The Crisis

by David Poyer

  She wasn’t as naive now. Nor as slim, unfortunately. But she was a GS-13. The next step up could make her a SAC at one of the field offices.

  Yet she was no closer than ever to what she really wanted. A family, a child . . . She wiped sweat off her face and tried to concentrate.

  She and Erculiano were the lead members of an advance party. The Navy often requested NCIS support in countries where contingency action might occur. Not that it always happened. It usually didn’t. But when a landing or humanitarian-assistance mission became necessary, personal relationships with the host government were key to avoiding publics relations disasters, or worse, security problems that could endanger either own forces or the mission.

  Of course none of this had been spelled out to their hosts. Her overt orders were to benchmark the host country police on investigational efficiency, respect for human rights, corruption, and technical accomplishment. Then submit a report on what assistance from Justice and DoD might improve their effectiveness in protecting public order and American interests. A carrot that usually prompted cooperation. No one had told her what the advance party was here to prepare for. She suspected another agency time waster, with her report filed for reference. But someone had to do those as well as the big investigations. That was how you got the big ones, after all. By taking on the shit details, and executing them flawlessly.

  “Gotta grab a shower,” Erculiano told her. “Feel like there’s scum all over the inside of my undershirt.”

  This was so unappetizing an image she squeezed her eyes closed. “You go ahead. I’ll wait.”

  THEY’D had dinner at the embassy dining hall, sloppy joes and french fries, and were back in the Conex writing up their reports for the day when the phone birred. They looked at each other. He picked up.

  “Out front at the gate,” he said, hanging up. “Assad. With our weapons.”

  “Our weapons?”

  “What he said. You wanted to operate with them? Sounds like he’s ready to roll.”

  She cocked her head, wondering whether the letter of agreement would cover that, then dismissed it: Assad was apparently the ranking security officer in the capital. She bent to her suitcase and found the soft heavy pad of her body armor. Then, the hard heavy outline of the SIG.

  “Vests?”

  “Absolutely. Whenever we’re off-compound,” she told him. “At least until we get a reading on what these rebels are up to.” He made a face, but pulled his out of its plastic sheath and squirted it with lilac-smelling baby powder.

  She turned her back and flipped a fresh blue silk abaya over her head. Once she wouldn’t have done that in front of a man. Even wearing pants and a blouse under it. But she wasn’t the little Muslim girl who’d grown up sheltered in Harlem anymore. She wiggled her fingers behind her. “Borrow some of that powder?”

  She dusted the vest and pulled it on, buckled the side fasteners, pulled the folds of light cloth back down. She chambered a round, decocked and tucked the pistol into the shoulder holster she could get to without anyone on the outside of the voluminous swathe of cloth noticing a thing. She could even shoot through it, though she’d risk setting the fabric on fire.

  ROLLING through the night took her back to Bahrain, the breakneck dash through the streets to keep USS Horn from being attacked. Only this time they were in open pickups, not the unmarked, closed vans the Bahrainis favored.

  Night in Ashaara City was even less reassuring than day. The pavements degenerated as they left the vicinity of the embassy into potholes and ledges the wheels dropped from with jarring shocks. In the beds behind them rode sloppily uniformed troops carrying heavy German rifles and old-style French helmets slung over their arms while their shaven skulls gleamed in the occasional streetlight. From time to time shots echoed in the crumbling blocks of low buildings. She and Erculiano rode together, with a grizzled, half-Arab-looking sergeant who’d spoken only in grunts and not once looked her in the eyes.

  “You sure this is smart?” Erculiano muttered.

  “It’s an honor, Paul. To be invited. I’m surprised they’re letting us, this soon.”

  “We’re not supposed to operate with them. Only liase.”

  “The best way to liase is to operate.” He wasn’t really objecting; he was protesting for form’s sake. He looked as excited as she felt.

  There wasn’t nearly enough excitement in most NCIS work. Most of what she did inside the Beltway was sit in meetings, discuss budgets, suffer through the latest leadership fad, and plot against other agencies. She’d made her bones in the Mideast, though, and cemented the commitment with the Arabic specialization. She’d spend the rest of her career here, and in counterterror watch groups in Washington and Norfolk. To end, probably not as the director—she couldn’t see a Muslim in that seat, ever—but maybe as a regional director, or heading up the counterterror bureau.

  Though that might be impossible too. There’d always be those who suspected any Muslim had to be a terrorist, deep in her heart.

  The headlights bored through darkness. Buildings still rose to either side, but no streetlights lit the increasingly uneven road, which seemed, from the sound of the tires, to have turned to gravel. Behind them the soldiers were singing, a haunting hymn to which they hammered rifle butts into metal. She wondered what the words meant. Her roots were here, but this was the first time she’d actually come face-to-face with real Africans on their home turf. Something shifted in her belly. The boots and butts slammed down, over and over, in a booming roar that must have carried out over the silent houses for many blocks. It felt like fear, but she wasn’t sure that was all it was.

  THE sergeant growled what must have been a command to stop singing. The trucks pulled into a cleared space. Shattered bricks ground under the wheels. She caught whiffs of lime and urine. The troops swung down with only a little murmuring and clanking. She turned her head to catch Assad peering in the truck window, and started.

  “Come,” he murmured. “You see.”

  They picked their way down a dirt-floored alley behind a trio of soldiers. She felt inside the abaya and quietly withdrew the SIG. Got a second magazine ready, but kept the safety on and her finger off the trigger. The night was full of smells, faint crepitations, the calls of some sort of insect, up under the eaves of the houses. The hum of a generator a couple of houses away.

  Their arrival hadn’t gone unnoticed. A woman called from a second-story window, and one soldier, squat, with a scraggly mustache, answered, telling her, Aisha guessed, to butt out. Instead the woman screamed what sounded like curses down at them before she was grabbed from behind and dragged back from the window.

  Suddenly shouts burst out ahead, and a bellow she recognized as the sergeant’s. She hugged the wall, keeping as much cover as she could between the noise and her body. The surface was crumbly, soft, and she realized what she’d taken for concrete was painted mud. Its peculiar stench, ammoniacal and biting, added to the strangeness of the foreign night.

  Assad’s voice, carrying in command. Words came drifting back through the chain of police. Then the grizzled trooper was guiding her forward, holding her elbow between finger and thumb as if she were made of spun sugar.

  Hand-carried lanterns threw beams around the interior of a corrugated-metal garage. An ancient truck squatted on blocks, hubs dangling, like an old cow with broken legs. A chain hoist swayed. Three frightened men stood with hands behind their heads, staring at rifles pointed at their throats. She spotted the major’s tall shadow near a workbench. He beckoned her with a closing-palm gesture.

  “You say drugs,” he said, in accented but passable English. He pointed a flashlight. “See.”

  Heavy black plastic, pulled back, revealed brown bricks she recognized, even before bending to sniff the sweetish-sick odor, as hashish. At least twenty keys, professionally shrink-wrapped the way smugglers tried to foil drug-sniffing dogs.

  One of the captives suddenly broke free, shouting in a high voice. A trooper cracked him in the f
ace with a truncheon. The others were shouting too, gesticulating at the truck, at the hashish. They were denying the stash was theirs, disclaiming any knowledge of it. Right, she thought. Sailors did that too, when they were caught.

  One of the troopers called from the truck. When she looked that way he was holding something up. A long tube with a thick blunt head, like some great spermatozoon.

  “Rocket-propelled grenade,” Erculiano breathed.

  She was headed over to examine it when shots cracked outside. The troops crouched as Assad spoke into a cell phone, coordinating backup, she guessed. Erculiano grabbed her shoulder. She shrugged his hand off. “Let go, Paul. I’ve been in raids before.”

  “We shouldn’t be here.”

  “This is exactly where we should be. Drugs and weapons; these people have a bigger problem than they’re admitting.”

  More shots outside. The troops were emptying through a back door, checking their rifles. The agents were suddenly alone. She frowned. Where had Assad gone? The captives the troops had been guarding?

  “Where are you going?” Erculiano hissed.

  “Just follow me.” She moved toward the only other exit, a linteled doorway wider than usual, as if to allow the passage of large parts. A black curtain separated it from whatever lay beyond. She stood to one side, then whipped it back with one hand, pistol in the other.

  Then caught her breath, unable to make sense of what lay tumbled in the light of a hissing gasoline lantern. For a moment they seemed nothing more than bales of oil-smeared rags.

  But the smears weren’t oil.

  Bodies sprawled across a concrete floor. Not just of men, either. Women in abaya, the small brown feet of a child—

  And the soldier who’d shouted back at the woman, the one with the scraggly mustache. He lay staring up at something invisible, bloody fingers digging into his stomach.

  She recoiled even before the sergeant pushed in front of her, blocking her view with his wide chest. He motioned her back, grunting. She obeyed, but couldn’t stop a horrified flutter in her throat. Then realized: She couldn’t leave. She had to find out what had happened. Had the rebels executed these people? Were they hostages? Captives? Why was there a dead soldier as well? Atop the other bodies, which meant he’d been killed after them?

  Or had the police executed them? No, the firing she’d heard had been farther away. But maybe they hadn’t been shot. Maybe those were slashes, not gunshot wounds.

  She blinked furiously, trying to recall exactly what she’d just seen, but it was already blurring. She started forward again, but the sergeant shoved her back so hard she staggered.

  “Aisha? What is it?”

  “Bodies, Paul . . . I think.” She took a deep breath. More troops were joining the noncom, shooing them out. Erculiano pulled her back as she stood irresolute. It was hardly possible Ashaaran security troops were executing civilians. But if they were . . . American special agents did not belong within a million light-years of the scene.

  Assad had to know that: that if things like this were taking place, they must be hidden. It would be an enormous loss of legitimacy for the Ashaaran government, already widely regarded as corrupt and repressive, to be implicated in mass murder too.

  But if that was what this was, why ask her along?

  Why invite witnesses?

  Or were they less there as witnesses, than . . . to be implicated?

  No, it didn’t make sense, the rebels had to have killed them, the soldier too. She put it aside for later and backed out into the alley again, into the soft brilliance of a moon just clearing the rooftops. She leaned against a wall, coaxing her slamming heart to slow. The image of the bodies came back, clear this time, the way it hadn’t been a few seconds earlier.

  She became aware of more shooting, a firefight in fact, on the far side of the block. She looked back to the alley entrance, where the trucks must still be waiting.

  Then turned, and began jogging along a side court parallel to the road they’d come in on, hoping it would get her up closer to the firing.

  Erculiano yanked her back. She rounded on him. “Let go, Paul. Stop touching me.”

  “This isn’t our bust. These are rebels, not criminals—”

  “Just cover me. Or stay here, if you don’t want to come.” She drew the SIG again but held it close to her chest. Slipping from shadow to shadow, she went down the alley. She heard nothing behind her. Then Erculiano’s reluctant steps.

  Bullets snapped overhead and cracked into the walls, knocking sprays of mud and plaster down around her. They were high, though, as if the assault was at the second story. She came to a corner and halted, screwing her courage up. Then went low, thighs protesting as she crouched, and peered around it.

  Movement! She froze. Then rotated her trunk to face the wider alley-mouth in that direction. Her dark blue silk would be black in the starlight. She doubted anyone could see her. She pointed the SIG, level in her locked arms.

  A slim figure hesitated, peering around. It carried a rifle. An AK, by the outline. Other shapes swam in the dim behind it. The silhouette’s head foreshortened, searching the shadows, but didn’t steady on her.

  She shook the shielding cloth away and steadied the pistol, picking up the tritium-illuminated sights. The blue-green dots centered on his chest. Her breathing slowed as she took the slack out of the trigger. An escaping smuggler. An escaping rebel.

  He lifted his face to the moon.

  The face of an angel. His features were noble, his large dark eyes weary. So young, but he carried himself proudly. Like an East African David. The young and comely king. She held the extended pistol, trembling, on the verge of firing.

  But at last did not, only held her aim, in case they turned her way. But they didn’t, only paused to listen and then followed the young man as he ran swiftly, sandals scuffing in the urine-smelling mud, under the moonlight, running away.

  6

  The Red Sea, Patrol Area “CRS”

  TEDDY Oberg was standing in the RHIB arguing with the big Hawaiian, how he was going to rerig the releasing gear, when the petty officer in charge screamed, “Helmet!” pointing at Teddy.

  Midmorning, two days after they’d gotten under way. Hot and sunny, like every day so far, occasional patches of haze, a few knots of wind kicking up some chop. The wake was a freeway of whirling, jostling turquoise, a tan tint just discernible above it. Submerged exhaust, bleeding up out of the wake, the same color as the russet haze before sunset. And far off in the distance the black mass of a containership headed for the Canal and Europe.

  Teddy and the other SEALs in the rigid-hulled inflatable had manned up on the fantail an hour early to run through everything again before they were in hailing distance of the contact. Nobody seemed to know what it was, this ship; just that the drill originally scheduled for this morning had been called off, and Shamal ordered to intercept.

  They wore standard boarding gear: desert battle dress uniforms, knee protectors, assault vests with ballistic armor under climbing harnesses under orange Navy flotation gear, fastrope gloves, flashlight, flare kit, handcuffs, and so forth on and on for thirty pounds of additional equipment. Their weapons were secured inside the boat with bungee cords. They had MX-300s, the “bone phone” with the ear mikes, for intrasquad use and VHF in the boat for comms with the ship. They had plastic-sheathed knives and an M60 machine gun on a mount but with a bipod too so they could board with it if they had to, plus extra magazines for their HKs and SIGs. Basically, loaded for bear.

  Only you were never ready for anything, he thought. Even a routine board and search could throw you a curve, usually one that meant blood, sweat, and shit to catch up. “What the fuck?” he muttered to Kaulukukui. He and his swim buddy stared at each other.

  “He’s poppin’ a safety violation, Obie. Wants you to put a hard hat on, like every other swinging dick in the fuckin’ boat.”

  “No shit! What I’m askin’ you, when that tending line twists around like that on the
release hook—”

  Their heads whipped around, and the first class’s too, at the blare of the long-range acoustic device, a flat-panel loudspeaker capable of breaking eardrums at a hundred yards. “VESSEL ON MY PORT QUARTER, YOU ARE CROSSING AN INTERNATIONAL EXCLUSION ZONE. STOP ENGINES AND HEAVE TO IMMEDIATELY. STAND BY FOR BOARDING. IF YOU DO NOT COMPLY YOU MAY BE SUBJECT TO USE OF DEADLY FORCE.”

  He caught the first class’s swing back toward him, grabbed the hard hat, clapped it on over his BDU cap, and jumped on top of the gunwale, balancing on the round thick rubber with a hand to the center console windshield. The inflatable rocked in its cradle as on the other side the Hawaiian’s not inconsiderable weight bore down as well. On tiptoe, they could just see the ship that had crossed within the thirty-mile reach of the slowly cruising Shamal’s surface radar.

  So far, it didn’t look as if whoever was on the bridge was impressed with the warship bellowing orders at it across the calm flat sea. Standard operating procedure was for Shamal’s bridge team to radio them as soon as they were in sight, passing the order to identify by Channel 16. But obviously this guy hadn’t gotten the word. Like so many others Teddy’d had to hold wakeup calls on over the last few years.

  Looking inboard again, he caught a familiar face gazing from the catwalk. Teddy had about shit, recognizing Lenson the day they got under way. Wasn’t that he didn’t respect the guy. He had notches in his gun, the operational kind the team could recognize. But their last op had had its unpleasant moments. He’d mustered a grudging smile as Lenson slid down the ladder. “Commander. What you doing in the Red Sea, sir?”