Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

The cell-phone beep, amplified by a speaker on the table, sounded like a baby’s shriek. A man flinched; a gray-haired woman in a dark suit and draped scarf frowned as if somebody had broken wind.

  The sounds of the call bounced around the little room. The beeps became static, then utter silence, and then a single rattling ring sounded.

  “Cayman Islands pass-through,” Valdez said. The speaker began to emit clunks and knocks. “Passing through,” Valdez said. He almost sang it. The noises stopped. “Here we go—satellite—transfer—now—!”

  The room was charged but silent, as if everybody was holding his breath. Rose knew that she was, and beside her, Kasser was leaning a little forward, and she couldn’t hear him breathing, either. Down the table, the woman who looked hardly out of her teens was staring at her laptop, and suddenly she muttered, “Hit.”

  Valdez was still looking at his own computer. He said, “Oops.”

  “Jakarta, Indonesia,” the young woman said.

  Valdez put the cell phone on the table. “Well, back to the old drawing board.” He grinned around at them. “Sorry about that. There’s a digital answering machine at the other end. I configured for an analog. Little glitch.”

  The feeling in the room changed. Rose felt a wave of relief and then annoyance from the others; suddenly the room was filled with voices, still low, but no longer whispering. Kasser made a sour face. “Win a few, lose a few.”

  “How long?” somebody with an NSA red badge said.

  “Maybe half hour.” Valdez was sitting again, staring at his screen. He turned to the young woman at the other laptop. “Wha’ d’you think, Mave?”

  “Twenty minutes, half hour.” She wasn’t pretty, but she had a bright, feline look to her, and Rose wondered fleetingly if she was Valdez’s girl. Geek meets geekette?

  Somebody said he needed a cigarette and somebody else said he’d buy that. The room started to empty.

  Mombasa.

  Alan was leaning over the shoulder of an electronics mate who had one of the detachment’s five laptops open in front of him on the plywood table. Around them, extensions and cables squirmed across the floor and two other tables. Every surface held electronics equipment, most of it a gray or black metal box—big, small, narrow, wide. They were getting a feed from the NSA office where Rose had been watching Valdez.

  The laptop in front of them had just had its blank screen replaced with a long line of numbers.

  “What’s that?” Alan said.

  “Uh, I think—frequency—” The young man touched the screen where a block of numbers ended. “Then this here should be coordinates of the cell towers, I guess—UMG probably, let’s see—”

  Alan knew the universal military grid better than he did. He studied the numbers. “East of India, west of Hawaii,” he said. “South of the equator—where’s a map, for Christ’s sake?” He looked around. The electronics tech didn’t even bother to respond; maps weren’t his line of work. Alan poked his head out the door to look along the balcony above the hangar. He shouted at the first sailor he saw. “Grab me a world map! Anything with UMG coordinates on it!”

  “Uh, sir—we didn’t bring—”

  “Find something!”

  When he turned back to the room, the laptop had two new messages below the numbers: “Jakarta, Indonesia” and “Reconfiguring.”

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “They’re reconfiguring, sir.”

  “Reconfiguring what?”

  Washington.

  “Is my husband getting this?” Rose said to Kasser.

  “We sure hope so. We’ve gone way out on a long limb for this.” He didn’t look happy. He looked, in fact, old and tired—a man nearing retirement who needed sleep to deal with the pace he had to keep. A late night in a room at NSA was not doing him any good, physically. Still, he was gracious. “Want to meet some people?” he said.

  “Oh—well, if—”

  “Anyway, they want to meet you.” He smiled. “You’re famous.”

  It helped to learn who some of the people in the room were. One was from the National Security Advisor’s office, a short, balding man named Saffron, who kept snapping his fingers as if he wanted to hurry things along. A taller, thinner woman with gray hair that looked as if it had been sculpted from aluminum proved to be a senator who sat on the Intelligence Committee. The two security men she’d already met, although now, in this more relaxed atmosphere, one grinned at her and asked if she’d really shot a guy dead with a revolver at a hundred feet.

  “Bad news travels fast,” she said.

  “One-shot kills ain’t bad news, ma’am, ’less you on de receiving end.” She didn’t understand what the fake Southern accent was for, hoped it was not some sort of African American parody, and settled for smiling at him.

  A black man in a sweater and an open shirt turned out to be a CIA executive, no office or branch specified; a Latina woman was a specialist in interagency relations; two middle-aged men who talked only to each other were from FBI antiterrorism.

  “This a first?” she murmured to Kasser. “All these folks in one room?”

  “First chance most of us have had to watch one of NSA’s new toys in action.”

  Then Valdez was standing again. He picked up the cell phone. Aware of the change, people began to move toward him; somebody leaned out the door and called, and the two security men went to guard the entrance.

  “Gonna try this again,” Valdez said. “Sorry about the glitch. Had to choose, made the wrong choice. Shoulda flipped a coin.” He looked at the young woman. “Mave, you ready?”

  An NSA man with a red badge cleared his throat. “We’ve, uh, added a visual cartographic display that we hope will show graphically what’s going on.” He waved a hand at a twenty-five-inch flat-screen monitor that had been set up on the end of the table. A Mercator projection of the world in spiderweb blue lines filled the screen. “It will graphically represent the grid coordinates that the, um, system—” He looked at another NSA man as if checking if it was okay to suggest that they had anything resembling a system. The other man closed his eyes in what seemed to be agreement. “—um, presents as numeric values. If this experimental effort works, you will see each—what will those be, Mavis, cell-phone towers?—okay, each tower represented by an orange dot. All calls between towers will be represented by red lines.”

  Kasser leaned close to her. “He knows damned well they’re cell-phone towers. He just hates to tell us.”

  The man stopped speaking. Valdez said, “Okay?”

  Nobody said it wasn’t.

  “Okay.” Valdez flashed Rose a smile. “Show time!”

  His thumb pressed the send button again.

  Mombasa.

  Two sailors had piled charts on a cleared space across from the laptop. Alan had had time to locate Jakarta on one, but the charts were in different scales and weren’t continuous. One sailor was standing over the charts; the other was sitting next to him. In theory, at least, they were ready to plot positions. If any came in.

  “They’re up again, sir.”

  Alan crossed to the laptop. A single word was on the screen: “Calling.”

  Washington.

  “One ringy-dingy,” Valdez said. He waited. “One ringy-dingy’s all we get—it’s picking up—Mave, you got a fix? Jeez, maybe we need more time—”

  On the big screen at the end of the table, an orange dot appeared about where Jakarta was.

  Everybody waited.

  “Well, it’s sitting there,” Valdez said. “This time, it took.” He watched his own screen, leaned forward, and hit several keys. “Yeah, we’re in. Line is still open. Virus has to be in place; that’s microseconds to get in, no more. Lookin’ good.”

  The NSA man, standing with his hands joined just where his trousers’ zipper ended, said rather grouchily, “What are we waiting for?”

  “Waitin’ for somebody else to call. It’s an answering machine, right?” There was an uneasy stir around him. Valdez said
, “Hey, folks, I’m just the head wizard here; I can’t make the dudes out there in Jakarta or wherever do our work for us. We’re in. Now we gotta wait for them to do their thing.”

  Kasser said, “What if they call in only once a day to pick up messages?”

  “Then we got a long wait.”

  General unhappiness. Movement, muttering, even a female voice—the senator’s—saying pretty clearly that somebody could have warned them. Rose, siding with Valdez because he was an old friend, resented the irritation around her, the implication that the important parties missed, the contacts forgone, the gossip given up to be here in this stupid office, were all Valdez’s fault.

  He, however, was unfazed.

  And then he said, “Bingo.”

  At the same time, a red line sprang to the screen to connect Jakarta with the eastern end of the Mediterranean, somewhere in Israel or Lebanon.

  “Where the hell is that?” the CIA man said. “That Beirut? Can’t we have a little more detail there?”

  Mavis looked at him with the bored weariness of a world-class call girl talking to a Brownie scout. “The map’s too small.”

  “I want those coordinates—” He began to push toward her.

  “Second gotcha,” Valdez said.

  A line flashed from Jakarta across half the world, jagged for an instant as individual towers registered, then straightened to a mean that ended at the southern tip of Italy.

  “That’s a surprise,” Kasser muttered.

  “What’s it mean?” the senator said.

  “It means the virus works,” Valdez said.

  Mombasa.

  Alan looked over a sailor’s shoulder, silently urging the man to work faster but knowing he’d only slow him down if he spoke. The sailor had already got the coordinates of the first two hits and made a dot on Jakarta and one on the Bekáa Valley, in Lebanon. At the same time, the electronics rating at the laptop began to read off a new set, and Alan, looking at the edge of the map, called out, “This one’s farther west—get the map for the western Med—Valvano, you got that—?”

  “Yessir, yessir—” Valvano was too eager to please—young, insecure, anxious in the presence of the skipper. “Got it right here someplace—” He went past the correct chart and burrowed in the pile. Alan saw him do it, bit his tongue.

  “Got another,” the electronics tech called. Alan put a hand on his shoulder. “Just hold it. Let them settle down.” He watched the numbers stack on the screen. Unless Valdez and NSA were crazy, the virus was scoring hit after hit, and in places that so far made no sense. A part of his brain whispered, Why all the traffic? Who talks that much? He filed the question away as unanswerable at that time, although he was thinking, too, that people who committed acts of terrorism didn’t communicate unless they had to. And what he was seeing suggested that, however horrific the bombings in Mombasa and Cairo, something bigger was surely going on.

  “Sicily, sir,” Valvano called. “It’s in Sicily!”

  No sense at all.

  Washington.

  “Sicily?” Rose said.

  “Like your name,” Kasser said, smiling. Siciliano. He looked worn out. Rose suspected that she did, too. The day had been full, a twisting, turning day with surprises and changes.

  On the big screen, the red lines were weaving a new red spiderweb over the pale blue one. What Valdez had said he would try to do was now proven: both the eastern Med and the Sicilian dots had sprouted other red lines, meaning that the virus had caused the phones at those sites to mark their outgoing calls. And as she watched, one of the sites that had been called from Sicily, a dot on the Italian mainland south of Naples, shot a red line northward into Switzerland.

  The CIA man was standing next to Valdez. He shook his head. “What the hell have you wrought?” he said.

  “I wrought like I ought, is what I wrought.”

  “You wrought cool, man,” Mavis said. She high-fived Valdez. They grinned at each other, and Rose thought she could see the sexual sparks the two gave off. She smiled. She guessed she knew what they’d be doing when the job was done.

  It was going on midnight. Nearly ten in Houston. The kids and their NCIS guards would be in the air.

  And her husband?

  Mombasa.

  Alan grabbed Cohen by an elbow. “We need a world map,” he said. “Even a kid’s map would be better than what we got. I got three guys in there now, they’re like the Marx Brothers with a roomful of flypaper.”

  “Get it from the boat?”

  “I need it now.” He stared down into the hangar, where sailors in T-shirts and jeans were carrying crates from the morning run to Nairobi. He saw more Tusker pass below him. Well, at least they remembered the essentials. “Call the embassy in Nairobi. Tell them we need the biggest world map they can find, on tomorrow’s flight.”

  Back in the office, some sort of order prevailed, worked out by the men themselves. They’d divided the world among them; they’d go one at a time to the computer, pick off the next item that fell within their UMG parameters, and head back to the improvised plotting table.

  “Menendez’s like a chick with hot pants,” one of them said. They laughed. Alan looked over the shoulder of Menendez, the man handling the Middle East, and saw that he, indeed, had more hits than the others. Four lines radiated from the Bekáa Valley site now, and, to Alan’s surprise, one of them connected it to Malindi, a port only eighty miles up the coast from Mombasa.

  “Valvano, how you doing?”

  “Good, sir, not too much action now. Stuff going out from Sicily, but slow. See, over to, um, Salerno, I guess it is, then they called somewhere up in, I guess, Switzerland. Like that.”

  “Can you give Menendez a hand?”

  “Uh, yessir, I guess.”

  “Don’t get in his way, just figure the location and let him enter it and draw the lines. Okay?”

  “Yessir.” Valvano’s tone suggested that he felt he’d been demoted.

  “You’re doing good,” Alan said to him. Did that help? Apparently not.

  He looked at his watch. After ten. Dukas and his team were due in on the noon flight. The forensics people were supposed to ETA with their 747 at one-thirty.

  Cohen put his head in, found Alan, and hurried over. “Can we talk?” he murmured. Alan led him out to the balcony. Cohen kept his voice low. “Boat says they’re planning a flyoff in case the typhoon hits. Our other S-3 is coming in this P.M., but between the lines I read that we’re gonna be on our own until that storm is over—no more Marines, no more choppers after today.”

  No lifeline. Alan grimaced. “Better make up a wish list. For sure, I want some firepower on our S-3.”

  “Kenyans won’t like it.”

  Alan ignored that. “Plus a better medical kit and some big cooking pots. We’re all sick of MREs, and the planes can get us fresh stuff from Nairobi.”

  Twenty minutes later, Patemkin and Sandy Cole came in. They looked pleased with themselves. She signaled with a look that they had something. Alan huddled with them in the dead corner outside the det office.

  “The guy from the dhow talked.”

  “And?”

  “He boarded in Kismayu. They picked up the explosive somewhere on the coast.”

  “Somalia.”

  Patemkin was leaning back against the metal railing, the elbow of one arm in the fingers of the others, his chin held between thumb and finger as if he was stroking a beard. “Maybe Kenya, actually. He didn’t know. Or so he said. They picked up the explosive and sailed into open water and he could see Lamu Island.”

  “That’s Kenya.”

  “Yup. That’s Kenya.”

  Alan turned back to the maps. Menendez was drawing additional lines beside the first one wherever there were repeated calls between sites. There were now three lines between the Bekáa Valley site and Malindi.

  And one new line northeast from Malindi to a nowhere spot where a tangle of tiny islands marked the eastern end of the border between Kenya and S
omalia.

  Alan looked at it.

  Jesus Christ. South of Kismayu where he could see Lamu Island.

  He grabbed Cohen. “Find out what we’ve got in the det in the way of photo equipment. The longer the telephoto, the better. Then schedule both aircraft for a two-plane mission tomorrow, full crews with MARI gear up and ready. Schedule me on the flight.”

  He looked at the map, the single line angling northeast from Malindi.

  Maybe—maybe—

  Washington.

  “What does it mean?” Rose said. The room was emptier now; she and Kasser, Valdez, and Mavis were still there, along with the security men and the CIA man, but the others had drifted away. It was one in the morning, after all; most of them would be up again at six.

  Kasser stretched. “It means NSA can do something I didn’t know they can do. And it means your man Valdez is a genius.”

  “Oh, we already knew that.” She smiled at Valdez. “But I meant the map.”

  Kasser looked at it. His shoulders sagged. She wondered if perhaps he was sick as well as tired. He had a look of resignation that she thought might go with one of the slow, inexorable diseases. “Well,” he said, “I think it means we have a real oddball problem. I don’t see a single call yet to the places I’d expected to see—Sudan, Afghanistan, Iran. A Lebanese connection is a little strange, too. If we’re talking some sort of connection with the attempt on you, I mean. Palestinian groups in Lebanon really focus on Palestine and Israel. They don’t normally connect with things like these two bombings and trying to kill you.

  “The other oddball is the site on the African coast. That’s north of where your husband is, but close enough to be suggestive. Then there’s another little tick north of that. Right up tight against Somalia.” He made a face. “I hear Somalia, I get uneasy.”

  “Everybody’s saying al-Qaida,” the CIA man said.

  “You buy that?”

  The man sighed. Shrugged. “I want to buy it,” he said. “But so far, that’s not what I see.”

  “So what do you see?”

  “You tell me.” He put his hands in his pockets. Another line flashed on the map, this time from Sicily to the Kenyan coast. “What’s got one foot in Sicily, one foot in Lebanon, and one foot in Kenya?”