The Crisis (43 page)

He thought again, but only fleetingly, about the producer's offer. But there were sharks in those waters too. All in all, he preferred the ones with gills.

An illuminated citadel rose from the sea. Every porthole blazed. Every deck light was on. They seemed to be slowly drifting to the right, as if the ship was under way. The swimmers were being set aft by a current that set toward the mouth of the sound. Teddy had anticipated this, and they slowly finned the last yards, black masks and snorkels invisible in the black water, and one by one reached up to rest a glove on the rough steel of the tanker's afterhull.

“Go,” Oberg muttered.

Kowacki sucked thorough breaths, flushing carbon dioxide from his bloodstream, and submerged. Teddy felt his belt for the backup. A tapered pine plug from
Shamal
's damage control stores. He doubled, pulling off his fins and lashing them over his back. A few yards forward, below the waterline, the other SEAL would be feeling across the underbody. Finding, at last, the intake for the ship's auxiliary generator.

A hoarse inhalation as Kowacki resurfaced. A wordless nod. Teddy pulled his carbine around and reseated the magazine. He torqued the suppressor to make sure it was tight. A little water in it actually made the suppressor work better. On the other hand, a team guy had once had one blow off the end of his rifle, pretty much finishing off staying covert. One of those lessons passed on in bars. The others busied themselves, hugging the shadows, avoiding the light from the portholes.

It dimmed. It flickered, then died. Even down here, they heard distant shouts of dismay.

Electricity perked in Teddy's blood. He pushed Kaulukukui's meaty
shoulder.
Go
. An arm held aloft a device like the Statue of Liberty's torch. It recoiled, with the twang of a stout spring.

A thunk above them as the plastic-padded grapnel hit steel. Teddy was oriented, the green lit circle of his night sight steady on the line the deck made against the sky. If anyone heard the hook hit, and looked over the side, he wouldn't live to yell.

But no one came, and a black bulk heaved itself out of the water and began muscling up the line. Sumo always managed to talk himself into going first. Or if he couldn't, you'd find him there anyway, his big mitt gently maneuvering the man in front of him out of the way. Teddy had long since given up trying to get ahead of him, even when he was team leader.

Four minutes later, breathing harder than a thirty-foot climb in full gear should have warranted, Teddy crouched aft of the deck house. The starlight was bright enough to see by. The afterdeck was only big enough for the four of them and the piping of the stern manifold valves. A deck-mounted cargo pump occupied a semienclosed compartment to port. The deck house went all the way across the beam, which meant a cavern-like breaker to starboard was the only way forward and up.

He unleashed the team with a hand signal. Whacker and Bitch Dog would head around the main deck, taking out sentries, then do a quick, violent entry to the mess decks. He didn't need anyone in the engine spaces;
Tahia
's own engineers were in charge down there; Suleyman's men had been content to let them provide power, fresh water, even air-conditioning.

He and Sumo were going after Suleyman. If something went wrong, if some of the pirates held out in an isolated compartment, their leader might be a bargaining chip.

So far they still had surprise. He'd been afraid a backup generator might kick in, but all the lights stayed off. Combat booties squishing, they stopped at an open door. Beyond lay blackness. Teddy indicated the high side; Kaulukukui pointed low. They sliced the pie, bulled in, and swept the dark.

“Night viz,” Teddy whispered, so low he could barely hear his own voice. A crackle in the dark, though, showed Sumo had heard.

The goggles lit a green depthless world where stray gleams glared like lighthouses. The effect was uncanny. He could see, though only in a narrow cone, and only with his right eye. Fortunately it was his dominant one, so he kept it to his rifle.

They didn't meet anyone until the 02 level, where they found a body facedown in a pool of blood. He knelt. The blood was warm-fresh. He started to turn it over, then left it as Kaulukukui hissed, “Up here.”

The cabin where Suleyman had held court was empty. The safe was open and another body lay on the floor here. Even in the green shadows Teddy recognized him.

It was the captain. Someone had been at him with a knife.

He couldn't help shivering. He turned for the door. “Mess deck,” he muttered. “And we go in full auto.”

 

BUT there was no one in the mess. At least, no one alive.

The hostages lay under the tables, atop them, wherever their final moment had found them. No smell of powder, but lots of shit and blood, sprayed over the ice cream maker, the racks of cheap dishes, the serving line. Arms, hunks of flesh, severed heads.

“Machetes,” Kowacki murmured as he crouched with finger carefully lifted from the carbine's trigger. “Like in Kenya.”

“Anybody on deck, Whacker?”

“No sentries. Nobody.”

“Nobody on the bridge either.” Teddy saw a hand move, and went to the body. But it had been an involuntary spasm, the slow drawing up of an arm. He swallowed. “Okay, search this fucking ship.”

They assembled fifteen minutes later on the main deck.
Shamal
swung to her anchor two hundred yards distant. The moon lofted over the silvery beach, glimmering in the sound. Teddy looked shoreward. Half a mile? He saw neither motion nor light. It was as if they'd never been here.

Except for the dead.

“Where the fuck did they go?” said Arkin. “They
swam
?”

“We did,” said Kaulukukui, just as low. “Why'd we think they couldn't?”

Kowacki murmured, “Fuck. Fuck.”

Teddy said nothing. Just stood with his shooting gloves on the rail and his head down, telling himself it hadn't been his fault. It was the Dutch, for trying to get cute with the ransom. Koos and Con's, for not staying to make sure the hostages were released. Geller's, for not letting him assault earlier.

But inside, he knew it wasn't.

The hostages would still be alive, if he'd been more aggressive.

A
ISHA had prepared for this meeting, but not well enough. She wasn't ready for ten sickening hours into the southern wastes, along the worst roads she'd ever driven. Nor for the dusty heat. Nor the slovenly, stinking men who avoided her eyes as they muttered things she couldn't make out, as they avoided her touch and even her shadow.

Nor above all for the emaciated, listless children who scrambled slowly to surround the white GMC and its GrayWolf escort vehicles, begging in soft hopeless voices whenever the caravan pulled over to debate the map or take a pee break.

They'd met the Waleeli escorts on a shell-crumbled corner in Uri'yah. The town might once have been pretty, with the remains of shops and houses, sagging fences around what once had been gardens, a large cemetery on its outskirts. Now it was a ghost, the houses dead sockets, the withered gardens cut with slit trenches, the few inhabitants staggering husks. It marked the farthest the Waleeli forces had gotten in the face of a U.S. ultimatum: Stay on their side of a line five kilometers to the north, or be bombed.

“Stay with the vehicle, please, Agent Ar-Rahim.”

Whalen, the hard-ass GrayWolf squad leader, barking his requests like orders. Embassy personnel no longer had Marine escorts. The PMCs—private military contractors—accompanied them everywhere. She liked neither his presence nor his tone. But protesting had gotten her nowhere. Peyster insisted anyone on State business had to be accompanied by bodyguards outside the compound, and wear a vest. She snapped, “I'm taking a leak, all right?”

“Just stay in sight.”

She thought an unpleasant image as she searched for a corner to lift her abaya. But one boy, with an enormous hole in his face that he presented shamelessly, kept trotting alongside, hands outstretched. At last
a Waleeli smashed him aside with a buttstroke, after which she found privacy behind a wrecked truck.

Dust, everywhere. Her lungs hurt with each breath. She blew her nose and wiped reddened eyes. Coughed, until the choking passed. Then they climbed back into the vans for the last leg.

Trying not to fidget, she said a du'a to quell her nerves.

She was on her way to meet the mysterious man of the desert. General Al-Khasmi—which Nuura said meant “the Pruner” or “the Orcharder” in southern dialect—had emerged from obscurity to lead the mobile militia that'd defeated a small Governing Council force at Uri'yah. She'd tried a documentation build, but as happened so often here, there was no official paper, no computer hits, and verbal accounts conflicted. Some said he was a former imam, a madrassa student turned warrior. Others, a brigand and smuggler who'd made his bones in the qat trade. One summary suggested he had links to Iran. The one thing all agreed on was that he was no more than twenty-five.

None of which prepared her for the bare-chested man in camo trousers who sat under a blue UNHCR tarp stretched tent-style over a frame of thornbushes.

He
was
very young, with handsome features except for an ugly swelling that marred the lower jaw. The holes the thorns punched through the plastic sprayed beads of sunlight over his dark face. The GrayWolf uniforms—Whalen had insisted on clearing the area before letting her “exit the vehicle”—parted reluctantly as she advanced. They faced several ragged Ashaaran youths with the ubiquitous AK-47s.

Beside Al-Khasmi another young man, tall, nervous-looking, with eyes red as stoplights and a qat lump in his cheek big enough to choke a goat, handed him a faded shirt as she came up. Pulling it on, he motioned to the carpet before them.

Peyster had tried to make her use a male translator, but after trying him, she'd gone back to Nuura. Faced with a male, Ashaarans talked to him, ignoring her entirely. Nuura settled her swollen belly awkwardly. She was very close to term. Maybe she shouldn't have brought her. Flies buzzed in tight circles, undeterred by the OFF! Deep Woods she'd soaked her clothing in.

She was here to try to make a deal. The poorest quarter of the Old City had erupted into riots after the assassination of a local cleric. ADA forces, though grandiloquently titled the National Army of Ashaara, could keep order only within about a mile of the Palais du Président. Abdullahi Assad still defended his stronghold in the southern and eastern neighborhoods of Ashaara City, while Islamic elements, apparently allied with this young man, were gaining strength in the hinterlands.

She'd pushed back against State's assumption that an Islamist was automatically an enemy. Peyster had been dismissive when she'd suggested sounding out Al-Khasmi. “Another tinpot warlord,” he'd snorted. “Cut off his supplies and he'll wither. If that doesn't work, Ahearn can take him out with an air strike.”

He might be a warlord. But she wasn't so sure he was a “tinpot,” whatever that was. A nobody months ago, he now controlled the southern mountains, and there were reports of banditry under green-and-black banners in the west, heretofore solid Assad territory. She wanted to give him a chance to come in from the cold.

She started in Arabic, but didn't offer her hand.
“Assalam aleikum.”

He half smiled.
“Tafuddal,”
he said, waving again at the carpet, and she settled herself, careful to stay modest as she shook out her skirts.

“Ismee Ar-Rahim. Ana min America.”

He looked puzzled; shook his head. Nuura translated into lilting Ashaaran, and he spoke at length. When he was done she relayed, “He says he does not speak Arabic well. He is not educated. He has never met an American who wore abaya.”

“Tell him I'm Muslim.” She watched his frown.

“What is your lineage?”

This was the typical greeting in this part of Africa, and she made the best answer she could. His frown grew deeper, as if everything she told him pleased him less.

“He wants to know if you will have food.”

“I'll have a bite with him.”

He called and a woman emerged from a tent carrying a large copper pan. Aisha gave her a close examination, surprised to see another woman here. She was tall, perhaps even pretty under full
hijab
. Only her eyes showed, but in a microsecond's flash they seemed to take in everything. Then she was gone, back to the tent.

The pan was filled with a lumpy yellow paste, like her mother's corn muffin dough before it was baked. The first sweet taste told her what it was. World Food Organization corn-soya blend. Along with long-grain rice, cooking oil, and beans, CSB made up most of the aid distributed in the camps.

An insult, and not a subtle one. He was serving her the very food he'd stolen. Her jaws stopped. How to respond? He was waiting for her reaction. Yes, he'd have been handsome, before whatever had torn up the side of his face. For a moment his features tugged at her memory.

“He wants to know, do you enjoy it.”

“It is excellent in taste and very nutritious. It would make a good meal for starving children.”

“He says it builds strong soldiers as well.”

She thought they came out of that exchange even. But obviously guilt wasn't going to work. She took another bite before he called again and the woman brought
injera
bread, dates, durra, and what Nuura whispered was camels' humps, a delicacy. Well, perhaps she ought to make allowances. He
was
sitting down with her. Treating her on an equal basis.

She wiped her mouth, remembering not to use her left hand. The dusty wind rattled the tarp with a sound like falling leaves. Suddenly she remembered Central Park, holding her father's hand as the white passersby stared. How she'd hated them . . . “Try to explain something to him. Tell him: The Americans are not necessarily your enemies.”