The Command

She’s scared, but Ina gets a unicorn in a field of flowers, its hooves in the air. Cobie takes another shot of whiskey. At last she lies down on the damp blue plastic and peels down her jeans. The machine buzzes. She bites her lip at the sudden blazing pain, whispering softly ouch, ouch, ouch.

THE DAIQUIRI PALACE, AGAIN

Back on the beach. It’s cool now, and somebody lights tiki torches. Everybody’s drinking daiquiris a woman shakes up at the bar. They go swimming again. Her back stings when the saltwater hits it. There are more girls now, women the guys picked up and brought back to dance and swim. The English girls are going around topless, showing it off like they just invented tits.

Patryce takes her top off first. She teases Ina and Cobie when they won’t. Lourdes tells her she’d better put it back on and stop drinking, but Patryce tells her not to be a poop. They’re not gonna get to do this once they get to the Gulf, she’d better go back to the fucking ship if she’s going to spoil her fun.

Cobie tries to ride the bull, but the shaking makes all the food and booze come up and she hunks all down the front of her new bathing suit. She rinses it off in the house, then goes into the water to wash her front off. But when she comes out her top’s gone from where she left it on one of the lounge chairs. Then somebody hands her another daiquiri, and it’s kind of fun walking around with the night wind on her chest and the guys all trying to act cool, like it’s nothing. They take their shirts off, too, and pretty soon they’re playing drunk volleyball down on the beach.

IN THE BATHROOM

She has to pee bad but doesn’t want to do it in the water. Something brushed her legs the last time she went in and now it’s dark. The light’s off when she goes into the bathroom. She switches it on and sees Wilson’s head in this guy’s crotch. His wet shorts are on the floor and Pa-tryce’s going up and down on him. Bartlett, who runs the ship’s store. A big dude who jokes about how he’ll give them a break on the Slim Jims. Patryce’s eating his Slim Jim now. It’s huge and glistening, almost blue. Cobie stares. She’s never seen a black man’s dick before. His eyes open and he smiles at her over Patryce’s head. She looks away quickly, hesitates, then goes into the stall and closes the door and pulls down her bottom. She has to pee forever, like she’s soaked the whole ocean in through her skin. Meanwhile they’re grunting and thumping on the other side of the partition. Finally she wipes herself and rushes out, bare feet clammy on the concrete. It’s wet with piss and beer and saltwater and gritty with sand.

Outside the torches are still flickering but everything feels different. Her back burns where she got tattooed. She feels sick and dizzy and the beach is going around and around, like when you’re down in the hole and the ship’s rolling. Lourdes is standing alone, hugging herself. Eyes wide, looking scared. Some guy’s shirt’s hanging on the railing. Cobie pulls it on, not caring whose it is, and the next thing they’re on the bus, then there’s the ship, and the ladder, and her rack. That’s the last thing she remembers. In her fucking rack, with the motor droning next to her ear and the ship spinning and spinning like it’s all going down the toilet. Vortex. To

nothing

but

black.

10

Four days after they left Palma for operations with the battle group, the word arrived. Along with lessons learned, COMIDEAST-FOR instructions, and rules of engagement. The binder of messages and references was two inches thick.

Dan flipped through it on the bridge while Hotchkiss and Camill stood waiting. The sun glared and swayed. A blue sea was running. A burnt-orange haze glowed around the horizon. Over the years Dan had watched that dirty halo creep farther and farther out over the Med. Roosevelt, Anzio, Cape St. George, and the amphibious ready group lay thirty miles behind them. Horn was out ahead in a screen station, maintaining tabs on aircraft and surface contacts as Task Force 61 plowed toward far-off Crete, with the sonar chanting its eerie, lilting whine.

He rubbed his temples, glancing at a chart of the northern Red Sea the exec had propped against the window. Operating areas and warning zones were outlined in red and green and purple. He read through tab after tab, orders, mission, rules of engagement, logistic requirements.

Horn and Laboon would detach as the battle group passed 28 degrees east, about the longitude of Rhodes. Operating as Task Unit 61.1.7, under tactical command of Laboon’s captain, they’d transit the Suez Canal and “inchop”—change operational commanders — to Commander, Mideast Force, for duty in the Red Sea. Their mission would be enforcing U.N. sanctions by interdicting traffic to and from the port of Al-Aqaba, Jordan, the transshipment point for imported goods and exported oil trucked out the Iraqi back door.