Phillie's theology was not necessarily sound, however sincerely held.
As quietly as she'd gotten out of bed and walked the hallway to eavesdrop still more so did she turn and slip off back to bed.
"Why me, anyway?" Stauer asked. "I'm nobody special."
"Exactly what I told my chief," Wahab agreed. "‘This American neocolonialist bastard is nothing special,' I said, ‘except that he seems to believe nothing is impossible and I have never seen anyone his equal for making the impossible possible.' My chief, of course, scoffed. Do but note, however, that he sent me here anyway."
"Not a total loss, that," Stauer said. "It's good to see you, and that's the truth. Will you be in town for a few days?"
"At least that," Wahab answered, "or my chief will not believe I truly tried."
"Where are you staying?"
"I've a reservation at the airport Marriott."
"Nonsense." Stauer was adamant. "You're staying here. Where's your bag, by the way?"
Wahab grinned despite his overall disappointment. "I seem to recall leaving it on the landing when some rude barbarian asshole stuck a pistol in my face."
When Wes laid himself down next to Phillie, after showing Wahab to his room, she sensed such a weight bearing down upon him that she didn't even think about offering sex. Instead she just asked, voice full of concern, "What's the matter, hon?"
He told her a truncated version of the story, not that she needed it, having already eavesdropped on virtually every word.
"And you're disappointed about having to turn down an old friend?"
"That, yes," he admitted. "But more than that, for just a brief moment I had the sense that my youth was in my hands, to spend again as I wish. I thought I sensed purpose again. But . . . no."
This was not precisely what Phillie wanted to hear, since she rather hoped to become a purpose for him, full and entire in herself. Still, she clucked sympathetically and sidled over to lay her head on his chest.
"Sleep," she said. "And you're not useless. And you're most emphatically not old, that you would need some fountain of youth. And if you don't believe me . . . " Her hand wandered down to where he had the means of proof that he was not yet so very old.
Gently he moved her hand aside. "Not tonight, Phillie, because tonight I feel old and useless."
He felt her head nodding on his chest and wrapped one arm around her. In moments they were both asleep.
The lack of sleep, the starvation, and the stress of U.S. Army Ranger School affected different people different ways. Many of these ways were lasting. Many of them were adverse. Stauer's souvenirs from the course included bad knees, a weak back, and the almost complete inability to either dream, except for nightmares, or to remember any dream that wasn't a nightmare if he happened to have one. And it had been nearly three decades since he'd attended ranger school.
It had cost him one girlfriend, in fact, years prior. His nightly, sweat-pouring, terrorized awakening, his suddenly sitting bolt upright and shouting out, "I wasn't sleeping, Sergeant," had been simply too unnerving.
Still, sometimes . . .
The magnets came in all shapes and sizes, large bars, small bars, discs, rods, and horseshoes. Rather, they came in all sizes relative to each other. Compared to his own tiny dream self they were huge and threatening, every one. Indeed, they didn't just threaten; they struck; they bounced; they sometimes crushed him between two of them.
Eventually, from chaos, a kind of order emerged, the magnets grouping themselves into little subgroups, all being held in place by invisible lines of force. At the center of the grouping was one particular magnet, the largest of all. It dwarfed Stauer's dream body, as it dwarfed one little magnet held tight. Somehow Stauer knew it was important to free that little one. He swam to it, though how he swam in atmosphere or vacuum he hadn't a clue. In dreams, one never asks.
He pulled and tugged; he set his dream feet against the major magnet and tried pushing off with his arms. Nothing worked. Dimly, Stauer began to realize that the little magnet was not merely held in thrall by the huge one, but that all the other sub groupings contributed their share to fixing it fast in place.
"They have to go," the dream self said, aloud.
Still swimming through the void, Stauer aimed for what looked like the smallest and weakest grouping of magnets. He built up speed as he neared it. Then somehow, as can happen only in a dream, his orientation changed to feet first, even as his speed picked up to an amazing rate.
He struck the magnet with his feet, causing it to spin off, out of control, until it was lost in the distance. Taking a glance at the captive, Stauer saw that it was looser in its orbit about the great one. He began to head for the next smallest group . . .
Wes sat bolt upright. In a whisper, rather than a shout, he said, "I wasn't sleeping, Sergeant."
"Huh? Wha'?"
With a broad smile painted across his face, Stauer gently nudged Phillie. "Honey, I think I've changed my mind about making love tonight. Afterwards, say if I give you a minimum thirty minutes of post coital cuddle time, would you mind making breakfast, no pork for my guest?"
"Cynical bastard," she muttered sleepily. She rolled over onto her back even so.
The first faint traces of light were filtering through the window of a spare bedroom holding a much sleep-deprived Wahab. He could have slept through that easily enough. What he couldn't sleep through was Stauer shaking him like a rat in a terrier's mouth. Wahab opened one baleful eye to see a boxer-shorted, broadly smiling Stauer shouting, "Get up, you black bastard. Get your lazy ass up. And don't tell me about jet lag. I don't care. My girlfriend's making breakfast and we've got some planning to do!"
CHAPTER FOUR
I was shipwrecked before I got aboard.
-Seneca, "Epistles"
D-160, At Sea, MV George Galloway
In the peculiar loneliness of a storm at sea, the ship plowed the waves. At the bow a white rush of foam lifted, split, and curled to each side. Astern, it left a faint trail of whitish water and cavitation bubbles, the trail soon disappearing under the twin influence of wave and mixing.
Above that trail was a name, in Latin letters. It would never have done to have given the ship any obviously Islamic name. In the paranoid world that was, all such were inherently suspicious. Still, let it not be said that the naval arm of Al Qaeda was completely lacking in a sense of humor. If they couldn't give the chartered ship a holy name, they could at least honor one of their foremost unholy allies in the west.
Of the workings of the ship itself, a mildly seasick Labaan had little clue, even though operating a small boat was certainly in his repertoire. Instead, while the other three remaining with the team alternated turns guarding the prisoner, well chained below inside a shipping container, with long sessions making obeisance to the sea over the side, Labaan searched the news for any indication that Adam's disappearance had been discovered. So far as he'd been able to determine, there'd been not a whisper. There were disappearances all the time, of course, so he'd had to use a fairly narrow set of search parameters. After several hours of trying, however, and scores upon scores of searches, he'd come up with precisely nothing.
So typical of the Yankees, he sighed, meaning New Englanders and New Yorkers, specifically, not Americans, in general, not to care about or report a crime in their backyard, while so desperate to fix all the ills of the world everywhere else.