Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  Now Martin Craw came toward them, a little grin on his face as he took in both Alan and Laura, hand outstretched.

  “Laura, I want you to meet the best master chief in the U.S. Navy. Martin, this is Laura Sweigert, who just brought a kilo of white powder through Kenyatta arrivals.”

  “Ma’am.” Craw was in his early forties but seemed an ancient to Alan because of his great, quiet authority. His grin, however, and his quick appraisal of Laura were not an old man’s. “How’d you do that?”

  Laura rocked back a little and smiled at him. “I think it was the T-shirt.”

  Craw reddened only a little. “Kinda dangerous.” He didn’t make clear whether he meant the T-shirt or the white powder. Craw was from Maine.

  She made a sound that pooh-poohed the idea. “Hell’s bells, Craik brought through a goddamned gun!”

  “Not so loud—”

  “And bullets!”

  “Laura, hey—”

  She held up her hands. “Okay, okay.” Her fingernails, like her toenails, were painted a glittery red. Her lipstick was pink, her eyeshadow violet, her hair a mousy brown that you ignored because it was gelled to look as if she’d just got very, very wet. “Entirely legit,” she said. “We’re testing airport security for NCIS.”

  “I figured.” Craw grinned. He jerked his head at Alan. “He’s always legit.”

  Laura made a face. “So I’m discovering.” She put a hand through Craw’s arm. “What are your plans for the next couple of days, sailor?” Alan, caused abruptly to see Craw through her eyes, realized that the senior chief was a damned good-looking man.

  Craw saw Alan’s look, blushed. “I’m goin’ to be working for Mister Craik.”

  Alan bent and picked up his helmet bag, which held the H&K. “You want to bring me up to date, Chief? Like, um, what you’re doing here?” He had last seen Craw on board the USS Thomas Jefferson a week ago, when he had had to fly back to CONUS to be deposed for a national-security case.

  With Laura leaning against him, Craw explained that he had flown into Mombasa the evening before from the CV to set up the U.S. hangar there as their home base while they shore-deployed. “Orders from the CAG.” He raised his free hand, which held a black attaché case.

  “Yeah, I know, I got ’em, too. But I didn’t expect to be met at Nairobi.”

  “Thought I could brief you flying back to Mombasa. The admiral’s goin’ to inspect us tomorrow.” Again he gestured with the attaché case. “Got some paperwork—”

  “What the hell, we just got here!”

  “Well, he’s makin’ a shore visit, so it’s some ship today, us tomorrow.”

  That changed the price of fish. What he and Laura had just done—moving illicit items through airport security for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service—was a peripheral responsibility, a test of local conditions that would become part of a report. He had treated it as a game; however, with this return to the realities of his detachment, the pleasures of the game faded and the serious trivia of Navy life took over.

  They began moving away from the arrivals area. “What’s our space like down there?”

  “Kinda filthy. One of the old air force hangars at Mombasa airport. Not been used for a while—dust, gear missin’—been a lotta thievin’, I’d guess. I put everybody to cleanin’ up, but the place is big—room for a couple P-3s in there and to spare, if you had to.”

  They were walking toward the Air Kenya desk now to start the flight to Mombasa. “How many personnel?”

  “Aircrew for one plane plus seventeen—other plane comin’ in a few days.”

  “Staying where?”

  “Nyali International.” American military, like government people, got put up in the big international hotels on the beach because they were supposed to be more secure than hotels in Mombasa itself. “But I told ’em, you boys just plan to be in this hangar nonstop till the admiral’s blown through, then I’ll get you some rack time. They’re all good boys.”

  They were, Alan thought; they were all good boys now, although when he and Craw had first encountered them some months before, they had been pretty bad boys. Detachment 424 was a one-shot unit put together to test-drive a 3-D radar-imaging system called MARI, and it had been almost run into extinction by its acting officer-in-charge before Alan and Craw and a few others had been able to shape it up. Now deployed with the Jefferson in the Indian Ocean, it had been ordered to fly off to Mombasa for two weeks as an advance party for a visit by the entire battle group.

  “Give me a rundown.”

  The men on the dhow smelled Mombasa before they saw it—a dustier air, car exhaust, garbage, people. The dark man raised his binoculars but couldn’t penetrate the haze; Mombasa is a low city, anyway, most of its seafront masked by trees, and the dhow was still well out, although in the shipping lane so as to seem as much a part of normal traffic as it could. Other dhows and rusty merchant ships had passed them going the other way; once, a sparkling-white Kenyan Coast Guard ship had approached and the men had tensed, but it had passed without hailing.

  The dark man gestured toward the deeper haze of Mombasa. “We go on past the city. Kilindini Harbor is beyond. Tell Simoum that he and the crew can take to the boat once he has sailed us into Kilindini.”

  The other man—paler, nervous—squatted in front of him, holding out the tools as if they were an offering. “Haji, I am ashamed—I am losing my, my—I want to go with them.”

  The dark man shook his head. His face was severe, but his voice was kind. “Pray. You will be with me in paradise. God is great.”

  The other man began to weep.

  They talked business, then a few personal things, then a little scuttlebutt, Laura laughing with them. When they got to talking about individuals in the det, Craw laughed—a loud, staccato sound, like a series of backfires—and said, “You know what Mister Soleck did now?”

  Alan prepared himself. LTjg Soleck was their idiot savant, their divine fool. He had once managed to miss their departure from CONUS and then spend three days catching up with them because, as he had said quite frankly, there had been a bookstore he had had to visit.

  “What’s Soleck?” Laura said.

  “My cross,” Alan groaned. “A good kid, but a royal screwup—when he isn’t being brilliant.”

  “He’s a doozer,” Craw said.

  “So what’d he do?” Alan had a vision of a wrecked aircraft.

  “He was trolling for fish from the stern of the carrier.”

  “The fantail?”

  “No, sir, the CIWS mount.” Craw pronounced it “cee-wiz”—the cee-wiz mount. “Somebody saw him and told me and I didn’t believe it, so I went down and there he was, with a gawd-dam spinnin’ rod, just standin’ there like he was bass fishin’. And the CV makin’ better’n twenty knots!”

  “Well—” He looked at Laura. “Soleck is a little, mm, eccentric. He didn’t do anything really, um, stupid, did he?” He had a terrible thought. “He didn’t fall overboard, did he?”

  “No, sir. But he caught a fish! A gawd-dam big fish! Which he carried by hand all the way to the galley so’s they could cook it for his dinner.” Craw’s smile became small, almost evil. “And not just his dinner.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He didn’t.”

  “Yes, sir. Direct to the flag deck, courtesy of LTjg Soleck and Detachment 424.”

  Laura guffawed. They were having a beer now in a crowded bar near the departure lounge. She leaned back to laugh, and conversation in the bar died.

  “Was it—edible?”

  “It was gawd-dam delicious! Some big red fish I never saw before, spines on it like a cactus, but it cut like steak and tasted like tuna. Admiral said it was the best fish he ever ate!”

  Alan let out a sigh of relief. “That’s okay, then.”

  “Well, no. Next day, twenty guys was fishin’ there, and the day after, forty, so the ship’s captain put it out of bounds and sent a memo specially to
Mister Soleck, telling him to stop having good ideas.”

  Alan sighed. “I suppose I got a copy.”

  “Yes, sir. Ship’s captain would like a word with you when you’re back aboard.”

  Alan nodded. Right. One week away in Washington, back one hour, and he was going to be up to his ass in Mickey Mouse. Welcome to the U.S. Navy. He flexed his hands and glanced down to where the fingers should have been. Welcome to the U.S. Navy.

  Then they were moving down the ramp toward the aircraft that would take them to Mombasa. “Don’t worry,” Craw said softly. “Everything’ll be fine.”

  “Right.”

  “We’ll make things shipshape for the admiral, then we got two weeks on the beach to relax.”

  “Right.”

  Alan didn’t tell Craw that he had a set of orders that would keep them busy for longer than two weeks, or that his orders had a secret addendum that gave him the responsibility for assessing the consequences if the United States and the UN went back into Somalia. He was returning not only to assess Mombasa as a port of call but to gather information for a war.

  The dhow anchored in Kilindini Roads. Ten minutes after she swung to rest on her anchor cable, a boat put over, and six men motored away for the distant shore. On the dhow, the dark man was standing by the landward side, peering through his binoculars. A distant gray vessel was barely visible in the haze at dockside, but he studied it for some minutes, then turned to the only two men left on the dhow with him.

  “Now,” he said. “Bring the detonator.”

  Over the Indian Ocean.

  LTjg Evan Soleck was worried.

  The S-3 in whose right-hand seat he rode was mostly older than he was, but that wasn’t what worried him. They were flying at twenty-three thousand feet, two hundred miles from the carrier, and the gauge for the starboard fuel tank wasn’t registering, but that wasn’t what worried him. The man in the left-hand seat was a lieutenant-commander and hated his guts, but that didn’t worry him, either.

  What worried Soleck was that in three days he was going to make lieutenant, and he didn’t know what he was going to do about a wetting-down party. It was tradition that you gave a party for your shipmates for a promotion, and you wet down the new bars with the most drinkable stuff available. Not giving a party wasn’t an option. Soleck had heard a story about a new jg in a squadron—nobody ever said what squadron it was, but everybody swore it was true—who had refused to give a party, and his CO had sent him away every weekend for months—courier duty, bullshit trips, hand-carried messages—until he broke and gave a party at last, and nobody went. Soleck couldn’t imagine that degree of isolation. You’d be frozen right out of a squadron. A pariah. He’d kill himself.

  So he had to give a party. But it had to be just right. Really phat. Something they’d tell stories about long after he’d been ordered someplace else. So that when he was, let’s say, an old guy—a commander, a squadron CO, even—the nuggets would stare at him and nudge each other and say “The Old Man’s the one that gave a party so cool that—” That what? There was the problem.

  “You take it?” the man beside him said.

  Soleck snapped out of it. “Yes, sir!”

  LCDR Paul Stevens was a difficult man. He didn’t like Soleck, the jg knew, because Soleck hero-worshipped Alan Craik, their CO, and Stevens and Craik didn’t get along. What Soleck didn’t understand was that Stevens never would have liked him anyway, because Soleck was an optimist and a doer and a happy guy, and Stevens went through life with his own personal cloud raining on him all the time. Now he scowled at the much younger man and sneered, “You awake?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Stevens grunted. They had both been put up for the Air Medal for flying into a war zone seven weeks ago to pull out Craik and an NCIS agent and a spy they’d captured, and they’d flown back out with two Chinese aircraft pissing missiles at them and had lived to tell about it—but was Stevens happy? No. He’d done brilliantly, evading missiles with the slow, fat S-3, hoarding fuel long past the gauges’ limit, getting two wounded men back to the CV in time to get the blood they needed. But was he happy? No. All he’d said was “That trip gets me O-5 and a medal, and I’m goddamned if I ever do anything that stupid again.” The talk before had been that Stevens would get passed over for commander and would have to leave the Navy, but now he’d made O-5 and got a medal, and he remained as sour as a ripe lemon, a weight on the entire detachment.

  “I need to take a piss,” he was saying. “Keep it level on 270 if you can manage it—you’re already three goddamn points off.”

  Soleck started to object, then shut up. “Anything you say, sir.”

  “Yeah, I bet.”

  Stevens headed for the tunnel. Alone in the front end, Soleck brought the S-3 back on course and ran through the things he might have said. He knew what Stevens’s beef was: when Craik had taken over the det several months ago, Stevens had been acting CO and things had been a shambles. Craik had whipped them into a first-class outfit; then, with Craik home on convalescent leave after the wild ride out of Pakistan, Stevens had been made acting CO again, and the CAG had been right on his ass the whole time to keep him up to the mark. The CAG was Craik’s personal friend, Captain Rafehausen. “His asshole buddy,” Stevens had sneered. Yeah, well, I admire both of them a hell of a lot more than I admire you, Stevens, Soleck said inside his head. You don’t even have a friend! Mister Craik gave you the chance that got you the medal and your fucking O-5, and you’re not even grateful! The trouble with you, Stevens, is that you’re—

  He was what? Soleck was too young, too inexperienced, to know that there are people incapable of happiness. He thought that Stevens was lazy, but he also wondered if Stevens was actually afraid of failure: better not to try than to fail.

  Which brought him back to the wetting-down party: would he have to invite Stevens?

  He slid into a reverie about a private banquet room somewhere, maybe champagne—champagne, really? Did aviators even like champagne?—well, booze, certainly. And women. He didn’t know what kind of women or how he’d get them, but they’d remember a party with women, wouldn’t they? And a theme. Something Navy—maybe a few musicians playing Navy stuff—

  “Jeez, you’re on course.” Stevens dropped back into the left-hand seat. “You get any reading on that gas gauge?”

  “No, sir.”

  They were flying in tandem with the det’s other S-3, running MARI scans on surface ships in the Aden-India sea-lane. Slowly, they were building a library of computer-stored images, and someday, when a classification system evolved, you’d be able to bring an unknown contact up on MARI, and the computer would scan the data banks and give you an ID. Great stuff, but this part of it was really tedious.

  “Sir—” Soleck began.

  Stevens ducked his bullish head as if prepared for a blow. “Yeah?”

  Soleck swallowed. “Sir, what did you do for a wetting-down party when you made lieutenant? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  Stevens stared at him. He hunched his shoulders, shook himself deeper into the seat and put his hands on the con. “I got it.” Stevens looked away from him then, checking the gauges, doing a quick visual check out the windows. He was the best pilot in the det, maybe the best on the carrier, you had to give him that. Why was he such a prick?

  “I bought everybody a beer at the O Club. That’s what everybody does.” He started to say something else and then thought better of it, but his tone had been kinder than Soleck had ever heard. Soleck wanted to say something more but could think of nothing. The moment passed, and when Stevens next looked at him, it was the old, sour face he turned. “Forty minutes to turnback. Call Preacher and tell them section’s forty from RTF, right tank uncertain, but estimate fuel okay to touch down.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Soleck decided then that he’d have to ask Mister Craik. He wouldn’t see him for some days—the word was they’d fly off to Mombasa within the week—and then, when they were m
ore or less alone sometime, he’d just ask him. The way he’d asked Stevens. Craik would know. He’d know if women or music or goddamn fireworks were in order. Or if he should just buy everybody a beer and let it go.

  But what would be memorable about that?

  USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inbound Channel, Straits of Gibraltar.

  “You know Al Craik?” asked a lieutenant-commander in a rumpled flight suit. He wore an old leather flight jacket against the forty-knot wind that blew through the Straits of Gibraltar. He was short, compact, and thin-faced, and the pocket of his flight jacket, embroidered in the blue and gold of VS-53, said “Narc.”

  “Never met him. But I went through AOCS with his wife. Rose Siciliano then. Man, she’s a tough chick. Great pilot, too.” He grinned at the memory and turned to look up at Narc as he descended the ladder from the O-3 level to the hangar deck. He, too, wore a flight suit and a jacket, only his was embroidered with the black and white of chopper squadron HS-9. It said “Skipper Van Sluyt.” They were both officers in the same air wing: CAG 14, six days away from transiting the Suez Canal to relieve the USS Thomas Jefferson off Africa.

  Narc nodded. “She’s at NASA, going to fly the shuttle.”

  “No shit? Well, good work if you like that sort of thing.” Skipper Van Sluyt started down the ladder again.

  Narc followed him down, surprised. “What, the publicity?” Narc did like that sort of thing. He had an Air Medal of which he was very proud.

  “Yeah, Narc. That and the ever-present corporate—” Van Sluyt had turned his head, perhaps wondering if his anti-NASA speech was going to have the right effect on Narc the Navy Yuppie, when the carrier hit the crosscurrent at the entrance to the Mediterranean. Ninety-five thousand tons of carrier are not easily moved, but the constant flow of water between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic creates something like a wall. The great ship gave a lurch, and Skipper Van Sluyt’s feet jerked out from under him. He fell down the rest of the ladder, his tailbone breaking on the second to last step and his collarbone at the bottom. As he said later to his wife, “That’s what you get for bad-mouthing NASA.”