by David Poyer
A chattering groan rose below them. Nylon, biting and slipping over steel as it absorbed energy. White smoke burst off the bitts. Horn reeled, tilting. He felt the astern bell taking effect, but too late. The quay wall slid out of sight beneath the bow. He closed his eyes, bracing for the crunch.
When seconds passed without it, he opened them again. Nothing had parted, and they hadn’t hit the quay. He breathed out, looking around at those who watched from bridges and forecastles, who’d gathered, like spectators at a suttee, to witness his self-immolation. Said to Hotchkiss, “Okay, you’ve got the conn back. Remember your engines are still astern. Your rudder’s still right, and you’ve still got the tug alongside.”
The windlasses began going around, slowly warping Horn into her berth, while Dan stepped back where no one could see him, lifted his cover, and smoothed a shaking hand over his sweat-soaked scalp.
THE Second Fleet flagship was moored close enough to walk to. His briefcase was waiting at the quarterdeck, along with Lieutenant (jg) McCall, the strike officer. Strike was the rename for what had been missile officer on his previous ships. Kimberley McCall was rail-thin, as tall as Dan, and carried herself in a way that straddled boyish scrawny and model elegant. She was from Savannah and proud of it, single and into tennis, parties, and getting her MBA. Dan told her they’d be visiting Vice Admiral B. F. Niles. Had she ever heard of him?
“Yes, sir. ‘Nick’ Niles. First African-American three-star. Commanded Barney and California. I hear your paths have crossed before.”
“What?”
“You worked with him at Joint Cruise Missile Projects. Back when the test beds were crashing, and nobody knew why till you found out. They told us that story at Tomahawk School.”
Dan remembered it: how he’d frozen his butt off lost in Saskatchewan and only survived by burning the fuel out of the bird. “Sea stories get improved along the way. And Admiral Niles and I haven’t had the happiest of relationships.”
“Any idea why he wants to see you, sir?”
“I’d guess it has to do with Women at Sea. But we’ll find out when we get there.”
They fell silent, swinging along the waterfront. Gray prows grew, cast their shadows over them, fell behind. The smells of river, fuel oil, steam, exhaust. Passing enlisted muttered, “Good morning, sir, ma’am.” Dan noticed them eyeing McCall. She was humming under her breath.
Mount Whitney was the East Coast command ship, a swollen gray blimp spiky with antennas and dishes. A staff officer took them down a hushed, carpeted corridor. In the flag captain’s office a Jack Mathias introduced himself and gently detached McCall. She’d not be required, he said. The admiral would see Horn alone. Mathias grimaced apologetically, like a proctologist’s nurse. Dan’s mood of disanticipation sank another notch.
“Lenson,” Niles rumbled. He didn’t get up or ask Dan to sit. Just reared back in the padded chair, pale-palmed hands locked behind his bull neck. Dan tried to swallow his nerves by inspecting him back. But Niles’s Certified Navy Twill khakis looked as if they’d just come from the tailor. Three silver stars flashed like rhodium-plated shark’s teeth at his collar points. He looked more grizzled around the edges but otherwise the same: massive, beefy, and pissed off. Even the jar of Atomic Fireballs on his desk might have been the one Dan had sampled in Crystal City, years before. The flag captain was lingering in the doorway. Niles pointed a finger pistol and blew him away.
Dan opened with, “Good to see you again, sir.”
“Bullcrap. You hate my guts. And notice I’m not saluting your Congressional.”
“I hadn’t noticed, sir.”
Niles blinked like a rhino contemplating a charge. “I have no idea how you got it. Or a command. It wouldn’t have happened if I was on the board. I have no idea how your wife fixed this dames-at-sea fiasco for you either, but we’re going to unfix it just as fast.”
“She had nothing to do with it, sir. I got the CO selection before she was named assistant secretary. And it’s not a fiasco. Not yet, anyway.”
Dan remembered too late, contradicting Niles wasn’t the way to get on his good side. The pouched eyes burned even redder. “Well, just to make it clear, we aren’t going that way.”
“What way, sir?”
“Women do the job on the auxiliaries. But we don’t need them aboard combatants.”
“It’s good to hear your policy on that, sir. I was hoping to get some guidance as long as I was here.”
“I’m sure you were. It’s horseshit, and we’re not going to stand still for it.”
“Who is ‘us,’ Admiral?”
“The service leadership. He keeps pushing this, he’s going to see a backlash he won’t believe.”
Dan wondered why a black man would be so set against integrating women. But obviously being black didn’t mean you were a liberal, a lesson Nick Niles seemed to live to personify.
Niles was looking out the curtained porthole. No, not a porthole, more like a round picture window. “Lenson, I have a problem with your commanding one of my ships. A big problem. Usually you Academy guys understand the concept of obeying an order. But it didn’t take with you. You were out sick that day, or something. To you a command’s not a command, it’s some sort of suggestion from above.”
“I work within the system, sir. As long as possible.”
“And when you decide it isn’t?”
“I try to take responsibility, and act. I know that can’t be officially encouraged. But if any service has a tradition of independent action, it’s got to be us.”
“I see. It’s not direct disobedience. It’s taking responsibility.”
Dan didn’t bother to answer again. He sounded defensive even to himself. The worst of it was, at some level, Niles was right. He did regard power as intrinsically suspect, and thanks to the shrink, he thought he knew why. Growing up with an abusive cop for a father didn’t give you the warm fuzzies for authority figures.
“And as far as the system—you have no idea what the system even is. You think you’re smarter than we are.”
“No, sir, I don’t—”
“You think you’re holier, or more ethical, or something. But we have the big picture and you don’t. You react too fast; you don’t think things through. God! You resigned once. How about trying it again?”
“Sorry, sir. I like command.”
“I can’t believe you got a ship,” Niles said again. He shook his head, like a stymied water buffalo. “But since you did, I’ll be watching. No more Lenson adventures. No more hanging people. Fuck up, just once, and you’ll be on the beach. Let’s see you stay in with a relief for cause in your jacket.”
Dan was still standing, at an almost reflexive brace. Niles stared at him for some seconds more, then picked up a red-striped message folder. Leaving Dan unsure whether the interview was over. “Are you done with me, Admiral?” he said at last.
And Niles said, just as he had years before, “Oh, I’ve had enough. Get the fuck out of here.”
HIS hands shook, his fists were balled. Mathias’s glance was pitying. Dan stood in the passageway, trying to regain control. Fighting the murderous gloom that shadowed everything he saw.
Then, from nowhere, he wondered: What am I so upset about? Niles didn’t like him. So what? He’d never expected to make 0–5, and here he was. Never expected to get a command, and he had.
Maybe he was just numb, but suddenly it just didn’t seem to matter that much. He’d been shipwrecked, torpedoed, and tortured. Led men in combat. Where did Niles get off telling him he wasn’t a good officer? To hell with Niles’s opinion of him. And everybody else’s, too.
McCall came striding down the passageway, cool gaze seeking his. He watched with only the most perfunctory attempt to hide his admiration. Damn! She was good-looking after all.
5
Manama, Bahrain
THREE blocks outside the main gate, in the rundown, predominantly Shi’a neighborhood west of the U.S. Naval Support Activity, a dark-e
yed woman with a surgical mask over her face peered down at the body sprawled on the pavement. Blood and fluids stained the road. The driver stood beside the truck, smoking; the bicycle, crushed flat, was still pinned under the big double rear tires.
“He must have died instantly,” the traffic sergeant said in Arabic. “The wheel passed over his head.”
Aisha Ar-Rahim said a short du’a asking for help. Then she knelt and pulled the bloody sheet back, careful to touch it only with rubber-gloved fingertips, releasing the olfactory bouquet of the violently and recently dead.
The pathologist at Glynco, where she’d gone through federal law enforcement training, had warned the students before their introductory forensic autopsy. Blood, he’d said, was only part of that mingled smell. Its metallic tang could be flavored due to recent ingestion of foods, drugs, or alcohol. The lungs, liver, and kidneys all had peculiar odors. Bone had little smell, unless it was heated, as in amputations. Of course, any tissue that had been burned—in this case, from contact with the truck’s exhaust pipes, muffler—would have its own aroma. And finally, organ contents—bowel and bladder—would be part of the collection. Their odors were dependent on many things, including metabolites of vitamins, asparagus, alcohol, coffee, drugs, diseases, and, of course, the bacterial mixture in the feces.
Breathing through her mouth, after that first necessary whiff, she studied what lay beneath.
The skull had been crushed. But the face had not been destroyed. The right cheek hung down, exposing teeth carameled with tartar. She pressed the flap of flesh back into place, restoring the face to where she could visualize it in life. Black hair, brown eyes, weathered skin. Mustache, but no beard. About thirty, at a guess.
Aisha was from Harlem, New York. This was her second month in Bahrain as a special agent, specializing in foreign counterintelligence—although so far she hadn’t done any of it in her two years with the agency.
Which up to now, she thought, had been nowhere near this exciting. Though it was hard to see this as a high point.
Typically, a duty call would be answered by an admin person. The “investigative assistant,” a fancy name for the secretary, would notify the duty agent. After hours, after 5:00 P.M. or on the weekend, like now—it was Saturday—base security would contact the duty agent directly, who would then respond.
Which she was doing now, since the resident agent in charge was in Naples at the moment. When they’d told her where the body was, she’d started to put on a pants suit she often wore when she had to go off base. Then changed her mind, and chose instead a light but capacious abaya dress with long sleeves, low heels, and a scarf, which she’d converted to a hijab before getting out of the car. In the black leather purse locked in the white Suburban were a cell phone, a heavy, silver-toned badge with the seal of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, a container of Mace, handcuffs, a little prayer rug, just big enough for her face and hands, that she’d bought on hajj, and a nine-millimeter SIG Sauer P228 loaded with 115-grain Cor-Bon +P+ hollow points.
She asked the police sergeant, in Arabic, “Tell me again why you called us.”
He smiled nervously, obviously still unclear who she was, though she’d already explained. “He has American ID.”
“You’re telling me he’s an American?”
“No, that he has American ID.”
She remembered to keep her voice softer, more polite than she would have if this was a crime scene investigation in the United States, or within the walls that sealed the American enclave from the Arab city around it. “May I see it, please?”
She flipped through the documents in the noon sunlight. The sergeant looked uneasy, keeping an eye on the passersby. The women were all in black, covered from head to toe, only darting eyes visible. Some tugged children. The men wore the long white cotton thobe that was the national dress of the island. The sergeant cleared his throat, and they dropped their glances and walked quickly past, sandals scuffing up dust.
Aisha compared the ID with the face she’d jigsawed together. The photo was good. The ID was good. The trouble was, Base Security said Achmed Hamid Khamis had been fired the year before. Not only that, he’d been in his fifties, and weighed 110 kilos. The broken body under the sheet would barely weigh 60 and was twenty years younger.
“You’ll take charge of the body?” the sergeant said hopefully.
“What other identification did he have?”
He showed her, reluctantly. An Omani passport, but in a different name from the base ID. Blood had soaked into one corner, bright arterial red, like raspberry juice. Same man, same face, but a different name. Another photo ID. Reading the Arabic with some difficulty—she spoke it better than she read it—she found it was a Bahraini driver’s licence in the same name as the base ID. But this photograph was of a different man, with a longer jaw and smaller eyes, one of which did not look directly at the camera.
“Have you called the SIS? Major Yousif?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“It’s your decision, of course, But this may be something he’ll want to look into.”
The sergeant went back to his car, shooing children away from it. They scattered, throwing clods of earth at him and some at Aisha, too. He shouted and they fled, brown bare feet kicking up in the sunlight.
Left with the body, she turned the head to one side and then the other. Looking for scars, tattoos, earrings. Bone shifted beneath her fingers. They came away wet with a thin, clear, slimy liquid she figured must be cerebrospinal fluid.
With a quick, violent jerk, because she hadn’t seen enough of this yet not to be horrified and disgusted, she peeled the sheet down to the waist and lifted the shirt. The trousers were black polyester with a cheap belt and brass-tone buckle. Above it, the midriff had been can-openered. Here, yes, bowel contents, urine, the warm organic gush-ings of shit and death.
She covered it again, swallowing to keep nausea from overwhelming her, and went on to inspect the hands. You could tell a lot from hands. These were ringless. The watch was a cheap Casio, still running despite the impact.
She was thinking of fingerprints—she had a portable kit in the car—when she turned the unresisting, still-warm hand over. On the underside of the wrist, just above where the cuff of the long-sleeved shirt would cover, was a smear of ballpoint. She lifted it to the sunlight, trying to make it out. Arabic lettering, but smudged. Stretching the skin and looking closely, she thought it said Imaamah. She didn’t know what the word meant. But that, after all, was what photographs were for.
YOUSIF arrived just after she put her camera away after close-ups of the truck, the bicycle, the face, the midriff, and the smeared letters on the wrist. Bahrain wasn’t so large an island he couldn’t have come direct from headquarters. He was in the British-style uniform of the Special Intelligence Service. He bowed with a tight smile. “Sabaah el-khair, Agent Ar-Rahim.”
“Sabaah an-noor, Raa’id Yousif.”
“Kayf haalik? How is your health today?”
“Praise to God, I am well,” she said. “And you?”
“Praise to God, well.” He looked at the body. “American? Is that why you are here? Or is the driver one of yours?”
“Neither, I think. Though the sergeant thought he might be. He has a U.S. base ID, but it’s”—she searched for an equivalent for the word “bogus,” but didn’t know any—“mosh kowayes, no good,” she finished.
“Is that right?” He looked into her car. “Where’s Robert?”
“In Naples.”
“I see.” He looked at the body again, but didn’t touch it. “The sergeant says you found something else amiss with his papers.”
She showed them to him, and he nodded halfway through her explanation and took them. He picked at the military ID with a thumbnail. Flipped through the passport, peering at the visa stamps. Then pocketed everything as an ambulance filtered down the narrow street. “We’ll take care of it from here,” he told her over his shoulder, switching to English. Which
he spoke almost flawlessly, only having trouble with the fs, as she’d noticed Arabs often did.
“You’ll take care of it?”
“He’s obviously not one of your people, he’s not in your records. And the death occurred in town. So he’s my problem. Raqeeb! Sergeant!” Switching back to Arabic. “Any of these scum see what happened?”
“They say he made a turn without looking and the truck was backing out.”
Aisha said, “I’m wondering what he was doing with a base ID.”
“I wonder that, too. Did you take prints?”
“Not yet. Do you want me to?”
“No, we’ll do it at the autopsy.” He used the English word, as if he thought she might not know the Arabic.
“So you’ll do an autopsy?”
He smiled at her. “Inta betettallam. Oh, yes.”
“Can I be there?”
“Of course. I’ll call you when it’s scheduled.”
“And if you find out who he is, meanwhile, will you let us know?”
“Most assuredly,” Yousif said, smiling. “We will share everything we find out with you. Just as we always do.”
He was addressing her as ya saiyyida; formally, but was there an undertone of humor? And if so, what did it mean? Men in white were unloading a stretcher. She waited, but Yousif said nothing more, and a few minutes later she went back to her car.
CRIME happened in every community, and that was true of the military, too. The Naval Criminal Investigative Service looked into any crime involving naval personnel, from grand theft to murder. It conducted criminal investigations, contract fraud, counternarcotics, and counterintelligence work. Its jurisdiction was worldwide. Agents were civilians, not military, federal law enforcement officers, equivalent to those in the FBI, CIA, or DEA.
Aisha was an assistant resident agent in charge in Bahrain. She and the senior RAC, Robert Diehl, provided law enforcement, counterintelligence, and force protection for the thousand personnel on the base, as well as for those aboard the ships that called here for fuel, repairs, and liberty. She also occasionally choppered out to the battle group in the Gulf, though another agent handled most of the shipboard cases.
