He stood with his elbows on the rail and his chin propped on one hand, gazing blankly at the hazy junction of sea and sky, cataloging once again all the charms he now knew Judith Farrell possessed, charms that apparently lay forever beyond his fevered reach.
The barge was a paint scow. It had been towed into position shortly after dawn by a tug. In its hold were dozens of fifty-five gallon drums of paint, and ropes and scaffolds and long-handled rollers and a gang of a half- dozen or so workmen wearing coveralls that displayed the spills and drips incidental to their trade. The scow itself wore the scars of countless accidents involving paint of every color of the rainbow, though gray seemed predominant.
On scaffolds suspended against the side of the warship — scaffolds not visible from the catwalk where Toad moped, since the sides of the ship slanted steeply inward from the catwalk to the waterline — pairs of men wielded long-handled rollers and brushes. After months of exposure to salt air and seawater, the hull of the
The workmen quickly applied the new gray paint over the orange-red streaks of rust and what fading gray paint remained. However, on the scaffold near the hangar bay opening for Elevator Two — the second aircraft elevator aft on the starboard side and the one just forward of the ship’s island — one of the painters worked slower than his comrades. He spent most of his time watching the unloading of a barge moored near Elevator Three, aft of him several hundred feet. That elevator was in a down position.
The sailors used a crane on the flight deck level to transfer cargo from the barge to the elevator. Wooden crates on pallets were gently deposited on the elevator where sailors derigged the wire bridles. Forklifts moved the crates from the elevator platform into the hangar bay. There sailors in blue denims and white hardhats noted on clipboards the stenciled numbers on the crates and directed other forklift operators in their shuttle of the crates to prearranged positions. They worked quickly and efficiently with only occasional shouts from a khaki-clad figure, a chief petty officer.
The painter on the scaffold worked slowly with his roller and observed the scene from the corner of his eye. The sailors should be done in an hour or so, he concluded. Already men were attacking the crates in the hangar, breaking them open and distributing packages to a seemingly never-ending line of men who carried the cargo below. They queued like ants to receive their loads, Colonel Qazi thought. He noticed that the laden porters took orders from another chief with a clipboard before they departed, and they walked away in every direction to hatches around the walls of the two-acre hangar bay. The colonel correctly surmised that the contents of the crates were being carried to many different compartments throughout the ship.
After a while Qazi’s companion, Yasim, finished the section they were working on, so Qazi shouted in Italian until he attracted the attention of the sailor on the catwalk above and outboard of them. With much swaying the scaffold was moved until it hung immediately beside the Elevator-Two entrance to the hangar bay. From there Qazi could better observe the layout and activity of the hangar bay.
Even though it was daytime, the bay was brightly lit from an array of lights on the overhead.
“So many men,” Yasim commented softly.
“Yes. All trained technicians. Look at the men working on the aircraft. See all the black boxes.” The access panels were open on many machines, exposing the myriad of electronic components that filled every cubic inch of the fuselages that did not contain engines or fuel tanks.
“We do not have this many technicians in our whole country,” Yasim said, the envy in his voice discernible.
The colonel motioned Yasim back to work and dipped his own roller in a paint tray. They had better stay busy or they would surely attract someone’s attention.
“When?” Yasim queried.
“Tomorrow night, Saturday night,” the colonel muttered as a fine spray of paint from his roller misted across his face. “It must be then. The crate comes aboard tomorrow morning and it won’t sit there forever. These people are too efficient.”
“How do we know they won’t open it?”
“We don’t.” The colonel paused and looked again at the men with the clipboards. They appeared to be comparing the crate numbers against preprinted lists. Computer-generated lists, the colonel surmised. “The numbers on our crate don’t match anything on their lists. So they will leave it to last.”
“But what if they open it?” Yasim persisted.
“Then they will think there has been a mistake.”
The real problem, the colonel knew, was where they would put the crate, opened or unopened. He had toyed with the idea of placing a beeper in the crate, but with so many electronic sensors on the ship, he had rejected that option as too risky. Selecting an unmonitored frequency would be pure guesswork, if there were any unmonitored frequencies, which he doubted. He would just have to visually search for the crate when the time came, betting everything that he could find it.
He had bet his life before, many times, but this was different. What was at stake this time was the Arab people’s chance at nationhood. If this operation succeeded, the emotional and political pull toward one nation for the Arabs would be great enough to overcome the centrifugal tribal, economic, and political forces which had always kept them apart.
Although the forces of nationalism had fired humanity for two centuries, the Arabs still had only a patchwork quilt of states with every major type of government — dictatorship, monarchy, anarchy, even token democracy — all of which left the vast bulk of Arabs poor and ignorant, saddled by a religion that focused on a dead past and culturally unable to embrace science and technology, which alone gave promise of adequately feeding, clothing, and housing them.
So they were left in the wasteland with their dictators and demagogues, their passions and their poverty. Left in a desert of failed dreams which they were taught to accept because paradise awaited them. In the next life, not this one.
The Palestinians were a running sore because the system could not expand to take them in. The system could not grant their desire for nationhood because none of the Arabs truly had a nation. So the Palestinians were cast out, as the culturally oppressed in Iran felt they, too, had been cast out.
Would he find the crate?
I will find it, Qazi told himself. The Arabs have been a long time dying. The crate will be there and I will find it. Because
He pulled his cap visor down to protect his eyes and began vigorously applying paint.
“Is Chaplain Berkowitz around?” Jake Grafton asked the sailor at the desk in the chaplain’s office.
“CAG, is that you?” Berkowitz’s door opened wide and he stood there smiling. “Come in, please.”
Berkowitz was short and wiry, with a luxuriant head of hair that always looked as if he had missed his last appointment with the barber. He was the senior chaplain aboard — the
“I was aboard last night when the OOD’s messenger found me. I was delighted to help out.” Berkowitz dropped into one of the visitor’s chairs near Jake.
Jake glanced around. The chaplain had painted his office a light beige and procured carpets from somewhere. A Star of David hung on one wall. On the opposite wall was a cross.
“So how is Bull?”
“I can’t violate a confidence, of course, but I think he is coming to terms with himself, which is the important thing.”
Jake nodded. “I was a little worried. You know how it is with guilt. It’s an acid that eats away everything.”
“Chaplain Kerin is talking with him this morning. Commander Majeska’s a Protestant, and Kerin is about as near to his denomination as we have aboard ship. It was a terrible thing about Lieutenant Reed, but Majeska is only a man and he made a very human decision. It’s the same decision most of us would have made had we been in his place. I think he sees that. But until he understands that emotionally and comes to terms with it …” Berkowitz ran out of words.
“Yeah,” Jake said. “Thanks again, Rabbi.”
