Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

And every one of them, when the interview was over, indicated the driver James and said, “He want to fuck? Three hundred shillings.”

  He didn’t. He was a Christian, he said.

  And every one of them said that she was a Christian, too, so what was the problem?

  Cairo.

  Triffler and Keatley were being led down a corridor in the Cairo morgue by their guide, Detective Sergeant al-Fawzi-al-Mubarak. He had greeted Triffler like an old pal, then shaken Keatley’s hand and said, “Good man, good man,” as if Keatley had brought him something wonderful. Keatley hadn’t. In fact, he had looked wary.

  The morgue was in a nineteenth-century building that seemed to have borrowed its architecture from the Paris Opera: very flossy, with columns and domes and the sort of presence that very large frogs have in very small puddles. Down in its bowels, however, it was utilitarian and banged up and, as they approached the morgue down a long, tiled corridor, a little fragrant.

  “You done this before?” Triffler said to Keatley.

  “Sure, sure.”

  Triffler didn’t believe him. He didn’t want to make it a pissing contest—seeing which of them could take the sight of Cram’s body more stoically—but he thought that Keatley might make it an occasion for machismo. “I haven’t,” Triffler said. In fact he had, but he thought that Cram was going to be really bad, and he didn’t see any point in being brave here if he was going to go inside and lose his breakfast. Machismo be damned.

  Al-Fawzi was holding one of a pair of metal double doors for them. Beyond was fluorescent lighting, stone floors with rubber matting laid down the center, and sand-colored walls.

  Cram was in a small examining room. There was no rolling out of a drawer, no sheet-draped gurney. No other bodies. He was on a waist-high tiled block, everything very clean, as if the surfaces had been wiped down for their visit. Triffler guessed that the body hadn’t had much blood in it by the time the police had found it, anyway. Decapitation bled well.

  “Lot of blood where he was found?” he said to al-Fawzi, trying to postpone the moment when he would have to look right at Cram. He was trying to acquaint himself by degrees, break himself in with peripheral peeks.

  “Blood?”

  “Was there a lot of blood where you found him?”

  “Lot of blood. Much blood, yes.”

  A bald geezer in a lab coat came in behind them and stared at Cram as if he was considering buying him if the price was right. Suddenly, he turned to them and said, “Doctor Sharif.” They all shook hands—more time for Triffler to fill his peripheral vision. Then they all stood there. Triffler swallowed. He couldn’t put it off any longer.

  He looked.

  It could have been worse.

  But he didn’t see how.

  The autopsy had already been done, so the torso had been opened and the organs removed, and where the living Cram had had a fat gut, there was now a depression, two large flaps of skin flowing down from the ribs and hips but not meeting. The space between them was not something Triffler wanted either to look at or to talk about. Cram’s head had been put more or less where it belonged. Not something he wanted to dwell on, either.

  Triffler made himself go closer. Doctor Sharif took this as a sign of eagerness and urged him closer still and began to point out interesting bits, keeping Triffler’s right arm in an Ancient Mariner grip. Doctor Sharif had nutmeat-colored skin, with the top of his head—mostly what Triffler saw from his height—mottled with browner spots and shiny under the ceiling light. He gave Triffler a tour of Cram: burns, contusions, ligature marks. “Penis removed, put in mouth—not found until we did postmortem—”

  Triffler heard coughing behind him. Keatley was leaning over a sink, making unhappy noises. Mmm-hmm. Keatley was not setting him a good example.

  “No drugs in system, somewhat alcohol. Food digested, perhaps five, six hours. Time of death difficult, but, putting together with police report, maybe early morning.”

  Triffler took a deep breath and looked at al-Fawzi. “What’s the last he was seen? Last we know he was alive, I mean?”

  “Half-eleven the night before the head was found, he was at police press conference. Many witnesses, no question of it.”

  “So they may have had him for four, five hours.”

  “Maybe less, no more.”

  “And nobody saw anything.”

  Al-Fawzi held up a finger. “We have a snitch saw him leave the press conference room. With another man.” He smiled. Very good teeth. He was proud of “snitch.”

  “ ‘Snitch’?”

  Al-Fawzi looked panicked. “Incorrect word? Meaning, man who saw it.”

  “Well, ‘witness.’ ‘Snitch’ is more, um, you pay him for information. On the street, you know?”

  “Ah, ‘witness.’ ” Clearly, al-Fawzi regretted losing “snitch.”

  “Any ID on this other man with him?”

  “He says, only a man. This witness is a peasant, a workman; he was folding chairs so he could vacuum-sweep the carpet. He says, these were the last people in the room, except him. They leave together.”

  “Force?”

  “He says, he thinks they are friends. Smiling.” Al-Fawzi pushed the ends of his mouth up with thumb and index finger.

  “Can I talk with this witness?”

  “He waits for us at headquarters.” Al-Fawzi emphasized the second syllable, head-quar-ters. It sounded rather nice, Triffler thought.

  “On to headquarters.”

  They found Keatley outside in the corridor practicing deep breathing. “Kind of sucker punched me,” he managed to say. His eyes were teary.

  “Put head between knees,” al-Fawzi said.

  “Hard to walk that way.” Keatley started up the corridor for the exit.

  Over Mombasa.

  “You catch that?” Soleck asked. “I had a signal.”

  “Roger, Jaeger Two.” Alan was still blinking. On their third image of the metal shed, something had flashed on the screen. The metal return from the center of the channel was different. Alan played back the computer’s last hits on the passive electronic surveillance system. There were two anomalous hits with vectors that could overlie the area they were targeting.

  “Explosion?” Campbell asked from the front seat. They were all MARI veterans, and most of them had used the system while things were blowing up.

  “That’s what it looked like to me.” Alan ran his cursor over the center of the channel and hit image again. He ran back the vectors on the ESM and looked at the signals, logging them to the event. “Everybody see that Charlie-1201 signal?” he called, reading off the alphanumeric ID code.

  “Roger. That’s nearly in the cell-phone range.” Soleck was puzzled.

  “That’s a long signal,” Campbell said. “Did we get the whole thing?”

  “We have it on tape and we’ve been airborne for three hours. I don’t think we can claim we’re checking hydraulics much longer.”

  Opono moved around in his seat like a man trying to find a comfortable spot. “I think we should go back on the ground,” he said.

  Alan spent a moment taking that in. “David, we have an order to these things. Right now, we take this data back and we scrub it. But off the record, yeah. Yeah, I want to go back. Okay?”

  The plane turned hard, the pilot enjoying the excuse to pull a tight maneuver. Alan grimaced.

  “Okay,” Opono said.

  In ten minutes they were back in the stack over Daniel Arap Moi International Airport. Alan leaned out into the aisle and looked out over the nose as they started their descent. He could see their hangar, with the helicopter next to it. The big bird’s rotor blades were turning. He looked at his watch. Time for the afternoon flight to the Harker. They had been in the air for four hours.

  “You guys have a good story for Air Traffic Control?”

  Soleck came up on the link. “My daddy always says don’t tell ’em unless they ask.”

  “Roger that.”

  Alan sat back
and checked his harness for landing, his mind already going through the data and planning his next move. It was time to take the initiative.

  Things happen in threes, he thought. But not if we happen first.

  And he wondered what he had just watched exploding.

  Utica, New York.

  It was, in Houston, early in the morning for Colonel Brasher’s voice to be loud in Rose’s ear. He couldn’t wait to start shouting, she decided.

  “Commander Siciliano?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, well.”

  She held the phone tight against her ear, as if she could hide the conversation from her parents that way. “I’m at my parents’ house in Utica, New York,” she said.

  “I gave you an order to report here, Commander.”

  “My orders were changed, sir.”

  “Yeah, they were.” Sarcastic, not agreeing.

  “I wondered when I should report back, sir.”

  “Well, as I’m not writing your orders, I don’t give a shit when you report back—how’s that?”

  Her temper stirred; she pushed it away. “I don’t want to be uncooperative, Colonel. I’m trying to do what’s best for everybody.”

  “Well, maybe that’s your problem. Maybe you ought to stop worrying about everybody and start worrying about the Johnson Space Center. You’ve made an enemy of Hansen and his department, I’ll tell you that. You know what it’s like to be an astronaut that the PR people don’t like?” He waited. “It’s like death. But maybe you have pals who can pull strings for you on that, too.”

  “I didn’t pull strings, sir.”

  “I don’t like to have people go over my head, Commander. Let me tell you something—you Navy people think you’re God’s gift to command and control. Well, here we do what we’re told and we get along by going along. We don’t blue-sky and we don’t grandstand and we don’t shoot up the landscape like a bunch of goddamn cowboys.”

  “I didn’t ask to have somebody try to kill me.”

  “What you didn’t do was let Hansen settle it for you and get your ass back here where you belong and leave all that detective crap to somebody else! You looked like a valuable acquisition—on paper. Female, highly decorated, gunner. You get here and you turn out to be a fucking prima donna.”

  She actually stammered. “I didn’t get into the program to be fodder for the PR department!”

  “What the hell do you think makes this program run? Without PR, we’re toast! If they were all like you, we wouldn’t have the annual appropriation of the goddamn Tea Tasting Board.”

  She waited. He outwaited her. “I—I don’t know what you want me to do.” Again, she waited. After seconds of silence, she said, “I’m missing training time.”

  “Yeah, which reminds me. I looked over your latest test scores. You missed the VO2-Max standard by point-two.”

  “That’s not true.”

  He laughed. “Tell that to the physiologist. You missed the VO2-Max standard by point-two. Is that clear?”

  “The technician told me I was good to go.”

  “I don’t take my authorization from the technician, okay?”

  “I don’t understand what you’re telling me.”

  “Two hundred people start this program for every one who makes it into space.”

  She heard the flatness of the threat in his voice.

  “You understand what I’m saying?” he said.

  “Are you saying I’m out?”

  “Lots of fine people never make it into space. We need people for lots of jobs here. Two years here can be spent very helpfully flying the weather plane.” Again he waited, and this time she outwaited him. “You understand what I’m saying?”

  “You’re saying I’m out of the track for space flight?” She felt as if a hand had been put around her throat and was squeezing.

  “All I’ll say at this point in time is I wouldn’t go out of my way to ask for a waiver on your VO2-Max. Which, without I do so, doesn’t make the standard.”

  She thought of two years of flying the weather plane. Seeing space flight from the confines of mission control and our house in Houston.

  “I don’t fit the profile,” she said.

  “On paper, yeah—in person, you turn out to be a loose cannon.”

  “ ‘Too independent.’ ”

  “Too individualistic, too mouthy, too committed to some agenda has nothing to do with the NASA mission.”

  She was trembling, but she didn’t want him to hear it in her voice. “I need to think, sir. I’d like to end this call now.”

  “My pleasure.”

  She put the phone into its cradle without a sound. She leaned her forehead against her fist and her fist against the wall. An image of the mean streets through which she’d driven came into her mind. Was it to show them—the nuns, the neighbors, the guys who’d felt her up and told each other she was easy—that she’d wanted to become an astronaut? To get her picture on the cover of a magazine? Articles in the hometown newspaper, arranged by Houston PR? How much of her desire to be an astronaut had been vanity, how much a genuine drive to achieve?

  She straightened and tossed her hair back, touched her eyes with a tissue. He’s handed me a lemon—how the fuck do I make the lemonade?

  Malindi.

  Geraldine and Sandy learned many things in Malindi: that the woman who called herself Liese had been smuggled into a warehouse near the port to have sex with the watchmen, and the warehouse had been partly filled with zebra and impala hides and ivory and freezers full of some kind of wild meat; that a fisherman’s boat went up the coast once a week with half a dozen of the whores on it to service “soldiers” up there, the girls weren’t sure just where—it was all tidal creeks and mangrove; that the “soldiers” were Africans from many places, but there were also a few whites who bossed everybody.

  Then they were talking to the woman who called herself Britney. It was afternoon, hot; they were sitting in the shadowy inside of a hoteli, a mud-brick tea shop with rooms in the back. The road smell of tar and gasoline was strong, the tea weak and milky. Britney was skinny but had good breasts and long, oiled hair that she combed with her fingers as she talked. She had been up with the “soldiers,” too, she said. She didn’t like them. “We are not supposed to talk about it,” she said to Sandy in Swahili.

  “Why not?” Geraldine said when Sandy had translated. Geraldine’s pencil was poised over her yellow pad.

  “Because—” Britney shook her head. She made a little gesture with her chin. “Polisi.” Then she was gone through the door the tea had come from. Seconds later, two Malindi policemen came in, slitting their eyes against the shadow after the bright sun. They were thin men, tall. It was clear that they didn’t intend to be pleasant.

  “What are you doing here?” the older one said. They had no guns but carried truncheons.

  Sandy seemed unfazed. She didn’t get up or even take her feet from the stool they were propped on. Her purse was on the tiny table; she reached in and got her passport and held it up, open. “U.S. embassy.”

  “What are you doing?” He tapped his truncheon on the table. “What is this woman writing down?” He took the yellow tablet and scowled at it and handed it back to his companion. “Who is this woman?” he said to Sandy, exactly as if he already knew which of them spoke Swahili.

  “She is doing research.” She translated for Geraldine, who got out her passport—the tourist one, not the diplomatic one she used when she was NCIS—and then produced the letters she’d forged the night before. They were colorful, with letterheads pastiched from the Internet, rather grand in their academic prose, from the University of Southern Arkansas at Chicago, the University of Western California at Seattle, and Harvard Institute of Technology. “This will introduce Professor Geraldine Pastner, whom we recommend for her ongoing research toward a work titled ‘The World Sex Industry and Images of Transgender Liberation: Self-Esteem, Object Positioning, and Narrativity.’ ”

  T
he policeman scowled at the letters.

  “Tell him it’s about sex,” Geraldine said. “Tell him I’m interviewing prostitutes.”

  “I’d say he already knows that.”

  The policeman passed the letters back and tapped his truncheon on the table some more. “You must leave Malindi. You have no authorization.”

  “Where do we get authorization?”

  “Nairobi. All foreigners must get authorization from Nairobi.”

  He kept tapping. Through the hoteli’s open front, Geraldine could see two more policemen hassling their driver. “I think it’s time to go,” she said.

  Sandy stood. “Just when I was going to wow him with my sheriff’s badge.” She smiled at the two cops and retrieved the letters, but she had to give up the yellow pad, which was being held as “evidence,” and led the way to the car.

  “The fix was in, right?” Geraldine said. “The cops are on the take, right?”

  James said, “Very bad—very bad men.” All the way back to the Nyali Beach hotels, he kept saying that it was very bad, very bad.

  Finally, Geraldine said, “You’d feel better if you’d taken one of those nice girls up on her offer.”

  He shut up.

  Cairo.

  Al-Fawzi’s snitch was a small man who looked rather like Sam Jaffe in Gunga Din and had the same puzzled expression. What is a nice Jewish actor like me doing in a turban? He came to Triffler’s shoulder. He was wearing a white shirt buttoned to the neck but no tie, the trousers from a blue wool suit far too big for him, and Nikes with the counters smashed down so he could wear them as scuffs. No socks.

  Al-Fawzi treated him with contempt. “He has no English,” he said to Triffler. Since Keatley’s moment of glory in the morgue, al-Fawzi had started acting as if he wasn’t there. “I speak to him in Arab, he answers, I translate.” He turned to the small man and shouted a single word. The man’s eyes widened and his body sagged. Triffler thought, I wish I could do that. A rush of Arabic followed, then panicked responses from the witness.

  “He says the man, this other man, was tall and European.”

  Good, cuts the possibilities way down.

  “Silver hair. Gray, anyway. Tall, he keeps saying tall. Not fat. No moustache or beard. Wearing coat, shirt, no tie.”