The Shores of Tripoli

by Fisher Samuels

  “How’s he doing, Doc?”

  Ruiz shook his head. “He needs a hospital.” Blood covered his gloves and dark blue undershirt.

  Williams looked at Rogers, who was sprawled out on one of the galley’s table with his side covered in thick bandages. “Can’t you do anything?”

  “No. I don’t know where the bullet is. It missed his lung, but I don’t know how.”

  “Open me up,” groaned Rogers. He winced and grabbed onto the table tightly with both hands. “Get it out.”

  Williams grabbed Rogers’s forearm. “We’re trying, Buck.” He looked at Ruiz. “So that’s good, right? That it missed his lung?”

  Ruiz gave a nod to Childress. “Watch him for me?”

  Childress sat on the bench with his back against Rogers’s makeshift hospital bed.

  Ruiz walked Williams out of the Galley. “It didn’t hit his lung, but I—I think it hit his liver. Don’t know how bad, but if it went in deep enough, it could be real bad news. Could’a hit his kidney, too.”

  “How can you find out?”

  Ruiz swallowed. “If we were in a hospital, the surgeons would do an ex-lap. See how bad it is, what else is damaged.”

  “A what?”

  “Exploratory laparotomy. They’d, uh, make an incision and go into the abdominal cavity.” He ran his finger down his side from the bottom of his rib cage to the top of his pelvis.

  “So do it.”

  Ruiz’s eyes widened. “Sir, that’s a serious operation. I can’t do that! Sure as hell not in a fucking galley!”

  “I know.” Williams nodded and put his hand on Ruiz’ shoulder. “But what if there’s nothing else we can do for him?”

  “He needs blood, too!”

  “We can supply that. The crew. If we match, right?”

  Ruiz nodded.

  “We have to try, right?”

  Ruiz looked down at his bloody gloves. “I can’t make any promises. I don’t have the right equipment.”

  “No one here does, Doc. But you’ve gotta try something.” He patted his shoulder then turned toward the stairs. “What do you need from me?”

  “A-pos blood. And beach the boat.” Ruiz looked back in to the galley. “Or find some place I can work ashore. Some place clean.”

  Williams looked back. “How soon do you need to start?”

  “Longer we wait, lower his chances.”

  ———————

  “I can take over for you, sir.” Childress stood next to Smith on the starboard side of the upper deck. Childress looked toward the harbor. “Much better view up here. What’s going on over there, sir?”

  “Same. Muskets and cannons. And our guys in the middle of it all.” Smith lifted his binoculars and scanned the shoreline west of the harbor.

  “You looking for a good beach, sir?”

  “Yep. Want to make sure there’s no traffic nearby. Sunrise should be soon, so we got to do it somewhere out of the way.”

  Childress pulled out his phone and checked the time. “Five ten. What time’s sunrise?”

  “Think it was six-oh-eight this morning. Did you set that with the skipper’s watch?”

  “Oorah, sir.” Childress looked east, but the sky was still dark.

  Smith kept scanning the horizon, looking nearly due west. “What a barren coastline. Farwa Island’s the only real option. There’s no cover around here.”

  Childress nodded, but Smith was still looking through the binoculars.

  Smith let the binocs hang. “Do you seriously think we time traveled?”

  “Seriously think? No,” he answered with a laugh. His smile faded. “I can’t imagine how this is even possible. But there’s no other explanation.”

  “So you can’t think of how it can happen, but you’re the one who comes up with the idea that we traveled back in time two hundred years.”

  “Right. From a relativity perspective, time travel’s possible. If you move fast enough, that is.”

  “Relativity?” Smith paused. “You’re not the average Marine.”

  “There ain’t such a thing, sir.”

  “Good point. I guess not.” Smith looked at the horizon. “I think you need to go to college.”

  “I’m working on it.” Childress leaned on the railing. “What gets me is that if we time traveled, the Earth should’a moved under us. Spinning on its axis, orbiting around the sun, the sun moving in the galaxy—”

  “Alright. I get it. Nothing makes sense, but here we are.”

  Childress looked up at the stars. “Guess I just consider us lucky we didn’t pop out somewhere in deep space.”

  Smith laughed. “Some luck. Where you from, Tricky?”

  “Annapolis, sir.”

  “No shit. I love Annapolis.”

  Childress nodded.

  “Didn’t get to spend much time exploring, but, you know. Every weekend I could, I loved it.”

  Childress didn’t say anything.

  “How’d you decide to join the Marines?”

  Childress chuckled. “Dad was a state senator. Seemed like a good way to piss him off.”

  “He have other plans for you?”

  “Probably. Never told me about ’em, though.”

  Smith chuckled.

  “I sure as hell didn’t want to go the Academy.” Childress looked at Smith. “No offense, sir.”

  Smith fixed his stare on the horizon. “Look!” He pointed north.

  Childress pulled out his phone and started taking pictures. “No shit!”

  The green bubble sizzled on the horizon for only a few seconds and then it blinked into darkness.

  “Is that what you guys saw a little while ago?”

  Childress was swiping through the pictures he took with his phone. “Yeah—”

  Smith leaned over to look at the screen, but the phone’s camera only captured a small, nondescript green blob on the horizon. “What the hell is it?”

  “I don’t know, sir. But it’s the same color as the sparks that hit the boat when we—during the weapons test.”

  “What time was the last one?”

  “Skipper said it was zero three thirteen.”

  “What time were those pictures you just took?”

  He tapped the screen to display the picture’s details. “Uh, zero five twenty one. Why? Think it’s regular? Like an echo?”

  Smith shook his head. “No idea. But it’s something to think about.”

  “Hey, LT? Do you know exactly where we were when we got zapped? The ship, I mean.”

  “No, but it might be in the nav computer. Or the autolog. Why?”

  “If that green thing’s an echo, maybe we should try to be in that bubble the next time it pops up.”

  Smith heard someone climbing the ladder and turned to see Williams.

  “Find a good spot to beach, LT?”

  “Think so, sir. Farwa Island. It’s the only place with any cover on the whole coast. But there’s a coupl’a problems with it.”

  “Go on.”

  “It’s about 45 nautical miles away. At full speed, we wouldn’t get there till sunrise.”

  “And we’d burn a hell of a lot of fuel. Nothing closer?” Williams looked along the coastline, but in the moonlight, all he saw was open beaches.

  “Nothing that I could see from here,” Smith replied. “And looking at the charts, that’s the closest island or inlet.”

  Williams took Smith’s binoculars and scanned the coastline.

  Childress looked to the eastern horizon again. “Sir, what if we didn’t have to worry about sunrise? Could we just find a beach?”

  Williams lowered the binocs. “I guess if it was far enough away. And we posted some guards. Why?”

  “There’s no glow on the eastern horizon, so I don’t think the sun will be rising in the next hour.”

  Smith nodded. “Well, shit, if we went back two hundred and ten years, we coulda’ gone back a few more hours either way.”

  Williams shook his head and laughed.
“I didn’t even think about it, but you’re right.” He looked at his watch. “Who knows what time it is.” Williams looked at the Philadelphia again. “Wish I could recall what day she got captured. October? October something, 1803?”

  “That’s why it’s cooler out here,” said Smith. “This’s one way to get out of a summer tour on the Med.”

  Childress smiled. “And skipper?”

  “Yeah, Tricky?”

  “We saw the green sparks again.” He opened his phone to the pictures.

  “What do you guys think it is?” asked Williams.

  “No idea. But we’ll think of something,” replied Smith. “Right, Tricky?”

  “Oorah, sir.”

  ———————

  “You’re going to beach us now? I’m not ready.” Doc Ruiz’s expression grew tense.

  “It looks like he’s dying. We’ve got to try something.” Williams looked at Rogers’s face. “He looks pale.” Rogers was somewhere between sleep and unconsciousness, and it showed.

  “He is dying.” Ruiz put his palm on Rogers’s side and gently pressed. “Internal bleeding, and I don’t know where it’s coming from. I, uh—”

  “You gotta look, Doc. You gotta go in and help him.” Williams put his hand on Ruiz’s shoulder.

  Ruiz lowered his head with a grimace. He paused and then wrenched his shoulder away. “I can’t do it! Do you know how invasive this is?”

  “I can only imagine, Doc.” Williams look down. Rogers was turned on his side, and his wound was covered with gauze and towels. “But we’ve got to. You said it yourself.”

  Ruiz shook his head. “I—I can’t do it.”

  Williams grabbed Ruiz by both shoulders and turned him to face him. Ruiz looked tired and scared, and Williams understood why. “Doc, if you do nothing, he’ll die for sure. But if you try, you just might save his life.”

  Ruiz stared at Williams, and then he started scanning around the galley. It was nothing like a well-stocked hospital room, or even a well-stocked medical facility on any of the larger ships he’d been assigned. It was a tiny kitchen in a patrol boat and his supplies were limited to a single locker tucked below some extra life jackets. “I don’t have anything here. I’m just a corpsman, skipper. I—I don’t know—if it’ll work.”

  Williams nodded. “I can’t just let Buck die.” Ruiz tried to pull away, but Williams held him by the shoulders. “And neither can you. Everyone will be there to help.”

  “Skip—”

  “I know, Doc. We’ve got no other choice. But no matter what happens, you’re—.” Williams paused. “You’re the only one who even has a chance of saving him.”

  Ruiz nodded. “Okay.”

  “Now I’m going to beach the boat. What else do you need?”

  Ruiz ran both of hands across his crew cut. “A pos blood. If not that, then A neg, or O. And I’m gonna need more lights, and clean towels, and—shit, skipper.” Ruiz held out his hands. “I don’t know what else I need.”

  Williams patted Ruiz. “It’s alright. We’ll start with the blood and towels and lights. Get ready. I’m going to find a beach.”

  Chapter 11

  Prisoners

  “Hey, Watts. Look at this!” Grassley’s hands were tied tightly together, but he’d managed to sit up straight enough against the side of the wooden gunboat to see the moonlit American flag moving down the Philadelphia’s mast. Soon after it was lowered, a white flag was raised in its place. The gun and cannon fire slowed and gave way to shouts and cheers from the numerous gunboats surrounding the Philadelphia.

  “Allahu akbar,” said the man at the tiller of the corsair boat. He repeated it until the men around him joined in. “Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”

  Watts tried to move, but winced in pain. “What’s going on?”

  “Looks like they surrendered.”

  “What!?” Watts struggled to straighten up a bit. He saw the white flag on the Philly’s aft mast flapping in the gentle breeze. “What the hell’s going on here? This shit for real?”

  “I’ve got no fucking clue.” Grassley nodded his head toward the Philadelphia’s waterline. “Check it out.”

  They were still close enough to see two men getting into a rowboat under a white flag of truce. One of the men held something shiny over his head while the other rowed the boat to shore.

  “What’s he holding?” asked Watts.

  “Holy shit. The Captain’s sabre.” Grassley lowered back down against the bulwark and looked at his boots. “We just became prisoners of war.”

  ———————

  The captain of the wooden gunship barked a command and the crew luffed the sails. He steered it toward the rocky seawall and rubbed the wooden hull against the stone pier. As it slowed, two sandaled sailors jumped off and secured the dock-lines.

  In the moonlight, the white tower of the fort that had been firing at the Philadelphia stood tall on the jetty to their right. The cannons had been pulled inside and the ports were covered with loose-fitting planks.

  Grassley looked back at the Philadelphia. “Check it out. They couldn’t have missed from here. Knew what they were doing.”

  Watts looked at the Philly, leaning to her side in the harbor not more than three hundred meters away. “Yep. Harassing fire.”

  From behind, Grassley heard the metallic scrape of a dagger being pulled from its scabbard. He turned to see a young man with wild, scared eyes looking at him.

  The man yelled something at them, then jabbed the dagger toward the tower.

  The pier was a jumbled collection of rocks, timber and sand, but it served its purpose of extending a walkway to the deeper waters to help unload cargo. Or in this case, prisoners. The harborside was cast in an eerie blue-whiteness. The buildings along it looked weathered and old, and the moon-shadows made them look as though they had either grown from the sand or were dissolving into it.

  The man led Grassley and Watts along the wall of the fort and into an gravel-covered area enclosed on three sides by stone walls. The area was large and barren, and about twenty meters wide by ten meters long. The area could have held hundreds of men, but for now, Grassley and Watts were the first men there.

  The young man shoved Grassley from behind. Grassley stumbled in the gravel and turned to see the man’s face still tense with fear. Two more men ran up to the man’s side, neither much older and both seemed just as intimidated by Grassley and Watts. The three of them talked in a rapid, guttural tongue and pointed at their uniforms and boots.

  One of the men waved his hand in Grassley’s face and yelled, but Grassley didn’t understand what the man wanted. The man yelled again and then pointed at the ground next to the wall.

  “Sit? You want us to sit?” Grassley pointed at the same spot and moved slowly towards it.

  The man just stared, his eyes fixed and intense on Grassley.

  Grassley pulled Watts with him and backed to the wall and sat down.

  Watts’s back smacked into the wall. “Agh!” He slid down it and sat on the gravelly ground. “Watch my fucking shoulder, man.”

  “Hold on, Watts. Guy looks pretty pissed off.”

  “Fuck ’em.” He tried to loosen the rope by spreading his wrists, but it shot pain through his neck and shoulder. “Bastards.”

  The man backed away and stared at them while he said something to his friends.

  “Who do you think these guys are?” asked Watts.

  “No clue. Maybe some kind of pirates?”

  “I don’t recognize their language. It’s close to Arabic, but something’s off.”

  Grassley nodded. He looked at the men talking to one another, the first man still holding his dagger. They were all wearing tunics of varying lengths, and all had sandals on their feet. There was nothing modern about them.

  ———————

  Grassley and Watts were in the three-walled enclosure for fifteen or twenty more minutes before any more prisoners were brought in with them. The first two men were br
ought in by another pair of tunic-wearing sailors. One of the prisoners wore a plain blue jacket and white pants, and was led to the far corner of the enclosure. The other had braided shoulder epaulets on his blue jacket and was shoved to the wall next to Grassley.

  “You’re the LT, aren’t you?”

  “Beg ’pardon,” said the young man.

  “Yeah,” said Grassley. “You’re the lieutenant that told the Captain about the sailboats coming in. When we were in his stateroom.”

  The lieutenant looked at Grassley and Watts, but didn’t answer.

  “You remember us, don’t you?”

  “Where’s the other man? The big one?” asked the young lieutenant.

  Watts shifted his position with a grunt and smiled. “The big one got away.”

  A group of men neared the enclosure, being led by a man carrying a tin lantern. Four armed pirates escorted eight more prisoners to the dark corner on the opposite side.

  “They’re separating us. Officer and enlisted?” Grassley looked at the lieutenant. “Are those men all enlisted?”

  He nodded.

  Grassley looked at Watts. “Our stock just went up.”

  For the next hour, the holding area filled with men from the Philadelphia. The final group of prisoners included Captain Bainbridge and two other officers, and five enlisted men wearing red jackets.

  “More of those Marine guards,” said Watts.

  Bainbridge looked at the men in the group of nine other officers from his ship, and then saw Grassley and Watts. Bainbridge stood next to one of his officers and whispered something. The officer looked in their direction and then nodded. When Bainbridge was done talking, the man nodded again and walked briskly toward them.

  “What is the meaning of this?” asked the officer.

  Grassley shrugged his shoulders. “Of what?”

  “On your feet, mister.”

  Grassley laughed and then stood, but slowly. “Yeah?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Grassley sneered. “I’m a prisoner.” He looked down at Watts. “Him too.” He raised his voice. “Just like all of you, because we were trying to help your asses off the rocks!” Grassley’s breathing quickened. “What the fuck you think we’re doing here?”

  The officer stared intently at Grassley, then looked back at Bainbridge. Bainbridge hooked his finger in the air and the officer returned to his side.