Force Protection

Force Protection

Gordon Kent

For intelligence analysts who sort truth from lies.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Day One

1

2

3

4

Day Two

5

6

7

8

9

Day Three

10

11

12

Day Four

13

14

Day Five

15

16

17

Coda

About the Author

Praise for Gordon Kent

The Alan Craik Novels

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

The old bull elephant stamped.

The matriarch let the stripped acacia branch drop at her feet and turned her head a little. The bull stamped again, snorted. She took a step toward him and then looked down at her calf, unsure. He stamped again.

All through their band, heads came up.

The old bull’s ears shot forward, full display, and he stamped, louder, and trumpeted. There was a noise now, a noise they all knew, and the alien metal smell. Too close, the old bull was saying. She turned away, her calf at her side, and began to move along the nearly dry watercourse, away from the noise. She was the matriarch, and the others followed her lead. She moved quickly, easily, fitting her bulk between trees or just knocking older wood down. She wanted to get into deeper cover first, while the bull did his job.

Braaat. A noise like a tree being torn out of the ground right beside her. She whirled and her calf was gone. She started to go back. She could smell her own fear and that of her sisters all around her. Her calf was kneeling at the base of a tree, slumping down slowly, and she knew he was done. She keened a little, and Braaat sounded again. Something punched her in the head and stung her ear and she bellowed her pain. One of her sisters stumbled, fell, didn’t rise. The ripping noises were all around her, everywhere, and she watched another, younger bull go down heavily, his feet thrashing and tearing at the dry earth even as he gave his death cry. All their shrieks tore the air, audible for miles, the message clear to other elephants. Panic and death.

Angry and afraid, she whirled her bulk back and forth, looking for her assailants, looking for the predator killing her family. She hated with a wild hate, and called, standing over her dead calf, until the braaat finished her, too.

He was a big, confident white man with a sneering smile. His black soldiers feared him. He walked through the carnage, his ‘boys’ already cutting the ivory and in two cases taking the hides. Younger men were cutting the tails for bracelets. He shook his head at the two dead calves.

‘That’s a waste of ammunition,’ he said to a young black man, his own South African accent plain. ‘No reason to shoot ‘em. Nothing on ‘em worth taking back.’ He made ‘back’ sound like ‘beck.’ The boy nodded, his eyes still wide from shooting the elephants. The South African thought that killing elephants was an excellent way to train his men. He walked back to the big truck that they had come in to lay their ambush hours before, took a long drink of water to wash the red dust from his throat, and reached for the cell phone on the seat.

Sixty miles down the coast of Kenya, in the small city of Malindi, a man also reached for his cell phone. He was dark with sun but not African – Mediterranean, rather, perhaps Maltese or even Spanish. His English was accented but clear, slightly Americanized. He was a small man, not quite middle-aged, muscular. He was sitting in the well of a thirty-foot power boat in the Malindi marina, sipping Byrrh and looking at a handsome black woman in a thong.

‘Uh,’ he said into the phone.

‘This is Cousin Eddie.’

He knew the voice and the South African accent. A prick, but a necessary prick, was his view. ‘Uh,’ he said again. The topless woman was lying on the deck of the next boat over. Her nipples pointed skyward like little antiaircraft guns, he thought. He’d had experience of antiaircraft guns.

‘We got eleven nice pianos.’ ‘Pianos’ were elephants (because piano keys used to be made from elephant ivory).

‘Send them down. Everything okay? The kids, they’re okay?’ The ‘kids’ were fifty adult mercenaries, mostly Rwandan Hutus.

‘Kids are fine. They’re playing every day.’

‘Ready for the celebration?’

‘Can’t wait! Everything going nicely.’

‘I sent you three new kids with toy boats.’

‘Yeah, got here last night. Very eager.’

The man in Malindi thought that for what he was paying, they should have been very eager indeed, but he didn’t say anything about that. Instead, he said that the kids should be kept busy with their toy boats, and he didn’t want anything to go wrong at the celebration, was that perfectly clear? The South African at the other end said that was perfectly clear, in the voice that men use to show that they don’t take shit from anybody, to which the man in Malindi responded by grunting and shutting down his cell phone and watching the topless woman grease herself with lotion. Then he turned the phone back on and put in a call that went by way of a pass-through in Indonesia to a number in Sicily.

Carmine Santangelo-Fugosi was the son of a smalltime smuggler who had been born in a mountain village and who now lived in an eighteenth-century palace that had been built by the family that had once ruled this part of Sicily. The head of the family had been called ‘Count;’ that had lasted almost until Carmine’s father had been a young man. Now Carmine lived there, and people showed him even more reverence than they had shown the counts, and they called him Don.

He was tall for a Sicilian, slightly stooped, fifty, a solidly built man with thick features and a head of graying hair that he left long because he was trying to hide pattern baldness. He wore a collarless white shirt and pleated trousers and felt slippers, and from time to time he spat on the floor of his own terrace, big gobs, to show he was a peasant and came from peasants.

‘This is very nice,’ a small Lebanese man said in French from the shade of an umbrella, ignoring the spit. The umbrella was fixed in a cast-iron table with a glass top and rather too much filigree work in the legs – more of Carmine’s peasant taste – and matched by the chairs around it. The Lebanese wore sunglasses and a weary-looking cotton suit the color of muddy water. With him at the table was an almost pretty man who translated the French into Italian for Carmine Santangelo-Fugosi.

Carmine looked around at his terrace, his eighteenth-century palazzo, his flowers and his French doors and his tiled floors. Of course it was nice. Carmine was a fucking billionaire – what did he expect? ‘I don’t want any shit from Hizbollah,’ Carmine said.

The Lebanese made a gesture that indicated that shit was something that Hizbollah would never in a million years give him. He said in French that none of this would ever get back to Hizbollah and that if it ever did, he, the Lebanese, swore on his mother’s grave – he was a Christian – that he would kill himself.

Carmine looked at him as the translation came and said, ‘Tell him that if Hizbollah finds out, he’ll wish he’d killed himself today.’

Then Carmine’s cell phone went off and he turned away, the phone at his ear, and walked to the edge of his terrace, where a balustrade separated him from the twenty-meter drop to the town below. Down there were a street, a café, roofs, and then the port and the Mediterranean, sparkling away to Africa.

‘And?’ he said into the phone when the man in Malindi had finished his report. Carmine kept his voice low and his back turned to the table, which, because the terrace was so big, was too far away for anybody to have heard him, anyway. Plus the Lebanese wasn’t supposed to understand Italian, but Carmine never trusted things like that. People lied about themselves all the time. He leaned on the balustrade and carried on his side of the conversation in grunts and mono-syllables, turning slowly to look around the terrace. Two other men were there, one at each doorway, arms folded, impassive, both the children of his father’s relatives. Both armed.

‘So,’ he said. He covered the phone with his other hand so he could look at the Lebanese while he talked. The Lebanese was getting a lot of money to do the job, but could he do it? Carmine wondered if he should get rid of the man and start over. No, there wasn’t time. ‘I don’t care about that,’ he said into the phone when the other man started to give him details. ‘All I want is your assurance that everything will be ready for the celebration. Your absolute assurance.’ When he heard the reply, he grunted and switched off, but the grunt was a positive one. He trusted the man in Malindi.

He spat. He couldn’t spit like that without a certain run-up, a certain amount of sound not unlike retching. He went back to the table and waved a hand at one of the other men, who came over and poured him more coffee and then backed away.

Carmine took a biscotto in his right hand and, holding it between his thumb and third finger, used it to lecture the Lebanese. ‘I want the only face on this to be Muslim, you follow me?’ Carmine came from a village where they had still now and then been visited by puppeteers who did plays from the romances about Saracens and Christian knights; his sense of Islam was based in that half-sophisticated, half-ignorant past. ‘That’s what the world is to see. That’s what Jean-Marc is for.’ He gestured with the cookie at the handsome translator, who was actually a freelance television journalist and who smiled at them as if he was on camera. ‘You deliver Mombasa,’ Carmine said to the Lebanese. He dipped the biscotto, sucked the now-soaked end. ‘No mistakes. You don’t get a second chance. Eh?’

‘Of course, of course –’ The Lebanese was afraid of him and showed it – never a bad idea with Carmine, who liked fear in the people around him. The Lebanese tapped the glass top of the table. ‘I have everything arranged –’ He stopped. The translator was shaking his head at him.

Carmine hawked and spat and waved his left hand. ‘Don’t tell me details. Tell Carlo or somebody. Get out.’ He looked toward a door. ‘Carlo!’

The Lebanese was hustled out, his right hand halfway up to give a parting handshake, his mouth still open. He would be back in his Christian village in Lebanon by midnight. It might seem he would have nothing to fear there from somebody living in Sicily. But he knew better.

Carmine sat at the table with the translator, wiping his mouth with a cloth napkin. ‘What do you think?’ he said.

‘I think I don’t understand what is going on, Don,’ he murmured.

‘You don’t need to understand!’ Carmine’s head was down like a bull’s. ‘You do what I pay you to do – you talk nice, look pretty on the camera, you keep saying what I tell you. You don’t hear nothing, you don’t know nothing, you weren’t here today, and you didn’t meet this no-balls Lebanese! Yes?’

‘Yes, yes – of course – Don.’

Carmine sat back. He fingered a cigarette out of a pack on the table without looking. ‘You want to keep a secret, you chop it into pieces and you give each guy a piece. They look at it, they say, “I don’t know what I got here.” That’s how it stays a secret.’

He lit the cigarette and turned and looked across the terrace at the sea, his legs spread, his forearms on his knees and his hands joined, smoke blowing from the side of his mouth. The sea was empty but he seemed to see something there, because he said, ‘The US Navy, that’s what I worry about. Fucking US Navy.’

Day One

16 August 1999

1

Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Nairobi, Kenya.

Laura had tarted herself up so that she was quite a distraction, he thought, watching her approach the passport-control slot with her hidden contraband. She walked with a bouncy stride that wasn’t really her own, chest up and out, her rear also very much on view in tight yellow shorts that barely reached her hips. Her navel rode calmly in all this motion, its ring with the diamond chip winking. Laura had made herself, in fact, all distractions, and every male eye in the shed-like arrival area was on some part of her. The fact that she didn’t have a really pretty face was irrelevant.

Alan Craik grinned despite himself. She was enjoying it! He, on the other hand, was nervous, for her as much as for himself, and he tensed as she sashayed to the passport-control booth and started to chat with a security officer. More balls than he had, he thought. He had only to move a 9mm pistol through; she had something far more dangerous.

He flexed his fingers to relax them, felt the odd sensation in his left hand where two fingers were missing. Or, rather, were red stumps. He forced himself to look at them, felt disbelief, slight disgust. My hand. The fingers had been blown off by a bullet seven weeks before. There had been talk of his leaving the Navy.

He balled the hand into a fist and forced himself to concentrate. Back to work.

Alan laid his US passport, a twenty-dollar bill sticking from its top, in front of the black man at passport control. The man, too, had been looking at Laura, and Alan grinned.

‘Maridadi,’ Alan said. Pretty.

The man’s eyes flicked over Alan’s shoulder again to Laura, fifty feet away, and he growled Whore in Swahili, which Alan wasn’t supposed to understand. He stamped the passport and waved Alan through. The twenty had disappeared.

Alan took three steps, clearing passport control, and looked for her. For a moment he lost her, then saw the bright yellow of her buns swinging up the stairs to the balcony above. He guessed that she had seen the sign up there for a ladies’ room, used that excuse to bypass customs temporarily. Up there, however, farther along the balcony, was a uniformed Kenyan soldier with an automatic weapon, strategically located between the stairs and the exit at the far end that led directly to the terminal. He was there to turn back anybody who tried to get out that way.

The yellow shorts flashed and the door to the ladies’ room closed. Alan turned and walked out.

He waited for her in the terminal hall. His pulse had leveled off again, and the sweat that had threatened to leak down his sides had stopped. His part was over: he had moved the weapon and fifty cartridges through the airport’s security. Now, if Laura didn’t get arrested for moving drugs –

A wooden dhow moved south along the Kenyan coast, nearing Mombasa. It was going slowly under motor power, its sail useless in the humid breeze that blew from the shore. The men aboard could smell the land beyond, an odor slightly spicy, smoky, earthy, overlaid with the moist decay of the mangrove swamps where Africa met the ocean.

A dark man sat at the foot of the mast, waiting for the first sight of the city. Just now, he could see only blue-green haze where the land lay, and here and there a darker mass where a point thrust out. He had binoculars hung around his neck, but he did not use them. He was in fact seeing far more clearly with an inner eye, which looked beyond the haze, beyond Africa even, into his future.

In four hours, he would be in paradise.

He believed this more completely than he believed that he was sitting on a ship on an ocean on a ball rolling through space. He believed with both passion and simplicity; he believed utterly. He had no fear of the destruction of his physical self that would send him there. They had assured him that he would feel nothing: a flash, a pressure, and he would wake in paradise.

Another man approached him. He had a bag of tools in one hand and, in the other, a black plastic case that held a detonator. ‘Time,’ the man said.

The dark man shook his head. ‘Not yet.’ He returned to his contemplation of paradise.

‘Hey, man,’ he heard her voice say behind him.

‘My God, you made it!’

‘Piece of cake!’ She shrugged. Grinned. Held up a hand so that he could see that the fingers were trembling. ‘Little reaction after the fact.’ Laughed. Her distractions bounced, and Alan Craik, loyal husband, father, moral man, pursed his lips and thought that it was going to be a long three days – and three nights – before she went on to other duties.

‘How’d you get by the guy with the gun?’

‘Walked.’ She moved a little closer. ‘Want to see how I walked?’ She wasn’t wearing a bra, he knew – she had told him earlier – and her silk T-shirt was definitely a little small.

‘I think we ought to do our report.’

‘You’re a great partner, Craik. I tell you, man, I sure lucked out with you!’ She sighed. Laura Sweigert was a Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agent, good at her work, tough, but she had a reputation for liking what she called ‘contact sports’ when the workday was over. ‘I just scored big, man – you think I want to write some fucking report?’ He remembered a news report about a female tennis star who, after a big win, said she just wanted to get laid.

A long three nights.

He was saved by a voice, calling his name. Behind them and to their right was the exit lane from immigration, lined on both sides by a crowd of greeters – family, hustlers, tourist reps, women in saris, men with hand-lettered signs that said ‘Adamson’ and ‘Client of Simba, Ltd.’ The voice calling ‘Mister Craik! Mister Craik!’ came from there, and Alan searched the two crowds, feeling Laura’s hand on his bare arm. He thought he recognized the voice and searched for a face, a white face in the mostly black crowd, and then he saw a Navy ball cap and knew he had the right man, and he waved.

‘Craw! Hey, Craw!’

Master Chief Martin Craw had been one of the people who had got him through being an ensign. Craw had taught him the back end of the S-3. Craw had shown him how to massage old tapes and older computers and pull up targets from electronic mush. Craw had given him an example of what a Navy man should be.

Now Martin Craw came toward them, a little grin on his face as he took in both Alan and Laura, hand outstretched.

‘Laura, I want you to meet the best master chief in the US Navy. Martin, this is Laura Sweigert, who just brought a kilo of white powder through Kenyatta arrivals.’

‘Ma’am.’ Craw was in his early forties but seemed an ancient to Alan because of his great, quiet authority. His grin, however, and his quick appraisal of Laura, were not an old man’s. ‘How’d you do that?’

Laura rocked back a little and smiled at him. ‘I think it was the T-shirt.’

Craw reddened only a little. ‘Kinda dangerous.’ He didn’t make clear whether he meant the T-shirt or the white powder. Craw was from Maine.

She made a sound that pooh-poohed the idea. ‘Hell’s bells, Craik brought through a goddamned gun!’

‘Not so loud –’

‘And bullets!’

‘Laura, hey –’

She held up her hands. ‘Okay, okay.’ Her fingernails, like her toenails, were painted a glittery red. Her lipstick was pink, her eyeshadow violet, her hair a mousy brown that you ignored because it was gelled to look as if she’d just got very, very wet. ‘Entirely legit,’ she said. ‘We’re testing airport security for NCIS.’

‘I figured.’ Craw grinned. He jerked his head at Alan. ‘He’s always legit.’

Laura made a face. ‘So I’m discovering.’ She put a hand through Craw’s arm. ‘What are your plans for the next couple of days, sailor?’ Alan, caused abruptly to see Craw through her eyes, realized that the senior chief was a damned good-looking man.

Craw saw Alan’s look, blushed. ‘I’m goin’ to be working for Mister Craik.’

Alan bent and picked up his helmet bag, which held the H&K. ‘You want to bring me up to date, Chief? Like, um, what you’re doing here?’ He had last seen Craw on board the USS Thomas Jefferson a week ago, when he had had to fly back to CONUS to be deposed for a national-security case.

With Laura leaning against him, Craw explained that he had flown into Mombasa the evening before from the CV to set up the US hangar there as their home base while they shore-deployed. ‘Orders from the CAG.’ He raised his free hand, which held a black attaché case.

‘Yeah, I know, I got ‘em, too. But I didn’t expect to be met at Nairobi.’

‘Thought I could brief you flying back to Mombasa. The admiral’s goin’ to inspect us tomorrow.’ Again, he gestured with the attaché case. ‘Got some paperwork –’

‘What the hell, we just got here!’

‘Well, he’s makin’ a shore visit, so it’s some ship today, us tomorrow.’

That changed the price of fish. What he and Laura had just done – moving illicit items through airport security for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service – was a peripheral responsibility, a test of local conditions that would become part of a report. He had treated it as a game; however, with this return to the realities of his detachment, the pleasures of the game faded and the serious trivia of Navy life took over.

They began moving away from the arrivals area. ‘What’s our space like down there?’

‘Kinda filthy. One of the old air-force hangars at Mombasa airport. Not been used for a while – dust, gear missing – been a lotta thievin’, I’d guess. I put everybody to cleanin’ up, but the place is big – room for a couple P-3s in there and to spare, if you had to.’

They were walking toward the Air Kenya desk now to start the flight to Mombasa. ‘How many personnel?’

‘Aircrew for one plane plus seventeen – other plane comin’ in a few days.’

‘Staying where?’

‘Nyali International.’ American military, like government people, got put up in the big international hotels on the beach because they were supposed to be more secure than hotels in Mombasa itself. ‘But I told ‘em, you boys just plan to be in this hangar nonstop till the admiral’s blown through, then I’ll get you some rack time. They’re all good boys.’

They were, Alan thought; they were all good boys now, although when he and Craw had first encountered them some months before, they had been pretty bad boys. Detachment 424 was a one-shot unit put together to test-drive a 3-D radar-imaging system called MARI, and it had been almost run into extinction by its acting officer-in-charge before Alan and Craw and a few others had been able to shape it up. Now deployed with the Jefferson in the Indian Ocean, it had been ordered to fly off to Mombasa for two weeks as an advance party for a visit by the entire battle group.

‘Give me a rundown.’

The men on the dhow smelled Mombasa before they saw it – a dustier air, car exhaust, garbage, people. The dark man raised his binoculars but couldn’t penetrate the haze; Mombasa is a low city, anyway, most of its seafront masked by trees, and the dhow was still well out, although in the shipping lane so as to seem as much a part of normal traffic as it could. Other dhows and rusty merchant ships had passed them going the other way; once, a sparkling-white Kenyan Coast Guard ship had approached and the men had tensed, but it had passed without hailing.

The dark man gestured toward the deeper haze of Mombasa. ‘We go on past the city. Kilindini Harbor is beyond. Tell Simoum that he and the crew can take to the boat once he has sailed us into Kilindini.’