The Command

by David Poyer

  She was about to go when she turned back. “I guess I’ll read about this, right?”

  She meant, on her fitness report. And he saw again her keen hard ambition, and knew this moment would vanish soon enough from her memory. Or maybe that was cruel. But he knew what she meant.

  “I already addressed that issue, Claudia. We’re all feeling our way through this thing. Let’s call this a free throw. If it doesn’t happen again.”

  She chuckled. “I don’t think you have to worry about that.”

  At that moment they both heard a watertight door scrape and bang open. Someone coughed at the bottom of the ladder. He let go her hand just as, inside his stateroom, the buzzer went off.

  “Shit,” he muttered, and closed the door as her steps faded. “Captain,” he said into the phone, tucking his still obstreperous member back with his other hand.

  “Sir, Lieutenant McCall. I took over TAO from Mr. Camill.”

  “What you got, Kim?”

  “Flash traffic from COMSIXTHFLT. The radioman’s gonna be knocking on your door about now, but I thought I’d have the figures ready.”

  Dan opened the door, revealing the radioman with fist in the air ready to knock. He looked surprised. Not as surprised, Dan thought, as you’d have been if you’d come up that ladder sixty seconds earlier. “Flash message, sir,” he said, holding the board out and looking away from his commanding officer’s hard-on.

  He scanned it, cradling the phone in one shrugged-up shoulder as McCall filled him in with short staccato statements. He heard her out. Then gave the word to come up to flank speed.

  29

  Domiat, Egypt

  SHIFTING the heavy, clinking bag from hand to hand as he made his way down to the waterfront, the man in the loose-woven dishdasha thought this was not the most remote cranny of the world he’d ever seen. At least it had trees. Stores with refrigerators, though the flyblown goods smelled of dust and kerosene. It had mosques—true ones, not the elaborate and idolatrous Shi’a mockeries.

  And turning the familiar corner he saw again through the eyes of a gangly boy running these dusty alleys, shouting to passing captains to take him on as a hand.

  Because this rundown village of adobe mud was where he’d grown up.

  Now, thirty years on, he walked the same narrow shaded alleys, mind weaving strangeness with familiarity into a loose fabric of past and present through which the incandescent sun burned with unvarying ferocity. Now he called himself Mahmoud. With his new identity he’d put on once more the voluminous cotton country Egyptians wore about their business. In the heat and light and sea wind its fluttering caress surrounded him like a cool flame as he neared a wooden pier that stretched out into the Nile.

  Domiat, or Damietta, was eight miles upriver from the sea. This eastern branch of the great river was the poor relation. It met the Mediterranean through a tortuous, shallow way, almost choked at times by a shifting bar of sand. To the east lay Port Said. Far to the west, Al-Iskandariya. The land between slumbered in broiling heat, a sandy coast given over to dates and figs, goats, donkeys, and water buffaloes.

  Even in his boyhood, though, it had based an intensive sardine fishery. Along the English-era stone quay, along the piers that groped out into the scum-flecked stream oozing at this low season at barely a walking pace, rode scores of the nondescript, tough little craft that grazed the southern Mediterranean for the tiny fish that served not just as food but as fertilizer for the sandy fields.

  And breathing in the river smell, the rich after odor of the fishery, he closed his eyes, behind gold-rimmed sunglasses such as a liberal cleric might wear, and for a moment was also in Cameron, in Calcasieu, in Cypremort and Grand Chenier and Bayou la Batre, listening to the chatter of Vietnamese. And the whine from a distant radio became the strange atonal music Vinh and Nguyen had played in the land of their exile.

  And at the same time, a barefoot child squatted outside the coffeehouse, brushing flies from his lids as he hung openmouthed on the tales of graybearded seamen.

  And at the same time his own fleet would be far out from Bir Sudan by this time of the morning; out where the water lay flat and lightless as oiled steel and the sky shifted with a pulsing ruddy haze, and the radios lilted with Mohammed Mounir and Ahabaan Abdul Rahim.

  Was this, he wondered, what growing old meant? That you lived not just in the present, but in all the moments you’d inhabited? He’d heard once that the Sufis, may they be cursed, said man was only a thought in God’s mind.

  Yet even Damietta, remote as it was, bore the marks of the ceaseless struggle between Islam and the West. The ruined forts at the entrance testified to that. The Franks had controlled all this stretch of coast during the Crusades. Till Salah-ad-Din, the great prince of Islam, had thrown back the Westerners eight hundred years before. He stroked his newly grown beard, pondering that struggle. Which had never ended and never would until the last soul on earth bowed in submission to God.

  But no man could fight forever.

  He waved flies off his face, frowning. Unfortunately, he still had to settle with Salim. Where the Sheikh gave with open hand, his querulous advisor doubted and misered. No better than a Jew. But surely such an action as he was about to carry out would close his career with honor. Surely after it a tired, no-longer-young man with only one eye could retire to his boats, his company, his private devotions. To a quiet life in the Sudan.

  When he called out, several men emerged into the sunlight, wiping their hands on cotton waste. He acknowledged their greetings with a smile. Went down a rickety gangplank, clutching the bag to his chest, feeling the cool sweating roundnesses within with anticipation.

  The boat smelled of years at sea. Its deck was patched with the paint the villagers had compounded of the oily fish from time out of mind. It was a hundred feet long, with a midships deckhouse and a stumpy pole mast to which the outrigger nets were hinged. Moored by a line to the stern, a smaller craft lay on the sluggish river: a beaten-up fiberglass-hulled sport fisherman with a tilted-up Yamaha outboard.

  THE first team, in this same boat, had sailed from Domiat the month before, made the round trip to their target area, and returned. They’d been boarded and searched a few miles from their destination, but of course there’d been nothing in the hold but sardines.

  The second group had been here a week. They’d overhauled the engines and installed steel plates shielding the wheel and the fuel tanks. They’d installed another bank of batteries, a second generator, and two more bilge pumps, and had scrubbed down, decked in, and run lighting to the hold. They’d bought bottled water, new mattresses, a butane stove, rice, couscous, dates, tea, coffee, chocolate, and canned meat.

  Then, the night before, they’d driven the truck in from the warehouse in Port Said. Under cover of darkness, they’d swayed the heavy crated package down into the hold. Where it rested now beneath closed hatches, snuggled into its cocoon of the other material.

  He spoke briefly with them, saying all would be as God willed, but he had hopes of success and victory. Then stood watching as they filed up the gangplank. From the pier, one of them—the Sheikh was very media-savvy—held up a video camera. Shielding his face with his sleeve, he bowed deeply to all those who would see and thus be moved to follow in the path. The cameraman panned over the boat, then out toward where the river met the sea. Then the red light went out, and they waved, and he waved back to them.

  Then he was alone.

  The third crew, the final crew, would not board for a few hours yet. He went below and checked the hold again. Running his hands over the sacks stacked close against the bomb, their contents slowly warming in the dim heat of the hold.

  The bomb itself was not so much. A small charge, as such things went. It was the heavy plastic-covered sacks stacked around it that made him smile. They were covered with writing in many languages. Most also bore colorful pictures of healthy robust sheep and goats, for the benefit of purchasers who couldn’t read. Products of India, for the mos
t part, though some came from China and other countries as well. The Sheikh’s men had purchased the material in small lots here and there throughout the Middle East, from various agricultural suppliers and commercial growers.

  Sheep grazed on pastures without trace amounts of certain rare elements lost their appetite. Their skin grew scaly. They became anemic, and the lambs did not thrive or grow. Most of the sacks contained cobalt sulphate, a heavy sand the color of dried blood. Others contained cobalt chloride. A few contained cobalt carbonate, which potters used in blue glazes, but as this was the most expensive form of the element, they numbered only a few.

  He snapped a padlock behind him, then looked into the engine room. Humming quietly, he checked the battery charge, fuel level, oil level, through-hull fittings. All secure. He went topside again and looked across at the dusty streets.

  Almost against his will, he went slowly up the gangplank. Checked the lines.

  He hesitated there for a moment, a white-clad figure alone in the burning sun, on the hot stone of the quay. Then began walking, with firm, steady steps, on into town.

  SHE was heavier than he remembered; shorter than he recalled. She stared at his shoes from the barely opened door with no sign of recognition, a fold of cloth drawn across all but her eyes.

  “Haleemah?” he asked, not even sure it was her.

  “Who … You are not him. Who are you? Who sent you here?”

  Did she know him? Had he, too, changed so much? Or did her dull tired gaze no longer see? He remembered her beside a fountain, the day they were married. The radiance of her smile, her slender body in the night… “It’s me. Your husband.”

  Her eyes came up, flickered on his face. Recognition came. And with it, something that looked like shame. “Ahmed. You didn’t write me you were coming.”

  “I’m here on business. Let me in.” He glanced down the narrow, stinking hallway. A state apartment, built not long before but already its concrete flaking, the halls smelling of urine.

  Unwillingly, it seemed, she opened the door. Closed it immediately, and stood wringing her hands as he looked around.

  “You have been well?”

  “Well, well… God has given us health … but this is not a very big place,” she murmured tensely. He noticed her front teeth were blackened, rotten. Furrows of worry had engraved her face. “The government lets me stay here because of Badriyah. But they only give us twenty-five piasters a month to live on, and the baladi keeps getting smaller, and it’s five piasters now—there’s no fish or rice anymore on the green card—and I can’t go out, I can’t leave her here—it’s been five years! Five years!”

  He patted her shoulder. She was weeping, clawing her face. He said, “Things will be better now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re going to Sudan. I have a business. A fishing business.”

  She said wonderingly, “You always loved boats.”

  “I have eight. Every day they go out. Fifty men work for me. You will both live in my house.”

  “House?” she said, like a child repeating a word it has never heard before.

  “I have a house on the Red Sea, in a place called Bir Sudan. I’ll take another wife. But you’ll still be my senior wife.”

  “Your senior wife,” Haleemah mumbled. “But what of the girl—”

  “We’ll hire a Sudanese woman to help you take care of—” He nodded toward the other room, assuming she was in there, though he didn’t hear her. He remembered her as never silent. That mindless crooning, wordless, endless, not disturbing, unless you were disturbed by the wind in the desert or the mindless tinkle of a fountain.

  His wife trembled. Her eyes burned. She clutched his hand and began kissing it feverishly again and again, mumbling rapidly “God be praised, God is great, God be praised.” He caught her smell, close, rotten, the stink of a woman who has not bathed in months. There was no air-conditioning or even ventilation in this concrete tomb. The glass-less windows were shrouded with dark cloth. She was muttering rapidly now about houses and maids and money, interspersing it with pious du’a and praise of her husband’s generosity.

  And something within him moved away from her. She was so intent on her comforts, on the outward things that meant nothing. Her breath stank. He shook her hand from his sleeve. “Where is she? I will see her now. Then I must go.”

  “Oh—she’s—in her room.” She grabbed his sleeve again, then, as she grasped what he’d just said. “Go? Wait. Coffee—I don’t have any— a bad wife—not ready—so expensive—I’ll go across the hallway. Sit down, wait, sit down—”

  “Don’t disturb yourself. Be calm. All things in good time,” he said, trying to make his voice reassuring. He pressed her hand again, felt its roughness. She was old. Old.

  He went into the next room. Pushed aside a sheet hanging in the doorway, realizing too late it was damp, hung there to dry.

  He stopped, breath catching in his throat.

  Small bowls of lentils and couscous, half eaten, half decayed, covered the floor. The stench of feces hung where flies swarmed above an uncovered pot. Cloths stained with brown dangled from a line.

  A black bundle lay on the truckle bed. The room was very hot. The windows were sealed. He moved carefully among the pots of food and ordure until he could bend over, then sit, carefully, twitching aside the blanket.

  His daughter’s cheekbones stood out like those of a corpse. She breathed rapidly and shallowly, as if she’d just been running, and red spots flamed on her cheeks. Her eyes were closed. He touched them gently, the blind eyes that had been so beautiful when she was little. Her skin was puffy and unnaturally pale, save for that flush. A smell welled from beneath the blanket. He touched her cheek, but she did not open her eyes or move. He shook her shoulder, so thin he felt bone; nothing altered. Indeed, now that he looked close, he could hardly recognize her.

  He glanced back, becoming angry. “Why’s she asleep?”

  “She’s like that all the time now.”

  “What do you mean? Doesn’t she sing?”

  “She hasn’t done that since you went away.”

  “She opens her eyes?”

  “She no longer opens her eyes. She no longer sings. There is no money for doctors.”

  He grew angrier, rage grew monstrously within him. “Where are the things I sent?” he shouted. “The silk? The furs? For her to touch, and stroke?”

  “No, no! Don’t shout at me!” His wife covered her ears, cringing. “I had to sell them.”

  The bowls shattered as he kicked them aside. He shouted, “You sold

  them? She loved to touch them. That was her only pleasure! You have not taken proper care of her!”

  “There’s no money—no help—I can’t do everything—”

  “What have you done to her? Who were you expecting to see when you came to the door? Bitch! Whore! I will not take you to Sudan. You would shame me before my friends. You are no longer my wife. This is a sty.”

  He kicked over the chamberpot, then jumped back as a flood of shit poured across the floor. His wife screamed and fell to her knees in it. She screamed, throwing her abaya over her head, pleading for forgiveness, for God’s mercy to enter him, for him not to leave them again, for him to stay.

  He strode down the hall, filled with disgust. The sound of her wailing followed him. But he did not look back.

  HE stopped at the store again for more soft drinks and baladi bread on the way back to the harbor. The old storekeeper served him with unspoken questions in his gaze. He didn’t greet the man, or ask his name, though his face was obscurely familiar. The boy who’d grown up here was long buried beneath other identities, other experiences. His daughter would die soon. He accepted that. It was the will of God, like her blindness, her retardation. Written in the Book before the ages had begun.

  All was the will of God, and no man or devil or might of empire could change the smallest jot of what He had written.

  The quay, the trawler, the burning
sky were the same. The only difference was a battered pickup ticking over in the gritty heat, and in it three dark-haired, dark-skinned young men abiding with the eternal patience of Egypt.

  He greeted them courteously, shaking each’s hand for a long time, holding it as the dust from the departing truck sifted out of the dry air. Three. Not overmany to crew a hundred-footer. But enough, if they were willing. They’d not need to work the nets, after all.

  They squatted in the skimpy shade of the deckhouse and he shared out icy colas they accepted with childlike pleasure and nervous reserve. Their names were Ali, Antar, and Rasheed. He did not know what they’d been told about him, but they seemed respectful, even afraid. He uncapped a bottle for himself and sat questioning them, asking how long they’d spent at sea, what experience they had with engines, whether they could steer and read a chart. As he’d expected, they were quite young. Older men did not want to sacrifice. Too much bound them to this world. Antar seemed to know enough about diesels that he felt confident appointing him to their care. The others were deckhands, no more, though they swore they could steer. Not a great deficiency. It was only a hundred and forty sea miles to their destination. He could train them well enough on the way that they could make the last few miles on their own.

  They sat together for some hours as the sun descended, and prayed together, when the call rang out to asr. The volunteers gradually relaxed. They spoke of their families, and what had driven them to oppose the enemies of Islam. They had no children. They were filled with hate and recklessness. This was good, he thought. The network had chosen well. These men would not even miss themselves.

  For all of them, maybe even for himself, he thought with sudden insight in that drowsing heat of oncoming evening, that was the Sheikh’s wisdom: to find such hollow vessels and show them how God fit the void within them so perfectly none could doubt he had been fashioned to fulfill a greater cause. Sometimes a tool was broken. Sometimes it was lost. And sometimes left behind, when others were more suitable. When the task was truly understood, the fate of the tools did not matter.