Mike sincerely wished he could do more for her. "Sweetheart, we have to make this water last. You won't die from thirst at this rate, but if you drink it all up, you'll sweat it out and there'll be nothing left to sustain you. At least you can replenish your body fluids a litde at a time."
"You are bad like the sheikh!" she said. "If you don't give me water, over into the sea I shall jump." She reached up and grabbed his trousers, pulling herself to her feet. She staggered over to the gunwale. "I prefer to drown than die so slow."
"You won't drown, Hildy," Mike said, applying a bit of crude psychology. "The sharks will eat you before that."
"Ach, mein Gott!" she cried, sitting back down. "Now horrible fishes to eat me!" She crawled over to the small bit of shade in one comer of the cockpit and began weeping. She sobbed bitterly, her body shaking with the effort.
Mike knew the woman wouldn't last much longer. His conscience bothered him a bit since he had lied outright about her being able to get revenge for her murdered friend Franziska. It would be virtually impossible to prove that Sheikh Omar Jambarah had killed her. Mike's real reason for getting Hildegard to come with him was as an intelligence asset. She undoubtedly had a lot of information regarding the sheikh's operations, ports of calls, visitors, and other subjects that could be fed into the intelligence files.
He glanced at her huddled in the shade. If she got steadily worse, he would give her the rest of the water and sacrifice himself, leaving a note revealing her usefulness to the antiterrorist cause. Maybe that way she could last until a ship turned up. He looked around at the unforgiving environment, then turned to the radio.
"All the ships as sea," he said. "Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. I am at six degrees five minutes north and sixty-three degrees twenty minutes east. I say again. Mayday. Mayday. Mayday. Position six degrees five minutes north and sixty-three degrees twenty minutes east. Over."
He switched off the radio to save the battery, then gave the throttle a little push to get the boat a bit of momentum in the rapid current.
.
DHOW NIJM ZARK
OFF THE PAKISTANI COAST
30 OCTOBER
0445 HOURS LOCAL
CAPTAIN Bashar Bashir and his first mate, Bakhtiaar Ghanem, stood at the wheel of the dhow, staring into the light to the east. They had been silently sipping hot tea as the old boat strained against its anchor cable. Ghanem, as usual, was fidgety and cranky. "I hope they are not late."
"Whatever happens will happen because Allah wills it," Bashir said.
"I am not as complacent as you," Ghanem said. 'Things do not always happen through Allah's will. If we are caught by the Pakistani Navy this close to shore, it will be because the people who are to meet us are delayed."
"Either way, it does one no good to worry," Bashir counseled him. He looked upward and raised his voice just enough to be heard by the man standing watch up on the main mast. "Badr! Do you see anything yet?" "La, Raiyis!" Badr answered. "Nothing."
"I tell you, brother" Ghanem said. "Something has gone wrong with al-Mimkhalif. We have not been called to pick up arms or supplies for them for a long time, eh? Hafez Sabah and that American fellow have dropped out of sight. This bodes ill for us all. Perhaps they are dead. Or worse! Captured!"
"If there had been a serious reversal of their fortunes, we would not have been called to serve them tonight," Bashir said. "You seem to know so much. Have you been speaking with their leaders?"
"Of course not," Ghanem said, "but I am not a stupid man, only an uneducated one. Most of them could be rotting in Pakistani jails this very moment, and if things go wrong today we may well join them."
"I admit that I am not optimistic about the situation," Bashir said. "We were supposed to have warships we could call if we got into trouble. Now nobody has spoken of that for a while. To tell you the truth, I would not be sad about going back to hauling cargo between Alula and Bombay."
"Nor I!" Ghanem exclaimed. "We did not make much money, but we knew we could return home safely unless a storm caught us at sea."
"Ah, well, if al-Mimkhalif is truly destroyed, we will be free of them," Bashir said.
"I told you we should have turned them down when they first approached us with their offer."
"You did no such thing, Bakhtiaar Ghanem!" Bashir said. "You were already making plans to build a big house in Alula when we took on the first job for the mujahideen."
Ghanem shrugged. "Perhaps, but--"
"People on the beach!" Badr, the lookout, called down.
Bashir pulled his ancient telescope off the binnacle and focused it shoreward. He could see some shadowy figures pulling rafts from hiding places in the brush. These were the same floating platforms used to come out to the dhow and pick up cargo, then ferry it back to the beach. They were divided into two groups, each taking one raft and dragging it across the sandy expanse to the water's edge. It took some hard work, but they got the things into the water in about ten minutes, then began muscling them through the gentle surf that lapped in from seaward. As soon as the water was waist deep, everyone jumped aboard and began paddling.
"Sloppy!" Ghanem snorted.
"I agree," Bashir said. 'They are not as good as the men who normally pick up the cargo. This appears to be their first time at the task."
"Ha!" Ghanem laughed. "That means these fellows were the big shots in the camp. They sat on their arses while their underlings came to do the hard work. So this is the first time for them to come out to the Nijm Zark."
One of the rafts began to broach. As it turned, the riders on it went into a frantic effort of uncoordinated paddling to try to face it back toward the dhow. But the incoming waves, though slow and shallow, were persistent and within only moments, the raft was pushed back to the sand.
Ghanem laughed again, this time with more derision. "Those buffoons could not cross a lake properly."
Bashir grinned and shook his head in amusement. "We may be here for a while."
The leading raft drew alongside the wooden ship and the crew helped the seven men climb over the railing and onto the deck of the Nijm Zark. One of them was Kumandan, who looked around. "Where is the captain?"
"Here I am, ejfendi," Bashir said, recognizing the man's authority by his well-tailored uniform. "Bashar Bashir at your service, if it pleases you."
"How do you do," Kumandan said. He glanced toward the beach. "What happened to them?"
"They broached, ejfendi," Bashir said.
Once again the crew of the second raft pushed their vehicle into the sea, then leaped into it to begin paddling. They bobbed awkwardly, not making much headway as they struggled across the undulating waters.
Kumandan growled in his throat, then turned to Bashir. "If they broach again, we leave them "
"As you command, ejfendi" Bashir said with a slight bow.
The raft began to lag and list a bit, but the riders worked hard until it suddenly straightened up and began moving straight toward the dhow. It took them twenty minutes, but they finally reached the old boat. As soon as they were hauled aboard, Kumandan nodded to Bashir. "Sail to Mikhbayi."
Bashir salaamed. "As you order, so I obey, ejfendi "
.
ACV BATTLECRAFT
INDIAN OCEAN
VICINITY OF 6deg NORTH AND 63deg EAST
1400 HOURS LOCAL
THE collective mood aboard the ACV was one of irritability. There had been a couple of flare-ups between the two assault sections involving Bruno Puglisi and Dave Leibowitz versus Joe Miskoski and Guy Devereaux. It involved some inadvertent bumping when they were changing places between topside and the cabin. Puglisi gave Devereaux a hard shove with a snarl of warning, setting off a spontaneous clash. The situation didn't have a chance to escalate into a brawl, however, because Senior Chief Buford Dawkins and Chief Matt Gunnarson each grabbed their respective men by the collars and pulled them apart with threats of throwing them to the sharks. Lieutenant Bill Brannigan jumped up and locked some heels, delivering an ass-chewing that seemed hot enough to scorch the paint off the overhead and bulkheads. Everything quickly settled down, though Puglisi muttered under his breath for the next quarter of an hour before finally becoming quiet.