The Command

“Shut up,” Marty told him. To the old man he said, “Oh, yeah? Well, too fuckin’ bad. We already know.”

“You know?” Pouchy eyes closed in cunning. “No, you don’t. Or you wouldn’t be down here.”

“Uh-huh. Well, maybe. You would be—”

“I am Saloman Rashik.”

“Uh-huh. Rashik. Okay, Liz—”

“Lizard. Not ‘Liz.’”

“That’s what I said, Liz. Take him back to the fantail and get him bandaged up. Then hold him separate. You know the drill from there. Don’t let the others see we got him. Sass, I’ll cover you, which way you going from here?”

* * *

They reassembled on the bridge with Cassidy after forty-five minutes of going through the tankage and the cargo. Actually they gun-decked the tankage. Nobody smuggled oil into Iraq, and Yazd wasn’t a tanker anyway. Cassidy said the chart markings and fixes checked out. There was more animal feed than the bill of lading specified, but since there was no UN restriction on it, they couldn’t argue with that. The master had wanted back on the bridge. He glowered from a folding chair, arms folded.

“Who’s this Rashik dude?” Marchetti asked him.

“Who?”

“Ra-sheek. Rashik.”

The master shrugged and rolled his eyes. “An old man of no use. He kills bugs. He cooks. That’s his cat.”

“He’s from where? Lebanon?”

The captain said no, Syria, and he was a troublemaker and a liar. He stole from the others in the crew. Rashik was a piece of shit. He could ask anyone. Marty thought about that, then crooked a finger at Cassidy. They went out on the little wing, where “George” couldn’t hear them.

“Whattdya think, sir? He says he’ll show us where it is if we give him asylum.”

“But what is it?”

“He won’t tell us unless he gets what he wants. Or at least something in writing that says he gets it, if he comes through.”

“He’s just jerking our chain,” Cassidy said. “We already searched this rustbucket. And the French, before us. You heard what the master said. A shit-for-lunch, a thief, a liar.”

“Sometimes it’s your scumbags come through for you,” Marty told him. “They’re always looking for a better deal. We could see what he’s got to offer.”

The lieutenant said he could work it a bit if he thought it was worth it.

Marty borrowed a pack of Vantages from Crack Man and went aft. He sat down with the old guy and offered him a cigarette. They went back and forth for about twenty minutes. The Syrian, or Lebanese, or whatever he was, kept saying he’d show them where it was if he got asylum. Marty said he couldn’t make any promises, but maybe they could help him if he showed them what he had. Somewhere in here he realized the guy wasn’t as old as he’d thought, he was only about forty, but he looked hard used. He said if he did that and they left him aboard, the master would have him killed. He wanted to be taken off. The cat had to come, too.

“You say there’s something aboard, huh? Contraband?”

“What?”

“Something smuggled? What is it — oil?”

“Not oil.” Rashik’s nose wrinkled in contempt. “These are American cigarette? They don’t taste. Is tobacco in them?”

“Work with me, I’ll work with you.”

Eventually they got down to what it was: pipes. Rashik said he’d seen them being lowered into the after hold late one night. “Pipes” sounded harmless, but when Cassidy reported it to the ship, the word came back to check it out, and meanwhile hold the informant separate from the rest of the crew.

So Marty and Crack Man and Sasquatch and Turd Chaser — they called him that because he was a hull tech, the closest the navy got to plumbers — climbed down into the after hold and started tearing it apart. Before, they’d sampled; now they dug. They hauled and strained at the stacks of feed. In the terrible oven heat of the closed hold the cottonseed waste or whatever it was had rotted into what you found in a sink drain when you took it apart. Oozing through the jute bags, it stained coveralls and hands fertilizer brown. They panted through their mouths, trying not to smell what they were standing thigh-deep in. The beefing and bitching started. Rats rustled at the corners of their vision, burrowing away from the sudden activity. But at last they got down to the ceiling-boards, right down to where he could shine his light through the rusty bottom into the fetid stinking roach-crawling bilges.

He straightened, disgusted, dizzy with the closed-in heat. “Fuck it,” he said, wiping a sleeve over his dripping face. “That’s enough. There’s nothing here.”

“You want us to restack this shit?”

“Fuck it. They can do it.” He waded toward the ladder, trying to shake crap inches thick off his boots, like walking through a hog yard.

Then his gaze stopped.

On a swipe of green paint, back by the after bulkhead. Where they’d stacked the bags as they burrowed down.

The team cursed anew but he drove them back to work. Bags tore as they manhandled them, releasing fresh showers of what looked like smashed-flat coffee beans. It made a slippery paste underfoot as they struggled hundred-pound sacks from one end of the hold to the other.