The Command (15 page)

“Second, once we get into this operating area, we're going to be doing a lot of MIO. Make sure we're taking a strain on our boarding team; they're not going to have a lot of time to break in. We'll get there, and probably an hour later we'll have to put guys over.”

“Want me to get more people qualified there, too?”

“If we need to. I think Marchetti's got one team already, but back-check the weapons officer on that. I already told you about food … Camill's working on the chop message … I guess that's all for now.”

A tap on his door. The duty radioman. “Sir, message from CTF 61.”

Hotchkiss got up, too. As she left, she brushed so close he could smell her hair. Strawberry scent. He looked after her as she went down the passageway, fanning himself with the message, before he saw the radioman watching him, eyebrows raised.

T
HE smell of strawberries took him back—to his college days, carefree, or as carefree as a young Arab could be trying to get good grades and make his parents proud.

Back to the days in America.

The man who'd called himself Malik in Iran, Rafiq in Buenos Aires, and other names in many other places, sat under fluttering blue canvas awnings in the Marina Corniche, looking over the sun-gleaming gulf and eating fresh strawberries and frozen TCBY yogurt with a plastic spoon. His thinning hair ruffled in the hot wind. His narrowed gaze, watching the pedestrians promenading past, laughing and chattering and playing music on cassette decks, seemed to see everything and yet nothing at all.

The Sudanese passport tucked into the breast pocket of the cream linen sport jacket showed him without the plastic-rimmed glasses he'd worn in Mashhad, without the beard, with only a carefully trimmed mustache. With his high narrow forehead and prominent nose he looked a little like Anwar Sadat. The name in that passport was Doctor Fasil Tariq al-Ulam. He wore light slacks and a yellow shirt, unbuttoned at the throat, and pens in a pocket protector. A gold-toned Casio calculator-watch. A wedding ring. A cigarette smoldered in an ashtray. He'd spent the afternoon strolling the waterfront. Coffee at the Phoenicia. The hourly show at Dolphin Park. Another coffee at the Marina Club, where he'd struck up a conversation with one of the boat owners, and spent twenty minutes examining a chart of the harbor before taking the table in the café.

The chill sweetness numbed the roof of his mouth. How did they get fresh strawberries here, he wondered. Fly them in?

He looked out over the beach and felt the hot wind like the breath of the Devil. Heard the flutter of canvas. Smelled a tang of wood smoke.

With that smell another beach floated up in memory. Far away, and
long ago, but he'd never forgotten. Who could forget something like that? He could not.

He could not.

He could not.

He'd taken a job with the Vietnamese. That summer that seemed to him now the longest season of his existence, heavy, dirty, dangerous work far out on the Gulf of Mexico. Himself young, eager, friendly, someone people liked. A good guy, the Americans said. The shimmering water, the heat, had not been unlike the sea on which he looked out now.

Then, he'd admired America. He smiled bitterly to himself.

Three semesters a year learning the engineering he'd make his life's work. The teachers spoke English too swiftly to understand. But the books were patient. And yes, the West was attractive. There'd been alcohol. And blond Southern girls, with their soft speech and flirtatious ways. They said he was dreamy. They called him Omar. He met them at bars. A few drinks, then back to his apartment.

Closing his eyes he recreated the tangle of sun-browned limbs, the fine golden hairs inside the parted thighs of blond cheerleaders who called him darlin'. Slipping white panties from the tanned hard bodies of tennis players. They passed notes to him in class saying they wanted to stroke his fancy. Or pressed their breasts against his back in the library, when he was trying to study. They fucked without shame, eyes blue as ice staring into his. Later he saw them with other men, and they met his reproachful stare with amusement at his anger. At Star Trek cons he slept with Romulans, Vulcans, Klingons, Kohms. With Commander Uhura, her high boots tumbled on the floor as he violated the Prime Directive again and again.

But that summer his hands calloused and his fingernails broke, and he picked up shrimper's Vietnamese and learned how to keep engines and winches, injection jets and coolant pumps running when there weren't any parts to fix them with.

That August the
Hônh Phúc
threw a wheel and another boat towed them in to Cameron, on the pass to Lake Calcasieu. He'd gone ashore to get away from the stink of shrimp and diesel fuel, and walked till the sea left his legs. By then he was far out on the beach. He stopped at a bar. Then it was night, and he heard the music, and followed it out into the wind and the sand grated under his sandals
and he walked down between the dunes to where the surf roared glimmering in the moon.

On another beach decades later, he closed his eyes again. Listening to a truck going by behind him, on the wide smooth highway that bordered the Gulf where the emir held sway.

He must have heard it then, too, but mingled with the surf his ear could not distinguish that deep-throated throb, huge pistons firing up and down in the brutal syncopation of tribal drums. Because walking down out of the dunes he'd found a dozen men gathered around a fire.

They must have thrown gasoline on it, to get it blazing so high in such a short time. The flames streamed up from huge crooked logs of bleached driftwood. Jagged scars showed where they'd been dragged across the sand.

Barrel-chested, muscled, their vests and leathers were studded with bright metal and dangling with chains. They wore boots and wristbands, head wraps, heavy rings that flashed in the firelight. They passed bottles from hand to hand, and the smell of marijuana came with the crackle and heat of flame. The firelight flickered on their machines, slanted in black shoals. He had not realized here existed no obligation to welcome the stranger. Had just walked past, sandals digging into the cool sand.

Someone had called out. And something in his voice had given him away, when he answered.

“Hold on there a minute,” a contemptuous voice had said, when the light fell on his face. “Look what's tryin' to sneak up on us. Where you think
you're
going? Wherever you think, you ain't.”

He'd known then to run, at least, but someone else had dropped his beer and tackled him, slamming his face into the sand.

He'd begged, but up in among the dunes they'd pushed him from one to the next. Made him strip off shorts and T-shirt, sandals and underwear. Then made him kneel in the sand.

He tried to laugh. Naked. Alone. Hoping once they saw he was harmless, wouldn't fight back, they'd let him go.

Then one of them, coming up from the fire, had picked up a pointed stick.

Alone at the café table, the slight dark man who'd passed through so many identities he had no longer any name at all sat motionless, staring out at the sea.

…

AT a little after three o'clock another plodded into the shade. He was heavyset and bearded, with a wide, sunburned nose. He wore the thobe, the long white shirt or robe many wore on this island on the street or in the shops, especially during the hot season, and a
ghutrah
on his head. Their gazes touched, then slid off. Al-Ulam took sunglasses from his jacket and slipped them on. They looked around the café, noting those others who sat sipping coffee or lemonade or beer, foreigners mostly. At last the new arrival shuffled to his table. Murmured in classical Arabic, “I still feel the loss of Al-Quds, like a fire in my intestines.”

“What excuse have I to surrender, while I still have arrows, and there is a tough string for my bow?”

The other bowed. “Peace be to you, sir. Do I address the honored Abu al-Ulam?”

“I am Doctor al-Ulam.”

“I am Rahimullah bin Jun'ad. We are honored to have you among us.”

“May God increase your honor, Rahimullah bin Jun'ad,” al-Ulam said politely, waving to the seat. “Please, sit down. Join me.”

The heavyset man glanced at the cigarette, but said nothing as the waiter listened and presently brought freezing glasses of sweetened lemonade tinkling with ice.

There was no hurry to their talk. They became acquainted gradually, both wary, both formal. Al-Ulam learned bin Jun'ad had two sons and that he was a customs clearance manager for InterFilipinas International, a shipping company. He was originally from Yemen, but had lived in Bahrain for twenty-two years. He in turn told the other rather less, and only part of it true.

As two dark-haired beauties came swinging along the corniche, bin Jun'ad frowned. Flicked stubby fingers in their direction. “Are these
muhajaba?”

Al-Ulam thought this might be the first approach to their business. As bin Jun'ad closed his eyes, he admired them. They were bold, attractive. Their skirts did not cover their legs, their scarves did not cover their hair. As they clicked by on high heels, he caught the hot glance of dark eyes.

“They must be foreigners. Indians? Lebanese?”

“Unfortunately, they are our women; but seduced by the devil, and the West, which serves him. This regime”—opening his eyes, bin Jun'ad gestured at everything around them, speaking in a thick low murmur unintelligible a few feet away—“is
jaahili:
ignorant, false, deeply corrupt. The land is
kufr,
the law
kufr,
the regime
kufr,
the
people
kufr,
all save a few. The al-Khalifas and al-Sauds permit this evil.”

“The shadow cannot be straight, when the source is not.”

“Indeed. They call themselves Muwahhidun. But those who have knowledge say that to use man's law instead of shariah, and to support the infidels against the Muslims, turn those who do so into
mushrik,
those who are no longer in Islam.”

“You are eloquent,” al-Ulam told him.

The stubby fingers fluttered. “No, Abu, I am an ignorant one. But I am a Qari; I have memorized the Book. These spewers of filth call adopting the ways of the polytheists modernism. But did not the Prophet, peace and the blessings of God be upon him, say, according to al-Bukhari, and ibn Maajah and others: ‘Whoever brings anything new into this affair of ours that is not from it, it is rejected from its doer.'” Bin Jun'ad glared out as more women passed, laughing and commenting as they watched a young man run along the beach.

“Those whom I serve in the name of God,
subahanahu wa ta'la,
do not hold with those who shirk their faith,” said al-Ulam. He rattled ice, set the glass down. “The word of God is simple to know and easy to obey. All has been set forth clearly. A command is a command. Is that not simple enough?”

They fell into a debate about whether the women who had just passed were
kufr
only, or fully
kaffir.
Whether, following the test of ibn Taimiyyah, the great imam and scholar who had died in prison in 728
A.H.,
their corrupt way of life doomed them to hellfire as Muslims, or whether the essence of unbelief manifested in their way of life had sunk so deeply within them they had left the fold of Islam. Bin Jun'ad quoted the hadith of ibn Abbaas that most of the inhabitants of hell were women who had committed
kufr
in various ways, illegal intercourse, or temptation, or simply being ungrateful to their husbands. They debated this for some time before bin Jun'ad asked if al-Ulam had been in Afghanistan.

“Truly, I have.”

“Recently? Or in the past?”

“Both in the past, and recently. With Mullah Omar and Mullah Ahmad in Kandahar.”

“Is it a just regime, as we have heard?”

“The
imaamah
of Mullah Omar is pure and clean and wholly Islamic. You will not see women parading like whores or masquerading as men in the schools. They are put away, the foreigners are gone, and the people live in all things according to the word of God. I have seen
the wonders occurring in that country. In the Sudan, also, we are building the jihad.”

Bin Jun'ad said respectfully, “When you said you had been there in the past, did you mean as a
mujahid?”

“I was living as an engineer in Egypt when the call reached me. I left my family and followed the path of jihad.”

“Where did you fight?”

“I fought in two actions, but I was not the bravest. It would inspire you, to see how the brothers charged with their Kalashnikovs and did not falter. The machine guns cut them down right and left, but the rest went on, shouting God is Great.” He waited as the other murmured the phrase, too, then went on, “One day we captured eight of the godless ones—the Russians. We made them kneel, and looped detonation cord around their necks, leading it from one to another. Their heads leaped off in perfect arcs.”

“Isn't God merciful,” bin Jun'ad breathed, eyes blinking rapidly.

“We drove them out, and then their power collapsed in their own country, too. After that, we realized nothing was impossible. One superpower has fallen. Now it is the turn of the second.”

“I am told you have worked with the Sheikh. Do you know him? The Sheikh?”

HE debated how much to tell this man. He hadn't survived this long by trusting others. This Qari had known the password, and he voiced the right opinions, but by speaking of the Sheikh, he was touching on matters better unsaid. The one al-Ulam followed was so reclusive he himself had never met him. The Sheikh didn't trust telephones, for example. He sent his instructions on videotapes or by hand-carried notes. Or most securely of all, by word of mouth, through men who could be trusted because they could be killed.

Which was why since Afghanistan the man bin Jun'ad was calling Abu, honored son, had not lived in any country for longer than a year. In the Gulf War he'd carried messages between Iraq and a Saudi group Saddam had counted on to support his invasion. But that group had been suppressed by the Saudi police. He'd barely escaped, using another false passport, to refuge in the Sudan.