Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  Soleck was scribbling on his kneeboard. “Closed shed ought to throw a good return. Metal?”

  “Perhaps.”

  Alan nodded. “Up in Somalia they have metal roofs.”

  “Yeah, I think I remember that. That should make a spike even before you image.”

  Alan added, “There may be some sort of pier or dock; the Harker witness may have mentioned this place—”

  “Airstrip?” Campbell asked. “Sometimes they show on MARI.”

  “Maybe,” Alan said. He could see it in his mind. “I bet they have fuel, either way. If they aren’t in a town, they’ll need fuel. Expect a fuel truck, something like that.”

  “Cool,” Soleck said, satisfied. “Can do.”

  The Road to Malindi.

  Sandy herded Hahn and Pastner out of the hangar before the S-3s were airborne. Getting to Malindi was not like making a trip to the mall. Mombasa itself was still like an occupied city, roadblock after roadblock, streets cordoned off as unsafe, military trucks parked in twos and threes at corners. Traffic was light, or so Sandy said—to Geraldine Pastner, it seemed frenetic—but slow.

  “Well, nobody shot at us,” Geraldine said when they were out of Mombasa. Hahn, who was riding with them as far as the Nyali Beach hotels, looked grim. “We still have to make it back,” he muttered. He was going to check out the hotels to try to find who had fingered Alan Craik. Neither woman said that he had the cushy job, so what was he worried about, but they gave each other a look.

  After they’d dropped Hahn at the doors of the International and assured him that they’d pick him up again at five, they both leaned back and grinned as if they’d just got rid of a difficult relative. “Men are such shits,” Geraldine murmured. “You suppose he wanted to be the one to go to Malindi while we did the hotels?”

  “Only if he’s never been to Malindi before.” Sandy explained: Malindi was the last stop before the Tana River, where the two-lane road ended. There used to be a ferry across, and more road on the other side; now there was no ferry, and the other side was upande ya shifta—bandit country, worse since Somalia had fallen apart and a quarter-million Somali refugees had moved south. In effect, the Tana was the border now; beyond it was a wild and woolly nobody’s land where guns wrote the law. Malindi partook of this wildness, a pretty, old city that was an opportunist’s playground—money laundering, drugs, poaching, all the profitable middleman’s activities that modern life could offer. The road to the place, therefore, reflected its semi-outcast status, poorly maintained, heavily roadblocked, haunted by legends of carjackings and ambushes.

  Their driver was a short, slender man who made no attempt to hide his nervousness. He insisted that they drive with the windows up.

  “For heaven’s sake, why, James?” Geraldine said.

  “Spears.”

  Geraldine looked at Sandy. She shrugged. She lowered her voice, put her head close to Geraldine’s. “Now and then, a tourist gets speared by somebody pretending to sell stuff, but that’s when they’re stopped. He’s just nervous.”

  So they drove along, swerving around the potholes, staying under forty to reduce the damage to the shock absorbers, forking out cigarettes and cash at roadblocks. Two hours and fifty miles after they’d cleared Mombasa, they began to see signs that they were close.

  James, relieved, said, “Okay now. Here is Malindi. Where you ladies like to go?”

  Geraldine leaned forward. “Where the whores are. You understand ‘whores,’ James? Prostitutes?”

  Sandy told him in Swahili.

  James was scandalized.

  They found a flight suit long enough to cover David, and the det’s parachute riggers spent a hard half hour with their ancient sewing machine, tailoring a flight harness to fit Opono’s long frame. Alan took David through the cramped confines of the plane, showing him the spreader pin that would ensure the opening of his parachute if he had to eject and demonstrating the harness. The heat of the day was already enough to make him light-headed. He sweated through his flight suit before he was done walking around the plane, and the concrete was warm under his hands as he crawled under the S-3’s belly to check his chaff and flare cartridges. He went back to the hangar to get a tape for the back end of the plane and thought of Master Chief Craw. Opono would be in his seat.

  At nine thousand feet, it was cold. They all felt the change at four thousand, when they flew through the local coastal environment and into the cold air of middle altitude. The sweat of the morning turned to ice water, and Alan unstrapped and handed David a heavy leather flight jacket whose sleeves were several inches too short. Alan was clumsy helping him get it on, his hand cramping from the temperature change. Then he served out a thermos of coffee.

  “I thought America had all this technology,” David said.

  “We do!” Alan pointed at the computer facing his seat. “We just don’t waste it on sailors. Besides, this plane is older than I am.”

  Once he had Opono settled, Alan leaned forward between the two front seats and watched the Kenyan coast roll out in front of him. Cohen was on the radio, his helmet mike switched to allow him to communicate with the tower without interfering with communications inside the plane. He kept shaking his head, which led Alan to want to know what he was saying to the tower. He unplugged his comm cord and replugged it to the radio. Immediately he heard Cohen telling the tower that yes, they were on a check flight for hydraulics failure, just a quick hop, and no, they weren’t leaving the control area. Well, maybe a quick jog north to see the elephants. Alan nodded, pulled the cord, and gave Cohen a thumbs-up. They couldn’t really file a flight plan for visiting poaching camps on the north coast.

  Alan got back into his seat and clicked the toggles that fastened his harness to the ejection mechanism. Then he pulled his keyboard out of the locked position to the right above his seat and drew it down across his lap, locking it on to the armrests. He switched his display monitor from standby to on.

  He looked over at Opono, who had an unhealthy pallor under the deep black of his skin. Airsick? When Alan thought about it, the whole plane stank of age and JP-5 and burned electricals and sweat, none of them calculated to make a passenger feel comfortable. It was the first time in months that he had flown in a det plane without Master Chief Craw. He missed Craw, and he realized that he had expected Craw to put a tape in the back end to run the computer. He unstrapped again and went back into the tunnel, a tiny space that was filled with the computers and electrical gear needed to make the plane’s MARI system run. He slid the cartridge, roughly the size of an eight-track tape, into the grooves, seated it, and locked it in. Then he went back to his seat and strapped in. Again. The smell was still with him, and somewhere in it was a ghost of Craw. He plugged in his comm cord, still missing the man, the feeling more intense for being in the plane where they had always been a team.

  “Jaeger Two airborne,” Cohen said over the cockpit intercom.

  “What’d the tower say?”

  “Just a nastygram about our last-minute change of flight plan. No biggie.”

  Alan reached up and toggled the computer system on, flipping the switch and then counting down on his watch until the system should have reset at sixty seconds.

  The word “system” flashed briefly across his screen in glowing green. He nodded, relieved. He could run the back end alone; indeed, he was a past master of the MARI system, but there was always that moment where the computer either accepted its load or didn’t.

  Cohen circled north, waiting for Soleck’s plane to take station. The MARI system required two planes, radiating from widely spaced angles, for the best possible radar image, an image that could be as good as a photograph under the right conditions and in the hands of skilled users.

  Alan was inputting parameters as fast as his undamaged fingers could fly, then frequencies so that the two planes could share a secure datalink, a job usually handled by an airborne control plane. As soon as his own plane entered the link, a pixel map of the African co
ast appeared, replicated on David’s screen. He recognized it but showed no sign of surprise. Way to go, Evan, Alan muttered. Evan Soleck, his most junior pilot, who fished from the fantail of the carrier and had arrived on the Jefferson with tennis rackets, had qualities of genius, and massaging the ancient computers in the S-3 to maximize performance was one. He also excelled at building the datasets necessary to make primitive graphics. David Opono, raised on Hollywood portrayals of American technology, took it all for granted.

  Soleck’s plane should be well out over the ocean. Alan could see the line of weather to the north and east marking the coming storm and hoped that the storm front wouldn’t interfere with his mission.

  “Whoa! You gotta see this, Commander!” Cohen said from the front. Alan looked out of his own window and saw mostly sky as the plane was turning west. He leaned out over the central aisle and then unstrapped to look through the windscreen.

  Below him stretched the savanna of Tsavo. An enormous herd of zebra had caught Cohen’s attention.

  “I think I saw lions on a kill,” Campbell said without his usual affected boredom.

  “I could fly here all day,” Cohen said.

  “You should see it on the ground,” Opono said, the last word coming out as g-rowand, as if it had special meaning. “Perhaps when we are done here I will take you all to the park.”

  “Better than TV,” Campbell said softly.

  “That’d be great,” Cohen said, impressed. Cohen, who was armored against any kind of happiness, who could sour any conversation, had a broad grin on his face as he followed the zebra herd, his speed slowed to just above stall. Alan let them look while he strapped himself in again. Opono smiled at him and he grinned back.

  “Gentlemen, if we could leave the zebras to their grass? I’m ready to image.”

  “Whoa, I’m on it.” Alan heard power go into the engines and the nose came up. He changed his radio settings and called the other plane.

  “Jaeger Two, this is Jaeger One, over.”

  “Jaeger One, I read you loud and clear. Go ahead.”

  “Ready to image.”

  “Roger.”

  “Sector one.”

  “Roger, sector one.”

  Alan used his keyboard to point the antenna in the nose and started imaging the first sector they had chosen, an islanded stretch just south of the Somali border. The initial returns were difficult to read and disappointing. The sandy soil of the beaches defracted the radar rather than reflecting it, masking the edge of the water and making Alan’s job more difficult. He reimaged several times, each time asking the pilots to reposition the planes.

  Far out to the east, beyond Rafe and the carrier battle group, now visible in the link as a wedge-shaped series of circles, a mass of low pressure was moving across the Indian Ocean, bringing high winds, rain, and waves. Outriders of the storm were already around them, little squalls of rain that diminished the pilot’s visibility and attenuated the radar. Twice, Alan watched his cursor blink and vanish, indicating that the system had dropped its ability to trace the returns from the focused radar in the nose, and each time he had to start again. Given the relative short range to the target, it was frustrating.

  The pilots had to fly racetrack patterns, each pattern with a long leg toward the image target to get the best aspect for the radar, followed by a turn away when one or both planes was out of aspect and the system was off-line. Each pattern took them closer to the target, making their images sharper but raising the possibility of discovery if their quarry had a radar of its own—if their quarry even existed.

  On the third pattern, Alan got a spike return on his initial run, but he couldn’t seem to focus the spike when he switched to image mode. After refinement, he leaned over to Opono, who appeared to be asleep.

  “Take a look at that,” he said.

  Opono wiped his eyes and craned forward to look at his screen. He shook his head and reached over the aisle to tap Alan’s shoulder.

  “What am I looking at?” he shouted.

  Alan tapped his helmet and then unhooked his harness, leaned across Opono so he could smell last night’s beer on the man and pressed his PTT intercom button. “You have to press the button to make your intercom work.”

  Opono shrugged, pressed the button.

  “What am I looking at?” he asked.

  “See the line of the coast? See the beach here, and here? I think that’s a house, and those are vibanda.”

  Opono looked at them. Alan cycled back from image to map mode so that Opono could see where they were imaging.

  “It might be Guryama. I can’t say for sure, Alan.”

  If it was Guryama, according to their chart, then they were imaging miles too far to the south. Alan moved the cursor north and got the spike again, a hard metal return somewhere north of Guryama. When he tried to get the spike to image, the attenuation increased and he lost the image. He used the loss as a break, putting the location labeled Guryama? into the link so that the second plane and anyone interested out on the battle group would have a common point of reference.

  “It’s raining up there,” he said, mostly to himself.

  “What?” Opono asked.

  “It’s raining north of Guryama.” He switched his intercom to talk to the other plane. “Jaeger Two, this is Jaeger One, over?”

  “Gotcha, skipper.” Soleck.

  “I have a hard return north of the point in the link marked Guryama. You copy that?”

  “I copy Guryama, but I don’t have a return.”

  “Tell your Tacco to keep hitting the coast between Guryama and the border.”

  “Roger that.”

  Opono waved at him and Alan hit his intercom button.

  “Why can we not just fly over and look at the coast?”

  “SAMs,” Alan said, thinking that he had explained himself. Opono just shook his head. “Look, David, if these are bad guys, they’ll have MANPADs, little surface-to-air missiles that can take an S-3 down faster than you can say ‘poacher.’ And it’s raining up there; we wouldn’t see much, anyway.”

  Opono nodded, clearly unsatisfied.

  “And if we spook them with big Navy planes, they’ll run, and we’ll never get them,” Alan said.

  Opono caught his eye and smiled. “That, I understand.”

  Cairo.

  Triffler and Keatley had become the tail of a tornado that was blowing through the American embassy in Cairo. Patemkin had made three calls to the Nairobi embassy before they left the ground in Mombasa, and he told them that he’d made six more from the Cairo hotel when they’d first got there last night. Nonetheless, he had bounced into their room at seven this morning and dragged them down to an American breakfast before a hair-raising taxi ride to the embassy.

  “Early bird gets the worm,” he said. The taxi banged into a pothole, and his teeth clacked from the concussion when they hit bottom. “I want to blitz DEA before they realize we’re here.”

  “If we live that long,” Triffler said. He was holding on to the handle above his window and sitting up very straight.

  “You got a contact in the cops here, right?” Patemkin said to Triffler. The words came out in bursts as they bounced.

  “Detective sergeant, caught the bombing, then”—a terrific slam and a bounce—“our guy who was murdered.”

  “You get on him while I see the chief of station, we may want his—holy shit look out Jesus Christ that was close—his help.” Patemkin grinned. “Is this fun, or what?”

  At the embassy, they had rushed down a corridor to the chief of station’s office, then rushed behind him and Patemkin to the chief of mission’s office, then rushed behind all three to the ambassador’s chief of staff.

  And cooled their heels in a side room while a lot of politicking went on next door.

  “Good coffee,” Triffler said. It had been served in china cups. With saucers. “Kenya,” he said. He tasted again. “You get the hint of citrus?”

  “Get a hint of this, will y
ou?” Keatley said. He held up a finger. Keatley was not a morning person.

  “You have to be forgiven a lot because you were a Marine,” Triffler said.

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “It means you’ve been drinking Navy coffee so long your taste buds have dissolved.”

  “Coffee’s coffee.”

  Triffler looked shocked.

  “Nothing personal,” Keatley said.

  Triffler looked as if he wasn’t at all sure. He took coffee almost as seriously as high-school football.

  “You look—no offense—as if you’re going to church.” Keatley was still resenting the Marine comment. Triffler was dressed in a pale gray lightweight suit, a pink button-down shirt with a plum-colored tie, and black tasseled loafers with a shine that made the eyes sting.

  “I wouldn’t wear this shade of gray to church,” Triffler said. “Actually, I’m dressed for a hanging. And I hope to be the guy doing the hanging.”

  “DEA?”

  “Better them than me.” Triffler took the plum-colored paisley show hankie from his breast pocket and flicked a mote of dust from his left shoe. “These mah fightin’ clothes, dude.”

  “The gun bulge helps. Very stylish.”

  “You see it because you know it’s there.” Triffler sat erect and looked down his right side, holding the arm away. “Invisible to the untrained eye. I had the suit tailored for it.” He had a .380 Sig 232 in a belt-clip holster, and Keatley had already told him it wasn’t enough gun.

  “Not enough gun,” Keatley said again now, never one to let a good thing be said only once. He pulled a Government .45 from under the left side of his nylon golf jacket. “This is enough gun.”

  “Never mind that it makes you look as if you’re carrying your lunch under your arm. And don’t wave that thing around.” They’d already been hassled at the gate by an Egyptian rent-a-cop who had wanted them to turn the guns in; only some energetic appeals by Patemkin had let them bring them into the embassy.

  Keatley shoved the gun back into his shoulder holster. “We’re both supposed to be carrying nines, anyway.” He sounded grumpy.