Back on the jetty, he walked slowly past the destroyer again. Then, on impulse, turned and went up the gangway, the metal gridwork bouncing beneath his weight.
The sailors watched him without interest. As he stepped off, actually standing now on the deck — it was all steel, he saw, every bit of the ship was heavy, thick, welded steel, unlike the Vietnamese shrimpers, which were of thin metal, or his dhows, which were built of wood— one left the shade and sauntered over. He was large and pale, with a round face and blond hair under his white hat.
“Help you with somethin’?”
“Here’s my card. I’m a doctor. I wished to offer my services, should any of your crew need medical attention.”
The man had a southern, southwestern accent; al-Ulam guessed Texas. It brought back unpleasant memories. He trembled, keeping the hatred from his face. Smiling, an inoffensive, inquiring little man, trying to drum up a little business. Who glanced only for a moment at the empty machine-gun mount, at the padlock that secured the ammunition locker beside it.
“That’s nice of you, buddy, but we got a corpsman aboard. And if it was something serious, we’d send ’em over to base medical.” The sailor handed the card back and slapped him on the shoulder. “But thanks for stoppin’ by, Doc.”
At the head of the pier the same woman watched him approach. Another sailor stood with her now, a black man, large and imposing. The shape of his head and of his features looked Sudanese, though he was lighter than most Sudanese. Centuries before his ancestors had most likely been Muslims.
For just a moment he felt doubt. He remembered Americans who’d treated him well. The college friends he’d drunk and partied with. The tanned girls like the houris promised in Paradise.
Then he remembered those who’d thrown beer cans at him from pickup trucks. The humiliation on the beach. Their wars on Arabs. Their support of the Jews. And now their arrogant thrust into the heart of Islam.
Looking back at it, he realized the great gray machine was not a ship but the idol of a people so arrogant they had denied God.
What had the Qari said? “Bones must break and limbs must fly.” The thought made him lick his lips, feel as if he’d just drunk several cups of coffee.
He’d attack neither the naval station, nor the apartment building.
He would destroy this monstrous
“You didn’t take long,” the woman guard said. She made no move to stop or detain him, though.
They trusted everyone. They were vulnerable, soft, and afraid. Weak inside their steel shells.
“They did not require me, after all,” he said to her, a quiet, polite little man in a gray suit. “Unfortunately, it was the will of God that the sick man die.”
The guys had stripped to bare chests, Cobie to a skivvy shirt. Even with shore power, the air-conditioning didn’t work too good when you had an open access all the way up to the main deck.
Just getting the engine out of the module took two hours. Then it jammed athwartships. They had to slide it back in to free the beam clamp and shift it around a cable run. Then they reattached it and swung the inlet end out, took a strain, swung the aft end out, et cetera, et cetera. There was a lot of chain-hoist work. Manual hoists, not power ones. Pulling many yards of rattling greasy chain hand over hand before the turbine rose an inch. She was soaked through by the time they got it to the escape trunk.
Helm gave them a break there, and though she didn’t smoke, she went up to the 01 level with those who did and stood looking out at the city. Across the water some guy was taking their picture from the end of a finger pier. She had absolutely no desire to go ashore. What had gotten into her, to sign up for four years of this? Kaitlyn would be ten by the time she got out. She’d have missed her kid’s whole childhood. And for what? To float around the world with buttholes and turkeys, dipshit officers and asshole chiefs. She got so worked up she bummed one of the Porn King’s Marlboros, and puffed angrily with her hands stuck into the back pockets of her dungarees.
When they went back down, Helm had gotten the Allison swung around until its intake duct was poking inside the scuttle hatch. He told her to take the seventy-foot chain fall up to the 01 level, to the scuttle in front of the data processing room, and rig it to the overhead and drop the fall down to him. And to make sure it was solid; he didn’t want the engine coming back down on top of him. She smiled. He trusted her! She took Sanders and Akhmeed and went up to rig it.
They dropped the hook down seventy feet to where Helm caught it. She could bend over and look all the way straight down five decks to the terra-cotta bottom of Main One. She told the guys to stand well back when they got on the chain hoist.
