Shores of Tripoli

Mahmud Karamanli, and thus his captive male “wife,” Billy, lived a much more Spartan and furtive existence in Derne than they had in Tripoli. Afraid for his life, and seeing plots all around him, Mahmud moved his pared-down retinue from one position in Derne to another location almost nightly. Mahmud couldn’t trust anyone in the Karamanli clan now, not knowing whether the personal threat came from Yussif or Hamet—or possibly both. The brothers were from different wives, so Mahmud had purged his retinue of anyone not from his mother’s family. The only two female wives he brought were from branches of his mother’s family, as well. As their own fortunes—indeed, their very lives—were dependent on his well-being and power, they were the only female wives he could count on. Even the two hijras, Raatib and Fateen, were jettisoned, as they, basically, were in the employ of the Karamanli family.

Billy’s world was reduced from a luxuriously appointed room with a balcony at the top of the Tripoli palace to an eight-foot by seven-foot collapsible cage in the corner of Mahmud’s chamber of any given night that was erected after each move from one hiding place to another. Mahmud’s falcons had a cage almost as large. Billy didn’t need a cage to remind him that he was as much a prisoner here as he had been in Tripoli, even though he now was considered to be in favor and among Mahmud’s trusted possessions.

A cot and piss pot were put in the cage for when Mahmud didn’t have Billy out of the cage and in his own bed for the continuing tradition of the one suck and seven-position fuck. He was fairly frequently out of his cage, though, as Mahmud had only brought the two female wives of his mother’s clan and felt the need to fuck once or twice a day in the fear that each day might be his last.

Fortunately for Billy’s well-being, the situation came to a head fairly quickly.

An American plot to reinstall Hamet on the throne had already been set in motion. Within the context of the decision to burn the Philadelphia in Tripoli harbor, the former U.S. consul to Tunis, William Eaton, was sent to Egypt as naval agent to the Barbary states, with the mandate to back the claim in Tripoli of Hamet Karamanli. Once Hamet agreed to Eaton’s plans, naval support from the naval frigates, the USS Nautilus, Hornet, and Argus, were pledged to Eaton’s efforts by Commodore Samuel Barron, commander of the U.S. Mediterranean fleet. A detachment of ten U.S. Marines was assigned to Eaton, and these, in turn, recruited and trained some five hundred Arab and Greek mercenaries.

Once prepared, this force, the first land battle engagement force on foreign soil of the United States, started as a five hundred-mile, fifty-day, march by foot and camels across the Libyan desert. The first objective was to secure the port city of Derne, and then the force would continue on to Tripoli, after which Hamet Karamanli’s victory would be complete.

The first sign that Mahmud’s household had that Derne was even less safe than they had anticipated was when it was evident that the pirate fleets that had relocated from Tripoli to Derne, always better informed than the palaces, were sailing out of the harbor and dispersing in all directions in the Mediterranean.

Billy was in his cage in the harbor fortress suite of rooms Mahmud was temporarily ensconced in when the informants arrived to tell him that the pirates had seen the Nautilus, Hornet, and Argus sail in close to the shore at the village of Bomba east from Derne on the coast. The pirates observed that there already was a land force occupying Bomba. Longboats had been launched from the ships, and the two forces had merged.

Distressed, but unsure of what the threat was—if it involved foreign naval vessels, it surely couldn’t involve a plot by either of his brothers, Mahmud reasoned—the youngest Karamanli brother gathered his household and retreated up to the top of the town to the governor’s palace. Here, he dithered in uncertainly and indecision for too long.

Hearing a cry of “The ships are here” broadcast from a nearby minaret rather than the anticipated periodic call to prayer, Mahmud was drawn to an upper window of the governor’s palace on the morning of April 27th in time to see the first bursts of the bombardment by the Nautilus, Hornet, and Argus over the rooftops of Derne. After opening the falcons’ cages and releasing his precious birds into the air over the city, Mahmud gathered only three nephews from his mother’s family with him and fled the palace toward the western gate of the city—where half of the Arab and Greek mercenaries of Eaton’s army were already pouring into the town.

There was a flurry of activity within the palace, and then all was quiet. Billy began working the hinges on his cage with the crude implements he’d managed to gather and hide over the previous two weeks expressly for this opportunity.

Once free, which took a while and made Billy feel that there may now be no chance of flight, he nonetheless remained calm. The worst that could happen to him would be that he would die today. And with the life he’d already led, that was a possibility on any given day. He felt fortunate to have lived so long. That sentiment having been offered up, however, he had no intention of volunteering for demise.

He had been naked. First, feeling even more naked without any weapon to defend himself if the palace was invaded in the next few minutes, Billy went to Mahmud’s bed and retrieved one of several short swords the man had stashed under there for his own protection in the night. As he knelt by the bed, one of the cannonballs from the bombardment by the American frigates found a corner of the palace. He was flattened beside the bed by a blast that dumped part of the room’s ceiling on top of the cage he’d so recently escaped from, flattening it to the floor. Large chunks of masonry had splattered across the room, missing Billy only because he had been crouching beside the opposite side of Mahmud’s bed from the blast. Feeling doubly charmed at one blow, Billy was heartened to think that he was guaranteed at least one more personal miracle on this day. If Mahmud could have his seven fuck positions for good luck, Billy would gladly take three daily miracles.

Wailing from another room told Billy that Mahmud had abandoned his female wives too.

He stumbled through the debris on the floor to Mahmud’s wardrobe and chose the smallest thawb and sandals he could find and shrugged into them as quickly as he could. Then he had the presence of mind to find windows on all four sides of the palace at the level he was on so that he could survey the best escape route. East and west clearly were both out. The land gates in each direction were the scene of bloody fighting, with the forces fighting their way into the city making headway. To the south was the poorer sector of the city, where the streets between buildings were mere walkways and the roofs more often were thatch instead of mud brick. This sector was already a fiery furnace, and no one was going in; everyone was stumbling out—into the armed melee in the city square beyond the façade of the governor’s palace.

He found the wives, cowering in a corner alone. All of the male retainers Mahmud hadn’t taken with him had left on their own. Billy told the women that their best hope was to go to the governor’s wing of the palace and to try to merge with his harem—that there no longer was any safety for them on the streets of Derne, if there ever had been. He tried to tell them that any danger they were in would be from their own people, not from the American forces. They were too frightened to understand this, however, and Billy wasted precious minutes escorting them to the governor’s wing himself, where they were taken in by an old, wizened woman, who Billy had to believe was the closest thing they could count on for protection and salvation.

Billy ran back to the windows at the top of the palace, knowing in his heart that he was too late to do much of anything for himself now as well. He could see that the fighting was already near the entrances of the palace itself—and he had to dive for cover as another cannonball landed on the palace. He hoped it hadn’t landed on the governor’s wing, but by the sound of it, it was possible that it had done so. It was clear that the palace was a target of both the land invaders and the bombardment from the sea.

The young American decided that his best bet for escape was at the harbor. He was a sailor. If he could commandeer a small craft, no matter how small—the smaller the better, actually—he stood a chance of escaping the city.

Looking down into the palace’s central courtyard, he saw that there was a fair-sized pond in the center. And there was a watercourse leading from the southern, upper side of the palace to the pond and then streaming away in a channel again that went into a tunnel below the floor of the palace to the northern, down-slope side. The tunnel looked large enough to fit his relatively small body—the first time in years that he appreciated that he was small of stature. So that’s where he headed.

He had to dispatch a man barring his way to the center courtyard, but he did so without knowing if the man was a palace guard or one of the invaders. All he knew for certain was that, wearing a thawb and with his dark coloring, he would, at first glance, be taken to be an Arab himself. He couldn’t count on getting more than a first glance before someone tried to run him through—and the fineness of the thawb that he had pilfered from Mahmud’s wardrobe would surely identify him as a patrician of the city and thus well worth the stab from various factions.

The water tunnel turned out to be tall enough and dry enough in the season for him to move through it with only his feet getting wet. At the other end, a good eight foot off the ground at that point, was a barred opening. Billy was still strong from his Indian physical training conditioning and imbued with enough adrenalin to give him superhuman strength—and the bars were rusted. He managed to punch them out and also to drop the eight feet without noticeable damage other than a slightly twisted knee.

It pained him to run, and he could do no more than lope awkwardly, but he was loping for his life, so he fought through the pain. He almost welcomed and enjoyed the pain of being active again—and free, if being an obvious target in a city under attack could be considered to be free. To him, it was, though. He was as free as the falcons that Mahmud had considered more important to give a chance at life than he did the man who had saved him from assassination in Tripoli. What happened to him now depended largely on his own ability and fate, he told himself, not on the controlling decisions of other men.

He made it half way down to the harbor before he was accosted by an Arab of the city who was more interested in ransacking a wine shop than saving his own hide. As Billy came into view, and possibly misconstruing Billy as the owner of the shop, the man was upon Billy with a bruising body blow almost before Billy saw him. Billy had been trying to move through the shadows of streets where no fighting was going on at the moment with the sole goal of getting to a boat of some sort in the harbor that he could handle by himself. He strongly felt both the limits and the glory of being entirely by himself in this endeavor. The streets in the area were almost deserted, the residents more than an hour ago having already moved up toward the higher city—where the fighting was now going on—to escape the initial bombardment of the lower town from the sea. Out of the jaws of the tiger and into the paws of the lion. He had to do what he could so as not to suffer the same fate.

The man was larger, and heavier than Billy. But Billy was in better shape. If he could only stay out of the grip of the big bruiser . . . but he couldn’t. Billy made a feint at the man with the short sword, but the man had been holding a sack with stolen goods in it, which he swung just at the right time and sent the short sword clattering into the mouth of an alley. Billy backed toward the alley entrance, scrambling after the lost weapon, but the man was upon him, wrapping his arms around Billy, squeezing his waist and lifting him off the ground. Billy struck up with a fist, hitting the man under the chin and snapping his head back. But that proved to be a mistake, because when the man’s head slammed forward again, he head butted Billy in the forehead. Billy collapsed, seeing stars, only momentarily, but it was enough time for the man to free one arm of the waist chokehold, pull a dagger from a sheath at his waist, and bring that up to slit Billy’s throat.

It seemed to take an eternity for him to do it, though, and Billy watched the expression on the man’s face turn from angry, victorious determination, to surprise, then confusion, and then, as blood began to run out of his mouth, to close down into a mask of death.

Billy didn’t have time to extricate himself from the collapsing Arab before two men in uniform were grabbing his arms and legs and unbuttoning their flies as, carrying him between them, they pulled Billy into the alley.

Billy’s thawb was bunched up under his armpits. One of the soldiers was bracing his back against the wall of the alley, with his knees slightly bent, and his arms wrapped around Billy’s waist. Billy cried out as his channel was skewered on a long, hard cock. Then the other soldier was crouching in front of Billy and working another long, hard cock inside him on top of that of the first soldier.

Charged with the lust-raising adrenalin of hand-to-hand combat and with all three men panting hard and moaning in their three-way fuck, ejaculations came quickly to all three, Billy first. When the two others were finished with him, they let his body slowly sink to the ground.

“I see we came at a good time,” Hal, the U.S. Marine, said, smiling down at a moaning, but quite satiated Billy.

“And how good it was to be able to come with you again,” Dirk, the other U.S. Marine, said with a grin. “There’s nothing like a good fight to get a man’s juices going. We saw you and there was no question we both had to have you again. I’ve been hard since the fighting began. I see that Hal has been as well. We were actually coming into this quiet street to have at each other for a break.”

Billy was about to comment, being dazed enough still from the head butt not to fully comprehend how his lovers of the night on the Philadelphia had magically reappeared near the Derne harbor in the heat of the battle. He was about to make a stab at commenting, though, when a whistle was heard and both Marines stood up tall and turned their faces to the sound of the trilling.

“Ah, our commander, General Eaton, summons the Marine detachment,” Dirk called out, and then he turned and started to move away.

Before he followed his comrade, Hal leaned down and said, “Stay right here and safe. We will come back for you when we can. I can’t wait to hear what you are doing here. And, more important, I can’t wait to fuck you again.”

Billy moaned and closed his eyes. He scuttled a bit to the side, pulling himself further into the shadows of the alley.

But he would not have a moment’s peace. A voice growled, “I wouldn’t lay there if I were you,” as a strong hand grabbed his upper arm and dragged him up into a half standing position, eliciting a groan from Billy when his twisted knee objected. Just as he was pulled away, a body, with blood covering the front of its thawb, landed on the spot where he had been trying to move too. He looked up, to see the face of a Greek. The battle for Derne had reached the rooftops.

As he tried to stand, his eyes reached the level of those of a big, black dog, its jowls covered in foamy drool. The word “freedom” entered his brain.

“I would have bothered you earlier, but you and those Marines seemed to be enjoying yourself. And there were two of them. One I could handle, but two would be a stretch. They handled you well, though. Do you do this with all of the men who accost you in battle?”

The pirate captain, Benjamin Palmer, a big grin on his face, was standing beside Billy.

“We three have a history,” Billy replied. “What are you doing here?”

“This is where the Barbary pirates were, and I’m a pirate,” Palmer said, his voice rife with tease. “I was leaving a bit later than the others because I wanted to check on what they might have left behind in their haste. I’d think you’d have remembered that I was a demanding pirate. I will have to see that you have reason to remember it. The more interesting question is what you are doing here—and in Arab mufti—but that can wait. My men are protecting a breach in the eastern wall. But probably not for long. The Black Falcon is just down the coast. We’d best be off before the American frigates run out of cannonballs and decide to chase some pirates.”