The Shores of Tripoli

by Fisher Samuels

  “Why didn’t you ask me that question, cap’n?” Grassley stared at Bainbridge. Midshipmen Crothers stepped away from the wall and looked at Grassley. “And you, you little shit, didn’t you tell him we were trying to help?”

  Bainbridge’s eyes widened and he marched up to Grassley. Even though Grassley was six inches taller and probably fifteen or twenty years younger, Bainbridge lashed out and smacked Grassley right on the cheek. Grassley’s head jerked to the side, but before he could move, two of the nearby officers grabbed him by each arm.

  Grassley struggled in their grip, and Watts started to stand. Another officer stepped in front of Watts and looked at the bloody black stain on his shoulder. The officer grabbed hold of Watts’s wounded shoulder and pressed him down.

  “Ow! Shit!” Watts’s boots slid out from under him and he slipped back down the wall.

  A piercing gunshot cracked through the moonlit enclosure and echoed off the stone walls. A loud voice yelled something in that same strange variant of Arabic, but it was obvious what it meant. Everyone stopped and looked at the tall, thin and bearded man holding a smoking flintlock in the air. The man next to him looked like an older and slightly shorter version of the man. Behind the two men, dozens of pirate sailors lined the moonlit walkway, some holding daggers, others lanterns or flintlock pistols.

  The older bearded pirate was wounded, his arm hung limply, and the shoulder of his white tunic was covered in dark blood. He yelled something to the group of pirates behind him. The group of pirates spilled into the enclosure, six of them surrounding Grassley, Watts and the Philadelphia’s officers.

  Grassley helped Watts get up and the group walked along the jetty, past the fort, and to the first barred door of a row of cells that faced the harbor.

  “Must be our new home,” said Grassley. He walked into the cell and leaned in the nearest corner.

  “What the hell were you up to back there?” asked Watts.

  Grassley watched Bainbridge walk past him. “I hate officers.”

  Chapter 12

  Echoes

  “Done, sir?” asked MacFarland.

  Williams nodded. “Took forever. Doc doesn’t have the right needles for donations.”

  “Wish I could help,” she said. “B negative.”

  He pointed to the bend in his left arm. “O pos. Minus a pint.”

  “We’re ready to go, if you are.”

  “We better hurry. Buck doesn’t look good.” Williams sat in his chair. “Alright, helm. Fire up the twins.”

  “Aye, skipper.” Chavez tapped on his control panel and the Dauntless’s diesels rumbled to life.

  “Well done, Boats.” Williams buckled his seat harness. “Ahead slow, ready to weigh anchor.”

  Chavez nudged the throttle controls and the Dauntless shuddered forward. Chavez watched the display on his console and idled the boat when the computer sensed the anchor was free. He tapped on the panel and the windlass began to haul in the anchor rode. Chavez waited for the anchor icon to go green. “We’re clear, skipper.”

  Williams grabbed his microphone. “Buckle up. Here we go.”

  “Skipper, we want heading one five zero,” said MacFarland.

  “You heard her, helm. One five zero. Set speed at fifteen knots.” He spoke into the microphone. “LT, ready on the stern anchor.”

  “Ready, skipper,” replied Smith over the intercom.

  The Dauntless picked up speed and Chavez put her on the heading for the beach.

  Williams looked out the starboard window toward the Philadelphia in the harbor, but quickly focused on beaching his boat. “You’re sure the path is clear, Shiv? All the way to the beach?”

  “Aye, sir. Not a rock.”

  Williams picked up the microphone and waited until they were about two hundred meters from shore. “Alright, LT. Drop anchor and prepare for beaching.”

  On the stern, Smith kicked the anchor off the fantail platform and the rode started paying out from the large coil. He moved to the aft end of the cabin and sat on the deck with his back against the bulkhead.

  “Helm, slow to idle.” Williams spoke into the microphone. “Brace for beaching.”

  ———————

  Doc Ruiz leaned over the chest of the injured sailor from the Philadelphia and grabbed hold of the table. He looked at GM3 Brewster who was holding the man’s legs. “Hold on, guys. Here comes.”

  “Got him!” PFC Childress was laying over Rogers’s legs.

  “One hundred meters,” said Williams over the intercom.

  “Hold on, Buck.” LCPL Graves was sprawled across Rogers’s chest, carefully avoiding his wounded side.

  “How fast are they going?” asked Brewster.

  “I don’t know. Fast enough to get beached, but not fast enough to get too far outta the water,” answered Ruiz.

  “Fifty meters.”

  “Holy shit.” Brewster shook his head and rested it on the injured sailor’s legs.

  “It ain’t going to be bad,” said Graves. “Just keep that guy from flying off the table when we stop.”

  A gritty scraping sound filled the galley and the boat gently decelerated. Before any of them noticed, the boat had slowed to a complete stop. More importantly for Ruiz, the boat was completely upright and not leaning to either side.

  “That’s it?” asked Brewster.

  Graves carefully eased off of Rogers and stood. “What’d you expect? Train wreck?”

  “I thought it’d be worse, too,” said Childress.

  Ruiz stood and checked on the sailor. He hadn’t shifted at all, but the bandages that held the wood shrapnel in place were spotting with blood. “Shit!”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Graves.

  Doc Ruiz felt the man’s stomach. “Internal bleeding.”

  Graves and Childress remained near Rogers.

  Ruiz started removing the bandages from the sailor.

  “What are you doing?” asked Graves.

  “I got to look. He could be dying.”

  Graves stepped close to Ruiz and pointed back at Rogers. “Buck’s dying, too!”

  “I know, dammit.” Ruiz kept removing the bandages.

  “Hey!” Graves grabbed Ruiz by the shoulder. “Buck first!”

  Ruiz looked up at Graves but didn’t flinch. “Let me do my job!”

  “Come on, guys,” said Childress.

  Graves still had Ruiz by the shoulder. “Your job is taking care of us! Not them!”

  Childress heard footsteps on the ladder. “Guys?”

  “What’s wrong?” asked Williams.

  Graves looked at Williams, his face still snarled. “He won’t work on Buck!”

  “Let go of him.” Williams got between them and looked down at the sailor. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s bleeding, skip. Internally. I got to find out why.”

  “After you fix Buck,” snarled Graves.

  Childress put his hand on Graves’s shoulder. “He will, corporal. Just give him a minute.”

  Graves wrenched his shoulder away. “Fuck that, Tricky! Look at him.”

  Williams and Ruiz looked at Rogers’s ashen face.

  “What’s the plan, doc?” Williams looked at Ruiz.

  “Let me find out what’s going on with him,” Ruiz said gesturing to the sailor. “If we can’t go to a hospital, I got to—”

  “Bullshit. Buck should be first!”

  “Corporal! Let the corpsman do his job,” said Williams.

  Graves wasn’t backing down.

  “Alright. Just get out of here,” said Williams. “Topside. Now.”

  Graves didn’t move.

  “Come on, corporal.” Childress tried to coax Graves to follow him.

  “That’s an order, corporal,” said Williams. “I will handle this.”

  Graves stared for a moment, then walked to Rogers and put his hand on his chest. “You better fucking save Buck.” He patted Rogers and went topside.

  Williams let the tension fade b
efore he turned to Ruiz. “I know you’ve got to triage, Doc.” Williams looked at each of the men on the tables. “When you do that, tell me what you think.”

  Ruiz was breathing quickly and he looked nervous. He looked at the sailor first. “Let me look, dammit.”

  “I’m going to send Lieutenant Smith down. Just to help. I’ll let you work.”

  Ruiz didn’t respond.

  ———————

  “Where’s Graves?” Williams looked out the cabin windows and scanned the deck.

  MacFarland nodded her head up to the ceiling. “Up top. On watch with Tricky. Need me to get him?”

  “No. LT Smith, we’ve got a problem.”

  “What’s that, skip?” Smith crossed his arms over his vest.

  “The sailor we rescued’s bleeding internally. Doc’s gotta check him out.”

  “How’s Corporal Rogers?” asked MacFarland.

  “That’s the problem. Neither of them look good.”

  Smith wrinkled his brow. “Which one’s worse?”

  Williams shook his head. “Don’t know yet.”

  “Can’t he save both?” asked MacFarland.

  “Don’t know that, either. And you both know as well as I do that Doc’s got to be impartial.”

  Smith nodded. “So why don’t we just let him decide?”

  “I will. But I’m worried about Graves.”

  MacFarland nodded. “They’re pretty tight.”

  Williams snorted. “I’d say.” He looked at Smith. “LT, I need you down in the galley.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “I’ll keep Graves up here. Brewster’s still down there. I’m a little worried about him too.”

  “How’s he doing?” asked MacFarland.

  “Seems fine for now.” Williams shrugged. “But who knows how much stress he can handle.”

  “I’ll watch him, too,” said Smith.

  “Thanks, LT.”

  “Anything else, boss?”

  “No. Go on down. Thanks.” Williams looked to the barren beach ahead of them. “Son of a bitch.”

  “Doing alright, sir?”

  Williams looked at MacFarland. “Yeah. Think so.” He looked at her eyes, and for an instant he thought about how attractive she was. “How about you?”

  “Good as can be,” she said.

  Williams snapped out of it. “I need you to work on a couple of things.”

  She pulled out her notepad.

  “Tides and sunrise. I think we’re at low tide now, but maybe you can use the hull on the beach to check.”

  MacFarland nodded and made a note.

  “Then sunrise. Our clocks are obviously all off, so try to figure out what time it is. Watch for daybreak. We got to get off this beach and out of sight.”

  “And what if the sun starts coming up before Doc’s finished?”

  Williams looked out at the beach again. In the darkness, it looked desolate, but he could only see so far. “Who knows what this place’ll look like come daybreak.”

  ———————

  “We don’t even know that guy’s name. Why the fuck are they trying to save him?” Graves gripped the rail of the cabin-top watch deck.

  Childress was leaning against the railing looking toward the northern horizon. He pulled out his phone and checked the time.

  “Doc said it could’a hit his liver. Or kidney. That’s bad, right?” Graves looked at Childress.

  “Yeah. I’d say so. But the other guy’s bleeding out.”

  Graves started pacing. “How long’s it been? An hour?”

  “Hour and a half,” replied Childress.

  “He’s gotta be fixing Rogers by now.”

  Childress kept looking North.

  “Fuck!” Graves grabbed hold of the starboard .50 cal and aimed it at the top sail of the Philadelphia. The rest of it was hidden behind the sand dunes on the beach. “All ’cause of that fucking showboat.”

  “I know you think it’s bullshit, but—”

  “You’re right. It is bullshit. We didn’t go back in time.” Graves lined the gunsight up with the middle of the sail and shook the gun like it was firing.

  Childress followed Graves’s aim and saw the moon setting behind the Philly on the horizon. Next to the Philadelphia, the moon looked even bigger than it normally did near the horizon.

  They heard boot steps coming up the ladder.

  “Did you see it yet?” asked Brewster.

  “Still got a few minutes,” answered Childress.

  “What happened?” asked Graves.

  “He’s not going to make it.”

  “What!” Graves started for the ladder, but Childress grabbed him.

  “Whoa. The skipper said—”

  Graves ripped his arm free. “Don’t fuck with me, private.”

  “No, no, no,” said Brewster. “He hasn’t started on the marine yet. That sailor. Don’t go down there. It’s a fucking bloody mess.”

  Graves stopped. “Hadn’t even started yet?! What the fuck!”

  Brewster looked confused. “He had to. The guy was bleeding all over. His guts damn near shot out when the doc pulled out that chunk of wood.”

  Graves stared at Brewster. “How long’s he gonna wait?”

  Brewster shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  Childress’s phone started chiming in his pocket. He reached in and silenced the alarm.

  Graves started down the ladder.

  “Corporal?” Childress raised his hands then grabbed the back of his helmet. “Shit!”

  “Let him go. How much time we got?”

  “Any time now. That was my alarm.” Childress pulled out his phone. “If it’s regular, coming every two hours and eight or so minutes, we should see it any second.”

  ———————

  “Let him do his job, corporal. I’m not going to tell you again!” Williams had his hand on the chest plate of Graves’s armored vest.

  “He’s been fucking around on that other guy. Hadn’t even looked at Buck yet!”

  “That’s not true. That’s not true. He’s looked at Buck plenty. But he had to start with the more serious patient first.”

  “What about our crew? Your crew, sir?” Graves leaned in again, but Williams still held him back.

  Williams shoved Graves away and pointed at him. “You bow up to me again and I’ll go UCMJ on you. That what you want?”

  Graves backed off.

  “It is my crew. And doc’s got rules like the rest of us. If he thinks that one guy needs help more than another, he’s bound by the Geneva Convention to help in that order. Even if he’s an enemy.”

  Graves shook his head.

  “And that other guy’s an American, too. Just give Doc a little time.”

  “What if Buck doesn’t have time?”

  Williams nodded. “I know, corporal. I don’t want this any more than you do. Time is all we can give him right now.”

  It looked like Graves was going to barge past Williams to go belowdecks.

  “I’m going to go check on him, but I’m ordering you to stay up here. Understood?”

  Graves nodded. “Oorah, sir.”

  “Hang tight,” said Williams as he went down the ladder.

  Graves turned away from the hatch and tucked his hands behind the side panels of his armor. He saw MacFarland at the back table, flipping through pages of a book.

  “You know he’s got a lot on his mind, right?” she asked.

  “How’s that, ma’am?”

  “Lieutenant Commander Williams. He’s got a lot on his mind.”

  “Who doesn’t.” Graves looked out the starboard window at the setting moon.

  ———————

  Williams almost got sick to his stomach as soon as he stepped into the galley. Blood was pooled in the aft port corner of the galley. Williams followed the streams of blood up to the starboard table that held the injured sailor from the Philadelphia. He was completely covered with a bloody sheet.

&
nbsp; Doc Ruiz was huddled over Corporal Rogers. “Shit!”

  “Need me to pull more?” asked Smith.

  “No! Just hold it there. Wait. Wait. Shit!” Ruiz shifted his position and put his bloody boot on the table’s aluminum bench seat.

  Williams didn’t say anything, and walked back through the hatch. He went around the ladder to his quarters, which he hadn’t been in for nearly twenty-four hours. He shut the hatch behind him and sat on his berth, fighting the nausea that was growing in his belly. He looked down at the floor and saw that he’d tracked blood across the light grey carpeting.

  “Shit.”

  He grabbed a hand towel from his sink and pumped the faucet to dampen it. When the soles of his boots were clean, he got down on his hands and knees and started blotting out the thin lines he’d trailed on the carpet. After he cleaned the carpet, he saw a bloody smudge on one of his slippers.

  He picked up the slipper, turned the rag inside-out to a clean spot, then aggressively scrubbed the soft suede. “Dammit,” he mumbled.

  His eyes started to burn as they teared up. He wondered why he was crying, and then he couldn’t hold it back. He scrubbed the slipper and tears poured from his eyes. All he could think about was the night that his daughters gave him the slippers before he shipped out. It was a tradition his wife had started when they first got married.

  Williams never forgot how she’d cried as he packed for his first trip only six weeks after the wedding. She’d always given him grief about his ratty old slippers. He told her they were his lucky slippers, and that he’d worn them all four years at the Naval Academy. When he put his old, worn slippers next to his duffel bag, she put a gift-wrapped box next to them. He looked at her smiling through her tears. He unwrapped the slippers and looked at her, unsure of what to say. But he remembered what she told him that night nearly fourteen years ago. “You don’t need luck. You just have to come back to me,” she said.

  And it’d been that way every time he packed for each tour. He’d grab his last pair of slippers and put them on the ground next to his bags. Then one of his daughters would run off to another room, then run back in and put the wrapped box on the ground. He’d unwrap them and smile, and they’d all say it together: “You don’t need luck, dad. You just have to come back to us.”