Prepared For Rage

by Dana Stabenow

  Up the coast from Port-au-Prince, it was so small it didn't even have a name, which might have explained why it was on no map. Although AMI thought that absence more probably had to do with the reason for its existence, its primary industry, which encouraged a wholesale discretion on the part of its residents, always providing they wanted to live to see tomorrow. It was probably the same reason that the encroaching vegetation had been encouraged to overhang the shoreline, all the buildings, and as much of the marina as possible. That much harder to spot, from the sea or the air.

  There were a few open skiffs tied up to the marina, one painted a deep blue with a broad stern to accommodate the line of six large outboard motors bolted to it. Akil, inexperienced in the ways of boats, thought they looked very powerful.

  He had been here for three days as the rest of the cell trickled in in ones and twos, some flying in on a seaplane held together quite literally with duct tape. Others came by ferry, a self-propelled scow whose arrivals and departures were as erratic as her drunken captain, a squat, scrofulous man with an almost incapacitating limp, very bad teeth, and one eye. Akil had arrived by car, although he'd had to hire a driver to find the road and then to get the car down the almost indecipherable switchback through the jungle, alive with bird calls. He imagined that he could hear the slither of snakes, too, and his driver, a gaunt, morose young man with the scarred knuckles of a fighter, enlivened the journey with a description of the various indigenous species. None of them were poisonous, the driver assured him, but Akil didn't like snakes, and this made the pit stops on the twelve-hour, twenty-two-mile journey interesting. If Akil had been in a less apathetic mood, he might have been more appreciative.

  He didn't know quite what he was doing here. Yussuf, good soldier that he was, had arrived before him and had begun to gather in Yaqub's cell members as well as his own, settling them into the tiny cabana he had rented at the very edge of town. He brought them food-if all went according to plan they wouldn't be there that long but there was no point in giving away information about themselves to the investigators who would swarm about the place later-and he found women for those who wanted them. He led them in prayer, stiffening more than one spine, and when the Koran couldn't do the job, engaged the nervous in long discussions of what waited for them in paradise, with emphasis on the honey and the virgins.

  During the last three days Yussuf couldn't be faulted. After the initial greeting, Yussuf had said only, "Yaqub?"

  "He didn't make it," Akil said.

  Yussuf muttered a prayer for his boyhood friend's soul and asked no more questions.

  By comparison to Yussuf, Yaqub would have been at best only a decent aide de camp. Akil himself was superfluous.

  He didn't need to be there. Moreover, he shouldn't be there. He'd known that before he'd arrived, before he'd left Miami, even. It was the first time he'd ever exposed himself to the risk of operations. For that matter the operation itself was at risk because of his actions. Sooner or later Zahirah's body would be found, and when they questioned Mrs. Mansour she would have too much of value to tell them. He cursed himself again for not returning to the house and disposing of her. He didn't make mistakes like that. It was why he was still alive, and still a threat.

  He himself had flown on pre-existing reservations from Miami to Lima, from Lima to Mexico City, and from Mexico City to Port-au-Prince, a different passport for the last flight. The last two men had arrived this morning.

  The transportation he had arranged for six months ago was due in late this evening. He would see off the faithful, entrust Yussuf with the completion of the operation, make the hazardous drive through the jungle back to Port-au-Prince, and fly to Paris, where he already had a reservation in a hotel where all the rooms had satellite television and he could watch the results of his plan play out on CNN and the BBC, and especially on Al Jazeera. It would be the glorious culmination of a long and inventive career, and a fitting coda to the life of his master, the man who had taught him everything. He knew Zarqawi would approve and rejoice at this astounding blow to the fabric and pride of the infidel.

  The thought steadied him, and he returned to his room to sleep away the afternoon.

  She was there the moment he closed his eyes. He knew it was a dream and he struggled to wake, but she wouldn't let him.

  "Adara," he said.

  "Akil," she said.

  "Adara," he said.

  "Stay with me," she whispered, her voice husky in his ears. "Daoud," she said. "Stay." Her hands ran shyly over his body.

  "Zahirah," he said.

  "Yes, my love, it's me. Stay with me, oh my best beloved."

  He rolled her gently to her back and slid between her legs with a feeling like coming home, a feeling he had not known since he left his village for the last time. "Zahirah," he said, her name almost a prayer. "Zahirah."

  "Daoud," she said, and he looked up to see dead eyes in a dead face, her neck bent in an unnatural angle, the dark marks of his fingers around the tender skin of her neck. Her body was cold, unmoving around him.

  He woke violently, covered with sweat, and rolled off the bed to the floor. He scrabbled toward the bathroom on all fours, barely making it to the toilet in time. He vomited until his stomach heaved up nothing but a clear fluid, vomited until his esophagus and his sinuses burned like fire, vomited until he was too exhausted to do anything but lie on the bathroom floor in a puddle of his own sweat. He started to doze and jerked himself awake just in time. There would be no more sleep for him today.

  He became aware of a persistent knocking. "Dandin?" Yussuf's anxious voice said. "Dandin, are you there?"

  "A moment," he said. He rinsed out his mouth and sluiced off his face and reached for a towel. In the mirror he saw a reflection that shocked him, a gaunt and haggard face with haunted eyes.

  When had he become so old? He was only thirty-seven.

  THEIR TRANSPORT DRIFTED INTO THE MARINA LIKE A GHOST AT HALF past two the next morning. An eighty-foot sailboat with a hull painted black or a very dark blue and two dark red, lateen-rigged sails, or so Yussuf told him. He knew nothing of sailboats, or boats of any kind. The younger man could barely contain his excitement.

  The master of the vessel knew what he was doing; he had the boat warped in to the slip and lines around the cleats in moments. There was a mutter of exhaust from the rudimentary main street of the village, and a large, enclosed truck backed down the dock, shaking the pilings beneath it. The passenger-side door banged and footsteps went to the back of the truck. They heard the click of a lock and the sound of a sliding door rolling up. There was a bewildered murmur of voices, cut short by a vicious, low-voiced curse. When the voices quieted the first voice snapped out an order, and many people began to come down the ramp.

  "You have the money," the boat's master said.

  Akil handed it over. The master tossed it through the open door of the boat's cabin. "Don't you want to count it?"

  The master's teeth flashed white. "If it's short, your people are going to

  have to walk to the U.S. from the middle of the Caribbean. And unless they're related to Jesus Christ…" He chuckled. "Quickly, now, before the rest get here."

  He showed them to a stateroom in the bow. It had four sets of bunk beds and its own bathroom. It was very crowded with the ten of them, but except for the weapons they were traveling very light and had no belongings to find a place for.

  Yussuf was left standing in the center of the room, looking very solemn. The boat continually dipped beneath their feet as more people boarded from the slip. Muted voices could be heard speaking in Haitian through the bulkheads. A small child whimpered, quickly hushed.

  They looked at him expectantly. This was the moment where he gave (to paraphrase something he'd once seen an FBI agent say on television) the "come to Allah" speech, when he spoke the words that made them truly feel that they were on a mission graced and blessed by God himself, a God who held them in his hands and would welcome them to paradise when
their task was done. This was the last time he had to make them feel that their task was worthy of their deaths, for surely they would all die. "You are about to embark on a sacred quest," he said. "You will strike a blow at the very heart of the Far Enemy, this godless infidel and friend to the Jews, whose abhorrent secularism has led to abominations like homosexuality, feminism, drinking, gambling."

  They looked at him, waiting confidently. There was more. There had to be more.

  There was. "I am coming with you," he told Yussuf, and beneath that young man's astonished gaze went to a corner and sat down with his back to the wall, crossing his legs and closing his eyes.

  Outside, he heard light footsteps pad down the deck as the lines were loosed, and canvas flapped as the sails were pulled up. Under sail power alone, they slid slowly and silently away from the dock and out to sea.

  MIAMI

  Doreen and Nicholas Munro came aboard the day before Munro left the dock. Cal had intended to hand them over to the XO after the initial greeting and dinner in his cabin, but somehow it didn't turn out that way.

  He liked them, for one thing. Mrs. Munro was a short, round figure with thick glasses that gave her the look of a blue-eyed owl. Her hair was completely white and had a tendency to stand on end, and she wore polyester plaid bagged out at the seat and knees with an air of insouciance. "I'm a housewife, wife and mother, plain and simple," she said breezily, "so don't ask me what I do for a living, thanks."

  Mr. Munro was a tall man with amused brown eyes and hair even thicker and whiter than his wife's. He wore a gray sport coat over an open-collared shirt and jeans worn white at the seams. He was an aviator and as Cal had learned the main influence in his daughter's life. He was very affable-"It's Nick, Captain." "It's Cal, Nick."-and Cal offered him a ride in the helo when they got out to sea, warmly seconded by Lieutenant Noyes.

  He gave them the dollar-and-a-quarter tour, after trying to fob them off on the nickel tour didn't work. They were insatiably and flatteringly curious about life and work on board Munro, and on instantly easy terms with every crew member they met, from FS2 Steele in the galley to MPA Molnar in Main Control to MK3 Fisher doing fuel soundings on the main deck. "We have two diesel engines and two gas turbine engines. The diesels are locomotive engines, the turbines are Pratt & Whitney's, essentially the same thing they built for the Boeing 707s."

  "Really," Kenai's father said. "I'd like to hear a little more about them."

  "When you get settled in, I'll have MPA come get you and give you a more detailed tour. He can print out some specs for you, too, if you'd like." Cal closed his mind to what MPA's probably profane reaction would be to that much time pulled away from his precious engine room and said, "If we're using only the bow prop we can still make five knots. We can go twenty-nine if we're up on both turbines."

  Grinning, Mr. Munro said, "She throw up a rooster tail when you're going that fast?"

  "No, sir," Cal said, grinning back, "but she'll put up a pretty impressive wake. Until Deepwater, which is the program building the new 410s, the Hamilton class 378s were the largest cutters built for the Coast Guard. When they were built, back in the sixties and seventies, they were all about speed and endurance, which meant they sacrificed a lot of utility and ease of access. We've got twenty-two different fuel tanks, and it is a genuine exercise in Newtonian physics to get her fueled properly."

  "How far can you go on a full tank? Or tanks?"

  "Fourteen thousand nautical miles," Cal said, and added, "at twelve knots, that is, on one diesel."

  "More than halfway around the world without stopping for gas," Mr. Munro said.

  "How many crew members on board?" Mrs. Munro said.

  "A hundred and fifty-one." Normally. While many of the crew members were excited about watching the shuttle launch from offshore, many others had opted for leave during what they considered to be at best a public-relations exercise. Munro was running north with a crew of sixty-five, well under strength. Fortunately, all the chiefs except for GMC had elected to forgo liberty until their return. He could run the ship with the chiefs alone if need be, long enough to get her into port, if need be.

  He wound up taking the Munros through virtually every compartment from the bow prop room to aft steering, and he was absurdly gratified when they understood the tac number system identifying each individual compartment the first time he explained it to them. "Excellent," he said. "If you understand this system you'll never be lost."

  "Good luck," Mr. Munro said.

  They all enjoyed a good laugh at that.

  Kenai's father had a near miss with the Darwin sorter on the boat davit, and Cal got another big laugh when he described the little PA so blinded by love for Kenai that he'd run right into it. Mrs. Munro-"Call me Doreen."-demanded more news of Kenai's visit.

  "What's involved in offshore security for a shuttle launch?" Nick said.

  "Now, there's a question," Cal said. They were on the bridge. "Let's go down to the wardroom and get some coffee, and I'll walk you through it."

  They disposed themselves around the wardroom table and Seaman Trimble was sent down to the mess deck for some of FS2's baked goodies while Cal made them both americanos. "You have an espresso machine on Munro7." Nick said.

  "Well, of course," Cal said with a poker face. "It's probably one of the more important contributors to crew morale."

  "It's the single most important contributor to your morale, sir," Seaman Trimble said.

  The Munros laughed. "You're on report for insubordination, Trimble," Cal said. "Dismissed."

  Trimble grinned and saluted. "Aye aye, sir," he said, and departed.

  The baked goodies were found to be snickerdoodles, which Doreen pronounced divine.

  "Okay," Cal said, "security on a shuttle mission. To begin with, there's an eight-mile security zone around the launch pad. Nobody unauthorized in or out for the duration."

  "That's boats," Nick said. "What about aircraft?"

  "There is a no-low-fly zone of twenty nautical miles. Believe it or not there are some private pilots out there who think they can do a flyby of a shuttle launch."

  "Oh, I believe it," Nick said. "So, is the Munro the only sea-based security presence during the launch?"

  "God, no," Cal said. "There are four small boats, two twenty-five-footers, and two shallow water boats. They're working from the shoreline to two nautical miles out. Then there are two forty-seven-foot MLBs- motor life boats-working two to six nautical miles out. A CPB-a coastal patrol boat, an eighty-seven-footer-usually acts as OSC, or on-scene commander, of all the Coast Guard assets working the mission. They're usually the offshore enforcement and response vessel."

  "Usually?"

  "Usually," Cal said. "Theoretically, an MEC or medium endurance cutter is the OSC, but in practice D7, the operational district responsible for this area, never has any available MECs. Not enough assets, and of course they never know how long those assets will be tied up."

  "Because of launch delays," Nick said. "Kenai warned us. What's the forecast?"

  "Weather's not looking like a problem," Cal said. "But it's July. Hurricane season. You never know. At any rate, Munro is OSC for this launch."

  Nick smiled at his wife. "Because Kenai's on board the shuttle."

  "Yes."

  "And because she's related to Douglas Munro."

  "Yes."

  "Our tax dollars at work," Doreen said.

  Cal laughed. "That's right."

  "I like boat rides," Doreen said, twinkling at Cal.

  "Me, too," Cal said, grinning at her.

  "What else?" Nick said.

  "We've also got a HU-25 Falcon patrolling a one-hundred-fifty-nautical-mile safety zone."

  "Medium-range fan jet," Nick said. "Fast, too, got a cruising speed of over four hundred knots."

  Cal shrugged. "If you say so, Nick. I don't do airplanes. The Falcon will make sure there are no vessels in the way of falling boosters."

  Or shuttle parts, they all tho
ught.

  "Recently, we've added an MH-90 HITRON-an armed helicopter- as an air intercept asset. If necessary, it will enforce the no-low-fly zone."

  "Impressive," Nick said.

  "Reassuring," Doreen said tartly.

  Nick grinned. "Do you report directly to Mission Control, or what?"

  "Or what," Cal said. "We report to the Range Operations Center. The ROC reports to the Forty-fifth Space Wing of the U.S. Air Force."

  "I didn't even know the Air Force had a space wing," Doreen said. She looked at her husband. "It sounds so, I don't know, what am I trying to say?"

  "Thrilling?" Nick said.

  "I was going to say Heinleinian," she said.

  "Fictional?" Nick said.

  "No. More like we've already got such a permanent presence in space that we've got a whole arm of the U.S. Air Force supporting our presence there."

  "We do," Cal said.

  "I guess so," she said. "I wonder if Kenai knows."

  "I bet she does," Nick said, quirking an eyebrow at Cal, who smothered a grin. "What happens on Munro during the launch?"

  " Munro will run security from Combat," Cal said, "you remember, from the operations center three decks down?"

  "Are there often a lot of offshore security problems during launches?" Nick said.

  Cal smiled at his deceptively mild tone, and shook his head. "No," he said. "Not unless you count the charter skippers whose clients sign up for a shot at a game fish and, what the hell, since we're in the area, how about a front-row seat to the launch, too, or the drunk driving the Liberty Bay-liner who can't resist coming in for a closer look." He reflected. "I'm told there's the occasional poacher, hunting alligator. The place is virtually a game preserve, no hunting, trapping, and especially no shooting. But that's about it. Most people are sensible, they know enough to stay out of the area during a launch, or if they want to watch to go to one of the official viewing areas."