The Gulf (44 page)

“And I intend to win! So I will
not
have you undermining me. Or debating me. You'll carry out my orders with unquestioning enthusiasm. If you disagree, you'll keep it to yourself! Is that clear enough?”

“Yes, sir.”

“On this ship, you carry out my policies, Lenson. Your personal feelings are immaterial. It was that way for me when I was number two. You'll want that from yours when you get command.”

“Yes, sir,” said Dan again.

“Now get out of here,” said Shaker. “Get ready for Manama. We'll be there at dawn.”

*   *   *

Outside, in the coffin-sized corridor between the captain's cabin and CIC, he stood alone for several minutes, pressing his fists to his head. They shook; his mouth was dry; rage still hammered in his blood. It wasn't only Shaker's anger that had surprised him. His own had, too. And frightened him. He'd almost hit Shaker in that moment they'd shouted at each other, face-to-face.

Everyone in the Navy got his butt chewed to ribbons from time to time. It was part of the experience. But Shaker hadn't been putting this on for show. He was serious.

Dan found himself wondering whether he ought to have a talk with someone on the staff about this. Maybe Byrne. He and Jack went back a long way, back to Ike Sundstrom and the
Guam.…
No. He'd been privately reprimanded for not supporting the commanding officer in front of the wardroom. For that, Shaker was well within his rights.

Still, he wondered. He knew the captain had talked to all the junior officers, individually, in private, since he came aboard. Dan had set the appointments up. Had he talked to them like this? And what had been their response?

He rubbed his mouth, thinking again about Shaker's face, and then about Hayes … and Schweinberg … Kane, he'd barely known the enlisted flier.

What was he supposed to think? He was too tired to know what was right and what wasn't. He needed to be alert, rested, to see what was really going on. Fortunately, now, they'd be in port for a few days. A little liberty, a little time to unwind.

He needed it. They all did.

Still rubbing his lips, Dan turned and went below. Behind him, a petty officer turned a switch marked
DARKEN SHIP
. And in the corridors, the lights changed suddenly from white to deep and bloody red.

III

THE STAND-DOWN

23

Mombasa, Kenya

THE C-5 flared out for the last few seconds, hanging above the rushing runway as if it feared the return to earth. Gordon peered past Terger through the window. The greenness was astonishing, unnatural, after the sun-blasted Middle East. As he stretched—he'd napped through most of the flight—he could just make out, beyond the plain, the blue fog of distant mountains.

“Now this, she looks like Africa,” said Maudit from behind them.

Getting a hop to Kenya was unexpected luck. They'd pulled in after “Pandora” for a few days' maintenance, and the end-of-operation message had suggested that EOD personnel be included in the first liberty section. He'd thought Kearn's face would fall off with jealousy as he'd given him the word: a long weekend, to begin in six hours. It was
Audacity
's chief boatswain who'd suggested they try to snag a space-available. “Get out of the fuckin' Gulf,
out,
” he'd said. “Go someplace you can have some fun. Karachi, Sri Lanka—anyplace but Diego Garcia. The ugliest nurse there's dated solid till menopause.”

At the terminal, they'd walked in, found the military desk, and asked the Spec-4 on duty what was available. Half an hour later they boarded, penciled in on the manifest of personnel and replacement parts heading for Mombasa and
Forrestal,
due in in four days.

The transport quivered as the wheels met pavement. Inertia dragged them forward as the turbofans went into reverse. Burgee, behind him, handed up a Special Services brochure he'd snagged from the flight crew. “Good news and bad news,” he said.

“What's the good news, Clint?”

“Beer's cheap.”

“The bad news?”

“Three-quarters of the prostitutes have AIDS.”

“Says the Navy,” Maudit muttered.

“No, that's Kenyan government figures.”

“Jesus.”

“Well, you're big boys,” said Gordon. “I'm not going to tell you not to dip your wicks. But that'd make me think twice.”

He ran his eyes down the brochure as they waited to disembark. Already there was a different smell in the cabin air, humid and earthy rich. Suddenly he was excited. Being a civilian had nothing to compare to this sudden depressurization, this absolute and unexpected freedom. Anything at all could happen on liberty—and usually did. He remembered three little girls in Bangkok.…

They took one of the yellow-stripe taxis in from the airport. Dusty herds of thin red cows driven by thin black children parted before them. It was now that a basic disagreement surfaced. Maudit and Burgee wanted to skip downtown Mombasa for a hotel with a beach. The older men wanted to see Kenya. Gordon was also strapped for money. This meant the Castle, the more or less official hotel, where the Shore Patrol was based. According to the brochure, it had a special U.S. Navy discount.

They agreed to disagree, but he made it plain where and when they'd join up again. After a short one to take the edge off, they split up. Terger was going west, to the national parks. The younger guys were going north, and he and Lem Everett had decided to entertain themselves in town.

“Just a minute,” said the chemist, just as they were parting. “In case you get lucky.” He opened a tote bag, and passed out four small bottles of his homemade perfume.

*   *   *

The road north was newly paved, a two-laner along the coast. The two divers relaxed in the rear seat, watching the countryside slide by. The air was steamy, hot, and wet. “Smells like a Laundromat,” muttered Burgee, stroking his mustache.

Maudit didn't reply. He was counting the money he'd exchanged. You got an awful lot of Kenyan shillings for a dollar. He took a deep breath.
Balaise!
There was nothing like a spell of active duty to make you realize how good you had it as a civilian.

A few miles later, the taxi slowed, turned off through a whispering lane of palms, and rolled to a stop at a huge white building that looked as if it had been airlifted direct from Las Vegas. “Nyali Beach,” the driver said, turning to face them. “Twenty shillings, gentlemen.”

“How much is that?”

“Three dollars, I think.”

“Jesus, Tony. I'm not sure I can afford these sky-high prices.” They split it and added a tip, then piled out. Two porters were already hauling their bags out of the trunk.

The lobby was white marble and they stared around, a little intimidated. “Let's check things out before we get a room,” said Burgee. “Make sure this is, uh, the right kind of place.”

“Meaning the bar?”

“That and the beach.”

They caught a glimpse of it across a patio; sand white as powdered sugar, blue water, the lazy parabola of a volleyball. They couldn't see the players. They went into the bar, blinked at the sudden dimness, and then stopped, together, ten feet inside. Their eyes traveled slowly around the interior. There'd been talking as they entered, but now the place was silent.

“Ha putain,”
muttered Maudit.

It was filled with women in bathing suits, and every one had her eyes fixed on the two sunburned, well-built divers. Burgee swallowed and fingered his mustache, fighting a sudden urge to turn and run. Instead, he swaggered to the bar.

They ordered Tuskers, and before they had them half-finished, there were five women lined up beside them. “Where are you girls from?” Burgee asked a pale-skinned, stunningly built honey blonde in a white two-piece and espadrilles.

“Most of us are from Germany and Norway. We came on a package tour. I'm Elena.”

“Clint. This here's Etienne, we call him Tony. Uh … aren't there any men here?”

“There were supposed to be. This is supposed to be an adventure tour.”

“No, a sex tour,” said another woman, beside Maudit. He turned, intending to face her, but found his eyes channeled like pinballs down the front of her beach wrap. “I'm Brigid,” she said, sliding her arm through his. “Und vhere are you boys from?”

“The U.S.”

“Navy? We thought the carrier wasn't due till next week.”

“You got good intelligence,” said Burgee. “But we just flew in from the Gulf. Been clearing mines up there.”

“Is it true all American sailors are tested?” said Brigid, fingering his sleeve as if she were branding him in some way, leaving a scent marker that would warn off other women.

“Tested,” he said. “Tested?”

“For AIDS.”

“Oh. Oh, yes, that is perfectly correct,” said Maudit. “Tested and passed before we came on active duty. All the two of us.”

There were women all around them now. “Let us buy you a drink,” said a voice behind them. “There's a special beach not far from here. Would you like to go with us?”

“Well, we got to get our shorts—”

“You won't need clothes.”

“We should see if we can get a room,” said Maudit.

“Don't worry about that,” said three voices, together, in varying accents of alarm, laughter, intoxication, and lust.

“Ha putain,”
muttered Maudit again, then jumped suddenly off the stool as a hand insinuated itself down the back of his jeans. He and Burgee looked at each other. “Could be tough,” he said.

“Could be deep water.”

“Could be dangerous.”

“Only one way to find out.”

“Beach Time!” Burgee screamed, and they stampeded out of the bar, waving their Tuskers and scattering foam.

*   *   *

Lem Everett spent the next day buying things. There were plenty of things to buy. Shops lined the quay; there were shops outside the hotel.

The Old Kilindini Road was one huge shop. Its warren of alleyways harbored goldsmiths, batik dyers, brass foundries, and, for whenever you got weary, little dusty-floored bars selling strong, delicious Kenyan coffee, soft drinks, and the ubiquitous Tusker. He bought a Swahili flyswatter, a brass coffeepot, a malachite egg, three elephants carved in ebony, an Arab-style dagger in a hammered scabbard, a Swahili sari, and a Zanzibar chest bound with sand-cast brass. He smiled his thin banker's smile as he stalked from one stall to the next, haggling down old men with the eyelids of tortoises to prices that made them cry aloud to Allah to save them from this infidel whose ruthlessness would bring them bankruptcy and abandonment in their old age.

In the evening, he dined on an excellent curry, then sat for a long time over a White Horse and soda. From beneath an awning, he stared out over the darkening bay. It had been raining while he ate but at last eased off into a mist, the rain clouds moving past and inland, to die, he knew, this side of the mountains of the Masai.

From time to time, he opened a little book. Noted, in minuscule handwriting, a line or metaphor or sometimes even just a word that might work in a poem he was considering on the Gulf. Or better yet, into the big poem. He'd been working on it on and off for five years now, keeping the manuscript, crabbed and dirty with erasures, in a drawer in his desk at work. Two minutes between phone calls, twenty at lunchtime over an apple and soda. Its tentative title was “The Atonement.”

Behind the mountains, the clouds trembled a tawny red. Somehow at that instant, it all fused, the idea of Africa, of Masai, the violent dying glare behind the overcast.

He opened the notebook and wrote carefully: “The sky was the color of a lion's open mouth.”

It needed work, but there was something there. That was the way with words. Alone they were flat, non-numinous. But if you rubbed them together long enough, you would find a pair that threw mysterious sparks. Like pieces of fissionable metal machined to fit. “A matter that renders Self oblivion.” Ginsberg—he loved the “Plutonian Ode.”

He sat there for a long time. When he left, a tiny bottle lay beneath his chair, forgotten where it had slipped out of his jacket.

*   *   *

The rain had stopped, but the ancient stone of the waterfront was still wet and slick. Gordon strolled, hands sunk in the pockets of his slacks. The air was cool, fresh from the Indian Ocean, and ahead the old Portuguese bastion of Fort Jesus was a crenelated cutout against the fading day.

He was standing on the quay, looking out at the moored fishing boats—they had a vaguely Arab look to them, though they were older and more beat-up than the ones you saw in the Gulf—when he heard a heavy splash, then a keening so filled with terror and loss he broke into a run, thinking of a child in the water.

Three ragged black men, bony as beggars, were lifting their voices in sorrow and expostulation. When he reached them, they were standing beside a wooden litter, looking down from the quay wall to the stern of a fishing boat. Several limp-looking fish lay forgotten at their feet. An old man squatted on the boat's counter, staring into the water as if contemplating suicide. Tears streaked his cheeks and scurried into a gray beard. Gordon followed his eyes. A few bubbles circled, an oily film reflected the last glimmer of scarlet over Africa.

“What's the trouble?” he said.

The nearest native looked startled. He looked Gordon up and down, then said, “My father, we have lost his motor.”

“What? You dropped it?”

“It was very new. We don't leave it on the boat at night. They steal. And now it's gone.” He looked down at the weeping ancient. “We will never be able to buy another one. We had to borrow. Now we lose our boat.”

Gordon looked down, too. The water moved in sluggish swirls, black and evil-looking, denser somehow than water should be.