Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  “I’m heading home,” she said.

  “Suits me.”

  She made lunch for her father and mother and the kids; Reko and Gorki were on per diem and wanted junk food. Her mother, she found, was flustered by her being there but somehow pleased; her father smiled a lot but looked weary. He’s got old, she told herself with the surprise every child feels at that realization. He watched her mother constantly, fussed both at and over her. Worried sick. After lunch, he hugged Rose and whispered, “She’s better with the kids here. Like her old self.”

  Rose didn’t say that her mother seemed to her frightened and confused. She didn’t say that she didn’t believe her mother had a self, only an emptiness, a lifelong dissatisfaction.

  She put the kids to bed in her old room and lay down on her parents’ bed. How strange, to lie there where she had been conceived, to stare at the same ceiling. Houston, she thought. What am I going to do about Houston?

  A different voice sounded inside her head. Tom Hanks at the end of Apollo 13, for years her favorite movie: “All from the confines of mission control and our house in Houston.” He meant, that’s how he’d see the moon, because his crippled spacecraft hadn’t made it that far.

  The confines of mission control and our house in Houston.

  The word “confines” stuck like a fishbone in the throat. She hated confines. Maybe I’m more like my mother than I think—never satisfied.

  Houston. Endless suburbia. The NASA family. Being a good team player. Fitting the image.

  She’d hated another movie about the space program—The Right Stuff. It had made the astronauts seem inauthentic, constructs of public relations and hype; by contrast, the test pilot Chuck Yeager had been made to seem heroic. She’d disliked him, thought him a kind of outcast, a cowboy loner.

  Not a team player.

  “The confines of mission control and our house in Houston,” she said aloud.

  She thought of a scene in The Right Stuff she’d never understood: while the astronauts are being turned into corporate lookalikes in Houston, Yeager takes the X-15 to the edge of space, and the aircraft flames out and goes out of control; the crash crew drives toward the smoking wreckage and, as a figure emerges from the smoke, one says, “Is that a man?” It is Yeager. Another voice says, “You’re damned right it is.”

  You’re damned right it is.

  But Yeager had been rejected by the space program. “Doesn’t fit the profile—too independent,” the recruiter had said.

  Not a team player.

  For years, she’d thought that all she wanted to be was an astronaut. Now—

  The confines of mission control and our house in Houston.

  Washington.

  “Jason, this is not about your budget!”

  Ted Kasser stared at a picture of his wife and wondered for the thousandth time why she had worn so much eye makeup to a picnic. He was exhausted, but that was normal. He wished he had a good old-fashioned secretary, some trustworthy guy he could send out for coffee. Real coffee. “I don’t care,” he said quietly into the phone. He tapped a pencil on the desk and tried not to stare at his wife’s picture. Then he swiveled suddenly in his chair, clearly angry, and tossed the pencil so that it stuck in the ceiling tile.

  “Look, Jason, I don’t give a shit about your protection budget. I’ll get the director to sign. I mean it, I want twenty-four-seven protection on the families of everyone on Dukas’s team, starting as soon as this call started. This isn’t a fucking drill!”

  An analyst from the counterterrorism section came in looking guilty and dropped a message on his desk, then pointed at it with his pencil. Kasser looked up, met his eye, nodded, and pointed to the door. The analyst made a quick exit. Kasser read the message and then started it again.

  “Okay, Jason, there’s a disconnect here. I’ll just call the director and it’s your ass. You had your chance.” He hung up. He wondered if, given the air of crisis since the attacks in Mombasa, he could send an analyst out for coffee. Then he placed another call.

  “Sir? Ted. Yessir. There have been some developments. Yes, we can link the attacks in Kenya to the attack on Commander Siciliano. Yes, sir. That’s what I thought, too. Could you ask Jason yourself, sir? He didn’t think his budget would cover it.” He listened to the sound of swearing for two seconds.

  “Yes, sir. Yes, sir.” He took a deep breath. He had made up his mind as soon as he had hung up the phone from talking to Dukas. “Sir, I think we should go for broke on this. I think we should ask to be top dog in the investigation, with Mike Dukas as lead. Dukas has a big rep out there, and we’ve broken a big one with this cell-phone thing. Right. And if CIA and FBI and DEA are going to squabble over it, my thinking is they won’t give an inch to each other, but they might accept us because— Right. They might all settle on a little guy like us. I’d like you to take it all the way to the top. Yeah, I know—but—” He looked at his watch. “I can sack out here if I have to. And I guess that there’s things worse than keeping the President up late in a good cause. Yes, sir. I’ll be right here.”

  Kasser put the telephone in the cradle. Once, long ago, he’d been a cop.

  Mombasa.

  Ted Kasser didn’t get back to Dukas until two hours after Triffler and Keatley and Patemkin had left in the 747 for Cairo. Dukas figured that by then Kasser would have called if he’d had any success. It was over. He was still awake, sitting in his empty office and thinking of the immediate problems he would face by resigning—getting out of Mombasa, cleaning out his office in Washington, dealing with Leslie. Maybe he’d just go away someplace and leave all that for later.

  “This isn’t over,” Kasser’s muffled voice said in the STU.

  “It is for me. I’m sure you tried, Ted.”

  “No, no—it isn’t over. Right now, you’re going to get half a loaf.”

  “Which half?”

  “You can go back into Cairo.”

  That’s what he’d asked for. So wasn’t that the whole loaf? “What’s the other half?”

  “DEA will still be there, and it’s their investigation.”

  “The Cairo bombing maybe is theirs; Cram is ours.”

  “Well, by implication.”

  Dukas was in a fog, but he could make out some landmarks. “By implication” meant that there had been a shouting match and his side hadn’t lost. Meaning that DEA wasn’t sitting on top of the world.

  “Who’s refereeing?” he said.

  “National Security Advisor and Director of the FBI, near as I can make out. DNI has been over there for a couple of hours.”

  “Any idea what DEA is after?” Dukas said. If the DEA position wasn’t rock solid, why not? Because they weren’t supposed to be in Cairo at all? Because they’d blue-skyed something and not told all the right people about it?

  “We think that’s what the FBI is starting to ask. I’ve been looking around since you said it was DEA, and nobody knows anything, but there’s some off-the-record gossip that a DEA team is missing. Only gossip.”

  “In the bombing?”

  Kasser didn’t answer. Dukas remembered wondering why a terrorist would hit a set of AID offices. “Ted, you got any friends at AID?”

  “I might know somebody.”

  “How about asking if they did a sublet in Cairo to DEA?”

  He heard Kasser chuckle. It sounded over the connection like a hammer tapping an anvil, ker-lunk, ker-lunk, ker-lunk. “You think I’m too dumb to come up with that by myself?”

  “You’re on it, right?”

  “I’m on it and I’ll let you know.”

  Dukas was thinking of what it would mean if DEA had had a team in the Cairo building that had been hit. If the target had been the DEA team and not the AID offices, then maybe the bombing was more than an act of terrorism. More than an attack on Americans and not an attack on the Navy. More like what the cell-phone lines on the map showed.

  Who blows up drug enforcement agents?

  Silly question.


  “Thanks, Ted.”

  “You’re not going to resign, right?”

  Dukas took a big breath and let it out. “I guess not.”

  “I almost let you do it. I don’t like to be blackmailed. Even in a good cause.”

  Dukas nodded, as if Kasser could see him. “And I’d do it again. In a good cause.” He took another deep breath, as if he was oxygen-starved. Maybe that’s what fatigue did. “Ted, I want more, but I’m not going to resign over it. Call it clarification. We were supposed to have the flying forensics lab for at least a week; it got taken away a few hours ago and ordered to Cairo. I want it back. It can sit in Cairo, but it’s got to be ours, and Sheila Ditka can do the tech work for everybody.” Before Kasser could jump in, he said, “There’s no reason DEA should have sole use. They’re hiding something, but they can’t go on getting away with it. I’d like that case made tonight to whoever’s making decisions there. Then I’d like it clear that the lab is ours, and we’ll of course share it and welcome their techs, but it stays ours. And we run our investigation in Cairo and DEA shares with us fifty-fifty.”

  Kasser wasn’t pleased, but there was an odd mixture of anger and respect in his voice. “You never stop, do you?” He sounded tired. “Anyway, hang in there—I may have more before tomorrow.”

  At midnight Mombasa time, a message was relayed from the 747, already on the ground in Cairo, to the det’s hangar. Per orders, the duty officer—in this case, Chief Bakin—waked Dukas. It was from Sheila Ditka: Explosive checks out as C4. DMDNB taggant analysis corresponds to explosive manufactured in Switzerland in 1996. Checking for batch and history.

  She had already copied the NCIS lab in Washington, with a flag for Kasser.

  Dukas lay back down on his sleeping bag, trying to tell himself that it was cooler at night and going back to sleep would be easy. He was still awake two hours later, trying to put together the bombs and the phone calls that connected Sicily and Lebanon and Malindi, and the murder of a loser in a hotel toilet in Cairo, and enough involvement with drugs to get a lot of people blown up.

  At five in the morning, a sailor waked him to take another call from Kasser. It was eight at night in Washington and Kasser was still in his office, he could tell, calling on his STU. He sounded exhausted but triumphant.

  “It’s yours, Mike.”

  Dukas didn’t get it. He was still half-asleep. “My what?”

  “Your investigation. NCIS owns everything having to do with both bombings, plus anything coming from the cell-phone tracking. You’re our man.”

  Dukas grunted. He was waking up. “The Bureau? The Agency? DEA—?”

  “They see the light. You’re in charge.”

  “Who’d you have to kill?”

  Kasser’s chuckle was hollow. “Some arm wrestling at what’s called ‘the highest level of government.’ The big guys wore each other out and we came in at the end and won. Go for it, Mike.”

  Dukas actually smiled. He couldn’t stop himself. “Ted, you’re a great man. I’ll never threaten to resign again.”

  Kasser gave the same death’s-head chuckle. “Yeah, you will.”

  DAY

  FOUR

  13

  Mombasa.

  THE INTERMITTENT RAIN OF THE SQUALL LINE AHEAD OF the storm beat down on the tin roof of the hangar. It actually made sleeping easier, and Alan was deep down when one of the duty intel guys woke him at 0115 because the det’s other plane was coming in. The second det plane from the carrier landed at Mombasa at 0130 local. A helicopter landed a few minutes later. Grumpy, pouchy-eyed ground crews rolled out of their bags and ran out into the rain to get the planes tied down and their contents into the hangar. Alan waited in the hangar to greet Soleck and the others, shook hands all around with the helicopter crew that would keep him linked to the Harker if the storm cut comms with the boat, and went back to his sleeping bag. Before he could get back to sleep, he noted that the rain had stopped.

  Three hours later he was up again, this time gulping coffee while he read meteorological notices sent from the boat in message traffic and tried to guess Rafe’s intentions. The storm was huge, and Rafe would take the Jefferson east to meet it and to get more water under his keel. Alan thought that if he needed anything from the boat he’d better get it in the next twenty-four hours.

  Opono drove up to the line of Marine posts before the sun had risen. This time he had four armed men on his vehicle. Alan saw them arrive under the bright white lights of one of Captain Geelin’s posts and then went back to his preflight, expecting Opono to join him. When fifteen minutes had passed and the man still hadn’t made the short drive to the hangar, Alan walked out to post one, noting that his hangar had sprouted a Marine platoon with a mortar section, two S-3s, and a helicopter. He had an army and an air force.

  “Corporal, where did the KWS team go?”

  “Sir, Captain Geelin passed them. He was with them when they drove off.”

  Alan shook his head and walked back to the hangar, where he found Geelin and Opono drinking coffee. Opono shook hands, and Geelin nodded. Was there an element of warmth to the nod?

  “Good morning, David. Care to go flying?”

  “Yes.”

  Alan looked a question at the two of them.

  Opono explained, “I brought some men who know the ground here very well. I thought they could help. There are people who live out there in the flat ground beyond the runway.”

  “We’ve already run into the squatters a couple of times,” Geelin said. “Could have gone wrong.”

  That was news to Alan, and he thought, You should have told me, but he let it pass. His focus was on the mission.

  “Any trouble coming out here?”

  “The GSU is putting a cordon around the airport later today. They say it is for your protection. I think it is to keep your men from seeing what the GSU plans to do in the city, yes?”

  Alan was leading Opono to the briefing room, a plywood shack at the front of the hangar where the flight gear hung. It had eight folding chairs on the concrete floor and a piece of plastic screwed to the wall, a black felt-tip pen hanging from it. A tactical pilotage chart with a plastic cover was glued to another wall. Cohen and Campbell were sitting in the chairs, trying to create a comm card, something that was usually done for them. Soleck sat with Chief Bakin and two AWs.

  “We have to be able to talk to Mombasa tower,” Cohen insisted as they entered. Soleck was shaking his head. They all sprang to their feet as Alan entered.

  “Gentlemen, this is David Opono of the Kenya Wildlife Service. He’s the equivalent of a bird colonel, so act straight.” Cohen and Campbell shook hands. “This is Lieutenant Brian Campbell and this is Lieutenant Mark Cohen. He’ll be flying our plane.”

  “Al, uh, does Mister Opono have any flight quals?” Cohen could find any glass half-empty, if you gave him a chance.

  “No. He’s going anyway.”

  “Have you filed a flight plan?” David waved at the map.

  Campbell bounced up. “We weren’t born yesterday,” he said. “We told them we had to do a check flight for routine maintenance.”

  David’s face didn’t change expression, so Alan had to guess how complex his reaction might be to a foreigner’s lying to his country’s air control. Justified? But he didn’t have to like it?

  “We’re afraid Kenya would deny—”

  “I was going to recommend the same thing.” David smiled and shrugged. “Let’s go to work, eh?”

  Alan nodded.

  “We’ve already done a walk-around. We can fly anytime we want to. I’ve put a mark on the chart, here, for the possibility of a camp. A potential camp. Okay, David, what are we looking for? Will you be able to identify it?”

  “From the air? I doubt it will look like much. I have never seen it, yes?” Opono looked at Alan and shook his head. “But I have reports. A metal shed, they say. Probably a clear space for cleaning carcasses. Vibanda, little huts of grass, maybe a tent. That’s all. A loca
l guy said they were right on the water. There are three small villages in that area, just grass huts, and one abandoned compound.”

  “Brian, what I want is good MARI footage.”

  “What about digital?”

  “Unless I say otherwise, we don’t go too near them.”

  Soleck nodded and tossed his empty coffee cup into a distant can with élan. Campbell crossed his arms.

  David raised his hand. “If it looks like anything, I’d consider doing something about it. Directly.”

  Alan caught his eye. “I think that’s premature.”

  “Just thought you’d like to know how the KWS was thinking.” David pointed at the chart. “I have some information about these people; I think they are poachers.”

  “Do we have this ‘information,’ David?” Poachers. Alan was after bigger game than that.

  “Sandy does.”

  “Okay. Point taken, David. Can we look at the situation first?”

  “I’m here,” he said.

  Alan nodded and started to brief the mission. When he asked for questions, Soleck raised his hand.

  “Sir, what are we looking for?”

  “We don’t know, Evan. David says there’s a rumor of a metal shed. That will give a return, something to look for. If they’re the folks we’re after, I guess they’ll have something on the water; maybe a pier, certainly a boat. That’s all guesswork.” Alan’s reply covered his own doubt. What were they looking for? They were going to a reference point provided by the cell data. That’s all they had.

  “Will there be weapons? Dead animals?”

  David Opono answered. “Maybe.” He shrugged.