The Syrian Sunset, page 22
“How much do they know about chemical weapons?” It struck Shai to inquire, suddenly feeling hopeful at their distance from decorum.
“Diddly squat. Perfect, it is. We have to turn the sarin into bilge right there on the ship. They’re running simulations, equations, tragedy likelihoods on computers I can’t even turn on. All those parents whining about their poor babies having electronic childhoods, and not enough dodgeball, have turned out to be full of shit. They’re all over the docks like hungry seagulls. Our ladies of the night don’t bother sleeping. They pull in Navy experts, dockyard old hands, some men even. Rather a lot of them as it happens. These are smart women. When in the French countryside they ask which way to the vineyard. None of that macho wasting centuries trying to find it themselves. You know what a ’ro ro’ is?”
“Not even remotely.”
“Roll on, roll off. Big mother cargo ships. You have to roll on something like the Empire State Building. Too heavy to lift. Navy crew says, ‘which way you want it to point?’”
Shai grinned. “We going to have a gaze at the Cape Arthur anytime soon?”
McE threw his cigar on the bricks, ground it out, suddenly wishing he’d saved the tin to rehouse and smoke later. Alongside his inherited wealth and casual spending, he was as eager to save a buck as those who needed to. McE walked the remnants to a trash receptacle at the water. “Turns out we have loads of these ‘ro-ro’s’ all over the globe bobbing at the docks. So next time we start a needless war, we’ll have them at hand. Let’s go see the gentleman the ladies have fallen in love with.”
Soon McE drove through an open gate in a chain-link fence and parked at a quiet quay. A huge gray ghost ship rose before them, empty and silent, four decks running atop each other from stem to stern.
“You’ll like the provenance, cosmopolitan like you. Found her mothballed in New Hampshire, Portsmouth,” McE said as they exited opposite sides of his top-down Mercedes convertible. What hair Shai had was windblown and, to his surprise, the speed had quieted his head. “Came into the light of the world in the Imabari Shipyards in Japan in the year of our Lord 1977. Spent half its aging life in Saudi Arabia, carting oil drilling paraphernalia here and there. Navy grabbed it in the run-up to the first Gulf War, being already in the neighborhood and all.”
“Quite a luxury. All our wars are fought in our backyard.”
McE led Shai to the side of the monster. Preserved in the most recent freshening of the gray was the outline of a short Arab sword with a curved blade that broadened toward the point. “Why’s it get fatter at the end?” McE asked.
“Light weight, designed for desert warfare. Arc of the blade in harmony with the sweep of the rider’s arm as he slashes his enemy. Presuming he’s galloping.”
“You know anything about ships?”
“Bit less than scimitars,” Shai conceded. “Get a little seasick, if I’m forced to the truth.”
“Meet the Cape Arthur.” McE swept an arm like introducing a bride. “For the sarin killing machines, we’re tinkering with prototypes twenty-feet high. Each. The floor below the top deck is as big and open as anything on the water. Twenty-five feet high. As you can see, goes on as long as she does. If that wasn’t enough, variable-pitch propellers and stabilizers like my old dishwasher, built with the excellence and pride of bygone days.”
“And these implements of propulsion?”
“Keep the gentleman on his feet even when drunk with sarin. Our women of the docks are greatly pleased that the Cape Arthur remains on the calm side out at sea.”
“Six hundred feet long, maybe?”
“More than maybe, six hundred forty-eight. Will she set sail and not sink with all Bashar’s barrels and gleaming tanks of poison and the ones we need to pour the neutralized byproducts in? Our ladies’ mountain of printouts say da.”
Shai absorbed the enormity of it. Everything aboard one behemoth. It was an achievement of scale and wonder only the Americans could manage.
“The cost to outfit her?” Shai asked to tread water; he didn’t much care.
“We spend more on toothpaste for the troops at the government contractor special inflated price. It’s cheap compared to rebuilding Albania, which I’d still prefer due to the risks aboard. Hundred million. Includes sprucing up the scimitar.”
Shai’s irrepressible smile lifted off and as quickly landed. “How many needed to flip the on-switch and swab the deck of non-chemical spills?”
“In its previous life, to haul drilling rigs from one port in the sand to another, say twenty. The ladies suggest we’ll need a hundred and fifty but whisper due to the extraordinary hazards at sea, they could lop off some number, to be determined later. While we’re hermetically sealing that one extraordinarily large deck, we’ll have to build something between hammocks and condos somewhere. Additional food facilities, showers, latrines. We’ll make them nice, given a lot of these engineer types, as it happens, have never been to sea.”
“The alchemy machines?” Shai asked. “I noticed you skipped over how fabulously they work.”
“Not there yet, my man. We’re close. Cautiously optimistic. At the finish line. Minus a couple of breakthroughs.”
“The sarin will never leave Syria unless there’s a way to render it drinkable.”
“It is irrefutable that we can’t take it ashore. That America has set sail. The new breed of politician, these patriots shout spills and kills. They shake in their boots about what Fox News might say about endangering our precious population. Let’s find a watering hole in the great American outdoors. I’ll explain the best that a mind unable to penetrate calculus in high school can manage about where the alchemy problems lie.”
Shai said nothing and headed alone back towards the Mercedes. He noted that McE said problems in plural.
“The timeline’s a bit outside the way engineers think,” McE said as he slipped in and slammed his car door shut. “They said, ‘this is something that’s never been done aboard ship. We can figure this out. Give us two years.’ So I told them ‘how about two weeks?’”
Shai held onto the window frame as McE screeched a hard left to spin them around. “The compromise?”
“We’re negotiating somewhere in between. Say two months. Even with amazing stabilizers and propellers, this big guy bobs in the water. Sometimes left, sometimes right. The ladies inform me, sometimes forward, and then sometimes it has a mind to briefly head where it just was. The forklift operators, understandably, are used to hauling around the worst poisons man has conceived on unmoving dry land.”
“With her weight, there’s potentially lethal pressure on every pipe, welded seal, joint, hose and gizmo they invent that has no name yet,” Shai said quietly.
“That’s just the most obvious difficulty, on the list, but nowhere near the top. The ships elevators work hunky-dory with empty tanks but our ladies promise with filled ones, they will grind, stall or crash, depending on their mood.”
“If we skip over that a chemical fire kills everyone on board,” Shai suggested. “Even a small leak can get into the ship’s ventilation system.”
“That would be the top of the charts,” McE said, entering and accelerating through a yellow light near the end of its brief life. He looked hard at Shai who would have preferred McE notice, at his speed, the car in front of him approaching rapidly.
McE continued, “We’ll open the curtains to NATO for Tirana. Turn it into a Hollywood premiere on the Adriatic. Nobody can resist Tinseltown. That’s how we get them to say yes.”
Shai felt a surge of hope. Albania hugged the Adriatic Sea north of the Greek coast. It was a fabulous option. Latakia to their port Saranda, across from the island of Corfu, three days flat.
✽✽✽
Eleven days later, Shai shuffled into Levi Goodman’s inner sanctum. Rows of books haphazardly crammed the bookcases on dueling sides of the office: English, Hebrew and French novels on one wall, and of equal girth non-fiction. Goodman didn’t trust ideologues who had no time for novels, who shunned exploration of competing human desire in favor of firing bullets loaded with facts. Anyone could pull facts from a file cabinet and ease the drawer closed on those they preferred remain in the dark. Historical facts in particular were an army martialed to delegitimize, to bayonet the other side rather than ride together up a mountain to a view both cherished.
“I just got off the phone with McEnnerney,” Shai said, collapsing his tired legs into the small chair opposite Goodman’s desk. “Obama’s alone looking out the window, as much as that hurts him.”
“Basically, this we know.”
“Kerry used the phrase we’re hungover with Brooks Newmark, a Conservative British MP who argued with him for destroying every barrel bomb.” Shai had kept up hope, like blowing on an ember that like Winston Churchill when overwhelmingly pressured by Parliament to do a deal with Hitler, Obama would stand alone against the storm and fight. “Newmark was in DC trying to push the Americans into action on their own. Nothing new from Kerry other than eloquent imagery which we’ve come to count on from him when all else fails. 9/11 created a voracious appetite for war. Americans got drunk on it. They’re left with that hangover. Now that we are at a moment for a justifiable intervention to stop a massacre in Syria, people are worn out. It isn’t viable for any politician to support even cruise strikes. So the world’s great leaders retreated.”
“Being stuck with the lesser good of getting the sarin out of Syria is not a small thing,” Goodman said consolingly. “It may actually be the greater good. No certainty over there. What do the mobs chant: Assad or We Burn the Country? Given present realities, how about we play the cards we’re clutching in our hands? The Cape Arthur?”
“Slammed into an underwater mine. Not yet sunk but leaking badly.”
“Friend or foe. If there’s a difference?”
“Navy paper pushing experts.”
Goodman threw his feet on his desk which only made his lower back hurt. “We shun such restraints here, preferring to remain alive.”
“Came down to Norfolk from Washington in full regalia, narrow ties, those plastic pen holders for their shirt pockets. Produced an inspection report, pages upon pages. Sent out far and wide like wedding invitations of a couple with no means otherwise to acquire china and silver. Pentagon upper floors, along with a lot of other lesser hallways where the worry about career advancement runs deeper. If it had a headline, it would read: DISASTER, DON’T!”
“A sample of the highlights, if you have them at your fingertips, Shai.”
“The way cover your ass runs. Machines designed to work on reliable dry ground. Unforeseen weather likely. Too dangerous even in a calm. Rescue of crew in the event of a spill or leak, precarious, maybe impossible. Sailing into the complete vast unknown. Considerable concern about engineers who might have trouble standing on deck to begin with. SOS. Abandon ship. Look for alternative.”
“Dare I mention these concerns were all front and center from the get-go?”
“I think there was a lapse in not considering the paper pushers would spread them like the plague.”
“Suggestions for workarounds in all this flowing print?”
“None,” Shai breathed, exhausted. “They murdered it. Now that they’ve been summoned to put their signatures on it and reject these recommendations, the higher ups are worried about a disaster on their watch.”
“And their records.”
“Yes, mostly that I’m afraid.”
Goodman swung his short legs down and groaned from the back pain.
“Our lady quartet have anything ready for a rainy day?”
“Lacking experience in the rarified corridors of power, our ladies of the ocean were knocked to the sea floor. They swam right back up. These are women used to getting things done in a man’s world. They want to re-draw blueprints for greater security, large and small. Fly in the world’s welding experts. Those with sea legs preferably, used to ship stresses. Reweld seals so King Kong couldn’t yank them off. Every pipe possible, swap with flexible hoses. Weld the big stuff right to the floor and walls. Do a trial run, few days at sea.”
“In other words, the Americans have no back-up plan. Without one, the sarin stays in Syria.”
Shai stood. “What are we doing if we have to count on Albania as our last best chance?”
As he reached for the doorknob, Shai watched his outstretched hand tremble in the tension, didn’t care. It was benign and didn’t slow him. He turned.
“If you draw a red line and you don’t stick by it, you’re giving Bashar a green light. He can continue using chemical weapons with impunity. It will say to the Russians, America’s word is meaningless. It shows Putin, the West has no resolve. You need a stick as well as a carrot. Otherwise, if people realize all you’re doing is talking, they’ll talk you to death. And attack. It could lead to Putin launching adventures in Crimea, Ukraine; against all the breakaway republics. It’s not the Democrats or the Republicans, they’re all the same. It’s the end of an empire.”
Then he was gone.
CHAPTER 13
SOUQ AL-BUZURIYAH
DAMASCUS
In the outdoor Souq Al-Buzuriyah, Kassem stared at a giant poster of President Bashar al-Assad in blue slacks, a white shirt unfettered at the neck, and an unbuttoned tan blazer. Ropes strung above shoppers, secured the president, here the height of four Kassems, to a stone wall above several bicycles resting equally casually on kickstands. On the other side, the supports dipped across the crowded lane to iron rings above the row of shops. One woman, feet secured in orange plastic sandals, western jeans with fashionable knee patches, her ripe form snug in her orange blouse, arms bare to the sun and clutching a child’s hand, stood intent on a message on her phone. Nobody glanced up, as larger than life aspirations of leaders were commonplace in the Arab world; anyway, they all know that the vote was rigged. The Arabic caption infuriated Kassem: Hope in Science and Knowledge.
This mocked his years of late-night scientific reading. The Assads murdered with his science. At Bashar’s right elbow, the lie heralding his upcoming presidential campaign read: HOPE. Kassem quickened his pace until he found he was running and pushing people aside. As a woman he brushed past almost fell, he caught himself and her with the same outstretched arm, and embarrassed, squeezed his eyes and slowed.
He wanted to show Lilia the Khan As’ad Pasha. He hated that the world greatly likened his Syria to a barbaric animal. In the early Ottoman Empire, the khan warehouses had risen like gargantuan beasts themselves. Vast lines of a thousand camels trudged west from the Tigris and Euphrates bearing spices, rhubarb, and silks. Upon arrival, their drivers struck their beasts between their ears, and they dropped to their knees inside the paved colonnades to be unloaded. The Janissaries, the elite soldiers of the Turkish Empire, in high red boots, billowing red capes, tall white caps, and matching green leather shoulder and arm armor, patrolled and protected the wares. The camels departed bearing pounded brass, ironworks and garments woven from the formless bales of Chinese and Indian thread.
The grandest of all Syria’s khans, one of the proudest anywhere, 2,500 square meters (27,000 square feet) had long decayed since the governor of Damascus, As’ad Pasha al-Azm, raised it in the mid-18th century. In the 1990s, the renovation had garnered the Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Kassem looked down, his face hot. He was ashamed about the sarin storage breakthrough he had devised.
Inside the showpiece of alternating horizontal lines of black and white masonry was empty. The main cupola reached as high as any in Rome. Iron grated windows that beckoned the sun surrounded the cupola; a half-dozen smaller domes circled lower. The supporting pillars, the same white and black basalt, rose from the floor and widened into arches below each smaller cupola. Halfway up striped walls, inside each dome more arches flared and lead everywhere like a black and white Escher drawing. In each towering cupola, round black iron circles decorated the white plaster above the grated windows. Kassem walked on the original small black uneven stones.
There were no tourists. Alone, staring up, only Lilia.
As she heard his familiar heavy steps, she turned. “This is, wow.” She said the last word in English.
“You were never here?”
“No,” she half-whispered. In time, she would tell him she was a Jewish girl from the ghetto, believed he would not care but Shai had been explicit. That was not to be breathed, no matter how much she trusted him or anyone.
Nervous, he grabbed and kissed her. She kissed back, lingering, trembling and he saw she must be frightened too under her marble veneer. He wondered whether it was fear of arrest or about them? Last night she had slept without her night garments and this morning told him, “It was terrible. But I want to try again, just not tonight.”
“Let’s walk outside,” she said, taking his hand, enjoying how hers disappeared in it.
They walked under the vaulted ceiling towards the open-air end of the souq. People shopped, their feet clicking on the gray flagstones. Equal numbers of men and women walked in the street but only the women carried plastic bags.
“They intend to truck the sarin across land to the Mediterranean,” she told him quietly, still holding his hand. “The Americans have a ship. They want to try and neutralize the sarin at sea. It doesn’t quite work yet. They have a field deployable hydrolysis process...”
“I understand what they’re intending,” he snapped.
Rather than pull her hand away, she kept them laced together. This was not him. She felt a slight dampness on his fingers which scared her.
“They cannot put the VX through that process.”
