He couldn't answer her.
They waited with the body. The bad news was that it was their twenty-first body that day. The good news was that the Disaster Mortuary Affairs team wouldn't be that far behind them, so they wouldn't have to wait long.
And they didn't, the pickup driven by the same two exhausted men whipsawing around the wreckage on what was left of the road and skidding to a halt a few feet from Cal 's knees. This time they didn't even say hello, just went for the stretcher, stained with unmentionable substances from previous retrievals, muscled the body onto it and into the pickup, the back of which was getting crowded.
No one asked for the poncho back. The men didn't say good-bye. The three of them stood watching as the pickup careened around an overturned midnight blue Buick LeSabre with three of four tires missing and rattled off.
The sun was setting behind a gathering bank of low-lying clouds, leeching the light from the destroyed landscape and rendering everything suddenly more sinister. It began to drizzle, and a moment later the drizzle increased to a steady rain. If anything the sense of menace increased.
"Let's get back," Cal said.
The yeoman looked up the road. "There have to be other bodies," she said.
Cal knew how she felt, but he could feel the presence of many eyes trained on them, and again felt the acute lack of any kind of protection. "Tomorrow," he said.
But the next day the FEMA representative mercifully asked, "Who here knows about ships?" Cal put up his hand and found himself deputy director in charge of three cruise ships brought into New Orleans to provide temporary shelter for those left homeless by Katrina. He brought Parker and Helms with him, and the three of them gladly left the collection of bodies to other authorities.
He found himself reporting directly to the Coast Guard vice admiral, who was acting as the principal federal officer for Katrina response, and for perhaps the first time in his life didn't rue the fact that the old man was a friend of his father's. Between the Port Authority, the stevedores' union, and the ship's agent, all of whose offices were a shambles, it was a challenge just to maintain the ships' water reserves, which entailed finding sixty tanker trucks to deliver eight hundred tons of water per day per ship.
Finding them was one thing, keeping them was something else again. Across the six most affected parishes potable water was in short supply and tanker trucks capable of delivering it were in high demand. When he found one, it was all he could do to hang on to it before it was lost or stolen. One was hijacked right off the dock before it had even managed to offload its cargo, and when eventually the truck was found again the hijacker was apprehended in the act of selling said cargo for a dollar a gallon. He could have gotten five, he explained to the arresting officer, but he didn't want to price himself out of the market.
Initially Cal had no staff except for CWO Parker and YN1 Helms, which didn't help, and cell phones didn't work inside the skins of the ships so he couldn't even yell for any. Then by a rare stroke of luck he fell heir to what he decided ought to be designated the only national treasure walking around on two legs.
"Lieutenant Commander Mustafa Awad Azizi reporting for duty, sir," the national treasure said, snapping off a very smart salute and proffering his orders.
Cal read through them. Born in New Jersey. Academy graduate four years behind Cal. BS in civil engineering. A good mix of duty stations, including two years on patrol in the Bering Sea as a JG and two years at the yards in Seattle. He looked up, and said irritably, "At ease, Commander."
Azizi relaxed his stance. He was of medium height, with dark skin and dark hair that even with a regulation cut managed to look like the mane of a lion.
" New Jersey, huh?" Cal said.
"Yes, sir," Azizi said, "in spite of the fact that I look like Ali Baba and all the forty thieves put together, Trenton, New Jersey. My folks are a generation removed from Trinidad, and six generations before that the Tigris-Euphrates river valley."
Cal gave him a sharp look. Azizi smiled, which transformed his face, dominated by a long, broad nose with a distinct curl at the end, large flashing eyes, and a lot of teeth that looked to have received the assiduous and unstinting care of an attentive dentist from early on. "Yes, sir, Iraq."
"I didn't ask," Cal said mildly.
"No, sir," Azizi said. "I can't help my name or the way I look, but post-9/11 I've found it a good tactic to address it at once. Makes everyone relax."
"A pre-emptive strike," Cal said.
"Exactly, sir," Azizi said cordially.
Cal handed Azizi's orders back to the junior officer. "I could give a shit about your heritage, Azizi. Especially now. I'm one lone Coast Guard officer in the middle of one of the biggest messes this nation has ever had to dig itself out of. There are supplies pouring in and no way to get them out again to the people who need them. We've got a ton of first response people, fire fighters, EMS, doctors and nurses, and more on the way from every state in the union, and no place to put them to work because there is no electricity, which means no refrigeration and no air-conditioning. Hell, even the local EMS guys are sleeping in their ambulances."
He thought of his first week on scene. "And we've got bodies stacked up from here to Shreveport, and more of them every day, too, and damn few resources to deal with them. We can't bury them because the graveyards are all flooded, and even if they weren't we don't have any way to get them there."
"Yes, sir," Azizi said. "How many of us are there?"
"Well. I've got a chief warrant officer and a yeoman, although I don't know how long I'm going to hang on to either. The yeoman was on vacation in New Orleans when Katrina hit, and the CWO was changing planes from Atlanta to Dallas-Fort Worth en route to his next duty station when they closed Louis Armstrong Airport. But for the moment anyway, there's four."
Azizi looked at him for a moment. "I see."
Cal smiled. "And that, Commander, was the good news."
Azizi digested this in silence for a moment. "What's the bad news, sir?"
"I'm the boss."
Azizi looked delighted. "Really, sir? Well, then, let's get started."
It turned out that Azizi had an almost preternatural ability to hotwire anything on wheels; fork lifts, pickup trucks, even a motorized shopping cart liberated from a nearby supermarket. After a day of watching him in action Cal said, "So, you can hotwire anything, can you?"
Azizi shrugged, grinning.
"Does that mean you can un-hotwire anything, too? Make them impossible to steal?"
Azizi considered. "Well, sir, like I told you. I'm from New Jersey."