Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  “Something’s going down!” he screamed. “We’ve got automatic fire—it’s between us and the carrier—” He looked around for Keatley. The big man was using the last of the duct tape on Balcon. “Let’s go!” he shouted.

  “Go the fuck where?”

  “Like the man said, toward the sound of the guns!” He turned and began to run.

  In the boathouse, only the older man and the younger one were able to work with the boats; the third Tamil was lying on the floor upstairs, gutshot. The Algerians had not been quite such amateurs as they had thought.

  Both motors were running, filling the boathouse with blue-gray smoke and the smell of burned fuel. The line that connected the boats was coiled on top of the forward steel plate of the boat on the men’s right, so that it would pay out smoothly as the boat pulled out into the canal.

  “Can you see, Nala?”

  “Yes, yes—” The younger man was down in the corner closest to the canal, looking out the opened doors. Each man had a plastic box with a joystick—the technology they were familiar with. “Thirty seconds,” the boy said.

  The older man took out a packet of Kenyan-made cigarettes and pulled one free with his lips and lit it with a yellow plastic lighter. He drew deeply on it, coughed. He watched Nala, who was tensed up but still. A trustworthy boy, a little high on amphetamines, but not too much so. He was glad it was the other man who had been shot and not Nala.

  “Now,” the boy said.

  Karun whipped the cigarette from his lips into the water. He bent, revved the engine, and slammed the steel plate shut as Nala let go the bow end of the spring line that held it to the walkway. The boat moved forward, banged against the other one, and Karun took control of it with the joystick.

  The boat moved into the canal. Nala watched it with a look like greed, his hands on his own joystick, waiting to steer his own boat out just before the line between them went tight.

  “This canal is a goddamn city!” Hunyadi said into her helmet mike. “There’s another goddamn marina ahead.”

  Rose gave the plane more throttle and a little more angle of attack; the rotors got more vertical bite into the air and the helicopter gathered speed. Rose used the speed to get altitude and turn. She wasn’t watching her direction. Her attention was fixed on something just below them, less than one hundred meters away.

  “Did you see that, Tara?”

  “Wazzat, ma’am?” Hunyadi was tired. Rose felt fresh. She knew she’d pay tomorrow, but she had the energy now.

  “Powerboat, just pulling out of some covered dock like a boathouse. There! See it?”

  “Big Eagle, this is Argive One, over? I have a contact report.” Hunyadi had her kneeboard card out. “Bogie is a brown fiberglass boat, length five meters, bearing 010 relative from Big Eagle, do you copy?”

  She hauled the stick harder, pulling the nose around and struggling to get the door gunner facing the boat. But she couldn’t see the boat anymore—it was somewhere under her.

  “Where the fuck is it?”

  Hunyadi looked at her, wide-eyed.

  Rose let the hull rotate under the blade, leaning well out. Something struck her cockpit window and it starred. She opened the window and leaned out, heedless of consequence. There was the boat.

  “Fire when you see the brown hull. It has some sort of deck over it.”

  “Got it.”

  She felt the plane rock as the big gun amidships began to fire. Wham wham wham. Wham wham wham. The old fifty cals fired bug bullets and you could hear each one go off, like a slow jackhammer. She could see the rounds ricocheting with little sparks off the decks. Steel plates. Her door gunner put a whole burst into the boat and it sailed on, low in the water.

  Rose cursed, took the chopper lower to get the gunner a different shot, went down and down until her skids were near the canal and her own updraft was jolting the plane under her hands. The door gun continued to fire in steady, disciplined bursts—wham wham wham. The damn boat was like a monitor. It had no freeboard showing and the top was armor plate.

  Wham wham wham. The cockpit stank of cordite. Hunyadi flicked a glance at her, her knuckles white on the stick and her eyes huge. Rose willed her to relax, gave the plane a few meters of altitude to get out of the danger zone, and started for the bow of the boat. It began to move faster.

  Somali-Kenyan Coast.

  “Soleck, get me the goddamn radio signal from yesterday! The explosion—in the lagoon, we saw it on MARI—Jesus—! You know what I mean! The explosion here. Yesterday.”

  “Roger, yessir, I understand—stand by—”

  Alan walked in small circles, jerky steps that showed his impatience, his fear that the minutes were draining away. It could be any second, this one, the next, now—

  “I have the Roosevelt. You’re in the link, Skipper. Go ahead.”

  “Roosevelt, this is Commander Craik of Det 424.”

  “Roger, Commander. Go ahead.”

  “Give me the TAO! This is priority—now!”

  “Wait one.”

  Soleck’s voice broke in. “There’s firing on a boat in the canal, Skipper. I got it on Guard.”

  “Get ready to pass that radio frequency to the Roosevelt for immediate transmission to every ship in the canal. Am I right, that’s a possible R/C transmission signal?”

  “Well, it—”

  Another voice broke in. “TAO. Make it fast, Commander.” Roosevelt sounded far away.

  “The weapons being used against your ship in the canal are radio-controlled. Do you read?”

  “—body already passed that—” the TAO almost shouted at him.

  “Signal to follow. I think you can disable their weapon by jamming it! Do you read?”

  “Didn’t copy your last.” And then, in the background but clear, “Another one? Jesus, engage it with the deck 30 mil. Engage!” And then static.

  “He cut you off,” Soleck groaned.

  Along the Canal.

  Triffler ran toward the canal at an angle that would take him, he hoped, to the place the shots had come from. Ahead, looming above the houses, the carrier looked as if it was going to plow right through them; the farther he went down the bank, the more the carrier seemed to rise, to take over the landscape, to be a thing separate from the scene and from the water, a monster coasting over the green and red land.

  Triffler had an AK-47 in his left hand, his cell phone in his right. He hoped that he still had contact with the NCIS office on the boat, because it had occurred to him that two men running along the bank with automatic weapons might not look like loyal Americans to somebody in a helicopter or an Egyptian police car. Navy choppers seemed to be all around them now; the sound made it impossible to hear the voice on the cell phone. All Triffler could do was repeat, “Tell the choppers—it’s us—blue shirt, khaki pants, white T-shirt, and blue jeans—we’re running on the bank—tell them it’s us—two guys—”

  He was panting and he thought the heat was going to kill him, even if friendly fire didn’t. Keatley’s face was purple. When had they last had water?

  Triffler saw a helicopter lurch and turn so suddenly it seemed to spin on its nose. He looked where the nose pointed and saw a thin, chocolate-colored wake, hardly visible, something moving slowly into the canal, something weirdly shaped—a floating tent?

  Keatley shouted something he couldn’t hear. He had seen it, too.

  Alan was still pacing, the little circles tighter now. “Get me one of their helos!” he shouted into the link with Soleck. “Get me any plane that’s airborne up there. Get me Alpha Whiskey, Soleck!” He stamped his foot, looking at the coming storm, and wanted to shake his foot. He had never felt so useless. “Get me the senior officer in the air. Do it!”

  “Roger. Wait one.” Soleck sounded calm.

  Alan’s hands were shaking. He sat down in the long grass, his back against the radio. Above him, Soleck’s S-3 turned again, high above the heat and the smell of blood, trying to hold his contact with the Roosevelt
, way off over the edge of the world. And still climbing. Alan had time to think—to wish that he had shot Vervoert. To wish he had more time.

  “Go!” Soleck said.

  “What!” Rose shouted, her husky voice familiar over two thousand miles.

  The lead boat was past the bow of the carrier and the trailing boat was well out in the canal. Both had been hammered by the choppers and the lead boat had taken two hits from the 30mm grenade launcher on the deck, and neither seemed damaged.

  Rose was steeling herself for the next move, where she dropped the plane in the water in front of one of the boats. It was all she could think of. She gave the plane some power and flew so close to the bulk of the carrier that the projection of the flight deck was over her for a moment. The lead boat was starting to turn.

  “Ma’am? Rose? Commander Craik wants to talk to you now!” Vaguely, she thought the shouting guy on her link must be Evan Soleck.

  “What!” she shouted, her rotor blades skimming past the knife-edge of the bow.

  Her husband’s voice hammered in her ear. “Boats are radio-controlled. This is the freq, Rose. Jam it! Jam it!”

  A set of numbers scrolled by on the digital link. She turned, giving the door gunner another chance at the bow of the lead boat, and she squashed the intercom button.

  “Hunyadi! Get this freq jammed. Do it!” She hit the button again. “Big Eagle! Get the freq in the link jammed. I don’t know! Maybe an EA-6B on the deck. Get it now!”

  Hunyadi’s hands were flying around the cockpit and she heard the winch going in the back. Wham wham wham. Her door gunner was still using the old solution. Wham wham wham.

  She could see the cable between the boats now, just starting to stretch, the bow of the far boat turning in toward the carrier. Maybe twenty seconds, Rose thought. If I can’t jam it in one go, I have to use the plane. Next to her, Hunyadi toggled a switch and gave her a thumbs-up. Nothing changed.

  Wham wham wham.

  Karun moved the joystick, and his boat, well out in the waterway now and turning back to run parallel with Nala’s, did not respond. He pushed the joystick farther, then pulled it to the right, back left—anything to make it respond.

  Nothing.

  He looked at the boy. He was doing the same thing, but he was frantic. He used the joystick the way a child did now, ramming it back and forth from one extreme to the other.

  “Nala!”

  Nala’s boat was also in the waterway but still heading straight out, not quite ready to make the turn toward the carrier. If they went on in the same way, one turning, one crossing the channel, the two boats would cross paths but would not collide; then the line would come taut between them, and—? Karun was not sure.

  He tried his own joystick again. His boat continued its turn. Overhead, a helicopter was so loud it seemed to be landing on the house roof.

  “They have a jamming device.” He put the joystick down on the walkway with care, as if he were leaving it for somebody else to use. “It is over.” He jerked his head at the stairs. Nala threw his joystick against the wall. Karun made a face, shook his head. He went up.

  The house was too small for so many bodies. Flies were already gathering, and there was the disgusting smell of death—blood and shit. Tarim was lying to the left of the stairs near the far wall, his hands folded over his abdomen as if he was holding something in. Karun bent over him. Tarim’s eyes were alive but dying.

  “I will see to your family,” Karun said. He shot Tarim in the forehead with his pistol, the sound sharp and quick over the roar of the helicopter.

  Nala was bending by the little window near the door through which they would have to leave, the AK-47 ready to shoot. He had been just about to speak when Karun’s pistol had gone off, and he jumped and then crouched down. “Two men,” he shouted, “one European, one African. With rifles.” He pointed out toward where he had seen them; now there was nobody. Maybe they had heard the shot. “In the grass.”

  Karun went to the window on the other side, stepping over Tarim’s body to get to it. He looked out. Four white men and an Egyptian were coming down the slope in the funny half-trot that such a descent imposes on men not quite young. They had handguns. He went back to the first window and looked over Nala’s shoulder toward the journalist’s cars, whose roofs he could just see over the slope. Two hundred meters, he thought. Uphill.

  He went back to the window through which he had seen the men. They were still coming. He pointed the automatic rifle and fired three short bursts, taking out the closest one, putting the others down on their faces. Behind him, Nala smashed the glass of his window with the butt of his rifle and Karun winced, knowing it was a mistake, wanting to tell him to shoot through the glass and not wait, but it was too late. The air seemed to pulse with the noise of helicopters and heavy machine guns now, and he never heard the rifles firing from outside but saw Nala’s back burst open, blood spraying the room with red mist and the boy’s mouth wide to scream, no sound because all the sound in the world was taken by the helicopters and the machine guns.

  Karun crawled below the windows to Nala, saw the sucking wounds in his chest. He dropped his Kalashnikov and put one mercy shot from his pistol in the boy’s temple and went back down the stairs to the boathouse. The gray wall of the aircraft carrier was sliding by the open doors, seeming close enough to touch, seeming to fill all space as the guns and the machines filled all sound. It was over.

  Karun slipped into the water.

  Three hundred yards north of the boathouse, the larger of the two out-of-control boats struck the concrete at the edge of the canal. It was a glancing blow, and the boat scraped along the concrete for twenty yards before the second boat, the one locked in a circle, struck the first amidships and they vanished in a roar. The blast wave tore the nets off the bow of the carrier and destroyed two F-18s parked on the forward catapults, and the flight deck deformed by almost two inches. The fireball reached out toward the choppers, trying to pluck them down, and Rose fought it, flying on instinct as the dust and then the vaporized water obscured her vision. And then she was level, fifty feet above the deck and suddenly behind the ship, which was already plowing forward across the wreckage and the mud. The side of the canal had collapsed, and the whole deck of the ship had a coating of something dark, but Rose didn’t have time to worry about that because her bird was a cripple; something was seriously broken in the handling and she had to get down.

  Rose took her plane down the side, decided she would never get it back to the altitude she needed to put down on the deck, and headed for the sand of the Sinai seventy yards to the east. The rotors were complaining because something was seriously wrong, and she tried to get a little glide out of their continued rotation. She slammed her airplane down on the sand before the engine started to take itself apart. Hunyadi was right on with the numbers, her fingers sure on the switches, shutting down the damaged engine and getting the aircrew out of the damaged bird.

  The rotor stopped turning. The plane was silent. It wasn’t going to blow.

  Hunyadi was smiling. Rose smiled back, and thought, You’ll do.

  Triffler had sprinted back up the rise to the cars, Keatley gasping behind him and losing ground, and now Triffler was kneeling over Balcon, tearing the duct tape from the journalist’s legs and ankles with one hand. “A chopper, for God’s sake, give me a chopper!” Triffler was screaming into his cell phone. “Yes, another chopper—goddamit, don’t question me—! I know there’s a crisis, what the fucking hell do you think I’m doing out here?” The obscenity wasn’t like him, and later he’d regret it, tell his wife and his minister about it, but now he felt urgency like a hand at his throat. He had no time, zero time; the Egyptian cops were pouring down the green slope toward the little house now, and in no more than a minute they’d head up here, and then it would all belong to them. “Yes, we need a chopper for a wounded man, yes—a CIA guy, yes, I gave you that message, he’s down and he’s bad, but they’re trying to save him until a—ye
s! Yes, and now I need another! No, not a goddamn medevac, I need anything that flies and can pick me up within the next forty-five seconds! What can be so fucking difficult—the fucking air is filled with fucking helicopters!”

  Keatley, gasping, threw himself down in the shade of the car.

  “Wave your shirt,” Triffler said.

  Keatley stared at him.

  “Wave your goddamn shirt! So they’ll know it’s us!”

  Keatley crawled out of the shade and stood with the help of the car and pulled his blue shirt off. He was ten pounds overweight and pale, his chest blotchy with heat, sweating. Leaning on the car with one hand, hyperventilating, he waved the shirt.

  “Harder!”

  Triffler looked down toward the house. Somebody was pointing toward them. He and Keatley had needed only one look inside that abattoir before he’d known it was time to go. Five bodies, one just outside, blood everywhere. Then al-Fawzi and Geddes had come around the corner of the house, and Triffler had almost shot them with the AK because he was jazzed by then, not knowing that his eyes were wide, his speech too fast. He had never been in a firefight before. Never killed anybody before. If in fact he had killed anybody in that carnage. Geddes had shouted that Patemkin was hit; al-Fawzi had looked into the house and started screaming into his own cell phone, and Triffler had spun around and sprinted up the slope, knowing that he had only minutes to collar Balcon before the Egyptians got to him.

  “How long do I got to keep waving this thing?” Keatley moaned. His face was purple. Triffler heard a change in the discordant throbbings that filled the air over the canal and saw a chopper turn away from the carrier, now a magnificent bulk sliding away from them to their right, the stern just changing from profile to an end view.

  “You’re doing great.” Triffler got the last of the tape off Balcon’s legs and then ripped the piece from his mouth. He stood, grabbing Balcon’s shirt and pulling him up. “On your feet.”