Force Protection

by Gordon Kent

  “Where’s our bird?”

  “Sorry?” Cedric had paused to look at a sign, caught like a crow that has seen a bright object.

  “Chopper. Boat. You here with me, Mister Llewellyn?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I’m going to use the facilities and change into a flight suit. Don’t wander off.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  While she changed, she fascinated three Arab women who were changing from Western street clothes to head-to-toe black shrouding. Rose suspected they were going to Saudi, Yemen, or one of the other fundamentalist states. She wondered what they thought of her, changing into a one-piece with a zipper. Three minutes later, Rose was back in the main hall, dressed in her sage-green flight suit and with her helmet bag strapped to the top of her luggage. She stood at the door to the ladies’ room and looked for Llewellyn. She found him at a fancy watch counter fifty yards away, staring blankly at the display.

  “I’d leave you here, but I don’t know where the plane is,” she said pleasantly. He jumped as if struck. “Get me to the boat, Llewellyn.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Mombasa.

  Alan walked into the plywood shack that represented the intel area with his good hand full of images and found Dukas alone, reading from a stack of reports. Dukas looked up, flicked his report at Alan in mock salute, and told him what Harry O’Neill had said.

  “Drugs.” He looked at Alan, eyes pouched with fatigue, but alert and skeptical. “Drugs? Harry thinks it’s something about Somalia. Not too far from that cell-phone hit and this poachers’ camp you guys keep talking about.”

  Alan poured some of the coffee. “That’s the camp,” he said. He tossed the MARI images in front of Dukas. “I’m going to ask Rafe for permission to check it out on the ground.”

  Dukas grunted. “You mean, you’re going to ask Rafe to let you hit it.”

  “Yep.” Alan looked out the door, past the lounging aircrew and into the evening light outside the hangar. The air was electric, with a taste of ozone and the promise of rain.

  Dukas rubbed at the back of his head. “Show me the connections. Rafe’s going to ask, anyway.”

  Petty Officer Menendez interrupted, pushing through the open door, his eagerness arriving a little ahead of him. “Sir! We’ve been looking at the MARI and we’re pretty sure your dead elephants are fuel bladders!” He hesitated then, seeing that the two senior men had been talking. “Uh—sorry, sir—” But Alan nodded, and Menendez held up an enhancement of one of the MARI images, now pasted on plywood with colored-tape arrows and some inset photographs. “We don’t know much about elephants but, thankfully, Mister Campbell had imaged a whole pack of ’em on the same tape he got the camp. They have a lot more bone and they reflect radar real good.”

  He handed Alan a single image printed on standard paper. The elephants were quite clear, especially their heads and tusks. Then, as Alan handed the photo to Dukas, he pointed at his enhancement of one of the “dead elephants.”

  “These things have almost no return at all. According to Mister Opono, the bones would be the last things left behind, not the skins, and they wouldn’t ordinarily drag a corpse to the camp anyway, right? Okay. So we looked through some books and the best we can suggest is fuel bladders. Like they expect to refuel a big ship or some planes. And this big tent here? Under the canvas they got three, maybe even four vehicles. Like technicals from Somalia, right? Okay? See the tube? That’s a rocket launcher, right? And that, that’s some kinda vehicle-mounted gun. Mister Opono says they wouldn’t use these for poaching. Too messy.” He looked at Alan, then Dukas, his eagerness suddenly collapsing. “That’s all we got so far, but we’re still working.”

  Alan put his hand on Menendez’s shoulder. “You got something, Menendez. Good work.”

  “Thanks, sir. Valvano has something for you, too.”

  “Send him in.” Alan waved at the door. “Mike, think of this as a flag brief. We’re the flag.”

  “Might as well ask for Sandy and Geraldine, then. They have something to say, too.”

  Menendez called softly outside the door, then turned back. “Remember the muezzin calls, sir?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Remember that MP3 player loaded with the things? The one off the body? After the attack on the USAID office in Cairo, the NCIS guy—I don’t remember his name—”

  “Triffler,” Dukas growled.

  “Him, yeah, he got us more muezzin calls in the data files of one of the guys there. We found they were the same muezzin calls again, with a few exceptions. Cryptologists on the boat and back home took those files to the Internet and did things to them, looking for embedded codes, and found nothing.”

  Dukas leaned forward and interrupted. “They did locate the website where the calls originated.”

  “Sorry, sir. Sure. But Petty Officer Valvano, here, noted that there were two sets of anomalous muezzin calls. What both sets have in common is that they are posted repeatedly over the last five months, despite having the same digital content. We don’t know what one set is, but thanks to Muzari and Valvano, we think we have the other.” Menendez was like an MC at a party, and he looked at Valvano as if he was introducing his best act. “Valvano?”

  Petty Officer Valvano was clearly nervous about speaking in front of his skipper, so he stood beside Alan and spoke very softly. “The one signal—the one I figured out, well, uh, I hope I—anyway, it’s, uh, the time of the attacks. Well, minus twelve, I think. Except that once it didn’t happen. That’s, uh, all.” He gulped and then breathed loudly, as if he had run a race.

  “Thanks, guys,” Alan said. “Get me Ms. Cole and Ms. Pastner.”

  “Sure thing, Skipper.”

  Dukas was taking notes.

  “Penny for your thoughts?” Alan asked.

  “Time to write a threat assessment and put it out to the Nav,” Dukas said, never taking his eyes off the page. “Cell phones, muezzin calls, fuel bladders, poachers, drugs.” He looked up and shrugged. “I don’t get it. I mean, I see the outline. The bastards hit the DEA clandestine unit in Cairo. You can walk it back from that and maybe from the cell-phone indications for Sicily.”

  “What d’you think the camp is?”

  “You tell me.” Dukas was writing again.

  “I’d know more if I could go check it out. The wounded guy said they got the explosives on the coast, and the camp is on the coast.”

  “He could have meant anywhere. Kismayu, even.”

  “Like I said, I’d know more if I could look it over.”

  “Knock it over, you mean.”

  Sandy rapped at the door. Geraldine edged past her, sat on a chair with her legs either side of the back. Just the way Dukas was sitting. Sandy sat on the edge of the plywood table, barely resting her weight, as if afraid it would collapse.

  Alan finished his thought. “Yeah, Mike. I want to go in with the means to swing if I have to.”

  Dukas waved at Sandy. “You ready to talk about your interviews?”

  Sandy squirmed. Geraldine looked deadpan.

  “Sandy and I spent the day with prostitutes,” she said with a glint of humor. “We interviewed twenty women in Malindi, got six hits on our target area, and took witness depositions from three. I’ve got to say that the Kenyan prostitute is a cut above her American counterpart in social status; it’s a pleasure to interview a sex worker who will meet you in public and isn’t afraid of the cops.” She glanced at Mike, who smiled back. “The important data is that a few of these girls had been to the camp Opono described. They gave me a sketch map that matches our MARI imagery and they could describe the camp’s garrison. According to Liese, a Luo girl from upcountry, there are ten or twenty soldiers in the camp, more than there used to be, and most of them are Hutus from Burundi. At least two are white, either South African or European. She also noted that there were three or four men who she thought were from India. Elizabeth, another witness, says the four are from Sri Lanka and won�
�t have sex with African women because they are afraid of AIDS. They are short, have dark skin and very curly hair, and speak good English. They make jokes and flirt but won’t have sex.”

  When Geraldine mentioned Sri Lanka, Alan stood straighter and Dukas flushed.

  “How reliable are these girls?” Dukas asked.

  “As reliable as any prostitute. I think they’ve been there; their sketch map correlates really well to the imagery. Why lie about the rest?”

  Dukas was shaking his head. “What are frigging Tamils doing in Africa?” He looked around. “Well, they sound like Tamils.” He stood and stretched.

  Sandy spoke quietly. “We were stopped on our way back.” She handed Alan a stained envelope. “A little local man in a suit. He looked like Christ in an icon. You know?”

  Alan nodded. “Mister Nadek.”

  “Maybe. He gave me that and said he’d keep the city quiet as long as he can, but that ‘there are those who want blood.’ ”

  “I’m sure that’s true.”

  Rain on the hangar roof made a gentle white noise. Alan opened the envelope and read the contents. Toward the end, his smile was wolfish. He looked at Dukas. “They caught one of their own. He doesn’t say much about it, except that the guy was paid a lot and it came from out of town.”

  “If we had time, and manpower, we could run that down.” Dukas was leaning in the door. Sandy nodded. “David’s waiting to say something.”

  Alan nodded but he didn’t move. Instead he thought of Mister Nadek, trying to keep civilization together. And being betrayed by one of his own. Dukas leaned out and yelled for Opono, who walked in and sat with dignity.

  “Go ahead,” Sandy said. One of her hands trembled.

  “These are poachers up there in that camp.” Opono said it with complete certainty. “They are Europeans and they are Africans, and they are killers and exploiters and thieves. Evil must be destroyed.” He said that with utter certainty, too, and in the way you express beliefs you are sure everybody who can hear you shares. They didn’t share, however; there was a little flutter of looks and nervous movements, these people not accustomed to leaping from intelligence estimates to the idea of evil. Opono saw their reaction; he folded his hands and said by way of explanation, “I am a Christian.” He said it in the way that an African would say it to Africans and be perfectly understood, but they weren’t Africans and they didn’t understand that he was telling them that he believed in good and evil and a biblical idea of war.

  Sandy Cole looked at him as if she was hearing him from hell; she twisted a pencil in her soft fingers. It broke with a snap.

  Alan looked at Opono.

  “Would you go on a reconnaissance with us to investigate that camp?”

  Opono smiled. “I would be happy to lead it myself.”

  “Call Rafe now,” Dukas said.

  USS Thomas Jefferson.

  Rafe sipped cold coffee and thought of the old Navy saying: Fair winds and following seas.

  “Sir, I have a call for you from Commander Craik on the radio.”

  Captain Rafehausen turned in his chair and waved to the messenger. He was on the bridge of the USS Thomas Jefferson, watching rollers that had been born five thousand miles to the east roll at him like walls of water and then pass under the bow. Jefferson was steaming straight into the wind and waves, and spray was breaking over the flight deck from every wave. So far, she hadn’t buried the bow. Putting the bow into a wave would wreak havoc with the deck and smash the two forward catapults, wrecking the Jefferson as a fighting ship for weeks.

  Rafe knew that it was better to have a sea like this under his stern. A following sea. But that would bring the shore of Kenya, six hundred miles to the west, too close for the battle group commander’s peace of mind.

  In the big command chair above him, the captain of the ship conned her, trying to outguess the rollers and the wind, trying to ride the tops of the waves, keeping the great ship steady in thirty-foot-high waves.

  And they hadn’t even hit the storm yet.

  “Got you, Al. Give it to me.”

  “Sir, we think we’ve located a base from which the attack on the Harker was launched.”

  Rafehausen smiled when Al Craik called him “sir.” But he nodded when he heard the content. “Where?”

  “North coast of Kenya. It’s a known poaching camp, a place the Kenyan government—well, part of the Kenyan government—has wanted to clean out for a couple of years.”

  “What does poaching have to do with terrorism, Al?”

  “Stick with me, Rafe, this ain’t easy. One, we have a witness who can maybe put the dhow that made the attack at this camp on the day. Two, we have witnesses who have been in the camp and provided us with information about it. Three, I did a recce via MARI and got images of fuel bladders and other precursors for a follow-on attack. There’s more, real nuts and bolts.”

  “What’s Mike Dukas say? And who did this, Al? Islamic fundamentalists, or other?”

  “Other, Rafe.” Alan recapped the information for him, leaning hard on the MARI data, the fuel bladders, and the cell-phone connections. “Mike says he wants evidence from this camp, Rafe. We think this whole thing is about drugs. It’s all bought and paid for, Rafe: Kurds and Tamils and Pakistanis. At home they’d be terrorists. In this case, I think they’re unwitting mercenaries.”

  “You got a plan?” Rafe winced as he watched a fountain of spray leap ninety feet over the deck, but the carrier’s knife-edge prow cut through the top of the great wave and the ship began to race down the far slope, gravity pushing her faster than her skipper wanted. Five feet from Rafe, he bellowed for the screws to reverse. Rafe had to put a hand over the earphones. “Repeat your last? I’m losing you.”

  “Two planes and a helicopter and some gas.”

  “What?” Rafe was shouting. One of the bridge hatches had slammed open and four sailors were wrestling it back closed.

  “No . . . draulics and . . .” Alan said. “But I need the Marines. I’ll have Kenyan rangers as scouts and their boss will be the—”

  “Jesus!” the ship captain gasped.

  Rafe turned and looked out. The next wave wasn’t a wall. It was a mountain. He had heard the phrase “mountain of water” before and had never seen such a thing in fifteen years at sea. Even two wave crests away, it towered over the other waves like a nightmare.

  “Rafe?”

  Rafe was silent. After his exclamation, the Jefferson’s captain was silent, too. Rafe had enough sea time to know he had nothing to contribute, but he didn’t have the sangfroid to talk to Al Craik while the wave did its work. “Wait one, Al. Mother Nature has done herself proud. We’re about to climb a fifty-foot wave.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Been said,” Rafe snapped, reverting to aviator calm under pressure. Then he watched as the bow rose and rose, until his weight seemed to be on his back and he wondered if the ship could fall off the wave. He wanted to look behind and see what the trough looked like, but there was no monitor for the stern. They continued to climb. Rafe watched the ship’s angle on an analog device installed above the captain’s chair and wondered if there was some magic number at which the whole ship would flip or sink. Fifteen degrees? It didn’t seem like much to an aviator.

  And then he could see the sky over the top of the wave, and in a flash of lightning the tension on his back eased and they were over the crest, level for a moment, and then racing down the other side. A squall hit, blanking out vision, and the rain pounded at the bridge windows like bullets.

  “Rafe?”

  Rafehausen let go a deep breath he hadn’t been aware of holding. “Still here, Al. You want to take Marines in on the ground?”

  “Roger that.”

  “And you’ll get evidence that might prevent another attack?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  “But this place is in Kenya. So you’ll be launching an armed attack on Kenyan soil.”

  “Yes, sir. But we’ll h
ave a Kenyan government officer with us, and his authority.”

  “Can you make them shoot you first?”

  “—again?” They were on their way down the slope again, less steep than the last one, but it still caused a loss in radio contact. Rafe waited until they were past the trough. “I want them to shoot first. If there’s shooting, make damn sure you can tell me they fired first.”

  “Roger that. But I need some stuff. Big stuff.” He heard Alan start to talk faster as he got to his requirements. “I need an armed F-18. I need one of the smallboys. I might need medical and I might need a brig in U.S. territory.”

  Rafe watched the ocean roar by in awesome majesty and contemplated the order that would send one of his fragile escorts—a “smallboy”—in a long turn across the front of these incredible seas, back toward a lee shore. It could be done, with consummate seamanship, luck, and more luck.

  “Do you want a smallboy, or do you need one?”

  “I need one, Rafe. If I capture anybody over the rank of peon, Mike Dukas doesn’t want him going to Kenya. Can you hear me?”

  “Roger, Al, I copy.” Rafe looked out at the water again and thought, This is why I get the big bucks. “Esek Hopkins is northwest of me. I’ll get her turned toward you. Why do you need an F-18?” He couldn’t keep a hint of sarcasm out of his voice.

  “Say again?”

  “I would have to launch an F-18 in the next hour, before the deck closes. Even now, Al, I have intermittent forty-foot seas and freak waves. You copy that?”

  “Roger.”

  “You still want me to send a pilot off?”

  Pause.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Rafe’s voice was solemn. “Okay, Al. I’m going on your judgment here.” Ten years of friendship in that sentence. And a warning: it could be both their careers. “You go do what you have to do.” He paused. “You remember what I told you this morning? It still stands. I want you out of there as soon as we have a working deck again. You got that? We’re going to be late meeting the Roosevelt as it is. And this action of yours will have consequences with Kenya. No way it can’t—right?”