Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  The helicopter was well out over the water by then, turning north.

  Then a rough hand was trying to force him inside, but he pushed the gunnery sergeant’s hand off and shouted, “I’m the commanding officer here, Gunny! Get in!” and there was a fraction of a second’s meeting of eyes, the faces only inches apart, and the gunnery sergeant threw himself through the door. Alan gave Geelin a shove; a blow started his way, was pulled back, and they stared at each other.

  “Come on! Come on!” the aircrewman shouted at them.

  The gunnery sergeant grabbed Alan and the aircrewman grabbed Geelin and they were pulled aboard, nobody ever sure who was the last man to leave Kilindini. The last voice was Geelin’s, however, shouting angrily, “We’ll be back! We’ll be back—!”

  Seconds later they were over the water.

  Dulles Airport, Washington.

  Dukas had all his team in the departure lounge, except for the two who were coming in tomorrow on the forensics aircraft. It may have been a first: everybody on time, everybody with a valid passport, only three without the required shots or pills, which they’d get from a medic when they stepped off the plane. They had three hundred pounds of excess baggage, but that was the government’s problem; they had to have laptops, evidence kits, sleeping bags, flak vests, all the basics. Plus several steel thermoses of booze, five cartons of cigarettes, assorted packets of condoms, one extra set of false teeth, GPUs, handguns, cell phones, MSR two-way radios, and a compact barbecue that Special Agent Mendelsohn thought he was going to set up on their hotel balcony.

  Everybody knew everybody else, and everybody was pretty much at ease with everybody else, except Cram. Cram was always the specter at the feast, which may have been why he was always laughing. When he wasn’t laughing, he was telling jokes, or stories he thought were jokes. Right now, he was telling Geraldine Pastner about two female officers he’d investigated who’d turned out to be lesbians.

  “We didn’t ask! They didn’t tell! So guess how we found out they were gay!”

  It occurred to Dukas that Geraldine was unmarried. And unamused by Cram. “How?” she said. Being polite, nothing more.

  “They picketed in Vermont to get married!” He waited for appreciative laughter and got it from two of the men. But not from Geraldine, who said, “Civil union, not marriage.”

  “Whatever! But isn’t that something? Here they’re naval officers and they know they can’t be lesbos, and they go someplace to get married!” He cackled. She did not. Unsatisfied, trying for the laugh, he pushed harder: “And would you believe it, one of them had been married? I mean, really married—to a guy. Not once, but twice! To guys! Married twice to guys, and she turns into a lesbo. How about that!”

  Geraldine smiled. “Some women are slow learners,” she said.

  Cram looked puzzled. Geraldine gave Dukas a small, complicit smile.

  Mombasa Airport.

  Alan had arrived at the det spaces at Mombasa airport to find that what awaited him was not a solution but a problem: no food, no beds, and morale shot to hell.

  The space that had been assigned to his detachment had two side-by-side hangars and a tatty Quonset hut that had already been taken over for EM sleeping quarters. They had no beds and no bedding, but they had scrounged tarps and a roll of filthy foam rubber, and they had made mattresses of a sort. The Quonset also had a studio-sized kitchen, but they had nothing to cook and no pans to cook that nothing in.

  Each of the hangars was big enough to hold a couple of S-3s and then some, but now only a lone aircraft sat under the inadequate lights, big and bulbous and not threatening the way a warplane should perhaps be. It looked polished, and Alan guessed that it had been wiped down for the admiral’s visit.

  A long time ago, it seemed now.

  A second level ran along one side of the hangar, with a metal stairway down to the concrete floor. A pile of prefab plywood bulkheads rose at the far end; from this, the det had already made a detachment office and four other spaces on the upper level. Two wire-mesh storage cribs took up part of the lower level; the maintenance chief had installed himself in one. At the back were pallets of plywood and precut two-by-fours left by the Air Force for the next tenants.

  Next to the det office, two egg crates of comm equipment from the S-3’s belly pack had turned into a communications center, including an FS200 and a Pacer Bounce radio set with an RF-3200E transceiver and a compatible AVS card. The result was a flexible, powerful setup that gave them secure voice, image, satellite, and patched telephone comm—so long as they had things turned on and manned, as they had not for most of the day because everybody had been too busy getting ready for an admiral’s visit that had never happened. This partial comm failure had made the det personnel touchy—some sense that they had not only missed the action but had screwed up their end as well. And then, one of the first things they had learned once they had communications was that Master Chief Craw was dead.

  They had already been cranky because of the matter of food. The det’s sailors had planned to be there only that day, so they had brought hotel-packed box lunches, and then they were supposed to go back to their hotel. They had been willing to make do for one day. But there was the matter of drinks, too: it was a mile-and-a-half walk in wet heat to the civilian terminal, so until word had reached them of the explosion and the deaths, they had been fraternizing with the Kenyan Air Force guys in the next hangar and using their Coke machine. Cohen had wisely stepped on that as soon as he had—belatedly—made contact with the CV, so then there was no Coke machine and no food, and the water was tepid and, according to some of the men, polluted.

  These conditions and the comm mistake had made the det people edgy and supersensitive, and when the loaded helos had arrived after midnight with the retreat from the Harker, these feelings had combined with the Marines’ sense of betrayal to kill whatever had been left of morale. It was as if they had lost a battle.

  Now Alan and what he thought of as his lead team were sitting in a circle of folding chairs under a work light at the far end of the hangar. It was after one in the morning and everybody was drooping, their faces old and hard in the cold light. Alan was aware of his own smell and thought they must all be like that. He was so tired he could feel his eyes trying to close, his body crashing toward sleep no matter what his mind wanted to do. Three cups of awful coffee from the detachment pot (brought from the boat with the maintenance gear) had done little for him. And yet he knew that he had to drive them and himself, or the feeling of defeat they had brought from the Harker would become their reality.

  He forced himself to focus. “If I could have your attention—” His voice was raspy, thick. He cleared his throat. “We’ll make this just as short as we can.”

  Geelin was standing opposite him, looking mad as hell. He was apparently refusing to sit, as some sort of demonstration of—what? machismo? protest? pride? The hell with you; stand, Alan thought, too tired to assert so trivial an authority. Next to him, Lieutenant Cohen, a good pilot who now believed he had blown his first shot at even temporary command, and who had been in the hangar for eighteen hours, looked shell-shocked. He had, to Alan’s surprise, taken Craw’s death particularly hard.

  Next to Cohen, a big, shaven-headed SEAL named Fidelio was sitting with arms crossed and big feet pushed out into the middle of the circle. People who knew him called him “Fidel,” which was thought to be drop-dead funny. Alan thought the man had a chip on his shoulder but couldn’t yet tell why. Briefly, he and Fidelio stared at each other, the SEAL’s look seeming to say I can take you with one hand, but Alan thought this might simply be habit—SEAL culture. He looked back with a look that he hoped said So what? I’m the CO, but he was so tired it may simply have said Do what?

  Sandy Cole was sitting on his left. Fatigue didn’t do anything more for her than it did for the rest of them. Her slightly popped eyes seemed to float on swollen, flushed lids; deep lines had been driven downward from the corners of her nostrils, and it was
possible to guess now how old she was. Maybe thirty-five? Thirty-eight? The long dress was stained with oil and old vegetables, and her bare feet were dirty. Her running shoes, neatly lined up by one leg of her chair, looked brand new by comparison. She smelled a little of the decomposed body she had been working on.

  On his right was Bakin, the det’s chief petty officer in charge of aircraft maintenance. With Craw dead, he was now the ranking enlisted man. Alan wanted him there to hear what was said so he could spike some of the rumors that must already be floating around.

  Alan thought of standing to speak and decided against it. He might fall over.

  “Folks, it’s late, and we’ve all had a hell of a day.” Nobody so much as smiled. “We’re going to have a worse day tomorrow.” No response. “But we’re going to pull up our socks and come out of this winners.” Doubt, gloom. “Okay, let me tell you where we are. If you already know, just hear me out, because different people here know different things.

  “As of several hours ago, we are the U.S. Navy presence in Mombasa. As commander of the detachment, I’ve been tasked to guard the Harker and start the investigation of what happened to it.” Fidelio guffawed, not very loudly, but certainly audibly. Apparently it was obvious to Fidelio what had happened to the Harker. “The lady on my left is Sandra Cole, the Legal Attaché of the embassy in Nairobi. I’ll ask her to talk in a couple of minutes about what she’s found on the dock at Kilindini, including her analysis of the body of a sniper.” He looked across at Fidelio, who was scowling again. “Before that, I’ll ask First Class Fidelio to report on what the SEALs found in the water and on the outside of the ship. First, however, I want to square away some practical stuff that will affect us all.”

  He looked around at them and tried to smile. “As of right now, you are all restricted to our two hangars, the Quonset hut, and the space between. Nobody will leave our perimeter for any reason whatsoever without a written order from me.” He heard Chief Bakin’s sharp intake of breath and the scraping of the man’s feet as he suppressed a move to jump up. “On my right is Chief Petty Officer Bakin of the air detachment. Okay, Chief, say it.”

  Bakin was quite a young man. He took himself fairly seriously, but he was good at his job; tall and good-looking, at least by his own standards, he was accustomed to being listened to. “Detachment personnel were told they would be returning to their hotel tomorrow morning at the latest, sir!”

  “Negative that. Hotels are off-limits until I give the word.”

  “But—!” The posh beach hotels were the reason that this was supposed to be good duty—sun, beer, women, American-style living. “With all respect, that isn’t fair.”

  “No, it isn’t. But I’d rather they were alive here than dead in a high-rise that’s been hit by mortar fire. Or stuck at a barricade somewhere in Mombasa and not able to get out of it.” Bakin was going to object, and Alan held up a hand. “Chief, you and I’ll talk about it later, okay? For now, that’s the word— We’re all here; we’re all staying here. I’ll do my damnedest to get some sort of bedding and food in here before tomorrow night.”

  “Can’t we just fly them back to the boat?” Cohen said.

  “My orders are to stay.”

  The SEAL asked about tents, and Alan said that maybe tents would be along in good time; there was some fruitless discussion of tents versus hangars in the Mombasa humidity. He let them go on for forty-five seconds and then cut them off. “Okay, enough—we’re not getting anywhere. Geelin—by the way, that’s Captain Geelin of the Marine detachment standing over there—check with me in the morning about tents, okay?”

  Geelin wasn’t having any of it. “Tents suck if there’s mortars.”

  Alan nodded, unable to see anything wrong with the statement. Tents suck if there’s mortars. Right. Canvas not much protection, absolutely. The Marines, who had brought sleeping bags, had already glommed on to an equipment cage and a lot of plywood tables to sleep on; several of them were snoring, way up at the far end of the hangar.

  “Here’s our situation.” Alan rubbed his eyes, blinked. “Eight Marines, a Marine officer, and two civilians have been left on the Harker. Kenyan navy and army are providing security on the dock.”

  “So they say,” Fidelio said. He had a surprisingly high voice for a big man, and the statement came out more as a whine than a sarcastic snarl.

  “Belay that.” He looked around at them. “Kenyan navy saved our buns out there today. They’re being a little shitty about sovereignty, but remember—how would we feel if a foreign ship went down in an American harbor and the other country sent in their helos and marines and navy? Please, folks, please—get your people to see it that way. The Kenyans are basically our friends.”

  “With one of the most corrupt governments in Africa,” Sandy Cole said. “Which is saying a lot.”

  Another four-way chat room formed itself on the subject of African corruption, and Alan almost had to shout, “Can we talk about that later, please?” They shut up, and he said hoarsely, “We’re not here to discuss politics. I was simply making a point: the Kenyans are not the enemy.”

  “Who is?” Geelin said, sticking his jaw out.

  “Goddamn ragheads,” Fidelio said in his high voice.

  “Lotta Kenyans are ragheads—” Bakin started to say.

  “Stow it!” Alan stood up, knowing now he should have stood from the beginning. He hauled the folding chair around so he could lean on the metal back. “Geelin, sit down!” He waited. Geelin sat, having hesitated long enough to show he objected, but not so long he’d get called on it. Alan looked at them. “It’s one in the morning and I’m about out of patience, and if you want to practice the art of conversation, do it on your own time. All of you: if you don’t have something useful to say, shut up!”

  It got very quiet. Down at the far end, a Marine snored, three ascending snorts that ended in a long sigh.

  “Now! Situation: eight Marines, one Marine officer, and two civilians on the ship; Kenyans on the dock. We will resupply and transfer personnel once a day—our helo if it gets back here from the boat, Kenyans’ if not. Marines on the Harker are currently supplied for a three-day stay.

  “Thirty more Marines will get here from the gator freighter tomorrow—that’s today—ETA noonish. They will also be under Captain Geelin’s command; they will bring tents and will set up inside our perimeter but out of the way of our aircraft; if there’s space in the tents, the troops sleeping down there right now will also move outside. We need the space.”

  “Objection!” Geelin shouted.

  “I said we’ll talk about it in the morning. Next—an NCIS investigative team will be here by tomorrow night. They will also stay here. That means they will have to be fed and housed, so it’s going to get crowded. By the next day, their airborne forensics lab will be here with two more agents plus at least four forensics people; they may be able to sleep on their aircraft, but the agents will be in the hangar with us. Two of them are women.” He looked down at Sandy Cole. “You’ll have company.

  “The second S-3 will join us from the boat. Aircrew of four.” He looked up at the upper tier of offices and the narrow balcony that connected them. “As of now, all female sleeping quarters to be on the upper level; there’s a head up there for their exclusive use. Far end of the upper level is off-limits to male personnel.”

  “Air-conditioning,” Bakin muttered.

  “It would be nice to have, but we don’t.” Bakin sighed, one of those loud sighs that is meant to show how heavy the world is. Alan rode right over it. “Get your minds up to speed: we’re in a combat situation. This is not America. We are not welcome guests. But we’re here to do a job, and by God we’re going to do it—and we’re going to put up with the heat and MREs and people shooting at us! I’ll go to the mat for you and your people where it’s appropriate, but damned if I’m going to listen to a lot of whining about no Coke machine and no fried chicken, and damned if I’m going to give in because we got our butts kicked toda
y! We are here to do a job and we’re going to do it!”

  He felt wetness on the metal chair-back where his hands rested, realized he was sweating heavily.

  “Mark—” He looked at Cohen. “I want Campbell to fly up to Nairobi tomorrow. Don’t file a flight plan until the last minute—I don’t want anybody out there knowing when we’re taking off and landing.” He didn’t have to remind them that the airport was surrounded by small houses, bandas, and that any of them could hide somebody with a shoulder-fired SAM. “The embassy will meet him with thirty sleeping bags and some fresh fruit and maybe even some Coke; I’ll give him a purchase order.” He didn’t say that it would be drawn on his own account, and if the bean counters in Washington decided to be shirty, he’d be paying the tab.

  “Chief Bakin, I want you to get on the phone first thing tomorrow morning and get us a four-by-four from a rental agency. Toyota preferred, pickup okay. It’s to be brought to the airport security gate, then through airport security after the locals check it, and then you and Fidelio and whoever you need will take that thing apart until you’re absolutely sure it hasn’t been booby-trapped. Then you bring it here. Understood?”

  “How do we get over to the gate?”

  “We’ll try to scrounge a ride from the Kenyans next door.” He didn’t say what he wanted to: for Christ’s sake, walk!

  “I thought we had to stay inside the perimeter, sir.”

  “I’m making an exception, okay? In writing. We need a vehicle.” He looked around the circle again. “But nothing else comes in here. Don’t let anybody get cute—no cutting out for beer, no running to the fence to buy tourist crap from somebody who just happens to be there. Bombs come in all sorts of packages.” He looked around at them, met each one’s eyes, and satisfied himself that, yes, they had got the message: they were staying and it was going to be rough, but his will to do the job was bigger than anybody’s objections. “And no cell phones. All communications are to be from the comm office only. We have one local phone line and it’s to be considered insecure and not for personal use. I’ll try to set up personal calls to families through the boat ASAP, but nobody, nobody makes a call himself; I don’t care what the crisis is!”