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
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.
Labaan logged off of one search engine and pulled up a purely spurious e-mail account. This one contained in the draft folder a passage from the Jewish Torah and Christian Bible, Isaiah 11:6. Ah, good, Asad has made it home safely.
Another message informed Labaan that the transfer of his men and cargo, scheduled to take place at Port Harcourt, Nigeria, was on time and fully prepared.
Be glad to get the boy off my hands, actually, when the time for that comes, Labaan thought. Though what he's in for . . . and he seemed like a pretty nice kid, too, the one time we talked, if a little too full of the nonsense his professors have been pouring into his head. Well, until I am relieved of responsibility, I can at least keep him healthy . . . and maybe even knock some of the silliness out.
***
