Judith Farrell was a Mercedes, he decided. His Ms. Farrell was not some cheap crackerjack hot rod for a flashy Saturday night date, but a quality piece of design, engineering, and workmanship. She had character, brains, wit, beauty, and grace. He thought about the way she moved, how her hips swayed slightly — but not too much — above her long, shapely legs, how her hair accented the perfect lines of her face, how her breasts rose and fell inside her blouse as she breathed. How her lips moved as she spoke. How she smiled. Just thinking about her was enough to make a man sweat.
And you dumped all over her, fool! Not just once, not just the first time you met her. Oh no. You did it twice. Providence gave you a second chance and you blew that too. You idiot!
He descended into the catwalk that surrounded the flight deck and leaned on the rail just above the forward starboard Phalanx mount. Immediately below him a barge lay tied to the side of the ship, but Toad took no notice. 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 United States resembled that of a Panamanian tramp steamer with a bankrupt owner.
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.