Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  “You can’t carry it. That’s an order.”

  Keatley began to take the camera apart.

  The Egyptians had finished upstairs by then. Kassim was riding herd on Balcon, the woman, and the two technicians; al-Fawzi was in Room Four with Triffler and Keatley, looking out through the slats in the venetian blind, very film noir. Triffler got him to hit up the hotel manager for a roll of duct tape—nine minutes to go—and Triffler taped his .380 between two plastic boxes that had started life as sealed videotapes, which he ripped apart with a Spyderco knife, flinging videotape on the beds and letting it billow around the room, the hell with it. Then the gun fit. Five minutes to go.

  Keatley showed off the reconstituted camera. It wouldn’t hold tape anymore, and it wouldn’t take video pictures, but it had a place inside via the loading door that would hold his .45. He hefted the camera. “This sucker doesn’t leave my hand.” He looked through the finder.

  “What about your nine?”

  “Never use it, hate it—forget it.”

  “You may be sorry.”

  “Well, I won’t live to know, right? Shitty gun, fuck it.” He tossed the nine-millimeter on the bed. Al-Fawzi grabbed it and held it in his hand while he looked through the opening in the blind. Keatley put the camera over his shoulder and sighted down at Triffler. “How do I look?”

  “Like somebody who doesn’t know thing one about television cameras. You got two minutes to learn.”

  He ran upstairs and into Balcon’s suite and grabbed the startled journalist by the front of his safari jacket. “We’re on.” He pulled the journalist close. “One wrong word, and you’re the first one dead.”

  Balcon pulled his head back. “You assure me you will get me safely out of Egypt?”

  “I will get you safely out of Egypt.”

  One minute later, they were out in the parking lot.

  Out on the storm-swept Jefferson, intel was processing Soleck’s read on the buildup in Sierra Leone and Alan Craik’s information from the South African officer at the poachers’ camp. Seventeen minutes later, an urgent message went to LantFleet and DNI. Fourteen minutes after that, Sierra Leone closed the Freetown airport, and a British SAS special-forces team was diverted from the Liberian border to the task of securing the two Tu-103s.

  17

  Along the Suez Canal.

  THE SUEZ CANAL LOOKED TO TRIFFLER LIKE A STREAK OF brown paint laid down a green gutter; beyond the gutter’s edges was red desert. The colors were stark in their separateness. This was almost the canal’s narrowest section—a couple of hundred meters wide, actually too narrow now for the world’s biggest ships, although it must have seemed generous in 1869 when this long, straight ditch cut travel from Britain to India by weeks. Now the canal was wide enough to take an aircraft carrier—but not wide enough to allow the carrier to turn around. Once in, ships had to go through.

  Triffler stared out at the too-bright landscape. The sun hurt his eyes. The temperature in the car was already above a hundred. Balcon was in front with the driver, Keatley and Triffler in back. He could smell the dirty T-shirt he had snatched from Balcon’s floor; it was the thing that most distressed him about the moment, worse than the heat, worse than the harsh light, worse than the sweat-cigarette stink of the driver.

  Balcon still seemed to be looking to Triffler for approval. Now and then on the ride, he glanced back and tried to smile.

  A beat-up Fiat was following them, two men in headscarves in it. They hadn’t appeared in the parking lot, only the driver of Balcon’s car, who hadn’t patted them down or shown the least interest in the suitcases or the camera. Then, on the road, Triffler had seen the Fiat behind them; so had Keatley, who had fired a meaningful look at Triffler. Guards, or enforcers? Both, probably.

  One surveillance car was somewhere back there, too, one somewhere in front. Too obviously Americans, Triffler thought, and too early in the morning for tourists to be out looking at de Lesseps’s ditch, but there wasn’t a parallel road, and the only way they could stay out of sight was to get way ahead or way behind. They’d apparently decided on both; at the moment, he couldn’t see either car.

  The road ran along the canal for miles. You could pull off and watch one of the world’s great ships seem to slide along between the green banks; if you aimed your tourist’s camera just right, no water would be visible, and the ship would seem to be sailing through the red desert beyond. Triffler didn’t care about any of that, but he took it in. No tourists would come out here today, however, he thought; they had already gone through two roadblocks, and three times he had seen light aircraft flying low over the canal. The alert was on. But the roadblocks weren’t serious—Balcon’s press credentials were enough to get them through. The trailing car somehow came under his umbrella, too. Maybe it was an umbrella of money. Or maybe the roadblocks were simply a way to show willingness on the part of the police, and they were really going to let through anybody who wasn’t hauling a mobile rocket, because tourism was big business.

  Their driver watched the road behind him in his mirror; sometimes his eyes met Triffler’s there. The man looked worried, had looked worried when he had picked them up—a fusser, a fidgeter. Had he seen Geddes’s car back there? Probably not, Triffler decided; he was simply being overcautious. Then, however, he increased speed for several minutes, glancing back, speeding up, glancing back, then abruptly turned off toward the canal, the trailing car wheeling into his dust cloud as they barreled down an unpaved lane that took them past a stand of low, spiky palms. Down along the canal now were small houses, each one with a dock, a boat, an Egyptian flag. Just like any lake in the States, except that a hundred feet off the end of the dock, an oil tanker was passing. They headed down toward the houses and then turned to their left, north, sandy little pairs of ruts heading away to their right toward the houses. The driver, Triffler decided, had wanted to make sure nobody was in sight behind him when he made his turn. Very nervous guy.

  The car stopped. The trailing car stopped. The driver turned and looked at them. “Nous voici,” he said.

  Triffler got out and the sun hit him like a club. The two men in the trailing car were already out. They had AK-47s and they were pointing them at him.

  The pat-down in the blazing sun by the men with the AKs had been cursory, but enough to cause Keatley to cock an appreciative eye at Triffler. When they were done, Keatley hefted his camera and then put it to his eye and panned around and stared at each of the gun-toting guards with it. One of them gave an embarrassed little smile, then did a vaguely Chaplinesque parody of a soldier with a gun and, laughing, withdrew into the shade of the Fiat with his buddy. They weren’t Egyptians, Triffler thought—from farther west, maybe Algerians.

  Balcon was standing out in the harsh, hot light, hands on hips, staring down at the canal. He and Triffler exchanged looks, Triffler giving a little nod to say that, so far, Balcon was doing all right. Earning brownie points, in fact. Balcon gave a small, sad smile.

  Triffler set up the reflector umbrella and put himself and his suitcases and boxes under it, just on the canal side of the dusty road. The cars were on the other side, trying to get some shade from the tall grasses that grew rankly there. Balcon’s “guide” was sitting on the driver-side doorframe of his car, the door open, his back against the side of the driver’s seat. He looked despondent but was probably simply bored.

  Triffler pretended to take a reading with what he hoped was a light meter. He trotted over to Keatley and showed it to him, and Keatley muttered something about goddamn playacting and when were they going to get serious?

  Triffler lowered his head. “When we know it’s going down.”

  He puttered under his umbrella. Keatley pretended to pan over the canal, first north, then south. An Indian freighter moved past them, and he pretended to videotape that. On its deck, men burned almost black with sun wielded big paint rollers and spread glistening white over the bulkheads. The ship glared with it. Brown bow waves spread and lapped against
the green bank, and all the little boats by all the little docks bobbed up and down. The Egyptian flags lay limp in the ovenlike air.

  Balcon chewed his fingernails and paced and looked north, where the ships would come from. He was wearing a soft-sided safari hat that was meant to look dashing and that at least kept the sun off him and hid the anguish on his face. Partly because of that unhappy face, Triffler kept the hollowed-out tape boxes with the .380 close, in case Balcon couldn’t stand the strain and decided that, after all, he’d be better off with the guys with the AK-47s.

  Then Balcon was standing out in the sun, hands on hips, looking north through the haze, standing there so long that Triffler put his head around the dazzling umbrella and looked north, too, and saw, as if it floated on the haze itself, the incredible mass of the carrier up there where the brown, red, and green of the landscape merged in muted grays.

  Somali-Kenyan Coast.

  Alan was on his satphone with Dukas, who was waiting to get on an airplane from Nairobi to Cairo, running through what Vervoert had told him and watching Fidelio, who was planting a jury-rigged charge to blow up the rest of the weapons and ammo. “There’s a force of men and materiel, some of it pretty big stuff,” he said, “waiting someplace to fly into southern Somalia. Check an airstrip at this place called Kusdasii, see what sort of planes it’ll take. I think they’ll be pretty big— Yeah. Right. Exactly my thinking—we guess at the range and go looking for a bunch of military waiting to fly— Exactly.” He listened to Dukas speculating about where the force was and how far they’d fly, and then he was talking about the operation in the lagoon. Alan had already explained to him the Tamil’s use of toy boats to trap explosives against a hull. “Yeah, this shithead said that it wasn’t part of his operation, but it’s got to be part of the operation. That’s the ping we got on MARI—they’d dummied up a prow for practice. They’re going to blow up another ship, and it may be another Navy ship— Yeah, I’m guessing. But, Mike, they flew out yesterday, so they’re in place by now. Yeah, even in a little helicopter; if they refueled, they can be in the Med by now. Or Yemen. Or the canal. Yeah, where Rose is. Oh, shit, I don’t know—”

  He listened to Dukas’s demands for more information—Dukas acting like the head of the investigation now, not his old friend Mike. Dukas wanted prisoners interrogated, the site searched with a fine-tooth comb, documents—

  “I haven’t got the personnel, Mike! Neither have you. No, you listen to me for a second—I don’t have interrogators who speak the languages; we’ve captured Somalis and Rwandan Hutus and Nigerians, at least; we don’t have those languages! Plus I haven’t got time to dick around up here, the goddamn— I know that. Please, Mike—Jesus, will you listen?—I’ll put Hahn and Mink on the interviews, they can go out to the Esek Hopkins with the prisoners and the wounded. We’ll do what we can on the weapons, but I’m not going to leave any up here. No, they have to be destroyed. Yes, that’s a military decision, not an NCIS decision. Okay? Documents, records, whatever, we’ll do a quick search and I’ll bring back what I can. Malindi? Jesus Christ, there are more important things than— Okay, I’ll ask him about Malindi. Okay. Okay, okay.”

  Along the Canal.

  Triffler carried the hollowed-out videotape boxes in his hand to Keatley, who was now wearing his blue button-down shirt as a hood over his head against the sun. Triffler said, putting his left hand on the duct tape where the .45 was hidden in the camera, “See the carrier?”

  “See it? I’m filming it.”

  “I’ve got to get on my cell phone to Geddes and Patemkin. It’s going down.” He stripped off some of the tape. “Take out the two guys with the guns, okay?”

  “About time.”

  Keatley worked his fingers under the tape, the camera pointed more or less at the rank grass between the cars so that it hid what his hand was doing. “I want to get closer,” he said.

  Triffler lifted the piece of duct tape that held the two hollowed-out video boxes together. He stripped it down and rolled up the tape and pushed it into his borrowed blue jeans. Neatness is all. “I’ll take care of the driver and Balcon,” he said.

  “We move together?”

  “We move together. We’re pretending to talk about the carrier—got your piece?—point the camera as we walk—good—” They reached the edge of the dirt road, halfway between the two cars. Triffler moved them two steps closer to the guards. “Now,” he said.

  Triffler pulled the .380 from the tape boxes and turned toward the driver, who was asleep now under the car. He would wake soon enough. Triffler allowed himself a glance at Balcon, who was shading his eyes with his hand and looking toward the carrier. Two shots roared at Triffler’s right, then a third; Triffler stepped forward and knelt and pointed the .380 at the driver’s left eye, which was about eight inches from the muzzle.

  “That wasn’t so hard,” Keatley said. His shadow fell over Triffler’s hand. A helicopter chuffed overhead.

  Two hundred yards away in one of the little houses, one of the Sri Lankans raised his head and said, “Gunshots.”

  “The journalists?”

  The older one shrugged. The noise of a passing helicopter shook the walls. “The carrier has been warned,” the youngest one said. He pointed upward at the noise with his thumb.

  “That changes nothing.”

  Two of the Algerians were in the house with them, two outside. One of them went to a window and looked out. The house was hardly bigger than a garage, everything small, so he had to stoop to look out a window that was the size of a large book.

  “They’re planning to kill us when we’ve done the job,” the youngest of the Sri Lankans said.

  “I think so. But not yet.” The older one, Karun, was squatting, a cigarette between his brown fingers. He thought that the Algerians were amateurs and he had contempt for them. “Where is the carrier now?”

  “Maybe four hundred meters.”

  Karun inhaled deeply and tucked the cigarette into his palm so the glowing end was hidden, then stood and went down the stairs to the boathouse that was the house’s canal-level story. The boats floated there next to a duckboard walkway, two twelve-foot fiberglass dinghies whose tops a local fundi had covered with steel plate, tentlike, protecting the outboard motors and the two hundred kilos of C4 that each carried in its bottom. The weight put them so low in the water that their gunwales were almost awash.

  “Very sluggish,” the young one said for the tenth time. They hadn’t seen the boats until they had arrived yesterday. They had always used this technique before with off-the-shelf model boats that were big enough to carry only the explosive needed to knock down a coastal freighter.

  “When I have started both motors,” the older one said, “you and Tarim go up and shoot the Algerians. You have to get their automatic weapons quickly and kill the other two as they come in.”

  “Then?”

  “Then come down and guide the boats, fool, what do you think? When the job is done, we go up and kill the journalists and take their car, as planned.” He tossed his cigarette into the brown water and bent forward to open a crudely acetylene-cut hatch in the steel plate. “Ready?”

  The other men nodded. He pulled the starter cord of the outboard.

  Standing in the ruins of the military camp, waiting for the chopper to lift him off, Alan had time to think about the complexity of the operation he had just wrecked, tried to see the toy boats and the attack. Soleck was right—the target had to be the Roosevelt in the canal. He trotted back to his Marine radioman, heard the helicopter returning from the Hopkins, where it had taken the wounded. The toy boats—if they were the mechanism used to deliver the C4, then they were radio-controlled. And that meant the signal—

  “Get Jaeger One on guard,” he snapped to the radioman. “Tell him to get me a patch through to the Roosevelt.”

  Along the Canal.

  “It’s going down now,” Triffler shouted into the cell phone. “I can see the carrier; we’re on the bank where we’re
supposed to be able to shoot TV footage, so it’s got to happen soon—it’s going to be close to where we are!” Geddes was on the other end, shouting back at him. “Where are you guys?” Triffler shouted. They didn’t know. They’d been stopped at a checkpoint, and Geddes had got lippy with an Egyptian soldier, and there’d been a bad scene. They’d lost Triffler’s car then and had gone on and on; Patemkin, in the lead car, hadn’t seen Triffler’s car turn off, and finally Patemkin had pulled off and waited and seen Geddes. By then, they were out of it.

  “I’m back down the canal!” Triffler shouted at the phone. “Come back down—we pulled off on a dirt road. There’s cottages here on the water—docks, small boats—dammit, if I knew what they were going to pull—” He looked for a landmark, finally realized that the biggest landmark in the canal was moving down toward him. “Oh, Lordy, drive south and look for the goddamn carrier! We’re at most a quarter-mile south of it! I don’t know what you’re going to do when you get here! Just get here!”

  He could see the helicopters now flying ahead of the boat, outboard of it so that they were almost over the banks of the canal itself. Their heavy chuffing came on the warm air like drums. Triffler looked helplessly to left and right, searching for anything—a missile, a suicide boat, a mine—

  He tried to call Mombasa, but the signal was bad, and he stood helplessly, not looking at the bodies by the farther car, the cell phone useless in his right hand.

  Until he thought of the NCIS office on the carrier itself.

  “Toy boats?”

  Triffler was connected with one of the NCIS agents on the FDR. Everybody on the big ship, it appeared, was looking for two toy boats that were going to blow off the carrier’s bow.

  “Tamil Tigers? What have the Tamil Tigers got to do with—?” A Navy helicopter passed almost directly overhead and he couldn’t hear. He looked up, down, then at the canal—and thought he heard shots. The helicopter moved south and he waited, and then it came clearly—a short burst of automatic fire.