The Crisis

by David Poyer

  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.

  Zeynaab

  FOR 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 a
ssembly 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.

  More years pass, and she grows into a young woman.

  Then one day she hears a noise she’s never heard before. It’s like thunder down below the mountain. Then another noise, distant, somehow familiar, but it’s some time before she remembers there are such things as motors.

  The women come out of the weavery and the gardens to stand watching as—for the first time ever—a truck grinds up the mule trail that’s the only other way up besides the basket. How did it get through the wall? Few of them have ever seen such a thing, but Zeynaab breaks into a sweat the moment she sees it. The men who jump down carry guns and she remembers. She runs to the cowshed. Trembling, she crawls into the hay.

  They find her there hours later. By then the men are tired. They’re covered with soot and blood. With wearied violence one drags her out. “Time to die, Christian,” he says. “All the others are dead, now you.”

  “No. Not Christian! I’m Muslim!”

  He seizes her arm, looks at her wrist. Her crossless wrist. “Then what are you doing here?” he snarls, and savagely twists her arm behind her. It’s so painful she’d scream if his hand wasn’t over her mouth. If his body wasn’t against hers. If she had enough breath to struggle as the others jerk her skirts over her head and push her down into the straw.

  WHEN they’re done they leave her for dead, but don’t make sure of it, as they have with every other woman on the mountain, and all the monks too. When much later she staggers into the sunlight she doesn’t know who she is, or where. The buildings are burning. The gentle bull lies stretched out dead. She looks at the bodies of women, children. Does she know them? What’s the meaning of all this smoke?

  She shuffles to the infirmary. The woman who welcomed her years before lies on a bed, the cord with the plaited crosses knotted around her throat. The men have done other cruel things to her too. Zeynaab kneels by her, wanting to pray, but not knowing who to. Where will she go now? At last she enters the burning refectory. She stuffs a basket with bread and cheese, then goes into the Sister Abbess’s room.

  Then she sets off down the mountain.

  8

  Ashaara City

  THE crackle woke Aisha before dawn in the low-ceilinged cubicle she shared with one of the translators. The embassy’s housing coordinator had looked horrified when she’d asked to room with another Muslim woman. The only others were Ashaarans, maintenance and cleaning employees. Most lived in town, and the rooms for those who slept on-compound were small and shabby: a row of curtained-off broom closets in a shedlike building huddled out back.

  Not that different from the slave quarters, behind some Big House.

  Her roommate, a small, quiet woman named Nuura, wasn’t in bed. The sheets were thrown back, but she wasn’t there.

  Aisha rose, dressed, quickly did wudhu in the sink, then took her rug out for morning salat, orienting by the sun through a dirty window. The past day or so she’d listened for muezzins out in town but hadn’t heard them. Strange that there were no calls to prayer.

  She stood and recited the intention to pray, then the takbir and the other dawn prayers, prostrating, saluting the angels to her right and left. She did this in the Arabic she’d learned as a child in Harlem. Then muttered in English, “Forgive, bless, and protect me this day, and let all my work be done in your name.” She strapped on her SIG, checked that her badge and other walking-around gear was in her purse, and let herself out.

  Dawn in East Africa broke as she hesitated in the doorway. The sky held a hot blush scented with burning. An uncertain breeze stirred the dust and flapped the flag above the chancery. She scuffed toward the administration building, the backs of her sandals flipping up powdery gouts. Someone had tried to grow grass here, unsuccessfully. There were trees, though, the local acacia. She looked across the open area always left at the heart of every Ame
rican embassy in these mercurial lands.

  Jolene Ridbout, the attaché, had given her and Erculiano a tour the day they arrived. The compound was enclosed by a rose brick wall less carefully mortared from the inside; its finished surface faced out. Beyond it was Ashaara; inside, the United States, with its own laws and customs and extraterritoriality.

  Uh-huh . . . to her left as she trudged, the heat building as light flooded pale dust like weightless lava, lay a gated extension with tennis court and swimming pool and picnic benches. Close by huddled Conex boxes, one her makeshift office. Ahead rose the two-story GSA Building, where vehicles were repaired, laundry was done, supplies were taken in, and garbage was sorted to go out. A generator droned, and blue mercury-vapor security lights still burned over pickups and SUVs on neatly painted asphalt. To her right the ambassador’s residence, a white-pillared neo-Victorian, shimmered like a bad dream.

  West, toward the main gate, was the chancery. Glass and aluminum, with slanted louvers set to cut the sun and “pay homage” to local architecture. An inner barrier of chain link was topped with razor wire and anchored by a concrete structure styled to resemble a minaret but all too obviously a guard tower. It looked like a keep, a last redoubt; the chancery, like a very expensive prison.

  She came to a deserted playground under one of the acacias and after a moment’s hesitation lifted the hem of her abaya and began climbing a welded jungle gym painted in faded reds and yellows. She was sorry halfway up but kept clambering, and perched at last, teetering and panting, where she could peer over the wall.