Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  “Hey, Alan.” He pushed the papers away.

  “Hey, Rafe.” Craik sounded tapped out.

  “You holding up okay?”

  “We’re alive and well and living in—if it’s Tuesday, it must be Mombasa.”

  “Give me a status.”

  “Second helo lifted off half an hour ago. Ship’s Marines have secured our dock, and we’ve got the Kenyans to keep a patrol boat in the water nearby. City sounds quiet, whatever that means. We’ve got food for three days; water’s iffy. No telephone lines, no off-ship electric. SEALs tell me the ship’s forward third is on the bottom, apparently stable. Fires out. Minimum water coming in beyond the flooded compartments, but no pumps operating. Summary: we’re stable, but we’re stuck here.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s what we need to talk about. First off, the Kenyans want your Marines off the dock.”

  “Like hell.”

  “Restricted to the ship. They acknowledge the ship is U.S. territory, but the dock is theirs. You will restrict all American personnel to the ship.”

  “Rafe, Jesus—”

  “That comes straight from the ambassador, Al. He doesn’t like it; I don’t like it. But here’s the deal: the Kenyans say they have eyewitnesses plus evidence, plus maybe one of the terrorists, and we can’t see anything or talk to anybody until we give them back their dock. Period.”

  “All we’re doing is maintaining our perimeter!”

  “A Kenyan general or some such complained to the ambassador that Marines threatened Kenyan Navy personnel.”

  “Like hell. A couple of them were in the potential field of fire. We waved them off.”

  “They’re very touchy. Pull your people back.” Rafe heard Alan’s weary anger, guessed that Alan would have to deal with an even angrier Marine officer. Couldn’t be helped. “You with me?”

  “I hear and will comply.” The ironic tone was not lost on Rafe.

  “Okay. Then we gotta have an evacuation plan I can lay out for the ambassador ASAP so he can tell the Kenyans we’re ‘lessening our presence’—his words. Here’s the bad news, Al: he wants you out of there before tomorrow. You can leave ten men on the ship. It’s a done deal with the Kenyan military.”

  “What the hell is this? These guys have been busting their asses to save this ship! We can’t abandon it—”

  Rafehausen rubbed his forehead. He wanted a cigarette, and he couldn’t smoke in there. “The Kenyan view is that they’ve busted their asses to keep a mob from tearing the ship apart, and you with it. I only know what I’m told, Al. The word from the ambassador is that the Kenyan mil have arrested hundreds of people today, and they don’t want us looking over their shoulder. The hospitals are full. There’s at least forty people dead in Mombasa—that’s the official total, so it’s probably a lot more. They think they’ve got a revolution on their hands and they’re paranoid and I think the real truth is they don’t want American Marines all of a sudden coming out of that port and messing up whatever it is they’re doing.” He rubbed his eyes. “I heard Mogadishu mentioned three separate times. The Kenyans think we’re cowboys.”

  “We’re cowboys! You should see what I saw today. The Kenyans are using automatic weapons against their own people. And funny you should mention Mogadishu—that’s exactly what the Marine captain doesn’t want, too.”

  “Okay, so the sooner you get out of there, the less chance of it.”

  “Rafe, you’re telling us to, to—retreat.”

  “I’m telling you to do what’s best for the U.S. right at this particular moment.”

  “But, Jesus— All we need is a rooftop and a couple of choppers, we can do the Fall of Saigon.”

  “You want to whine, do it in a corner someplace. I want an evacuation plan—for tonight, for all but ten personnel to be restricted to the ship! Now give it to me.”

  Craik hesitated, probably dealing with his anger, Rafe thought. The guy would be pretty strung out; who wouldn’t? He’d done well, and now he was being told it didn’t matter: get out. Yeah, Rafe would have been mad, too. But when Craik’s voice came on again, emotion had been erased from it. “We’ll evacuate to the det spaces at the airport. We can’t go by sea; we don’t have the boats, and anyway we’d land someplace and still have to make our way to the airport, meaning we’d need vehicles. And we can’t just call a taxi—am I right that there’s still fighting going on?”

  “As I understand it.”

  “And you don’t want U.S. Marines shooting their way down the road to the airport—right?”

  “Yeah, yeah—”

  “Plan B. You could fly in, say, fifty Marines from the gator freighter, and enough Humvees for them and ourselves. They drive from the airport here, pick us up, and we drive back. I don’t think anybody’d stop a convoy of that size.”

  Rafehausen had been wincing. “That’s Mogadishu revisited. Negative that. Anyways, we couldn’t get all that gear to the airport before forty-eight hours, minimum, and then there’s gotta be route planning, coordination with the Kenyans—negative that. Air, Al, it’s gotta be by air.”

  “This is still a hot zone.”

  “How hot?”

  “How would I know?” Alan sounded angry again. “I can’t see beyond our dock. We can’t coordinate with the Kenyans, except the navy, and they’ve gone tough on us. For all I know, there are SAMs in every building around us, not to mention the point of land opposite Kilindini. Not to mention it’s night and we don’t have a chopper pad and you’re talking about at least two, plus they’d have to have extra fuel tanks to get here in the first place. No.”

  “They won’t need extra fuel; I’ve got your det working on fuel at the airport. They fly off from here—two SH-60s and maybe a gunship—and they fly to the airport, refuel, and come in at the same place the first choppers landed. Where’s that?”

  “End of the dock. But anybody who’s been watching knows that’s the landing place. They have it targeted by now. They don’t even need to be able to see it. No.”

  “How long since they’ve been shooting at you?”

  “We still hear shots.”

  “At you, I said.”

  Al Craik paused. “Three hours.”

  “That’s not such a hot zone.”

  “Rafe, they could be waiting for us! How do we know that the Kenyans haven’t leaked the word that we’re going to have to leave tonight?”

  “Now you’re paranoid.”

  “Yeah, come stand on this ship, you’ll be paranoid, too.” Then, almost at once, “I’m sorry I said that, Rafe. That was out of line.”

  “Understood. Okay. Your recommendation is no air evac.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We leave you there.”

  “For now, yes.”

  “Even though the ambassador has promised we’ll get you out, and the cooperation of the Kenyans depends on it.”

  Craik hesitated. Then, “Yes.”

  Rafehausen blew out his breath. “Overruled. I have to make the call, Al. Choppers will take off from here as soon as crews can scramble. EMCON throughout. Have your gunny drop lightsticks around the landing area, and it’ll be pick up and go—your people there, ready to pile in and lift off. ETA”—he squinted at a clock—“three hours and a half.”

  “I object.”

  “Noted.”

  They both waited for the other to say something. Then Craik said, “EMCON all the way is no good, Rafe. They’ll have to coordinate with the Kenyans, best do it through control at the airport, plus whatever contact you have with Kenyan military. Can you do that?”

  “It’s already been done.”

  Craik took time digesting that—a done deal. Then: “I want the right to wave them off if things go bad. I don’t want to be the one who blew away two helos and thirty people because he couldn’t tell the helos there was shooting going on.”

  “I’ll have intel set it up.”

  “That it?”

  Rafehausen felt the other man’s coldness. “We’ll g
et details to you. Al, we’ll make this work.”

  And because they were old friends and Craik had some idea of the spot Rafehausen was in, he said, “Not your fault, Rafe. Hey, my det out at the airport finally got in touch. Thanks for goosing them. Hang in there.”

  Houston.

  Rose, never good at controlling her temper, had managed to turn a growing anger into coldness. Fire into ice—not bad, she thought. She had managed not to take it out on her kids, and she thought she had managed to hide it from other people in her training sessions, but the rage she had felt in her meeting with the “education” wonk was still with her, even if chilled down. It’s so unfair, she thought and caught herself. “Fair” doesn’t get you anywhere. So maybe it was unfair that Dukas had told her to get her gun and NASA was telling her to ditch it, but so what? Maybe it was unfair that her husband was gone and she had a full plate plus two kids and a lot of unpacked household goods, but so what? Maybe it was unfair that her mother’s mind was going and her father had the burden of that, but so what? Was God laughing? Was anybody having fun yet?

  Home at last, she played with Mikey and the baby, walked the dog, got out things from the freezer that other astronauts’ wives had brought over when she’d moved in. Wives. Not the astronauts, but their wives. There were women astronauts, of course, but either they didn’t cook or they didn’t make house calls, and if they had husbands, the husbands didn’t, either.

  “We’re a family,” one of the wives had said to her. A decent, pretty, nice woman. Wife of an Air Force officer.

  “Just one big happy family,” Rose said to the dog. He thumped his big black tail on the kitchen floor. He didn’t fool her—he wanted his supper.

  After she fed him, she looked for news on the TV, found she was too early. CNN was showing the same footage, with some new clips of black mobs and military vehicles. Talking heads made serious babble. She turned it off and decided to bite the bullet and call her father.

  “How bad is she?” she said when they’d got past the greetings. Her father loved her, perhaps adored her; he couldn’t just say “Hi” and move on. He even had to sing a line of “Rosie, she is my posey,” and she knew that if he’d been in the room with her he’d have danced her around while he sang. He was a small, slender man, still kind of good-looking in his sixties, a machinist who’d gone down with the rest of Utica’s working stiffs when the factories failed, surviving now on Social Security and savings. And now he had a wife who was losing her marbles.

  “How bad is it?”

  “Well, Rosie, she’s getting on, you know. Getting to be an old lady, what the hell.”

  “Dad, how bad is it?”

  “Well—I told you, she had out my hammer and nails she got God knows where and I find her nailing up a window.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I thought it was funny, you know? I still do. I mean, funny if she isn’t your wife. Or your mother. Somebody else’s problem, it’s funny. I told you she thinks the colored are gonna get in.” He would never learn to say “African American,” usually not even “black.” On the other hand, he didn’t say “nigger,” although the word was often heard on Utica’s streets. “Then there’s little things.”

  “Such as?”

  “She cries. You know—you’ll see her sitting someplace, you think she’s just daydreaming, whatever, and you go close and she’s crying. ‘About what?’ I say. She don’t know. She looks at me like I’m the one who’s nuts because I don’t know what there is to cry about.”

  Rose chewed her lower lip. “I think I better come up there.”

  “Nah, Rosie, what’re you talking? You got kids, the job—” She could hear a smile in his voice. “My daughter the astronaut. I tell you there was an article in the paper?”

  “You told me.” Did he know about Alan? He would have said something. “You been looking at TV today, Dad?”

  “Your mother got a lock on it. She’s got her soaps, her shows—who knows what crap she watches? She sits there with her face turned toward the TV, and she cries.”

  She told him about Alan and CNN. He liked Alan, but his concern was always for her. His daughter, his Rosie, suffering the pain of a husband in danger.

  “I think I ought to come up there,” she said again.

  “Nah, Rosie, what could you do? Nah, I can handle it.”

  “I thought I’d bring the kids. Maybe they’d pull her out of it.”

  He was silent again. “It breaks your heart, kiddo.”

  “Oh, Daddy.” She understood then how bad it was.

  After she hung up, she went on the Internet to look at airplane schedules, and then she sat in front of the TV and watched the early news. She wondered if, like her mother, she should cry.

  Mombasa.

  They came up the dock in the darkness, hurrying, each man touching the back of the one ahead, trying not to slip on the rotting vegetables that should have gone to feed the BG but were now blown all over every surface. The air stank of rot and sea and burning; the night air was heavy and warm, hardly stirring. Mombasa reflected yellow-gray on the low cloud. Far up the hill, a light in the Seamen’s Mission seemed to stare down at them.

  Alan and Geelin came almost last with a Marine on each side, backing the length of the dock and covering the rear. As they moved away from the ship in the darkness, armed Kenyan sailors filled in behind them; they saw them only as shapes. “Jesus, don’t shoot,” Geelin muttered to the man on his right. He and Alan had discussed what would happen if somebody started shooting: U.S. Marines and Kenyans blasting each other with automatic weapons. It would be bad, very bad. And the Marines wanted to shoot, because they were angry and frustrated. They had left nine of their buddies and Patel and Barnes on the Harker, and the Marines believed deep down that the ones left behind were hostages as much as they were protectors of the ship. They were itching for the chance to shoot.

  The two SH-60s were down at the end of the dock, their rotors turning. A Kenyan gunship whupped along the shoreline to the south, two hundred yards out and high enough up to have a jump on anything that came at them from the shore, or at least that was the theory. It was only a sound out there, showing no lights. Alan believed that if anybody along the shore had a SAM, he’d be saving it for the SH-60s. A terrorist with a SAM probably couldn’t tell one chopper from another, but he’d know which ones had just touched down on the dock and taken on passengers, and he’d know enough to wait until they lifted off again full.

  He slipped, put his hand out to catch himself, felt the slime of something already gone bad, spinach or lettuce. Nobody slowed, nobody made any comment. He could just make out Sandy Cole’s long dress thirty feet ahead of them; she had a Marine on each side, their instructions to carry her if she stumbled or even got short of breath. Two other Marines were walking sideways, weapons ready, one scanning the water, one the ruin on the landward side.

  “Keep moving, keep moving—” he heard the gunny saying over the sound of the helicopters. “Get aboard—move your ass—” The gunnery sergeant sounded angry.

  He hit an ankle on something hard, stumbled, felt Geelin’s hand on his elbow like a pair of pliers.

  The group ahead slowed, then stopped. They had reached the helos.

  “Second chopper!” the gunny said. “Break here— Morton, you’re the last one on the forward chopper—go, Christ, what are you waiting for—?” Then, hidden behind the bodies ahead of him, the gunny began shoving people toward the second helo. “Go, go—hustle, goddamit—!”

  Against the barely lighted cloud, he saw the first helo’s rotors start to turn faster.

  In the right-hand seat of the SH-60, Lieutenant Pat Blessing of the Jefferson’s chopper squadron scanned the instrument panel, its lights in the darkness like the lights of a city from the air. The sweep was habitual—altimeter, barometric altimeter, vertical speed indicator, vert instrument display—

  Beside him, the pilot glanced out his side, then looked over. “Hanks?”

  Th
e aircrewman, seated facing out behind him, muttered, “Yo,” his voice raspy over the comm.

  “You got ’em tucked in back there?”

  “Sitting on their helmets and praying, sir.” The Marines were, indeed, sitting on their Kevlar helmets—protection from ground fire when they got into the air.

  “Okay, guys, I’m going up fifty and straight out three-zero-zero and hold on for jinks. Here we go—”

  The VSI moved and Blessing felt the aircraft rock and soar as the engine seemed to burst into its full throb and growl, and the horizon dropped as they jumped the fifty feet; to his right, the lights of a Kenyan patrol boat swung past his window. He was hitting switches and scanning the instruments, taking time to glance over his left shoulder at the aircrewman’s panel, the silhouette of Hanks’s arm and helmet.

  Then they were over the water, and Hanks, staring at the AN/AAR-47, seemed to jump, and he shouted into the comm, “Missile bloom three-three-five, three hundred yards, water level!” and the world spun as the big helo tipped hard to the right, turning its cold belly to the heat-seeker that was after it. Blessing was shouting, “Chaff and flare, goddamit—!” his fingers flying, Hanks’s hands moving to switches behind them, and they heard the thunk of the flare pods.

  Alan saw the helicopter rise, the thunder of its engine and the blast of its rotors making him duck and wince. They were shuffling forward toward the second chopper, his hand on a Marine’s back, and Geelin’s hand on Alan’s shoulder because Geelin was determined to come last. The gunny was three men ahead, pushing Marines into the blackness of the door, hectoring them.

  He looked past the dark bulk of the aircraft and saw the first helo disappear behind it and then appear again out over the water, silhouetted against that sickly sky, and then a line of fire was drawn from the shore to his left out over the water, and he felt his gut drop as he recognized a missile. The chopper tilted violently right, its belly seeming to burst with light, and he thought it had been hit, but the missile was still away to the left, moving over the water, drawing its pencil streak of fire longer and longer. The flares burst into hot light, and the missile’s pencil line became an S-curve as it found heat, then other heat, and the curve became a wiggle, and the missile twisted in an agony of indecision and blew up.