The Command

by David Poyer

  BY 1700 they were on station, under way at bare steerageway between the incoming and outgoing traffic lanes. Dan left the bridge after a renewed warning to Osmani, who’d just qualified as officer of the deck, to maintain a 360-degree awareness. He had no desire to get run down by a sleepy tanker skipper.

  He took his place at the wardroom table, freshly showered and feeling more human than he had most of that day. Baked haddock, one of his favorites. The first bite was halfway to his mouth when his radio sounded off. “Captain, bridge.”

  “Go.”

  “Message from the commodore via voice, Captain, relayed through Georges Leygues. Intercept, board, and search.”

  He started to say, “I’ll be right up,” but instead stopped himself and told Osmani to have the TAO plot a course and speed to intercept and get back to him. He got halfway through the fish before the wardroom phone rang.

  “NOW away the boarding and search team. Section Gold. That is, away the boarding and search team. Team Gold provide.”

  Marchetti came to, pulled from the depths of exhaustion and the strange dreams he got when he had to sleep in a hot compartment. In this one, he’d been a helicopter pilot in Somalia. Wounded and left behind, with thousands of pissed-off skinnies with guns searching for him. A nubile Arab woman had hidden him. He’d undressed her, been on the point of entering a velvety softness. For some reason they’d both been speaking German. He stared at the underside of the bunkabove, hearing the ship creak and sway around him. Then swung out and dropped into his coveralls, stacked around his boots fire-station style. He bloused the cuffs and buckled his belt and was ready to go. Pulled his cap off the bunk light and was out the door, through the mess. The other chiefs were eating. He grabbed a biscuit off Forker’s plate and gnawed at it as he went up two decks.

  Goldstine was handing out the weapons and ammo at the ready locker. The guys grabbed their iron without expression, haggard, silent. Too many boardings. Too many condition-three watches. He’d thought they might get a break, running in to Aqaba. Guess not. He slung the shotgun and stuck the .45 he’d started carrying as backup in his belt. “What is it this time,” he asked the boarding officer, Ensign Cas-sidy A porky, scared-looking kid who didn’t seem to have any idea how to lead a boarding team—or anything else. It didn’t seem fair the chiefs had to train the officers. Marty figured they’d given him Cassidy to either harden him up or break him, and so far the odds were not good.

  “Motor vessel Yazd. Bound for Aqaba. She hove to on the radio call.”

  “Flag?”

  “Iranian.”

  On the rolling fantail the red plastic-and-nylon jacob’s ladder was laid out ready to drop. He saw the other ship, tilting slowly back and forth ahead. Horn was making up on it, slipping through deep blue four-foot seas. A rust-streaked white deckhouse on a black hull. No net gear. Maybe a thousand tons, the typical small merchant that ran around from the gulf. Heaving to on the call was a good sign. More than once in the last few weeks they’d had to chase them down, threaten them, before they hove to. Horn rolled to a sea, and the choking hot breath of turbine exhaust blew down on them. He didn’t need that, looking at a two-mile ride in a small boat.

  “Go ahead and load,” he told them. “Mags only, chambers empty.”

  Fear, the port RHIB, came up from astern with a rocking roar, leaping over the wake that dragged behind Horn’s vertical stern. The coxwain raised a glove, then twisted the wheel to come in. “Kick that ladder over,” he told one of the men, then looked back along them, lined up ready to go. Crack Man, Sasquatch, Lizard, Snack Cake, Deuce, Amarillo, Turd Chaser.

  The supernumerary, Wilson, stood back a few feet, weaponless because he’d told Goldstine not to issue her anything. He waved her back impatiently. Seven men plus himself and Cassidy. It made for a crowded ride but the semi-inflatables could carry more than the old rigid whaleboats. He didn’t miss them. Just the fact the soft side of the RHIB wouldn’t crush your arm or your leg if you got caught between it and the hull paid their way as far as he was concerned.

  “Gold team, move out,” he shouted, and swung over the rail.

  THE helo was up. Standard when they ran a boarding and search. A close pass, letting the target see the barrel of the gun poking out of the door, tended to meek down your average merchant master. Plus with all the protuberances and gear the SH-60 had fitted it looked even more dangerous than it actually was. It roared low, then curved away, gaining altitude, leaving caramel smoke and a racketing roar.

  He pulled his attention back to clinging heavily loaded to a swaying ladder above a turbulent sea. He glanced down to where the RHIB surged and lunged, then dropped. Landed in the floorboards. He un-fouled the sling and moved aft, perching on the gunwale. It got wet back here but he didn’t mind. One by one the guys picked their way down the ladder and dropped. When Cassidy held up a hesitant hand the coxswain gunned it, the bow hook tossed off the painter, and they surged forward so suddenly he almost toppled backward.

  From sea level the target looked much farther away than from up on deck. All he could make out between the passing waves was its stack and mast, tilting back and forth. Rolling like a pig in shit. The RHIB jostled toward it, the coxswain taking it slow. The heavy seas shouldered the boat left and right, pushing it around as if it were made of Styro-foam. A sea burst over the gunwale and soaked them. At least you were cooler when you were wet.

  He licked sweet salt from his lips, and sucked a heavy odor of burning fuel, different from the familiar smells of Horn. The motor vessel’s exhaust smelled like cheap diesel, like at a truck stop in Georgia, and he started to feel ill again. Sasquatch was already gagging over the side. For a big guy, he got sick easy.

  “Hurry it up, God damn it,” he yelled at the coxswain. Who shrugged as the chopper roared over again, a hundred feet above their heads.

  But he nudged the throttle up, and they started slamming through the waves, jarring like they were hitting solid banks of gravel. Looking ahead, he saw the target closer now. Weeping rust. A deserted after-deck. The crew was supposed to be up forward, so the helo could keep an eye on them. The painted legend YAZD and beneath that a squiggle he figured was whatever Iranians spoke.

  Suddenly it loomed over them, a startlingly high wall of rough, rusty steel and flaking black paint. Marty eyed the rope ladder dangling from the stern. Not the quarter, the stern. Oh, well…. It slipped from sight as they continued ahead, doing a circuit, looking up at the bridge. He couldn’t see into it from this angle, but he didn’t see any heads. Nor any antiboarding measures. Sometimes they tried to make it hard. Welded steel spikes to the hull. Epoxied the bases of busted bottles along the deck line. Wrapped barbed wire along the handrails. As they rounded the bow eight or nine scruffy-headed, swarthy men gazed down at them. Some looked bored, others ticked.

  “Horn Gold, this is Horn, over.”

  He said into the radio, “Horn Gold. Go ahead, over.”

  “They giving you any trouble?”

  “Not aboard yet. Over.”

  “The master said the French boarded him already.”

  “So why we searching them again?”

  “Beats me. Commodore said to.”

  Okay, great. He said roger, out, and holstered the Saber as the coxswain aimed them for the ladder. The bow hook got it and hung on as Fear seesawed violently. Turd Chaser got his gloves on a rung and swarmed up it, bolt cutters bobbing where he’d slung them over his back. A moment later he stood at the top, hand on holster, staring around. When he beckoned, Amarillo hit the ladder.

  When Marty got to the afterdeck, the team was out in their perimeter. But their weapons pointed at nothing but flaking steel and battered bitts and what looked like a metal-mesh goat pen. The vacant, seedy, rolling deck felt creepy, like boarding a ghost ship. But Horn rode a couple of hundred yards off, and the helo clattered overhead. Aside from that, all he could see was mountains, far off to the north.

  “Bridge?” said Cassidy He nodded. Shotgun at por
t arms, buckshot in the tube, he led them forward.

  THE master said his name was George. He sounded pissed. In a small, smelly room behind the little enclosed bridge he pulled a folder from behind a bolted-down, corroding typewriter. “I tell you, French inspect already. Two day ago.”

  “And we’re inspectin’ you again,” Marchetti told him. “Like having gravy on your cake. You can stay up here or go forward with your crew. Your choice.”

  George spat on the dirty deck. He threw the folder down contemptuously. “You take us off bow soon,” he said. “Too much sun.” And left.

  Marty picked them up and fanned the documents out. She was registered in the Grenadines, wherever that was. “We got lucky,” Deuce said, pointing to an ancient photocopy machine.

  They could see the crew through the windows, sitting with backs against bulwarks and wildcats in the eyes of the ship. Bedraggled, unshaven, in torn denims and dirty field jackets. They were all smoking. Dead in the water, the vessel careened back and forth with a long pendulum roll that set Marchetti’s teeth on edge. From below came shouts as the sweep teams went through the next deck down. He had three teams of two. Amarillo and Crack Man were on the bow guarding the crew. Sasquatch and Snack Cake were going through the crew’s quarters and mess decks, and Turd Chaser and Lizard had headed for the engine spaces. After they made sure all the crew was topside, they’d move them somewhere they could keep an eye on them—most likely the mess decks. Then start the actual search, opening holds and tanks, taking soundings and samples. He wondered again why they were reinspecting if the French had really given them a clean bill on the inward passage.

  Cassidy pulled himself up into the pilothouse as the helo buzzed past in a blast of sound. A close pass down the starboard side. “Got the sounding log,” Marchetti yelled to him.

  It showed a ballast tank, four cargo tanks, and two fuel oil tanks, along with fuel oil service and settling tanks and freshwater tankage. All quantities were given in square meters. He handed it to Deuce along with registry, manifest, bill of lading, a crew list, and a sheaf of individual licenses and documents. The crew was Iranian, Syrian, Pakistani, Greek, Russian-Ukrainian. Some of this was in squiggly writing, and he told Deuce to see what he could make out of it. There didn’t seem to be any UN form and they had to call the master back to scowl-ingly retrieve it from another folder.

  The 986 form showed clearance for a cargo of animal feed, Indian tea, bagged flour, and raw jute. He compared it to the printout that had come over from the Maritime Interdiction Center. Yazd had been inspected many times before. It looked like this was her regular run. The database from the previous inspections, bumped against the log and the other onboard documentation, gave them a benchmark to check on crew changes or out of the ordinary cargo or itineraries.

  The photocopy machine hummed. Light chased across the bulkhead. Marchetti passed a hand over his wet forehead. The enclosed quarters, the extreme roll was getting to him. Changing from one ship to another in midocean set off bad things in his inner ear. He went outside and gripped the handrail, looking across to Horn until the nausea backed off. Down on the forecastle the crew laughed, making gestures up at him. He made a gesture back at them. They stopped laughing, then got up unwillingly as Crack Man motioned them up.

  Back inside, he grabbed the copies of the tankage diagrams and went below, planting his boots carefully on worn steel rungs.

  Belowdecks was dim and spooky. He flicked a switch but nothing happened. The crew had turned off the generator, or else it was broken. He looked into the mess decks, wrinkling his nose. Insecticide, curry, greasy meat, old cigarette smoke. A movie poster showing an Indian woman dancing with a bear. A flash of the woman in that afternoon’s dream, dark-haired, wide-hipped, full-lipped. Scattered newspapers in incomprehensible alphabets. A gray cat stared insolently from the sideboard, where it was licking a plate.

  A central ladder well wound into the depths. He pulled his .45 and worked the slide. Fuck the rules. The passageways creaked as the steel fabric rolled around him.

  Two decks below he glimpsed one of the teams moving past the lad-derway, the lead man ahead, pistol drawn. Then the other, covering him from the other side.

  He was watching the roaches scatter in a deserted stateroom when he heard shouting, scuffling, a thud. “What’s going on down there?” he yelled, rounding the ladderway, sliding down on the greasy handrails without touching the treads.

  Snack Cake and Sasquatch stood over a guy lying on the deck. “He jumped out at me,” Snack Cake said.

  “So you coldcocked his ass?”

  “Only a little bit.”

  “Fuck, man.” Marty bent over him, helped him to his feet. The Iranian, or whatever he was, wasn’t very big. He wasn’t young, either. Blood streamed from matted hair into a gray-streaked beard. He looked to be about sixty, and not a lot of tread left. “Shit. This ain’t gonna look good.”

  “Asylum,” the geezer said, perfectly plainly.

  “Huh? What’d he say?”

  “Asylum. I want asylum in U.S.” He smiled through the blood. He had terrible teeth.

  “We’re not in that business, Pop,” Marchetti told him.

  “You give me asylum, I tell you where it is.”

  “Where what is?” said Lizard.

  “Shut up,” Marty told him. To the old man he said, “Oh, yeah? Well, too fuckin’ bad. We already know.”

  “You know?” Pouchy eyes closed in cunning. “No, you don’t. Or you wouldn’t be down here.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, maybe. You would be—”

  “I am Saloman Rashik.”

  “Uh-huh. Rashik. Okay, Liz—”

  “Lizard. Not ‘Liz.’”

  “That’s what I said, Liz. Take him back to the fantail and get him bandaged up. Then hold him separate. You know the drill from there. Don’t let the others see we got him. Sass, I’ll cover you, which way you going from here?”

  THEY reassembled on the bridge with Cassidy after forty-five minutes of going through the tankage and the cargo. Actually they gun-decked the tankage. Nobody smuggled oil into Iraq, and Yazd wasn’t a tanker anyway. Cassidy said the chart markings and fixes checked out. There was more animal feed than the bill of lading specified, but since there was no UN restriction on it, they couldn’t argue with that. The master had wanted back on the bridge. He glowered from a folding chair, arms folded.

  “Who’s this Rashik dude?” Marchetti asked him.

  “Who?”

  “Ra-sheek. Rashik.”

  The master shrugged and rolled his eyes. “An old man of no use. He kills bugs. He cooks. That’s his cat.”

  “He’s from where? Lebanon?”

  The captain said no, Syria, and he was a troublemaker and a liar. He stole from the others in the crew. Rashik was a piece of shit. He could ask anyone. Marty thought about that, then crooked a finger at Cassidy. They went out on the little wing, where “George” couldn’t hear them.

  “Whattdya think, sir? He says he’ll show us where it is if we give him asylum.”

  “But what is it?”

  “He won’t tell us unless he gets what he wants. Or at least something in writing that says he gets it, if he comes through.”

  “He’s just jerking our chain,” Cassidy said. “We already searched this rustbucket. And the French, before us. You heard what the master said. A shit-for-lunch, a thief, a liar.”

  “Sometimes it’s your scumbags come through for you,” Marty told him. “They’re always looking for a better deal. We could see what he’s got to offer.”

  The lieutenant said he could work it a bit if he thought it was worth it.

  Marty borrowed a pack of Vantages from Crack Man and went aft. He sat down with the old guy and offered him a cigarette. They went back and forth for about twenty minutes. The Syrian, or Lebanese, or whatever he was, kept saying he’d show them where it was if he got asylum. Marty said he couldn’t make any promises, but maybe they could help him if he showed them what he
had. Somewhere in here he realized the guy wasn’t as old as he’d thought, he was only about forty, but he looked hard used. He said if he did that and they left him aboard, the master would have him killed. He wanted to be taken off. The cat had to come, too.

  “You say there’s something aboard, huh? Contraband?”

  “What?”

  “Something smuggled? What is it—oil?”

  “Not oil.” Rashik’s nose wrinkled in contempt. “These are American cigarette? They don’t taste. Is tobacco in them?”

  “Work with me, I’ll work with you.”

  Eventually they got down to what it was: pipes. Rashik said he’d seen them being lowered into the after hold late one night. “Pipes” sounded harmless, but when Cassidy reported it to the ship, the word came back to check it out, and meanwhile hold the informant separate from the rest of the crew.

  So Marty and Crack Man and Sasquatch and Turd Chaser—they called him that because he was a hull tech, the closest the navy got to plumbers—climbed down into the after hold and started tearing it apart. Before, they’d sampled; now they dug. They hauled and strained at the stacks of feed. In the terrible oven heat of the closed hold the cottonseed waste or whatever it was had rotted into what you found in a sink drain when you took it apart. Oozing through the jute bags, it stained coveralls and hands fertilizer brown. They panted through their mouths, trying not to smell what they were standing thigh-deep in. The beefing and bitching started. Rats rustled at the corners of their vision, burrowing away from the sudden activity. But at last they got down to the ceiling-boards, right down to where he could shine his light through the rusty bottom into the fetid stinking roach-crawling bilges.

  He straightened, disgusted, dizzy with the closed-in heat. “Fuck it,” he said, wiping a sleeve over his dripping face. “That’s enough. There’s nothing here.”

  “You want us to restack this shit?”

  “Fuck it. They can do it.” He waded toward the ladder, trying to shake crap inches thick off his boots, like walking through a hog yard.