Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  “I need to move around this city,” Alan said. “I need to have your word that my men are safe. I need you to spread the word to your people that my people are safe. Can you make me that guarantee?”

  “I can,” Sheik Khalid said. “Give me two hours, and your people will be safe from us.”

  Alan nodded. “I’ll do my best to pass your views to my government.” He looked at the toilet paper, pinched it more firmly against his ear. “Somebody got you and me here. Somebody made the decision to be here at this time on this day. Somebody bribed the waiter to put the telephone out there where the shooter could get at me. Somebody in the IPK.” He looked at the old men. “Three of you knew where and when this meeting was to be.”

  The silversmith was leaning against the wall. He looked up at Alan. “Four of us knew.” He looked at the translator. “Please, Commander. I heard what you said. I understand what you said.”

  “Four of you knew,” Alan said, looking at the translator again. The youth of today. He waited for him to translate. The three elders were looking at him, too, and then Nadek said, “We will find out. You and your men are safe in Mombasa now.”

  Opono thought his ear had been hit by a piece of stone, not a bullet. He seemed more amused than worried as he dressed it. “The ear bleeds well,” he said. “You look quite dramatic. Would you like me to wrap your head with a bandage, like an actor in a movie?”

  “I’d like you to stop the bleeding.”

  “The bleeding has stopped itself.” He clapped Alan on the shoulder. “You’ll live to fight another day.”

  “Thanks,” Alan said and winced inwardly, wishing he could be a little more generous. Thanks, you saved my life. He began to tremble, and he lay back against the jeep’s seat. They’d roared away from the hotel just as the police had arrived; the place would be swarming with them now. “They’d have kept us there the rest of the day,” he muttered.

  “It was just high tide. The boat could get in tight to the beach that way. Well planned.” Opono studied him. “The boat went north.”

  Alan glanced in the rearview mirror. The pickup was parked behind them, the two sailors looking serious and perhaps scared. They’d seen the blood on his vest. “What’s north?” he said.

  Opono shrugged.

  “Sandy says you’ve told her about poachers up north.”

  “Told her and told her. That’s how we met—I went to the embassy to complain, because I knew nobody in the Kenyan government would listen. Yes, we have poachers up north.”

  Alan’s head was splitting. He was in shock. Still, he said, “Tell me about them.”

  Houston.

  Rose drove easily and expertly, checking both of her children and the dog, who rode behind her. Seven-year-old Mike was in the front with her, two-year-old Bobby in an infant seat behind him.

  “You strapped tight?” she said to Mike.

  “I’m working.” He was staring into the right-side rearview mirror.

  She reached across and tested his seat belt, keeping her eyes on the road. When she had sat up straight again, she said, “You answer a question when I ask you, Michael, or there’ll be trouble.”

  He hunched into himself. “Yes, ma’am.” He looked aside at her. “I was checking for surveillance.”

  She laughed. “You’re your father’s boy, all right.”

  “You’re carrying your gun!” he said: rigorous seven-year-old logic—if Mom carries a gun, it makes sense to check for surveillance.

  “That’s just to satisfy Uncle Mike, because I made him a promise. Monday, it goes back into the drawer.”

  More seven-year-old logic: “It isn’t Monday yet.”

  “That’s why I’m wearing it.” It sat on her belly in a pouch, about as inconspicuous as a pregnancy.

  “Well, that’s why I’m watching for surveillance.” His eyes were on the mirror again. They were driving through sleeping suburbs toward the day-care center, after which she’d turn around and drop Mikey at camp and go on to the Space Center. It would take far longer than she wanted it to, but it was supposed to be only for a week and then there’d be room in day care at the Space Center and neither she nor her kids would have to spend an hour in a car each way.

  “Mom.”

  “What?”

  “We’re being followed.”

  “Mikey—” She sighed. Being the wife of a man who seemed to live at some border-crossing into the world of espionage was sometimes trying, not least when her child made that world his own fantasyland. “Who’s following us?” she said, finding it easier to go along than to squelch him.

  “A dark green van, Texas plates.”

  She glanced into the overhead mirror. Indeed, there was a dark green van behind them. Well, yes, it was following them.

  “See?”

  “I see it.”

  “I saw it yesterday.”

  “Mikey—!”

  “I did! When you picked me up me at camp. I saw it!”

  She was a little exasperated with him for roughening the mood of the day, which had started pretty well despite everything. She had promised to bake cookies when they all got home, and she usually hated baking. Super-Mom. It had started out to be a good, quiet day, and now her child wanted her to believe that there was a threat behind them. Nonetheless, she shifted her weight and felt the gun on her abdomen and unconsciously touched it with one hand, checking by feel that the speedloaders were in there, too.

  “Mom?”

  She decided to be patient. “Yes, Mike?”

  “There’s two cars back there. Right behind each other.”

  She started to protest that two things can’t both be behind each other, but she glanced into the mirror, and as she did so she saw a second vehicle pull slightly out over the center line and then glide back in behind the green van. It was very close behind, closer than most drivers would get, and if it was going to pass, it could easily have done so, because nothing was coming the other way. Up ahead was a wide curve to the right and then a long straightaway; the car would have had time to pass before the curve, she thought.

  And a memory surfaced. An antiterrorism course five years before, and a video of attacks by bicycle, scooter, and car. One of the scenarios showed a two-car assault on a single car, with one pulling up tight behind and the other swinging out and then forcing the victim off the road.

  Without thinking, she accelerated.

  “Check your seat belt,” she said to Mikey.

  “You just did!”

  “Young man, what did I say—?”

  He muttered, “Yes, ma’am,” and checked his belt as she turned and reached over the back seat, getting a lick from the dog, and tested the restraints on the younger child, who patted the dog and called it Bloofer, a corruption of its real name, Blue, that had now become its real name. Then she was into the curve, steering with one hand and feeling the tires come just short of squealing; she took her foot off the accelerator and the car slowed, and immediately she accelerated again, halfway around the turn and increasing speed because it was safe there, gaining speed while still in the turn.

  And the following cars did the same.

  “Mom—”

  “Not now.”

  She came out of the turn into the long straightaway, still accelerating. The needle moved past seventy. The big 4Runner held the road well.

  In her mirror, the van grew suddenly bigger. It was moving up behind her fast.

  Her one day of defensive driving at the antiterrorism school flashed. Thoughts cascaded down her brain: the vulnerability of her kids, the weight of the 4Runner, the bumper height of the van behind.

  The second vehicle pulled abruptly out into the far lane and came roaring toward her. It was a pickup truck, half a dozen years old, black.

  The van was ten yards behind her.

  “Hold on,” she said.

  The two vehicles moved on her at the same speed, the van closing up almost against her rear bumper and the pickup matching it and then surging ahea
d to take a position next to her, at first a bit behind so that she was even with its hood, then moving up until she and the other driver were exactly even, and she shot a look across and saw a man grinning at her, a skeletally thin man with ragged hair and a baseball cap. And a manic grin.

  She had done it once with an instructor sitting beside her, and at the last moment he had had to bark at her to get her to make the move. Now she had to do it alone, with her children in the car. At more than seventy miles an hour.

  And the dog. The dog had no restraints and, if she crashed, would come off the rear seat like a missile.

  “Hold on!”

  She floored the accelerator, moved ahead, then sensed in her peripheral vision the pickup’s even faster surge; as it came a little past her, she stood on her brake pedal.

  The 4Runner squealed, and she felt herself pitched forward toward the wheel. Mikey’s head snapped down, and the dog slammed into the back of her seat and the baby screamed. Then the van hit their back bumper with a loud thud.

  This was where the instructor had shouted at her.

  She swung the wheel hard to the left. Her left front panel caught the pickup, which was still ahead, in the right rear, precisely as this maneuver is meant to do. The pickup was big, but the 4Runner was heavy and powerful, too, and the pickup had no weight in the rear. The impact put the pickup into a sliding spin. Mikey, staring out his windshield, screamed when he saw the truck right there at their front bumper and then swinging, seemingly toward him, in what would become a 360-degree spin. Behind them, the van was late and so still trying to push her forward; it struck her left rear and simply aided what she had already started by grabbing her parking brake and yanking back, while again standing on the brake pedal—a 180-degree turn that ended in a near stop.

  The van flashed past. Mikey screamed again, and there was another bang as the van hit the spinning pickup.

  Then Rose was around. She shifted down and accelerated, controlling the turn, remembering the instructor’s bellow (“Not yet, not yet—let it spin—Now!”) and coming out of it headed in the opposite direction and beginning to move, the car swaying and both children screaming. She asked the engine for power and it responded, and they started back down the highway.

  And swayed drunkenly to the left and then to the right, and she knew that the impact with the pickup had driven metal into her left front tire. It shredded with a sound like a power saw, pieces of rubber hammering against the undercarriage. She tried to control the careening car but felt the wheel torn from her hands as it swerved too sharply to the right. Small trees densely lined the road there, and she prayed in an instant that they wouldn’t hit, that the airbags wouldn’t inflate and pin them in the car for the men in the van to take as they wanted. She got the wheel again, fighting the momentum, fighting the draw of the trees, and the car sloped into a shallow ditch, straightened, and scraped along to a stop, canted like a beached ship.

  “Out, get out!” she shouted. “Mikey, get the hell out!”

  “But Mom—!” He was crying.

  “Get out!”

  She was around the front of the car, knees like jelly with the fear and the shock of it. She had to wrestle Mikey’s door open and unbuckle his seat belt. She grabbed his shoulders. “You’ve got to take care of Bobby! Can you do it?”

  He looked her in the eyes. His nose was running, his cheeks red and wet. A child of discipline, he nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Get Bobby out of his seat and take him into the woods, honey. Just stay there until I come for you. You hear me?” She had the Smith in her hand, the other reaching for the speedloaders.

  The boy was working on the baby’s harness, but his eyes were on the floor. “Mom—Bloofer—”

  She had already seen the dog. One leg was broken like a stick, and it lay with its back arched in pain, blood oozing around its teeth.

  “Take care of your brother. Now!”

  Rose looked down the road. The pickup had come to rest crosswise but upright, its front end pointing to her right. As she watched, the passenger door opened and the driver pulled himself out. His hat was gone. He put both hands to his head and sat down in the road.

  Rose threw herself down beside the 4Runner, her right shoulder against the right rear tire. She liked the right-side prone position for shooting, the support for one shoulder and arm. Parting the roadside weeds, she looked up, the corner of her car’s bumper giving her protection overhead and perhaps masking her.

  The van was coming back slowly past the front end of the pickup. It stopped next to the pickup’s driver, who was still sitting on the pavement with his head in his hands. The van sat there for what seemed a long time but was only seconds; she imagined a conversation between the van and the man on the ground. He didn’t get up, however. He was going to stay where he was.

  Then the van began to roll toward her.

  She let it come. She wanted no more than the distance between two telephone poles between them for her first shot.

  It came slowly. The front end was dented where it had hit the 4Runner. Above the damage, the two big windows stared like insect eyes. They would be her target.

  And it came on, no more than twenty miles an hour, not knowing where she was or how she was.

  To the point she had marked.

  She fired off all six shots in rhythmic procession, four in the driver’s window, two in the passenger’s. The first shot hit the top offside corner of the driver’s window, a poor bit of shooting, but it got the driver’s attention. The van swerved. The second shot was lower and more toward the center and blew out the whole upper quarter of the window. With that, the van accelerated, and the rest of her shots raked across it at closer and closer range, the last one into the right-side window as it careened past her car, hitting the offside of the 4Runner with a crunch and a squeal of metal on metal. The big SUV swayed above her and she felt the tire at her right shoulder move, and she thought, Killed by her own car, and it rocked over her and then back and settled again, a smell of hot metal and oil hitting her nostrils as dust billowed around her, and then another squeal and crunch from down the road.

  She dug out her cell phone. There was no 911 out here, and she didn’t know the state police number. Stupid. She dialed the astronaut duty officer at the Space Center and shouted at the EM who answered, giving her name and her location and telling him somebody was trying to kill her. “Get the police!” she bellowed. “Police! Horton Road, east of Oak Grove! Do it!”

  Then she was lying across the hood of her vehicle with the Smith in a two-hand hold, looking down the barrel at the van, which was on its side a hundred feet down the road, wheels still spinning. A speedloader was in her left hand; a glance told her it was empty. When had she reloaded? She pressed the trigger, and a shot whanged off toward the van and thumped against it, and somebody hollered from inside.

  She looked to her left. The driver of the pickup was on his side, throwing up in the road.

  Two dark hands appeared on the posts of the driver’s window of the van.

  “Come out with your hands on your head! If you don’t, you’re dead!”

  “I’m hurt!”

  “Not as hurt as you’ll be if you try anything, you sonofabitch! Show me your face, with your hands on your head!”

  A dark, bloody face rose slowly into view, one hand behind his head. When he was clear of the window frame he’d come through and could see, the man pulled the other hand above the car. There was a big automatic in it. A .40 Magnum or even one of those .50 Desert Eagles.

  She shot him in the face.

  Far away, a police siren sounded.

  Behind her, the dog whimpered.

  Mombasa.

  They had left the hangar doors partly open so that the sun slanted in and gave a warmer light to the gloom. The S-3 was back in the hangar, having returned from Nairobi at two with sleeping bags and forty sets of boxer shorts and T-shirts and crates of fresh fruit and Coke and bread, plus two cases of Tusker beer that wer
e waiting for the end of the service. Four Marines guarded the hangar entrance but stayed outside out of deference to the memorial service, which was the detachment’s private business.

  In the corner, the twenty folding chairs and the plywood table that was neither altar nor coffin but stood in for both seemed dwarfed by the vast space around them. The table had been covered with a black tarp that hung to the floor and had been folded under so that it looked neat. An American flag provided by the Marines had been put over it to hang down the front. A box, spray-painted the dark gray of an S-3, sat behind the flag and made a kind of lectern, with a vase on each side of it made of painted PVC pipe and filled with a spray of acacia branches because they couldn’t find anything else. A chief’s hat sat on the box. They didn’t have a master chief’s hat.

  LTs Cohen and Campbell sat front and center in their flight suits; like everybody else, they’d left their uniforms at the hotel. The men of the det sat behind them in T-shirts and dungarees, all but Chief Bakin, who was out of sight behind the dark blue box and the sprays and the plywood table.

  Then Bakin stood up. His appearance could have been comic, rising seemingly from nowhere, but nobody laughed. He had managed to press his shirt somehow. He looked somber and handsome as he opened a Bible on the painted box.

  “ ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters . . .’ ” He didn’t need the Bible. He knew it by heart.

  Fidelio sang “Danny Boy.”

  Bakin read from Genesis, “ ‘And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree . . .” ending with “. . . for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.”

  Cohen gave a short speech about Master Chief Craw, saying that he had been a good man and everybody had liked him. He asked other people to say things, and seven sailors stood up one after the other and told about good things that Craw had done. Cohen recited the Kaddish and went back to his chair.