Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  Mombasa.

  From the landward walls of Fort Jesus, he could see the Muslim neighborhoods of Old Town laid out at his feet like a map, although the streets were tiny and twisted like a collection of old rubber bands. The fort served to draw the tourists, and nearest to it were prosperous shops owned by Kikuyu or Hindus with money; plastic Masai spears and plastic Masai beads woven in China grabbed at the attention of German and American tourists, and sad-looking tall men with heavy spears and a trace of Masai in their veins guarded the shops. Farther off toward the dhow port were the real shops of the Muslim residents, tiny shops with deeply embrasured doors and windows capable of resisting a siege. The smell of cardamom and curry carried even to the top of the wall. And to the north, he could see the slow rise of the ground into the natural amphitheater of the park in front of the old colonial office.

  The man atop the walls squatted in the coral ruins of a tiny sentry kiosk on the landward side and carefully unwrapped the burlap package under his arm. Seventy feet above the streets of Old Town, he exposed the receiver of an AK-74 and inserted a clip.

  Alan Craik loved Africa. He’d seen the bad parts—Rwanda, Zaire, Somalia. He’d seen the parts in Tanzania and South Africa that looked like wildlife shows on the Discovery Channel. But this is where his love of Africa had had its birth, at the top of this narrow Mombasa street that ran down from the shiny oddness of a Hard Rock Café to a fifteenth-century mosque and the Old Town of Mombasa. He smiled broadly, boyishly, looking at the coral walls of Fort Jesus, where he had first tried his halting Swahili, and at the glint of the water in the dhow harbor beyond. It wasn’t like coming home, but it was like returning to a beloved vacation spot. He didn’t even realize he had started walking down toward Old Town until Martin Craw’s hand grasped his arm.

  “Whoa, there, Commander. We got less than an hour before we’re due at the det.”

  Alan smiled back at him. I’m in Africa! was what he wanted to say, but he swallowed it. Then he thought, Screw the command image.

  “You’re the one who said we should leave them alone until they got the place straightened up, Martin. That’s why I’m still lugging this ball and chain.” He indicated the heavy helmet bag in his maimed left hand, the two green loop handles wrapped around his wrist to keep the pressure off the stumps of his fingers. “I thought dropping Laura at the Harker would take longer.” USNS Jonathan Harker was a ship supplying the battle group, in port for three days. Laura had drawn the duty of checking with the captain and crew on their experience of Mombasa as a liberty port—plus, as she had found when they had pulled up at the dock, the BG’s flag was making a tour of the ship, and she’d got roped into his party. She hadn’t been a happy force-protection investigator.

  Craw smiled as if he wished it had taken longer and looked at his watch again. “If I let you loose in an African city, you’ll be out till all hours.”

  “Martin, you look to me like a man who needs a beer.”

  “Beer? And air-conditioning? That’s a big yes.”

  “We’ll have one, repeat, one beer here, and then I get to cruise Old Town for thirty minutes.”

  “Yes, sir!” Craw’s reply was deliberate overenthusiasm; he was a man capable of quiet sarcasm, often so deep it was difficult to detect. He paused on the crowded sidewalk to ogle a local woman in blended Western and African clothes. Alan hustled him inside.

  The interior of the Hard Rock was cool, pleasant, and entirely American; only physique and face shape made the crowd different from a bunch of American blacks in an American city. Most of them were speaking English. The Hard Rock franchise was genuine, unlike that in Bahrain; it had been hit hard by the Nairobi embassy bombing but was still a bastion of burgers, milkshakes, and beer—and a magnet for sailors. One wall had plaques from ships of the U.S., British, and Canadian navies, and one from an Australian destroyer.

  They sat at a table and ordered beers: Alan a White Cap, because it was Kenyan, Craw a Rolling Rock, because he was delighted to find it. Alan watched the city bustle by the huge picture window. He could see the park in front of the old British colonial office away to the left, surrounded by monolithic bank buildings—still a spiritual center of the town, although the real economic center had moved up Moi Avenue since he was last here. He was growing nostalgic for a town he had barely visited. “I know a great restaurant here, really world-class, called the Tamarind Dhow,” he said, still bursting with the notion of being in Mombasa. “Want to grab some food there after we visit the det? It’s on me.”

  Craw smiled slowly, not raising his eyes from the menu of the Hard Rock. “I sort o’ have some plans, tonight, skipper, if you don’t mind. Rain check?” he drawled, and then looked up with a sudden laugh.

  “Master Chief, do you have a date?”

  “That would be ‘need to know,’ sir.” He smiled again. He seemed happy about it. “Do you really need to know?”

  “Nope.” Alan thought of saying “Don’t hurt yourself,” but he let it pass. “But if you’re going to sit here and drool over your good fortune, I’m going to shop.” Craw smiled again. Alan couldn’t remember seeing him smile so often, at least since he had reached command rank. Craw waved him away. “It’s only Mombasa, skipper; I can find you. I’ll catch you in ten minutes. If I don’t see you in Old Town, I’ll catch you around Fort Jesus. Leave the helmet bag.” He reached out for it. “I’ll watch it.”

  “I’m signed for it.” Alan wrapped the handles around his wrist again. He waved, tossed an American ten-dollar bill on the table, and headed out into the street, checking his watch. Time to see if the same old silversmith was still in business.

  The interior of the shop was dark and cool, a profound contrast with the white-hot street outside. Three young boys were working in the back, two of them drawing wire by pulling a core through ever-smaller holes in a steel plate. He had seen the same craft demonstrated at Colonial Williamsburg, but these boys did it better. They were doing it for real. The third boy was polishing silver with ashes and a lot of elbow grease. Alan smiled and called a greeting as he entered; later, he couldn’t remember what language he had used, but he would remember the slight tension in their body language as they turned to him. He knew the shop was off the beaten track, but couldn’t imagine they were against tourists.

  A fine old sword stood in a niche behind the counter; that caught his eye as he ignored cases of bangles and earrings. Rose never fancied such stuff. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen her in any earrings except military studs. But just under his hands, as he leaned on the counter, there was a heavy chain of solid links, almost like big beads; it was crisp and very well made. He smiled; it was usually so difficult to find anything for Rose.

  “May I see the heavy silver necklace?”

  “Oh, yes.” One of the young men sprang down from the bunklike bench where he was working and opened the case. Alan couldn’t pin down what was out of place, except that the young man should have been talking a great deal more.

  The necklace was just as handsome close-up as in the case. He caught the young man’s eye. “Bei gani?” he asked. He showed a U.S. twenty-dollar bill. When here many years before, he had learned that it was easier to buy everything with U.S. dollars. Cheaper, too.

  The boy held up his hand and spoke rapidly without smiling. He went too fast. Alan thought he heard something like “Mia moja na thelathini na sita,” which would have been a hundred and something. More than a hundred. That seemed unlikely; silver wasn’t that expensive.

  “Ghali sana. Pudunza bei kidogo, rafik’.”

  The young man on the other side of the counter kept looking past him into the street, and Alan wanted to turn around, except that the other young men were just as interesting. They seemed to be listening for something, utterly still. Not getting much work done.

  The boy at the counter muttered something about his father. Perhaps serious bargaining had to be done by an adult, although in most of Africa all three of the shop boys would be th
ought men. In Somalia they would have been fighting for years. One of them even looked Somali. Not impossible.

  “Lini?” Alan couldn’t remember how to ask something as complex as when the father would be in. It might not even be polite.

  “Kesho!” Did he really mean tomorrow? The young man at the counter waved his hand as if eager for Alan to go. He was eager. Then, swiftly, his expression changed and he retreated to his work area, his face blank, as a new, older man came in through a beaded curtain to the side of the counter. He was looking at the three boys in puzzlement, but he smiled as he looked at Alan. “My son. I do not know why he torments me this way. You are interested in the necklace? I made it myself.”

  “It is very good.”

  “It is, isn’t it? Too good, I think. Tourists want a cheap memento of Africa, not a good piece of silver.” Alan liked him instantly; he had the directness that Alan associated with craftsmen. Men too busy for bullshit. The young men were listening; no wire was being drawn, no silver polished.

  “What price did my son quote you?”

  “Tafadhali, mzee. I did not really understand him. My Swahili is never as good as I think it is. Not nearly as good as your English, for instance.”

  The older man polished the chain idly, unfazed by flattery. “Hmm. Yes. It is. One hundred twenty dollars.”

  “I could perhaps go as far as eighty dollars.” Alan wanted it more now than when he had first looked at it. He also wanted an excuse to prolong the meeting. The older man was interesting, a type; and the young men were clearly on edge—waiting for something, something that a foreigner, an mzungu, was not part of.

  The mzee looked at him, one eyebrow raised. Alan settled on to a bench by the counter with a sigh, as if ready for a long siege.

  “Perhaps if we had some tea?” The mzee was happy to dicker, indeed, would have been sorry if the business had been concluded directly.

  The plan to meet Craw was somewhere around the edge of Alan’s consciousness, but Craw wouldn’t worry and Alan knew where to find him. The tourist part of Old Town wasn’t more than a couple of streets, really. And tea, sweet cardamom tea, drunk in this medieval shop would make Alan’s day. The det wasn’t going anywhere without him, either.

  The older man turned to the boys and said something in Arabic, a language Alan didn’t speak but easily recognized. Arabic was the language of education in Old Town Mombasa, the language of the Qur’an. Alan’s attention sharpened. Nobody answered the mzee, and Alan was surprised, but it was of a piece; they were waiting for something. Finally, the one who had first come to the counter dropped his eyes and darted out of the main door. He returned with a small tray, rattled off some Arabic as he entered. Alan was reaching for a cup when the older man caught his eye and motioned with his hand. He looked very serious.

  “My son says there is a bad crowd in the street. Perhaps you should go now.”

  Alan looked out the shop doorway, wondering how long the boy had been waiting for this “bad crowd.” Then he could hear, in the distance toward Fort Jesus, a sound like waves on a beach.

  The street in front of the little shop was empty.

  Bad crowd?

  Alan took his little cup of tea and drank it off, holding the other man’s eye. Now he was more than a customer; he was a guest.

  “How bad is it, mzee?”

  “I have no idea.” The mzee was calm, attentive, dignified. “It might be better, after all, if you stayed here; these things soon pass.” He picked up the necklace, studied it, said in the low voice of a man speaking to one who he thinks is sympathetic, “You understand: we are Muslims, and the government is not our friend.”

  “I appreciate your hospitality.” Alan could hear the beach noise louder now, as if waves were breaking higher. It was a crowd, all right. But it didn’t sound angry.

  “But I should go. I have a friend looking for me by Fort Jesus.”

  “Please go carefully.”

  “I’ll be back for the necklace,” Alan said. The noise was growing louder still, and the young men were restless.

  “Inshallah,” the older man said with a bow.

  The old man had had no idea there was trouble in the street. But the young ones had expected it.

  “Allahu Akbar,” Alan said and hoisted the helmet bag through the door. God is great.

  The crowd was thicker at the end of the street, men and women mixed, so not immediately dangerous. Still, the non-Muslim Kikuyu shops that pretended to be part of Old Town seemed to be closed, their half-Masai guards glowering from the height advantage of their steps. The street he entered from the backstreet with the silver shop was narrow at the best of times; now it was claustrophobic, with at least a thousand men and women jammed along its length. Alan began to shoulder his way along it, looking for Craw, for any white face, but there was none. He got as far as the gap between two ancient houses and he turned into it and pushed along through a smell of urine until he reached the next street, which was almost as full. He shoved himself toward Fort Jesus, navigating by the minarets of two mosques.

  Men were pulling prepared signs about a jailed leader and economic conditions out of their houses. Some were in English, but all were labeled with the green sigil of the Islamic Party of Kenya—the IPK. Women were pulling the black abyas over their street clothes. He was acutely conscious of his color and of the fact that he was in the dressing room of a major demonstration—Old Town Mombasa was emptying into the streets that led up past Fort Jesus and into the center of town.

  Despite his unease, he kept pushing his way along, apologizing—sameheni, pole, sameheni, pole. Twice, men bumped him hard or elbowed him, not enough to do damage, but enough to remind him to keep moving. His missing fingers itched and he felt trapped. If it hadn’t been for Craw, he would have gone around the other end, through the back alleys below the dhow port; he could walk that way and come out high up on Kenyatta Avenue. But if he did that, he’d be leaving Craw wandering Old Town in a riot.

  He could see the corner and the peach flank of Fort Jesus rising beyond it, and then he caught sight of a white face and bushy eyebrows, a dark polo shirt. Craw. None too soon, he thought, and began to burrow toward him when three men off to his right registered as being different, somehow not part of the crowd. He couldn’t put a finger on it and he was eager to get Craw’s attention, but they were all three lighter skinned, carrying bundles that struck Alan as wrong. Some kind of tension. He hoped they had only swords or cudgels. The rest of the crowd seemed to keep them a little distant, too; he could see they were not “with” anyone.

  “Craw!” he yelled—pointlessly, as it turned out. There was too much noise. He kept burrowing. The three men were still there, just off to his right, and they were all looking at him now. Great. “Craw!”

  Craw was standing on a step next to a half-Masai guard. The man was ignoring him, and Craw was looking up and down the street. Alan willed him to look a little farther back, and kept pushing, an inch at a time. Suddenly, as if a dam had broken, the crowd began to move the way he wanted to go, and the sound crested and crashed like the noise of the sea. Now Alan had to fight to reach the edge of the street and the human eddy where the Masai guard next to Craw was using a club to keep the crowd from his shop. Alan got clubbed on the shoulder as he struggled to get Craw’s attention.

  “Whoa, Ben, that’s my guy! Cool it!” Craw stuffed a bill into the other man’s hand.

  “Glad to see you, too!” Alan shouted and got up on the step. From his new vantage point he could see the crowd sweeping up the hill out of the square at the base of Fort Jesus and into the park where the British colonial office had been. He couldn’t grasp how many they might be, but they didn’t seem any less packed in the larger area. They were loud, but almost half were abya-wearing women.

  “Riot?”

  “Protest, I think.” But Alan couldn’t forget the three men he’d seen.

  At the top of the park, as many as twenty trucks full of what appeared to be soldiers in ca
mo with assault rifles were deploying. Alan leaned past the Masai guard and shouted into Craw’s ear. “General Service Unit. Nasty. Those guys will shoot first and ask questions later.”

  The ground rose in a gradual curve uphill from Alan to the park, giving him a dramatic view over the heads of the crowd. The protestors had marched to the park on Nkrumah Road and now it was the only exit. A man with a loudspeaker was bellowing from an incongruous gazebo in the park’s middle, and a Kenyan cop with a bullhorn was yelling back at him from the top of a truck cab. The loudspeaker droned on. Alan couldn’t catch much of the Swahili, but the man in the gazebo appeared to be using the rhetoric related on the signs—demands for the release of Sheik somebody.

  He shouted into Craw’s ear again. “I think we should get out of here the other way.”

  “What?”

  “I think we should get out of here the other way!”

  “What other way?”

  “Back through Old Town.”

  Alan waved his hand toward the little street from which he had come. A flicker of motion in the second story across the street caught his eye, and he watched, appalled, as the barrel of a rifle poked from the window and fired. The report was audible over the crowd noise. Alan was trying to point it out to Craw when the GSU officer with the bullhorn was cut off the truck cab and flung fifteen feet. The GSU response was immediate and brutal: a volley of fire swept the front of the crowd. Even from hundreds of feet away, Alan could see the mist of blood as the whole front of the crowd was cut down, and the rising scream of panic and hate that rose behind it. The rifle in the building across the street was firing steadily now. The crowd, trapped in the square, broke from the police guns and trampled their own dead, jammed the two exits, and then seemed to flinch away. The scream rose to an impossible pitch as the guns fired. Alan could smell the copper taint of blood on the air. He wanted to close his eyes. The line of fire from the GSU to the crowd meant that high shots went straight at their position on the step; bullets chipped the doorway behind him, and one creased Craw’s arm. Across the street, a group of young men were looking up and pointing, trying to get the crowd’s attention on the shooter in the window. The bulk of the crowd, sixty thousand strong, hovered in the cordite-filled killing ground between the choked exit streets and the guns, and then with a high-pitched cry they charged the gun line. The GSU fired one long burst. Bullets that must already have taken a toll of lives spattered around Alan and Craw. The Masai guard died between them, the top of his head blown off.