Marty started forward, wincing. She was letting the rope slip through her bare hands. He reached out, but she said in a muffled voice, “Hands off, till you get invited.” Then let go and fell in a panting, tumbled pile.

“There,” she said. She got up, looking at her hands. Wiped them on her coveralls, leaving dark patches.

“Nice job,” he told her contemptuously. “I’d high-five you, but I just had my dick in my hand.”

“Don’t let that stop you. I just had my finger up my snatch.” She planted herself down with the men.

This dirty-mouthed bitch snapped back like a nylon line. He just needed a little time, to figure out how to ditch her. Though probably like most girls, she’d drop out all by herself, once it got really tough.

“All right,” he said, “We’ll call you … a supernumerary. Any of these limp ladies wimp out, you step in. That should motivate you melon-heads. … Your teammates are Crack Man, Sasquatch, Lizard, Snack Cake, Deuce, Amarillo, and Turd Chaser. Your name’ll be … Spider. Cause you climb like a sick one.

“Okay, that’s enough, listen up. Now we’re going to talk about a UN 986 Letter and what’s gonna be on it and what’s not. Pay attention, because we’re gonna be doing this for real starting about two days from now.”

They bent their heads over the handout while he went on talking. Thinking, beneath what he was saying, that she still didn’t belong here. He wasn’t going to let her put the team, the mission, at risk.

But he’d take care of that his way.

13

Oparea Adelaide,

Northern Red Sea

THE high sharp mountains lined the coast, lavender violet in the morning, red as candlelight through wine in the evening sun. They cut the horizon jagged and cruel for miles inland and never seemed to be out of sight, no matter where Horn went in the narrow band of sea that slipped like a crack through the most storied desert on earth.

All the coasts looked the same, brown, hot, barren. The steady northeast wind was lip-cracking dry. It brought a fine invisible dust that lodged in the pores of the skin and could filter through a watertight door, especially if there was precision machinery on the other side. The dryness was only occasionally varied with a land squall that fogged the air like battens of fiberglass packed around the slowly moving ship.

Over the past weeks Dan and Horn had come to know the upper portion of the Red Sea well. It was shallow, except in the shipping channels, which ran from the scatter of islands at the foot of the Gulf of Suez south more or less down the center of the Red Sea itself. And narrow: at its widest it was only a hundred miles across, and up in the tributary gulfs the coasts closed in alarmingly. It felt strange being under way on patrol where one could see land on either hand.

This early July morning he stood sweating in the pilothouse, alternately looking down at the chart and out at the mountains as the quartermasters laid out a revised oparea grid that had just come down from the commander, Task Group Red Sea. From Commodore Cavender Strong, Royal Australian Navy, embarked aboard HMAS Torrens, a River-class frigate of British lineage. His force consisted of Torrens, Horn, Laboon and a French destroyer, Georges Leygues.

Dan had not yet met Strong personally, but he’d gone on the scrambler phone with him the day Horn reported in.

Strong had laid out their assignment in spare sentences. The coalition group had been here for a year. Their operating area was bounded by the Sinai to the north, the Hejaz to the east, and the coast of Egypt to the west. The entrances to both the Gulf of Suez and of Aqaba were choked with small jazirats, islands, and coral reefs and sand shoals. The islands were low and rocky, with few lights or other navigational aids. The commodore emphasized Dan should take the utmost care when transiting and not to depend on any one navigational method. The year before, a British warship had grounded on the Sha’b Ali on the way from Suez, not even reaching her patrol area before she had to turn back on a long voyage homeward.

Essentially, Strong said, they were conducting a modified blockade, although the word “blockade” could not be used publicly. “Interdiction operations” or, better yet, “enforcing UN sanctions” was the preferred phraseology. They were here to prevent embargoed goods from reaching Iraq and illegally exported oil or oil products from leaving it.