Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  The journalist’s eyes were dilated with fear and shock, and he, too, was red-faced and gasping. “You told me—you said—”

  “Shut up.”

  “You promised you’d get me out of Egypt!”

  Triffler didn’t say that he hadn’t promised anything; he didn’t say that a promise to a piece of contemptible shit like Balcon wasn’t a promise at all. He kept his fist balled in the sweat-stained fabric of Balcon’s shirt and watched the helicopter swing toward them, slanting a few degrees so the pilot could check them out, then start a descent into the flat green grass a hundred feet from them.

  “Come on.” Triffler began to drag Balcon toward the landing zone. Keatley followed, sagging, head down, his shirt flung over his shoulders.

  Balcon tried to resist. “Where?”

  Triffler waved his free hand at two Egyptian cops who were walking up from the charnel house. “Away from them.”

  The three of them stood together in the wind of the chopper’s descent, grass swaying back from the rotors as if a big hand was sweeping it flat. When it was down, Triffler crouched and began to drag Balcon along.

  He didn’t tell him that in twelve hours he’d be in the naval brig at Guantanamo Bay.

  Somali-Kenyan Coast.

  Near the Somali border, Alan was back on the radio, hearing what was going on in the canal and watching Fidelio walk toward him. When Fidelio got close, he stood with his hands on his hips, waiting. Alan nodded and held up a hand. “Yeah,” he said with a catch in his voice. “Yeah, that’s just like her.” He looked over at Fidelio and the radioman. “Rose got the boats. They’re safe.” Fidelio was bold enough to slap his skipper on the arm. “Where’s Triffler now? Shit.” Triffler was out of contact, somewhere down near the canal. He handed the radio back to the operator. He looked at Fidelio, who said, “Ready to blow.” Alan nodded and walked down to the beach and told the lieutenant to get his men aboard the helo. The prisoners, all but the white officer, were sitting on the sand with their knees raised and their thin arms resting on them, models of patience. Vervoert and two black noncoms, hands cuffed behind them with plastic restrainers, were standing between two Marines.

  “Let’s go,” Alan said.

  “The other prisoners?”

  Alan shook his head. “Leave them.”

  Alan was the last one aboard. From three hundred feet, he looked down at the beach, where the black mercenaries were trying to get two rowboats into the huge waves from the storm surge. Out to sea, the sky had been replaced with a line of purple-black. The wind was rising to a scream against the sound of the rotor blades. At the fringes, down where they had left the bush to begin the attack, other people were gathering. The Guryama, looking for justice.

  The storm was about to break.

  Mombasa.

  Alan was the first out of the chopper, the blades still turning, red dust churning with the rain into the glare of the lights. He ran for the hangar. People straggled out, roused from sleep, yawning. The Marines came behind him and headed for the mortar strongpoint. Geelin was already there.

  Alan was almost at the hangar when he saw Sandy Cole. She was standing in the shadows in front of the hangar, her dress limp on her body. She didn’t notice him; her attention was fixed on the chopper. He turned and looked at it. One of the crewmen was out looking at the underbelly. The rotors were taking their last slow turn. Four of the Kenyan game rangers were out, clustered by the door. They waited. They watched something inside. Then two of them reached in and began to pull.

  She recognized it when the two inside and the four on the ground had his weight among them. Even wrapped in a blue plastic tarpaulin. She knew.

  She made a sound that a dying, angry animal might have made, the sound rising and growing in her throat and becoming a scream that tore the hot night apart. Alan saw a young sailor flinch away and cover his face. The sound went on and on, fell, and then started again. On and on, the scream beyond language that is disbelief and loss and utter despair. He would have to hear it for the rest of his life.

  Coda

  ELEVEN OFFICERS FROM DETACHMENT 424 AND THE CARrier’s air wing were relaxing in the warmth of a Sicilian outdoor café. The Mediterranean, under the hazy sun, lay blue-green and slack, its sparkle dulled by a thickening of the air that may have been dust blown over from North Africa. In the late-afternoon near silence, the laughter was muted, but the men smiled a lot. They were headed home.

  “Great party, Soleck,” Captain Rafehausen said. No longer the acting BG commander—a vice admiral had been flown out from the States six days before—he was the one-hatted CAG again, and a happier man for it. Rafe put his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Saw you got two more okays on the landings since you were on the beach. Great—great—”

  “There’s going to be dinner later!” Soleck said, as if he knew that this gathering at the trattoria wasn’t memorable, but maybe the dinner would be. It was his wetting-down party. It was what Lieutenant-Commander Craik had told him to do.

  But so far, it wasn’t memorable.

  At another table, Alan watched Soleck with a smile. “Were you ever that young?” he said to Mike Dukas.

  Dukas, who had a laptop open before him and a Peroni beer bottle in his right hand, squinted at Soleck and shook his head. “I was born older than that.”

  Alan laughed. “How’s your teenaged girlfriend, by the way?”

  “She’s not a teenager and she’s not my girlfriend!” Dukas had been shying away from the subject of Leslie Kultzke since he had arrived that morning. “She’s my office assistant—period.” He was wearing reading glasses and he really did look old, maybe deliberately so—slumped in his seat, glasses on his nose, deep frown. He typed something into the laptop and waited and reacted with a grunt to what came up.

  “She invited you to dinner yet?” Alan said.

  “How’d you know?”

  “Women do that sort of thing. Did you go?”

  Dukas squirmed in his plastic chair. “Only once.” He gave Alan a hard look. “Nothing happened!”

  “Did I ask a question? Funny how sometimes you get answers without even asking questions. Little sensitive, are we?”

  Dukas punched a key as if he was putting out an eye and muttered, “Some people know when to find a new subject, or else.” He looked over the glasses. “I’ve been here two hours, you haven’t asked about the case.”

  “I figured you’d tell me when you were ready.” He looked at Soleck, who was moving from table to table like a nervous maitre d’. Alan waved. “Soleck’s party isn’t very jazzy, is it? I feel responsible.”

  Dukas peered over the tops of the glasses again at the relaxed figures. “What you need is some Greeks in this Navy.” He went back to the laptop. “Yeah, I’ll tell you when I’m ready. Now I’m ready.

  “What’s happened is, the French guy opened up like a clam in a steam bath when they got him to Gitmo. Turns out the French already had a sheet on him—funny how they didn’t make a diplomatic stink; in fact, they asked quite nicely if they could have a round with him. Guy turned out to have connections with the Marseilles mafia; they were clapping their hands that we’d grabbed him. So he gave us a little stuff, played some footsie, I offered him immunity if he’d puke it all up, and he did. Some names, some dates, some places. Yes, he got instructions to ID you at your hotel; yes, he walked Cram into the elevator and got out on the first floor, leaving Cram with two heavies who were headed for the basement—end of Bob Cram. Yes, he gave us the guy in Sicily, whose name is Carmine Santangelo-Fugosi and who lives in the fancy palazzo you can see over your left shoulder if you turn your head about ten degrees.”

  Alan turned his head. “Holy shit—” The laughter went on around them; something was going on with a pretty woman who worked in the trattoria. “The cell-phone calls came here?”

  “Why d’you think I told you to hold this love feast here? Santangelo-Fugosi’s a player. Friend of a lot of biggies, right up to maybe the president,
also the Vatican; owns a bank that the EU keeps trying to bring down and can’t. This is crime big-time—not breaking guys’ knees and running a little dope, but scamming corporations and rigging markets and busting economies. Interpol thinks he’s made a connection with the Russian mafia. In fact, some of the money that funded the hit on the Cairo AID building came, we think, from Moscow. Big player.”

  “This didn’t all come from the French guy, Mike.”

  “No, no, he didn’t know any of this shit. All he knew was his good friend Signor Santangelo-Fugosi was going to make him rich and famous by putting him on-site at some big events before they happened, and ask him to help out in the occasional murder. But he didn’t see the big picture at all—didn’t want to see it, in fact. No, we put the big picture together from little pieces—from Harry, from Russia, from DEA, from the guys you captured in that camp, from Hizbollah, who’re mad as hell and willing to share information with me if it’ll get them some revenge.”

  “And the big picture was?”

  “And the picture was—” Dukas keyed the laptop and waited and then smiled at what he’d brought to the screen. “It was creating a new source for opium, with the labs right in the fields. In Somalia. A dope combine that would have their own country: Somalia from the border to the Juba River. Fuck the Taliban, who were unreliable; fuck the Lebanese and Hizbollah, who were demanding and expensive; fuck Colombia, and maybe pull the rug out from under their economy, and then go in and buy for ten cents on the buck. Do it all yourself—grow, harvest, extract, distribute—what you call your vertically organized industry.”

  “And the Navy was in the way.”

  Dukas nodded. “Twelve hundred Marines and a carrier air group could screw them good. But if the hit on the FDR had worked—and you were right, the first hit was supposed to be the gator freighter and not the Harker—they’d have moved in and got a crop in the ground before the canal was cleared. Remember, when the Egyptians scuttled ships in the canal in fifty-six, it took three years to clear. These guys needed one year. And all the time we’d be trying to come back at them, they’d be paying off people like Balcon to bullshit about American aggression in the Horn, and Carmine’s fucking bank would be buying politicians, and the media would be getting press releases about the glory days of Italian Somaliland. Every year they could make it work was worth billions to them. Three years would have been worth a lifetime of smaller stuff. And would we really go back into Somalia because of drugs—especially drugs that were probably going to wind up in Europe and not the U.S.?” Dukas looked straight at him. “You know how many people in the Congress would like to say ‘Fuck Europe’?”

  “So what’re you doing to Signor What’s-his-name?”

  “Nothing. Zip, zero, nada. Santangelo-Fugosi’s the Teflon scumbag. We don’t prosecute; the Italians don’t arrest. That’s the news from Foggy Bottom—he’s too close to too many people.”

  “He almost killed my wife!”

  “That’s right. And he really did kill Bob Cram, and seven DEA guys, and a bunch of people on the Harker, and some Egyptian and Kenyan civilians.”

  “And Martin Craw. Goddamit, Mike—!”

  Dukas took several folded sheets from an inner pocket of his wrinkled jacket. “Can you translate into Italian on sight?”

  Alan’s angry face clouded, uncertain where they were going now. “If it isn’t technical shit, sure.” Alan had spent part of his childhood in Naples.

  Dukas put a cell phone on the table. “When I tell you, read what’s there—but in Italian.” He looked around. “Okay, tell your birthday boy it’s show time.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You will.” Dukas pointed a thumb over his shoulder up the hill. “We’re going to have a little conversazione with the pride of Sicily.”

  Alan studied Dukas’s face. “You’re serious.”

  “Dead serious. This is the Dukas-Craik response. It’s all we’re going to get.”

  “And Soleck?”

  “He wanted memorable, he gets memorable. Plus, he’s young—this’ll be something that’s going to last the rest of his career.”

  Alan waved Soleck over, and the young officer came too fast, a glass of red wine slopping in his left hand. Alan sat him down, rode over his questions and his nervousness, and told him to listen. Dukas pulled the laptop around where all three could see it. The screen was filled with a photograph of the Harker as Alan had seen it that first morning: tilted, burning, wrecked.

  Dukas explained it to Soleck. “The guy who caused this is in a room in that big house above us on the hill. Right now, he’s behind the third window on the right. He’s looking at the same picture on a computer up there as I am on this one down here. He doesn’t know it, but there’s a laser eavesdropper pointed at the window so we can hear everything that goes on in the room.” Dukas fitted a headset over his hair. “Satchmo, you there? This is Dizzy. Got it? Okay?” He waited, drummed his fingers, smiled. “We’re a go.” He turned back to the two officers. “Our scumbag’s got two other people in the room with him.” He hit a key, and a picture of Bob Cram’s severed head came up. “That’s why they’re in the room. All three of them got this picture and a message to be up there at this hour.” He hit another key and a picture of a Tomahawk cruise missile, nose-on, appeared. “They also got that.”

  Dukas hit a number on the cell phone, pressed his headset against his right ear. “Ringing—ringing—got it.” He winked at Soleck. “Their private cell-phone network, courtesy of NSA.” He waited, then pointed at Alan. “You’re on.”

  Alan put the phone to his ear. A male voice was saying “Pronto!” in the angry tone that tells you he had said the same thing several times already.

  “Give me Signor Santangelo-Fugosi, and don’t give me any shit,” Alan said in Italian. The man did start to give him shit but was cut off; the cell-phone sound was hushed as, Alan thought, somebody put a hand over it.

  Dukas smiled. “Carmine’s reaming the guy’s ass. I don’t speak much Italian, but I know reaming when I hear it.” He pointed at Alan. “He’s back. Now it starts.”

  “What?” a different voice said in Alan’s ear. Alan looked down at the script Dukas had given him and, translating as he went, started through it. “Signor Santangelo-Fugosi, this is Lieutenant-Commander Craik of the United States Navy. You tried to kill me, and you tried to kill my wife. You failed.”

  A new picture came on the screen.

  “This is a photograph of the room in which you are at this moment.” The laptop showed a large room, gloomy, overdecorated.

  A new picture appeared—an old man sitting by a flower garden. “This is your father, on the private terrace of the house you bought him in Taormina.” The picture changed again: a small boy sitting at a desk, photographed through a window. “This is your grandson Giancarlo in his bedroom at his school in Switzerland.” And changed again—a handsome man in his thirties, just coming out of a baroque doorway. “Your son Emilio, leaving his mistress’s apartment, where he spends each Tuesday and Thursday night.” And then to a clinical atmosphere, a medical table, a man lying on it, naked from the waist up. “You, signor, visiting your doctor in his office last Wednesday.”

  The Tomahawk missile reappeared.

  “If you ever make any move against the Navy or any of its people again, these photographs and the details of where and how they were taken will be passed at once to the command directorate of Hizbollah.

  “And what they do not finish, we will.

  “If you understand and agree, come to the terrace and wave. If you do not, these pictures and the information will be e-mailed to Hizbollah at once. They have a team standing by. It takes only the pressure of a finger on a key.”

  Soleck, who spoke no Italian, was looking from Alan to Dukas and back. Dukas put a finger to his lips and pointed up the hill. “Watch.”

  They waited. And waited.

  Dukas pressed the earpiece into his ear and listened. “They’re arguing. Somebody
’s bullshitting about omertà.” He held up a hand. “Footsteps—he’s walking—”

  A figure appeared on the terrace. Dukas whipped a pair of compact binoculars from a pocket and jammed them against his eyes. “It’s him. The big prick.”

  The figure—white shirt, dark trousers, hair almost white in the thin sun—looked out, down, away. He must have seen people in the café below him every day. Then his gaze returned to the café and he leaned forward over the balustrade.

  He waved.

  “Wave,” Dukas said.

  He waved. Alan waved. He nudged Soleck. Soleck turned all the way around and studied the small figure and, not knowing why, waved. Alan jumped to his feet. “Hey, guys—everybody—wave! Wave!”

  The small figure waved. And stopped. He looked down at them—

  a dozen unknown people waving at him. He could bomb the shit out of us, Alan thought. He leaned close to Dukas. “How many people have you got around us right now?”

  Dukas was watching the figure back away, then turn and disappear. “About thirty.” He grinned. “And Harry standing by to contact Hizbollah if Asshole does something really stupid.”

  “Yeah, but Mike, we’d be dead.”

  “The kid wanted memorable, right?” Dukas grinned and walked into the center of the party. “Next round’s on me! Everybody drink up! Hey, there any Greeks here? We need some Greek music—hey, signorina, any musica greca—huh. Balare?—huh, dance—dance?—Noi, um, voramo balare greco, okay? Ce ouzo, signorina? Ouzo—?”

  The café was in a port, so of course they had some Greek music, at least such Greek music as had made it into a movie’s album. Dukas helped carry glasses and bottles; he got people on their feet; he shouted, “Louder—turn the music louder—piu forte, piu forte!—I want them to hear it up the hill—!” Tables seemed to push themselves out of the way; plates of antipasto appeared; the music blared; and American officers and locals put their arms around each other’s shoulders under Dukas’s direction and formed a circle, moving clockwise, Dukas counting tempo and giving directions, singing, “LA-LA, la-la-la-LA-la, LA-la-la—”