The Command (36 page)

“Bob?” Yousif inclined his head to the senior agent. “You like that?”

Diehl looked sour, and she was glad she hadn't said anything about him taking out his gun in the car. Because what she was proposing was out of line, too. But they had to find those explosives.

“She broke the case. It's hers, far's I'm concerned.”

The Bahraini smiled. “All right,” he said.

…

A short woman in a housedress answered the door, the corner of a scarf drawn across her face. She peeped through the crack as Aisha asked, in Arabic, if Mr. al-Dhouri was home.

“Who are you? What do you want?”

“I work on the base. I have some papers we need to have him sign, for his benefits.”

“What kind of papers?” But the door opened a little more.

“Insurance papers. In case he's hurt. Are you his wife?”

“Oh. Yes. May I see them?” The door opened a little more, then all the way. Aisha stepped into a small front room.

“I'm sorry, these are for him. Is he here?”

“No, he's not here. He's probably out at the boathouse.”

“The boathouse,” Aisha repeated. “What boathouse? You mean, back on the base?”

“No—I don't know. I don't know where it is. That's all he calls it. He's doing some work there, after his regular job.”

“All right.” She felt like fishing. “Is Mohammed with him?”

“Who? I don't know. The only one of those people I know is Salman.”

“Salman,” she repeated, more for the cell phone than for the tired-looking woman before her. It was a common name.

She was turning to leave when the woman said, “Wait. I have the number there.”

She tried not to sound eager. “At the boathouse?”

“Do you want me to try and call him?”

“Let's try. I've tried to get up with him on the base, but he's never there.”

“He works nights now, that's why,” the woman said. She took a phone off the wall. Punched in the numbers, then handed Aisha the handset.

THERE was an art, Diehl had told her, to phone calls. The most important thing was not to act too smart. There was, for example, a way to find out who else was in the room you were calling, along with the one actually on the line, which was often useful to know. So she started with, “Hello, who's this?” “Hello?”

“Hello, can you hear me? Who's this?”

“This is the Qari. Who's this?”

“The Qari? Which Qari?”

“The Qari bin Jun'ad. Who else? Who did you think you were calling, woman?”

“I was calling the other one. Is he there?”

The voice grew irritated. “What other one? Who do you want? What do you want?”

She guessed that was enough. “Is Shawki there? Tell him his wife needs him at home.”

But another voice broke in, one she recognized. The woman was on another extension, in the house. She screamed, “Shawki?
Shawki?
Tell him not to come home. The police are here. They're looking for him!”

Cursing, Aisha slammed the phone down, ran into the next room. Two of the Bahrainis had come in the back door. As she entered the kitchen they were wrestling the woman to the floor. The phone swung on its cord. Whoever was on the other end could hear them shouting at her. She bent, and clapped it to her ear. Hoping to find out what they wanted, at least. That might tell them what splinter group they belonged to. Accents. Background noises. Anything, because by the time they could trace the number and get out there, they'd be gone.

The line was already dead.

Diehl came in behind the police. He asked if she was all right. She didn't answer.

She nursed her black mood as the SIS led the handcuffed and screaming woman off, as the police ransacked the house. Wanting to chew them out for charging in while she was on the line with the very people they wanted. But knowing she couldn't. Till presently Yousif came over and without a word laid a plastic-covered slab the size and shape of a block of cream cheese on the breakfast counter. One end had been sliced open. Inside was a whitish substance.

“What is it?”

“What we're looking for.”

“Where?”

“In the pantry.”

She picked it up tentatively. Heavier than cheese, but not that much heavier. She pressed her fingers into it. They made dents on the Mylar-covered surface. A demolition block. Probably enough to destroy the house they stood in.

“There's a lot more than this missing,” Diehl said, dropping it into his pocket.

“Not here,” Yousif said. He looked around the house, now littered and torn apart. The police were ripping up the carpet, to show bare plywood flooring.

She called that number back several times that afternoon and evening, but no one ever answered.

T
AKE in lines one through six.”

“Fo'c'sle, midships, fantail report, all lines taken in.”

“Rudder amidships … All engines back one-third.”

Dan surveyed the receding jetty from the wing.
Horn's
repairs were complete, and she had to vacate her berth for another paying customer. The wind had shifted to the north. The sky was turning a menacing saffron. A shamal, one of the infrequent summer sandstorms, was predicted. Yet still they had no orders, and he had no idea when he'd be called on the carpet. They were shifting to a mooring out in the harbor. They'd have to run liberty boats. But all sections had had a couple of days ashore. The first flush had worn off, and most of their disposable income had gone as well.

He'd left Blair at the Regency, saying he'd call when he knew what was going on, and when he could get ashore again.

The first day they'd stayed close to the hotel: investigated the gold souk, visited the Grand Mosque, shopped. They'd bought a rug, bargaining with a gimlet-eyed old Yemeni in Shwarma Alley. Blair had found crystal and rhodium jewelry sold by an Egyptian couple who spoke better English than they did. He bought her a tie-dyed abaya that looked terrific with her blond hair. On the second day they rented a car and drove out of the city to see the Tree of Life and the wildlife park, then to swim at Jazayer Beach.

The Tree was a disappointment—just a dry old mesquite surrounded by miles of nothingness—but he was impressed with the island. It was clean, livable, and the Bahrainis they met seemed to have nothing against foreigners. He told Blair he could see retiring here. She told him it wouldn't be as pleasant for a woman. At which point it became an argument, but Blair didn't hold grudges the way his ex-wife did. They knew they didn't have long. That made every kiss stolen in their rooms or in the car sweeter.

“Engines stop. Left full rudder.”

“Navigator reports: nearest hazard to navigation bears two-two-zero, two hundred yards, shoal water. Navigator recommends continuing right to course zero-niner-zero; two hundred yards to the mooring buoy.”

Horace Camill had the deck, Bart Danenhower the conn. The repair officer was doing well. Dan expected they'd be convening an OOD board for him in the not too distant future. Most all his wardroom was turning out well. He was less pleased with his chiefs. That jury was still out. On him, and on having women aboard. Well, Blair had said they were bickering upstairs on that issue, too.

Recalling his attention to what was going on, because it could be tricky, he sat up in his chair. There was the mooring buoy, a steel cylinder yawing in the blue-green chop. They were approaching it cross-wind, which was the hard way, but he didn't have room to jog south and make an upwind approach. The buoy party was in the boat, life jackets and hard hats, running parallel to them and a little ahead, a hundred yards to port. The deck division stood ready with grapnels and shackles and pry bars. They'd unshackled the chain and flaked the heavy links out ready to go overboard. Dan thought about letting Danenhower do the approach. But considering how little maneuvering room they had, decided to take it himself. When they had the boat under the bow, and were lowering the buoy line and the messenger to the crew, he swung down from his chair.

“Captain has the conn,” voices chorused. He went out on the wing and looked aft. The huge gas tankers looked too damn close. The end of the crowded jetty was no farther away. Directly ahead was the shipyard, and between it and them the steady procession of fishing craft nodding their way in to shelter. The whole sky was brown now with an ominous shadow, like a dropping cloak. He clicked his portable radio to the boat frequency.
“Faith, Horn.”

They rogered. He said, “We're going to have to do something like a flying moor. So move fast on this. Get going at five knots and I'll follow you.”

They rogered, and he called the engine order into the pilothouse. Looking aft, he saw the stern was swinging; the wind grabbing the bow and forcing it to starboard. He used both engines and the rudder to twist back and nudged ahead, following the boat, to which he was now secured by a thread of wire rope and a two-inch messenger. This would depend on how fast the guys worked. If they didn't make it, he'd have to back off and try again. Above all, he didn't want anyone to get hurt.

He brought the ship to a halt fifty feet from the buoy. As it began to drift past, two men scrambled up on its heaving steel, boosted by the others in the RHIB. They had the wire line shackled in seconds and dropped back into the inflatable as the buoy spun and tilted, dragged sideways as the destroyer leaned on the wire. He kept jockeying the engines, keeping her bow in position as the line handlers on the forecastle hauled around on the messenger and paid out the anchor chain that would serve as the permanent pendant. The boat party caught the descending chain and made it fast, tripped the wire, and they were moored. A whistle blew. The underway flag came down. The jack and ensign fluttered up into the growing wind.

He shook the tension out of his shoulders and said quietly to secure the engines, secure the underway watch. He felt confined, though, penned in by shoals and jetties. They'd have to stay alert for changes in the weather and for passing traffic. More dhows were coming in, now, a long line proceeding in from seaward. Early, before their usual evening return.

Hotchkiss, at his elbow. “What you got, Exec,” he said, looking down on the top of her head.

THE wind kept rising through the afternoon, visibility dropping as sand filled the air. It kicked up a short, sharp chop even in such confined waters. At 1300 he secured liberty. It was getting too rough to run the boats. Hotchkiss asked did that mean the security patrol as well, and he said yes.

He also grew concerned, as the bow rose and plunged, that they had so little water underfoot. He and the navigator went over charts and depths and the range of the tides. The basin was dredged to at least nine and a half meters, but
Horn
drew thirty-two feet forward, where the delicate bulb of the sonar dome jutted down. Basin depth was calculated on mean low water, and thus worst-case, but still there was so little beneath the keel the fathometer gave random numbers instead of a true reading.

He considered getting under way. The up side: they'd get some sea room. The down side: they'd have to pick their way out in reduced visibility, through unfamiliar shoals, channels, and strong currents, especially at the entrance to the Khawr al-Qulayah. There were abandoned oil platforms out there, too. Some brilliant scrap-metal salvor had cut them down flush with the level of the sea, and they didn't show on radar.

If it got much worse, he'd try it. But there was one other trick first. At 1400 he set the underway watch, started one engine, and began steaming to the mooring. That seemed to help the pitching, and the motion smoothed out.

The wind whistled. The windows showed only a sand-colored darkness, with shipyard, tankers, the city, only distant outlines, without detail. The harbor creamed, lines of spume lying the length of the wind. A dhow labored, making for safety with agonizing slowness. Sand ground at the glass. Ships returning from the Gulf routinely had their bridge windshields replaced. The anemometer showed forty knots gusting to sixty, to sixty-five. He stayed there for an hour. It didn't change. He left Hotchkiss in charge and went below.

HE was in the in-port cabin going through the traffic that had accumulated over the past couple of days when Casey Schaad knocked. Looking across from his computer station, Dan saw Marchetti behind him, shaven dome unmistakable under the lights of the passageway.

“Yeah, Casey.”

“Sir, Senior's got a concern about our security.”

He tuned himself out of the CNO's training goals. “All right, talk to me.”

They squatted on the settee. Marchetti said, “Sir, I don't like where we are. I brought it up to Weps here, and he said we ought to come up and let you know.”

Dan wondered how difficult it had been to persuade Schaad to surface the issue. “In what sense, Senior?”

“Sitting here at anchor with our thumb up our ass.”

“You don't like the location?”

Marchetti rubbed his skull, wondering how he could put it. He just had a bad feeling. “There's too much traffic. We're too close to the beach. All these dhows going by all the time. What if one of 'em decides to run into us and put some armed guys aboard? We don't have our deck weapons mounted, or ready ammo. We'd kick 'em off eventually, but it'd take us a long time. We could lose a lot of people.”

Dan swiveled his chair, torn between his own doubts about their readiness and the local regulations that had been explained to him at the base commander's office. At last he said, “Casey, what's your take?”

“Well, sir, Machete's spent a lot more time in the Gulf than I have. This is my first time here.”

Dan swiveled again, reminding himself when it groaned to get it greased. Nothing aboard was new. Everything needed attention. But if they'd given him a new ship, would anything be different? He didn't think so.