Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  There was firing far up the dock. Presumably, the Kenyan sailors had found the missile launcher.

  If they could secure the area—if, the Big If—and if the Kenyans would stay with them, he could call the Jefferson and tell them to fly in Marines and medics. It was an irony of the situation, of course, that when he could do that, they would already be more or less secure.

  Twenty minutes later, Alan was heading below to check on damage control when a snappy-looking black man in a pale blue uniform shirt and body armor came striding over the deck toward him. He was smiling, but he was clearly not going to kiss any white man’s butt.

  “Ngiri, Maiko, lieutenant, Kenyan Navy.” He gave a partial salute. “You are in charge?”

  Alan nodded.

  “You are civilian?”

  “Craik, Alan, lieutenant-commander, United States Navy.”

  “Oh!” Ngiri snapped to, really saluted, put on his helmet and fumbled with the chin strap. “Sorry, sorry, sir, they said this was a civilian ship—”

  Alan waved all that away, pulled the man into the shade and relative privacy of a bulkhead. “What’s the situation up the dock, Lieutenant?”

  “Neutralized.” He got the buckle fixed and snapped to again. “One shore party, under my direction, sent to neutralize missiles launched against our fireboat: mission accomplished, sir.”

  “What’d you find down there?”

  “Two Islamic terrorists, sir. One launcher, I think a bazooka. Bazooka?”

  “Yeah, could be—bazooka-type, yeah, could be one that hit your fireboat.”

  “And two surface-to-air missiles.”

  Alan stared at him, stunned. A SAM could have taken out a helo—of course, that had been the intention. The explosion on the Harker was supposed to bring in help; the SAMs and the snipers would then destroy the help. Alan thought that through, then jumped back to something the lieutenant had said. “Islamic terrorists. You sure?”

  The lieutenant smiled. “Nothing else they could be, sir. We have a so-called political party, the Islamic Party of—”

  “IPK, yeah, yeah—”

  “You know? Well, then!” He squared his shoulders. “I am a Christian.”

  Alan decided to let that pass. “You killed both of them?”

  “We did.” With some satisfaction.

  “We’ll want to examine the surface-to-air missiles, if we may.”

  “They are the property of the Kenyan Navy, sir.”

  Alan stared at him, nodded sharply. Embassy business. “Can you tell me what kind of SAMs, Lieutenant? Country of origin, manufacturer—?”

  Ngiri bristled because he did not know. “I am not an expert, sir. You must ask my superiors.”

  Above, on the superstructure, Hansen was waving at him. “Come with me,” Alan growled.

  “I have been ordered back to my base, sir.”

  Out in the open water, the Kenyan patrol craft was still idling between the docks, its guns threatening the shoreline. Alan pointed at it. “Your guys are still out there. Hang on for a couple of minutes, okay?” He guessed that Hansen had got his secure comm link at last. Could he now order in helos, with the possibility that a couple more SAMs were waiting somewhere in ambush? “Lieutenant?”

  Ngiri’s face was blank. “I will ask my superiors.”

  Alan started away, turned back. “What’s it like out there on the end of the dock now?”

  “Very quiet.”

  “Room to bring in a helicopter?”

  Ngiri had never brought a helo in anywhere, he guessed. Still, the lieutenant said, “Oh, yes, maybe—perhaps—”

  Alan took a step closer to the Kenyan. “Lieutenant, Mwakenya na mwamerika ni rafiki—kweli?”

  Ngiri wasn’t taken in by the white-man-speaks-Swahili ploy. He lowered his head half an inch to acknowledge Alan’s feat, but he didn’t smile. “Yes, we are friends,” he said, using English as if he was closing a door.

  Alan didn’t give up. “Rafiki yangu, nitaka saidi yako.” It was pretty bad Swahili, actually—he never could get those agreements of the prefixes—but it got across his plea for help. “Tafadhali.” That meant “please.” In Arabic, sucked into Swahili by the force of convenience on this coast that had been trading with Arabs for two thousand years.

  Ngiri gave a flicker of a smile, held up a long, thin hand like an Ethiopian saint. “I will try.”

  Alan started for the superstructure at a trot. He passed the wounded men sprawled in the shadows. The man who had been bleeding was dead.

  Bahrain.

  Harry O’Neill tried to ignore the knock on his office door. His house staff knew better than to trouble him when he was on the phone in his home office. He shuffled his slippered feet in annoyance.

  The caller, a rich Saudi with a lucrative security contract to give, required careful handling, and any interruption of the conversation would almost certainly be taken as an insult. O’Neill, a black American with a security business in the Middle East, had learned to be careful with every nuance of courtesy.

  “Harry?” Dave Djalik, ex-SEAL and Harry O’Neill’s best contract operative, was leaning in the door to his office.

  “Busy, Dave.” Harry waved his hand and hardened his voice to convey the seriousness of the situation and went back to his telephone call.

  “Harry, you’re going to want to see this.”

  “I’m on the phone with an influential—” Harry looked up and caught the expression on Djalik’s face. He leaned down to the phone and murmured an apology in Arabic. The response made him wince, and then he hung up. Djalik was already gone, and Harry followed him out of the office space in his house and through the foyer where a fountain played on ornamental rocks under a clear dome, and down a short hallway to the one room in Harry’s compound that held a television.

  “I’ve already watched it twice,” Djalik said. He laughed.

  On the screen, a slender man in shorts was climbing out on what appeared to be the derrick of a dockside crane. The yellow lettering at the base of the image said “CNN Mombasa, Kenya.” The camera panned across wreckage and then back to the crane.

  “The man on the crane is unidentified, but CNN sources suggest that he is a member of the U.S. Navy,” a hushed voice from the television said. Djalik laughed again.

  “A member of the U.S. Navy! Wait till you see who it is, Harry—”

  One of the cranes was moving, the man on the derrick a passenger, the tension of his grasp on the supports around him clear even at a distance. The crane swung until its arm neared another crane, and the passenger was up and moving, jumping from one crane to another. A circle appeared around the man.

  “We think he’s firing here, Jean,” one of the reporters said. In the background, Harry could hear somebody talking in French. The camera zoomed in, and he could see the man firing one-handed. Moments later, there was a close-up of the man as he walked along the dock, and Harry saw the man’s maimed hand and it all came together for him.

  “Alan Craik,” he said aloud.

  “Bingo,” Djalik said.

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  Captain Beluscio stood in the Tactical Flag Command Center with his left hand on his hip, his eyes on a television screen that showed the CNN tape, right forefinger pressing a miniaturized headset to his ear. Listening intently to the headset, he was nonetheless giving orders to subordinates with his hands and eyes. Standing in front of him now was the Marine detachment commander, a wiry, muscled man whose short-sleeved shirt already revealed goose bumps on his arms from the frigid air-conditioning. Crew-cut, scowling, the Marine looked like a boxer waiting for the bell. Beluscio held up a finger of his free hand to tell the Marine to hang on one more second.

  Beluscio listened. “But—” he said into the headset. “But—” Then “Goddamit, no, but—”

  He threw his head back and rolled his eyes; clearly, somebody was really giving him an earful. He looked up at a wall clock. Reaching a hand forward as if he was going to touch the Ma
rine captain’s cheek, he said softly, “Okay, suit up and join your boys. But nobody goes until I give the word!”

  The Marine was gone as soon as he stopped speaking.

  Beluscio glanced at the TV screen, now back to a talking head, and turned his attention again to the headset. “I know that, sir—”

  He waved over an aide and murmured into his ear. “I want to know how fast Yellowjacket can put her Marines into Kilindini Harbor—at least a company.” USS Yellowjacket was a Wasp-class gator freighter—a small aircraft carrier with VSTOL aircraft, choppers, and nine hundred Marines. Beluscio had decided to send the Jefferson’s Marines to Kilindini; the idea was that the helos could stay off the coast for at least an hour if need be, then divert to Mombasa airport if the landing zone was still hot. The chief of staff held the man from running off. “Tell them my Marines are on the way as advance guard; Yellowjacket is a lot farther away, and what I want to know is how fast they can be there in force, with logistics for at least a week. Go!” He locked eyes with a female officer across the room and, eyes open in a question, mouthed the name: Craik? The woman shook her head, shrugged, palms up.

  The captain swung around and pressed his whole hand against his ear and all but shouted, “No!” He listened, eyes wide, mouth open. “I don’t care who you are, you’re not giving me that order! No!”

  He gestured savagely at a lieutenant-commander a few feet down the space. He made equally savage writing motions; somebody pushed a message pad into his left hand. He was so angry that his handwriting became a tangle of points and edges as he wrote: Message to CNO URGENT. Get these assholes off my back! CIA—FBI—whoever!

  He pushed the pad at the lieutenant-commander and returned to the headphone. “Sir, you do that! Go right to the White House! You tell them you’re going to override Navy authority in this area! I hope they ream your ass good. Until then, I’m in charge here, and I’m in charge of the situation at Kilindini! The Harker is Navy responsibility, and the Navy will investigate, and the Navy is in charge! Now get off my comm channel so I can do some real work!”

  A sailor materialized in front of him. “Comm has a secure link with Lieutenant-Commander Craik on the Harker, sir.”

  “Well, thank God, finally—”

  “And, uh, sir, Captain Rafehausen is on channel four for you.”

  Beluscio had an instant realization that everybody, even this sailor, knew of his and Rafehausen’s rivalry, and then he was on channel four and trying to sound neutral. “Captain Beluscio.”

  “Hey, Pete, Rafe. What’s the situation?”

  “I’m up to my ass in alligators, but everything’s under control, okay? We’re on top of it up here.”

  “What’s the word on the admiral?”

  Beluscio hesitated. They were both thinking the same thing, he knew: if the admiral had been badly injured, the BG would need a new commander, and Rafehausen had the seniority. “Nothing as yet. We’re assuming that he’s alive and well until we hear otherwise.”

  Then it was Rafehausen’s turn to hesitate. “Keep me posted, will you?”

  Beluscio repressed a bitter answer and said something neutral. Switching channels, he snarled, “Get me this Craik—now!”

  Washington.

  Mike Dukas strode up the corridor toward his boss’s boss’s office, his face severe, hardly acknowledging the hellos and nods of passing people. The meeting he had asked for early this morning was going to take place three hours late. Not really his boss’s boss’s fault; he had been summoned to a meeting with the head of NCIS and reps from both the CIA and the FBI, and he had decided that meeting Mike Dukas was probably less important.

  Dukas had spent his time finding out who was available to go with him to Mombasa and what sort of support he could hope for. He had tried to raise Al Craik half a dozen times on the supposedly international cell phone NCIS had given him, without success; two of the times, at least, Craik’s phone had been busy, so he was probably still alive. Otherwise, news from Mombasa was iffy, to say the least, that coming from the television increasingly so, as the stations went more to spin and less to simple fact. There had been a couple of long camera shots of the city, with distant smoke that the voice-over said was from the crippled ship, but who the hell knew how accurate that was? As with most TV news, what you had to look at most of the time was the newspeople themselves, who seemed to believe that they were really what was happening. Dukas had been particularly taken with a blond Brit who had worn a bush jacket and said he was broadcasting from “the edge of Mombasa city,” although Dukas, who knew Mombasa a little, believed the guy was really at a tourist lodge about fifty miles away. Palm trees are palm trees, right?

  NCIS had nothing in Mombasa. Neither had the Navy. The nearest presence was the naval attaché in Nairobi, and he didn’t seem to know squat until ten A.M. Washington time, when he called to say that “an asset on the spot” said that there was rioting by the Islamic Party of Kenya, which the General Service Unit was putting down with maximum violence and minimum concern for human rights. (Actually, he hadn’t said the last part; that was what Dukas had added from his own experience.) The attaché added details over the next hour: hospitals filling; some people with gunshot wounds, a rarity in Kenyan demonstrations; firing heard from Kilindini, some of it described as machine guns; the dock area closed off; the big fuel dump by the docks safe so far. (The closing of the docks explained the end of the CNN coverage of the Harker, Dukas thought—also the disappearance of the French newsman who had tried to interview Alan.)

  By eleven, Dukas was getting itchy. He wanted to go. He had even managed to get a tentative promise of a forensics team and an aircraft they called the Flying Trocar, an airborne forensics lab bundled into a 747. But only if he moved fast; in a few hours, somebody else would have a better claim on it.

  Almost running now in his eagerness to get going, he nonetheless diverted from the straight path to Kasser’s office to put his head into one of the cubicles where the special agents spent their days when they weren’t on a case. A bright-looking, tousle-headed woman named Geraldine Pastner was sitting there, surrounded by photos of dogs.

  “You in?” Dukas said.

  She grinned. “Better than D.C. We going for sure?”

  He shook his head. “I’ll know in a couple minutes. Meantime, do me a favor? The clip on CNN—I want to know how they got it and who shot it. Get us a copy if you can, unedited if it’s available.”

  “Ask or order?”

  “Ask, ask, Jesus! We don’t want to get crosswise of them. Anyway, you can’t order media to give up sources, you know that.”

  “I know that.” She smiled; he smiled; the smiles meant that under certain conditions you certainly could lean on the media, but this wasn’t one of the conditions.

  Then Dukas pushed his heavy body to Kasser’s office, summoned by a phone call that to him was three hours late. He didn’t smile this time but shook the other man’s hand, took note of the wall of citations and certificates and trophies without acknowledging them, and sat. He preferred Geraldine Pastner’s dogs.

  “Okay,” Kasser said, “it’s this ship at Mombasa.” He was sixty, a career NCIS man, deputy to the overall honcho.

  “Right. I left you a mes—”

  Hand held up to stop him. “I got it. You got bumped by CIA and the Bureau.” He sat back, joined his hands, looked up at Dukas. “They want it.”

  “Like hell.”

  “That’s what my meeting was about: they want it. ‘Major international incident, part of worldwide movement, big picture; NCIS lacks the facilities, the personnel, the experience, the—’ ”

  “That’s bullshit!”

  Kasser smiled. “Not the word I used.” He had been a special agent for a long time. Now he was polished a lot smoother than Dukas, but he was still a Navy cop. “Make your case, Mike.”

  Dukas hadn’t thought he’d have to do so. He thought the case made itself. Still—”This is a Navy service ship, considered as Navy property.
In this situation—any war or combat situation—it falls under the command of the local authority, who in this case is the commander of BG 9, now the flag on USS Jefferson.” He tapped the desk. “I checked with legal.” Kasser nodded. Dukas went on. “Explosion, cause not yet known, but TV says a bomb, and we got no better information. But that’s what we need to investigate, right? No, this is not, repeat not, an Agency or a Bureau matter! They’ll get the reports; we’ll share with them just as generously as they share with us—”

  “Now, now—”

  “They think information comes in suppositories and should go up their ass for safekeeping.”

  Kasser grinned and then got serious again. “There was also somebody from State at my meeting, plus two guys from the Joint Chiefs. They’d rather work with the Bureau.”

  “They’ve got nothing to do with it!”

  “They say they have. They’re saying what everybody on the TV is saying—Islamic fundamentalists, Islamic extremists, whatever. There’s already pressure to carry out a punitive strike.”

  “Without an investigation?”

  “Osama bin Laden. They’ve got a contingency plan.”

  “This only happened a few hours ago!”

  “It isn’t just this one—there’s a whole string of stuff. They want to use this one as motivation to make a punitive strike.”

  “They call for a punitive strike before there’s proof, and they’re wrong, this country looks like shit! What’d they do the last time—they blew up a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan! We’re not goddamn Nazi Germany!”

  “The Agency and the Bureau say they can have the proof in seventy-two hours.”

  Dukas banged his fist on the arm of his chair. “This is a Navy ship; we’re a Navy investigating unit; we do our own work. CIA and FBI stay out.”

  Kasser looked at his hands again. “Tell me why I should send you.”