"And if he doesn't?"
Somewhere off to the left a voice called out an order, and he heard the sound he had not heard in nineteen years and had never once forgotten: two hundred pairs of polished shoes coming down on the pavement at the same instant.
"Then I guess I find out," he said, "what I'm still afraid of."
* * *
The ship had been called the Anahita, and in the spring of 2007 she was a rust-streaked freighter of about four thousand tons, registered in a country she had never visited. Her manifest said she was carrying agricultural machinery from Bandar Abbas to Mogadishu. Her actual cargo, according to a report that had crossed Commander Daniel Carter's desk aboard the destroyer USS Kessler three days before, was machined components for shoulder-fired missiles, wrapped in oilcloth and packed inside the hollow frames of tractors.
They took her in the dark hours before dawn, when the moon had gone down and the Arabian Sea was the color of engine oil. Two rigid-hull inflatables off the Kessler's stern, seven of Carter's operators in one and Lieutenant Tom Reyes's boarding team of nine sailors in the other. The SEALs would take the bridge, the engine room and the crew; the Kessler's team would follow and conduct the search, because whatever came out of those tractor frames had to be documented by the regular Navy, not by men who officially weren't there.
Carter remembered the climb all his life: the caving ladder swinging against the hull, the smell of the ship coming down over the rail to meet him, diesel and rot and old paint. He remembered Mike Chardi going up beside him on the second ladder, the faint green glow of his night vision, the steadiness of him. Mike was thirty-one that spring, a Special Warfare Operator First Class, a big quiet New Englander from Fall River who did crosswords in pen and had shown Carter, two nights earlier in the Kessler's wardroom, a grainy photograph on a laptop that his wife had emailed from Virginia Beach.
"Seven pounds, eleven ounces," Mike had said, turning the screen. "Lucas Michael. He's got my ears, God help him."
"He's got your everything," Carter said. "Poor kid."
"Don't say that. Lena reads my email." Mike had looked at that picture for a long time. "I'm going to teach him to fish. My old man never taught me anything but I'm going to teach that kid to fish."
Up the ladder. Over the rail. The deck dark and cluttered and rolling gently underfoot. Carter's team moved through it the way they'd moved through a hundred ships on a hundred nights, fast and quiet and without any wasted motion, and inside four minutes the bridge was theirs and the master of the Anahita, a small exhausted Sri Lankan with a cigarette still burning between his fingers, was sitting on the floor of his own wheelhouse with his hands on his head saying over and over in English, "No problem, no problem, no problem."
The crew were rounded up on the fantail. Fourteen men. Carter counted them twice. The manifest said sixteen.
"Two missing," he said into his radio. "Find me two more."