Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  “I have a nine in my attaché.”

  “Me, too.”

  Triffler smiled. “There used to be a song, ‘I Got a Razor in My Shoe.’ I could modernize it—‘I Got a Niner in My Case.’ ”

  “What the hell kind of song is that?”

  “They were called ‘coon songs.’ ” Triffler flashed him the smile. “Keen perceptions of the culture of my people by white intellectuals in the music business, many of them Jewish.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “African Americans were all supposed to carry razors in their shoes.”

  “Why?”

  Triffler opened his mouth, closed it, smiled again. “To shave with.”

  Keatley thought about it. “Oh, I get it.” He frowned. “Kind of racist, right?”

  Triffler nodded several times. “Kind of.” He poured himself more coffee, and he was standing by a window, cup in one hand, saucer in the other, when Patemkin stuck his head in. “You’re on.” He twitched his head toward the corridor.

  Triffler took a sip of coffee and put the cup on the saucer and the saucer on the tray. “Let me do the talking,” he said. It was said in such a way that it was clear that there was no room for negotiation on the point.

  They went ten steps down the green-carpeted corridor, passing a photograph of Jimmy Carter with the wind blowing through his hair, and followed Patemkin in another door, past a no-longer-really-young woman who nonetheless looked well worth making a move on (that was Keatley’s response, not Triffler’s), through yet another door, and into a large office that seemed to be filled with people, only one of them female—the CIA station chief. The rest sorted themselves out as an FBI agent, the chief of staff, somebody they didn’t know but were introduced to as from State Department Security, and the large DEA guy who had thrown them out of Cairo yesterday morning.

  Only yesterday? How time flies when you’re having fun.

  “Herb Geddes,” the CIA chief of station said as she waved a hand toward the DEA honcho. She was a fiftyish woman named Marjorie Fine, her graying hair cut very short so that she looked like a swimmer just emerged from the water. She was trim and slender in an off-white shift that seemed vaguely Egyptian. “Mister Geddes is from the Drug Enforcement Agency.” She spoke to Triffler (“The black guy’s in charge,” Triffler could hear Patemkin saying to her) but directed the last few words to include Keatley as well.

  Triffler put out his hand to Geddes. “We’ve met.” He smiled. Not like a man with a razor in his shoe. Geddes’s hand came out slowly; it felt cold to the touch and the grip was limp, then too forceful, sending two messages: “I don’t want to be here” and “Mine’s bigger than yours.” As they shook hands, Triffler beamed his smile over the others, taking in the constellation that had been created: Marjorie Fine as point of contact and first-level gunner, with the chief of mission and the chief of staff and the State Security guy behind her to give authority and weight, and the FBI man scowling at the edges. Diplomatic street cred.

  “We seem to have a situation here,” Marjorie Fine was saying. “I want it resolved. I want it resolved now. I don’t want to leave this office without closure. Is that clear?” She addressed most of it to Geddes, but hit Triffler and then Keatley with the finale.

  “Maybe a certain lack of transparency,” Triffler said.

  Geddes said nothing. Marjorie Fine said, “Maybe.” She looked at Geddes. It was clear that she was not delighted with what she saw. She waited. They all waited.

  “Maybe we’d better sit down,” the chief of mission said.

  Mrs. Fine allowed a trace of irritation to show in one eyebrow before saying, “What a good idea.”

  They dragged chairs from the walls, Keatley getting his from the outer office. When they were sitting, the early momentum now lost, Marjorie Fine said something again about finding resolution and the need to be forthcoming in the name of cooperation, with a few other words thrown in about this tragic event. “And a lack of transparency,” she said. She looked at Geddes. “On the part of the Drug Enforcement Agency.” She was smiling, but you wouldn’t want to hand a knife to somebody who smiled that way.

  “I’m acting in accordance with the policies of my agency,” Geddes said in the grudging voice of a suspect asked to give his name.

  She looked at the State Security man, who handed her a sheet of paper, which she passed to Geddes. “The policies have been clarified,” she said.

  Geddes flushed. He was not liking what he read. “This should have come to me,” he said.

  “It just did.” She crossed her legs. She was wearing ecru panty hose and lightly heeled shoes that matched her dress, and she had good legs. “The White House directs your agency to clarify itself.”

  Geddes’s face got redder and set itself in a pattern of furrows and bulges that suggested permanence. He was a good-looking man, or would have been if he wasn’t trying to seem like both the rock and the hard place. “I have secret orders,” he said, as if secret orders were a medal that came with kisses on the cheek and a swell ribbon.

  Triffler smiled. “So do I. Mine are to find and deal with whoever killed our man here yesterday. And that’s what I’m going to do.” Triffler was sitting with his right leg over his left, elegant and almost casual. When Geddes started to say something, Triffler raised a hand from the arm of his chair, the index finger up, and said, “You ordered us out of town. That won’t do.”

  “I’m afraid that’s just tough. This is DEA’s investigation.” Geddes turned toward Mrs. Fine. “We have a moral imperative here!”

  She made her voice solemn but no less tough. “We understand you lost a team of seven people in the bombing. Is that right? We didn’t learn it from you. We had to learn it from the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, who got it only because of a lot of screaming and desk-pounding. Now, you’re not going to do that here, Mister Geddes. You think you are, but you’re not. If you can’t play in the sandbox with everybody else, you’re going home.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  She put her right hand up as if she was going to cup her ear, but moved it farther back, the thumb and finger held out to grasp something. The State Security man put another sheet of paper in it. She handed it to Geddes. He read it and turned purple. “Okay?” she said. “The White House orders that this investigation is under the direction of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service—not your agency, not my agency, and not the FBI. Lead investigator is Special Agent Michael Dukas; Special Agent Triffler is his deputy. Now, please tell us exactly what’s going on.”

  “I need to talk to my agency.”

  “No you don’t. It’s all there in those two messages. The words are ‘cooperate’ and ‘share.’ You just read them.”

  Geddes swallowed and puffed out his cheeks. He exhaled slowly and noisily. Triffler found himself feeling sorry for the man, who was, after all, doing exactly what he was doing: working his ass off for his own people in a terrible situation.

  “Okay, I’ll ‘share’ and ‘cooperate.’ I want it clear it’s under duress, and I’ll file a complaint.” He scowled around at them. Nobody seemed to be wetting his or her pants. Geddes shrugged himself upright in his armchair and pulled his right ankle up on his left knee and picked at his shoelace. The purple in his face had faded into a deep red, darkest under his eyes, as if it had puddled there. When he spoke, it was directly to Triffler. “We had a team in Egypt to work with the local authorities on stopping heroin that was coming in through East African ports and up through here and going, well, everyplace.” He stopped, looked around. No applause. He seemed to be hoping that he’d said enough. Nobody else agreed. He tightened his lips together so that the lower lip bulged, turned and looked at Triffler, and started to talk again. “Most of it was coming from Afghanistan. This wasn’t the primary route, but enough was coming up this way that we were worried. It was coming mostly out of Pakistan and down along the Arabian Peninsula in fast movers—like cigarette boats?” He paused. No
good. Everybody still wanted more. He gave a cluck of disgust.

  “Then, three months ago, something happened within the team here. We’re not sure what it was. Maybe a personality thing. But there was a lot of internal disagreement, infighting. And they were on to something that we think was new. Maybe connected to the East African smuggling, maybe different.”

  He looked over at Marjorie Fine and then back at Triffler, his hands now joined over his right foot, fingers laced. He was warming to the narrative, maybe actually feeling relieved to let it all out. “Frankly, nobody back home made much of this. I mean, I never heard about it. It was just something their bosses in Washington heard or felt and thought they were keeping an eye on. But it wasn’t important enough to send somebody out to ask what was going on.”

  His look at Triffler hardened. “Then you guys came in with this Bright Star stuff. We think that our team here battened down the hatches.”

  “Bright Star happens every other year,” Triffler said.

  “Yeah, whatever. The cooperation between you guys and the Egyptians spooked them, we think. Our agency got a request to ask you to lay off.”

  There was a pause. Triffler was expected to say something. “I don’t get it. Bright Star is just SOP.” He thought he saw where Geddes was going. “They thought they’d get sucked into Bright Star?”

  Geddes shifted his weight. “Not actually. But in terms of cooperation. They were afraid the Egyptians would get too close. They were on to something.” He looked around at the others. His eyes moved in quick jerks, giving an odd sensation of fear. His face, less red and less unbudgeable now, looked worried. “The team called a meeting for yesterday morning. They were scattered—we’re not sure where they were in detail, but we know they were in Europe and the Middle East—”

  “Where in Europe?” Triffler said.

  Geddes hesitated. He looked at Mrs. Fine. “Italy,” he said sullenly.

  “Where in the Middle East?”

  “We think they had a guy in Pakistan for a while. Also Lebanon. Maybe the Palestinian areas in the West Bank.” He shrugged himself up again. “So they scheduled a meeting for the whole team yesterday. And the bomb blew.” He looked around again. “That’s what we know.”

  Triffler put one long forefinger along his cheek. “And the woman who was murdered here yesterday? Was she AID or DEA?”

  “She was with us.”

  “Member of the team?”

  Geddes looked grim. “Deputy head.”

  “So—she could have scheduled the meeting. And told her boyfriend. And stayed home because—”

  Geddes’s head was going up and down, agreeing, agreeing with everything.

  “Okay. You got a mess. We have a mess, too. Here’s how it goes: we’re here to find who killed our guy. You’re here to find who killed your guys. We’ll give you everything we have and we expect the same from you. We brought in the flying forensics lab and two people to work it; we’ll share on that, too, do your work for you if you want. Or you put your own techs in with ours, but all results get shared. Capeesh?”

  Geddes’s head bobbed.

  “And of course that goes for the Bureau, too.” Triffler glanced at the FBI man, who hadn’t yet said a word. He gave his head a little dip. Practically wild applause. “First thing I want is bomb residue—unless you already did the analysis.”

  Geddes shook his head.

  Triffler looked at Marjorie Fine. “Ma’am, I think we’re done here.” He smiled. “I want to thank you. I hope I don’t overstep if I say that I like your style.”

  She stood. “Remember, sharing and cooperation extend to my agency and the FBI, too.”

  They all smiled at each other. Triffler managed to be next to Geddes when they left the office. “I want to have a long chat about some telephone calls we’ve been tracing,” he said. He touched the knot on his tie, checked his reflection in Jimmy Carter’s photo as they passed. “Then I want to have a chat about drugs.”

  The Somali-Kenyan Coast.

  When Alan finally got an image of the big return north of Guryama, he was sure he had their target. One big building reflected radar so well that it stood out like a beacon on his screen. There were nine smaller buildings and two obvious trucks, one of which might have been a tanker, and a funny little subsidiary return in a narrow channel just east of the buildings. He put the image on Opono’s screen.

  “Hangar,” he said. “Something over here. That’s a shed, right? Does that look right to you?”

  Opono pointed at the biggest return. “Drying shed. Trucks. Barracks. Yes. Bigger than I expected, but these poaching camps have a sameness to them. What’s that?”

  That was a reflective blob near one of the trucks. It was large and irregular.

  “Dead elephant, maybe?”

  “There’s another,” Opono said as the image panned to the west and caught another vehicle and another blob. Alan locked his cursor on the new one and tried for better resolution. At high res, it still looked like a blob, a giant amoeba sitting on the ground next to a truck. It didn’t look like an elephant, but even at its best, the system achieved only one-meter resolution.

  “Jaeger One, what are those things?” Soleck asked from the other plane.

  Campbell spoke up from the front. “Skipper says dead elephants.”

  Silence.

  Alan ran his cursor to the other side of the camp. “Bring our nose a little east.”

  The view moved too quickly, so he lost his orientation, and then he walked the cursor back to the blobs and then back east again a few meters at a time.

  “Bingo. See the pilings?” He was pointing to Opono but talking to the other plane. “That’s got to be a dock. There’s a boat anchored in the creek there and another just off, and something with a huge metal return over here in the middle of the channel.”

  “Channel?” asked Opono.

  “See this black? That’s how water, at least calm water, returns on MARI. And this here is rock, so that’s an island. So this is the channel between the shed and this island.”

  “Rankov says there’s something sunk in the channel,” Soleck said from Jaeger Two.

  “There’s something there, I grant you.” He turned to Opono. “This look right to you?”

  “It has all the marks of a camp. But I’d like to see it.”

  “Me, too. But if we overfly it, we’ll spook them,” Alan said. “Let’s get it all on tape and think about it.”

  Seventy miles to the north of Alan’s plane, their soft tissue invisible to the probing beams of the S-3’s radars, four men were practicing death in a lagoon.

  “Keep your hand steady, Nala,” the older man called.

  “Something is interfering with my signal,” Nalakanu said, but he always complained the most. Out in the channel, there were two big radio-controlled toy boats linked by a rope. Nalakanu’s boat was too far behind. The connecting rope was beginning to drag it into a turn.

  “Faster, Nala. Faster!”

  Nala wanted to shout his frustration, because he was the one always singled out for his father’s insults, never his older brothers. It was not fair. He jammed his joystick all the way forward, hoping that his boat would respond, and it did, finally putting slack in the line and drawing even with the other boat until the two toys were side by side, ten meters apart, moving steadily along the flat water of the channel toward a large piece of metal that stuck up from the channel like the prow of a ship.

  “Excellent,” their father said. Even that much praise was rare.

  The two toy boats swept past the metal prow, but the cable that linked them caught, and both toys swung suddenly in toward the sides of the prow.

  “I’m getting a broadcast signal,” Soleck said from Jaeger Two. “Do you have your ESM up?”

  Lebanon.

  Harry watched the Hizbollah men on the street, learning what he could of their tradecraft for the day when he was not on their side. They were quite capable, and Harry didn’t even have time to no
te the arrival of two men on motor scooters before the Lebanese, an officer in one of the Christian militias, came out of a house between two bodyguards and slipped into a car. A bearded man on a scooter raced past and both bodyguards turned to watch him and then they were both dead, shot from behind at point-blank range by a man with a silenced Chinese automatic. And then the other scooter rammed the car’s open door, tearing it off so that the man inside had nowhere to hide.

  Under other circumstances, Harry would have pitied him.

  Malindi.

  The Malindi prostitutes were concentrated in a pretty little port area and along the highway into town. Geraldine thought the ones around the port were better dressed, but the ones along the highway were, she learned, greener—country girls who went back into the bush on slow days and walked to their villages, mostly Guryama. The ones in the port wore cleverer makeup and arguably trendier clothes, and no wonder—some of the boats in the harbor would have graced any California marina, price tags running into six figures in dollars.

  And the girls had professional names.

  “Liese,” one said early on.

  “That’s a German name.”

  She covered her mouth and giggled. Did she speak German? Well, she could say “three hundred shillings” in German and “yes” and “no.” Geraldine didn’t ask what the “no” was used for.

  There were also Britney, Cameron, Christiane, and Michelle. And Hannah, Crissie, Oprah, Cher, Stefanie, and Annamaria. Plus Elizabeth, Tania, Biba, and Golda before the Malindi police appeared and wanted to know what was going on.

  Long before that, Geraldine had found that she was having a good time. The Malindi prostitutes were a straightforward lot, not much impressed by their trade and not much offended by it, either. They weren’t teenaged dopers on the run or anorexic bimbos who got beat up by pimps. They had families; they were providers. When Geraldine had to pee, they took her to whatever they used, pretty noisome in one case; when Geraldine was hungry, they told her where to eat.

  Sandy sat and translated and looked disassociative.