Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  It was less than a kilometer to Kilindini Port, a simple piece of navigation, given that they had only to traverse the creek and turn north, and that their boat drew less than six inches of water. Alan passed the helm to Patel; the merchant marine sailors were actually sailors, with experience in boats that Alan and Craw lacked. Various technical aspects and a lot of creeping, dirty water occupied Alan’s mind for the first few minutes, but after that he was a passenger, free to let his mind wander on what might be ahead of him and what he had left behind. And then they left the mouth of the creek and turned north, and suddenly all the devastation of the explosion was visible at once.

  The Harker lay half on her side in the mud at the end of Pier One, her tops on fire. The gantry crane at her berth was toppled over and afire, and a barge of some sort, probably petroleum from the smoke, was ablaze from stem to stern at a mooring fifty yards out. The smoke from the burning barge was what had made the giant black fist in the sky, and the curtain of black smoke lit with balefire cut off Alan’s view of the northern part of the port. There appeared to be another fire up by Pier Six, although whether it was a secondary from the main explosion or a separate device he couldn’t tell.

  Already he assumed the explosions were deliberate.

  Jagiello said something in a choked voice. Patel’s knuckles were white where he gripped the tiller.

  “Holy shit,” White muttered. He looked to Alan for direction. “We going there?”

  Alan thought of the admiral’s inspection tour, of how he had dropped Laura at the Harker less than two hours ago.

  “Yes,” he said tersely.

  Patches of oil, some burning, heaved on the water. Alan directed the boat to the empty side of Pier One, whose bulk would protect them from the heat of the burning ship. A ladder ran up to the pier. He could see movement on the Harker’s superstructure, probably a fire party, but crouched down now in the lee of the structure.

  Craw pointed up beyond the giant cranes and port offices to the blue metal of the main gate. GSU trucks and a crowd—difficult to see whether they were protestors or rioters, but then Alan saw the flash of rifles. The crowd was being swelled from the rear by people coming down Moi Avenue; some in front were trying to climb the fence. The man on the wire fence closest to him wore a Chicago Bulls T-shirt, and his head was bare. He was not a Muslim. The riot had become general.

  The inflatable kissed the base of the ladder and sat there, rising and falling in the turbulence of her own wake. Alan tucked his pistol into his waistband at the back and grabbed the ladder with his maimed hand and hung. Then he reached up with his right hand and took a firmer hold and began to climb as Craw grabbed on below him. He had to climb slowly because his left hand couldn’t bear weight—climb, pause, climb, pause. At the top at last, he pulled himself on to the pier. It struck him an instant later that it was a shambles.

  Whatever had hit the Harker had spread paper and cloth and jagged metal and several waiting cargoes over the pier. Fresh vegetables, probably intended for the battle group, had been stacked here by the ton; now they and their thin-walled wooden crates made a decomposing carpet.

  A wave of heat from the burning oil barge struck him, enough to suck the air from his lungs. The stench of petroleum was overwhelming.

  The fire crew on the Harker was yelling at him, but there was so much noise he couldn’t hear them. He turned and helped Craw up the last step of the ladder. Craw’s face showed the same shock that Alan assumed his had at seeing the orderly pier they had left that morning turned into a giant garbage heap. Oddly, where the superstructure of the Harker had stood between the pier and the blast, a few stacks of pallets still stood as reminders of what the pier had looked like before the explosion. Their survival told him that the explosion had occurred between the Harker and the oil barge.

  “That’s gon’ take a damn sight of cleaning,” Craw said, his hands on his hips.

  Something whickered through the petroleum-laden air between them. Alan was slow to grasp what it was, and Craw looked up at the superstructure of the Harker.

  “We got to call the Jefferson, Commander. This looks deliberate.” He was taking in the angle of the explosion and its shadow.

  Alan heard a high-pitched whine behind him, and his mind, filled with the fire, the damage to the ship, and the chaos on the dock, failed to understand it. If he thought about it, he marked it as another spent round, perhaps from the GSU up at the main gate. He was reaching into the helmet bag, rummaging for his international cell phone, when Craw leaped into the air and fell full length on a heap of cabbage. Alan bent down: Craw’s face was ruined. A bullet had entered at his right temple and taken his lower jaw as it exited. But it didn’t matter. Craw was dead. Martin Craw was dead. Alan finally grasped that a sniper was shooting at them, had been shooting for three or four shots. His hand closed on the cell phone and it all made sense: the fire crew huddled behind the superstructure, trying to get their attention, the little signs of bullets in the air. He flattened himself in the garbage and a sawlike scrap of the crane ripped into his ribs. White’s head came up over the edge of the pier.

  “Sniper!” Alan yelled. White ducked. Another round hit just to the right of Alan’s head, which he had thought was in cover.

  Martin Craw was dead.

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  The flag communications officer laid his hand on Peter Beluscio’s arm and interrupted him in midsentence. Beluscio, flag chief of staff and a captain with a recent date of rank and the touchiness to go with it, whirled, his eyes fierce. Beluscio was a tense man, at best; with the admiral ashore, he was right at boiling point. But the comm officer didn’t budge; instead, he pulled him away from the intel officer with whom he’d been talking. A rating who was watching expected an outburst, but there was none: the chief of staff, seeing the other officer’s set, white face, let himself be led aside.

  “Maybe a terrorist act at Mombasa.”

  The two men stared at each other.

  “A U.S. ship called the Harker has had some kind of explosion in the harbor there. Comm just got a message from their radio, pretty garbled. Asking for help. Sounds like mass confusion there—something about rioting on the dock, gunfire; it isn’t clear.”

  The chief of staff’s thin face was drawn very tight. “The Harker’s the ship the admiral was supposed to visit today.” His face had lost its color, too. “You heard from him?”

  “You were the last one to talk to him—0600 or thereabouts? Since then—”

  “Jesus. Check with his hotel. Bilton’s with him, flag lieutenant. See if he knows anything.” He shot his lower jaw forward, always a sign he was near panic. “Jesus.” He looked up quickly. “What kind of help they asking for?”

  “It’s still coming in. Radio guy said there’s wounded. Something about being hit by glass himself, plus there’s a sniper—it’s a real mess—”

  Beluscio wiped his hand down the sides of his mouth. “Jesus. Oh, Jesus—” He strode out of his office and along the passageway. “Walk me down to Flag CIC.” He put his head in a doorway. “Dick! Come with me!” Then he was out again and moving, his presence opening a path before him. “Get everything you can on this ship, why it’s there, the ball of wax. Get intel to prep a brief on known threats in the area, in case this was really terrorism. Also local facilities—Jesus, what’s the hospital situation there?—better put our hospital on alert in case we have to bring wounded here. Jesus, with AIDS and all, what’re the local hospitals like? There must be an advisory on that.” His face was a deep scowl. He was thinking that he was six hours’ flank speed from Mombasa; should he order part of the BG there for a show of force? Christ, his ass would be grass if he did that and he was wrong. He needed information, more information, lots of it. “Check for local contacts—didn’t there used to be an Air Force unit there? And the naval attaché at the embassy, but, shit, he’s in Nairobi. He may have something, though. Now, this ship, the Harker, what’s the crew size? How many potential wounded we
looking at? Get on it—”

  Mombasa.

  Alan raised his head and tried to take his bearings. The pier stretched away like a nautical garbage dump in front of him and, although the first crane was a wreck, toppled by the direction of the blast, the second and third still stood. Even as he looked at the cranes he saw a flash of movement in the cab of the crane by berth number two. The sniper. He was changing magazines. Alan rolled over the edge of the pier and grabbed the ladder with his good hand and found himself on the same rung as White.

  “Down.”

  “Where’s Mister Craw?”

  “Dead. Now, go down!”

  Alan followed him down the ladder and fell awkwardly into the boat. He turned to Jagiello, now at the tiller. “Farther down the pier. Opposite berth three, if there’s a ladder.”

  The little boat chugged into the shadow of the warehouse that dominated the north end of the pier and cut off any view of the main port. There was a ladder below berth three; the crane at Pier Two was invisible now on the far side of the pier. Alan set himself to climb the ladder; this time, he barely thought about it. White and Patel made to follow him. Alan waved them back.

  “Stay here. Try to raise somebody on the cell phone; I’ve got numbers for the Jefferson in memory.” White nodded; he already had the phone in hand. “If I don’t come back in half an hour, get back to the Yacht Club and hole up there.”

  “Our mates are on the Harker.”

  “The Harker is on fire and your mates can’t reach it because of a sniper. You can’t help them unless you can find a way to get them off.” Alan looked up the ladder. “Frankly, if I’m not back in half an hour, I don’t really give a shit what you do.” He started climbing. Bad command style.

  He raised his head over the edge. He was on the other side of the sniper’s crane now, and unless the man actually read minds, he was unlikely to switch his focus from the Harker to the empty end of the pier. Alan moved as quickly as possible, headed for the base of the third crane. As he rounded it he saw motion, and without volition he had his automatic in his hand and on the man’s center of gravity, and then he froze and forced the muzzle up and away from him. The man had a fixed smile on his face and everything about his posture said “no threat.” He was big and very black, almost blue, naked to the waist, stinking of sweat even above the petrol fumes.

  He put his hands up, but he smiled. “Hakuna matata, bwana!” he said through very white teeth. “No problemo, man! I ain’ got no gun.”

  He didn’t, either, or if he did, it was very cunningly hidden. The man didn’t look dangerous. He looked excited, even interested.

  “Who are you?”

  “I da crane man, bwana.” He bobbed his head. “Big blast come, booom! An’ I get down real fas’. Then crazy man start shootin’ an’ I stay down.”

  “Does this crane work?”

  “She mine an’ she work fine!”

  Alan took the plunge. “I have to get the sniper up there. From this crane.”

  The other man looked at him and whistled. Alan ignored him and started up the ladder inside the crane’s pedestal, but the other man caught at his leg.

  “Where you get him from?”

  Alan looked up the interior. He had never been in one of the giant cranes, and he had no idea how to get around one. He had intended to improvise.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I get you into the cab. You go out the arm, yeah? And maybe I give you a little help from the crane. It still have powah; I can feel it.”

  Alan shrank against the side of the ladder and let the big man go by. It was odd, because the big man’s plan sounded much better, but Alan missed the surge of adrenaline that had carried him this far. He wanted to get it over in a rush. He followed the man up into the cab, another long climb that made his left hand ache.

  The cab had had Plexiglas windows, but they were long gone, probably ripped out by the operators when the air-conditioning failed. Alan ducked as soon as he got into the compartment; he was at the same level as the sniper now and could see him clearly less than fifty meters away. Close enough for a good man with a rifle to kill them both in two or three shots, even through the metal sides of the cab, and far enough away that Alan’s pistol had no realistic chance of hitting him.

  Alan’s only consolation was that the sniper was not terribly good. He had fired at least four times before he hit Craw; that argued for a poor shot. But Martin Craw was still dead. Alan didn’t want to face the fact that he had probably got Craw killed. Not yet.

  He moved cautiously up to the bow of the cab, where a small door let out into the triangular structure of the arm—two beams below with metal plates for flooring, a single beam above, the three joined by a spiderweb of crosspieces that left a central opening wide enough for a man to walk stooped over. The arm pointed ninety degrees away from the sniper’s crane.

  Alan looked back at the operator. “Will the arm reach crane two?”

  “Fully extended, she will, bwana.” He smiled and hit a button, and the arm started to extend, internal engines powering a second, inner arm out of the first. Alan nodded and moved out along it. He felt the energy again. He was moving. He caught up with the back of the slowly extending inner arm and clambered on it, banging his hip and almost losing his grip. Now he was moving out under power, and he had to watch to keep his feet on the angular braces between the beams. The inner arm didn’t have a floor.

  Lateral motion shocked him, and he grabbed overhead struts convulsively, suddenly and painfully aware of how high above the ground he was. The arm was swinging, slowly at first and then faster, until he began to fear that the impact would break the arm or throw him clear. He wrapped arms and legs around the supports and clung, no longer worried about fire from the sniper; that seemed like the least of his concerns.

  The arm slowed. He could see only poorly up the length of the arm, but very clearly out the sides and down, where it was a twenty-meter drop to the pier. Now the arm was pointing almost directly at the crane at berth two and extending steadily, the diesel engine that powered it chugging along so that Alan thought his target must hear him coming. Through the open sides, he could see the barge on fire and the Harker, and Craw’s body lying still on the dock. He looked back along the tunnel into the cab, but he couldn’t see the operator anymore. Instinct told him it was time to make his move.

  He crouched over with the pistol held in the ruin of his left hand and his right hand ready to catch at the supports and began to move as quickly along the arm as he could, trying to run on the supports. It was an odd, quirky run, and twice he missed his rhythm and sat heavily, bruising his legs and only just holding on to the pistol. But now he was almost at the end of the arm. It was swaying violently, and the intense heat from the burning barge was creating a wind; his own antics made it move even more. From the end of the crane to the other cab was a ten-foot gap, and the other cab was smooth plastic and steel, with nothing to grab, turned now so that even if the sniper could see him, he had no position from which to shoot. Nor could Alan see him. He wiped sweat away with the back of his right hand.

  Then his crane began to move back to the right. It moved only a few meters before the inner arm started to slide out again and Alan realized that the operator must have seen his dilemma; now this arm was moving to cross the other crane’s arm. Alan threw himself to the end, regardless of consequences; he had to be there when they touched, because if the sniper was unaware up until now, he would know he was under attack the second his crane was hit by the other crane.

  Alan stood in the triangular opening, his legs straddling the cable that ran the heavy winch, and watched the other arm get closer and closer. He would have to leap between the struts into the interior of the other arm only twenty meters from the sniper and fire immediately down its shaft into the cab. He took a deep breath, didn’t look down, and leaped just before the cranes touched.

  He went cleanly through the opening in the struts, caught himself on the deck plates,
and rolled to a crouch, changing the gun from his left to his right now that he was stable and he could see a blurry form over his sights. Then he fired, double tap, and ran forward. He didn’t feel himself yell, but someone was screaming as he pounded down the crane, arm firing as he went, and into the cab, where he tripped over the sill and went flat behind the console.

  When he raised his head, the sniper was a little above him, slouched over the console, quite dead. Later, Alan would find that he had put six rounds into the man. Just at that moment, he was grateful to be alive, and sorry, so sorry, that he had lost Martin Craw.

  2

  Mombasa.

  JEAN-MARC BALCON HAD GOT TO THE PORT’S GATE BEFORE the riot started, and he had scolded and bullied his two-man crew into setting up a camera position where they could cover the event. The cameraman was as cynical as most of his sort, a Serb who had been kicked out of Kosovo and was now bouncing around the world, freelance and usually stoned, and he said that for stock shots of a fucking nigger port, he could put the fucking camera anywhere.

  “The ship,” Balcon had said, “I want good shots of the ship there.” He had pointed at Pier One and the gray Navy supply ship that floated there.

  “What the hell for?”

  “Because I say so.” Balcon had sworn to himself for the tenth time that he’d get rid of the Serb as soon as the shoot was over.

  Then the dhow had come in and the bomb had gone off, and Balcon had started running with his crew behind him as soon as the rain of debris was over. They couldn’t get really close because of all the crap on the dock, plus a small tanker was on fire and Balcon was afraid it would blow, too, and then shooting had started and the Serb had said he was getting the hell out of there, he’d had enough of this shit in Kosovo, and Balcon, because he needed him, had promised him an extra fifty and had said they could pull back some toward the gate.