The Command

by David Poyer

  Bahrain was an Arab state, but it had hosted first the Royal Navy and then the U.S. Navy for many years. The air force had operated from the base at the south end of the island during Desert Storm. To the tourist, the island looked free and open, with its glamorous hotels and night clubs where liquor flowed. To business, it was a haven. When it became obvious the island’s oil reserves were running out, the government had created a free-trade sector that pulled shipping companies, banks, and merchants in from all over the Mideast.

  She hadn’t learned any of this from Diehl. He didn’t care about anything outside the walls of the base. In fact, he’d made cracks about the locals she hadn’t liked at all, although she hadn’t said anything. No, she was just the good little Muslim girl… She’d picked it up talking to the locals, mainly wealthy Sunni women she met in town, in the stores, when they made salat together in the little prayer areas in the malls. She loved to shop and buy clothes for her mother and her aunts, and there were beautiful modest fashions here and what else did she have to spend her money on? The women were surprised to hear she was American, and outspoken in setting her straight. The rest she got from her own reading, the local papers, Al-Hayat, the Gulf Daily News, the Middle East Economic Digest.

  For the less well-off residents, especially the Shi’a, things were more tightly run. The State Security Court could detain persons without charge or trial for up to three years. The Security and Intelligence Service had hundreds of agents and there were rumors of torture. But the emir hardly ever executed anybody, enjoyed a joke, and—she’d heard from a flight attendant she ran into one night at the Al Hamra— enjoyed the women he invited to his personal beach, far from the eyes of ordinary Bahrainis.

  A stir at the door announced a stiff, graying man in a British army uniform. Major General Sean Gough had headed the SIS for twenty years. He surveyed the room, talked briefly to a dark-browed man she recognized as the liaison from the U.S. embassy, and thus, she figured, the CIA chief of station.

  Then he saw her, and immediately came across to bow over her hand. Cold blue eyes studied her from a foot above her head. “Sister Aisha,” he said in fluent, Saudi-accented Arabic. “Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatu. How good of you to join us again. You and the commander are most welcome.”

  “Thank you, General.”

  “Unfortunately I have an unpleasant issue to raise. Either with you, or—perhaps—”

  “What is it, General?”

  Hooker, back from his conversation with the Arab. He didn’t look happy to see them together. “Good morning, General.”

  “Commander.” They shook hands. Gough said, in fluting British English, “About to remark to your charming young protégée. Hearing unsettling things about the security on your base. More precisely, the security of your explosives. Not good news for those of us responsible for keeping the lid on the kettle, so to speak. Eh?”

  “Sir, I’d like to—”

  “No, no, Commander. Not in front of the natives. Call you this afternoon. A cozy little chat. Eh?”

  Gough winked at her and turned away. Aisha could tell Hooker was furious just from the set of his fingers on the china cup. She moved away in case it should shatter.

  To bump into Major Yousif. The SIS man smiled down. “Ya Naqueeb Ar-Rahim,” he said, addressing her by a police rank. “Ahlan, ahlan. Welcome, welcome, a happy occasion. It seems to be written we are to meet again and again. Why do you think that is?”

  “Maybe because we’re both cops.”

  “You’re the first Arabic speaker the Americans have sent us. Fortunately for us, the CIA has not yet reached that level of expertise.”

  “They just haven’t told you,” Aisha said. “Pretending you’re stupid is an old American trick. You’d be surprised how well it works.”

  He chuckled. “Oh, no. I’ve been taken in all these years.” He didn’t have an unattractive laugh, like some men. She noted he didn’t wear a ring, either.

  “Not to ask questions where they’re unwelcome, but how well do you get along with the Americans? Or I should say, the other Americans?”

  “Fine. We’re used to looking different, different religions and nationalities.” This wasn’t exactly what she thought, but you didn’t tell a host country security agency anything that didn’t reflect well.

  “That’s hard to imagine. We Arabs have what I have often thought of as a centrifugal tendency. But then, our colonial history, the boundaries we were left with … and then the tragedy of Palestine. So you’re both Muslim and American.”

  “I don’t see why I can’t be both.”

  “You must have your own opinions.”

  “I certainly do.”

  “May I ask what they are?”

  She decided to change the subject. “What did you find out about the man who died in the Quraifa? You were supposed to invite me to the autopsy.”

  “I’m sorry. It slipped my mind you wanted to be there. It was routine. What did I find out about him? Nothing, I’m afraid. That’s why I never got back to you. The passport was false.”

  “The Bahraini license?”

  “Real, but not his. Reported lost some time ago.”

  “So the decedent found or stole a driver’s license, and used that name to get a base ID?”

  “The base ID was false, too.”

  She said, surprised, “It was real. I checked it.”

  “A high-quality forgery. Clearly so, under ultraviolet. We weren’t sure either, until the lab report.” He caught her expression. “Correct. Someone on the island is making forgeries good enough to fool your gate guards. We’re trying to find out who. We’re still trying to find out who this man was, too, and why he was here.”

  “Will you keep me informed?”

  “Always.”

  She thought, And yet you didn’t tell me any of this until I asked. But then someone was saying, “Shall we take our places?” and she nodded and went back to sit with Hooker and Diehl.

  Alternating between English and Arabic, the security minister read a long address from the crown prince. It was about popular participation and economic reform, and how necessary these were if the country was to move to a higher level of productivity. How citizens had to motivate themselves through education and innovation to build a modern society. How governmental officials had to set an example in morality and sincerity and be prepared to make sacrifices… She tuned out and stared out the window at the fingernail of distant blue visible far out over the nodding palms and the roofs of the city.

  The boilerplate over, one of the departments briefed on a resurgence of unrest among the Shi’a. Israeli suppression of the Palestinians had put hate for Israel and America in the air. Here that translated into resentment of the ruling family. He warned everyone to be alert for riots and possibly new acts of terror. Next was a report from what seemed to be an unofficial Saudi liaison, or perhaps he was official— everyone seemed to know him and he wasn’t introduced, so she couldn’t tell. His report was about the spread of religious extremism, but his definition of “extremism” seemed vague. The first part was in English; the second, Arabic. She could follow most of it, though she missed a word here and there. The Arabic segment was about “poly-theist” missionaries, and how to “welcome” them—actually, how to block their activities and find pretexts to ask them to leave the country. The Saudi seemed concerned the Bahrainis weren’t taking the problem seriously.

  Aisha caught Gough’s glance, evaluating how she was taking it. She smiled back. Caught a blank look on the face of the CIA man—it was going past him—a politely interested expression on the face of the security minister.

  For a moment she tried to imagine the tightrope he must be trying to walk. On one side, literally, they were right across the causeway, the Saudis. On the other, the British and Americans. The Iraqis threatening from up north. The Iranians, coreligionists of the Shi’ite majority, across the Gulf. On one hand, bazaar fundamentalism, whipped up by the repression and house-bu
lldozings in Israel. On the other, pressure from the steadily educating middle class to democratize. Beneath it all, the knowledge that soon the oil would stop flowing and Bahrain would become again a barren, waterless desert.

  No, she didn’t envy him at all.

  LIKE all Arab meetings, when it was over everyone scattered instantly. In seconds the room was empty. Diehl tilted his watch. “Half the fuckin’ day shot in the ass.”

  “You don’t need to use language like that, Bob.”

  “D’you copy any of that? What they were sayin’?”

  “Most of it.”

  “Anything worth hearing?”

  “It’ll all be in my report,” she said.

  Hooker came back from talking to a heavyset white man she thought was FBI. “Let’s go. We’ve wasted enough time here.” He still looked furious, and she knew it was about the missing explosives and guns, and even more, that Gough knew about them. Which meant he had sources of information inside the base.

  “What were you talking to the general about?” he wanted to know as soon as they were in the car.

  She said, startled, “To Gough? Nothing. He was just showing off his Arabic.”

  “Did you tell him about the thefts? And that Yousif, you had your heads together for a long time there.”

  “I did not tell them about the thefts, or anything else. Do you really think I would—”

  “Bob, you were there, did she say anything?”

  Diehl stirred uneasily. “Uh—they were talking Arabic—”

  “I did not say anything about that,” she said. “That is internal need to know and I would never discuss it with anyone off base. With anyone. If you don’t believe that, sir, we’d better have a private talk.”

  “No, no, forget it.” He sat back.

  She jerked the car around, almost sideswiping a taxi, so mad she could spit. At both of them; Diehl hadn’t even pretended to defend her. The security officer muttered something, some halfhearted apology, but by then she was taking deep, even breaths, forcing it down, down. To where his instant assumption—that because she spoke Arabic, because she was Muslim, because she was black, she was not to be trusted—could not hurt her at all.

  15

  Off Jiddah, the Red Sea

  HORN had her own little convoy for a few days. Yazd and a break-1 ibulk cargo tramp Georges Leygues had caught smuggling nine hundred tons of Iraqi crude out of Jordan under a blanket of olive oil. The crude was heavier than the olive oil, but the French had sampled with a tube rather than a dip bottle and found it. The tanker was old and very slow. They slogged down to Jiddah, the principal Saudi port on the Red Sea, at the blazing pace of six knots when not actually hove to to fix breakdowns.

  At Jiddah a patrol boat escorted Yazd and the break-bulk into the Royal Saudi Naval Facility. There the mysterious tubes would be pulled out of Yadz’s hold for examination by UN inspectors. Rashik had been packed off to purgatory with the State Department and Immigration and Naturalization. The Saudis would deliver the captured vessels to the custody area while the mill wheels of international enforcement ground their way to their disposition.

  Horn, drawing too much water for the naval facility, lay that night alongside the mile-long container terminal, surrounded by ro-ro ships discharging hundreds of shiny Japanese SUVs and trucks. She had disgorged, too, four hundred bags of accumulated trash they hadn’t been permitted to dump in the Red Sea. Since Jiddah was the pilgrimage port for Mecca, there was no liberty for non-Muslims. American crews were strictly limited to the pier, and the port captain advised Dan to have his women’s faces covered even there, or else keep them on board.

  He debated staying aboard himself, to show solidarity, but the prospect of a run uninterrupted by knee-knockers and fire hoses seduced him. He told Hotchkiss he was going ashore for an hour. Then suited up in shorts and a T-shirt from his last reunion and jogged down the brow.

  The asphalt flatness, long as many football fields end to end, was dotted by ziggurats of containers, rail lines for the massive traveling cranes, and thousands of plastic-wrapped Hondas like pupating locusts. As he finished stretching and swung into a jog, sodium-vapor lamps detonated salmon-colored light into the Arabian dusk. The wind brought a fine dust that isolated him like fog. The buildings of the forbidden kingdom loomed indistinctly as a realm of ghosts across the moat that separated the pier from the town.

  Gradually, as he ran, his mind recurred to where they might be going next. And where they might not.

  They were due a week of port visit—actually, more like four days, since they’d used up part of it poking along with the slower vessels. But during the run down, Strong’s inquiries on his location and estimated time of arrival had become more pointed. Dan wondered if he should warn the crew their long-anticipated liberty might not work out. The maritime intercept commander seemed to want them back on station as soon as possible. And just that morning a message from MIDEASTFOR had directed them to report the status of their Tomahawk loadout and daily systems checks, and communicate any degradation or casualty.

  Isolated as they were, he was hard put to gauge what was going on. But the fleet news summary reported increased tensions with Iraq. The inspectors had probed too deeply, and sabers were rattling again.

  If things lit up, Horn and Laboon might be called into the Gulf. But Strong was pulling them back north, to the head of the Red Sea. Contradictory? Or related to Commander, Mideast Force’s sudden interest in their missile loadout? San Jacinto, “San Jac,” had fired Tomahawks from the Red Sea during the opening hours of the Gulf War.

  After a couple of miles he found himself out of breath. You got out of shape quickly aboard ship. He slowed, then walked, looking at the distant lights of Arabia. Then forced himself back into motion, gasping in the gritty heat.

  THEY finished loading food and fuel and cast off at 0800 into the same spectral, powdery-dust haze as the day before. The temperature was already over a hundred. It would rise as relentlessly as the sun. Dan was on the bridge, watching as they navigated the reef-strewn pass of Ras Quahaz, when Hotchkiss came up. He was getting used to her expression when she didn’t have good news. Downturned lips, raised eyebrows, an indefinable way she tilted her head… He sighed and beckoned her in.

  “Did you want to keep your head on the maneuvering, sir?”

  “I can listen to you and watch the chart.”

  “I had an open-door visitor this morning. DK3 Hurst.”

  “Charmine Hurst,” Dan said, getting a mental picture of a small, earnest black woman in her late twenties. The disbursing clerks were the navy’s paymasters. “Good performer, her chief says. What’s her problem?”

  “Can we go outside for this?”

  “We’ll go back to my cabin,” Dan told her. “It’s too damned hot to be out there when we don’t have to.”

  In the little stateroom behind the bridge he closed the door and motioned her to the settee. He took the chair and tented his fingers.

  “She saw the corpsman. She’s pregnant.”

  Dan grunted, his morning just ruined. The whole pregnancy issue was getting to him. He’d lost two sailors already this cruise. All young sailors weren’t knuckleheads. But some were, and when you put nineteen-year-old male knuckleheads together with nineteen-year-old female knuckleheads … “And?”

  “She says it’s the DK1.”

  “Oh, swell.”

  “Uh-huh. They’re in there in that little disbursing office all day. And of course with the cash, it’s locked. Nobody can come in and surprise them. Apparently she didn’t bother with birth control. Simple as it is. We give the pills out in sick bay.”

  Dan wondered why her gaze moved around his office. It struck him that it was a small, private compartment, too. She was leaning back, one coveralled arm thrown over the back of the settee. He could envision her nude … a small, slightly protruding belly, freckles down her thighs … he liked slim, fit women, and Hotchkiss spent as much time on the machines as he did.
r />   The physical attraction was there. But even more alluring would be having someone he could just fucking hold. A skipper was alone as no one ever was ashore. Add the stark functional bareness of passageways, the comfortless machinery-humming desolation of air-conditioned spaces, and the thought of something warm and for yourself alone became worth risking very much for, indeed. He rubbed his lips, trying to concentrate on what she was saying, not the sway of breasts beneath blue cloth. And what did she mean by that reference to how easy birth control was?

  “I told her policy doesn’t require her to identify the father, but she wanted to. She’s sorry she let the ship down.”

  “I guess we all wish being sorry made things better. Hurst’s married, isn’t she?”

  “Unfortunately, they both are. Also unfortunately, DK1 Konow’s wife is also the mother of his three children. And also the vice president—”

  Dan closed his eyes. “Ouch. Vice president of the Military Wives’ Association of Tidewater, Virginia.”

  “You see our problem.”

  “So what do we do? Take them to mast is my first thought.”

  “She came to me in confidence,” Hotchkiss said. “I write her up, that finishes my open-door policy for the other girls.”

  “I see that, but it takes two to tango. Unless she’s going to say it’s rape, which is a whole different ball game. So to speak.” He stopped, realizing by her incredulous stare he’d just made the kind of half-unconscious pun a guy might make to another guy, but that was most definitely non grata with Claudia H. Hotchkiss.

  “You’d better get serious about this. It’s flagrant fraternization. Not only that, it’s adultery.”

  “You’re right, sorry … but if it was consensual, the only way I see to play it fair is to take them both to mast. How far along is she? Is she planning to keep the baby? Did she share that with you?”

  Hotchkiss told him, tone icier than it had been before his joke, “She’s three months gone. But there isn’t any choice. Navy medical care is prohibited by federal policy from terminating pregnancies. And she can’t depend on a civilian facility out here.”