Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  Bakin read Ecclesiastes, “To every thing there is a season.”

  Electronics Technician Second Class Basurto read his poem, which had neither rhythm nor rhyme but was well received and made three men sniffle, one of them Basurto.

  Bakin read the passage from John 14: “Let not your heart be troubled,” which ends with “I go to prepare a place for you.”

  Fidelio sang “The Minstrel Boy.”

  Then Bakin asked them to bow their heads and pray silently, and they bowed their heads and some prayed, and some were embarrassed, and some thought about what death was, and several looked at Sharawi, a nineteen-year-old who was Muslim and wore a Muslim cap and actually seemed to be praying, and then it was over, and the Marine who had been minding the comm office brought Cohen a message from the ship saying that somebody had tried to kill Commander Craik.

  And then three mortar rounds came in from the houses beyond the airport fence, and they all hit the dirt, and sailors wondered what the hell they were doing facedown in Africa.

  Houston.

  A helicopter was moving slowly overhead, circling like a buzzard looking for roadkill. She knew it was from one of the local TV stations and stubbornly refused to look up at it and become its next feed. Two ambulances and an EMT vehicle were parked at angles between her SUV and the overturned pickup; two police cars, lights flashing, blocked the road at each end of the scene. Cops and state troopers and sheriff’s deputies were standing in twos and threes all over the road, pointing, making notes, unreeling crime-scene tape.

  And she was the criminal.

  Not really, but she felt that way. They’d taken her gun and her cartridges, and they’d put her kids, scared but unharmed, with another cop, and they’d grilled her in the back of a sheriff’s car. The driver of the van had a bullet in his chest and head injuries from the crash, they said; the guy she’d shot in the face was dead, very dead. The driver of the pickup was strapped to a gurney, and the word was that he had at least a concussion and probably unknown internal injuries.

  “Do I need a lawyer?” she had demanded after the first couple of questions.

  “You’re not under arrest or anything, ma’am. We have to know what happened.”

  “I feel like I’m under arrest.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The deputy was fortyish, lean, mysterious behind shades as big as coasters. Perhaps because he had been aware of their effect, he had taken the sunglasses off then and smiled at her. He had paler patches around his eyes from wearing the sunglasses so much. “Ma’am, nobody in Texas is going to a charge a woman who was protecting herself and her kids from harm.” He had gray eyes.

  In fact, Texas charged and executed women as well as men, and protecting children might be in the eye of the beholder—or a good prosecutor. Rose had shivered, cold from shock. But she had refused to lie down, refused to be taken to a hospital. “Just keep the media away from me,” she had begged.

  By the time she began to feel other effects of shock, she had finished the interview with the deputy and was going through another with two local police detectives. She knew that her story was already out among the cops when she saw them looking at her, nodding now and then. They seemed to be on her side. One paced off the distance from her vehicle to the window in which she’d shot the now-dead man, and he’d turned toward her and given a thumbs-up. Still, she felt like the criminal, not the victim.

  “Who’s in charge here?” she heard a loud voice say. She was in a police car with the detectives. The lead one was in the front passenger seat, turned back toward her, one arm over the back. When he heard the voice, he looked at his partner sitting in the driver’s seat, and the other man did something with his eyes. “Here come de judge,” the partner said. The lead detective, a mid-thirtyish, fit-looking man named DaSilva, muttered, “Get him over here and out of everybody’s way.” The partner, an older man he called Donnie and whose name Rose had missed, got out and slammed the door. DaSilva gave her a smile that was probably ironic. “Your guy,” he said.

  She felt stupid. “I don’t get you.”

  “From NASA. PR. He’s gonna tell me he’s taking you to the Space Center and we can interview you there after they’ve got the story straight. Right?”

  “I—I don’t know.”

  “You’re an astronaut, aren’t you?”

  “I just got here.”

  A shape loomed next to his window and then folded in two and a big face looked in. “I’m taking Commander Siciliano to Johnson now. You can interview her there this afternoon if there’s a need.”

  DaSilva gave her the same smile, eyebrows raised. “See?” He turned to the face. “And who the hell are you?”

  The big shape unfolded again, and there was some fumbling, and a big hand produced a wallet with ID. The face stayed above, out of her sight, the voice floating down to say, “Hansen, Public Information.”

  DaSilva’s partner got into the car and looked at her with disgust.

  Her door opened. Hansen’s big face peered in. “My car is right down there.” He held the door for her.

  Rose looked at the detectives. The partner still looked disgusted. DaSilva looked unhappy. She said, “Would you rather I stayed?”

  “Oh, no.” DaSilva gave her the ironic smile again. “We love jumping when NASA snaps its fingers.”

  Hansen made the mistake of saying to her, “Come on, come on—this is a fucking mess enough already—”

  Rose grabbed the door by the window frame and pulled it out of his fingers. “I’m talking to these detectives.” Too late, she tried smiling at him. “You’ll have to take a number and get in line.”

  “Commander—!” He pushed his face into the open window. It was pink, maybe from bending down so far because he was a big man, over six feet and a couple of hundred pounds. He was going bald but fighting it with a haircut so gyrene that he looked almost shaved. Maybe he’d been a jock when he was younger; he still had the look, but a thickened middle. “We’re practicing damage control here!”

  “I’m practicing being a good citizen. Just cool it, okay?”

  Hansen started to say something, and DaSilva got out. She could see the two men’s midsections, close-up, through her window—belts and trouser tops and shirts, white on Hansen with a bad tie, black knit on DaSilva with no tie at all. Her impression was that DaSilva might reach five-ten if he was stretched on a rack, and a hundred and sixty stripped and hosed down, but he muttered something, and Hansen said, “Goddamit—” and then “But” and then “She,” and then he strode away, saying again, “Goddamit! Goddamit!”

  “That was nice of you,” DaSilva said when he was back in his seat.

  “I want to do the right thing.” Then she added, with a tentative smile, because what she had said sounded asinine to her, “I’m scared.”

  DaSilva nodded. “We do have that effect.” He picked up a notebook from the dash. “If your story checks out, you got nothing to worry about.” He began to ask her questions again. She interrupted him to ask, for the third time, if NCIS had been notified. She’d already told him, as she’d told the sheriff’s deputy, about Mike Dukas’s warning and why she was carrying the Smith.

  “It’s taken care of,” the partner said.

  “Would you please check?”

  “Lady, Jesus—”

  “I’m not ‘lady,’ I’m ‘Commander.’ ”

  DaSilva jerked his head. “Go check, Donnie.” He looked at her. “This is important?”

  “Very.”

  “ ‘National security’?” He sounded sarcastic. The local cops must have got a lot of that from NASA, she thought.

  “Maybe terrorism.”

  “All respect, Commander, these types don’t look like terrorists. They look like run-of-the-mill shitkickers to me. We’ll know when we get positive ID, but my guess is they’re homegrown scumbags and they have good old American prison records.”

  “For hire, maybe?” It sounded thin, even to her. Mombasa was a long way from Houston.
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br />   He took her through it again. The partner came back and said that the nearest NCIS field office was in Florida, so they’d called Washington. Something was in the works. DaSilva asked, apparently quite sincerely, if that satisfied her, and then he said he wanted to walk her through it.

  Outside, she felt the dazzle of the sun, saw the police lights still flashing, heard the helicopter—now joined by two others—overhead. Two deputies were measuring skid marks.

  “Who is in charge here?” she said.

  “I am.”

  “How come the sheriff’s deputies, if it’s your space?”

  “We haven’t had the time to shoot them.” By which he meant that they all got along and apparently shared jobs.

  Hansen was standing at the side of the road in the shade. He made an impatient gesture toward her. She ignored him. Her chill was replaced by sweating as she walked with DaSilva in the sun. She passed a car where Mikey and the baby were sitting with two police officers, who smiled. Mikey looked frightened. Rose ran to the car and reached in and hugged him. “You did so good,” she whispered.

  “Can we go now?”

  “Soon.”

  “Is Bloofer dead?”

  The pickup was gone, and a tow truck was backing up to the overturned van. Her SUV, however, was where she had left it beside the road. Rose looked at DaSilva. “My dog—?”

  DaSilva pointed at a woman kneeling in the grass beyond the 4Runner. “Ask the vet,” he said.

  Rose went over. The woman was bent over Bloofer. An inflatable splint was on the broken leg. His eyes were closed. Her stomach seemed to twist, then drop; the dog, always so buoyant, looked only pitiful. The woman looked up. “I gave him a shot.”

  “Not—?”

  “No. But—” She stood, wiping her hands on her jeans. “I’ll know when I get him to the clinic, but he’s pretty busted up.” She had a thin, homely face, wonderful blue eyes. “I can put him down, if you want. Or—”

  “Save him. Please.” Tears were in her voice and in her eyes and she turned away and pushed her feelings back down where they wouldn’t bother her.

  The woman made a little smacking sound with her mouth. “I’ll try.”

  Walking again with DaSilva, Rose said, “Who called the vet?”

  “I did.”

  They paced over the scene. When they came back down the road, the van was up on its wheels and the wrecker was getting in position to load it on its bed. Rose said, “I wish somebody from NCIS was here. To look for evidence. You know—no offense, but they’d know what to look for.”

  “Us local good old boys just never do learn what to look for.”

  “I didn’t mean that. But you’re doing a criminal investigation. They’d look for—other things. You know?”

  “Sure—fake beards, invisible ink, missile launchers—shit, we’d just miss all that stuff.”

  “Oh, come on—!”

  DaSilva waved a negative hand at something Hansen was trying to do or say as they walked past, not even looking at the man. At the van, a black kid in coveralls was fastening a cable to the van’s rear towing hook. “Just cool it a second, okay?” DaSilva said to him. “Have a smoke.” He held out a pack.

  “Don’t smoke.”

  “Good for you. You’ll live to be a hundred. Just cool it, anyway.”

  “Hey, man, I get paid by the job, not the hour.”

  DaSilva paid no attention. He looked in the driver’s window, then went to the front and looked through the shot-out windshield. “Where you taking this piece of shit to?” he said.

  “Police impound lot.”

  DaSilva turned and raised his voice. “Hey, Donnie, you got anything on this vehicle yet?”

  “Oh, man—” The wrecker driver leaned his buttocks against his truck and folded his arms. He looked at Rose. “I get paid by the job, not the hour,” he said. Rose was standing in the sun, and she felt her head start to wobble. She looked for shade.

  “Stolen,” Donnie called from the detectives’ car. “Stolen yesterday in Fort Worth. We’re working on the pickup.”

  DaSilva leaned in through the smashed windshield. He got so far in that his feet were off the ground, the legs not quite together, the left one bobbing gently as he did something inside. He was in there long enough for the kid in the coveralls to say “Oh, man” twice, rolling his eyes each time. When DaSilva came out, he dusted himself off and rubbed his hands together and straightened his shirt. Chips of automobile glass had stuck to the knit fabric, and they fell sparkling to the road. He raised his voice. “Hey, Donnie! Bring some evidence bags! And some gloves!” He motioned to the wrecker driver. “Move this piece of crap out of the road but don’t take it away yet.”

  “Oh, man—!”

  “You don’t mind if we try to conduct an investigation here, do you? You don’t object if we do the people’s business?”

  “Man, I get paid by the job!”

  “So get a new job.” He turned. “Donnie—!” Hansen had come up behind him; DaSilva’s turn had put the two men almost face-to-face again.

  “I’m taking Commander Siciliano with me now.”

  “If I’m through with her, you meant to say. Thank you. Yes, I think we’re through with her for now. So nice of you to ask. Commander?”

  Rose felt off balance. Shock had gone another step or two now; she felt as if she had no strength in her legs, and her vision seemed poor. Still, she said, “What did you find in there?”

  Hansen came toward her. “Commander—”

  “Detective DaSilva, did you find something in there?”

  “It’s ‘Sergeant,’ not ‘Detective.’ ” He gave her the ironic smile. “I don’t know national security from armadillo-doo, but, yeah, I think I saw some things in there.”

  “Commander, I have to insist—”

  She went by Hansen and stood close to DaSilva, fighting the feeling that she was about ready to faint. “What? Come on, Sergeant, I didn’t mean to bad-mouth you. If there’s anything, anything in there, let me know. Huh? Sergeant? Please—”

  Hansen’s big hand closed around her arm. “Commander, you come with me right now!”

  She turned. He loomed over her. She had to look up with her head thrown way back. “Get your fucking hands off me!”

  Hansen let go. “I only— Damage control—”

  She had been a helicopter squadron exec and a CNO staffer, and she had in reserve a voice that made people jump. “Don’t you ever try to tell me what to do! I am a commander in the United States Navy, and you are an overfed bureaucrat in fucking public relations! Do you understand me?”

  “I don’t have to put up with that kind of—”

  “Get out of my sight! GET OUT OF MY SIGHT!”

  Hansen’s face was red. His jaw went out and seemed to lock in place. He raised a hand, index finger extended, as if he were going to make one hell of a point.

  Donnie, evidence bags under his arm, had come up close to him. “Beat it,” he said. “You’re badgering a crime victim. You want that on TV?” He pointed up.

  Hansen looked up. One of the helicopters had a perfect view. He groaned. “You’ll hear about this,” he growled at Rose.

  “Jeez, you mean we won’t?” DaSilva said. “Aren’t you going to threaten us with the NASA firing squad?”

  “Fuck you!”

  Hansen strode away. “Goddamit!” floated back. DaSilva made an Imagine that! face. Donnie said to Rose, “Good on you.” He smiled. No look of disgust this time.

  She was shaking. It was the next stage of shock. She figured she didn’t have long before somebody was going to recommend a shot or a sedative. “What did you find in there?” she begged DaSilva. She was thinking of Alan and Dukas.

  DaSilva had lighted a cigarette, and now he blew smoke sideways. “A lot of glass. Two guns. And three cell phones, two identical, one still in the plastic wrapper.” He inhaled quickly and exhaled again, as if he was trying to suck up as much of the cigarette as he could in a hurry. “Us loca
l cops aren’t very bright, but when we see cell phones piled up like that, we think one-day phones, and we think drug dealers. Big-time drug guy wants communications, he gives his people cell phones good only for twenty-four hours, then they change—new numbers all around. Hard to track, hard to follow. Even though I’m not an intelligence genius from NCIS, I can see where the same scheme might work for somebody that wanted to do a hit on the wife of a naval officer involved in a terrorism investigation. Not that I’m saying that’s what it is. Us local cops, naive and uninformed as we are, try not to make statements until we have evidence.”

  “What’s the third phone?”

  “Probably the one the guy uses all the time. We check it, we probably find it’s got a local contract.”

  It took a while to sink in. Then she got it, and got, too, that DaSilva was perhaps saying more than he seemed to be. “Will you share?” she said.

  “NCIS gonna send somebody?”

  “Maybe. Sometime. I was thinking—more like, if I—if you— Look, Sergeant, if there’s two phones, that’s today and tomorrow. That means they plan to be all wrapped up in two days. That means we have to move really fast.” DaSilva had pitched his cigarette away and was pulling on plastic gloves. She fought her body for clarity. “How do the cell phones work?”

  “What d’you mean, how do they work? They work like cell phones.”

  “But—is there any chance there’s a number already in the one for today? Because if there is—”

  DaSilva looked at Donnie. “Smart woman. Think we could use her on the force?”

  Donnie grinned. “Suits me.”

  “They for sure came preprogrammed.”

  “Where does this one go?”

  “Lo-o-o-ng number. Osama bin Laden’s outhouse, maybe.” He gave her the smile. “See, I even know some of the names those NCIS guys know. Astonishing! Let’s go, Donnie.”

  “Can’t I—?”

  DaSilva turned to her, suddenly serious. “Commander, you’re dead on your feet. Go home. Don’t go to NASA; they’ll give you endless grief. You and the kids go home. There’s a sheriff’s deputy standing by to take you. Also two blues to sit outside your house in case these shitkickers got other buds around. Got any tranquilizers? Take one, lie down. If not, take two aspirin, lie down. I’ll call you when I got the stuff downtown.”