Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  “Sure it does. It’s just a pass-through. From there, the call could go to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, you name it. NSA already has the pass-through ID’d in the Caymans. I talked to a guy over there is hot to trot on the rest. They love it. Big challenge!”

  “Is your magic going to work?”

  “Two more frogs and a psychedelic mushroom and I think I got it.”

  Then she was in a military car with a driver, and then she was in the cockpit of an F-18, and then she was cutting a line through chill air at forty thousand feet.

  USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inport Haifa, Israel.

  Narc was first in line for the liberty boat, an evolution he had perfected as a junior officer and which now seemed too damned easy as a lieutenant-commander, but habits were habits. He blasted through his paperwork, recommended everyone in his department for promotion, and left it to the skipper to make the tough calls about who wouldn’t make the cut. That gave him an hour on most other officers, so he scammed a cheap sci-fi novel from the squadron intel officer (No Al Craik, he thought in passing) and headed down to the hangar bay where the line would form for the beach. He was so early that he seemed out of place in his clean Gap khakis and his polo shirt, and he didn’t want to sit anywhere and risk getting the omnipresent black grease-soot mixture on his trousers, so he went out to the fantail and scammed the seat that would eventually belong to the senior Shore Patrol officer.

  Last liberty before the Indian Ocean, he thought. Time to party. He wanted to get this cruise done and get back to real life with a squadron. He had a mental image of the folks on the Jefferson getting ready to transit the canal the other way, toward home. Just doing the turnover with them would be a major evolution. He opened the book and tried to tune it all out.

  The sci-fi novel wasn’t cheap enough and seemed determined to inflict both plot and character on Narc, who resented it and thumbed along rapidly, looking for action. Jesus, the thing’s like Dune, he thought. Everyone thinks that’s great, too. As the novel didn’t grab him, he found himself looking around idly, watching the first enlisted men and women arrive to form a separate line on the port side of the fantail. He speculated about the first man to show in the opposite line. What job did he gun-deck to get here so fast? He watched an IS1 from the intel center flirting openly with a chief from his squadron’s admin and shook his head. Trouble with a capital T. Narc wasn’t always at the head of the ethics class, but he drew his own line at fraternization. He’d seen how it could bite folks in the ass.

  The port of Haifa, Israel had started to envelop the carrier, so that buildings began to appear beyond the fantail on the starboard side. Narc got out of his purloined chair and leaned carefully against the rail so that he could see the shore. Haifa looked like every other Mediterranean port, with a lot of low, white buildings, dirty streets, and too many people, but it was prosperous compared to Egypt. You could see it in the cars and the lack of a shantytown. Israel hid its shantytowns in the occupied territories. He shrugged.

  Off the starboard side, a big ferry left one of the piers and started toward the carrier, which had yet to lose her weigh or pick up her buoy and anchor. Narc watched the pier for a moment and realized it had to be the beachhead for the liberty boat, as it was already thick with both Israeli and U.S. security. The attack in Mombasa had made the Navy cautious. For the second time in an hour, he thought of Al Craik, still stuck in Mombasa, and thought of all the crap his old shipmate had apparently endured in one cruise, and how pissed off he must be to be stuck on the beach when his carrier was about to go home.

  The big ferry had a bow wave as she plowed the water toward the carrier, which was just in the tricky process of picking up her buoy. Narc couldn’t see them, but he knew that, well forward, a party of bosun’s mates were doing the real deal, hauling chains and dropping anchor in a manner that Nelson would have understood, despite the technology that drove every other aspect of the huge ship. Somewhere above him, a fairly senior officer would be sweating the process of maneuvering the monster through the congested confines of the port. Better him than me, Narc told the bridge silently. He hadn’t liked any part of driving a ship at AOCS and he didn’t plan to go that way in his career.

  He felt the gentle change as the ship took up slack on the buoy and then settled again. Somehow, there was more motion at anchor, not less. He looked across the sun-dazzled sea to the liberty boat that was now slowing as it made a curve to approach the platform being rigged at the stern of the ship. Narc could see that the boat was early and wondered for a moment if it could be carrying a bomb. It wasn’t a panicked thought but an idle one, as he noted that the boat was virtually empty and tried to imagine how such a boat could be employed. But then one of the stewards on the boat waved up at him and he saw there were several more behind him, all wearing red waiters’ jackets. Narc couldn’t bring himself to believe that a dozen men would commit suicide together in silly red coats, so he waved back and started down the ladder from the fantail to the platform.

  The chop even in the harbor was enough to make the last ladder rise and fall five feet with each wave, but Narc had years of experience on liberty boats and he waited his moment and jumped to the platform. The big ferry was closer now and Narc thought she still had too much weigh on her. His opinion was a professional one. Every aviator endures years of commanding liberty boats as part of the duties of being a junior officer. He had commanded boats in Fort Lauderdale and Naples, Toulon and Antibes and even Haifa, and he knew that the hired ferry was going too damned fast.

  “He’s going to hit us,” Narc said aloud. There was only a small party on the platform, because the liberty boat wasn’t due for fifteen minutes and liberty wouldn’t even open for half an hour. The chief petty officer in charge seemed pained, then looked over his shoulder and his eyes widened. “Shit,” he said.

  “Everybody off the platform. Off!” Narc bellowed. He pushed a sailor up the first steps and grabbed another by the collar. “Off! Now!”

  The chief made a leap for the ladder and caught it, and there was no time for Narc to wait for the uproll. He jumped after, hooked an arm through the chains, and got his feet under him in a scramble that pulled every muscle in his lower back. Then he pounded up the ladder after the rest of the sailors as the ferry annihilated the platform behind him and plunged on like a shark seeking his blood. The whole carrier moved and he heard a noise like a bell sounding. The ladder-well distorted, and Narc was sure he was dead, crushed by a wall of metal, and then he heard metal tearing and watched as the deck above him ripped away from the ladder-well like paper, rivets exploding off the failed seam and ricocheting around him like bullets. One hit him in the shoulder and numbed it, and another hit his hand. One of the sailors screamed.

  Then they were all on the deck of the fantail and Narc could breathe again. He bent over, afraid he was going to vomit, and when he stood up, he was looking into the eyes of the ship’s XO.

  “You okay?” he said.

  Narc nodded. He looked past the XO to where the ferry, her bow staved in, was sinking slowly just aft of the mooring buoy and the wreckage of the liberty platform.

  “Holy shit,” he said. He wondered if there was a bomb.

  An hour later, Narc had changed his clothes and was ready for another try at the liberty line, although he wouldn’t be the first and would have to wait like everyone else. By the time he got there, the line ran all the way down the hangar deck. Only the ship’s boats were allowed to run, and they were leaving from the small companionway docks built in under the flanks of the stern, slowing the process to a crawl. He twisted and turned at the waist, trying to ease the pain in his back.

  “Damn, I’m never getting ashore,” he said to the next sailor in line, a female jg from one of the Hornet squadrons.

  “Haven’t you heard, sir?” she asked, far too chipper for the penultimate JO in a long liberty line.

  “Heard what?”

  “The accident bent one of our screws.”

 
Narc thought of the deep, bell-like note he’d heard at the moment of the crash. “So?” he said, hope rising within him.

  “We’re here for an extra two days, at least,” she said, and Narc gave a silent cheer. Two extra days in port. The cruise was shorter already.

  Cairo.

  Dukas and his team, minus Cram, stumbled out of two taxis and dragged themselves into the Cairo terminal as if they were the only survivors of an epidemic. Dukas, coming last with two Egyptian porters and the luggage, felt even worse than he had the night before, although he hadn’t thought that possible. Three hours’ sleep. Maybe he should just never have gone to bed. “Here comes the zombie patrol,” he growled.

  For the first time since he had known her, Geraldine Pastner looked like hell. Her skin had turned a dirty olive green. Somebody had gouged deep lines in her face while she slept. “I’d kill for a coffee with sugar,” she moaned. She sounded as if she’d been smoking Gauloises for twenty years or so.

  “Where’s Cram?” Dukas said.

  Mendelsohn raised sad eyes. “Never showed.” He was sitting on his luggage with his fist under his chin. He was supposed to have shared a room with Cram. “Never turned up.”

  Dukas went off to call the embassy and report Cram missing. He didn’t make much of it, really; Cram was the type who’d turn up in a whorehouse or an after-hours club and think it was a hell of a thing to have six A.M. breakfast in what he’d later call “the real Cairo.” Meaning that you could see Egyptians there.

  When Dukas came back, Keatley had checked them in and the baggage was gone. “They gave me grief about the guns,” he said. “Grief, endless grief. Why’d that stupid fuck have to put us on a plane so early?”

  “To be a stupid fuck. But that isn’t the question. The question is, Who is that stupid fuck?”

  Dukas had read the orders in the blue envelope. They had told him exactly what the blond bastard had said—get out of Cairo and get out fast. And don’t ask questions. Signed by the National Security Advisor, whose signature on the document had been confirmed when he telephoned Washington.

  So here they were.

  Dukas figured that their efficiency had been reduced about eighty percent by fatigue, and that they could have improved that to twenty percent if they’d been allowed to get eight hours’ sleep. But here they were, by the grace of a government whose right hand didn’t know that its left hand had itself by the dick.

  “Everybody sleep on the plane,” he said. “That’s an order.”

  At the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo, everything was quiet. The guests slept; the night staff yawned and watched the clock. In the mezzanine bathrooms, called the cloakroom, a sallow Egyptian named Farouk Bazir sluiced down the marble floors with a mop and then polished them with wax and a buffing machine. While he waited for the floor to dry in the ladies’, he went to the men’s with his mop and his mop-wringer and his cart of cleaning chemicals, and he parked the cart and went from stall to stall to make sure that nobody was asleep in them. He flushed each one, because late-night guests were given to doing animal things in them and then stumbling out without flushing. In the third stall from the end, he saw that something solid was mounding up out of the toilet and he muttered to himself because he’d be expected to clean it out, with his hands if need be. Then he leaned over the toilet and looked in and realized that he was looking at a small amount of human excrement and, under it, a human head.

  Bob Cram had been found.

  DAY

  THREE

  10

  Mombasa.

  “EERIE.”

  Mombasa airport in the after-dawn lay like a wilderness plain. The morning air was cool, smelling of dust and a hint of the sea. The eastern horizon was almost white, but the sun was not yet above it, and in the west he could still see the brightest stars.

  An animal roared distantly.

  “Lion?” Bakin said.

  “Elephant, I think.”

  They listened. Alan heard the rising whoop of a hyena. Beside him, Chief Bakin frowned. They were standing at the outer perimeter, two Marines in battle gear fifty feet on either side of them. It was silent, magical. Then the magic broke: the sun appeared over the horizon and the first brightness touched the terminal building across the airfield, and, as if on that signal, the doors of the hangar behind them rumbled.

  “Aircraft,” Bakin murmured.

  They watched the S-3 roll out. The crew were early, maybe nervous. Campbell started to do his preflight.

  “This is the third day,” Bakin said. “These things come in threes, I guess.”

  “We’ll see.” Alan grinned. “Inshallah.” As Allah wills it.

  Washington.

  Rose had turned the cell-phone package over to an NCIS special agent at the NSA security gate, she still holding the package while the silver-haired man signed for it in both her own logbook and the Houston custody log. It was he who insisted that the signature be witnessed by another special agent with him—“We want the cops to like us, ma’am; never know when we’re gonna need them”—and then he had walked away with the package and she had had herself led to a ladies’ room where she could change. She had been still in her flight suit, clammy and cramped from the flight. It was a relief to change into a uniform.

  NSA security was tighter than a hose clamp. She had to be photographed and thumbprinted; the photo went on a badge that she was to wear at all times, the point made with considerable emphasis. The thumbprint was scanned and digitized while she watched, and then an unsmiling black guy no older than Valdez told her that it would be available for comparison at “all class 1 checkpoints.”

  “What’s a class 1 checkpoint?”

  “You find out when you hit one.”

  Valdez and the cell phone were on the fourth floor. She had to be accompanied by a guard to get there, although nobody checked her thumbprint, but she figured she was like the cell phones—she’d been in somebody’s custody ever since she’d walked through the door.

  The room had no more character than a styrofoam cup. The walls were off-white and unadorned, except for scuffs and knocks where furniture might once have hit them. The floor was gray tile. A long, gray table littered with equipment and laptops ran most of the length of the room. Valdez was sitting at the table, staring through a magnifying lens at something held in a contraption that looked like the arms of a bionic midget. He didn’t look up, but the eight other people in the room did, sixteen eyes focusing on her as if they thought she might erupt into flame. Five of the eight were men. The women looked no more welcoming than they did. Two of the men came forward, blocking her sight of the table and Valdez. One even put his hand inside his coat, but maybe he had an armpit itch.

  “Commander Siciliano,” her guide said. He was a lanky redhead who had been introduced as Rondeau and who had an accent that could have been Texas or Louisiana. “Commander Siciliano’s cleared.”

  “ID,” the bigger of the two men said. Both were big, but he was really big. She touched her badge, but he held out a hand to mean that he wanted her own ID. “Mmm,” he said. He handed it to his buddy.

  “Commander Siciliano’s cleared,” the redhead said again.

  The very big man checked a laptop. “Ri-i-i-ght,” he said. He sounded as if he wished it had been wrong.

  The big men parted and she was allowed to move toward the table. Valdez glanced up and grinned and put his face down to the magnifier again. A tall, balding man who had been standing behind him stepped back and then came around the group and touched Rose’s left elbow. “Ted Kasser,” he murmured. They shook hands. Rose found herself whispering. “How’re we doing?”

  “He’s getting ready to download the virus into the cell-phone chip. Then we see if it works.” He had a nasal voice and an accent that she thought she recognized as western New York.

  Somebody else was whispering on the other side of the table. Rose suppressed a nervous giggle. What were they all being so quiet about?

  “Security,” Kasser wh
ispered in her left ear as if he had heard her thoughts. “They had to get the okay from the White House before they’d let you and me in.”

  Good God, she thought, and I didn’t even go through a class 1 checkpoint. What must they have on the other side of those?

  Valdez cleared his throat. People around him leaned away. “Well—” Valdez said. His voice sounded unnaturally loud. He stretched. “Hey, Commander, ain’t this fun?” Three people looked disapproving. Valdez stood and said, “Okay, let’s download this sucker and see what we got.” He was a small man with muscular arms and shoulders, a head that seemed huge because of thick black hair, a bright-looking face with high cheekbones and dark eyes. He moved down to a laptop that sat half a dozen feet away on the long table, the crowd parting as if contact with him was dangerous. He was like a wizard, indeed, feared by the people he was there to help.

  Rose and Kasser whispered together. Kasser knew Alan slightly, knew Dukas well. She asked about the Cairo bombing, but there was little known yet. Dukas was on his way to Mombasa, Kasser said.

  “I thought he’d stay in Cairo,” she murmured.

  Kasser’s face clouded. “Something came up.”

  Everything took longer than she wanted it to. It was after eleven when Valdez said that the phone was ready to use. The first day’s cell phone, he told them, the one the men in the van had been using when they had attacked her, was already out of it. Its twenty-four hours were over.

  “Who wants to be the birthday boy?” Valdez said. He held out the phone. Everybody frowned and looked somewhere else. “Jeez, I got to do everything myself?” Valdez laughed and winked at Rose. “You ready there, Freddie?”

  A very young woman with a red NSA badge was hovering over another laptop. She hit a key and gave Valdez a thumbs-up.

  “Okay?” Valdez held up the cell phone. “And uh-one, and uh-two, and uh-three—!”

  He hit the call button with his thumb.