Sometimes in the early morning the sea, caught sleeping and lax, is a temple of light, as lucid and shining as a gem. At 0630 a light wind played upon the sunlit waves, now and then blowing a few drops of spray from their crests, but not enough to raise the general humidity. In the relative cool before the heat would press down, Athena steamed toward a point two thousand yards off l’Étoile’s starboard beam. Velez arrived on the bridge with yet another message he had faithfully not read. General quarters had been called at 0600, and the ship was ready for battle, although in the circumstances battle seemed less than likely. The weapons were manned and, arrayed along the port side, the SEALs had their bipod-supported rifles at the ready.
Rensselaer unfolded and read the message. “Await French forces. Per direct presidential order, Athena is expressly forbidden to fire upon or board l’Étoile. Detailed clarification forthcoming pending decision of National Security Council. Stand by.” He put this, like the previous messages, into his pocket for later destruction so as to make sure no one aboard would be tied to his decisions.
As Athena lay motionless at a distance from l’Étoile, even with high magnification no activity was visible on the passenger ship. The skiffs had disappeared from l’Étoile’s stern tow, and Athena’s officers presumed that one or more of these would be used to ferry the hostages.
“Why would they do this,” Movius asked, “unless it’s a trap?”
“Because these ten people will eventually speak to the press. ISIS wants the story to get out. On the other hand, if one of those skiffs is packed with explosives it could be the end of us. Everything has to be at the ready, including the big gun.”
“Even if it kills the hostages?”
“They’d die anyway. We’ll stop the skiffs at two hundred yards and send out the whaleboat to deal with one skiff at a time, and keep our snipers focused on the terrorists. Everyone going out has volunteered. ISIS, too, will have their weapons trained—a Mexican standoff.”
“Why didn’t you include me in making this plan?” Movius asked.
“You were sleeping, and I wanted you fresh. Would you suggest any changes?”
“I concur with every element, but it’s dangerous. For the hostages, for the whaleboat crew, and the ship. And I’d have liked to have been the operational commander.”
“I want you here, ready on the order to move us out as fast as possible.”
Rensselaer then spoke into his sound talker. “If I give the order to fire, and only if I give the order to fire, the big gun, the fifties, and the port mini will open up upon a skiff I identify if it suddenly accelerates, has failed to stop, and/or is nearest Athena. Again, fire only upon my command.” He thought he was finished, but then he said, “And remember the Cole.”
They waited. 0700 passed, 0715, 0730. The sun had long risen on their stern, and with the now diminished breeze it was hot enough that everyone was already dripping wet in their helmets and body armor. The gunners had towels with which to wipe near their eyes so that sweat wouldn’t sting and blind. The stocks and grips of the SEALs’ rifles grew wet in their grasps. But everyone held his position, and the cook brought bottles of chilled water, warning each man not to toss the empties overboard, a strange concern given the circumstances, even if garbage floating on the sea is especially ugly.
As noted in the logs, at 0742 the prow of a skiff cleared l’Étoile’s stern, followed seconds later by the appearance of two other skiffs rounding the bow. They oriented toward Athena and moved slowly over pleasantly undulating waves with neither chop nor spray. Two of the skiffs were buff-colored except where they were worn white at the gunwales. The third was a cross between terra-cotta and red. They moved in unison, three abreast, and looked like the ship-shaped blocks of a war-college exercise in the days before computers.
Rensselaer, Movius, and Holworthy studied this little flotilla through stabilized binoculars. As the skiffs got closer it became clear that each of them held three hostages and four terrorists. Each hostage stood in front of a terrorist, who was belted at the chest and waist to her or him—five women and four men. Another terrorist piloted the skiff at the stern, and all the terrorists had AK-47s.
The whaleboat was deployed from Athena’s starboard side. Slowly and non-provocatively, it rounded Athena’s stern, heading toward the skiffs.
“I don’t get it, XO,” Rensselaer said, worried. “Why are the hostages deployed as shields? They know that we understand that if we blew their guys out of the water they would massacre the captives on l’Étoile.”
“Maybe they’re going to fire on us, or rush us like the Cole, and they want human shields so we don’t pick them off.”
“It doesn’t make sense. The guys running the boats aren’t shielded. I don’t want to hit the hostages, but I don’t want to be hit.” He went on the hailer. “Approaching boats, stop at two hundred yards.” Then he said it in Arabic, using meters, and again in English, using meters.
“XO, are we set to move out at maximum acceleration?”
“On the order, sir.”
At two hundred yards, the skiffs cut their engines—they had under-stood—but they glided another fifty yards or so before they stopped. The whaleboat approached very slowly. Rensselaer briefly scanned it before slewing quickly back to the skiffs. Watching the skiffs intently, he spoke to Movius. “Why is Velez in the whaleboat?”
“He volunteered.”
“He was supposed to man COMMS.”
“His striker volunteered, Ivoire, but he’s just a kid, so Velez took his place.”
“I understand, but Ivoire isn’t as skilled, and I don’t like the fact that Velez is in danger.
Half the crew are just kids.”
“I know.”
Reacting to what he saw beginning to happen on the water, Rensselaer ordered over the hailer, “Whaleboat, hold position. Boats from l’Étoile, does anyone speak English?”
No reply came from the boats. Lined up abreast, with three sets of hostages belted to terrorists standing motionlessly and saying nothing. Close up, the terrorists looked both bizarre and threatening even in wooden boats with outboard motors, no armor, no weapons to speak of, and the guns of a United States warship trained upon them.
“Speak up,” Rensselaer said, his words blasting across the water and carried by the wind.
In the same instant, someone in the whaleboat shouted over the radio, “RPG!” The nine men behind the human shields lifted RPGs from behind them. The whaleboat crew had seen the pathos of the hostages, who were pained such that they seemed to know they were going to die. Some of the women cried. Some had a beatific look, as if, in their last moments, they were bathed in love. And some were defiant and angry. There is no single way to die.
Shouldering the RPGs, all the terrorists aimed for the bridge. The second the whaleboat’s warning had been assimilated, Rensselaer and Movius simultaneously ordered the helmsman to make flank speed, and Athena began to move.
In perhaps the quickest, most sorrowful decision he had made in his life, Rensselaer ordered, “Snipers take your shots.” As Athena leapt forward, shots rang out. Three of the RPG-wielding terrorists were hit, falling and taking their hostages down with them. One of them pulled the trigger on his launcher as he went down. The flash of the rocket exhaust burned him and his captive and started a fire in the skiff, and the grenade went straight up.
To the deep, deep, everlasting regret of the shooters, the hostages were hit as two of the terrorists were killed. But one terrorist remained standing, although the woman to whom he was tied slumped almost enough to drag him down.
Before Athena drew out of the 150-yard effective range of the RPGs, five of them—anti-tank, armor-piercing, rocket-propelled grenades—were launched, not counting the one that went straight up. Three were wild, missing the ship entirely. One hit the lifelines between the rear superstructure and the RHIB, severing a cable on each side and exploding over the sea to starboard. But one made a direct hit, piercing the superstructure at COMMS and, as it was designed to do, bursting a millisecond after.
Athena then passed out of range, and on full power the whaleboat turned away from the skiffs. The terrorists held their AKs at the heads of the remaining hostages, and, faster than they had come, they sped back toward l’Étoile.
Athena came about to pick up the whaleboat as damage-control parties rushed in their fire suits and breathing apparatuses to the conflagration spreading from COMMS. All the electronics and hot electrical lines meant that the firefighters were restricted to halon and foam. The fire was intense enough to melt the aluminum bulkheads that enclosed COMMS, which meant that it was more than 650° Fahrenheit. Probably much more, and given that aluminum conducts heat at four times the rate of steel, to hold such a high temperature while the heat was rapidly conducted away, the source had to be significantly hotter. And the spectacular conductivity meant that the fire was quickly spreading to other compartments.
Pisecki calmly ran damage control, and when he had ordered all his parties to the right places he left his post and went to lead. Knowing that the whaleboat would have no problem catching up, Rensselaer ordered Athena to run with the wind at wind speed so as to deprive the fire of additional draft.
Black smoke and sheets of orange flame shot from the superstructure as the fire party confronted the blazes directly. After the exhalation bursts of halon and foam, white dust spread all over the ship. Commands and reports came as calmly as charges into the fire were fast and combative. In fifteen minutes, the flames were no more, but an acrid chemical smell would linger for the rest of the deployment.
While the captain stayed on the bridge, the XO went to report damage. Movius’s own cabin was destroyed, as was Rensselaer’s clothes compartment, which abutted it, and COMMS was gone. “Ivoire is dead,” Movius reported. “He’s unrecognizable. There’s nothing left of COMMS. It’s all melted. The deck plates are covered with solidified metal, and plastic that’s still bubbling.”
“What’s left?” Rensselaer asked.
“There’s nothing. I mean nothing.”
“Even to salvage?”
Movius looked around. “Some steel racks, now bent, but everything else melted and disintegrated.”
As Rensselaer watched the skiffs disappear behind l’Étoile, trying not to be dispirited, he said, “Get Seaman Ivoire into a body bag. We’ll do our best to bury him decently when we get a chance.
“Chief Pisecki.” There was no immediate answer. “Chief.”
“Sir.”
“Bring in the whaleboat.”
“I’m already at the davits, sir.”
*
The death of Ivoire hit the Athena harder than would have the loss of any member of the crew—Movius, Rensselaer, or even Pisecki, who was the most fatherly to the young. Only when Ivoire was gone did everyone understand how much it had been their honor and responsibility to protect him. They had been not as sharply aware of this while he lived, though they did sense that somehow they had formed a ring around him, happy that he was in the center. What they had thought of as merely liking him and enjoying his presence was something else. It was that in his presence they felt lightness and joy. The quality to which they had responded was holiness.
Whether he was aware of this or not, and no one could venture more than a guess, he never showed that he was, or used his effect on others to exercise any kind of power, or to capitalize on the regard in which he was held.
He was about thirty, and had been in the Navy for only a few years. From the low country of South Carolina, he had gone to Catholic schools and Georgetown. Though he easily could have been an officer, he chose not to be, and was never unhappy about being subordinate. Among other things, without exception, everyone with authority over him had known immediately that in the higher and more permanent order of things he was in fact superior. He had the quality of making hierarchy disappear—something that even in the Navy was deeply respected.
Once, Ivoire had just entered the mess deck when another young Southerner, who was white, was saying, “Well, that’s nothing. I was on an LPH port visit to Kingston, and they got all the Afro-Americans out on deck so the Afro-Americans onshore watching would say, ‘Hey! America’s just like us!’”
“Tommy,” one of his friends said—they had all seemed strangely frozen, and he had wondered why. “Tommy?” He cleared his throat.
Tommy turned around, and there was Ivoire, a foot and a half away from him. Tommy reddened with embarrassment and shame. When Ivoire gestured to him to come closer, Tommy thought he was going to be punched, and he would have accepted it. But Ivoire just said, “Tommy, the ‘Afro-Americans’ onshore were actually Afro-Jamaicans.” Then he smiled, and he put his arms around Tommy, and any racial prejudice that might have been hanging around in Tommy just disappeared, at least at that moment. You could feel it, almost see it, part from him and fly away. Later, Tommy had said, “When he did that . . . when he did that . . .” and was unable to go on. Ivoire was the heart of the ship.
They assembled at the bow, the most unencumbered space on deck because in high seas water would have to wash over it with the least obstruction. Some stood dangerously near or even straddled over the anchor chains. Because every man was still vibrating from the fight and making ready to fight again, the ceremony had to be short.
The captain spoke: “Those of you who may not have known before have learned on this deployment how, when familiar with and accepting the prospect of one’s own death, feeling is cut off when others die. We think, well, that’s our job, too. When the soldier is old and many years have passed, deep upwellings of emotion will come, but not now. Now we look on, without reflection or broken hearts, and we keep going. There’s satisfaction in that, and also honor to the fallen.
“In time, everyone is forgotten. You’re young now, but your body will fail. You’ll be pushed out by those who arise in your place. Fashions will appear that you’ll neither understand nor countenance. All currencies and standards will change. As others are enmeshed in the struggles of the world, you’ll be thinking of the silence amid the stars. Ivoire is there now. He was our brother. We loved him.”
Rensselaer then read the Lord’s Prayer, and what was left of Ivoire’s body, encased in vinyl and wrapped in the flag, was committed to the sea. By custom, the flag remained, and was carefully folded.
The sea there was three miles deep. As his body fell into the depths, within sight of l’Étoile and in waters where the fourth battle had unfolded, Athena realized belatedly, though perhaps not in full, what she had lost, and consonant with her new blackened and torn port side, she was a different ship, and that much farther from home. The crew was now not merely comfortable with death and expecting it, but, although perhaps inexplicably to some at a far remove, comfortable in seeking it.
*
“I was supposed to have stayed in COMMS but I didn’t want Ivoire to go in the whaleboat,” Velez told the captain. “It should have been me.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“It’ll be with me for the rest of my life.”
“For some things there’s no cure. You just live with them, that’s all. What have we got in COMMS after the damage?”
Before Velez could answer, the port lookout reported from the bridge wing that l’Étoile was getting up a head of steam. Rensselaer acknowledged and turned back to Velez.
“We’ve got nothing, sir. No links, no transmission, no reception. The only thing that’s left are the five hand-helds because they were with the SEALs. That’s it.”
“Their sat-phones?”
“The sat-phones were charging in COMMS. They’re gone.”
“You can’t fix them? Just one?”
“You can’t even see them.”
“What about COMMS on the bridge?”
“Back-shorted. They’re more or less melted inside.”
“Can you construct something?”
“Maybe an orange juice can and a string. That’s about it. You’d need many factories to make a piece of equipment that can do the job of what we lost. Sorry.”
“So, apart from the hand-helds. . . .”
“They have maybe a few hundred miles range in absolutely ideal conditions.”
“Sir,” the OOD said, “l’Étoile is moving west and increasing speed.”
“Keeping in mind the height of l’Étoile’s mast, we’ll follow from beyond the horizon, tracking the wake in daylight and following the disturbance of bioluminescence at night. I’ll be in the wardroom. Mr. Holt has the con.”
*
Aboard l’Étoile, believing that with their little wooden fishing skiffs they had won a naval victory against an American warship, the terrorists were as elated as the hostages were downcast. To cast them down further, purely out of malice, Hadawi seized a middle-aged woman from among them, forced her to kneel, and, as she cried, decapitated her.
They wanted to inflict as much suffering and terror as they could. They didn’t fully indulge their imaginations and enjoyments and massacre everyone, only because they were not ready to publish to the world until they had taken the hostages inland among the wastes and crags of the Somalian desert, and because they were preoccupied with controlling l’Étoile and fending off an assault—though not from Athena, which they had written off.
It was true that after taking so many hits Athena now had neither spit nor polish. She was blackened and stained with oil smoke and the smoke from her own fire in COMMS. The window glass and frame that had killed Josephson was replaced with plywood, which gave Athena the air of an abandoned tenement. Salt air had already begun to rust the scars on the steel hull where shrapnel from Sahand had stripped the paint. The superstructure was punched with holes and stove-in at COMMS, where a round opening gaped. Under the waterline, she was patched, and the national ensign was in shreds. Rensselaer kept it flying. He could have replaced it, but he and the crew loved and respected it too much to betray it on account of the damage it had suffered as they had fought under it.
Despite sinking the Sahand—which may have been the most important single action of the war, perhaps saving the carriers in the Arabian Sea off Iran, in a battle no one would have thought Athena could win—Rensselaer counted himself a failure. He suspected that unless Athena was withdrawn, much fighting and dying remained, and as Athena was the only American warship in the area, he doubted she would be pulled out. He had lost three of a crew of less than thirty, and although he had been forbidden to board l’Étoile, he could not foresee abandoning so many innocents to their deaths. Any effort to save them might mean a costly, cross-deck battle as of old.
In that circumstance, he would lose many good men. Whatever his own fate, by disobeying direct and emphatic orders he would be held responsible for, and indeed would be responsible for, the deaths among his own men and the hostages executed in the assault or killed in cross-fire. Should Athena assault l’Étoile, his only honorable way out after having done his utmost to keep the casualties down and save the hostages would be to be among those killed.
Waiting for Movius and Holworthy in the silence of the wardroom, he rested his hand on the highly polished table and pictured himself in the grave or in the deep, as the world, and Katy, too, carried on without him. When those who had known him were themselves forgotten, his existence would be unregistered except in a few strokes of ink here and there, which meant nothing to anyone and upon which, with no reason to linger, no one would. The only thing left, the only worthwhile thing at all, since the beginning and all the way to the end, was to love, and to do right.
Movius and Holworthy arrived and took their seats. They knew messages they had not seen had come in. These would be the only armature for sound recommendations in regard to what might lie ahead.
“What are our orders, sir?” Movius asked. “Everyone’s on edge.”
“XO,” Rensselaer said, “I’ll be quite surprised if we ever get back to normal.”
“What are our orders, sir?” Holworthy asked, his skepticism in regard to Rensselaer having returned—despite the action Holworthy had relished—because he knew that Rensselaer was concealing the messages.
If Rensselaer told them, they could be held to account, so he didn’t. He suspected that if it came to it they and the rest of Athena’s crew, like him, would choose to disobey. They had seen the atrocities on l’Étoile, and they were good men. “Our orders,” he said, “are to await orders.”
“And since we cannot receive orders . . . ?” Movius asked.
“We proceed according to discretion.”
“Whose discretion?” Holworthy asked.
“Mine. I want your advice, but the decisions are mine alone. Until Marconi, that’s the way it used to be. The Navy’s traditions and command structures were designed for exactly the kind of situation in which we find ourselves now. Those traditions should see us through. Although we don’t know if aboard l’Étoile they’re doing what they promised, we have to figure that every hour we lose one and perhaps more. Before the French get here a hundred will have been murdered. Buck extrapolated l’Étoile’s course and speed, and if that holds, they might make landfall and the hostages might be taken inland in twenty hours or less.”
“Why would they do that when they have them on the ship, where they can better see what’s coming?” Holworthy challenged.
“Because on land they can disperse them, disappear, and elongate the crisis. If they’re all together on the ship, one assault and it’s done, and perhaps many of the hostages would be saved. That’s what I’d do were I in their place—take them into the mountains and stretch the executions out for months, to keep the whole world horrified and helpless.”
“We’d send in teams to stop them.”
“If we could find them in however many groups they might splinter. And everything’s in the Gulf now, so it would be late, or never.”
“It would be easier for us on land, until they were divided up, anyway,” Holworthy concluded. “But meanwhile, we lose twenty hostages?”
“If we go in now,” Movius said—Rensselaer had long before come to the same conclusion—“we could lose them all.”
“So we let the twenty go,” Holworthy said, numbed and resigned.
“We do,” Rensselaer confirmed, his tone the same.
“What if they change course, or go dead in the water again?” Movius asked.
Rensselaer answered, “At that point we might have to go in.”
“It’s going to be a very hard twenty hours, sir,” Holworthy said.
“It is.”
“I can speak for the crew, I think,” Movius said. “I’ve talked to a lot of them individually, I’ve heard them talking, and I’ve spoken to the chiefs. After what we saw, they want to fight. It’s not that they’re angry. Yeah, they’re angry, but it’s deeper than that. Anger dissipates. They’re beyond anger.”
Rensselaer nodded in agreement, but, still, he was almost overcome by the crosscurrents of responsibility and consequence. Attempting to rescue the hostages might doom them all and many of his men. Forgoing the attempt might—it was likely—doom them all and leave a scar for life upon everyone on Athena. Disobeying the sense of the order, if not its explicit command, would mean his disgrace. That, however, would pale in regard to the disgrace of watching hundreds of people led to slaughter. Although concealing the orders from everyone would protect them from courts-martial and even reprimand, acting would expose them to the risk of dying.
He understood simultaneously the burden of high command and how that burden could be borne only by distance from both the situation and its consequences. This was a luxury the CNO, the SECNAV, the Secretary of Defense, and the president—insulated by stages, dealing with matters of flesh and blood translated through many steps into abstractions—had to have so as to enable such decisions as now fell to Rensselaer without the slightest luxury of separation.
“If they hold their course,” he said, “we’ll pretty much know where they’ll make landfall. In that case, we can put extra fuel in the RHIB and do a covert reconnaissance out ahead of them. Does that seem sound to you?” he asked Holworthy.
“That sounds just right to me. They’ve had the initiative up ’til now, and that’s been hard to bear. It’s time we took it back.”
“Then make your preparations.”
*
With l’Étoile dead in the water, even deep below decks it was possible to hear the staccato tapping of automatic weapons fire, screams from above, and the distant, muffled thud of RPGs. As of yet, no one had set foot in the short hall off of which the dressing and electrical rooms were arrayed. Though they might be found at any moment, as the hours dragged on and nothing happened, Martin and Petra felt more secure.
The last meal they had had was far more salty than what they were used to, which made them correspondingly thirsty. In their confined space, it didn’t take long for them to see a little sign above the tap, which said, “Non-Potable Water.” Unlike what was supplied to the passengers, it was saltwater with a taste of petrochemicals, as were the water in the tub and the line that fed the toilet. They had to drink, and they had only Champagne.
“We wouldn’t be at our best if they did find us, would we?” Martin asked. “I’m so thirsty I couldn’t take just a sip, believe me. And if they saw even the empty bottle, being Islamist terrorists, it probably wouldn’t be very much to our credit.”
“It would be more dangerous to go out again,” Petra said. “Is there a high water content in cheese?” Then she said, “That’s stupid.”
Because they were somewhat punchy, this made them laugh, suppressedly.
“Petra, if we don’t drink, the dehydration will make us drunker and weaker than if we do. I should go out.”
“No, don’t. We may die anyway, so why not die with Champagne while it’s still reasonably cold?”
“After a moment’s consideration and the exchange of exactly similar, sad, and yet defiant looks, he popped the cork. As the mist from the bottleneck settled, they listened hard. Nothing. And then they drank. They were so thirsty they drank the Champagne like water, and it was a magnum. Soon extremely relaxed, they lost their fear, and between the two of them it didn’t take long at all to finish the bottle. It was a Jean Lallement, a small and little-known house but a most excellent Champagne, and it completely did them in.
*
Many decks above them in the main salon, the terror had not subsided, especially as no one had been properly fed.
Not long after l’Étoile had steamed away from what Hadawi took to be the incapacitated Athena, a sense of triumph spread among his troops. They had succeeded, the world would know, and they held the upper hand over the paralyzed great powers. This was unfortunate and tragic for the younger women among the captives, especially the six French lycéennes. For they and women who seemed under forty were separated from the rest and herded into the bar. The doors were shut, and then, by rank order, Hadawi’s soldiers chose the women they wanted.
Somehow, almost inconceivably, Madame Eugénie had blended in with her girls and moved with them to the bar. Hadawi’s men thought it amusing. When the first of her trembling girls was chosen, Madame moved between her and the man who had selected her. “Non!” At first, he laughed. Then, in one quick movement, like a boxer, he swung the butt of his rifle at her head, felling her instantly. He took the girl, and the others took the other five, Sophie last, perhaps because of her braces.
All the women were forced into individual cabins. The young and the old, the obvious virgins prized not for their youth, delicacy, and innocence but merely because in some ancient and obscene code virginity itself was seen through a horribly distorted lens as a reflection of the quality of the man who violated it.
The other passengers well understood what was happening. Some were close enough to the accommodation corridors to hear the pleadings, screams, and sobs. These women and girls were variously wives, girlfriends, mothers, and daughters. The terror they had felt was now replaced by a deep, all-encompassing blackness.
*
On the lower deck that ran almost the whole length of the ship, and which, unlike the areas accessible to passengers, was austere—no wood paneling, carpeting, incandescent lighting, or paintings, as on the upper decks—Martin and Petra were recklessly drunk, and, like all drunks, spoke more loudly than was necessary.
“I have a theory,” Martin said.
“What’s your theory?” Just saying this gave Petra pleasure, and it shone from her blue eyes.
“My theory is that alcohol, whatever it does—and I know what it does, chemically, biochemically, sort of, as much as can be known about the brain and all that: I’m a chemist—has an effect beyond what science can show.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes.”
“And what is that?”
“I think—and it may not really be think, but sense—that alcohol cancels out the learned.” He pronounced this as “learned,” when he meant only learned.
“You mean people?” she asked, wrinkling up her nose and squinting in disdain, because of the way he had said the word.
“No, I mean the things we have to learn so as to exist in the material world. As with drugs, canceling that out gives a glimpse of the spiritual world. Of course, that’s a bad idea in the material world—to which we’re—you could say confined, limited, sentenced—because it’s so unhealthy, and because you can’t bring anything back from it into the sober world. But it’s true, and it makes death acceptable because it shows you what’s beyond.”
“It does.”
“It does. But I don’t recommend it.”
“Indeed. We don’t live that way.”
“We don’t. Why would we?”
“We wouldn’t. Why should we?”
“We shouldn’t.”
“But I must say that it makes sex more spiritual even if annoyingly anorgasmic,” Martin said.
“Not for me.”
“I know. It also means that, though I’m impaired, I’m going out, because I know that death is one with life.”
“I know. It also means that I’m going with you.”
“No. That’s too much.”
“I see,” she said, “I do. I wouldn’t, otherwise, but now I’m so tolerant.”
“I’ll go. And I won’t be afraid. I have a connection to the eternal, to God. I can’t lose.” He was very drunk.
It never would’ve happened without the magnum of Champagne, but he left, and the door clicked shut. He was fearless, and she feared nothing. And he was angry at being a Jew, 1942-style, but he was also perfectly confident that he could take down any enemy—Nazis, Hitler himself, anyone.
He went back to the huge, multipart, empty, industrial kitchen, hoping to encounter a hijacker. But he didn’t. In complete relaxation and delight, he assembled a stock of foods: many bottles of Perrier, baguettes, jambon, crudités, cookies (especially chocolate), canned and smoked fish, more cheese, a container of sliced roast beef. It was too much to carry back in one trip, so he took as much as he could, gave it to Petra, and returned to the kitchen once again. Still fully intoxicated, he saw a huge dumb-waiter-like apparatus almost the size of an elevator, and was so curious about it that he seemed to forget the circumstances. It was an incinerator. Oblivious of any threats, he was magnetized by the detailed instructions, and read them carefully, with, somehow, more enjoyment than one might expect to be gleaned from incinerator instructions.
This appareil directed high-temperature gas jets as hot as multiple acetylene torches at whatever was weighing upon its spring-loaded steel grate, turning refuse into gas and ash. When the ash fell through the grate and the weight upon it lessened, the jets would cease. Until then the temperature was like that in a blast furnace. A mushroom-shaped green button turned it on; a mushroom-shaped red button turned it off.
A very clever way, Martin thought, to dispose of garbage at sea. Even wet garbage such as meat scraps would be reduced to ash, which would then be environmentally and responsibly discarded in the ocean: just fertilizer. “Nice,” he said to himself. But, then, hearing a passageway door close, he instantly became slightly less intoxicated even if not enough to make him fear, and not enough to scotch the desire to meet up with one of the terrorists despite knowing that in his drunken relaxedness he would not be at his physical best.
Casting about, he searched for a weapon. Nothing. The knives and cleavers were in a different bay. How he wished he had a cleaver. He realized that part of his difficulty in delivering the first load of food and water to Petra was because he had drunkenly kept the empty Magnum bottle in his hand. And it was still there. He looked at it, and smiled. Then he calmly stepped back behind a partition and awaited the footsteps coming toward him.
“Oh my,” he said to himself delightedly. “Here he comes.”
And it was so. Appearing was a fierce-looking, bearded terrorist who carried an automatic rifle. He was horrible to behold. Dressed in black, he had the dead, empty eyes of a man without a conscience, he was muscular, and he smelled of sesame oil. But he was not nearly as big as Martin, who also was muscular, and who had been made fearless by Champagne.
Holding his rifle, the terrorist stepped forward. All the decks he had searched had been empty. Expecting nothing, he had grown quite careless. Martin was behind him, and could easily have hit him on the back of the head. But Martin was so happy that he wanted to do it in a different way, so he said, “Bonjour!”—which made the terrorist turn, startled, right into the magnum that smashed against his forehead.
“Excellent,” said Martin, totally nonplussed. “You did perfectly.” He didn’t know whether he was addressing himself or the terrorist.
As if no one else might come along—though the man he struck had, in fact, been wandering about the ship, looking for him and Petra, there was no one else—Martin stripped him of his weaponry and rested it on one of the stainless-steel islands. Then he dragged the unconscious man over to the incinerator. Opening the dumbwaiter-like door, he hoisted the limp head up to the edge, where it stayed because the chin caught on it. Then he grabbed the waist and eased the body in, feeding the legs after it. “Bon voyage, Nazi,” Martin said. He closed the door, and pushed the green button. Though the man was still alive, he was unconscious, and he would be dead before he could awaken. The incinerator would turn off when the ash was so light the rising grid tripped a switch.
Martin looped a belt of magazine pouches around his shoulders, slung the rifle, an American M4, gathered up the remaining food, and returned to Petra. When the door was shut he said, “Petra, I killed one of them. I incinerated him. I did. I actually incinerated him. No one knows what happened, we have food, we have a rifle and ammunition, here we are, and I couldn’t have done it without Champagne.”
*
L’Étoile had not varied course since Athena had begun to trail her straight-as-steel wake and the luminescence she cut through the water. From this, Buck Lanham was able—as even a yacht club novitiate would have been able—to place landfall at a small village on the Somali coast, unknown to the world and straddling a feature that had barely made it onto the map: Ras Hagar. The term ras denoted a headland or a cape, and at Ras Hagar there was hardly such a thing, just a minor bump out into the sea, slightly north of the village, and a concrete pier slightly to the south, built long ago by the British or Italians. The chart actually said “Built by either Britain or Italy, pre-1950.”
This was likely because parallel to the pier at the southern end of a beach a little over a mile long and five hundred feet at the widest, a wadi led through a three-hundred-foot-high escarpment into the interior and was used as a road. Another wadi, to the north, was wider but steeper on the sides and impassable to vehicles.
Had it been accessible to European vacationers, the beach at Ras Hagar would have been prized for its whiteness, its expanse, and the double lines of surf arising from the Indian Ocean’s African shallows. But it was 190 miles south of the Horn of Africa’s tip, in unrelieved desert controlled by Somali warlords, pirates, and the Somalian province of ISIS. The fishing/piracy village there consisted of between fifty and one hundred one-storey, mud-brick huts, a small mosque, and not much else.
These were loosely clustered near the outward passage at the southern wadi, just north of a large salt pond created when the surf crested a narrow strip of beach between it and the ocean. The pond had probably been born of the effect of the pier, which, between pond and village, jutted seaward, intercepting the surf’s eternal attack upon the land. Piracy here had been unsuccessful, as all but one ship had been retaken before it could make land, and that small ship, a Kenyan coaster loaded with cattle, fetched a ransom of only €50,000. The village had reverted to fishing and was unable to support half its population, until ISIS took over and stimulated its economy with infusions of blood-and-oil cash from the Levant. Although not happy with the new governance, people came back. Western intelligence agencies had no idea of the new regime, as surveillance had ceased after the diminution of population. On Athena’s chart, 9° 02' 4.5" N, 50° 35' 21" E was marked, “Semi-populated fishing village.”
A little more than half a mile up the coast, the land shallowly bent inward before projecting into an almost de minimis salient: Ras Hagar. Behind this, after speeding wide and ahead of L’Étoile, Holworthy and his men beached the RHIB and camouflaged it as best they could with nets, and mats of washed-up, dried seaweed. The escarpment there was far more gradual than the one high over the village, and at a little past midnight they began to ascend by the light of a quarter moon.
In addition to his own weapon and eight magazines of ammunition, each SEAL carried a 125-pound pack. This near-one-thousand pounds of collective supply was not as much as it might seem. Ammunition, grenades, three Claymore mines, and water made up the bulk of it. The rest was filled in by food, clothing, two hand-held radios, camouflage netting, shovels, and, because the ground in the Middle East was so often hard and rocky, a pick, or rather, half the head of a double-headed pick—eight pounds just in itself. They didn’t know how long they might have to stay should the RHIB or they themselves be discovered. Thus all the ammunition, water, and food.
The night wind was coming off the land, which had cooled precipitously in the trick deserts play on those who don’t know them and are caught shivering in the cold. Nonetheless, the SEALs began their climb unprotected, for they knew that though the rise would be only about three hundred feet, they would be soaking wet after carrying a total (including their own body weights) of almost three hundred pounds up a crumbling slope that necessitated two or three steps when otherwise just one would suffice.
They were in territory about as empty and isolated as possible, and yet every five minutes or so they would stop, listen, and scan with night vision. Not a single one thought it necessary, but on the off chance that their enemy was more competent than estimated and had posted a picket line, they took all precautions—and the periodic if short rests enabled them to move faster when they climbed. In daylight the cliffs would be ocher, the desert beyond, khaki and buff. The air was so cold that there was no scent, but in beating sun the rocks and sand themselves would have a scent, and the scrub of the desert, too, though its faint perfumes were as sparse as the water it retained.
When the SEALs came over the top of the bluff, they were very hot, but then, in the wind, they were shivering and dry within a minute or two. They put on their sweaters. No one could resist the wonder of where he was and what he was doing. But this elation would vanish after a day half-buried under camouflage nets in 120-degree heat as the wings of flies made the only breeze. Now, however, between unending desert and unending sea, they stood beneath a dim moon and the stars. Not a single earthly candlepower served to lessen the glow of the Milky Way in this place that had not changed since the beginning of the world. They were there as timeless soldiers and raiders, divorced from all they had known, comfortable with physical deprivation, strain, and death. They hardly recognized themselves. But in the cold, crystal wind coming off the desert, they were glad to have come.
And then they set out to hump south on the plateau, half a mile in, on a track parallel to the sea. Moving fast on level ground, they stopped only every ten minutes. In the first break, they took off their sweaters and had water. Then they came to the north wadi, descended, ascended, and broke again, this time with chocolate and water. They virtually raced across the last mile and a half to their observation point above the village, where they arrived at 0330 and dropped their packs.
Without an order from Holworthy, they automatically spread out into a perimeter while he scouted for a place to dig in. They were three hundred or so vertical feet above the village at an eroded place along the bluff where landslides had settled in an angle of repose. Probably the village had grown up there because it was safe from further rockfall. Which is not to say that the slope was gradual. And that it was littered with sharp rocks made its top an ideal defensive position, although to the south, on the plateau, the remains of an abandoned settlement could be used against them as cover for weapons of sufficient reach. There was nothing they could do about that.
As Holworthy and the others knew from exercises and real life, fighting your way up a steep rock slope is almost the worst thing you can do. It isn’t just that the enemy has cover and a nearly perfect view, but that your every movement must struggle against gravity as it simultaneously puts you in hostile sights. And then, courtesy of rocks and scree, his every bullet becomes shrapnel. A machine-gun burst of a hundred rounds in a few seconds will send a thousand shards in a stinging, sometimes deadly cloud. The SEALs didn’t worry about a frontal assault up the slope, and in the other directions they had excellent fields of fire. They placed their Claymores to the south, where a flank attack might originate.
Then they dug in right at the edge so that with their scopes they would be able to see everything, and yet to see them one would have to be less than thirty or forty feet away. They took note that there was no reason that anyone would be up near their position, not even goatherds, as there was neither scrub nor a path. Five slept while one listened and scanned.
*
The morning sun rose bloody at the edge of the sea, climbing fast according to its near-equatorial privilege. It yellowed just as fast, awoke the village, and then settled into the blazing white with which until just before it set it would punish this entire quarter of the world.
Holworthy and his men were completely on their own, with Athena still out at sea, no air support, medivac, or long-range communication. The nearest American forces were 550 miles south near Mogadishu, unaware of their presence. “We might as well be on the moon,” Holworthy told them. “No running to mama.”
No one knew Holworthy’s story, so if he had emotions it was hard to prove or imagine. When he was made, it seemed, everything was poured into competence and efficiency, with emotions left begging. As the sun rose, he got to work.
The radios could sometimes range two hundred or more miles, especially if transmitting from a height. Although even with the SEALs at three hundred feet above sea level and the receiving hand-held on Athena’s bridge thirty feet above the water, the ship was not yet close enough for line-of-sight transmission, Holworthy was fairly confident that he would get through. The likelihood that ISIS would break the encryption was almost nil, but the radio direction finder presumed to be on l’Étoile, or a simple set in the village, could give away the reconnaissance.
Normally, Holworthy would have communicated via uplinking to a satellite, which after shufflings here and there, probably even back to the U.S., would downlink to the ship, the only interception possible being from within narrow and vertical transmission columns. But with the sat-phones destroyed he had to transmit horizontally. As far as RDF, he realized that he might even be picked up by American arrays in the Med, or similar Russian installations he knew not where.
Thus he worked hard to keep his transmissions exceedingly brief, and had arranged with Velez to bypass normal voice-to-voice etiquette. He wrote down his report so he could say it fast and then click off. After an hour of close observation, he composed and rehearsed it like this: “Dug in commanding position three one five degrees northwest village sixty-three one-storey mud-brick from high waterline to fifteen hundred feet back. EST two hundred civilians, twenty armed men Kalashnikovs. Two possibly Russian one-oh-five-millimeter towed guns directly north and south of village at ten feet back of high water, ammunition two piles each gun, seven trench lines various lengths in village, two machine-gun emplacements visible. Possible sandbagged HQ three structures south of mosque, dozen black flags, two dozen vehicles scattered, stores stacked on probably functional pier. Sea condition two, offshore sandbar, weather clear.” It was essential that Athena know where the SEALs were dug in so as not to fire upon them.
His transmission began with “E2C to base. Record this transmission.”
After a second, Velez said, “Go.”
Holworthy sped through his report in thirty seconds followed by, “Out.”
Velez had recorded it. He then made a transcription and brought it to Rensselaer, who said, “Doesn’t mince words, does he?”
“No, sir. Would you say they’re expecting us?”
“I would say that, yeah. But they don’t know us.”
What Holworthy had left out was the feel of the place. Before the sun rose, dozens of muted fires had appeared among the huts. Fuel was so scarce that these were just large enough to heat water for rice and tea, and although they blazed for a minute or two they quickly settled into red spots like cigarettes in the dark, and then were further muted as pots were placed upon them. But the scent rose in the still air, for the breeze was in stasis, cold air from the desert having ceased spilling over the plateau, and warm air yet to blow in from the sea. The smoke calmed the SEALs as if they were bees. Something very lovely and kind there was about woodsmoke in the small, subtle doses that sweetened the air.
As it got light, the SEALs counted people as best they could, and then averaged out their estimates. When the light was dim enough to see a laser dot but bright enough so that it would not be as conspicuous as in the dark, Holworthy took the range of the two artillery pieces, their ammunition stores, the trenches, and various landmarks in the village. He then sent two men out several hundred feet in each direction along the cliff line and had them mark firing positions with some stones, against which he ranged with the laser.
For forty-five minutes, he used a calculator to triangulate the exact distances from each of the SEALs’ firing positions to each of the targets. The discrepancies were not great, but given that in regard to the village every shot was 500 yards or more, the more exact the ranging the better their chances of hits with their three M4s, one Remington 700, and the Barrett .50 they had carried up for Holworthy.
Each man had his role and his ranges, as well as a clear understanding of hand signals, procedures in case of attack from the flanks, the routes and methods of withdrawal, the firing order, and a clear instruction not to fire too close to civilians, especially women and children, even if it meant forgoing a legitimate shot.
“Can you figure it, sir? They prepared to defend, but they did it so badly.”
“Not for them,” Holworthy answered. “Their traditions are unscientific, and they don’t have the history we have of infantry fighting. I’d say that for a bunch of terrorist bastards they’ve done quite all right.”
“Except. . . .”
“You want a list?” he asked, peering through his scope as he spoke. “Their artillery is on the beach, not up here. Are you kidding me? They don’t even have spotters or lookouts on the bluff, much less a perimeter to keep us out. The guns aren’t dug in. Neither is the ammunition. They haven’t laid any mines—see people walking all over the place, everywhere? They haven’t marked out any fields of fire, or arranged anything. They should have had buoys out in the water to range the artillery. I’ll bet they haven’t had any gunnery training either. You can’t just point and shoot an artillery piece. And then, I don’t know about these guys, but most of the insurgents I fought don’t aim their weapons. They use them like a hose. Their shots go wild and they burn through their ammunition so fast that in a manner of minutes they can’t do anything but run away.
“Don’t get me wrong. It’s not the rule. A lot of them are trained, and there can be marksmen among them, but in general they lack fire discipline and precision, and they think that emotion adds to their effective-ness—like what you see in the movies when the hero is mad and he jerks the pistol forward to help the bullets hit harder.
“We try to stand our ground methodically, intently, and without emotion. They scream a lot when they fight. Except for when we communicate, we fight in silence. Are you worried?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. Don’t be. I don’t know what the CO is going to do, but Athena’s got a lot of firepower should we need it, and to be behind the enemy, on high, unobstructed ground. . . . If we engage fully, it’ll be their worst nightmare.”
Their preparations made and the message to Athena delivered, the SEALs settled in to endure the heat of the day, sleeping when they could, and savoring the relatively cool wind as it arose from the sea, because by noon both the wind on the desert and the wind over water would be almost unbearably hot. From the village below they heard the occasional tinkling of metal, children playing, the sound made by rickety doors as they were slammed shut by the breeze, and of course the call to prayer. It was the latter that told American soldiers each time they heard it that they were in another world, which they would never change.
Everything down below was surprisingly busy, and yet the fishermen did not take out their boats, but, rather, pulled them back far from the sea. Soon, the SEALs were discovered, but only by flies.