The Crisis (17 page)

“Actually yes. SIPRNET'd a girl I know on the J-3 staff. They're recommending we pull everyone out and let things settle. Iraq's too hot and Iran's too sticky to get tar-babied in Ashaara too. But Melinda Gates and Mia Farrow are getting a lot of publicity about the drought and the massacres on the western border. Anyway, we got an attaboy on the plan. They wanted to know who generated it. We said you did.”

“It was us, not me.”

“We're PC types, not amphibious planners,” Wurtz said. “You pulled it together.”

Dan shrugged and asked where their surface units were now. The GCCS showed
Tarawa
,
Duluth
, and
Oldendorf
approaching the Bab el Mandeb, the entrance to the Red Sea. The two faster ships were catching up with
Duluth
, which meant hot-refueling the birds aboard her might be more trouble than it was worth. They'd be in launch range in eighteen hours.

“Where's
Anchorage
?”

“Recalled. They decided they needed her in the NAG more.”

The Northern Arabian Gulf, Navy-ese for what the rest of the world called the Persian Gulf. Dan rubbed his face, looking at the screen. Pinpoints scattered across it were U.S. ships. Thanks to radar, satellites,
data uplinks, they could surveil the entire surface of the earth. The Air Force could drop special-delivery metal and explosives here and there. But control Africa, the Horn, the Middle East, not to mention the folded abysses of inland Asia, Pakistan, Afghanistan? There just weren't enough forces.

Goya let himself in through the lower door. They rose, but he motioned them down and climbed the aisle. “Just got off the horn to Oman.”

“General Leache?”

“His deputy. Said the phibron commander junked his plan and is reworking yours. He'll send a draft so we're all on the same page.” The commodore hitched up his trousers and smoothed his mustache. “So we're on the sidelines now, except for any involvement our PCs may have.
Cyclone
and
Firebolt
are under way to link up with
Shamal
. Anything else we should be doing?”

Dan couldn't think of anything. The approaching amphibious squadron commander would take charge now, carrying out the assault. The assault . . . he flashed on Oberg standing on the deck of the trawler, covered in blood, shaking a rifle and comparing the dead around him to fresh shit. There'd be more now, and they might include Oberg's team, and marines, and embassy personnel.

He hoped he hadn't missed anything, in the plan that was now only hours from launching men and metal at high velocity toward an inexorable execution.

 

HE and Monty and Kim hung in CACC, drinking coffee and watching the satellite feeds the Mountain's antennas pulled in. Finally he told them to chow down, clean up, get their heads down if possible. He shaved, then took his uniforms to the laundry to see if he could get service even though he wasn't embarked staff or ship's company. They said dry cleaning was no problem, but they washed only once a day.

Back in the CACC, smelling bad. Forcing himself to stay awake. Hour after hour went by with no word. Finally, late in the morning, he went back to his stateroom. Changed into PT gear and took his net bag down to the self-service washing machines.

While they were churning he jogged the flight deck, sweating in the dry heat, looking out over the blue-green basin. Past it sprawled the flat ocher and tan of the city, and beyond that the Martian wastes of the backcountry fading to distant hills backlighted as the sun reached its zenith. The flight deck radiated heat like a solar oven. At last he shambled to a stop, sweating rivers.

A seaman waxing the passageway stared. “You went
outside
, sir?” he
said, as if Dan had just taken a space walk. He leaned against the bulkhead, waiting for the dizziness to pass.

 

BACK at his stateroom a messenger from Radio stood at the door. Dan flipped open the aluminum clipboard with weary detachment. The icy conditioned air was a cold martini down the back of his sweat-soaked cotton T. He scanned the pages, absorbing acronyms and abbreviations that took years in the joint world to interpret.

It was from the Joint Chiefs, coordinated with State and approved by the secretary of defense. Navy and Marine forces currently en route to Ashaara would secure the U.S. embassy and evacuate nonessential personnel. But the core of the staff would remain, though the scene commander was directed to make preparations to evacuate them as well if conditions worsened.

A one-star Marine general would arrive shortly to stand up CTF 156, Joint Task Force Red Sea.

CTG 156.4—Goya—was assigned as Commander Maritime Security Group. He'd break his flag aboard
Oldendorf
and secure Ashaara's sea boundaries with the destroyer and his PCs, working with any remaining elements of the Ashaaran Coastal Defense Force.

The amphibious ready group commander aboard
Tarawa
was assigned as Commander, Amphibious Task Force, CTG 156.5. The marine colonel commanding her detachment would be the Commander, Landing Force, CTG 156.6. Eight paragraphs detailed the mission and rules of engagement, and attached a company of Army Guard civil affairs personnel, the only mention of any non-Navy forces, though by definition a “joint” task force integrated elements from several services.

Dan and his TAG staffers were assigned as special advisers to help stand up the task force.

CTF 156 was to support a humanitarian assistance mission to relieve famine in the city and backcountry, Operation Collateral Gratitude. Several paragraphs detailed the JTF's relationships with the other services and the interagency aspect—State, nongovernmental organizations, and a UN skeleton staff Dan assumed would fly in from New York.

He was rubbing his face, looking through blank eyes at a remembered map of Ashaara, when heels tapped in the passageway.

McCall looked exhausted; the collar of her khaki shirt was grimy. “Read it?”

“Just finished.” He initialed it. “I need a copy of that,” he told the radioman. “No, four. Bring 'em to CACC. I have to talk to the watch supervisor. We need to reconfigure to host a task force staff, right away.”

When he left, McCall said, “We're assigned to help stand up a task force. Unfortunately I don't have a good idea exactly how to go about that.”

“It means we have two hundred things to do somebody else should've done last week. Set up a teleconference with
Tarawa.
We sent them our plan; they sent us theirs; we need to smooth out any hard spots between the two and get this initial incursion rolling. Takeoff'll be soon—”

“Two hours.”

“We need
Cyclone
and
Firebolt
positioned as helo guards, in case of trouble en route. See if Geller got backup comms with the beach. Wurtz knows Building Twenty's complement and capabilities. He can take charge of reconfiguring the command and control setup here to support the JTF. I want you and Monty looking farther out. After the embassy's secure we've got to occupy the port, airfield, communications, water, power generation, hospitals. Control the infrastructure. Get somebody here from Treasury to find out where the governnment's money went. Find what leadership's left now the president and his cronies have decamped—”

He grimaced, mind outracing speech as he thought of all that had to be done, immediately, before a country descended into chaos. McCall rubbed her palms down her thighs.

The 1MC hissed. “COMMANDER LENSON, YOUR PRESENCE IS REQUESTED IN THE COMMODORE'S CABIN.”

“That's for you,” she said, smiling wanly. He smelled ginger perfume and perspiration and apple shampoo. Even grimy, she belonged on the big screen, not at a computer workstation. They were alone in the passageway. He fought a sudden impulse to take her in his arms.

He put his hands behind his back. “Ever worked hard before?”

“Now and then.”

“It won't hold a candle to this.”

She put out a hand, and he sucked in a breath, unsure where she'd touch him. She patted his arm. “A chance to make a difference.”

“Or wreck your career. This'll be the big time, Kim. The real deal.”

She pinched a fold of his soaked T between finger and thumb, held it out, then let it snap back. Said in that oh-so-soft Savannah drawl, “Commodore wants you.”

He took the hint, and ducked inside to change.

 

F
OR a long time she thinks she's in Paradise. Hauled up the cliff in a basket, she discovers a different world high on the mountain. She spends timeless days in an infirmary with rows of beds, empty except for her and a wrinkled granny who never stops talking, in a language Zeynaab doesn't know a word of. A woman in a cowled habit and leather belt with crosses plaited into it brings her meals but rarely speaks, and when she does her words sound twisted. Zeynaab understands but it's not how people speak in her village. The food's so good, milk and cream and cheese, that she eats too much and has to throw up into a brass basin the woman patiently holds, saying
“Bi-ism as-Salib”
each time Zeynaab retches. But then she eats more.

One day when her feet don't bleed anymore a girl comes for her. She's a few years older than Zeynaab. She tells her to be quiet and follow. As they leave they pass the woman who took care of her, and Zeynaab runs and hugs her legs through the robe. The woman smiles down sadly. She takes a cross on a chain from a shelf and fastens it around Zeynaab's neck. The girl pulls at Zeynaab again and she goes off, looking back with her thumb in her mouth.

She lives in a stone dormitory with bare wood floors. Thirty-three other girls live there too. Each morning, before dawn, a wooden bell rings. Everyone gets up in the dark and goes out under the stars or the fog to the assembly hall. They sit on benches along the walls while a very old woman in black prays for a very long time in that language Zeynaab doesn't understand. Then they go back to their dormitory and eat bread and milk. The smaller children are allowed to play then. At midday the bell rings again and they go to the hall for more long prayers. This time they eat there, at a children's table lower than everyone else's. This happens again in the evening, and then everyone has to go to bed.

She pieces together a vague idea of Saint Shenouda. That's what this place above the clouds is called. It was his picture on the pavement where she was lifted into the sky. There's another in the church where they go twice a week for long prayers. He lived centuries ago. The older girls say there are two places on the mountain, one for men, the other—the
deir
, the convent—for women. A lofty stone wall separates them. This explains why she never sees the boys from the truck. Another, even taller wall far down the mountain has protected the monastery from attack for a thousand years. The head of the nunnery is called Sister Abbess. Everyone, child or grown-up, has to do exactly as she says. The grown-up
ummina
, the nuns, live in cells. During the day everyone prays or weaves, or tends the vegetable plots around the buildings.

It's cooler than she's ever known, with low clouds that turn to mist as they approach the mountain, and different plants than she grew up with. Her village now seems more like a story someone told her than what life used to be.

Gradually as the months pass she understands more, but then all her understandings fall apart. The older girls tell her the
ummina
are Christians. That's why they have crosses tattooed on their wrists, and wear plaited leather, and make three hundred prostrations every day. Yet all the children are Muslim, except for a few who wear the crosses around their necks. Zeynaab loved her cross, but the girls say it's a sin for a Muslim to wear one. They take her to the outhouse and make her throw it into the hole. She weeps that night and when she wakes up and goes to the assembly hall and the nun from the infirmary sees her she smiles sadly and looks disappointed, but says nothing. Aside from blessing her when she threw up, Zeynaab's never actually heard her speak.

Zeynaab washes dishes in the kitchen. She's examined again in the infirmary, where they make her spread her legs and open her mouth, and poke things into her ears. There's a bakery, a printing press, a place where the nuns write and read, a place where they weave, a laundry. Outside the walls are more gardens, apple orchards, but not like those in her village. There are apples and pears and grapes. Barns with pigs—animals she's never seen before—and chickens, and cows that give the milk and cream and cheese. A few goats, not nearly as many as in the village. There are cats but no dogs.

One day the headmistress of the dormitory tells her she's old enough to go to school. Now she doesn't get to play. She sits at a long bench with the others and learns to write. She doesn't like to do this and one day she breaks her slate and throws it out the window.

The
ummina ra'isa
calls her in. Zeynaab sits straight, hands folded in
her lap. She's frightened of this woman, who's holy and eats little and wears the great
skema
over her shoulders and wrapped around her waist. But the abbess speaks gently. She says if Zeynaab can't read she will not understand the
qanun
or the Bible. Zeynaab says she doesn't care.

The abbess asks, Do you ever feel the presence of the Holy Spirit? She says no,
Tamauf.
The abbess asks if she wants to marry Christ one day and give her life to Him, like Saint Demiana? Zeynaab says no again. The abbess asks, then does she want to leave the mountain, when she's grown, and go out into the World? Zeynaab's thought about this. Bandits kill people down below. Governments burn villages and shoot mothers. So she says, No.

The abbess says she need not give her life to Christ, but if she stays, she must serve the
deir
by tending the cattle. These are placid creatures who spend most of their time in the long low shed. There are five cows and a rather unaggressive bull. She feeds and brushes them. Learns to milk and make butter and cheese. She shovels tons of manure. She works hard and says nothing. They tell her when she dies she'll be buried in the graveyard behind the church, whether she wears the cross or not.