Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  “I didn’t like riddles, even as a kid.”

  11

  Mombasa.

  DUKAS AND HIS TEAM STUMBLED OFF THE AIRCRAFT AND looked around as if they were at the end of a magical, miserable mystery tour. Mombasa airport steamed under a near-equatorial sun now; concrete runways stretched away into rippling haze backed by trees that congealed into a smear like green algae in the sun-dazzle. An American who said he was CIA attached to the embassy led them to a cinder-block-walled room where a customs and an immigration officer gave them a cursory look and waved them on. The only one they gave any grief was Triffler. “Racial profiling,” he muttered when he caught up.

  Two Marines in battle gear were waiting beside a Toyota pickup that was parked in a cargo area. Dukas looked at it and said, “Geraldine rides inside,” because Geraldine hadn’t slept on the flight and looked as if she might already have died.

  “Like hell,” she rasped. She sniffed back what might have been tears but was probably the beginning of a cold. “You’re not going to treat me like some goddamn woman, Mike.”

  “You are some goddamn woman. Get in the truck.”

  She climbed up on the back bumper and fell over the tailgate into the truck bed. When she didn’t reappear, Dukas said, “Keatley, ride in the goddamn cab. Don’t argue.”

  Everybody else got into the back, including the two Marines. “This is how illegal immigrants travel,” Mendelsohn said. Nobody cared. They arranged themselves around the supine Geraldine with their backs against the sides of the bed, their legs stuck out. Triffler sat with his back to the cab and scowled at the landscape.

  They drove around the runways on a service road. The two Marines had their weapons pointed over the sides, and the CIA man rode standing behind the cab with a 9mm Sigarms in his hand. Dukas thought it looked a little like grandstanding, but maybe the guy had never had a chance to ride in a pickup with a drawn gun before. Maybe he needed more stories from his Africa tour. Rommel in the desert. He should have brought his hat and goggles.

  “You’re sick,” he said to Geraldine.

  She was lying full length with her head on her laptop, and she kept snuffling as if she couldn’t breathe. “Speak for yourself,” she said. The remark made no sense to Dukas, but little did just then. She blew her nose on a tissue that had already been used too often. “I’ve seen that guy who threw us out of Cairo,” she said.

  “I’ve seen him, too. I wasn’t more than six inches from him.”

  “I mean, I’ve seen him before.”

  “Where?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to remember. It kept me awake all the way from Cairo.”

  “Well, Jesus, remember, will you?”

  Hahn said she should stop thinking about it and then it would come to her.

  “Oh, shut up,” she said.

  “That was uncalled for!” Hahn shouted.

  “Better than kicking you in the head, which was my first thought.” She coughed. She shut her eyes, then popped them open. “DEA,” she said.

  Dukas, who was sitting with his back against the tailgate and his feet even with her waist, her head another half-body length beyond them, sat up and tried to look into her face, but what he saw mostly was the underside of her nose. “Okay, I give up. What?”

  “DEA, the guy was from DEA.” She rolled to her left side and blew her nose and looked sadly at the result. “Christ, I am sick.” She looked at Dukas. The truck was going slowly but bouncing, nonetheless, and her head bobbled. “I was at a meeting a couple of years ago, and he was there, and he was DEA.”

  “See,” Hahn said. “I knew if you stopped thinking about it, it would come to you. You started thinking about mouthing off at me, and it came to you.” He grinned happily. Geraldine put her head back down on her laptop and said to the world in general that Hahn was an asshole.

  “You’re sure he’s DEA?” Dukas said.

  “He was then. He could be the bouncer for the Cairo Planet Hollywood by now, for all I know. Or care.” She cleared her throat, a sound that would have suited a male truck driver. “Jesus.”

  “DEA.” Dukas tried to figure what the Drug Enforcement Agency was doing in Cairo and why they had thrown Dukas and his team out. Well, turf, he thought, of course it’s about turf, but how come Cairo is suddenly DEA turf? DEA must have an interest there, but it can’t be much; Egypt isn’t a big drug producer. So how come the big red-haired sonofabitch had a letter from the National Security Advisor telling Dukas to go suck eggs? His eyes met Triffler’s. Triffler, whose normally russet-brown skin looked gray, with blue in the shadows, shrugged.

  “Everybody out,” the CIA man said a little reluctantly. He had to put his pistol back into his shoulder holster. End of fantasy. The Marines were already on the ground, and a sailor was opening the tailgate. Dukas fell backward, was kept from falling out by two strong young men, and allowed himself to be helped down from the truck. He felt bad about the performance until he saw the others getting down and thought that he hadn’t done too badly.

  “Bed,” Geraldine said as she passed him. “If somebody doesn’t show me a bed, I’m going to act out.”

  A pale, rather large woman wearing a long dress appeared. She went right to Geraldine. “Hi, I’m Sandy Cole. Did you bring some things for me?” She was squinting into the sun to talk to her, and she put a hand up over her head to give a little shade. “We talked on the phone yesterday?” she said.

  Geraldine held up a plastic bag from an airport shop. “Can you show me where I sleep?”

  Sandy grabbed the bag, actually grinned as she clutched it to her. “You’re in with me.”

  Geraldine put a hand on her shoulder. “You got a deal.”

  Dukas was walking into a huge, shadowy hangar behind the sailors. Keatley was beside him. “You still alive?” Dukas said.

  “More or less.”

  “Geraldine says the guy who threw us out of Cairo is DEA. Can you stay awake long enough to send a message to Kasser and ask him to check it out?”

  Keatley didn’t say that he had been a Marine, but he might as well have. He had been sucking in his gut and walking tall since he had first laid eyes on the two battle-geared kids in the pickup. He wasn’t about to say he was too tired to pick up a telephone. “What about Cram?” he said.

  Dukas stumbled over an uneven place in the concrete floor and swore. “The other’s more important. Cram is—” He shrugged. “Cram is Cram.”

  Alan was coming toward him down a metal stair along the hangar wall. He was already smiling and waving. Dukas smiled, but the effort showed. When they met, Alan embraced him and Dukas sagged into him like a fighter who can’t hold his arms up anymore. “I’m dead,” he muttered. “We’re all dead.” He told him they’d been thrown out of Cairo and it might be DEA.

  “Cheer up. We got a breakthrough.” Alan was leading Dukas toward the metal stair. “Wait until you see it—Rose got two cell phones from the car that tried to kill her, see, and then Valdez—you remember Valdez, her EM computer whiz?—anyway, he—”

  Dukas gave up trying to follow it. He had thought maybe he was being led to his suite at the Mombasa Ritz, but no, they went up and the other men plodded behind a sailor toward several doors in plywood bulkheads back on the ground level. At the top of the stairs, Dukas looked to his right as Geraldine and the willowy woman vanished through a doorway at his level down at the other end of the hangar.

  “Sleeping rooms up there?” he said.

  “Women up, men down. Three guys to a room, sorry. No beds, but we got sleeping bags and pads.”

  “Right now, I could sleep on a coil of razor wire.” Alan led him into an office where four enlisted men were working at tables cluttered with electronic gear and cables, much of it pushed into disorder to make room for big charts. Alan pulled him along to the middle table and pointed over the shoulder of the sailor working there.

  “Black dot is a beginning or end point for a phone call. Lines are calls to or from—we can’t tell which
, they go so fast. But look!” He let Dukas look, then said, “Get it?”

  Dukas was stupid with fatigue, but he got enough. Lebanon to or from Malindi, up the coast; fucking Sicily, of all places, to or from Lebanon. Plus other lines that crisscrossed like a messy game of tic-tac-toe.

  “Stay with me, Al, I’m wiped. Go back. What am I looking at?”

  Alan told him again about the cell phones and the virus.

  “So Rose’s guy called where first?”

  “An answering machine in Jakarta.”

  “Answering machine. So does everybody call that answering machine?”

  “Negative. Sicily calls it every four hours—that’s from Washington, where they’re monitoring it closer than we can. So—”

  “So Sicily’s the center.”

  “At least it’s some kind of comm center.”

  “And then everybody else calls Sicily?”

  “Not everybody, not at all. But Lebanon does, and Sicily calls Lebanon. Notice the lines—only a few between Sicily and anybody else. So we think that Lebanon is maybe some sort of operational center.”

  “If this isn’t just the Middle Eastern version of telephone sex.”

  When Alan was finished briefing him, Dukas walked through the door, heading for sleep. Outside on the balcony, however, he stopped and leaned on the railing. Nobody was close, so it was as good a place as any to talk privately with Alan. “We’ve worked a lot together, Al, we get along. But let me lay it out right up front. I’m in charge of this investigation.”

  Alan nodded. “Understood.”

  “The Harker, everything resulting from it; the Cairo bomb; all this telephone stuff. Mine.”

  “Understood.” Alan crossed his arms. “But I’m in command here. The Harker, the Marines, any action that’s taken to further the investigation, any reprisals—mine.”

  They looked at each other. Dukas smiled the smile of a man falling asleep on his feet. “Understood.” He looked around as if afraid he’d be overheard. “It’s Day Three. No third bombing yet.”

  Alan shook his head. “No, and it’s funny that—” He was going to tell Dukas about his belief that too much traffic had shown on the cell phones to be normal, but he looked at Dukas’s face and knew it would be wasted talk. “You’re dead on your feet,” he said.

  They went down the stairs with Dukas’s hand on Alan’s shoulder, and Alan led him into a room where two of the three plywood tables were already occupied by snoring men. He pushed Dukas gently down on the third table and swung his feet up and began to pull off his shoes.

  “Hey—” Dukas growled.

  “Shut up and lie down.”

  Alan unzipped the sleeping bag and pulled it half over Dukas and, smiling, went out.

  Washington.

  Rose woke, wanting not to but knowing that she was fully awake and unable to do a thing about it. She stared at the bedside clock, realized it was not where she expected it, and then remembered that she was in a Washington hotel. She rolled over. Ten minutes of six, said a bar of red-orange numbers.

  There was another bed. With Mikey in it, his breathing a soft, sweet sighing in the room. The baby was in a rented crib in a corner.

  She remembered. They had a suite. Gorki and Reko were trading watches in the sitting room. A hotel security man was posted in the corridor.

  She rolled on her back and stared at the ceiling. The hours at NSA had been exciting. Worth the trip.

  But now she was out of it.

  She got up and checked Mikey and then the baby, who was sleeping on his back, his fists on each side of his head like flower buds. She felt a sudden and surprising urge to weep, an emotion somehow merging her love for this frail creature with her own sense of letdown. How fast it had all come apart! A week ago, she had been riding high on the rush of astronaut training; now she was two thousand miles from Houston, and the people there thought that she was a liability. She could hear the words—uncooperative, grandstanding, aggressive. Violent. Self-centered.

  Not a team player.

  She went softly into the bathroom and closed the door and cried.

  Bahrain.

  Harry O’Neill’s office had a big teak desk and, behind it, a matching table with a computer; three pages from a Persian manuscript were framed on the walls, their colors picked up by a blood-red kilim on the floor. At the other end of the big room, more comfortable chairs and tables were clustered in a conversational area. Harry sat there easily in a leather chair, but he didn’t sprawl and he didn’t shove his legs out so that the soles of his feet showed. Bad form in Arab culture. He sat like what he was—a powerful man who was at ease with himself and his world, wearing a silk T-shirt and a linen jacket and black slacks, Bally shoes with thin soles. On his head was an Islamic cap of embroidered raw silk.

  “And so?” he said in Arabic.

  The man across the low tea table from him was older but showed the respect that, if age were the only factor, should have gone the other way. He was dressed in a good but not pricey European business suit, but with a Saudi headdress covering part of his head and neck. “The tea is most excellent,” he said. He held a handleless cup in his right hand; with the left, he wafted the tea’s aroma toward his nose. “India,” he said. He sipped, then nibbled on a cake no larger than his two thumbnails. “I traced the dhow’s engine number to Sri Lanka. Jaffna. Not a stronghold of the Tamil, but—”

  “Tamil presence.”

  The man nodded. “The dhow was sold there four months ago. To a European. For cash.”

  Harry frowned. “You are sure?”

  “My friend!” The man spread his hands like wings over the tea service. “For you, I have to be sure.” He smiled, perhaps a little sadly, perhaps only wisely.

  “A European.”

  “But not an English speaker. Or he did not speak English with the seller. He had a translator, but he did not himself speak English, which the seller understands. He said the buyer might have been French, but you know the use of ‘French’ to mean any white who does not speak English.”

  “Description? Name?”

  “It was not that kind of sale, my friend. On the papers, the buyer is something called the Baranjee Trading Company, Limited, which, so far as I can determine, does not exist.”

  They sat together in silence. Both sipped tea, and the air-conditioning hummed and the cooled air moved between them like an invisible servant. Out the large window to Harry’s right they could see part of a skyscraper and then desert and then, far away, bright blue water.

  “So—Sri Lanka, a European, a nonexistent company. Nothing after that?”

  The man put down his cup. “He thinks that a skeleton crew was picked up on the docks in Jaffna, but maybe he was only telling me this as decoration. However it was done, the dhow was taken out of his yard five days after the purchase cleared, and he has not seen or heard of it since.” He spread his hands again. “The seas are full of dhows.”

  “You did well.”

  The man inclined his head, neither a bow nor a nod.

  “I will remember you when the new contract comes up,” Harry said.

  The man inclined his head again. They talked briefly of other things, drank tea, and completed gracefully the ritual of ending their business. When the man was gone, Harry stared out his window for several seconds and then moved to the computer terminal. A keen eye might have detected the bulge of a weapon just in front of his right kidney, but perhaps not; he was a muscular, fit man with the slender waist of somebody much younger.

  He sat and began to type an e-mail:

  To: Alan Craik

  Cc:

  Subject: engine

  Item was bought by presumed non-English mzungu in Sri Lanka three months ago. No hits since. Will be traveling.

  12

  Cairo.

  SERGEANT AL-FAWZI-AL-MUBARAK HAD CAUGHT THE CASE of the head in the toilet. An aficionado of American cop shows, he used words like “caught,” translated into Arabic—“he caught the sq
ueal.” He even used a translation of “squeeze” for girlfriend—“Is she his squeeze?” He didn’t have a squeeze of his own, but he was thinking of getting one as soon as his oldest son graduated from his private school. A matter of expense.

  He had caught the head in the toilet because the head belonged to a European and it had been al-Fawzi-al-Mubarak who had whisked around Cairo with the black American naval cop and blown away (useful phrase, but not very graceful in Arabic) the man who had killed the American woman from AID. Now his lieutenant said there might be a connection, so al-Fawzi could fold the severed head into his case.

  The sergeant was not sure he was pleased. Flattered, yes—it was a prize. But maybe, as the American shows said, more a trick than a treat? (He had had to have that explained to him, had in fact had to go to the USIS library in the embassy to ask about it, and still didn’t really get it because he’d never seen an American Halloween.) A responsibility and a risk—always a risk when the big foreign nations were involved.

  The head had been beaten before death, the medical examiner said. Also burned with a cigarette on the eyelids and in one ear. Also perhaps strangled, as part of a ligature mark showed on as much of the throat as had come with the head. Decapitated afterward with at least two tools, a sharp but short-bladed knife and perhaps a hacksaw.

  “Nice guys,” al-Fawzi had said. The Arabic for “guys” really meant “men of the people.” The medical examiner didn’t get it and didn’t care.

  Now the sergeant was in the bowels of the Semiramis. Two levels lay under the hotel, the lower even grungier than the upper. He had long since got over being disenchanted by the backstage areas of restaurants and hotels; the concrete floors, the dirt piled up in corners, the harsh lighting, were now merely what he expected. Still, they were less pleasant than the fake grandeur and comfort of the public spaces and the rooms above, all of which had already been searched, nothing found.

  The sergeant believed that the head belonged to an American named Robert Cram, because the American group with which Cram had arrived had checked out but Cram had not. The group had flown out of Sadat, headed for Mombasa, Kenya, but Cram had not. Cram’s clothes and suitcase were still in his room.