Prepared For Rage

"Daoud," she said, and he looked up to see dead eyes in a dead face, her neck bent in an u

He woke violently, covered with sweat, and rolled off the bed to the floor. He scrabbled toward the bathroom on all fours, barely making it to the toilet in time. He vomited until his stomach heaved up nothing but a clear fluid, vomited until his esophagus and his sinuses burned like fire, vomited until he was too exhausted to do anything but lie on the bathroom floor in a puddle of his own sweat. He started to doze and jerked himself awake just in time. There would be no more sleep for him today.

He became aware of a persistent knocking. "Dandin?" Yussuf's anxious voice said. "Dandin, are you there?"

"A moment," he said. He rinsed out his mouth and sluiced off his face and reached for a towel. In the mirror he saw a reflection that shocked him, a gaunt and haggard face with haunted eyes.

When had he become so old? He was only thirty-seven.

THEIR TRANSPORT DRIFTED INTO THE MARINA LIKE A GHOST AT HALF past two the next morning. An eighty-foot sailboat with a hull painted black or a very dark blue and two dark red, lateen-rigged sails, or so Yussuf told him. He knew nothing of sailboats, or boats of any kind. The younger man could barely contain his excitement.

The master of the vessel knew what he was doing; he had the boat warped in to the slip and lines around the cleats in moments. There was a mutter of exhaust from the rudimentary main street of the village, and a large, enclosed truck backed down the dock, shaking the pilings beneath it. The passenger-side door banged and footsteps went to the back of the truck. They heard the click of a lock and the sound of a sliding door rolling up. There was a bewildered murmur of voices, cut short by a vicious, low-voiced curse. When the voices quieted the first voice snapped out an order, and many people began to come down the ramp.

"You have the money," the boat's master said.

Akil handed it over. The master tossed it through the open door of the boat's cabin. "Don't you want to count it?"

The master's teeth flashed white. "If it's short, your people are going to

have to walk to the U.S. from the middle of the Caribbean. And unless they're related to Jesus Christ…" He chuckled. "Quickly, now, before the rest get here."

He showed them to a stateroom in the bow. It had four sets of bunk beds and its own bathroom. It was very crowded with the ten of them, but except for the weapons they were traveling very light and had no belongings to find a place for.

Yussuf was left standing in the center of the room, looking very solemn. The boat continually dipped beneath their feet as more people boarded from the slip. Muted voices could be heard speaking in Haitian through the bulkheads. A small child whimpered, quickly hushed.

They looked at him expectantly. This was the moment where he gave (to paraphrase something he'd once seen an FBI agent say on television) the "come to Allah" speech, when he spoke the words that made them truly feel that they were on a mission graced and blessed by God himself, a God who held them in his hands and would welcome them to paradise when their task was done. This was the last time he had to make them feel that their task was worthy of their deaths, for surely they would all die. "You are about to embark on a sacred quest," he said. "You will strike a blow at the very heart of the Far Enemy, this godless infidel and friend to the Jews, whose abhorrent secularism has led to abominations like homosexuality, feminism, drinking, gambling."

They looked at him, waiting confidently. There was more. There had to be more.

There was. "I am coming with you," he told Yussuf, and beneath that young man's astonished gaze went to a corner and sat down with his back to the wall, crossing his legs and closing his eyes.

Outside, he heard light footsteps pad down the deck as the lines were loosed, and canvas flapped as the sails were pulled up. Under sail power alone, they slid slowly and silently away from the dock and out to sea.

MIAMI

Doreen and Nicholas Munro came aboard the day before Munro left the dock. Cal had intended to hand them over to the XO after the initial greeting and di

He liked them, for one thing. Mrs. Munro was a short, round figure with thick glasses that gave her the look of a blue-eyed owl. Her hair was completely white and had a tendency to stand on end, and she wore polyester plaid bagged out at the seat and knees with an air of insouciance. "I'm a housewife, wife and mother, plain and simple," she said breezily, "so don't ask me what I do for a living, thanks."

Mr. Munro was a tall man with amused brown eyes and hair even thicker and whiter than his wife's. He wore a gray sport coat over an open-collared shirt and jeans worn white at the seams. He was an aviator and as Cal had learned the main influence in his daughter's life. He was very affable-"It's Nick, Captain." "It's Cal, Nick."-and Cal offered him a ride in the helo when they got out to sea, warmly seconded by Lieutenant Noyes.

He gave them the dollar-and-a-quarter tour, after trying to fob them off on the nickel tour didn't work. They were insatiably and flatteringly curious about life and work on board Munro, and on instantly easy terms with every crew member they met, from FS2 Steele in the galley to MPA Molnar in Main Control to MK3 Fisher doing fuel soundings on the main deck. "We have two diesel engines and two gas turbine engines. The diesels are locomotive engines, the turbines are Pratt & Whitney's, essentially the same thing they built for the Boeing 707s."

"Really," Kenai's father said. "I'd like to hear a little more about them."

"When you get settled in, I'll have MPA come get you and give you a more detailed tour. He can print out some specs for you, too, if you'd like." Cal closed his mind to what MPA's probably profane reaction would be to that much time pulled away from his precious engine room and said, "If we're using only the bow prop we can still make five knots. We can go twenty-nine if we're up on both turbines."

Gri

"No, sir," Cal said, gri

"How far can you go on a full tank? Or tanks?"

"Fourteen thousand nautical miles," Cal said, and added, "at twelve knots, that is, on one diesel."

"More than halfway around the world without stopping for gas," Mr. Munro said.

"How many crew members on board?" Mrs. Munro said.

"A hundred and fifty-one." Normally. While many of the crew members were excited about watching the shuttle launch from offshore, many others had opted for leave during what they considered to be at best a public-relations exercise. Munro was ru

He wound up taking the Munros through virtually every compartment from the bow prop room to aft steering, and he was absurdly gratified when they understood the tac number system identifying each individual compartment the first time he explained it to them. "Excellent," he said. "If you understand this system you'll never be lost."