At that moment they both heard a watertight door scrape and bang open. Someone coughed at the bottom of the ladder. He let go her hand just as, inside his stateroom, the buzzer went off.
“Shit,” he muttered, and closed the door as her steps faded. “Captain,” he said into the phone, tucking his still obstreperous member back with his other hand.
“Sir, Lieutenant McCall. I took over TAO from Mr. Camill.”
“What you got, Kim?”
“Flash traffic from COMSIXTHFLT. The radioman’s gonna be knocking on your door about now, but I thought I’d have the figures ready.”
Dan opened the door, revealing the radioman with fist in the air ready to knock. He looked surprised. Not as surprised, Dan thought, as you’d have been if you’d come up that ladder sixty seconds earlier. “Flash message, sir,” he said, holding the board out and looking away from his commanding officer’s hard-on.
He scanned it, cradling the phone in one shrugged-up shoulder as McCall filled him in with short staccato statements. He heard her out. Then gave the word to come up to flank speed.
Shifting the heavy, clinking bag from hand to hand as he made his way down to the waterfront, the man in the loose-woven dishdasha thought this was not the most remote cranny of the world he’d ever seen. At least it had trees. Stores with refrigerators, though the flyblown goods smelled of dust and kerosene. It had mosques — true ones, not the elaborate and idolatrous Shi’a mockeries.
And turning the familiar corner he saw again through the eyes of a gangly boy running these dusty alleys, shouting to passing captains to take him on as a hand.
Because this rundown village of adobe mud was where he’d grown up.
Now, thirty years on, he walked the same narrow shaded alleys, mind weaving strangeness with familiarity into a loose fabric of past and present through which the incandescent sun burned with unvarying ferocity. Now he called himself Mahmoud. With his new identity he’d put on once more the voluminous cotton country Egyptians wore about their business. In the heat and light and sea wind its fluttering caress surrounded him like a cool flame as he neared a wooden pier that stretched out into the Nile.
Domiat, or Damietta, was eight miles upriver from the sea. This eastern branch of the great river was the poor relation. It met the Mediterranean through a tortuous, shallow way, almost choked at times by a shifting bar of sand. To the east lay Port Said. Far to the west, Al-Iskandariya. The land between slumbered in broiling heat, a sandy coast given over to dates and figs, goats, donkeys, and water buffaloes.
Even in his boyhood, though, it had based an intensive sardine fishery. Along the English-era stone quay, along the piers that groped out into the scum-flecked stream oozing at this low season at barely a walking pace, rode scores of the nondescript, tough little craft that grazed the southern Mediterranean for the tiny fish that served not just as food but as fertilizer for the sandy fields.
And breathing in the river smell, the rich after odor of the fishery, he closed his eyes, behind gold-rimmed sunglasses such as a liberal cleric might wear, and for a moment was also in Cameron, in Calcasieu, in Cypremort and Grand Chenier and Bayou la Batre, listening to the chatter of Vietnamese. And the whine from a distant radio became the strange atonal music Vinh and Nguyen had played in the land of their exile.
And at the same time, a barefoot child squatted outside the coffeehouse, brushing flies from his lids as he hung openmouthed on the tales of graybearded seamen.
And at the same time his own fleet would be far out from Bir Sudan by this time of the morning; out where the water lay flat and lightless as oiled steel and the sky shifted with a pulsing ruddy haze, and the radios lilted with Mohammed Mounir and Ahabaan Abdul Rahim.
Was this, he wondered, what growing old meant? That you lived not just in the present, but in all the moments you’d inhabited? He’d heard once that the Sufis, may they be cursed, said man was only a thought in God’s mind.
Yet even Damietta, remote as it was, bore the marks of the ceaseless struggle between Islam and the West. The ruined forts at the entrance testified to that. The Franks had controlled all this stretch of coast during the Crusades. Till Salah-ad-Din, the great prince of Islam, had thrown back the Westerners eight hundred years before. He stroked his newly grown beard, pondering that struggle. Which had never ended and never would until the last soul on earth bowed in submission to God.
But no man could fight forever.
