'That whole thing with the hymn. There were foreigners singing: Jews, Huns . . . there were even neopagans, two of them to my certain knowledge, singing an old Christian hymn. And you? I've never seen you cry over anything. But you cried over that.'
Stauer tried to brush off her question by saying, 'It was just the beauty of the moment.' She wasn't buying it. He continued, 'Well, it was . . . but it was more than that, too. Those couple of neopagans weren't singing to God, New Testament or Old; they were singing to the rest of us. And the rest of us . . . this is the last time all of us are going to be together in this life.'
Phillie shook her head. Stauer couldn't tell if that was lack of understanding or full understanding overborne by denial. He guessed the latter.
His shoulder heaved with a weary sigh. 'In a few hours, hon, we begin landing. By this time two days from now, not everyone who's here with us will be on Earth at all. This was our last time in this life for us all to be together. That's what made the moment so beautiful and sad. That's why Jew and Pagan sang Christian hymn, why Russian and German sang together. We were singing, each of us, to each other, saying, ‘Comrades, we're together.''
As if to punctuate, one of the former Marines began singing a new song:
'Michael row the boat ashore.'
To which even the mechanized infantry replied, en masse. In that small space, low ceilinged and surrounded by metal, their voices caused the containers, the flooring, and even the hull to vibrate: 'HALLELUJAH!'
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
They that go down to the sea in ships,
that do business in great waters.
-107th Psalm, King James Version
D Day, MV
A hot wind, carrying its share of dust, blew from the stern to the bow. On the port side, four of the six Elands the LCM's could carry were loaded, while Mrs. Liu gently lowered a fifth down. Infantry and crew either crawled down nets or, in the case of the middle LCM, used the same loading ramp they'd come aboard on. Starboard, the former Marines, much as their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had before them, climbed down stout netting to boats rising and falling with the waters. They had it both better and worse than their progenitors, however. It was better in that there was precisely no reason to expect a hostile reception right at the shore. It was worse in that the boats that were to carry them to land were simple inflated rubber craft, with small, quiet engines. It was also somewhat better in that Chin's people had built from scratch a number of floating platforms that bumped and ground against the hull but that also provided something of a safety backup should a man lose his grip on the netting and fall. The floats had the additional advantage of allowing an easier boarding of small boats that were not normally terribly easy to board.
Chin's patrol boat, The Drunken Bastard, sat with its engines more or less quietly idling between the ship and the shore.
While some of the amphibians loaded the boats, and others climbed down the netting, the remainder stood in lines topside for their turn to debark. A few of them coughed, from time to time, whether from diesel fumes, or from the dust, or from a combination of those.
Behind those, near to the ship's superstructure, waited the light STOL aircraft. There were six of these, as the Mexicans had managed to patch one together from the scraps of two. Those same Mexicans now saw to arming four of those with a mix of unguided rockets and machine guns. The other two would fly almost unarmed, and solely to retrieve any wounded from the impending action. These weren't marked for medevac, but at least they weren't plainly armed to the teeth. (Though they did carry a side mounted machine gun, just in case.) The medevac birds had floats that were also wheeled, to allow landing on water or on the flight deck.
Behind the aircraft, though forward of where the helicopters waited, Stauer watched the proceedings from the glassed-in bridge. Being there, remaining on the ship, was a tough call. Yet it was the critical node, the locus of the most critical events, and the site with the greatest probability of cascading failure.
So here I'm stuck, he fumed. Doing my job . . . worrying.
Down in the Tactical Operations Center, just off the central meeting, planning, and dining area, Biggus Dickus, worried sick about his missing team, would have sympathized. Under the circumstances, however, he didn't have a lot of sympathy for someone as stuck on the ship and away from the action as he was . . . especially when he had three men missing.
And still worse, Biggus Dickus Thornton fumed, I'm totally unnecessary here. Hmmm . . . I wonder.
D-Day, Bandar Qassim, Ophir
While he hadn't seemed to suffer any permanent damage as a result of oxygen deprivation, Simmons was certainly the worse for wear, weak and still disoriented. He tended to fade in and out quite a lot, too. This hadn't been helped any by spending a long day in a small boat in a harbor altogether too close to the equator . . . without potable water.
He lay in the boat now, conscious if not a lot more than that, while Antoniewicz and Morales paddled the little craft toward the outer jetty where the pirate vessel of the night before had docked. They didn't know why it had docked where it had-perhaps the captain had simply taken the first available berth for fear of engine failure if he'd gone another yard. Or maybe it was the boat's normal docking station. Insects swarmed a light that hung well above the boat, illuminating it, a portion of the jetty and the surrounding water.
'Or maybe they were lazy,' said Eeyore to himself, his voice barely above a whisper. 'Or wanted to get out to sea again quickly. Or it's just dumb luck.'
'What's that?' Morales asked. He shook his head a little to clear it, wondering if the long unprotected day in the sun had affected his mind.
'I was wondering if it was just dumb luck that the boat we want is where we can get at it without having to risk the inner harbor.'
'Dunno,' Morales said. 'You bitching about it?'
'Not really. We deserve some luck, after all.'
