Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  His sun-wrinkled eyes scanned the clerks behind the reception desk, settled on a young black man. Producing a French passport, he laid it on the marble in front of the young man and then laid an American twenty-dollar bill on top of it.

  “I am looking for a friend,” he said. His voice had the same slight French accent as on CNN. He gave the twenty a little push with a finger. The young man looked aside and put a hand on both the passport and the bill. “Sir?”

  “My friend has been on television all day. The matata at Kilindini. Maybe you saw it? On CNN?”

  “Oh, yes, yes—?” The Land of Yes.

  “My friend has only three fingers on his left hand. He is in the American Navy. I thought he might be staying here.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “He is?”

  The young man slid his eyes to his right, toward the other clerks, to see if they were listening. He pocketed the twenty. “I was not here, sir—but my friends here, they say that man he did check in early-early this mornin’. They talk about him when the TV come on.” His voice was soft.

  The journalist said, equally softly, “I’d like for you to find the man’s name.”

  “You say he is your friend, sir. How come you—?”

  The journalist smiled. It was quite a fine smile, crinkling his eyes and putting creases in his cheeks. “It is a way of speaking.” He produced another bill. “Could you find me his name, ah—Thomas?” The young man had a plastic name tag on his maroon lapel.

  Thomas bent into a computer terminal. He was a very intent young man—good at his job, the journalist supposed. He let his eyes hunt through the lobby. A woman with a tight backside and impressive breasts was crossing toward the elevators. Look at me, he said inside his head, and she looked. She, too, had been hunting in the lobby, so there was no magic to her looking at him. She smiled. He smiled.

  “Lieutenant-Commander Cra-ik, sir. Christian name, Alan.” Thomas spread a slip of paper on the marble. The journalist took it, laughing—at what, he didn’t say—and slipped it into his shoulder bag. He thanked Thomas and hesitated, looking again for the woman. She was standing by the elevators. She raised an eyebrow. He decided that he couldn’t indulge himself that way, because it was dangerous to leave tracks.

  “Thank you, Thomas,” he said, and, with a look of admiration and regret at the woman, he turned away. The man in Sicily was waiting for a call.

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  Most of the det had seen “the skipper” on TV enough times that they didn’t even turn toward the set now, but to Soleck and Stevens and the aircrew of 902, it was all new. They saw the burning ship, the littered dock, the figure hurrying toward the camera that turned out to be Alan Craik (not really a skipper, only a detachment officer-in-charge, but Soleck and a lot of others called him “the skipper” anyway), and then the brutalized hand held up to ward off the camera.

  Seeing it, Soleck sucked in his breath.

  Seeing it, Stevens said, “The glory hound bites again.” He pulled himself out of his armchair and headed for the door. “Bite mine!” he called to the room at large.

  Soleck, never really ready for cynicism, was shocked. “How can he—how can—say that?” he sputtered. He had been there when they had flown Craik out of Pakistan, that wound new and bleeding, his life dripping out on the deck of the S-3. But Stevens had been there, too! Stevens had flown the goddamn aircraft and had flown it, well, brilliantly—had saved Craik’s life! And now—

  “How can he say that?” Soleck asked.

  “Forget it.” Reilley was a few years older, already a lieutenant. “He can’t help himself.” Reilley had been a Stevens supporter when Craik was new and Stevens had tried to turn the det against him, but Craik had turned things around and now Reilley, too, was on his side. “Stevens is his own worst enemy.”

  “But, Jesus—” The news that Admiral Kessler was dead in the explosion on the Harker had hit Soleck hard. He thought that Stevens should control himself out of respect, at least—show some sign of mourning. The death of an admiral was a big thing to Soleck, for whom the admiral had been an eminence, somebody glimpsed but never known, part father figure, part hero, embodiment of the idea of “the flag,” not the national flag, but the flag of the battle group’s command. To have him snuffed out was like—he thought of it as being like the death of Kennedy, which he’d heard his parents talk about. The reality of Admiral Kessler, who had been a political string-puller and a manipulator of his officers, had never reached him.

  But Stevens had no respect for the admiral and he had no respect for Craik. It made Soleck angry. It made him determined that when the det’s other bird flew off to Mombasa to join the skipper, he was going to be on it.

  Washington.

  It was one in the afternoon at Washington’s Navy Yard, and Mike Dukas hadn’t had lunch. He took food seriously, considered it a sovereign remedy for illness, lost love, depression. He was also a good cook.

  “You call this food?” he said to the younger man who had put take-out Chinese in front of him.

  “Yeah. Shit, yeah! You don’t like Chinese?”

  “I like good Chinese. This is dragon puke; I can tell by the smell.” Dukas was known for his ability to eat his way through a box of a dozen Dunkin’ Donuts, an entire pizza, other people’s leftover burgers-with-everything. “This is full of MSG and fifty-five kilos of saturated fat per carton.”

  “You didn’t tell me you wanted the gourmet health-food special.”

  “You speak Italian?” Dukas gave him the arm. The younger man rolled his eyes and walked away, and Dukas called after him, “Hey, thanks! I’m just in a bad mood!”

  His mouth was full of stir-fried vegetables and pork by then, and he was opening another container and sticking his nose into it, and then another that proved to be full of white rice, which he began to mix into the vegetables and pork. “Too much cornstarch,” he muttered. “They don’t even have cornstarch in China.” He dialed a number. “Now they probably do—they probably make cornstarch.” He took another mouthful, swallowed quickly, and said into the phone, “Hey, Mario! Hey, man, you coming with me?”

  Mario Delahanty was a forensics specialist. He liked the idea of some time in Africa, it turned out, but he couldn’t leave that day, no way.

  “Come tomorrow on the Flying Trocar. Yeah, Andrews at two P.M. is the current schedule. Hey, can you get that woman in the glasses to go? What the hell’s her name—Shirley? Shelley—Sheila, yeah—uh—right, Ditka, that’s the one. She’s really good. Yeah, I want her. Don’t be a smartass; she’s the best explosives analyst in your lab. So can we have her? Put her on the plane with you; I’ll see you in Mombasa day after tomorrow.” He started to hang up, heard something, put the phone back to his ear. “Yeah, you heard right: they’re shooting at each other there. No, we’ll be out at the airport. Secure, man! Marines! Navy air! It’ll be absolutely safe. I guarantee it.”

  He was back into the food, his mouth full and rice dribbling back into the carton, when the telephone rang. He picked it up and said, “Dukas,” which sounded like oo-kush because of the food.

  It was his immediate boss. He had had an idea. Dukas’s face darkened.

  “I don’t need any more good men, Don. I got all the good men already.” In fact, he had put together a hell of a team: in addition to Mario and Sheila Ditka, he had Hahn, the best of the newer special agents; Mendelsohn, who had been to Africa before and even knew a little Swahili; Geraldine Pastner, a pit bull with evidence, who bit and never let go; and Keatley, who had been a Marine and believed that God had put him on earth to enforce rules. All good people, all reliable, all smart. And all eager to go because the word had reached them that Special Agent Laura Sweigert had been killed.

  Now his boss said, “I’m giving you Bob Cram.”

  Dukas swallowed so much food his eyes bulged. “No you’re not!” he tried to say. He looked around for water, saw only tea, gulped it. Too late; his boss was already talking. “You’ll get
along fine; Bob’s a real people guy. What you need to hold your team together, Mike—guy with people skills, always sharing.”

  The tea was scalding hot. Eyes watering, Dukas said, “He’s a worthless asshole.”

  The opinion was widely shared but seldom voiced. Cram had been on loan to the Drug Enforcement Agency in the early 1990s (even then, people were trying to get rid of him) and he had got picked up off a Colombian street and tortured for four hours by one of the cartels. The torture had given him a certain status, even a certain heroism, and even though he had remained a worthless asshole, he was to a great degree untouchable. After the torture, nobody had ever dared fire him—but nobody wanted him around, either.

  “I won’t take him,” Dukas said.

  His boss laughed as if that was a really good one. Laughed and laughed. “I’ve already told him he’s on your team.”

  “No—”

  “He’s on your team, Mike.” Said with a certain forcefulness.

  “Aw, no, Christ—”

  “Liaison. That’s what I’d use him for—liaison. Perfect for dealing with those people over there.”

  Dukas thought of Bob Cram with the Kenyan police. Actually, they might get along—a shared experience of torture, although from different perspectives. “What if I say no?”

  “You can’t say no. Unless you want to lose Mario and Geraldine. Okay?”

  Later, when he had eaten and his mood was no better despite the food, Dukas walked to the other end of the building, where Files and Archives hid itself. Cram had been assigned there for a while to keep him out of the way of agents who were actually doing work. Dukas saw him across a room that was mostly file cabinets and desks, all but two of the desks empty—at one a fiftyish black woman, significantly located as far as possible from the one where Cram sat. She had a perpetual scowl, probably more from years of bureaucracy than from closeness to Cram; anyway, it was clear that pleasantness was not what she would serve up if challenged.

  Dukas studied Cram. Like a caricature of a cop: pushing fifty, hair already white, face red shading to purple, gut defying gravity only because of a leather belt. Dukas felt disgust, not at the physical man, but at the waste Cram represented—an agent slot made useless. At the same time, he felt a grudging respect, the residue of the torture.

  “Cram!” he said.

  Cram looked up. Big, shit-eating grin. “Hey, Michael O’Dukas!”

  “A higher power has put you on the team. We leave from BWI at eight, British Air. Be there.”

  “Yeah, I heard. I’ll come on tomorrow—not enough time—”

  “Tonight.” Dukas wanted to say, “Give me an excuse to dump you, please,” but he felt constrained. The common experience of superiors who tried to deal with Cram.

  Cram got very sincere. He reminded Dukas of the political reporter he had watched that morning. “I’m a family man, Mike.” There were rumors that Cram liked to hit on young women—the younger and dumber the better. Dukas had been careful to keep him away from Leslie, his assistant.

  Dukas ignored the “family man” bullshit. “You’ll handle the press, okay? You’ll need two words—’no’ and ‘comment.’ Other than that, you’ll hold down our office at Mombasa airport.” And try not to give yourself AIDS while you’re thinking about your family. The woman was scowling at them. From the look of her, Dukas was glad they hadn’t forced him to take her as well. “Take tropical clothes. It’s hot and sweaty there. Get to medical for shots—you got three hours. You’ll need a flak vest and a sleeping bag; call this number and talk to Sergeant Bally and then get your ass down to Building Nine and draw them from Marine stores.” He threw a piece of paper on the counter between them.

  “I’m allergic to shots,” Cram said.

  “Oh, too bad! Maybe you better not go.” Dukas tried to smile. “Tell the boss.”

  “Well—no-o-o—” Cram sighed. “I’ll put up with it.” He smiled a martyr’s smile.

  Back in his office, Dukas found that Leslie had pasted yellow stickies on the empty Chinese-food cartons, mostly about calling people who wanted to go with him but whom he didn’t want. There was one, however, about a man he very much wanted and hadn’t been able to find, Dick Triffler. Triffler was a too-precise, straight-arrow man whose performance on a recent case with Dukas had made Dukas want him around for every hardball that came his way. Now Triffler had been bumped upstairs to a post with the Bright Star advance guard in Cairo (doing the groundwork for the annual U.S.-Egyptian naval whiz-bang), and the Bright Star office hadn’t known where he was when Dukas had started calling at eight that morning. Now it was eight P.M. in Cairo and Triffler was in his hotel.

  “Dick!” Dukas shouted. Too loud, he told himself; Triffler liked quiet.

  “This is Richard Triffler speaking.” Melodious voice, calm.

  “Dick—it’s Mike Dukas!”

  Pause. “Oh, hi, Mike.” A distinct lack of enthusiasm, perhaps because Dukas had beat it out of town in the midst of an investigation and left Triffler to clean up.

  “Hey, Dick, uh—how’s Egypt?”

  “Unbelievable.” That could have meant anything. “The dirtiest place I’ve ever been.” Clearer.

  “How’s Bright Star?”

  Pause. “Some of the people are okay. Some are quite different from the way they behave at home.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “I was saying to my wife only this evening—by telephone, of course—that I’ve seen things in the last three weeks that make the Ugly American look like the Osmond family.”

  Dukas smiled. He put his feet up. “Well, jeez, I’ll bet you can’t wait to get out of there, huh, Dick?”

  Triffler’s tone grew warmer. “If I told you that I have twice asked for a transfer, you’ll get an idea of how I can’t wait for this to end! I spent the whole day at the embassy trying to get somebody to pull strings and help me. It’s supposed to be an honor to be here—living in a fancy hotel, traveling in a special car, everything on the tab— It makes me feel guilty, Mike. I hate the dirt and the disease and the poverty, but I hate it, too, that I’m supposed to be enjoying myself by ignoring it. Man, I can’t wait!”

  Dukas smiled more broadly. “Dick, it just so happens that I got a proposition for you. Have you heard about the explosion in Mombasa, Kenya, this morning?”

  Triffler wanted to go back to Washington, not Mombasa. Still, after ten minutes of hemming and hawing and digging one toe into the hot sand, Triffler admitted that he’d rather be working on an honest-to-God investigation with Dukas than swanning around Cairo with a lot of pampered bureaucrats.

  Dukas hung up with a satisfied smile on his face. He made a note to have Kasser spring Triffler from Bright Star, and he was shoving stuff into an attaché in preparation for going home to pack when he noticed another yellow sticky, way off by itself on a pile of files. It said “Inter-Agency Relations” and gave an extension number.

  That would be CIA Inter-Agency Relations, which would have heard that NCIS was serious about no-divvies on the investigation, and which would be trying to use the grail of interagency cooperation to horn in. Dukas frowned.

  He called to Leslie on the other side of the office. She came around the divider that gave them both some sort of privacy. She was wearing what she called “appropriate dress,” which meant that she didn’t look as if she was headed for a rave, but Leslie remained essentially a teenager with really bad taste. A fast learner, but a lot to learn.

  “Hi-i-i-i,” she said. She grinned. She grinned all the time now, he realized. Dukas thought that the signs were not good. She had invited him to her place for dinner, and he was still finding excuses to put it off.

  “Got a job for you.”

  “Great!”

  Coming to his desk and standing too close. Dukas wondered if he should point out that he was forty and she was twenty. He decided not. He was already getting jokes about that from some of the other special agents. “I want you to call this number.” He held up the yellow
sticky. “It’s CIA Inter-Agency Relations. Tell them Mister Dukas is too busy right now and he’s on a case, but if they’ll put it in writing and send it over by messenger, he’ll try to get to it next week.”

  She beamed. “O-ka-a-a-y!” She swayed out, turning to look over her shoulder at him.

  The trouble was, Leslie was also cute. And sexy. A little overweight, but that had never bothered him before.

  As he swung a laden attaché off the desk and got ready to go home, he wondered what he was going to do about her. Nothing, an inner voice accused him: You’ll use the Mombasa thing as an excuse to leave town and not deal with her, you shit.

  And that’s what he did.

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  Rafe Rafehausen was using his CAG office as a temporary BG-commander’s headquarters, unwilling yet to take over the admiral’s office. He’d never move into the flag suite to stay, he knew, not because of how it would look, but because of some innate sense of propriety that was odd in a man so usually brash. He also suspected that his time as acting commander would be short; once Kessler’s death was confirmed, some other two-star would be sent out. So for now he was doing the admiral’s job in his own office and trying to wear the CAG’s hat, too, although if the job lasted more than a day or two, he’d have to move to the flag deck so flag staff didn’t have to keep running to the CAG’s office.

  He had just got off the radio-linked phone with the American ambassador in Nairobi. The news that he had to pass to Al Craik because of that call was not good, and he pulled at his lower lip as he thought about how to tell him. “Get me Craik on the Harker,” he muttered into the phone.

  He scanned a printout on squadron fuel consumption and then pulled out another document and looked at it to see what the Texaco had in reserve. Sticking out at an angle and deeper in the paper pile was a message from Beluscio on the coming week’s weather. He was reading about the depression southwest of Sri Lanka that might become a typhoon when a voice told him that Lieutenant-Commander Craik was on.