Dead Low Tide (28 page)

“This time tomorrow I’m still going to be a Navy commander,” Prendergast cut in, “and every military investigator in the country’s going to be descending on the whole complex, top to bottom, sniffing every butt they can find to figure out how it all happened. So dispatching five collaterals who have no strings attached to any part of the objective requires a little bit of thinking. This whole thing’s come to be a clusterfuck beyond measure only me and my men will be left to clean up, and all you want to do is give me chapter and verse of Allah be praised.”

He looked away from Coburn, back toward the stern, and now the light was fading on us, the bridge and boat ramp and shipyard all behind us. “This time tomorrow you and Jessup’ll be squeezing the titties of seventy-two dark-eyed virgins apiece,” Prendergast said, quieter, as though the words were only to himself, “and I’m going to be standing around trying my damndest to melt into the wallpaper.”

Before I could understand what I was seeing, before I could take it in, Coburn was away from the wheel and had one hand to Prendergast’s throat, the other holding tight the back of his head, him still sitting there on the gunwale. And I could see Coburn had a knife in the hand at Prendergast’s throat, a dull gray glint in whatever last light was on us.

“Do it,” Prendergast croaked out, the words ice. “Fuck this enemy of my enemy shit. Do it. See how close you can get to the target by yourself.”

Coburn took in a quick breath, let it out slow. Then he was silent, held the knife without moving. A moment later he let go, stepped back to the wheel.

A target. Collaterals. Jessup, and Coburn, and seventy-two virgins apiece.

No.

No they weren’t.

Prendergast and Coburn were quiet a few seconds, and I thought I could see Prendergast reach to his throat, rub at it. Then he stood, a hand out to the console, and seemed to hop closer to Coburn on one foot for whatever damage I’d done when I’d swept his leg out.

But Jessup, and Coburn. Those words between them, that friendly greeting I couldn’t understand, that language. Arabic.

They were Muslim?

They were martyrs? They were
terrorists
?

No.

Prendergast stood next to Coburn at the console now. We were full in the dark, above us the stars out here on the river, us only a boat on the Wando in the middle of the night, headed toward Charleston Harbor.

Prendergast said, “The only thing going to save me is the fact how low under the radar you people are. All six of you.” He paused. “Even Ellen and Robert.”

His voice was no longer the ice of a moment ago, but now had a
kind of ugly glee to it, the words dark and happy at once. “You guys are so far under the radar your knuckles are dragging ground. Which I have to hand to you is the genius of you people. You hear it a million times: The West has clocks, but you people have time. Guess this’ll prove the point entirely.”

Coburn said nothing.

Jessup and Coburn were terrorists. Martyrs.

I closed my eye, opened it again, tried at another breath, and another.

No.

I looked at Tabitha. I could feel my blood bolting through me, felt these next breaths in and out quicker and quicker, and even though the pain in my eye and ear and jaw and that pain still hiding out deep in my stomach had all turned now to nothing for how loud blood banged through me, crashed through me, I looked at Tabitha, because I thought seeing her might somehow change this.

I thought that if I could see her face, and the curve of her chin and her eyes, her eyes, that somehow my heart might slow down and I would be able to throw away this idea of terrorism, of people I knew—someone I’d called a friend—being terrorists.

A terrorist. A fucking
terrorist
.

I thought if I saw her, even only a nod from her, that I could walk away from what any of this meant—A target? Who were Ellen and Robert? And where were we going? What was the
target
?—and begin to live.

A terrorist was a word. It was a word, loaded into it a million tons of the shit of the world, a million tons of the ugly and bloody and heartless stupidity of the world.

A word that had always been only on TV. Always only a word on the Internet, a description of unknown assholes to get pissed off at and to bitch about and to punch your fist in your hand over, like I’d done when I’d watched again and again and again the World Trade Center collapse, and when late one night when no one else was up I’d
gone to the Web and found the filthy rush of watching Daniel Pearl get his head cut off, a rush that left me wanting to kill, to
kill
the men doing it, the same rush in me when I’d seen a double-decker bus in London torn to pieces, and the rip of fire out the windows of that hotel in Mumbai, while terrorists held a gun to the neck of the city for days.

I thought if I could only see Tabitha, then this stupid word, the unbelievability of it suddenly here with me and suddenly real, might disappear, and I might find myself only in a boat on water. That I might be home.

But I couldn’t see her. We were in dark now, and she was only a shape against the hull across from where I lay, another shape leaned up against her. Just shapes.

“We’re not under the radar,” Coburn said, his voice flat but sure, nowhere on it anything other than purpose. “The radar can’t see us because we
are
the radar.” He paused. “Freedom is the greatest disguise ever invented. We came here, we were raised here, we were given purpose by the words of the great Prophet, peace be upon him, and no one anywhere even sees it, because freedom hides everything from everyone.”

“There’s not going to be any hiding once you push the button on that Haji tux,” Prendergast said, and I could hear him give a sort of laugh. “But you got that right about freedom hiding what it does. Poker night case in point.” He’d raised his voice a little now, said the last words louder, and it sounded like he was looking behind him. At Unc.

“If only some dipshit had just handed over the goggles instead of calling in a battalion of cops,” he went on, “we would’ve had the
freedom
to just get those damn Gen 4s back and let you walk away from it all. But no. Leland Fucking Dillard has to phone in the whole Third Army to make some idiot point about a commander playing poker, wreck the
freedom
of playing poker for half of Mount Pleasant, and in the process win him and his son and chums the
freedom
to end up a do-it-yourself project on YouTube that—”

He stopped, and I waited for some reason he’d cut himself off. Maybe he saw something out on the river, or maybe he figured Coburn would say something.

Or maybe he’d heard his own words, and what they meant: a YouTube do-it-yourself.

Still I looked for Tabitha’s face, and still I couldn’t see her.

“Freedom is worse than a disguise,” Coburn finally said. “Freedom is a whore. Freedom is who let us into the country. Twenty years ago, the first Gulf War ends, and Freedom opens her legs for all refugees from Iraq. But our three families aren’t refugees.”

His voice had gone different altogether, him somewhere else. Not out on a river, not in a boat headed toward strapping on a suicide vest and reaching a target only Prendergast could get him close to. He was somewhere else.

I waited for Prendergast to tell him to shut up again. But he didn’t.

“We are three families on the one true path,” Coburn said, “sent here because even twenty years ago we knew Charleston was ready to be plucked. A nuclear submarine base, the Weapons Station with its storehouses of missiles. Fuel storage tanks a hundred feet past a chain-link fence that Freedom thinks will keep the tanks safe, because they are here in America. Our fathers know all this before we ever get here, and because the whore Freedom sells herself so cheap, all our fathers had to do to get us here was to say we are Shi’a, we hate Saddam Hussein, and Freedom winks at our parents and we children and says
Come right in
.”

He paused, and I felt that water still coursing beneath me, saw night stars out here on the river, heard my own blood still pounding through me.

“Save it for the video,” Prendergast said, but there was nothing in it. They were only words out of him.

“And the whore Freedom doesn’t look behind the doors of our homes,” Coburn went on, “because Freedom says in America we must respect the lives of everyone. We three families have Christmas
trees, we have Christian names, we go to Sunday school, we get good grades and play baseball and have no accents. But behind our doors our parents teach us our whole lives we live in
ibada
to Allah Almighty, that we live in obedience to him and the one moment when our duty will be made known to us, praise be to Allah. And when that sign finally comes after all those years, Freedom doesn’t even know us anymore, because we’re now only six young Americans from three American families. Coburn and Tammy, Jessup and Nina, Robert and Ellen. We have kept our eyes on Allah and on each other through all those years.”

Jessup, the kid I’d thought I’d known my whole life. A kid three or four rows in front of me on a hot and sweaty school bus, sitting inside the havoc of a busload of kids on a field trip to Hampton Plantation. A kid behaving, while paper airplanes and pencils sailed through the air around him.

A kid sitting on the tracks down at the end of Marie Street, passing me a forty-ounce Colt 45.

An empty desk in homeroom the morning of 9/12, when we all stumbled into school.

And a man leaning out the gatehouse the first time we pulled into Landgrave Hall after we’d closed on the sale of the land down to Hungry Neck. A man I thought I might recognize, leaning out the gatehouse while the gate swung open.

Jessup Horry. Hidden from me, from everyone, all his life.

“And then the glorious day of jihad arrives right here,” Coburn said, “where we have been waiting. September eleventh is the signal we have waited for. Jessup joins the Army, I join the Navy, and Robert goes to Georgia Tech to study chemical engineering, because why do you want to risk learning anything at some training camp in Pakistan, when you can stay right here, and learn with the best equipment and training and teachers in the world? Ellen and Tammy work housekeeping for officers on base, because the whore Freedom subcontracts everything it can, and because we’re the right color—we’re
all the right color—and because we do not know what we will find inside the officers’ lives that will help us. Nina becomes an LPN and works home health care, because one day we will need a home from which we can work, just the right one, one no one will suspect is anything but the home of an old and respectable and private person. She will find a home in which that person lives alone, and has no family left, and then she will let him die, and we will use this place as our base for whatever imminent measure we are led to take.”

“I said save it,” Prendergast said, but this time the words had an edge to them, that ice he’d had coming back. “Save all this shit for you and Jessup’s fucking video.”

“Allah leads Nina to Landgrave Hall,” Coburn said, no difference at all to his voice, “and to the home of Judge Dupont.”

Nina. The screaming Guatemalan nurse of Dupont’s, a Guatemalan without any accent. A nurse it had been Jessup to tell me was Guatemalan to start with.

Jessup’d disappeared into the judge’s house with her once she’d started that screaming last night, stayed in there with her so long I’d forgotten about him until he walked into my line of sight, me parked in a wrought-iron chair on Judge Dupont’s patio while Unc and Stanhope had their bitchfest, Jessup walking down the yard to stand next to Harmon, and Stanhope.

Nina: his sister.

And Harmon, his hand on the stock of his M4 and scanning the growing Landgrave crowd, had nodded at Jessup once he’d made it out to them from inside the house. Like they knew each other.

“Allah’s almighty glory brings us,” Coburn said, “to the piece of land at the center of every opportunity our cell can hope for. And Allah leads the whore Freedom to give the Army hero Jessup his job with its own Federal Protective Service to oversee the land, and Allah leads you, Navy Commander, to a strip club off base to watch whores at work, and to tell me behind the bar, a Navy vet and so a comrade already, about a poker club in Mount Pleasant, and to help me get
the job pouring drinks there, and a job for my sister Tammy cashing chips. A poker club where Allah reveals to me you are a gambler who needs more money than you make in ten years to pay off your debts.”

He paused, took in a slow breath. “A gift from Allah, because you are on security for the Weapons Station, and you know exactly who of our brothers is in the United States Naval Consolidated Brig, and now you are one of the few who will be told exactly when tonight the confessing traitor Muhammad al-Qahtani will be transported back to Guantanamo from here, so that we can kill him for the dog he—”

“Shut. The fuck. Up,” Prendergast said, cold and low.

They were both quiet now, and I thought of that name: al-Qahtani.

The twentieth hijacker. He was here, at the brig.

The target, to be killed by his own Muslim brothers. A statement to the world: We can strike again in the United States, and we will kill even our own who are so weak as to betray us.

“This whole thing is compromised because of you,” Prendergast said, still just as cold. “You’re the reason this whole thing has turned into as big a shitstorm as it has. You’re the asshole who goes apeshit over Ellen and Stanhope. You’re the fucker goes and kills her because he smiled at her a couple times, and because she smiled back. You’re the motherfucker—not Robert, like you told us all—who goes and throws acid in her face, then strangles her, then has the audacity to call us up to help dispatch her body in the fucking pluff mud out back of the place.”

He took in a breath, said quieter, slower, “There’s no honor in that no matter how you look at it.”

Coburn said nothing.

My eye was open as wide as it would ever be, and searching.

I wanted to see the stars above us. I wanted to see the wide band of stars behind stars, the Milky Way up there, and the black that held them all, cupped them like velvet.