Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  “Word on the street?” Patemkin said. “Kids got communications to die for. Can you talk to them?”

  “Maybe.” He was dubious. “Not until we can move around Mombasa.”

  “God, it’s hot,” Sandy Cole said. The others murmured, growled.

  An intel-second poked his head in the door. If he’d knocked, Alan hadn’t heard it. Alan scowled, but the young sailor tiptoed in anyway, his body language saying that he wasn’t really there at all, and he was terribly sorry, and he was being fucking quiet—

  “Urgent p-comm, sir,” he whispered to Alan. He put down a message slip. Alan jerked his head toward the door and the sailor ran for it. Alan unfolded the paper and looked at it under the protection of its top fold. It was from Harry O’Neill in Bahrain:

  My sources say Islamic Party of Kenya not involved. See for

  yourself: you can have a meeting with their top guys at two P.M.

  at the Intercontinental. I’m working on the stuff you sent me.

  He looked around the table. They were all staring at him. The three men had sweat stains under the arms of their white shirts; one of Mink’s pens had leaked, and he had a blue-black spot like a target over his heart. Pierce-or-Pearson was the purple-red that can mean a heart attack is coming.

  “Let’s break for lunch,” Alan said. “What wine goes with Spam?” He felt slightly spooky, light-headed because of the fatigue, but buoyed by the morning’s work. And now a meeting with the IPK, graciously arranged at long distance by a man who didn’t understand that they were under siege.

  He caught Sandy Cole on the stairs. “Go to comm and tell them I said you were to talk to the NCIS team in London or Cairo or wherever they are—priority. There’s a woman with them—tell her what you need, clothes and so on.” She didn’t give a flicker of interest. “Then when the embassy security guy goes back over to the terminal, you can go with him. There’s a shop in the terminal. You’ll have to put up with a Marine standing by.”

  Her expression changed but she didn’t smile. She took a long time thinking it all over. “Thanks,” she murmured, pulling hair from her eyes with that long, pale hand.

  He went on down the iron stairs and dawdled crossing the hangar, wondering if he really had the balls to try to meet with the IPK in the middle of a revolution. Abruptly, he turned and went back up the stairs to the space that had been assigned to Sandy Cole. He knocked, there was a long pause, and then she came to the door and opened it six inches. She stared at him as if he was bringing bad news.

  “How reliable are these Kenya Wildlife guys you talked about?”

  She continued to stare at him, then shifted her weight and opened the door another inch. “Leakey trained them. They wouldn’t let you shoot an elephant even if you paid in American twenties. How’s that?”

  “Think they could get me across Mombasa to the beach hotels?”

  “Getting yourself a little R and R?”

  “Getting some information, maybe. Would they do it?”

  “Why should they?”

  He leaned on the doorjamb. He looked at the floor. “What do they need that they haven’t got?”

  She laughed. Not a nice laugh. “Modern weapons, decent uniforms, good cars.”

  “You know a lot about them.”

  Her face added defiance to its established sullenness. Also, maybe, a hint of see-what-you’re-missing triumph. “I’m fucking one of them when I’m not a prisoner in a hangar. Okay?” She opened the door a little more and leaned back, one hand closed around the knob so she had something to put her weight against, suddenly on the offensive—because she was defensive, he saw.

  Alan shook his head. “Not my business. Except—can you make the contact? I need a vehicle and three or four guys with guns. Two vehicles would be better. I need them in two hours. Possible?”

  She shrugged. She stared at him some more, probably wondering what was in it for her and deciding that if he was really going for information, that was what was in it for her. “I’ll make a phone call.”

  “Before lunch?”

  “You wouldn’t believe how having a period without enough tampons takes away your appetite for MREs.”

  Houston.

  A black man and a white man set up a barbecue grill and a folding table at the edge of a suburban park, even though it was still dark, between a ball diamond on one side and, on the other, a line of trees and beyond it a littered, weedy slope that ran down to a suburban cul-de-sac. They had folding chairs and a beer cooler, and if the sun had been shining, they’d have looked like two guys there for a quiet day in the sun. As it was, they looked like very early birds.

  “Can you see her house?” the white one said.

  “Of course I can. Clear as day. Jesus.”

  “It’d be too early for her to be up.”

  “They said she gets up super-early. She takes the kids to day care; it’s perfect.”

  “Hitting her with the kids in the car is shit. I don’t like hitting kids.”

  “You think I’m in love with it? But it’s today or tomorrow; that’s the deal. That’s it, today or tomorrow.” He picked up a cell phone that also had a radio transceiver in it and said, “Mick, you there?”

  “Yeah. Anything?”

  “Nah, too fucking early. No lights in the house yet.” He sighed and moved lower in the folding chair. He watched the other man reach for a beer from the cooler. “Take it easy on the beer. We maybe got all day, man.”

  The other man shrugged. “You’re the designated driver. Fuck you.”

  London.

  Cram had got three of them on an eleven o’clock flight, so they were stuffing papers into attachés and saving files and closing laptops when Hahn shouted across the now-littered VIP room, “Hey, Dukas! Telephone!”

  Dukas stared at him over the swirl. “I’m busy!”

  “Dick Triffler says he’s in jail and you gotta get him out!”

  Dukas pushed his way across the big room and grabbed the phone. “Dick? It’s Dukas!”

  “I’m in jail, I’m afraid.” The voice sounded very far away.

  “Where?”

  “Cairo. I’m sorry, Mike. I’ve been a very bad boy.”

  Dukas was thinking, Triffler—jail? It’s the end of the world! “Dick, what the hell for?”

  “Suppressing evidence.” He lowered his voice. “I, uh, borrowed a driver’s license and some keys in the course of my investigation. The owners were, uh, recently deceased.”

  Dukas began to grin. “You get anything?”

  “I think maybe.”

  “Well, call your boss, tell him to bail you out.”

  “I did, and he said that you’re my boss now, and as far as he’s concerned, quote, I ‘can rot in an Egyptian jail until my asshole falls out,’ unquote. Anyway, I’m not sure they have bail here. What I think is, if you come down and show your badge and talk really nice, they’ll let me go, because a few homicide cops are mad as hell but the rest think it’s pretty funny.”

  “Dick, I’m seven hours away.”

  He heard Triffler sigh. “I’ll try to keep them from getting out the rubber hoses until you get here.”

  Dukas started laughing. “Jesus, Dick—you! Mister Law and Order!”

  Triffler was silent for several seconds. At last he said, “I did my best in a very difficult situation.” Dukas heard him sniff. “Please wear a necktie and a clean shirt.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  7

  Houston.

  THE TWO MEN STILL SAT IN THEIR FOLDING CHAIRS. A BOOM box played reggae beside them, and the sun was already bright.

  “This sucks, man. Kids.”

  “I said we do it today if we get the chance. You want out? Good. Go. Then you explain it to the client.” The black one laughed.

  Two minutes later, the white man groaned. “Oh, shit,” he said. “She’s going out.”

  The black man was out of his chair and staring down through the trees. Below them on the cul-de-sac, next to a tract
house that backed up to the weeds, Rose Siciliano was buckling her children into a 4Runner.

  “She’s going out.”

  “She’s got the kids.”

  “Yeah? That’s not my fault.” He flipped on the two-way radio. “She’s coming out. You get that? She’s coming out.”

  Faintly, a male voice said, “Yeah, yeah. Gotcha.”

  The two men trotted to a van that was parked a hundred feet away. When they were inside, the black man at the wheel said, “I think he’s stoned. He sounded stoned.”

  “He’s always stoned.”

  “He better not fuck up.” He put the van in gear and drove out of the park.

  Mombasa.

  During the day, the atmosphere in the hangar changed.

  Before the afternoon sun began to slant through the open hangar doors, the empty space was echoing with the sound of hammers. Plywood walls materialized, breaking up echoes and beginning to suggest that privacy could exist again.

  The first Marine helo touched down at 1300 local. Within minutes, Geelin had expanded his perimeter, assigned billets to his new men, and started his two additional junior officers and a small cadre of NCOs on a tour of the area. A second chopper had brought sandbags, and within twenty minutes two squads were filling them. An hour after that, the Marines were building a sandbagged mortar position in the shade of the hangar. Alan, delighted, calmer, still death-weary, watched from the plywood eminence of the new Det 424 office—four walls, no ceiling, and a folding chair.

  “David is on his way,” a voice said at his elbow. He knew it was Sandy Cole, recognized the scent as well as the voice. “The KWS guy.” She didn’t say “The man at KWS I’m fucking.” He remembered the tone in her voice when she’d said “fucking” before. Despair? Bitterness?

  “Right.” He made himself too cheerful. “The Wildlife Service.” Cheerful was an effort. “Cheerful” would prove to be a phase before he got a second wind; real exhaustion was hours, maybe days away. He turned to her. “I don’t want to pry, Sandy, but I have to know—you’re sure we can trust him.”

  “He’s the Deputy Director for Forestry, for Christ’s sake!” Their eyes locked. She flinched first. “That’s a nice way of saying he’s in charge of all the parks nobody goes to, meaning that he’s a good guy who busted his ass doing the right thing and got sidelined, okay?”

  Alan tried to step carefully. “Does, uh, your security officer know about, mm, you and him?”

  She didn’t do one of her characteristic boneless poses; instead, she threw her head back and locked eyes with him again. “You think I’m going to have intimate contact with a foreign national and not report it? It’d be my career—and I do have a career, whatever all you guys think!” She moved her head as if to toss back her hair, but it hung along the sides of her face, heavy with oil or sweat. “They did a check on him. He’s okay, okay?” She waited, exploded. “Jesus Christ, he’s one of the good guys!”

  Alan nodded his head, kept nodding. Chewed his lip. “We’re letting him into the perimeter. Some lives are going to depend on him.” He didn’t say “Mine among them.” “Give me something in writing.”

  “So you can cover your naval ass? Oh, yes, sir!”

  “Better yet, have your security officer e-mail me something.” He smiled, trying to do “cheerful” again. “Call me when he’s here.”

  He had reached the point of fatigue where only cleanliness was left as a remedy. He drained his coffee and tossed the paper cup in a can. Then he went into the newly plywood-walled men’s room and splashed tepid water on his face, toweled off with his T-shirt, and walked shirtless past sailors swinging hammers to a half-finished officers’ rack room and threw the shirt on his bedroll. He changed into civilian clothes—a pair of greenish slacks and a crumpled white shirt with a khaki vest that he had worn on the plane. Safari chic.

  He found Cohen in the maintenance cage. Cohen was staring gloomily at a scrawled list of parts. Alan saw “ASAP” at the top. “Can’t be that bad, Dink,” he said.

  Cohen had last smiled at his bar mitzvah. “It’s worse.”

  “I need two guys to drive the pickup to get the men’s gear at the hotels. They’ll follow me and the guy from Kenya Wildlife. Better be black guys. Civilian clothes.” Black civilians might look less threatening in Mombasa than white military, he thought. Another hopeful maybe. “We must be able to scrounge a couple of civilian shirts from the guys, huh?”

  Cohen looked out into the hangar as if the hope of finding two black sailors and two shirts was beyond imagination. In fact, a third of the det was African American. “Marines’d be better,” he muttered.

  “The Marines have a job to do. Anyway, they look like Marines, and they’ll want to fight if they’re challenged.”

  “What’re our guys supposed to do—kiss ass?”

  Good question. Alan had tried to think it through and had come to the same impasse. “Get them a couple of sidearms, nothing heavier. Yeah, I know—we don’t have an armorer and we didn’t bring any weapons, but aircrew brought their own, so borrow. Okay?”

  Cohen nodded, but his face suggested that the idea was doomed—the det was doomed, the world was doomed; it was already written somewhere.

  When Sandy found Alan again, he was out on the apron in front of the hangar, watching an S-3 getting a blivet to carry extra cargo and drinking water from the boat. “David just passed the main gate,” she said, closing her cell phone.

  Alan nodded. Geelin strode up from behind the hangar, flecks of sand trapped in the sweat all along his arms and hands. He gave a salute. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

  Alan tried to be cheerful. “Go ahead.”

  Geelin glanced at Sandy; she shrugged and backed away a few feet. Geelin lowered his voice. “I don’t like you going out of the perimeter without a guard. I sure as hell don’t like you going to meet the same guys who wasted some of ours yesterday.”

  Alan smiled without humor. “Your opinion is noted, Captain.” Trying to do a parody of Spock, failing. Geelin looked as if he wanted to say more, but Alan’s response stopped him, as it had been intended to do. Alan no longer cared to hear every opinion offered, even by someone as competent as Geelin.

  Behind Geelin, an open jeep covered in red Mombasa dust rolled up to the Marine post. The driver was thin and very black; at this distance he looked like a stick figure in a cartoon.

  “Who’s this bozo?” Geelin asked, jerking his thumb.

  “My ride.” Alan nodded at the markings on the jeep. In the background, a voice was calling “Gunny, post three needs an escort!” Geelin’s jaw got stubborn. They’d been over it twice that morning, but Alan knew that he was going to say again that it was crazy for the CO to go alone into a hot zone with one unknown foreigner, and what he needed was at least the pickup and eight Marines, and— Alan held up a hand. “Matter’s closed, Jack.”

  The jeep crept forward from post three, now with a Marine lance corporal perched on the passenger seat, steering well clear of the S-3 and stopping near the mortar position. Alan and Sandy, fifteen feet apart, walked toward it under the pounding sun. Alan could hear Geelin marching along behind.

  “Commander Craik?” the black man asked, extending a hand. “Deputy Director Opono of the Kenya Wildlife Service.” His eyes crinkled. “My friends call me David.” He smiled at Sandy, but the smile could have meant anything. He looked younger than Alan had expected, perhaps younger than Sandy by a year or two. Alan glanced at Sandy, who was smiling but already drawing back, her hand half-raised. She had wanted to touch him, he thought, if only by shaking hands.

  Alan took his hand and shook it. “Call me Alan. You know Sandy Cole, of course. This is Captain Geelin of the United States Marine Corps.”

  Opono shook hands with Geelin and smiled. Sandy had raised her hand again and, when it was ignored, again backed away. “You ready to go, Commander?”

  He’d already thrashed out the acting command while he was away; Geelin had rank on Cohen, so the j
ob fell to him. Alan tossed his helmet bag in the back of the jeep and came around to get in. Opono turned his head to follow him, and as the sun came more fully on his face Alan saw that the man was older than he had thought. There was a weariness in it, he saw now, too, maybe a hard-earned cynicism. “How bad was your drive here?” he said, to say something.

  “Many checkpoints.” Opono’s smile broadened, as at a joke. Alan got it: Opono hated the army and the police, the creators of “many checkpoints.”

  “Are you armed?” Alan said.

  “Certainly not.”

  Alan glanced at Sandy, back at Opono, thought that the man was lying. For her sake? “Our pickup truck is going to follow so that my men can get our gear from the hotels. Problem?”

  Opono gave a soft smile. “No problem.” A little mocking now because of the trite African expression.

  “I’m carrying a sidearm. So are my men. Still no problem?”

  Opono’s dark face looked pained. “Showing a weapon makes things worse here.”

  “I don’t intend to shoot our way through Mombasa with three handguns.” Opono locked on to Alan’s eyes, then smiled, but he still looked pained.

  Alan got in the jeep, and the Marine escorted them back to guard post three, where the pickup was already waiting. Sitting that close to Opono, Alan realized that he smelled of beer.

  Alan started the drive on full alert, watching every oncoming matatu and checking out every gathering of men. It didn’t take long for him to accept that Mombasa was quiet, at least for the moment, maybe because military and police checkpoints were everywhere, as Opono had warned. A few people, mostly women, were out, probably shopping for food. The streets they went through had been cleared of any bodies and burned-out cars, but these were main roads. No tourists seemed to be coming into old Mombasa from the beaches, although he saw Masai guards on a tourist coach headed toward the airport. The wazungu are afraid. Behind him, the two sailors from the det were sitting up straight in the truck’s cab, looking grim. Still, by the time they were on Mombasa Island itself, Alan was almost relaxed, slumped in his seat and trying to make small talk with David Opono.