Fatin.” He heard footsteps.
A small boy pulled open the curtain and looked up at Mudawar with sleepy eyes. He dropped the curtain and disappeared into the darkness. “Father! Someone has brought Jamal home, but he is asleep.” The boy returned, smiled and tugged on the powder boy’s thawb.
Fatin opened the curtain. “What did your big brother do now, Kassim?” In the moonlight, Fatin saw Mudawar holding his son in his arms. “Jamal?”
Mudawar lowered his head. “Fatin, habibi,” he stammered. “My brother, something terrible happened on my boat.”
Fatin grabbed Jamal’s hand and saw that it was stained with blood. “Jamal!” Fatin snatched the boy’s lifeless body from Mudawar’s arms. Fatin screamed and tears poured from his eyes. Fatin’s wife emerged and saw her son’s limp body in his arms.
Fatin’s wife smacked her forehead with both of her hands and grabbed at Jamal. She stumbled into their dark home, wailing.
Fatin followed, careful not to bump Jamal against the sandstone doorway. “What did you do to my son?” he screamed from inside.
Mudawar pulled back the curtain and saw that in the darkness, Fatin had laid Jamal on the dirt floor.
He entered the home and held the curtain open so that he could see inside. Mudawar looked for a lamp, but found none in the outer room.
“Tell me! Tell me what happened!” Fatin cried and screamed while he rubbed his boy’s face. Fatin’s wife was kneeling next to him, clawing at her son’s bloody hands.
“I—he was on my boat, and he was—”
“Doing what?” screamed Fatin. “Why was he on your boat?”
Mudawar tried to answer, but the mother’s screaming was loud and incessant. “He was delivering powder. As he always does, and—”
Kassim sat down and started crying next to his wailing mother.
“What happened?” asked a voice from outside.
The light from an oil lamp lit up the room. Mudawar turned to see a middle-aged man enter the house holding an old silver lamp. “Are you well, Fatin?” The man looked down at Jamal. “What is wrong with Jamal?”
The mother screamed again, her outburst scaring even more tears from young Kassim.
Fatin tentatively felt around Jamal’s bloody stomach and found the hole in his thawb and in his side. “Shot? Was he shot?”
Jamal’s mother pressed her fingers into his bloody thawb then covered her still sobbing eyes.
Fatin put his arm around his repentant wife and cried. “Jamal is dead!” He stood and grabbed Mudawar by the collar of his tunic. “How!?”
Mudawar wrenched Fatin’s bloody hands free and pushed him away. “He was serving on my boat,” Mudawar said sternly. “I had to rescue my father.”
Fatin screamed and cried and fell to his knees. He wrapped his arms around his wife and younger son—now only son—and cried.
The neighbor leaned forward to put the lamp close to Jamal’s face. He reached down and caressed his forehead. “To Allah we belong and truly, to Him we shall return.”
Fatin stared with blood-red eyes at Mudawar.
“I am indebted to you, Fatin.” Mudawar took his sheathed dagger out of his belt and placed it on the ground before him. “I am your servant. But first I seek revenge for Jamal.”
Mudawar knelt down next to Kassim and put his blood-stained hand on his head. “Your brother now serves Allah. So you must now serve your parents. Do you understand?”
The little boy shook his head no and looked down at Mudawar’s dagger.
“Do not talk to my son!” Fatin grabbed the dagger and pulled it from its sheath. “You pirate!”
Fatin sliced the dagger up towards Mudawar’s neck, but Mudawar stepped back quickly and batted Fatin’s arm. As Fatin spun, Mudawar dropped his meaty palm against Fatin’s neck, and Fatin fell to the floor. Mudawar backed out of the door a
nd left Fatin’s family crying in the light of their neighbor’s dim lamp.
———————
Mudawar knew what his father had done as soon as he saw the gunboats sailing away. He wanted to yell at him to return to shore and let him be a part of the battle. He wanted to curse him. But he did neither. He would let his father have one more moment of glory in breaking the neck of a trapped rodent. Soon, his father would know what it would be like to run his guild without him.
He went back to his building—his father’s building—and opened the large wooden chest by the door. Nasser was proud to tell visitors that it was from Morocco, and the lid was inlaid with ivory and ebony. But Mudawar knew that the real treasure was inside. He retrieved the collection of maps and charts that had been taken from captured vessels. Most of the maps were in Spanish, but some were in English, others in French, and a few were in Italian or old Latin.
“Places you never cared to go, old man,” he muttered.
From the bottom of the chest, he flipped through the various map leathers and chose the best one. It was large and soft, and had two leather straps capped with glass beads and brass ferules. Mudawar laid all of the maps on top of the leather and paused. He flipped through the maps again and pulled out those with less detail or no depth readings and returned them to the chest. He carefully aligned the maps, straightened any wrinkles, and began rolling the stack into the map leather. He liked how the knobbed ends of the leather straps would make it easier to secure the maps, even with wet fingers. This map kit would be most useful on his boat if his father didn't sink it, he thought.
He searched throughout the room and began collecting items that meant more to him than the glittering gold or brass trinkets that his father preferred. He grabbed a sail bag and stuffed it with the new sextant that Hassad had given him, a collection of chart compasses and rulers, a stack of scientific and celestial navigation books, a bag of rope tying tools, and a few small mirrors that would be useful for signaling.
“Mirrors,” he grumbled.
He looked at his reflection in the golden sunburst mirror that his father so prized. Bloody smears lined the collar of his tunic. Jamal’s blood. Jamal’s blood from Fatin’s hate-filled hands. With his small decision to bring Jamal the powder boy on board as punishment for his clumsiness, little Kassim lost his brother. And if Fatin was like Nasser, Kassim had also just lost his father. His father and mother would be filled with sorrow and hate from this day forward, and Kassim would be lost. All of it was Mudawar’s fault. Mudawar leaned against the wall and put his forehead against the gilded mirror, the golden rays of the sunburst frame surrounded his head like golden flames.
He pulled back and looked at himself. His face was tanned from years on the sea, but he wasn't yet old. He imagined what he would look like at his father's age, doing the same thing, day after day, year after year. Climbing the castle stairs to ask the Pasha for approval to capture a ship. Going to the neighboring gunboat guilds to forge alliances or plot against others. Waiting for trade ships so he could buy all the best sailcloth and leave his competitors with just rags. He hated the future that he saw. He punched the polished metal of the reflective surface so hard that it left a dent the size of a pomegranate.
“Tomorrow, I sail for myself.”
Chapter 7
Fish out of Water
“Your clothes’ll be dry in a bit,” said PFC Childress.
Midshipman Crothers rubbed the material of his t-shirt and stretched his toes in his socks.
Doc Ruiz laughed. “Doing his laundry now, Tricky?”
“Guess I am,” replied Childress. “But you ask me to do yours, I’ll throw it off the fantail.”
Ruiz nodded and smiled. “Surprised you’re not reading. You feeling better?”
Childress nodded. “My tablet was dead, but it’s charging. I feel great, though. Deep sleeper I guess.”
Ruiz finished taping a bandage on the rowboat crewman’s side. “Be sure to tell me if you start feeling tired again. I thought you might’a had a concussion.”
“Sure.” Childress nodded towards the man laying on the table. “What’s up with that?” The large protruding splinter was wrapped in bandages that were taped securely to his stomach and side, and the man was strapped to the table with thick canvas bands.
Ruiz shook his head. “Might be piercing his spleen or kidney. I don’t want to pull it out. We gotta get him to a hospital.”
Childress grimaced. “Damn. Thing’s huge.”
“I know. It doesn’t look good. I gotta talk to the skipper. Holler if he starts moving.”
“Roger.” Childress sat and gestured at Crothers. “Why don’t you sit down, man?”
Crothers sat and leaned in to look at the pattern of Childress’ digital camo print. Now that he was a bit cleaner, Crothers looked to be nineteen or twenty like Childress, but he was much thinner and maybe six inches shorter.
“So why did your boys shoot one of ours?”
“Sir?”
“Why did someone from your crew shoot one of ours?”
“Beg pardon, sir, but I don’t know anything about that.”
“Maybe you don’t.” Childress folded his arms. He probably outweighed Crothers by 80 or 90 pounds, even without his armored vest and helmet. “But since the skipper thinks that was a hostile act, that makes you a prisoner of war.”
Crothers looked at his empty mug and nodded.
“Want another cup? I’m gonna grab one.”
Crothers nodded.
Childress refilled his mug. “So how long you been over here?”
“We crossed in to the Mediterranean just over two weeks ago.”
Childress took a drink and noticed that Crothers was thin, almost gaunt. “What’re you guys doing here, anyway? Some kind of tour?”
“Tour, sir?”
“Yeah, on the Philadelphia.”
“The captain says we’re on orders to blockade the harbor.”
“Your captain, huh?”
“Yessir. Captain William Bainbridge.”
“Bainbridge?” Childress sat back down with the coffees. “Funny. My older brother’s a squid on the Bainbridge.”
“Sir?”
“DDG-96. Out of Norfolk.”
Crothers looked more confused than ever.
“So how’d you get crewed on that old ship? Only saw it for a second, but it’s kinda cool.”
“Old ship, sir?”
“Yeah. How’d you get on the Philly. You a Coast Guard cadet or something?”
“I’m in the Navy, sir.”
Childress smiled. “Hair’s kind of long, isn’t it?”
Crothers turned when he heard footsteps on the metal steps of the ladder.
MacFarland stepped in to the Galley. “Private Childress, please escort our guest topside.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Crothers stared at the ensign with wide open eyes.
“What?” she asked.
Crothers didn’t say a word.
“Come on. Throw your cup in the sink,” said Childress.
———————
Williams sat in his chair and tapped at his control panel, but nothing happened. “Dammit. Can I get some tac lighting?”
Chavez opened the electrical panel and flipped a breaker to manually illuminate the red cabin lighting.
“Thanks, Boats. Any word on getting all this stuff back on?”
Chavez shook his head. “No, sir. We just need a little while to troubleshoot. Without getting shot at,” he added.
Williams nodded. “We’re going to hang here for a bit. Ensign, put two on deck to keep watch. See if LT Smith needs anything to get our systems back on line.”
“Aye, sir,” said MacFarland. “Brewster’s back on duty, and what about you, Tricky?”
“I’m on it, ma’am,” replied Childress.
Crothers was still staring at MacFarland. The armor and camouflage uniform may have hid her form, but her striking face, delicate hands an
d soothing voice made it clear that she was all female.
Williams noticed. “Alright, mister, eyes over here.” Williams paused. “Your ship just fired on us. Hit one of my men in the shoulder. You mind telling me why?”
Crothers seemed confused. “I don’t know, sir. I was in charge of the kedging detail.”
“Bullshit! You said you’re American.”
Crothers was stunned but nodded.
“And you came from the Philadelphia.”
He nodded again.
“Is that ship American, too?”
Crothers was still nodding. “Yessir. Of course.”
“Then why would it shoot at an American vessel?”
Crothers looked curiously at Williams. “I don’t know, sir.”
Williams nodded. “If that’s the way you want to play it, fine. Who are you with? Coast Guard? Navy Auxilliary?”
“Sir?”
Williams got up and walked to the port side of the cabin. “Look over there. See your ship? For the last ten minutes there’s been a lot of shots fired. Do you suppose they need help or not?”
Crothers looked out the window at the Philadelphia. He ran his hand over the glass and down to the metal frame. “What kind of ship is this, sir?”
“Look, goddam it. I’m trying to ask you if we should help your ship or not. You can see that she’s grounded!”
Crothers opened his mouth but didn’t speak.
“What?” pressed Williams.
“Aye, sir. We tried to get free. If you can help us—“
“If, what?”
It looked like Crothers was at his limits.
Williams leaned on the window ledge and paused. “Maybe you don’t know what’s really going on here. Maybe you do, and you’re just a little slow.” He turned to Crothers. “If I get you close to that ship, will they listen to you? Can you convince them into letting us help them off?”
Crothers shook his head and then nodded. “I—yessir. Yessir, I’ll talk to them.”
More heavy weapon reports sounded from the harbor.
Williams nodded. “Fine. I just hope we make it in time.”
———————
The Shores of Tripoli Page 6