They could hear the waves against the wooden prows, and many were the men who silently prayed to their desert god that the great U.S. Sixth Fleet would move off into the night to dominate some other stretch of sea.
But to the horror of many, Mr. Arieson ordered the wooden fleet to turn in to the metal monsters from the West. They were not even trying to escape. They were attacking.
"What are you doing, General?" asked the colonel whom Arieson had made his chief of staff. He was from a mountain tribe deep inland in the country now named Idra. He hated the idea of the sea, but through his courage had nailed his body into the boat with a smile on his face to show his men the proper leadership. Now he was overwhelmed by the stupidity of small wooden boats attacking the greatest navy the world had ever seen.
He pulled at Mr. Arieson's sleeve. It felt like stone covered by cloth.
"What are you doing?" he asked again.
"We'll never see a prize like that again."
"Prize?" asked Colonel Hamid Khaidy, who had studied briefly at Russian military schools and learned they thought of the Sixth Fleet as one of the three great threats in the world, the other two being kept secret from non-Russians.
"Just think of the glory in attacking the U.S. Sixth Fleet. The finest sailors in the world, commanded by the finest officers, with the finest pilots, and the latest weapons. This truly is a challenge."
"But isn't it the purpose of war to win? Aren't you supposed to attack where they are weakest?"
"What's the point in that? Who would you beat then? If you want a victory like that, go fight a clinic for the terminally ill."
"I have never read of tactics where you go looking for the biggest fight in the world," said Hamid Khaidy. He had the hard face of a desert warrior and cold night-black eyes.
"Don't worry. You'll love me for it," said Mr. Arieson. He smiled and let out a soft song about great battles, great Arab battles, how they defeated the Crusaders at the Horns of Hattin, and now how they would defeat the great U.S. Sixth Fleet that stretched across the horizon and could bounce signals of the night moon and demolish any city it chose. Arrogant it was, and greater still, a living electronic and metal dragon that ruled this sea where Western culture was born.
"Know this," said Mr. Arieson, "and pass it along. The word 'admiral' is an Arab word. Once you were great sea fighters too. You shall be known as such again."
"We shall die in this landless place," said Khaidy.
"Then die with honor, for surely you will die either way," said Arieson, and guided the little pieces of the vast wooden latticework bobbing on the coalblack sea like little water bugs toward the metal monsters in the distance.
The electronics rooms on the U.S. ships could detect a fly on the wingtip of a missile cruising at Mach 10. They could differentiate between a nuclear warhead half a world away and a normal explosive. They could do this with missiles, planes, and even artillery shells behind inland mountain ranges.
They could listen to telephone conversations and shortwave radios from Rome to Tripoli to Cairo to Tel Aviv.
They knew when propeller aircraft took off from Athens and when a balloon landed on a hilltop in Cyprus.
They could pick up submarines cruising near the sea bottom and tell a manta ray from a shark three miles down. They could identify a torpedo twenty miles away just as it launched its strike run.
But they could not pick up wood on the surface of the ocean.
Wooden sailing boats had disappeared from active combat almost a century before.
The Idran fleet of a thousand tiny boats bobbed into the great Sixth Fleet that night, and when the little boats were close, the fear became the greatest. It was as though a civilization many stories high loomed above them, churning along with propellers that made great gurgling hisses all about the flimsy wooden boats.
"What do we do now?" asked Khaidy in a whisper. He felt as though they could be sucked under by the great propellers of the aircraft carriers and would no more be noticed than a toothpick going under in a sink.
"We attack for the glory of your tribes and your nation and your faith," cried out Mr. Arieson, and Khaidy prayed for help from his desert god.
But Mr. Arieson was prepared. From boat to boat the order was issued.
"Unwrap the green bundles."
Khaidy had remembered that the bundles were too heavy to be food and too solid to be ammunition. He did not know why Mr. Arieson had some placed on board each dhow in the center, beneath the ammunition.
Now, as one was unwrapped, he saw a nearby gun get pulled to it and stick there. They were magnets. Magnets with ropes. They were magnet ladders, and now Khaidy, always quick of mind, understood what they would be used for. The ldran army was going to board some of the American ships.
And why not? The boats were actually safest here under the ships, because they were in the one place the big guns, the rockets and the airplanes could not reach. Mr. Arieson had showed them how to defeat the finest and most modern navy of all time. Up the ladders went the men of Idra, knives in their teeth, glory in their hearts, and when they hit the decks of the USS James K. Polk, they let out a battle cry and attacked.
The captain of the Polk, scanning reports of air activity over the Crimea, heard the yell and thought it was some kind of party. The captain commanding the marine contingent called out his men, who put up a good fight but were outnumbered. The air pilots had never been that well trained in hand-to-hand combat, under the assumption that if they had to fight someone with their hands, they were already rendered useless for flying. The sailors fought with mops and brooms. But it was no use.
Up went the green banner of Islam aboard the USS Polk with its nuclear weapons and aircraft, and for the first time since the Battle of Lepanto centuries before, the Mediterranean had a credible Arab naval presence.
There was no slaughter of prisoners either. A new sense of combat had taken hold of the soldiers of idra. They honored those who fought well against them.
"Now tell me the truth, friend," Mr. Arieson said to Hamid Khaidv. "Have you ever had so much downright fun in your life?"
"It's more than fun," said Khaidy. "It is life itself."
"I knew you'd see it that way. Now, how do you feel about fighting the Israelis in the Negev?"
"Just make sure we don't have to battle some out-of-shape reservists. I want their standing army," said Khaidy.
He did not even ask how Mr. Arieson planned to get them into position against one of the most heavily defended countries per square foot in the world.
In Washington the word was ominous. A nuclear-attack carrier had fallen into the hands of one of the zaniest countries in the world, which had devoted its military efforts to bombing kosher restaurants in Paris, kidnapping American priests, and trying to buy an atomic bomb to make it an Islamic bomb. Now it had a carrier full of nuclear weapons, had penetrated the U.S. Sixth Fleet, and could, if it knew how to fly the planes and use the equipment, probably slip a warhead right into Washington, D.C. Or anywhere else in the world it wanted.
And General Mohammed Mootnas wanted lots of places. He wanted just about any place with good plumbing and a lack of infestation by tsetse flies; he wanted what were better known as the second and first worlds.
The question was, and it was a hard one, should the United States sink its own nuclear aircraft carrier? The decision fell on the President alone.
"I'm not going to kill American boys just yet. I've got other ways to deal with this," he said.
In Folcroft Sanitarium, Harold W. Smith got the call for help.
"If ever we've needed you before, we need you now. Get your people onto the ship and take it back," came the President's voice.
"Well, I can't commit them just yet."
"Why not?"
"Both of them have gone back to their Korean town."
"Well, call them out of it. Tell them it's more important than anything they've ever done."
"I'll try. But I think they've quit."
"Quit? They can't quit. Not now. No. They can't quit." The President's normally modulated and calm voice began to rise.