The Gulf (31 page)

Not that he disliked them, or disliked the Navy. His experience was that it was about as free of prejudice as you could expect of any organization run by human beings. But he felt out of place among men who were basically conservative, whose first response to any challenge was patriotism and violence.

On the other hand, it was true that his roommate didn't seem to care about money. Buck had to admire that in him.

The question was, should he stay in, or take ATI's offer? On paper, it looked good. At the moment, he was making $2,339 a month basic, $206 flight pay, and $110 for hazardous duty. Quarters, subsistence, and housing allowance for Joyce and the kids was another $741. Total, $3,400, or about $41,000 a year. The engineering job started at $47,000. But that wasn't the whole story. There'd be no more deployments, no dets, no duty days … just home being Daddy and husband.

The company would need a commitment soon; they couldn't hold the position open indefinitely. And Joyce wanted an answer, too. She'd have to set things up for Jesse's kindergarten and Dustin's school, find a house, get herself a job. He had to decide soon.

Beside him, Schweinberg stared down, hardly registering the uninterrupted surface of sea as it droned beneath him. His mind was in the past. In the night after the Old Miss game. He'd had three tackles and his first interception, and after the postgame party, two blonde juniors had decided to see whether they could exhaust the human football-and-fucking machine that was Claude Schweinberg at twenty.

And still was, goddammit. His fingers stealthily explored a hardness near the cyclic.

The plane thought for him. They were on RADALT hold, automatically maintaining altitude, and the rudder pedal depressed and rose slowly under his flight boots. From time to time, without engaging much of his brain, his eyes lifted from the sea and moved across the panel.

Gradually, the hum of rotors and transmission, the steady rush and whistle of wind gentled his mind, sanded smooth the edge of his lust. His head nodded in an involuntary dovening. The sunlight fell hot in his lap and the air hissed cool through the vent. Airspeed eighty, heading 210 and coming left again. They'd been in the air for three hours, refuelled in a hover, then gone back out without so much as touching the deck. They'd have six hours off that afternoon, then fly again that night.

It was a bear of a schedule. But convoy duty was like that—grind, grind, grind. With only one plane in the det, it was just that much worse.

He caught his head sagging and snapped it back. The ICS was silent. “Kane, Christy, you guys sharp back there?” he grunted.

Their voices were muzzy. The crewmen got even less sleep than the officers during a convoy. They flew, worked on the plane, then flew again. He'd have liked to let them sack out now, but he needed their eyeballs. He glanced at his copilot, and found him staring fixedly out the chin bubble. Cool and collected. His ATO was the wrong color, but he never seemed to get rattled. Schweinberg admired that.

Hayes caught the motion and blinked, recalling himself from his career decision. From a hundred feet up, the Gulf looked rough today. Not North Atlantic rough, but rough for a narrow, shallow sea. The waves uncoiled slowly, leaving patches of ivory foam. The sun accompanied them, sparkling and glittering to the southeast. It made his eyes water. He locked the visor up and rubbed them.

“See anything?” drawled Schweinberg.

“No.”

“Well, I'm about passed out. You got it. Poke me in fifteen.”

“Uh-huh.”

The pilot eased his harness and slumped against the door. Buck took the stick. He ran his eyes over the panel. Main transmission pressure a tad low. Fuel consumption normal. Temperatures good. No odd sounds. He flexed his fingers on the cyclic, wishing he had some coffee or cola. Coming up on next circle … a slight bank, say five degrees, enough to let you look down at the translucent Gulf.…

The idea was to scan for anything out of the ordinary. Especially small boats and mines, but anything that might be evidence of Iranian chicanery. Hayes had never been able to decide how realistic this was. A properly laid mine couldn't be seen from the air. They were moored to the bottom and floated fifteen or twenty feet down, and even if the water was clear, nobody sweeping over at eighty knots was going to see one.

Drifting mines were different. The det from
Foster
had seen one last month and set it off with machine-gun fire. That would be a diversion. Schweinberg would love the noise.

He held the orbit, thinking how boring this all was. Tired, tired … when they got back and he put in his letter, maybe he and Joyce would leave the boys with her mom and head someplace to be alone. That would be a good idea. Get the arguments and tears that always followed a deployment over where they wouldn't upset the kids.

He realized then that for the first time he'd said
when,
and not
if.

The lead ship of the convoy prickled into sight to the south, a flyspeck that boiled on the boiling horizon. Two One vibrated and droned, and Buck Hayes shook himself into the waking present again, realizing with something not far from horror that he'd nodded off, too.

“ATO, ATACO.”

He clicked the transmit trigger on the stick. “ATO.”

“Crossing contact to north, your zero-two-zero, fifteen, request you check it out.” The petty officer sounded bored, too.

“Two One, wilco.”

Schweinberg shifted in his seat. He muttered, “Don't say ‘wilco' until I agree. Don't you know what that means?”

Hayes said between his teeth, “It means ‘I will comply.'”

“Right, but I'm the helo commander. I'm the only one who can say ‘wilco.'”

Hayes didn't bother to answer. He was sorry Chunky was awake again. It had been relaxing with him asleep. Except for the snore.

“What was that bearing?”

“Zero-two-zero, fifteen.”

Schweinberg stretched and belched. “Okay, gimme the airplane. Coming right. How's my fuel?”

“MAD vector,” said Kane suddenly, from the back.

“What?”

“Something registered on the magnetic detector, sir. Something big down there, something metal. Can we come around, take another sweep?”

“You're talking antisubmarine, right?” drawled Schweinberg. “Forget it. There ain't none out here.”

“It was something, sir. Can't we check it out? We got no sonobuoys aboard, but maybe we could localize it with a couple passes. I think—”

“For
get
it,” said Schweinberg, and his voice held exasperation and finality. “Told you,
ain't
no subs out here. It's just a wreck, some old ship or drilling rig on the bottom or something. Do what I tell you and quit thinking, Kane, quit your goddamn
thinking.
”

The SH-60 droned and vibrated through a huge arc. Hayes yawned luxuriously, still looking down. The Gulf rushed past blurry-swift directly under them, slower a mile away, and the horizon not moving at all. The black shadow of the bird rushed soundlessly over the sea, flying formation on them.

“There he is. Two o'clock,” said Schweinberg.

The speck ahead grew, became a boat. Characteristic banana shape. White, green, blue stripes. They flashed over it at three hundred feet, then banked back in a great loop. Hayes said, “ATACO, ATO: We have contact in sight. Identify as dhow, course one-eight-zero.”

Van Zandt
acknowledged. As they came around, he saw the convoy on the horizon. They looked small and lost, caught in the joining of the two vast bowls, placed lip to lip, of sky and water. The ship came back. “ATO, Bridge: we hold his course intersecting ours.”

“Concur,” drawled Schweinberg.

“Try to change his mind. Commodore doesn't want him passing through the formation.”

“Got it.”

Bank again. The sun blazed suddenly through the windscreen, blinding them, heating the exposed skin under their visors to the point of pain. Hayes wouldn't have been surprised if the impact of those white-hot photons slowed their airspeed.

Schweinberg told Kane to open the cabin door. He eased back on cyclic and the airframe gave an orgasmic shudder, transitioning to hover.

Killer Two One hung above the sea, moving with the dhow, which was chugging stolidly along perhaps two hundred feet away. “Wave him off,” shouted Schweinberg.

Hayes caught Kane's lifted arm, and past him a glimpse of the boat. The iron pipe of its exhaust rose perfectly vertical aft, putt-putting along. Clothing decorated the rails. A few men stood on deck. Around them, the topsides were littered with wire cages, fish traps, line, orange plastic floats. He remembered the yard they'd visited on a tour, the patient artisans carving ribs and stringers out of iron-hard teak. They'd said each dhow was guaranteed for a hundred years. It was timeless, biblical.

But now modern times had come, and a modern war with it. Helicopters, fighters, missiles. And in the midst of it all, pungpunging along in their eternal courses, moved the simple fishermen of the Gulf. What did they think of this strange desultory war?

“Sonofabitch don't want to move, sir,” said the gunner.

“He'll move,” said Schweinberg.

“Let's not get too close to this guy, Chunky.”

“No problem.” Yet the nose stayed steady just ahead of the nodding prow. “I'll go down the starboard side this time. Wave him off, Buck.”

The second pass had no more effect than the first. The ancient boat plugged on, dragging its slow, straight burble of wake. A thin stream of brown smoke jetted again and again out of the rusty stack. The men on deck watched them. One of them, a white-bearded ancient, was waving. “What is all that shit?” said Schweinberg.

“Laundry day, looks like.”

“Uh-huh. Well, what is it with this raghead? Is he dumb or just stubborn?”

“Probably headed for home.”

“Not through my convoy he ain't.” Two One banked left in a hairpin turn and this time dropped suddenly. Spray leapt up, a whirling mist that cut off everything around them. The forward airspeed indicator sank to zero, and they squatted, fifty feet up, directly in front of the dhow.

Schweinberg, staring through the spray into the oncoming painted eyes of the dhow, felt a surge of anger.
Fucking ignorant turbans. Greasy half-niggers. Want to play chicken, huh?
He moved the cyclic, and Two One tilted forward.

An artificial tornado of four thousand horsepower moved with them. Clothing fluttered and then tore away, sailing off toward Iran. The Arabs grabbed for handholds. They leaned forward into the rotorblast, shaking their fists up at the gray machine that menaced them.

When 421 came around from the close pass, Schweinberg saw with astonishment that the dhow was still plowing defiantly on. His mood changed instantly from contempt to alertness. They'd been warned against high-speed boats. The idea was they could dash in and drop off a bomb, or a mine, next to the hull of one of the escorts. But there was no reason not to suspect a dhow. They were slow, but you could pack a lot of explosive in that deep hull.

He slowed to a hover again beside it, not a hundred feet off, looking it over. The old man, the one who'd been waving, was staring out at them now.

Then suddenly, as Hayes watched, he bent. Tossed back a piece of canvas. And dragged up from under it something four feet long, metallically shiny, and shouldered it.

And the gunner, aft, wrestled his mount around frantically, and Schweinberg cursed, banking left, but too slow, far too slow to do any good. And the Arab swung his burden toward them, as the gunner still struggled helplessly with the belt feed, crew and pilots all caught in the impotence of nightmare, and held it up: the glittering tuna, long as he was, slim as the barrel of a missile launcher.

Hayes screamed, “Hold fire, Christer! It's a fish!”

“God damn it, sir, I was ready to shoot him!”

“Screw this pussyfooting,” Schweinberg said. “Give him a burst, Christer. Right in front of those eyes.”

“A burst, sir? We ain't supposed to—”

“Just do it, and keep your lip to yourself!”

They all watched the men on deck closely as they converged again. Watched for sudden motion, or for arms. The dingy wooden boat plowed on.

“Okay, shoot.”

The machine gun blatted briefly. Six cones of white spray appeared spaced across the water, twenty or thirty yards ahead of the painted eyes.

The prow, curved like a Turkish slipper, wavered, then swung to port. All the crew, now, were waving their fists, their mouths black wells of defiance and hatred.

“Death, you bastards,” Schweinberg muttered. “But first—cheech.”

Hayes, beside him, was getting angry. He hadn't asked the ship for authority to fire. They had no right to fire on these people! They were probably friendlies, Saudis or Bahrainis. If they reported a helo had shot at them, there'd be hell to pay. Now, irritated, he said, “God damn it, what does that mean, Schweinberg?”

“What does what mean?”

“This ‘cheech' shit.”

“Oh, you never heard that?” Two One banked like a roller coaster and headed back toward the distant ships. Behind them, Hayes glimpsed the dhow, foreshortened and naked-looking, hove to under a vast ocher sky as tiny figures fished for their clothing with poles. “I thought I told you … Kane, Christy, listen up, this's a good one.

“There's these two missionaries that get captured by savages. They're tied up and took before the chief. The chief says, ‘You invaded our territory and insulted our gods, and you have two choices: death, or cheech.' He asks the first missionary, ‘Which do you pick?' And the missionary thinks, and then he says, ‘Well, I don't know what it is, but it can't be worse than death. I choose—cheech.'

“The chief grunts. ‘Huh. Cheech. Good!' And he makes a sign. The warriors grab the first missionary, fifty or sixty of them butt-fuck him, one after the other, and they throw him into the river.