Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  They all started to talk at once. Dukas let them go for half a minute, then shut them up and said again that they had to think seriously about their families, and then he told them that they also had to think seriously about Mombasa and Cairo and what might be coming next. “We’re reeling, folks. We’re reacting, not acting. Somebody else is pulling the strings, and we’re doing the Oh-My-God tap dance just as fast as we can and we’re reeling. We’re also exhausted. I want to hear any good ideas and then I want us to all go to bed and get some fucking sleep. Anybody? Anybody got an idea?”

  Triffler looked at Dukas, cocked his head as if to ask permission, and said, “Muezzin calls. That’s the call to prayer you hear five times a day from a mosque. I got files from the computer of the guy who killed the American woman this morning, and they were full of muezzin calls. Anybody got a take on that?”

  Keatley scowled. “I thought there was just one call. Like a song. Everyplace the same call.”

  “No, no, every muezzin’s different. Like cantors, right? I suppose a guy could be a collector of muezzin calls, an aficionado, but this guy was also a killer who was deep in the bombing, so I look for hidden meaning. Anybody?”

  “Signal?” Geraldine said.

  Hahn muttered, “Code?”

  Keatley growled, “Could you set off a bomb with one?”

  “What else was in the computer?” Mendelsohn said.

  Triffler shook his head. “They’ll analyze it in D.C. It’s all in Arabic, which is Greek to me. Well, I just thought the muezzin thing might strike a chord with somebody. Sorry.”

  Dukas looked around at them. Geraldine was asleep. “Time for bed,” he said.

  And there was a knock on the door.

  Everybody except Geraldine went for a gun; she opened her eyes, looked toward the door, but didn’t move. Keatley was on his feet first. “Shall I—?” He was already at the door but standing out of any line of fire from the outside, a 1911 Colt in his right hand, safety off. Triffler was off the bed and leaning back against the wall, a sleek Sig .380 in his hand; Hahn and Mendelsohn were crouched at the other side of the room, their guns out. Geraldine stayed on the bed.

  “Yeah?” Dukas called.

  “FBI.”

  They looked at each other. Keatley shook his head. He motioned Triffler to the other side of the door and put his left hand on the knob. Dukas went past him, putting a hand on his arm to tell him to go slow. Dukas stood by the peephole in the center of the door and leaned forward, knowing that if the wrong people were on the other side, he would die of a battering ram of bullets fired through the door. It was metal, but not armor.

  He looked through the peephole.

  A sallow face looked back. Covering part of the chin was a leather case with a gold badge and an FBI ID card. Dukas read it with great care and stepped back between the beds and knelt, aiming his .357 at the door. He nodded to Keatley.

  “Jesus Christ.” The moan came from the man with the badge when the door opened. He was looking at the guns that were pointed at him. “Don’t shoot the fucking messenger!” he shouted. “I’m FBI! Jesus!”

  “Who’s with you?”

  Another body interposed itself. “I am.”

  He was big, blond, sunburned, and unpleasant, one of those people who see no point in being nice when nasty will do just as well. “Get out,” he said.

  Dukas stood. “What the hell does that mean?”

  The guy came in and stood inches from Dukas. “That means you’re in a place where you’re not supposed to be.” He flipped a pale blue envelope out of an inner pocket so that the free end bounced on Dukas’s clavicle. “These are orders to proceed to Mombasa now. Do not pass go. Do not collect your laundry. Do take your get-out-of-Cairo-free card. Beat it. Capeesh?”

  “Who the fuck are you?”

  “I’m the guy who’s telling you you’re outta here. Go!” He bounced the blue envelope. “You’re booked on the seven A.M. flight. Don’t piss, don’t moan, don’t call your boss—this comes from the top. The top. Get it?”

  Dukas looked down at the envelope. In the upper left-hand corner it said, The White House, Washington, D.C.

  Houston.

  Rose decided it was stupid to wait any longer, and, because she couldn’t get Dukas, she called Alan. And got no answer on his cell phone, either. Then she spent a half hour going the long way around to get the short way home—a contact at the Pentagon to get to an office in Norfolk to get a direct line to Rafe Rafehausen on the Jefferson to get them to set up a secure link with Alan’s det in Mombasa.

  They’d call her back when they had him on.

  Meaning that she had to put the phone in the cradle so he could call her. Meaning that every other asshole in the world could call her. And did.

  The connection was poor, and the STU made his voice sound as if he was talking through a toy trumpet in a windstorm. Still, it was his voice, and her heart lurched and she put her forehead against the wall and felt her throat constrict.

  “Rose? Rose? Rose, it’s Alan.”

  She swallowed the ball of feeling in her throat. “I know.”

  “How are you? My God, I’ve been so worried—when I heard—” His voice was ragged with fatigue, blurry, a voice that had just waked up and was trying to talk through emotional pain.

  She pulled her forehead off the cool of the wall and stood straight, her eyes fixed on the blankness of painted plasterboard where it had rested. “I’m fine and the kids are fine and Bloofer’s probably going to make it.”

  “Rose, if anything happened to you—”

  “Facts now. Feelings later.” She forced emotion back into its hole. “If I start to feel, darling, I’ll explode.”

  He was silent. The wind whistled in the STU. He said, “I love you.”

  “Yes. I know. Yes. More than—anything.” Emotion came scrambling up, trying to get out, trying to leap around the room and shout, and she said, “Facts.” She swallowed, focused. “The guys who tried to kill me had three cell phones. The police and Valdez think two of them are one-day phones. For calling whoever made it happen, right? Valdez thinks he can rig one so NSA can track it and we can find out who hired them to kill me. It has to be connected to what you’re doing. Doesn’t it?”

  “Families of every man who’s with me are being given protection because of what happened to you,” he said. “They damned well better be protecting you.”

  “I’ve got two cops and two NCIS gunslingers. What do you think of Valdez’s idea?”

  “I just—” He was fighting his own battle with feelings. It took him a while. Then: “How would he do it?”

  “No idea; he says it’s feasible. But we have to move really fast—the phones probably have only twenty-four hours each, and we don’t know when the twenty-four hours start.”

  “NSA, Jesus—they’re more inscrutable than the Chinese. It would have to come from the top.”

  “Local cops say the phones are evidence and they won’t give them up. But Valdez says he’s got to have a phone because there may be a recognition code in the chip.”

  “Wait one.” The wind whistled and her heart ached. She didn’t want to be talking about cell phones and danger. She wanted to be lying in bed with him, holding each other. Let me feel, she thought, and then, No—later. He said, “Okay, here’s what you do. Call Ted Kasser at NCIS Washington. He’s the director’s deputy—Dukas’s boss’s boss. He knows me, or he’s met me. Tell him what you need and what the time limit is. Tell him you have to get the cell phone away from the local cops, meaning that there will have to be a custody trail. Is one of your NCIS folks a special agent?”

  “Yes, Reko—a woman—she’s a Limited Duty Officer special agent.”

  “Okay, tell Kasser he has to lean on the local cops. You got a name there?”

  “Yes, DaSilva, nice guy, he—”

  “Kasser leans on him to turn the phone over to your special agent so there’s a custody trail. She’ll know what that means. Then you have to
get the phone to Valdez. Or he flies out there. How long a trip is that? Six hours—two to four to make a reservation and get to Dulles— Christ, that’s a loss of ten hours right there—”

  “I’ll worry about that. Ted Kasser. Okay. Then I get the phone to Valdez; he works his magic; will NSA follow up if it works?”

  “Ask Kasser that.”

  “It’s important, isn’t it?”

  “It could be the ball game.”

  “Or it could be nothing.”

  “I love you.”

  “Well—that’s the ball game.” She smiled at the blank wall. “I love you, and you’re everything to me, and I’m going to give the phone to Mikey and get on with saving the world. You take care.”

  He, too, might have had something in his throat. “You, too.”

  She put Mikey on and heard the monosyllabic discourse of a seven-year-old: “Hi,” “No,” “Yes,” and then the inevitable, “Some guys tried to kill us.” Sounding as affectless as she had tried to. She stood behind him and held his shoulders, and when he was done he passed the phone up to her and she said “I love you” and ended the call, and Mikey buried his face in her and held on. She stroked his head. “Sometimes,” she said, “bad things happen and we just have to live through them.”

  She put the buzzing phone on the table and went looking for Warrant Officer Reko, whom she found taking a break in the kitchen, Coke in hand. “I need to phone NCIS Washington, most urgent. Also secure. What do I do?”

  Reko looked surprised but hesitated only a fraction of a second. “Who you want there?”

  “Ted Kasser.”

  Reko’s eyebrows went up, but she passed Rose in a rush and was at the phone. Less than a minute later, she said, “They’re trying to find him. You want to wait?”

  “Definitely.”

  “I used your name. I wanted to move things along.”

  “He doesn’t know me.”

  “Commander, after this morning, everybody in the Navy knows your name.”

  Kasser got to the phone six minutes later. He did, indeed, know who she was, and he asked how she was and how the kids were, and he endeared himself to her by asking about the dog. “How did you know?” she said.

  “I’d say we know everything, but in fact I heard it from Mike Dukas’s assistant, who apparently has been watching CNN since it happened.” He had a deep voice, perhaps an old one, she thought; it had a roughness, a kind of scratchiness. But it was a good voice.

  “I need your clout,” she said.

  She told him everything.

  “I’ve met your husband,” he said. “He’s a friend of Dukas’s. Kind of a gunner.”

  “You could say that.”

  “You think this phone thing could really work?”

  “My computer guy says yes. But NSA is vital. They’ve gotta be on board.”

  “Okay.” He paused as if he was making notes. “Put the LDO special agent on.”

  “Warrant Officer Reko, yessir. One moment.”

  Reko held the phone against her ear and nodded. And nodded. She said “Yes, sir” five times. Then she held the phone out to Rose. “He wants you again, ma’am.”

  “As I understand it, your man has to have this phone in his hand.”

  “That’s the way I understand it, too.”

  “How you going to bring the two together in time?” Before she could speak, he said, “If I hear you right, the window is twenty-four hours and the clock is running. Yes?”

  “Yes, sir. Commercial air is nine or ten hours minimum. But, uh—” She thought about her children, the rough time that Mikey must be having since the attack. Didn’t they put kids with counselors, even shrinks, when this happened? And she was about to suggest that she leave her kids behind. “Um, well, if an F-18 could be made available, I could, uh, fly it myself. I’d have to refuel someplace—”

  “You’re F-18 capable?”

  “I’ve been flying them getting ready for astronaut training.”

  “In-air refueling?”

  “Well, I’ve done it—” She gulped. “But it would mean leaving my kids, and I—they were with me and had a rough time—I don’t know—”

  “The Navy has other pilots.”

  She hesitated, then blurted out, “I want to do it. I want to help my husband.”

  “Stand by.” He must have covered the telephone then, because there was nothing but the stormy silence of the STU. Then his voice was back. “I need to clear this at ONI and put somebody on it there. What’s your active-duty status?”

  “I was put on leave. And told to get myself to the Space Center and stay there.”

  Kasser was quiet for about three seconds and then he laughed, but without humor. “Let me see what I can do about that. You keep your phone clear, because you’re going to get a lot of calls.”

  That was easier said than done, but the media appetite was perhaps wearing off. Or maybe they were focused on the press conference that was supposed to take place at Johnson at five. At any rate, the calls got through.

  At four-seventeen, a Navy captain called from the Pentagon to say that an F-18 would be flown from NAS Corpus Christi to Ellington Field for her use.

  At four-nineteen, Reko was told to stand by to sign for and secure a package from the Houston police.

  At four twenty-one, DaSilva called to ask her what the hell the Navy was trying to pull.

  “It’s important, Sergeant.”

  “Yeah, ‘national security,’ I got the lecture. You’re pulling rank on me, Commander—I got my goddamn lieutenant shaking in his boots because our chief gets a direct call from the White House! You people are endangering evidence in an important case!”

  “It’s important to us, too. It’s really important.”

  “So is justice in Houston, Texas.” He didn’t sound friendly anymore. “Okay, I’m sending out the cell phones—over my stiff objections!—but we keep the plastic sleeves because they have fingerprints on them.” His voice dropped, now that he had accepted the inevitable. “We going to get these back?”

  She had her brain back together sufficiently to think about what he’d said. “I think NCIS will want the fingerprints, too.”

  “Then let them ask for them.”

  “How about the phones? Did you check the phones inside the plastic sleeves? For fingerprints?”

  “No, that would never occur to us.”

  “I don’t mean to patronize you.”

  “Okay, so you can do it without meaning to. It’s a skill, right? Look, Commander, you did a hell of a thing this morning, and you behaved in a stand-up way. But I know my job, okay?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Tell your NCIS people to ask us nicely for the prints. We dusted everything—phones, sleeves, the works—as a matter of course because we’re professionals and Houston isn’t really Mayberry RFD. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “So I ask again—we going to get the phones back?”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “I suppose you can’t tell me what’s really going on.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, too.”

  She heard him hesitate, as if maybe he was going to say something like “How sorry?” That might lead back to the personal, but he let it go and said, “Yeah,” and hung up.

  At four twenty-five, a female commander called from the Pentagon to say that her orders had been amended from “leave” to “special duty” with NCIS Washington, report soonest to responsible authority.

  At four-thirty, a squadron exec from Corpus Christi called with her flight plan from Ellington to Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, with refueling by an Air National Guard tanker out of Memphis. “You’ll be met at Andrews, I was told to say, by a car with driver, and you’ll know where to go, that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have a good flight. And please be nice to our airplane.”

  Then life sped up and two police cars parked, blocking the driveway
even more, and two cops came up to the door, and Reko signed for a sealed package they handed over. Phone calls came in for both NCIS people, and then Gorki told her that he and Reko would be bringing her kids to Washington right behind her on commercial air and they would meet in the morning. “My understanding is you may be there a little while. People upstairs figure you want the kids.”

  And they also figure I don’t want to be under house arrest at Johnson, she thought. She got Reko and Gorki to sit down in the living room while she told them what Mikey liked and didn’t like. The baby was too young to know what was happening, but Mikey had had a brief moment of panic when Rose had told him that she was leaving. Gorki had two kids, he said; Reko said they’d take special care. Rose brought Mikey in and explained it all to him, holding his shoulders and looking into his worried, too-young face.

  “This is for Dad?” he said.

  “Maybe it’ll end what happened to us and what’s happening to him.”

  “Okay.” He glanced at Reko and Gorki. “I’ll see you in the morning?”

  “Absolutely. And then maybe we’ll go see Gran and Nana, okay?”

  He liked her father. He’d spent a lot of his life with her father, in fact.

  “I wish we lived like other kids,” he said.

  She held him, tears in her eyes. The Navy has other pilots, Kasser had said. But they weren’t married to her husband. And she couldn’t sit with her hands folded and do nothing.

  For which her child paid.

  Then she was collecting flying gear and kissing Mikey and listening to the vet say that Bloofer was groggy but coming out of it, and the last thing she did was call Valdez and tell him she was on the way with the goods, to which he said, “I know.”

  “How the hell do you know?”

  Laughter. “Man, I got more Navy people on me right now than the Constitution. I’m being taken to NSA. You, too. I talked to your guy DaSilva in Houston. He thinks you walk on water, he tell you that? So he gave me the number showing on the cell phone those guys used today. A number in the Cayman Islands.”

  “But I— That doesn’t make any sense.”