Prepared For Rage

"I do what?"

"Make bead jewelry."

"I do?"

"Yeah. Doreen seemed to feel it necessary to establish your feminine side."

Kenai snorted. "I cook. Isn't that enough?"

"You cook?"

"I make one hell of a spaghetti sauce, smartass."

"I'll let you try it out on me when you get back."

Another silence fell. "I'm not loving this," he said.

She didn't pretend to misunderstand him. "Don't worry. We'll all come back alive."

He thought of the virtual bomb she would be riding into orbit that evening, and said, "Bet your ass. Hey."

"Hey, what?"

"What if I love you?"

"What if I love you back?"

They considered this in startled silence for a moment. "Probably just the situation," she said finally. "You've never had a girlfriend before who rides rockets. I've never had a boyfriend who didn't come unglued at the thought."

"Yeah," he said, "you're probably right. Take care up there."

"I will."

"We've got a date the instant you're out of debrief and Munro's in dry dock."

"You going to kill me if I say I'm not anxious for my first time on orbit to be over?"

He laughed. "No. I think the right thing for me to say right now is, have fun."

"It'll do. See you in a week."

"See you," he said, but she had already hung up.

SOUTH OF ABACO, ON BOARD FREIGHTER MOKAME

There was a hatch that led up to the bow of the sailboat, and before their first dawn Akil had it propped open so they could get some fresh air. They took turns sitting beneath it, letting the elusive breeze tease their faces. By afternoon the sun turned the cabin into an oven, and the combination of the heat and the oily swell passing beneath the hull that pushed the sailboat into a long, continuous roll put half of them on their knees in front of the toilet in the tiny bathroom. The smell of vomit spread the malady to all of them.

The moaning of the migrants was another constant irritant and through the walls they could hear others vomiting, sounds of protest ruthlessly subdued by crew members. Screams were quickly muffled during what sounded like an attempted rape, cut short by a meaty thud of wood on skull, a subsequent dip of the sailboat to port, and a heavy splash. After that, the moans and cries of the other passengers died to the occasional whimper.

"Why do they want to go to America so badly?" Yussuf said in wonder.

"Because they believe the lies," Akil said. " America, the promised land, where all your dreams come true." He looked around the room, meeting everyone's eyes in turn, willing them to believe. "They don't understand that America is a nation of unbelievers, crusaders who are determined to destroy Islam so they can remake the world in their own image. They will wipe us out, if we don't wipe them out first."

"What we are doing won't stop them."

"No," Akil said, surprising the engineer who had spoken words he thought wouldn't carry, "it won't. Not alone. But we are not alone. We are many, and our numbers are growing. They make the West fear us. Look how we have disrupted their lives. They fear to board an airplane. They fear what their own ships may be bringing into their own seaports. They can't defend themselves from us, and they know it. Each and every day, one of their newspapers has a story about how we could poison their water supply or explode a nuclear weapon in the center of one of their cities. They fear us, because they don't know where we will strike next." He paused for effect. "After tonight, they will fear us more."

"I still don't understand how we are to do this thing," the engineer said, apologetically but nevertheless insisting on an answer. "We have had training with the small arms, yes, but none of us knows how to fire the big gun."

Akil refrained from damning the engineer with a glare. This was how these things started, one man voicing doubts. It was good that he had come. He kept his tone instructive, almost pedantic. "Did I not say that Allah would provide? Trust in him, Hatim." He smiled. "And in me."

They needed more, though, he could tell from their bent heads and sidelong looks. He shrugged mentally. There were none coming back from this mission, and no opportunity for them to betray it, not with him at hand. "I have a confession to make, my brothers. I have been guilty of practicing a deception."

Their heads came up at that. "You knew you had become a part of al Qaeda."

There were nods all around. ~

"And you are all familiar with that martyr to our glorious cause, al-Zarqawi, most foully murdered by the infidel in a cowardly attack from the air."

More nods.

"Have you heard of Isa?" They exchanged wondering glances. "Isa sat at the right hand of Zarqawi. Trained by Zarqawi, he set up al Qaeda's online communications and banking systems so that the agents of the West would never be able to track them. He-"

"You are Isa," Yussuf said.

Akil, put off his stride, took a moment to regroup. "I am."

Most of them knew the name, and expressions varied from awe to fright to exhilaration, but Yussuf's face seemed lit from within. "Then we are truly members of the glorious al Qaeda."

Akil knew a momentary a

Yussuf was apologetic. "Forgive me, Ta-Isa. It is not that I doubted, and I understand that the utmost security is called for so that we may accomplish our mission in this great cause."

In a hushed voice Jabir said, "Are we under the hand of bin Laden himself?"

Akil gritted his teeth. "We are," he said. "He wishes me to tell you that Allah blesses our purpose."

The doubter who had spoken first said, still apologetically, "I still don't completely understand, Tabari-Isa. There are only ten of us. How are ten, against so many, able to accomplish our mission?"

"There is someone on board the ship who will help us," he said.

"A believer among the infidels?"

"Yes," Akil said. As well as someone who would be well paid. Or thought he would be. "I must speak to the captain," he said, and escaped the stateroom.

He stepped over and around numerous bodies down the passageway and up the stairs to the deck before he found the captain at the wheel in the tiny pilothouse. It was perched on top of the cabin, and was the one place on the whole of, to Akil's mind, this nauseatingly odiferous, dangerously overloaded craft where there was a semblance of order and solitude.

The captain raised an eyebrow at him and drew on his cigar. The smell hit Akil's nostrils and his sinuses ached in immediate response. He coughed, cupping his mouth and nose in his hand, trying in vain to block the smell. The captain took another drag and expelled another cloud of smoke. It drifted across the pilothouse, lit by the eerie green glow of various instrumentation screens. "I thought you didn't want anyone else to know you were on board."

"I didn't," Akil said.

"Then you shouldn't have come out of your cabin until I told you to." The captain blew a smoke ring, waited, and then blew a second inside the first.

Coughing again, Akil said, "Why is this trip taking so long?"

The captain raised his eyebrow again. "It took forty hours to get to Caicos Passage, and another fifty to get here."

"Where is here?" Akil said, mostly because the captain seemed to expect it.

The other man stepped back from the wheel, and smiled when he saw Akil's expression. "Don't worry, I've got her on the iron mike. The autopilot," he added, when he saw that Akil still didn't understand. He turned to a slanted table mounted against the rear wall and tapped the chart with the two fingers holding his cigar, now burned down to a squat, glowing stub. "Look here. We came through Caicos Passage fifty hours ago. There's no wind to speak of, and no seas, so I'm estimating that we'll be south of Abaco a couple of hours after dawn. Then we go up the inside, south of Grand Bahama -"