The Med

by David Poyer

  U.S.S. GUAM

  Eight miles to seaward of them, high on the bridge of the flagship, Isaac Sundstrom dropped his binoculars to dangle against the rows of ribbons on his tropical khaki.

  “Lenson! Get me Haynes.”

  “Sir?”

  “Colonel Haynes. Where is he?”

  “I think he’s in Helo Direction, sir, or he might be—”

  “Find him. Ask him if it’s convenient for him to come up to flag bridge.”

  Colonel Stephen Haynes, USMC, was in charge of the two thousand-plus marines in MAU 32. His troops were embarked in all six amphibs, and directed from Haynes’ command center on the Guam. When he came up Sundstrom was staring landward again, his binoculars on the leading wave. The coast was a line of brown, the surf a strand of white caught between blue sea and a climbing slope of foothills. Between the flagship, sixteen thousand yards out, and that seemingly motionless line, nine ships stood closer in. Two of them were the LSTs, Newport and Barnstable County. The third and fourth were Spiegel Grove and Coronado; the LSD and LPD carried both amtracs and assault boats. They were underway, steaming parallel to the beach while black specks tumbled from their sterns in plumes of spray: the second assault wave. Beyond them, low and black against the land, the destroyers rode close inshore. Ault, Bowen, the Italians and Turks. Their guns pointed toward the empty hills. And beyond them, closest in of all, a line of dark dots yawed and threw foam, streaming blue smoke as they wallowed almost imperceptibly toward the surf.

  The two men watched tensely, silently. A rumble grew above them and suddenly two jets flashed overhead, canted lazily away from the beach, and slanted down above a headland to the east. Metal glittered beneath them, tumbling, then dirty smoke leaped up. Moments later came the brrump of a stick of bombs.

  “How do they look, Steve?” said the commodore at last, not turning.

  “Not too bad. Scattered, but that could be the seas. Surf height’s four at last report. That’s pretty rough for the mike-sixes.”

  “You think so? I think they’re dropping the goddamn ball on us. The boat group commander’s four hundred yards left of where he should be. That’s why none of them are on track!”

  “They look pretty close on the screen,” said the colonel. “You’re a perfectionist, Ike. That’s what they told me about you before we met.”

  “Somebody has to be,” said the commodore, but Haynes’ words might have pleased him; at least he smiled. “Other than that, how are we?”

  “Some problems. Nothing we can’t iron out. We’ve been at this for a while.”

  “You’d think after three months in the Med … but some people just can’t get it straight. Like this chief staff officer of mine, Hogan. Like my intel team. Nothing personal, Steve, but a few of your men, too. And the ships’ commanding officers don’t have the big picture either. Their noses are down in their own little rice bowls. They don’t understand somebody has to quarterback the whole pie, make sure the operation doesn’t fall through the cracks. And frankly, anyone who doesn’t realize that—well, he isn’t worthy to be wearing khaki.” The commodore leaned back against the coaming. “Fine day, though, isn’t it?”

  “Except for the surf,” said the colonel. He stared to landward. “Some of those bulldozers, when they come off the causeways … this beach is notorious for soft patches in the sand.”

  “You’ve warned them about it? Ordered them to wear lifejackets?”

  “Of course, Ike,” said Haynes quietly. “I’ve seen drowned men before.”

  “Is everything else on schedule? When they hit—how soon can you be ready to pull out again?”

  “I’ll be ready anytime. But I’d hoped to get a couple of days ashore. The men get antsy cooped up. Forty-eight hours—”

  “I want them to prepare for a quick withdrawal. As soon as objective is reached.”

  “Understood,” said the colonel, losing the agreeable look he had worn since he arrived on the bridge. For a moment he and the commodore stared at opposite ends of the beach.

  Below them at that moment, two decks down, Lieutenant Lenson was repeating himself for the fourth time, shouting over the whine and static of unsynchronized transmitters at a Turkish destroyer.

  And inshore of them, deep within one of the warlike silhouettes that rode gray against white of surf and brown of hills, Chief Wronowicz, squinting against fluorescent light, grunted a warning about voltage regulation to the nervous watchstander in front of Number One switchboard in the forward engineroom.

  Four miles inland, the skids of the first helicopters slammed into the dirt at the landing zone.

  And Private First Class Will Givens and nineteen other seasick marines felt the scrape of beach under the treads. They seized their weapons as the nose lifted. The engine roared anew, shifting gears to maneuver inland, and then two dozen tons of amtrac skidded sideways as the driver braked. The hatch banged down into a blinding wall of daylight, and they pounded down the ramp, yelling as they dropped to their bellies onto sand and scrub, jacking cartridges into their rifles.

  A long blast of fire ripped out ahead of them. Givens saw the muzzle flashes between the dunes. Burdened with the mortar, he drew his pistol clumsily. “Machine gun,” screamed Cutford, beside him. The dark face was distorted. “Ready—advance!”

  “Oorah!”

  They charged forward. He fled over scrub brush, air hot in his throat, the sand turning his run into a nightmare stumble. Ahead of him the hidden gun chattered steadily. He fired wildly, not aiming, just making noise, and at that moment something caught his foot and he fell. Fell hard, knocking the wind out of him with agonizing force. He lay there for a long moment, watching the sand and trying to breathe. So many grains, alike from a distance, but up close each unique and only itself …

  A man walked toward him across the dunes. His eyes found Givens, steadied on him. Givens stiffened. He started to get up. The man walked up to him.

  “You’re dead,” he said.

  Givens sagged back into the sand. The umpire strolled on. A marine ran by him, shouting. The umpire caught his arm. The man crumpled. He grabbed at his leg and began shouting for a corpsman.

  Cutford returned, cursing him. Pulling the mortar from his unresisting arms, the corporal ran on under a double load, not looking back.

  And the whole immense mechanism of Task Force 61, over two thousand marines, three thousand sailors, eleven ships, forty aircraft, continued the strike inland toward a dot on a map, toward an imaginary enemy somewhere in the silent sweep of sere and empty hills.

  For it was all an exercise. It was all a game. Every man knew that; just another in an unending series of practices in a Navy that—it sometimes seemed to them—had been built and manned and maintained for forty years of peace, five thousand miles from home, just for drill. It had been the same through three months of the six-month deployment. This was just another exercise. It would go well or badly; some men would make mistakes and be reprimanded, others would do well and be complimented. But then it would be finished, and then there would be liberty. And then it would be over, and could be forgotten; because it was a drill, and none of it was for real.

  This time.

  THE BAQA’A VALLEY, LEBANON

  The air over the camp blazed with light; it boiled with windless heat above flat asphalt, off the tin roofs of the wooden barracks—built by the British, one of the men from the Committee had told him. The tall man thought it a sign, the dark humor of a God beyond history but determining it all, who fought for those who fought for Him. The desert air boiled above the obstacle course, the barbed-wire gate, the dusty road that stretched off toward the firing range.

  Hanna Abu Harisah crouched in full sunlight, blinking sweat from his eyes. In his pocket his thumb found the stopwatch.

  “Begin!”

  The assault pistol leapt of itself into his hands. Short-barreled, with a collapsible stock, it had a moment before been invisible beneath his civilian jacket. In the same motion he was at f
ull sprint across the tarmac.

  Running. Ahead, the glint and shimmer of aluminum. Behind, the thud of many pairs of boots. When the flat pop of automatic weapons began he flinched but kept on. His back felt naked. He ran as if to outdistance bullets. His own weapon jerked in his hands and spent cartridges leapt up to brand his forehead, glittering like broken-off bits of desert sun. They were past practicing with blanks. A man-shape sprang up to his right and he sprayed it without stopping, hearing three rounds clang off plate steel.

  Ahead, the boarding ladder. He went up it three steps at a time, screaming through scorched lungs, pistol extended and hammer back. Inside, darkness. Shredded upholstery, overhead luggage bins racked by bullets. A second manshape. He swung and triggered without thought. After two rounds the striker clicked on an empty chamber but he had anticipated that and his free arm swept up. The lever popped free as it left his hand and the grenade hit the cutout in the chest. Behind him he heard firing, thuds, muffled screams from the crew compartment.

  A whistle trilled faintly outside and he paused, panting. It was over. He retrieved the dummy grenade and watched his men as they filed down the boarding ladder. Dark-haired, sweating, they clutched their gleaming new weapons, pantomimed deadly jabs with their hands at each other. Some grinned; some looked bored; one, a new recruit not used to exertion in the heat, was vomiting over the handrail as he descended. Another had cut his forehead, and dabbed at blood with the corner of his kaffiyeh, which had come partly unwound.

  As Harisah lit a cigarette he searched their eyes, their gestures, evaluating them against men he had known and fought beside in years past. Four had been tested already, on a border raid four months before. The rest were un-blooded. But they had spirit. They had responded well to the physical and political training, accepting the trade: his harsh discipline, in place of the apathy and squalor of the camps of the Transjordan.

  They’ll do, he thought. Not all of them; as with any group a few would be flawed, cowards or too foolhardy. But only a mission would find them out. All in all, he was content.

  He took a deep drag and silhouetted himself in the open door.

  “Skhot’!”

  They stared back at him, turning to hear, gripping their weapons.

  “Thirty seconds, from a hundred meters distance,” he shouted, looking down into light-filled desert, into their upturned faces. The language he used was neither classical nor dialect; it was the new medial speech of the radio station, the newspaper. They were from many lands; it was their common tongue now.

  “So. Do you know why you are doing this?”

  They stared at him, heads lifted, eyes alight.

  “I will tell you. Should you be assigned to seize a plane in flight, be aware: They have trained teams to take them back on the ground. They are as skilled and as well armed as you. Yet if you know how they will attack, you can defend—or better yet, prevent them from attacking by using your hostages.

  “Very well, return to your places. We’ll do it again, up the rear ramp this time.”

  As they filed away, the tall man glanced across the terrain, past the barracks huts, the wire. From here, from the top of the ramp, he could see far across the desert, see to the mountains that danced above the hot plain.

  Beyond them, and beyond a plain and another range of mountains, lay his land.

  His people’s land, taken now by others. These others owned many things. Jet fighters. Missiles. Tanks. Some said, the atom bomb. There were not many of them. Yet they were rich. They had power.

  But there were ways yet to fight them.

  Harisah took a last drag and flicked the cigarette to the desert floor. He raised his weapon above his head and looked down on his men. Staring at the mountains, he opened his throat to the sky.

  “Sharaf! Majd! Khulud!”

  Sweaty, exhausted, their teeth gleamed whitely as his men looked back and up to where he stood. Their hoarse shouts, their upthrust fists echoed his. “Sharaf! Majd! Khulud!”

  Honor. Glory. Immortality.

  Their enemies did not have the ultimate weapon. He did.

  His enemies were not ready to die.

  II

  THE LIBERTY

  2

  Taormina, Sicily

  Lenson woke early that first morning ashore, roused by a golden triangle of sunlight.

  He watched it for a long time, not moving, after he opened his eyes. The ray crept across the crumpled sheet toward him, so slowly it seemed not to move at all. It was quiet in the room. There was only the sound of two people breathing, and the cry of gulls.

  When the sun reached his eyes he blinked and raised his head. Turning in the bed, he looked at the woman beside him.

  His expression of wonder grew. She slept peacefully, lips parted, a strand of dark hair across her cheek. His eyes traced her face in the ruthless morning light. The lacing of veins at her nose; the curve of her neck; a slight tired crinkle of skin at the corners of her closed eyes; the fine features, the delicate complexion of Asian blood. Raising himself gently from the rumpled bed, he stood naked by it for a long time, looking down at her. She had wrapped the upper sheet around herself, and in the quiet light her face was like a sleeping child’s.

  At last he turned, catching his breath as his bare feet left carpeting for tile, and crossed to the windows that opened on the balcony. He leaned out, feeling the stone morning-cool against his bare arms.

  Rubbing at the scarred flesh of his shoulder, he stared out, over the crystal blue of the Mediterranean.

  The Hotel Vecchio frowned down from the heights of Taormina like a captain from the bridge of his ship. It was a traditional hotel, a dignified hotel. Its walls were solid stone, and the curule chairs at each landing looked as if they had carried Caesars on holiday here by the blue Ionian. She had chosen it, days before, when the wives had arrived to await the ships. He thought it was too expensive, even in declining lire, but he had to admit she had chosen well. Its outdated calm would mirror the perfection of the coming days, the halfway point of the deployment. Here with her he could forget for a time the fatigue, the monotony, the loneliness of three months at sea. Could push away, ignore, the thought of three more months without her.

  For four days, he would be happy.

  He glanced back into the room. She was still, one arm outflung in the rising tide of golden light. He did not want to wake her. Their night had been passionate. Instead he leaned out again, absorbing himself in the play of light on rock and sea, the gradual repossession of the world by the sun.

  Sicily was awakening. Gulls cried in sleepy hunger from the paling sky, and waves lapped against the cliff below the hotel. A squad of small boys, naked as puppies, clambered from rock to rock. One dived into the blue, coming up to swirl water from his hair. Beyond them, miles out, the sun was turning a flat and perfect sea to liquid bronze.

  He lifted his face to the light. It took so much work to deserve, this sense of peace; and it came so seldom. Life was filled with a thousand negatives. Boredom, anger, sometimes terror. But happiness was part of it too, if you did what you had to do. If you did that—only what was right, and did it with all your strength—then the good could come.

  Surely nothing truly evil, nothing irredeemably ugly, could exist in a world with this capacity for beauty.

  A fishing boat, chugging slowly out to its day’s work, drew its silhouetted bow through molten copper, shattering it into a million glittering diamonds.

  Shattering it …

  Before his gaze, silently and tremendously, the bow, the cutting edge, grew to fill the sea, blot out the sky. A steel cliff. At its foot a line of white gleamed cruelly, like bared teeth.

  The bow of an aircraft carrier, towering sudden and tremendous in the night.

  No, he thought. Not here! Sweat pricked his bare arms. He swallowed, fighting memory, hallucination, nightmare. It was morning! Italy—Susan—

  He could not avert it. His fingers cramped suddenly on ancient stone, transformed, in his
seething mind, into the steel splinter shield of a destroyer.

  The Reynolds Ryan had been in company with a carrier task group. Late at night, several hundred miles west of Ireland, Dan Lenson had been on her bridge, junior officer of the deck.

  Someone had made a mistake.

  He stood frozen on the balcony for long minutes, looking out with unseeing eyes. The first wind of morning stirred the hair on his bare chest.

  The recording, like a tape in his head, ended at last. The North Atlantic, the cries of burning men receded, thinned, vanishing like a dream. The trawler was turning away. Men moved tranquilly about its distant deck, laying out their nets.

  Against his will, he looked toward the harbor. The curve of the town blocked his view, and that, too, was fine, as fine as the morning. He swallowed again.

  He did not really want to see the Guam.

  Behind him, later, he heard the bed creak. When he turned from the sea she was sitting up, watching him, her eyes intent and unsmiling.

  Just seeing her stirred him after the months of longing. It was not her hair, dark as oiled walnut, swept back with one hand to lie across the pillow, that stirred him, nor the revelation of nudity as she pulled back the coverlet to invite him in. It was not her bare legs, tanned dusky to the thighs, nor the small breasts, pale with a hint of saffron. It was true that compared to her other women seemed to him oversized, hairy, and common. (He had never said that aloud to anyone. But he had remarked to Flasher one night on watch that he had never looked at another woman with interest since he had met her; a remark that Red, for once, let pass in the darkness without a guffaw.)