Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  “Great shooting,” Triffler said sarcastically.

  “Thank you.” Sarcasm doesn’t travel well.

  “He’s very dead. Remember when we talked about rules of engagement, I said we were going to investigate?”

  The sergeant pointed at the little wallet. “You investigating. Here in Cairo, not good to, ah—play with evidence.”

  Triffler stood up. “I’m not playing.” He dropped the wallet on a table that had bowlegs and claw feet. “Get this guy’s address. Is that a driver’s license?”

  “Evidence,” the sergeant said.

  “My fucking A it’s evidence! I’m investigating a fucking bombing; don’t talk to me about evidence!” Triffler leaned forward and put his nose almost against the Egyptian’s surprised face. “This guy killed the woman who didn’t show up for work! Why do you think he killed her—because he was here to steal the silver? This is a fucking assassination, Sergeant! This guy killed her so she wouldn’t be able to talk to me!”

  He pulled his head back. The shorter, wider man looked stunned, as great anger will cause even strong people to look when they don’t expect it. Triffler already knew what the sergeant had been thinking since they had met: Thin American black man, no balls, treat him nice and he’ll go away. Now the sergeant was thinking, Uh-oh, very big balls.

  “I want the dead man’s address and I want to go there. Now!”

  The sergeant gestured at the mess.

  “They’re dead. She’s dead; what the fuck can she tell me now? He’s dead, but his room or his apartment or whatever the hell can tell me something! Come on, come on—!”

  “I make report—it is rule—”

  “Okay, report, get a forensics team or whatever over here. Then I’m outta here.”

  Sergeant al-Fawzi-al-Mubarak headed for a telephone.

  Mombasa.

  They made a kind of parody of a conference room out of a space between two prefab bulkheads by pushing two plywood tables together and putting folding chairs around them. There was water in a plastic carrier, and yellow legal pads that must have come from the boat, but there was a shortage of pencils in the det and so there was nothing to write with unless you brought your own.

  Alan took the head of the table and let the three embassy men sit where they would, with Sandy Cole at the bottom opposite him. She looked like a harpy—hair wild, eyes red, mouth turned down. They hadn’t brought her any clothes. They said they hadn’t had time, with lots of apologies, but the apologies hadn’t helped. Trying to pacify her as they headed for the meeting room, Alan had said, “Sandy, it’s okay, I don’t have any clean clothes, either,” and she had hissed, “I’m having my period! Are you?” Now she didn’t meet his eyes.

  The three men from Nairobi wore short-sleeved white shirts and ties, and they had batteries of pens in their shirt pockets. Two of them were CIA officers stationed at the embassy: Patemkin, very dark, intense, pushing forty; Mink, a thirtyish, long-headed ex-jock. The third man was from embassy security and looked distrustful of the whole situation. Maybe it was his attitude that caused Patemkin to take charge at once and say to Alan, “We’re here to help. No bullshit—this is a Navy thing, we acknowledge that, end of story.”

  Alan grinned. “I’m stunned.”

  The embassy security man, whose name was Pierce or Pearson and who was older than anybody else in the room by at least ten years, said, “You don’t have the best record of cooperation yourself, Commander.”

  Mink leaned forward. “Did you really tell George Shreed he was ‘contemptible’ in his own office?”

  Alan grinned even more widely. “What can you do for us now is the question.”

  The embassy security man growled, but Patemkin pointed out that Alan already had the Legat, and they were prepared to join him full-time if he wanted them.

  “Here?” Alan said, surprised.

  “Absolutely.”

  “The best we can offer is a table to sleep on, MREs to eat, and a sleeping bag—if they find some in Nairobi. We’ve got twenty-two Marines to defend the whole place, and I’m allowing nobody in or out. If you commit, you’re here. Okay?”

  Patemkin nodded. Mink nodded. The embassy security man said, “No way.”

  Alan smiled at him. “We’ll put you on the afternoon plane back to Nairobi. Okay, let’s get down to work.”

  Cairo.

  Triffler walked through the dead woman’s apartment, eyeballing it for the obvious, the big things that would tell him something about the bombing. He saw a man’s pants and shoes in a closet otherwise full of woman’s clothes: okay, she was getting laid, maybe by the guy who killed her. That would fit: trusted American employee, Egyptian lover, leaked information. He saw a kitchen where nobody ever cooked, a little Swedish refrigerator full of yogurt and orange juice. He went back and looked at the woman’s face. Maybe forty or a little younger, a few pounds over the American limit, no wedding ring. He went to the bathroom: birth-control pills, a decorative, lidded glass jar full of condoms. Cute. Okay. Bang me and I’m yours. Bang me and I’ll help you arrange to kill my coworkers. He went back to the bedroom and found her car keys in a purse under the pillow, flipped through her wallet—Alice Dempsey, same face, right woman; no AID pass, so maybe somebody had taken it; photos, including two of a cat— Shit, does she own a cat?

  “You see a cat?”

  The sergeant was standing by a telephone near the bodies, sweating. He had the expression of a cop who has waked up to the fact that maybe he had used excessive violence.

  “He shoots at me first,” he said.

  “Right. I’m your witness for that, and don’t you forget it. I said, did you see a cat?”

  “Cat?”

  “Oh, shit—” The big door was closed; Triffler opened it a crack and closed it at once because there was a crowd out there. “You call this in?”

  The sergeant nodded.

  Triffler went back to the kitchen and looked for a cat bowl and didn’t find it, then looked in a couple of likely places for a cat pan. He was relieved when he didn’t find one. He didn’t want there to be one more starving cat wandering the Cairo streets.

  He heard a police hooter close by. He went to the sergeant and, standing a little behind him, put a hand on his shoulder. “You ever shoot anybody before?”

  The man shook his head. “Once—” He waved something away. “Not dead.”

  “You better sit down.”

  “No! No good.”

  “Your call.”

  Triffler opened the door to the first knock, and Cairo police poured in. Triffler, who was a straight arrow and who believed that you followed every rule exactly as it was written, was nonetheless a man who knew where his responsibility lay. And he had been exposed enough to Mike Dukas to know that you had to keep your eyes on the goal.

  As the cops came in, he slipped out.

  He went down the stairs, his slender feet tripping, tapping on the worn marble treads, and squeezed himself between the cars again. There was hardly enough room to get his hand and the keys down where he could put the key in the lock, but he managed to get the driver’s door open, and then he used his long, thin arm to reach into the back seat and extract, one by one, the folders that were there. He glanced at them and threw them back—Economic Forecasts; Maxi-trends, economy; Boreholes; Nontourism—and wiggled his fingers over the seat until he got the edge of the laptop and pulled it toward him by the pressure of one finger on the corner, until he could grab the corner with index finger and thumb and pull it to him.

  He hugged the laptop to him as he squeezed through the cars again. The old woman was watching from her post near her cubbyhole. Triffler nodded as he went by her, reaching into his pocket for a fifty-piastre note.

  The plainclothes car with the bad shocks was still at the curb, the weasel still behind the wheel. He was having a vigorous conversation with a uniformed policeman until he saw Triffler, when he sank down into his seat.

  “You speak English?” Triffler said to him.
“English?” The man looked terrified.

  “English,” the uniformed cop said. He tapped himself. “English.” Big deal.

  “Great!” Triffler took the dead man’s driver’s license from his pocket. “Is there an address on this? Address? Street number?”

  It took a while to communicate what he meant, but at last he got it across. “Tell him to take me there. Me.” He pointed at himself, then away into the unknown. “There. He—take—me—there.”

  Seconds later, he was on his way.

  6

  Mombasa.

  ALAN BRIEFED THE THREE EMBASSY MEN ON WHAT HAD happened the day before, from the first sound of the bomb to the nighttime helo flight from the docks. Then they told him what they knew: Mombasa had quieted, but only because of a massive police and military presence; there was still no movement within the city, with a curfew that would be lifted only late in the day for two hours. The hospitals were overflowing.

  “What do your contacts say?”

  Patemkin made a face. “Mixed. Not getting good response, you know? Some, it sounds like a preplanned report: ‘The soldiers came and we were only defending ourselves.’ Others, it’s more like: ‘We had this demonstration going but it got out of hand.’ A couple, they were scared but they told us there was outside interference of some kind.”

  “I saw a guy with a gun, as I told you. Not a Swahili—lighter-skinned.”

  “Arab,” the security man said.

  “I don’t know that.”

  The man grunted. Patemkin got some papers from Mink and spread them in front of him. “It’s all confusion right now. Kenyan government is saying the Islamic Party of Kenya was behind everything that happened, and they’re showing pics of the sniper you killed, as if the guy was a known IPK. In fact, we can’t find any ID of him yet. Same-same with a guy they say was on the dhow that bombed your boat, but the guy is missing a leg and is in a coma and who knows what the hell he is?” He looked up at Alan. “Now there’s this crap in Cairo.”

  “Hold the phone,” Sandy Cole said. “The Kenyans are admitting they’ve got a guy from the dhow?”

  “To us they are.”

  She glanced at Alan. “I got a load of bullshit from them. We need to interview him.”

  “They say he’s in a coma.”

  “I want to see for myself.” She and Patemkin stared at each other. There was some sort of silent communication. Patemkin said, “Okay, I’ll lean on them.” He made a face. “The Ugly American strikes again.”

  Alan leaned in. “Let’s go back a minute. Outside agitation—what if the guy I saw was an outsider—if your reports are right and there was outside agitation?” He was thinking of Harry’s insistence that Islam was not responsible.

  Sandy shook her unhappy head. “That doesn’t sound right. Not the situation here.”

  “Well, it would be an unusual situation, wouldn’t it? If you had outside interference?”

  “Yeah, but why?” Patemkin said. “IPK are a pain in the ass to the government as it is; they don’t need outside help.”

  Mink spoke for the first time. “If they wanted to go violent, they might call in, let’s say, the Yemenis or somebody?”

  “Why?” Alan said. “No homegrown muscle?”

  “It isn’t necessarily muscle. You said a guy with a rifle. That’d be unusual here.”

  “Damned unusual.”

  “Well? So you go outside for it—other Islamic militants—”

  “Are the IPK really militants?”

  Patemkin was waving his hands. “Let’s do a ‘what if,’ okay? What if your man with the rifle was an outsider? So what? It doesn’t change the facts—big demo, violence, everybody knows the Kenyan cops are out for blood, so you get massive retaliation. I mean, whether your instigators are homegrown or you bring them in from outside, what’s the difference?”

  “Unless,” Sandy said, “the outsiders are uninvited.”

  Patemkin looked at her. “Say what?”

  “Well, we don’t know, do we? If there were outsiders, why do they have to be people who were brought in? How about if they were sent in? By—somebody.” She waved her hands. “Elsewhere.”

  “OBL?” Patemkin muttered. They all stared at the center of the table as if he had scrawled the letters there. OBL: Osama bin Laden. A man who had had such hype and such attention that he was his own acronym.

  Alan chewed his lower lip. “Why would OBL—?” He caught himself, remembering that the Nairobi embassy bombing had been an OBL job. When he glanced at the embassy security man, he found him nodding, his face grave.

  “He hit us once, he’d hit us again,” Pierce-or-Pearson said. “The sonofabitch, I’d like to kill him.”

  They all started to talk at once, and Alan shouted them down and said that there was no point in trying to guess at that point. “We need facts,” he said. “Let’s leave OBL until we know more. We haven’t covered the sniper and the bombers—in fact, we haven’t covered what sort of operation this was. If it was coordinated with the demos in the city, then this was planned and executed with a lot of skill, and it took a lot of people. Sandy’s working on the engine number from the dhow, that’s a beginning. I’ve got somebody tracking it from Bahrain; I hope to hear from him today—”

  “Somebody not cleared!” Sandy snarled.

  Patemkin raised his eyebrows but said nothing. Alan went right on, “—and I’d like you guys to get anything you can on the sniper’s body and the other guy the Kenyans have. The SEALs brought up some debris that they think has explosive residue on it, plus we’ll get more from the Harker as soon as the forensics people get here, which should be tonight. With their own lab.” This was a way of saying that if the visitors thought they could take over by saying they’d use the Bureau’s or the Agency’s lab, they could forget it. Patemkin raised one eyebrow a few millimeters and gave a little shrug. Point made. Alan went on: “But I want to work on the organization of this thing. If this was all one event, then it took the crew of the dhow, plus advance surveillance of the port and the ship, plus surveillance of the police and the Kenyan Navy and some intelligence about how and when they react, plus all the organization that goes into training snipers—there were at least two—and the guys with the missiles, and putting them in place. We’re talking at least a hundred people, right?”

  Patemkin was frowning. “You guys had an admiral killed. How accidental was that?”

  “They would have had to time the bomb to go off while he was on the ship—and then know where on the ship he was. I think this part was an accident.”

  “But what if it wasn’t?” Sandy said.

  Alan stared at the blank legal pad in front of him. “They’d need somebody either on the carrier or on the Harker—or maybe stateside at LantFleet, but that’s reaching—who knew that the admiral was making a visit. I can find how long that’s been scheduled—although it can’t be too long, because—” His face clouded. “Oh, my God! I hadn’t thought of that! See, until ten days ago, the gator freighter—the Marine carrier, it’s smaller than the Jefferson, part assault ship, part carrier for helos and V-STOLs—it was supposed to make the port visit.” He leaned toward them. “When the planning and the intel for the attack would have had to be done, that was supposed to be a Marine assault carrier there, not a freighter.”

  Patemkin leaned back, jingled change in a pants pocket. “That kind of changes the price of fish, doesn’t it.”

  “Could the bomb have sunk this Marine ship?” Mink said.

  “The gator freighter’s armored, but—I don’t know; I’ll check. It would have done damage, real damage. Whether the Yellowjacket would have its keel on the bottom like the Harker is another question. But think of what it would have meant—Marines onshore, caught in the demo. Maybe targets of the guys with guns. An American warship, damaged, certainly unusable for the near future. A real blow to the battle group. Especially if you got a lot of the Marines. There goes your land-based force projection.”

  “So
maybe the target wasn’t your admiral at all.”

  “Or maybe, because the admiral was going to be on board, the Harker was an acceptable target even though it wasn’t the preferred one. But that means that at least some of the goal was to hit an American target.”

  “An American Navy ship, isn’t it?” Laura said. “But if the target is the Navy, then why the attack on AID in Cairo?”

  “Maybe they’re not connected,” the embassy security man said. Patemkin waved a hand at that, as if of course they were connected.

  “Five crewmen of the Harker are still missing,” Alan said. “Plus one ship’s officer, but he’s turned up in Nairobi. If the admiral’s schedule was made available to the attackers, then I think we need to talk to the crew.”

  “Islamic?” Mink said.

  “Some.” Alan was thinking of Patel and finding that he was grateful that Patel was Hindu, then realized that he was just as guilty as the others of jumping to the Islamic answer. Again, he bent toward them. “What was your immediate response when McVeigh blew up the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City? Did you think ‘Christian white guy’?” He looked around. “I’ll bet everybody in this room thought OBL.”

  Pierce-or-Pearson said, “I don’t think this was done by a bunch of Christian white guys.”

  They talked another half hour, shifting toward the end to the Cairo bombing, but the talk became mostly speculation and the writing of long lists of questions and lines of inquiry. Patemkin wanted to look for a money trail; he had a line into the Kenyan banks, he said, but he needed names—names of people who had accounts and who might have received electronic transfers. Mink suggested looking at the stock markets to see if anybody had tried to make a quick profit from a temporary drop after the bombing; this was thought far-fetched, but he was welcome to look. Pierce-or-Pearson said he’d put the arm on a couple of Kenyan officials who were “contacts,” meaning that he had them on the payroll. Alan kept filling yellow sheets, turning the page, starting a new list. Explosives, customs forms, passports and visas, weapons smuggling, cell phones, the MP3 player, telephone calls—

  “When I was in the silver shop, just before the bomb went off, the young guys seemed to be expecting something. The old man didn’t.”