Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  We got it knocked. The pool must be down to a hundred million or so.

  “He thinks French.”

  “This guy knows when English is spoken with a French accent?”

  More abusive Arabic, more stammering, signs that the man might need air.

  “He heard him speak French on his cell phone. He says he knows French when he hears it.”

  “So where did they go?”

  “Out. Out of the room.”

  Triffler pushed his mouth out and wrinkled his nose as if there was a bad smell. “And nobody else saw them.”

  “Nobody.”

  Keatley pushed a big hand between them. “Ask him if this is the guy.” He was holding one of the photos that Alan Craik had had printed from the television tape.

  Al-Fawzi held up the photo. The small man’s face lit up. It was extravagantly clear that it was the man.

  Triffler looked at Keatley. “How did you do that?” he said.

  “It came to me while you guys were ignoring me.”

  “Don’t be sensitive.” Triffler had al-Fawzi bully the little man through it once more. Nothing else emerged, except the insistence that the photo was the same man came out even more strongly.

  Triffler looked at the back of the photo. “Jean-Marc Balcon.” He looked up at al-Fawzi. “Jean-Marc Balcon?” Al-Fawzi shook his head. Triffler looked at the witness. “Jean-Marc Balcon?” The small man backed away.

  “Who is he?” al-Fawzi said.

  Triffler looked at Keatley, who said, “French journalist. TV. Covered the bombing in Mombasa. How do we find out if he covered the bombing in Cairo?”

  That was easy, or so al-Fawzi said. There was a government press office that granted credentials. When Triffler heard the word “government,” he decided it wouldn’t be easy. Still, it was the necessary next step. “Let’s find him,” he ordered.

  Near Mombasa.

  There was a Kenyan Army checkpoint on the beach road in Nyali. There was another just before the traffic circle where the main road turned for the bridge and the city. Geraldine was in front, trying to get their driver to laugh, and Sandy was in the back alone, which made her look like the important one to the soldiers. The soldiers scared Sandy, who had thought herself inured to them, adolescent thugs with guns. They shouted at the locals and were quieter with tourists, more dangerous when they found the wazungu were police. They clearly had orders not to cooperate with Americans. The first checkpoint was rough, bad enough that Sandy thought they might beat her driver just to make a point. She got out of the car, afraid but angry, and used her passport and her big, fake badge to get her driver away from a crowd of adrenaline-pumped uniforms and back in the car.

  “Needed the badge after all,” she muttered.

  At the second checkpoint, she handed over her diplomatic passport with a hundred Kenyan shillings in the fold and they were waved through without any argument.

  Geraldine was scandalized. “Isn’t there a State Department directive about engaging in bribery?”

  Their driver just looked relieved. Sandy turned her head slightly and gave Geraldine a tight smile. “Maybe they should send someone out here to remind me.”

  The Nyali bridge was jammed, as usual. Somewhere ahead of them, a pushcart had overturned, its load of iron scrap filling the bridge. Young men in loose cotton moved along the lines of cars and matatus, and a very young man with a short beard leaned over and looked in at Sandy and then moved on.

  A crowd of women in black veils suddenly appeared ahead of them, and then, without warning, there were young men all around the car, and Geraldine had her hand on her gun. Sandy reached out slowly and touched her shoulder.

  “Too late for that, I think.”

  There were AK-47s pointed at them and bearded faces behind them that meant business.

  Geraldine sat frozen, her body fully charged to fight, her hand in her satchel on the grip of her Glock. Nothing moved except the heat off the pavement, and she had time to smell the patchouli on the young man at her door, look at his absurdly beautiful face marred by the passion of his stance, see the sweat on his brow and read his tension from the death grip he had on his weapon.

  I’m going to be a fucking hostage, she thought. Her hand was still on the Glock, and her finger was through the trigger, and Sandy’s hand was on her shoulder. She thought of shooting. Sandy seemed to have other ideas, and was speaking slowly in Swahili. The young men didn’t move, and then there was motion, and a small man in a dark suit burrowed through the crowd of armed men.

  “My apologies,” he said, as if the statement was a question. “The soldiers and the police are working very hard to keep us away from the Americans at the airport and the port is closed and barred. You are with the embassy, yes?”

  Sandy nodded. He had sweat stains right through his suit, and dark circles under his eyes. The man looked as if he had seen hell. She couldn’t take her eyes off his face. It was like the face of a Byzantine saint. “Yes, I’m with the embassy.” Geraldine made a grunt of protest, as this admission broke another State Department rule. Sandy had already decided that the little man was not a threat.

  “Will you be going to the airport?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could you please give this envelope to Commander Craik, with my compliments? And tell him that the city will be quiet. Please tell him that we will keep the city quiet as long as we can, but there are others—my views are in the letter. There are those who wish to see a great deal of blood. Tell him that.”

  “I will.” She wanted to help him. She believed him.

  He called something, and the crowd dispersed almost as fast as it had appeared. James lit a cigarette with shaking fingers. Then he coughed. He had lit the filter. Geraldine eased her fingers off the butt of her gun as the car moved forward. She had been so close to the edge—so close that it was with her still.

  Utica, New York.

  At one minute after nine in the morning, Rose was back on the phone. Her detailer was an A-6 pilot doing a shore tour, and a good guy. “Hey,” he said when she gave her name, “you’re famous.”

  “I need some advice,” she said.

  “Shoot.” He’d heard And no bullshit, please in her voice.

  “What have you got if I leave the astronaut program?”

  He was silent. He knew, although he hadn’t been in on much of it, that she’d been pointing her career for years toward space flight. And then he chuckled. “Can you leave tonight?” he said.

  She didn’t get it. He said, “I’ve got an urgent need for an O-5 helicopter pilot to take command of a squadron whose skipper fell and broke something. They’re on the Roosevelt in the Med to replace the Jefferson in the Red Sea in five days, and they’re hurting. You know how hard it is to find an O-5 who’s ready for chopper command? You’d have been my first choice if I’d thought for a second you were available.”

  “I couldn’t possibly do anything that fast. I haven’t even made a decision yet.”

  “New guy should have been there yesterday. You know what turnover of a BG is like. Actually, we thought we were going to sock the new skipper in while the boat was in the Suez Canal, but there was some glitch and they’re still at Haifa. New skipper’ll join at Alexandria—don’t want him—or her—flying to Haifa and finding they just left.”

  “I was only thinking.”

  “Oh.” His disappointment was clear. “So, what’re you asking me? What are the prospects long term if you leave Houston, is that it? And what’s happened, anyway? You were hot to trot, last I heard.”

  “It isn’t working.”

  “Hey, Rose, if I got the story right, somebody tried to kill you out there—that’s bound to screw up your perceptions. You a little depressed, maybe?”

  But she was hardly listening. She was thinking that the kids and her parents would be happy with each other. Alan and the Jefferson would be home in three weeks. That’s all it would be, three weeks. And then—“How long would the tour with the choppe
r squadron be?”

  “This deployment and a couple months after flyoff. Next skipper is already scheduled in. Say nine, ten months.”

  “My husband’s tour ends in a month or so and then he goes to be intel to Admiral Pilchard at Bahrain. What would happen to me and the kids then?”

  He chuckled again. “You holding me up for a good deal, Rose? Well, let me see if I can make you an offer you can’t refuse. Just hold the line, okay?—let me check something on another phone and I’ll get right back to you—”

  She started to say she was only asking for information, but he was gone. She waited for six minutes, during which Reko walked through and they smiled automatically at each other, and her father poked his head into the entrance hall where the phone was, and saw she was busy and vanished. And then the detailer came back.

  “Would deputy naval attaché, Bahrain, tempt you?”

  In other circumstances it would have taken her breath away. She said, “Can you really do that?”

  “Special circumstances demand special solutions. I went to the top and got the word: if you’ll take the chopper squadron on the Roosevelt and save our asses in the BG turnover, I guarantee Bahrain after.”

  “And—?” And bye-bye to the confines of mission control and our house in Houston.

  “I can give you two hours to think it over. But there’s a daily flight from Philly to Cairo that’s servicing Operation Bright Star, leaving 1800 local. You’d have to be on it, meeting a chopper from the FDR in Alexandria, because the boat’ll already be heading into the canal, and they can’t launch or receive aircraft there. Two hours?”

  Tears were in her eyes, but her voice was firm. “Put me on the flight.”

  “Rose—” She heard compassion in his voice and tensed herself against it. “You sure? No matter what happened in Houston, Christ, you’ve moved mountains to get there! Even if you had some sort of personality conflict—I’ll back you, I’ll get other people to back you— Rose, I need a helicopter skipper, but I don’t want an officer to throw away something good because of, of—I don’t know because of what. Should you see somebody, you know, somebody to talk to?”

  “Put me on the flight.” Her voice softened. “You’re a good guy, Perk. But my mind’s made up. Call it my moment of truth.” She sighed. My second moment of truth. She hung up and called a travel agent about the next plane to Philadelphia—from Utica, no easy matter—but there was one out of Syracuse, an hour away, at one. She went upstairs to pack.

  Around midnight Mombasa time there was a flurry of phone calls. First, Rose called Alan from Philadelphia.

  “I don’t get it!” he shouted.

  “I made a decision. I’ll get Bahrain; you’ll be in Bahrain. We’ll be a family—two years—”

  “You’ve wanted to be an astronaut all your life!”

  “And it didn’t work. Don’t scold me, honey; I’m worn down as it is. I need you to say I did the right thing—”

  The pain in her always husky voice turned him to mush. “Anything you decide is the right thing.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear.” She began to babble: the kids were with her dad; the dog was going to be picked up from the vet’s by one of the nice people in Houston; she’d be on the FDR by the time he finished breakfast.

  “God, I won’t get to see you for five months,” he said.

  Her voice broke. “I’ll wave when we pass the Jefferson.”

  Langley, Virginia.

  The analyst in the African Section who had first noted activity in Sierra Leone had accumulated five more bits of data. Her flag to the Brits had been noted with thanks and two reports from British agents on the ground had been sent. Over the same period, a second Tu-103 had flown into and out of Sierra Leone, filing flight plans to Mauritania for “used agricultural material.” One of the British agents in Sierra Leone reported “large groups” of men occupying a disused hangar on the freight side of the airport, with a few whites glimpsed among “many” Africans. Satellite overflights showed eight pallet-loads of unspecified equipment and four vehicles identified from ground surveillance as Brazilian Jaguars.

  The Langley analyst concluded from the continued presence of the Tupolevs that further onward flight was intended. She posted a brief report to Central Command and Sixth Fleet headed: “Temporary Military Buildup Sierra Leone for Unidentified Onward Deployment.”

  At seven that evening local time, LTjg Evan Soleck, avid reader of intelligence digests, read the report in the jury-rigged detachment office at Mombasa. He also read an analysis of residue from the bomb in Cairo, noting it as a match for the C-4 used in the dhow attack in Mombasa, and appending an Interpol report tying it to more C-4 used in a bomb attack on an Italian federal prosecutor’s motorcade. He put both reports in the skipper’s read board and filed it all away in his cluttered magpie brain.

  14

  Mombasa.

  IT WAS THE DOWNTIME OF NIGHT, THE HANGAR QUIET, snores rumbling, the African darkness like black velvet around them.

  “I want you and your det out of there as soon as we clear this storm, Al.”

  “Rafe—” Alan started quietly.

  “Listen to me, Al. I’m telling you that I want your det back on this boat as soon as we have a working deck. Probably day after tomorrow. This storm probably won’t close the local airport, and it sure as hell won’t close Nairobi, and that means you’ll have a new crew and salvage for the Harker and a special Marine force to cover it. The Kenyans are beginning to ask hard questions about your activity. We need to do our turnover with the Roosevelt, and you’re a big part of that.”

  Roosevelt. Alan had forgotten. End of cruise. Going home. The end of his command. And Rose would be on the Roosevelt. He frowned, bit down. This was Rafe. “Aye, aye, sir.”

  “Don’t aye-aye me, mister.”

  “Sir, we’ve worked like dogs to get settled here, to stay connected with the Harker, and to support Mister Dukas’s investigations, and it’s like you’re pulling us just when we’re getting somewhere.”

  “Tough, Al. Look, I can give you three days—did I tell you that the Roosevelt had an accident in Haifa? So they won’t be in the ditch until tomorrow, anyway. Look, Al—I know you’ve played a big part in this thing. But the cavalry is coming and it’s time to use it, okay?”

  Alan looked at the cell-phone chart on the wall and nodded, although his mind was already moving to other things. “Rafe, let me bring you up to speed on our overflight of this poachers’ camp.”

  “Sure,” Rafe said. “Shoot.”

  Bahrain.

  Harry O’Neill called Dukas from Bahrain. Harry was in a room above the desert, looking out over the lights of the city. He had his own STU—in fact, he had his own everything.

  “Drugs,” he said.

  “No shit?”

  “The guy in Lebanon coughed up everything. I believe him—Hizbollah don’t fool around when they interrogate somebody. A big buyer—big, Mike, as in biggest—paid him to set up, he says, an Islamic terror group to do his dirty work. They think they’re working for al-Qaida. Who they’re really working for is a guy in Sicily named Santangelo-Fugosi. That’s all I got. Hizbollah didn’t want to give me even the name; they want the guy’s balls, but I think they know already he’s too big for them. Big balls. Brass, too.”

  “Anything about Cairo?”

  “Didn’t know—he’d have given it up if he’d known. All he knew was Mombasa and the Harker. It’s all compartmentalized.”

  “What’s the bottom line?”

  “Drugs.”

  “How?”

  “He didn’t get that far.”

  “Somalia?”

  “Wasn’t mentioned. But I’d say, knowing some other stuff—the dhow—” Harry hesitated. “But if you wanted to do something in Somalia, who’d you have to get past first?”

  Dukas didn’t even have to think. “The U.S. Navy, that’s who. Jesus.” They were both silent, thinking about it. Finally, Dukas said, “Need I ask wha
t happened to the Lebanese who spilled his guts?”

  “Nice turn of phrase, Mike. ‘The interrogation was taken to its logical conclusion.’ ” Harry stared at the lights of the city, then at the velvet blackness of the desert. “Say hello to Al for me,” he said.

  Cairo.

  Rose got off the plane at Cairo feeling rumpled and disoriented—too much, too fast. She wanted to be there, and as she walked out of the customs area and into the terminal, she realized that there was now here and she didn’t have a next step. She just felt tired. She was certain she had made the wrong choice; long flights in cramped seats are no good for life planning. She was leaving her sons and her sick mother and she was sticky.

  “Ma’am?” an American voice said at her elbow. She found herself looking at a gangly boy in a flight suit, with a shock of bright red hair and an enormous nose. “Ma’am?” he asked again, hesitant. “Are you Commander, um—?”

  “I’m Rose Siciliano,” she barked. “Commander Um, I’m not. Who are you?”

  The boy (she could hardly think of him as anything else, with his absurdly cherubic face and the nose) reached to take her bag, at the same time twitching in the direction of a salute. He couldn’t seem to decide. “I’m Cedric Llewellyn, ma’am.”

  “Have a rank, Mister Llewellyn?” Rose was not giving up her luggage. They were standing in the middle of the terminal, with a thousand other air passengers making a swirl around them. It was hot, even through the air-conditioning. Rose wanted to move on. It had already occurred to her that this must be one of her officers. She shook her head, both inwardly and physically.

  “Oh? Oh, sorry, uh, ma’am. I’m a lieutenant, junior grade, ma’am.”

  “Mister Llewellyn, in the military we usually greet our superiors with the applicable courtesy and a firm announcement of our rank and purpose. I’ll save you time and suggest that you are here to take me to the boat, right? And you have a helicopter?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Cedric shrank, although he still towered over her by a foot. She wondered what recruiting officer had decided Cedric could be a helicopter pilot. He probably had excellent grades. Nerd. She shook her head again.