Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  “Therefore, we need a body with no head,” he had said. Therefore, he and four Cairo cops were searching the lower levels of the hotel. Therefore, he was not quite astonished when a slightly queasy cop with the regrettable name of Farouk (fat king of not-so-recent memory, playboy, and spendthrift) found him and said that he thought he had found “the remains.”

  Al-Fawzi looked at the young man. Leaned forward, sniffed. The boy had just vomited. There was even a fleck on his uniform. “Where?”

  The young man jerked his head. “Storage room. Behind the—I think it’s air-conditioning fans. We almost missed it because there was a ladder and a tarpaulin covering it.”

  The sergeant smelled it before he saw it. Even with air-conditioning, even two stories underground, the Cairo heat did its work. “Dead since last night, what else?” he said out loud. He pushed past another cop who had been posted at the door, as if crowds of newspeople, perhaps tourists, were going to go flocking in. “Get the scene-of-crime people and the ME.”

  “Already called, sir.”

  “I don’t want anybody coming into this whole space.” He waved his hand at the vast fan room, which was like a concrete cave with the abandoned relics of another civilization in it—curious fans with bat wings, a mesh cage piled to the ceiling with indecipherable metal shapes. “I want photos of this place, not just the room where the body is.” He scratched his lip under his luxuriant moustache. “A black-light examination of the entire place? Maybe.” He wiggled his eyebrows. “Maybe.” He was suddenly ashamed of himself. So Hercule Poirot. Not at all his usual style.

  He went in. The stench was remarkable. Blood had run over the floor to a mesh-covered drain in the corner. Even down here, flies had found it and were thick on its congealed surface. The body, pretty clearly lying where the decapitation had taken place, was stretched across the platform from a painter’s scaffold. The wooden bars were thick with old paint in cream, gray, and purple—a history in color of the hotel’s refurbishings—over which, near the headless torso, blood had also run.

  Al-Fawzi denied himself the luxury of putting a handkerchief over his nose. Bad example to the kids. He tried to take shallow breaths, keeping the air high up in his nostrils. It never worked, but it gave his nose something to do. He stepped carefully over the headless body and looked into the room’s corners. No sign of weapons, but many cigarette butts. He went back to the body and knelt beside it. Burn marks on the arms, on the shirtless back.

  “Poor bastard,” he said.

  He put two fingers in his not-quite-clean pocket handkerchief and put them into the left rear trousers pocket and lifted out the wallet he found there. Robert Cram. Driver’s license, library card, three credit cards, photos.

  No money.

  He shook his head. All this—murder, torture, decapitation—and some shithead had also robbed him. But put the wallet back so they’d know who he was. The sergeant had no doubt that the body was in fact Cram’s, although he would insist in his reports that the ID was unproven until they had other evidence—teeth, fingerprints, visual. Although who would recognize the face after what had been done to it?

  Significant. Whoever had killed him wanted him to be found. Wanted him to be ID’d. Knew he would be. The head first. A gesture of—what? Contempt? Bravado, certainly.

  He walked out of the room. The scene-of-crime people were just coming in through the far door of the fan room. Al-Fawzi pulled a clean plastic bag from a pocket and prepared to drop the wallet in. It fell open to reveal a picture of a pretty, slightly overweight woman. He saw the young cop at the door looking over his shoulder at it.

  “His squeeze,” al-Fawzi said.

  Mombasa.

  The 747 that housed the forensics lab landed in mid-afternoon and taxied to the det’s hangars, dwarfing the two buildings. The two NCIS special agents onboard were rested and bright-eyed and then vastly amused to hear that all the others were sleeping off a couple of very bad days and nights. They were less amused when they heard about the food and the security rules.

  “We’re better off sleeping in the plane,” the woman agent, Sheila Ditka, said. She had introduced herself as “the bang expert,” meaning, Alan gathered, that she was an explosives specialist.

  “You got beds?” Alan asked.

  “Well, no, but my God, at least it’s clean!”

  It was, indeed, spotless. Unfortunately for anybody who wanted to sleep aboard, it was a laboratory and as tight and crowded as a ship’s galley. It was capable of anything from a postmortem on a corpse to an electrophoresis run on a complex organic, but a hotel it was not.

  “Give us a try,” Alan said. “What we lose in comfort we make up in togetherness.”

  The male agent, Delahanty, made a face as if he’d bitten into a pickle. “Swell.”

  Alan walked them around the facility and gave them a quick rundown on the perimeter and security. Within half an hour, he had them in his own office for a briefing, most of which he did himself, with Sandy Cole sitting in.

  “You got any explosive residue?” Sheila said.

  Sandy nodded. “Still attached to metal, mostly.”

  “Well, I’ll start with that. I’ll take some samples, do a run for DMDNB and see if I can sort out what it was and where it came from.”

  “We’re not even sure it was C4,” Sandy said. Her voice was sour.

  “Yeah, well, I’ll know that, too, pretty soon.”

  “How soon?” Alan said.

  “Well—if we bust our asses, maybe six hours—”

  “There was another bomb this morning in Cairo. I want to know if they’re connected.”

  “I’ve already been on to the Washington lab to get a reading on it. Somebody’s got to get a sample of the residue up there and run an analysis. Egyptians are cooperative but so far slow. We’re working on it.”

  “FBI?”

  “They’re there, but there’s some screwup.”

  Alan thought about Dukas’s team’s getting tossed out of Cairo and the hint that it had been DEA that had done it. If DEA somehow had clout in the Cairo bombing, they might be trying to end-run around the Bureau, too, although that would be a lot harder than kicking an NCIS team out of town. He explained their communications to her—everything had to go through the boat—and agreed that it was worse than a pain in the ass that they couldn’t deal with Cairo directly.

  “All I need’s an analysis; I don’t need the stuff itself. Can I smoke in here?”

  Alan shook his head. Chief Bakin was adamant about not allowing open fire of any kind in the hangar. “Have to go outside. Just don’t be surprised if a Marine moves you along. They’re trying to keep any snipers from targeting us.”

  She groaned. Delahanty asked for the second time if it could be true that there wasn’t a bar anyplace. “Not that you can get to,” Alan said. “We’re restricted to the perimeter. We get beer once a day from Nairobi—two bottles a man, if we’re lucky.”

  Delahanty clutched his throat and made it a joke, but Alan wondered if the man had a more serious need for booze than he let on.

  “Well,” he said, standing, “let’s get to it. Anything you can tell us is a plus.” He turned them over to Sandy and Fidelio to start an analysis of the debris from the Harker.

  Alan had decided that Dukas and his people were to be allowed to sleep as long as they wanted, with coffee and MREs to be kept ready for them whenever they woke up, but that plan went galley-west when a third-class weapons specialist who was doing double duty as a yeoman caught up with him in the electronics office.

  “Urgent message, sir. Comm office. They wouldn’t even let me hand-carry it.”

  “How urgent?”

  “They told me to run, sir.”

  So Alan ran the length of the hangar and pulled himself up the stairway two steps at a time, one hand hauling at the metal rail as if it was a rope. He hit the comm office still running. LT Campbell was already there, called as communications officer to ride herd on a message that was h
eaded “Top Secret” and “Recipient’s Eyes Only—Most Urgent.”

  “Came on the link encrypted. Decrypted it myself.”

  Alan read it and stepped to the balcony and grabbed the first sailor who went by. “Go down and wake Mister Dukas. He’s in the bed nearest the door in the third room. Don’t wake anybody else. Got that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tell him it’s urgent and I said so.”

  Dukas came bulling along the balcony three minutes later. His clothes looked as if he’d slept in them, as of course he had. Next to the T-shirted sailors, he looked like an animated laundry sack.

  “Never rains but it pours, right?” he said. “Jesus, do I need a toothbrush! Okay, what’s the crisis?”

  Alan handed over the message. Dukas read, groaned, said, “Oh, Jesus—” in a despairing voice.

  “Who’s Cram?” Alan said. He had pulled Dukas into a dead area where nobody would walk close and where they wouldn’t be overheard so long as they kept their voices down.

  “A loser who got attached to my team because he’s useless. Aw, shit.”

  “Tortured.”

  “Yeah—again.” Dukas told him the story of Cram’s one distinction. “Jesus, they found his head early this morning. Why are we getting this now? Shit. Oh, I get it—they didn’t ID him until early afternoon. Still, Jesus—five hours!”

  “Probably went up the chain at Cairo police HQ, who kicked it around until they’d figured out how bad things were, then they called the embassy; the embassy kicked it around until they figured out how to make sure they weren’t involved, then told Washington; State kicked it around and finally decided to tell NCIS; and Kasser finally told us. Always the last to know.” Alan shook his head. “Kasser seems to believe the guy was tortured to get the names of your team.”

  “At least that.” Dukas rubbed his face with both hands, holding the message above the back of his left hand with two fingers. “He says he’s got people already with the families, but I have to wake everybody and tell them.” He looked at Alan with sad eyes. “Think I ought to give them the chance to pull out?”

  “My people didn’t get that option.”

  Dukas nodded. He needed a shave and knew it, his right hand passing over the stubble on his cheeks and jaw. “I’m not going to take this lying down. Cram was an asshole, but he was my asshole, and fuck DEA.”

  Dukas started out, turned back. His face was ugly. “You better know now—I’m mad, and I’m going back into Cairo, and nobody’s going to stop me—including you.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to say it. Go for it, Mike.”

  Alan directed him to a kid who knew the airline schedules, and then Dukas went down to the cubicle in which he’d been sleeping and looked for Triffler but didn’t find him, then put his head into the next and finally found him in the last one down and shook him awake. “Mister Triffler, come here, I need you.”

  Triffler opened his eyes to slits. “Who’re you, Don Ameche?”

  “Shut up,” a rough voice said from another table.

  “You, too, Keatley. I need you both awake and alert.”

  “Like shit.”

  Triffler was still lying down. He rolled on his back and folded his hands over his chest. “You’re going to make an unjust demand on us, aren’t you.”

  “I’m going to give you both an order, and you’re going to obey it.” He leaned his buttocks against the edge of Keatley’s table and put his hands on his knees. “Cram’s body was found in Cairo. Tortured, strangled, and decapitated. You leave for Nairobi soonest, and you will be on the red-eye to Cairo.” He scowled, not waiting for an objection. “And if you tell me we got thrown out of Cairo, I’m telling you we’re going back. Don’t argue.”

  Keatley was groaning. Triffler was still lying on his back with his hands folded over his chest. “Sometimes I think you hate me as a person. Other times I think it’s just good old American racism.”

  “The Cairo cop who’s heading the investigation is the one you already worked with. Was that only yesterday? Jesus. Triffler will be the lead, Keatley—he knows Cairo better than you and he knows the Egyptians.”

  “I don’t know the Egyptians!”

  “Three weeks there working on Bright Star, you’re a fucking expert.” Dukas stood. “Wash and shave in the men’s head on this side. MREs and coffee in twenty minutes in our office, which is at the far end of the hangar. Briefing in three-quarters of an hour.”

  “Guns?” Keatley said hoarsely.

  “Guns and vests, definitely, take two guns if you got them. I quote from the urgent message from Ted Kasser—‘identify and deal with the perpetrators.’ Okay?”

  Keatley swung his legs down. “Okay. As soon as I can walk.”

  Triffler still lay there. “I want to go home,” he said.

  “We all want to go home.”

  “I have a wife and two children. You know what Cram probably told those people who tortured him?”

  “Yes, and so does Kasser, and your house and your kids and their school are already being protected. What’re you going to do, stand out in front with your shotgun? You’re going to Cairo.”

  Triffler sat up. He sighed. “Yes, I am. I was just venting.” He put a hand on Dukas’s arm and pulled himself up, actually taller than Dukas when he was vertical, but thirty pounds lighter. “This is a fatiguing profession.”

  But when Dukas dragged himself back to the det office, his mind was not on Triffler or how little sleep they’d had. His face was rigid, scowling, hard. He spoke to nobody. In the det office, he said to Alan, “I need a STU and privacy and I need it now.”

  Alan looked at him, registered the hardness, and barked out a command to a rating. Minutes later, the otherwise empty NCIS office next door had a STU set up to communicate via the boat, and two minutes after that, Dukas was alone waiting for Ted Kasser in Washington to pick up his phone.

  “Kasser,” the nasal voice said. The sound was spooky, as if it was coming through a pipe with water bubbling somewhere in the middle.

  “Dukas. I’m sending my guys back into Cairo.”

  “Hold it, Mike.”

  “Fuck that. I got thrown out. I left a man behind; he’s dead. We’re going back.”

  “This is more complicated than that.”

  “Yeah, DEA. I don’t care if it’s God and his angels and archangels. We go back and clean up our own mess, or I’m out. Right out. I’ll leave NCIS today.”

  Kasser took several seconds to think that over. Dukas had clout—not position, but the clout that came from having just come off a big intelligence score. Two of them, in fact, “Nobody’s indispensable,” Kasser said.

  “No, and nobody’s worthless, which is the way we’re treating Bob Cram unless we go back and find out what happened, because he’s our guy. Is that what you want? Is that what you want everybody to see—that NCIS doesn’t care shit about its own people?”

  “You’ll really resign?”

  “Yeah, and I won’t do it quietly.”

  “Don’t do anything until—”

  “Triffler and Keatley leave here in two hours for Cairo. Period.”

  The connection sighed and gurgled. Kasser took his time again. Finally, he said, “I don’t know myself what’s going on, Mike. But it’s very high level. Director of Naval Intelligence would have to take it up with the White House.”

  “I don’t care about that. We go, or I go.”

  Maybe Kasser sighed. Dukas couldn’t hear well enough to be sure. Maybe it was only an electronic hiccup in the link that connected Mombasa, the boat, a satellite, and Washington. What he said was “I’ll get back to you.”

  “Two hours.”

  He hung up and sat there, seeing the plywood walls and the gray floor like projections of his disgust. The air was filled with sounds, none clear, but all overlapping and changing each other—somebody hammering a piece of metal, voices, a toilet flushing, the chuffing sound of a bird in the metal trusses above him, all swirling
through the ugly room that had no ceiling. Dukas shook his head and stood, pushing himself up with the help of the gray-topped table. His brain was slow from fatigue, he knew. Maybe resigning would be the best thing. He felt no excitement in the investigation, no sense of purpose, only disgust and a desire to laugh or maybe cry because Cram had been such a worthless schmuck and still they had to go back and find who had killed him. And why. Because not to do so—forget what Cram was like; it didn’t matter what he was like—was to become a time-server, a bureaucrat. Work to rule and take your pension.

  There was a knock. Dukas shuffled to the door and opened it and found a young sailor standing there.

  “Mister Craik would like to see you, sir.”

  Dukas grunted and headed toward the det office. Alan was there with a clipboard full of messages. “Bad news,” he said. “We’re losing the 747. It’s been ordered to Cairo.”

  Dukas was beyond reacting. “When?”

  “Be there 0600 tomorrow.”

  “Who’s getting it?”

  “Isn’t specified. ‘Report to duty officer, U.S. embassy, for assignment.’ ”

  “DEA,” Dukas said. He stared at a wall where somebody had put up a photo of the det and one of the S-3s on the deck of the Jefferson. Everybody was smiling, Alan in the center.

  “You okay?” Alan said.

  “Yeah, yeah. No. What the hell.” Dukas took the message, read it.

  Alan said, “Pilot wants to leave at 1930. I say, let’s send Triffler and Keatley with him. They’ll be there in four hours and they’ll be able to get some sleep. Your woman agent—what’s her name, Ditka?—she’s working on the explosive analysis now. She can work on it in the air, maybe. At least we may get something on the bomb residue out of it.”

  “At least. Or at most.”

  Half an hour later, they gathered their people in the otherwise empty NCIS office. Again, a circle of folding chairs sat in gloom. Alan and Dukas sat side by side, Geelin on Alan’s other side, then Sandy Cole, Geraldine Pastner, Triffler, Keatley, and around to Patemkin, sitting on Dukas’s left.