The Gulf

by David Poyer

  It didn’t make her popular. She knew that. But she didn’t want to be popular. She didn’t have time for it. Or for a lot of other things. Like a family, time off, a personal life.

  That was the price you paid in Washington, for being the best at what you did.

  “Which terminal?” said Trudell a few minutes later. She started, coming back from her thoughts, and told him to go to British Airways.

  She had to stop thinking about herself.

  It was time to think about how to prevent a war.

  5

  U.S.S. Turner Van Zandt

  THE hangar was cave-dim, oven-hot, crammed solid with noise and the heavy stink of kerosene. The two officers stopped just inside. One stood six feet in his dress whites; the other was shorter and much broader. One was black, the other white. For a few seconds, they looked up at the aircraft. Then the heavyset one tugged open his collar. He blew out, then raised his voice above the clattering howl of a grinder. “Chief. Hey, goddamnit, Chief!”

  A sweat-slick face appeared over an open cowling fifteen feet up. “The Good Humor man! I’ll have two scoops a rum raisin, on a sugar cone.”

  The heavyset pilot scowled. His name was Claude Schweinberg, but he was better known in Helicopter Antisubmarine Squadron (Light) 52, the Killer Angels, as “Chunky,” “Chunk Style,” or “No-Neck.” He was twenty-five and a native of Jacksonville, Florida. The taller officer was Virgil “Bucky” Hayes, from Montana.

  “Cut the comics, Mattocks. When you gonna have this whistlin’ shitcan ready to fly?”

  “Working on it, sir. But you flyboys can dick ’em up a lot faster than us workin’ men can fix ’em.”

  The two pilots were only half-listening. They circled the aircraft, their eyes flicking from nose section to cockpit, hydraulics bay, transmission.…

  The “shitcan” was an SH-60, side number 421: ten tons of magnesium, Kevlar, fiberglass, and aluminum, painted a flat, low-visibility gray. On the flight deck, it stretched sixty-five feet nose to tail cone. Now, with tail pylon, stabilator, and rotors folded to fit Van Zandt’s minimal hangar, it looked like a praying mantis in a matchbox. It was built to carry sonobuoys, radar, torpedoes, and other gear to find and kill submarines. It cost $19 million a copy. Usually, Van Zandt carried two, but 403 had been craned off in Sicily because of tail misalignment.

  “What was that chip light for, Chief?” Hayes shouted, pushing back his cap.

  “We didn’t find no chip, sir. The fuzz burn must of took care of it. Who had the stick?”

  “Me,” said Schweinberg.

  “Well, you must of did something right for a change, sir.”

  “I got somethin’ else down here for you to lubricate, Mattocks.”

  “Somethin’ that size, you want you a watchmaker, sir, not a aviation machinist.” The crew chief looked into the open engine. “Yessir, if you’d had a real chip, it’d tear this friggin’ gearbox up like a hand grenade. But I’ll check it out. Should have her back together around midnight, or anyway before we get under way.”

  The whine of the grinder died. “Under way?” screamed Schweinberg into the sudden silence.

  “We’re shovin’ off a day early, sir. Didn’t you hear?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Come straight from Mr. Woolton. He was in some kind of meeting with the new captain. Says we’re pullin’ chocks for Hormuz tomorrow, sharp in the A.M.”

  Schweinberg kicked one of the tires.

  “Take it easy, Chunky.”

  “Easy, hell! I thought we had two more days. That means”—the Floridian jerked his hands out of his pockets, dropping to a linebacker’s crouch—“we got some serious drinking to get through tonight.”

  “Ain’t no liberty tonight, Lieutenant,” called one of the mechanics, his teeth brilliant in a greasy mask. “Not for nobody. That’s from Commander Lenson.”

  At the mention of Van Zandt’s exec, Schweinberg’s face went sullen and crafty. “We’ll see about that,” he muttered, half to himself, half to the tire. He wound up and kicked it again, so hard the strut rattled.

  “You’re gonna ruin them pretty white shoes, sir.”

  “Fuck ’em. Come on, Bucky,” said Schweinberg, his heavy lids falling till they were almost closed. “We got an exec to see.”

  * * *

  Neither its members nor Van Zandt’s crew considered the aviation detachment part of the ship. They were based ashore, with seagoing assignments at most six months long. HSL 52, Det 2 consisted at the moment of 421, sixteen pallets of spares and tools, and thirteen men. Four were officers and pilots. The rest were enlisted, mainly maintenance ratings. The senior aviator, Lieutenant Woolton (“Woolie”), reported to Van Zandt’s commanding officer for aircraft operations, and to the XO for admin, housekeeping, and personnel matters.

  “Aren’t you going to change first?” said Hayes, bottom man on the ladder to the 01 level.

  “Hell, no, the shoes like these monkey suits.” Schweinberg glanced back. His eye lingered on Hayes’s gleaming aviator’s wings, then on the dark face, still beaded with sweat.

  What do you get, something in his mind asked, when you cross a nigger with a nugget?

  “Okay, here’s the plan. I don’t know what’s biting him, but Lenson was wound tight this morning. So we’re just going to hover in his face till he gives us the wave-off.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll do the talkin’. You just keep your mouth shut, and nod when I say something.”

  “Okay,” said Hayes again.

  The lieutenant knocked. “Come in,” came a voice from inside.

  Chunky stepped in; Buck lingered in the doorway. Schweinberg looked around, taking in the racks of books on the bulkhead, the built-in file cabinet, the desk with its bolted-down in/out baskets. Lenson sat half-turned from it, his flat and businesslike look bent on the stocky flier.

  “Ah, the Bobbsey Twins. Mr. Schweinberg. What are you doing awake?”

  “Sir, I thought I’d stop by, see if you had anything for me before I head on ashore.”

  “No liberty tonight. We’re getting under way early.”

  “Liberty?” Schweinberg opened his eyes wide. “XO, this isn’t for liberty. I’m detachment operations, see, and I got to get some charts over at the met office.” He glanced over his shoulder, and remembering his cue, Hayes nodded.

  “You’ve had two months here to get charts, Schweinberg. I know we’ve got all the DMA series of the Gulf.”

  “Yessir, but they don’t show the stuff that’s been going on, the bombing, the wrecks…” He glanced at Hayes again, but found the brown eyes turned full on Lenson. “Anyway, I met a guy who said to come over before we shoved off and he’d give us something the Bahrainis use. If they’re what I think, they could be a real ass-saver if we have to do a combat search and rescue.”

  Dan closed his eyes. Why did they put him in this position? He glanced at his watch as Schweinberg droned on, then said abruptly, “Well, why are you coming to me about it? What does Lieutenant Woolton say?”

  “I didn’t want to wake him up, sir.”

  Dan sighed. “How long’s it going to take?”

  Schweinberg drawled, looking out the porthole at the beach, “Oh, I don’t know, sir, that depends on a lot of things. See, I got to find this specific guy—”

  “You just got to get ashore one last time, don’t you, Chunky?”

  “Like I said, sir, it’s not for me, it’s—”

  “I know, I know, the charts.” Lenson glanced past Schweinberg at Hayes. Buck caught the tired irony in his eyes, knew suddenly that the XO understood he was being conned. “Okay, enough. Go ashore, if it’s that important to you. But I want you back before dark.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Hayes, giving the XO a half salute, though he had no cap on. Lenson fixed him with a gimlet eye, but all he said was “Keep an eye on him, Buck.”

  Back in their stateroom, Schweinberg grinned and banged a f
ist into his shoulder. “How you like them apples? Told you Papa Chunky fix!”

  “One of these days you’re going to step on your crank with him, Claude, and you’ll walk out with it nailed to your boots.”

  Schweinberg’s voice was muffled by his soaked skivvy shirt. “I never fly higher than I’m prepared to fall. Shower for me, then I’m off to the local Hooter’s. You comin’?”

  Buck considered it. He tended to regret nights out with his roommate. Then again, this might be their last time ashore in a while.

  “Well?”

  And after a moment, Hayes said, grinning, “Sure.”

  * * *

  Virgil was one of the western Montana Hayeses. His family had raised sheep near Kalispell since 1888. He’d grown up there, and his dad and mom still ranched on the South Fork. But he’d wanted to see what the world held. The same impulse that had pulled his great-grandfather west in the Seventh Cavalry pulled him east, first to the University of Iowa for aeronautical engineering, and then into the Navy.

  Pensacola, the sweltering sea-level Gulf Coast, had been a revelation. And not only in climate. Living among whites, he’d never consciously differentiated himself from them. How wrong he was, he’d found out one night in a waterfront bar. He’d nearly lost an eye, and graduated flight school six months behind his class.

  Now Bucky Hayes was a married man, with two kids and coming up on his five-year decision point. In his locker, he had a letter from ATI, Advanced Technology Instrumentation. It was a job offer, developing night-vision displays for helicopters. He’d have to answer it pretty soon.

  Now, his half-minute shower over, he pulled on boxer shorts and paused before the mirror. Well-defined pecs, triceps coming up; he turned, tensing deltoids to show smooth muscle. Next time someone swung at him, the outcome would be different.

  Behind him, in the other stall, Schweinberg was bellowing a fight song under the steady roar. Hayes thought of saying something—fresh water was always scarce—but then decided it wasn’t his place. And he had to bunk with the guy. It was better to have him clean.

  Schweinberg. He remembered the time he’d visited him at home. Schweinberg’s uncle, a construction contractor in Ortega, had hired him to knock down a wall. Schweinberg had strapped himself into an old Fury and crashed it into the building at forty-five, with Hayes getting it all on the VCR.

  Back in their room, he pulled on jeans and a rugby shirt he’d picked up in Gibraltar. Bahrain was friendly territory, but only a fool went on liberty in uniform in the Gulf.

  By the time they emerged onto the quarterdeck, the sun was turning the desert to the west gold and scarlet. They nodded to the flag, then ran down the rattling gangway.

  The quay was just oil-stained concrete, hot and still. “Take you, foot of the pier,” Hayes said, starting to jog.

  “It’s too fucking hot for that shit,” said Schweinberg, and then, as Hayes slowed, lunged past him in a linebacker’s sprint. He stayed ahead for a hundred yards before Hayes caught him, but he was fifty yards behind when their feet thudded on the dusty soil of Bahrain.

  At the gate a dented yellow Land Rover coughed into life and ground toward them. The driver was at least seventy, with a beard like a goat’s and sandblasted eyes under a dirty burnoose. “Hello,” he said, his withered hand gripping and releasing the wheel as if that was all that kept him upright. “My name is James. You gentlemen require a ride?”

  “James, huh?” said Schweinberg. “We needum go Manama Airport, lickety-split. Can do?”

  “Manama airport, sure. Get in.”

  Hayes held him back. “Wait a minute, Chunky. How much you want to stick with us all night?” he asked the driver.

  “Yeah, good idea.… You understand, buddy? All night?” Schweinberg traced an arc on his watch. The old man stared at him for a while, then said, “Sixty bucks.”

  They winced, protested, but he wouldn’t drop a nickel. At last, they got in. Hayes slammed the back door fruitlessly twice before noticing a twisted hook of coat hanger.

  They sat there for almost a minute, then realized he was waiting to be paid. “Later, later,” said Hayes, but the truck wouldn’t go into gear till they each passed up ten dollars earnest money. When he had it carefully put away, the old man bent to the snapped-off shift column. Too late to do any good, Hayes saw that the one hand was all the old Arab had. His left arm ended in a neat surgical stump.

  * * *

  They left the jitney at the service wing of the air terminal, cautioning the old man again to wait, and wandered down a corridor with signs in Arabic and English. At last they found the meteorological officer. Short and fair and flushed, he was sipping from a teacup when Schweinberg laid his elbows on the counter and belched politely. His pale eyes slid up over the rim like two slowly rising moons. “Pilots only in here, chappies,” he said.

  The heavy lids flickered once. “We’re pilots, Jack. How’s about some maps?”

  “What kind of pilots are you?”

  “U.S. Air Force, advance party for the B-52 wing.”

  “I beg your…?” The official’s mustache seemed to have suddenly stuck to the teacup. “Did you say—”

  “Didn’t you get the word? Got a wing of fifty Buffs movin’ in. Revetments, bunkers, shops, the works. Going to bomb the Assahollah, I mean the Ayatollah, to Kingdom Come. Now. Maps.”

  “Ah, what kind of maps did you need, gentlemen?”

  They left with two tubes of old commercial air charts of Iran. The Land Rover was waiting where they’d left it, and James was asleep. Schweinberg shook him, then wiped his hand on his jeans. “Okay, that’s enough doo-dah for the fucking XO,” he grunted. “Let’s get turgid.”

  * * *

  Bahrain being officially dry, there were only a few places to foregather for beverages. They discussed their choices as they headed back toward town. One was the Navy Administrative Service Unit (also known as the Alcoholic Service Unit), which had an attached bar. The beer was cheap, but they agreed it tasted like embalming fluid.

  “The Londoner Club’s got fresh Guinness on tap. Besides”—Schweinberg lowered his voice for some reason—“that’s where all the Gulf Air stewardesses go.”

  “There’s some nice stuff at the Regency.”

  “Well, lemme put it this way, Buck. Who’s the fucking helicopter commander here?”

  Hayes said, “On the other hand, I like the Londoner, too. Why don’t we go to the Londoner?”

  They left James and the Rover out front after paying him another thirty dollars, accompanying it with careful directions to wait till they came out no matter how late it got. The old man grinned toothlessly and waved his nonexistent hand. Hayes swallowed and turned away.

  The Londoner was comfortingly dim and smelled of yeast products and fish and chips. Two Saudis were playing darts. The rest of the crowd were Americans, Brits, and Germans, expatriates and contractors. Hayes and Schweinberg slid behind a table and ordered Guinness.

  “Now, is this so bad? Why couldn’t we all have had tonight off?” Chunky asked rhetorically. “We’re gonna be out there bleeding from the eyeballs for a week. What’s wrong with Lenson, he can’t give us one night to blow off steam?”

  “Beer’s up, gentlemen.”

  “Move it, nugget,” said Schweinberg, leaning back. Hayes frowned, resenting his tone, then got up. After all, he was the junior pilot.

  Suds billowed above the steins, ran like sea foam over his fingers and spatted on the floor. Chunky fastened his to his lips like emergency air. When he came up, he said, “What were we talkin’ about now—”

  “About the XO.”

  “Oh, yeah. XOs! I seen some winners,” said Schweinberg. “Like off Libya, in the Ouellet, there was good old Commander Horlburt. Give you an idea what we had to deal with, he used to sleep naked except for a jockstrap and white gloves. Our det OIC, Ski Collins, roomed with him; he saw it. Horlburt’s wife converted him, and he had these gory pictures—the Bleeding Heart, the Virgin, all over the r
oom. He had a high drift factor even for a shoe.” Schweinberg closed his eyes and submerged again for a while, then resumed. “Bertie-Buns loved to do inspections. If you didn’t do your hospital corners right, he’d pour water in your rack. You’d go out for a double bag at oh-three-hundred, eight hours in the air, then come strolling in ready to pull some serious Zs and find that waitin’… Finally he got in a fistfight with one of our guys.”

  “A fight? No shit?”

  “Yeah. We were at the NATO club in Civitavecchia. Well, Ski had a kind of a gas problem. So he was standing there at the bar and just as Horlburt comes in, he lets a juicy one go. And Horlburt says, real annoyed, ‘Can’t you people act like gentlemen?’ And Ski says, ‘Sorry, sir, I meant to say “Attention on deck.”’

  “Well, he took that as an insult, and goddamn near landed one before we got hold of him. And it was funny, ’cause he wasn’t a big guy, and we had four big pilots there. We figured, why report something like that, ruin his career, but we decided to take care of him on the side.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Well, one of the guys found this old Nautical Almanac in the USO library in Palma. Nineteen fifty-eight, I think it was. We peeled the covers off it and swapped it for the one Horlburt was using. Not one of his star fixes came out for the rest of the cruise. We let the captain in on it and every day he’d ask him where his fix held him. The sonofabitch’d sit there all seized up, and finally mutter ‘Ontario’ or ‘Java.’”

  Schweinberg’s eyes slid closed in bliss. “You know, black-shoes just ain’t like us, Buck. The junior guys ain’t so bad, but they get to be oh-fours, oh-fives, shoes get rigid. All the imagination of a bedbug—”

  “Hey,” said a voice. They looked up at a leather-faced man in a civilian-style flight suit. “Who are you guys? I don’t see you here before.”