Force Protection

The other man – paler, nervous – squatted in front of him, holding out the tools as if they were an offering. ‘Haji, I am ashamed – I am losing my, my – I want to go with them.’

The dark man shook his head. His face was severe, but his voice was kind. ‘Pray. You will be with me in paradise. God is great.’

The other man began to weep.

They talked business, then a few personal things, then a little scuttlebutt, Laura laughing with them. When they got to talking about individuals in the det, Craw laughed – a loud, staccato sound, like a series of backfires – and said, ‘You know what Mister Soleck did now?’

Alan prepared himself. LTJG Soleck was their idiot savant, their divine fool. He had once managed to miss their departure from CONUS and then spend three days catching up with them because, as he had said quite frankly, there had been a bookstore he had had to visit.

‘What’s Soleck?’ Laura said.

‘My cross,’ Alan groaned. ‘A good kid, but a royal screwup – when he isn’t being brilliant.’

‘He’s a doozer,’ Craw said.

‘So what’d he do?’ Alan had a vision of a wrecked aircraft.

‘He was trolling for fish from the stern of the carrier.’

‘The fantail?’

‘No, sir, the CIWS mount.’ Craw pronounced it ‘cee-wiz’ – the cee-wiz mount. ‘Somebody saw him and told me and I didn’t believe it, so I went down and there he was, with a gawd-dam spinnin’ rod, just standin’ there like he was bass fishin’. And the CV makin’ better’n twenty knots!’

‘Well –’ He looked at Laura. ‘Soleck is a little, mm, eccentric. He didn’t do anything really, um, stupid, did he?’ He had a terrible thought. ‘He didn’t fall overboard, did he?’

‘No, sir. But he caught a fish! A gawd-dam big fish! Which he carried by hand all the way to the galley so’s they could cook it for his dinner.’ Craw’s smile became small, almost evil. ‘And not just his dinner.’

‘Oh, no.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘He didn’t.’

‘Yes, sir. Direct to the flag deck, courtesy of LTJG Soleck and Detachment 424.’

Laura guffawed. They were having a beer now in a crowded bar near the departure lounge. She leaned back to laugh, and conversation in the bar died.

‘Was it – edible?’

‘It was gawd-dam delicious! Some big red fish I never saw before, spines on it like a cactus, but it cut like steak and tasted like tuna. Admiral said it was the best fish he ever ate!’

Alan let out a sigh of relief. ‘That’s okay, then.’

‘Well, no. Next day, twenty guys was fishin’ there, and the day after, forty, so the ship’s captain put it out of bounds and sent a memo specially to Mister Soleck, telling him to stop having good ideas.’

Alan sighed. ‘I suppose I got a copy.’

‘Yes, sir. Ship’s captain would like a word with you when you’re back aboard.’

Alan nodded. Right. One week away in Washington, back one hour, and he was going to be up to his ass in Mickey Mouse. Welcome to the US Navy. He flexed his hands and glanced down to where the fingers should have been. Welcome to the US Navy.

Then they were moving down the ramp toward the aircraft that would take them to Mombasa. ‘Don’t worry,’ Craw said softly. ‘Everything’ll be fine.’

‘Right.’

‘We’ll make things shipshape for the admiral, then we got two weeks on the beach to relax.’

‘Right.’

Alan didn’t tell Craw that he had a set of orders that would keep them busy for longer than two weeks, or that his orders had a secret addendum that gave him the responsibility for assessing the consequences if the United States and the UN went back into Somalia. He was returning not only to assess Mombasa as a port of call, but to gather information for a war.

The dhow anchored in Kilindini Road. Ten minutes after she swung to rest on her anchor cable, a boat put over, and six men motored away for the distant shore. On the dhow, the dark man was standing by the landward side, peering through his binoculars. A distant gray vessel was barely visible in the haze at dockside, but he studied it for some minutes, then turned to the only two men left on the dhow with him.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Bring the detonator.’

Over the Indian Ocean.

LTjg Evan Soleck was worried.

The S-3 in whose right-hand seat he rode was mostly older than he was, but that wasn’t what worried him. They were flying at twenty-three thousand feet, two hundred miles from the carrier, and the gauge for the starboard fuel tank wasn’t registering, but that wasn’t what worried him. The man in the left-hand seat was a lieutenant-commander and hated his guts, but that didn’t worry him, either.

What worried Soleck was that in three days he was going to make lieutenant, and he didn’t know what he was going to do about a wetting-down party. It was tradition that you gave a party for your shipmates for a promotion, and you wet down the new bars with the most drinkable stuff available. Not giving a party wasn’t an option. Soleck had heard a story about a new jg in a squadron – nobody ever said what squadron it was, but everybody swore it was true – who had refused to give a party, and his CO had sent him away every weekend for months – courier duty, bullshit trips, hand-carried messages – until he broke and gave a party at last, and nobody went. Soleck couldn’t imagine that degree of isolation. You’d be frozen right out of a squadron. A pariah. He’d kill himself.

So he had to give a party. But it had to be just right. Really phat. Something they’d tell stories about long after he’d been ordered someplace else. So that when he was, let’s say, an old guy – a commander, a squadron CO, even – the nuggets would stare at him and nudge each other and say, ‘The Old Man’s the one that gave a party so cool that –’ That what? There was the problem.

‘You take it?’ the man beside him said.

Soleck snapped out of it. ‘Yes, sir!’

LCDR Paul Stevens was a difficult man. He didn’t like Soleck, the jg knew, because Soleck heroworshipped Alan Craik, their CO, and Stevens and Craik didn’t get along. What Soleck didn’t understand was that Stevens never would have liked him anyway, because Soleck was an optimist and a doer and a happy guy, and Stevens went through life with his own personal cloud raining on him all the time. Now he scowled at the much younger man and sneered, ‘You awake?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Stevens grunted. They had both been put up for the Air Medal for flying into a war zone seven weeks ago to pull out Craik and an NCIS agent and a spy they’d captured, and they’d flown back out with two Chinese aircraft pissing missiles at them and had lived to tell about it – but was Stevens happy? No. He’d done brilliantly, evading missiles with the slow, fat S-3, hoarding fuel long past the gauges’ limit, getting two wounded men back to the CV in time to get the blood they needed. But was he happy? No. All he’d said was, ‘That trip gets me O-5 and a medal, and I’m goddamned if I ever do anything that stupid again.’ The talk before had been that Stevens would get passed over for commander and would have to leave the Navy, but now he’d made O-5 and got a medal, and he remained as sour as a ripe lemon, a weight on the entire detachment.

‘I need to take a piss,’ he was saying. ‘Keep it level on 270 if you can manage it – you’re already three goddam points off.’

Soleck started to object, then shut up. ‘Anything you say, sir.’

‘Yeah, I bet.’

Stevens headed for the tunnel. Alone in the front end, Soleck brought the S-3 back on course and ran through the things he might have said. He knew what Stevens’s beef was: when Craik had taken over the det several months ago, Stevens had been acting CO and things had been a shambles. Craik had whipped them into a first-class outfit; then, with Craik home on convalescent leave after the wild ride out of Pakistan, Stevens had been made acting CO again, and the CAG had been right on his ass the whole time to keep him up to the mark. The CAG was Craik’s personal friend, Captain Rafehausen. ‘His asshole buddy,’ Stevens had sneered. Yeah, well, I admire both of them a hell of a lot more than I admire you, Stevens, Soleck said inside his head. You don’t even have a friend! Mister Craik gave you the chance that got you the medal and your fucking O-5, and you’re not even grateful! The trouble with you, Stevens, is that you’re –

He was what? Soleck was too young, too inexperienced to know that there are people incapable of happiness. He thought that Stevens was lazy, but he also wondered if Stevens was actually afraid of failure: better not to try than to fail.

Which brought him back to the wetting-down party: would he have to invite Stevens?

He slid into a reverie about a private banquet room somewhere, maybe champagne – champagne, really? did aviators even like champagne? – well, booze, certainly. And women. He didn’t know what kind of women or how he’d get them, but they’d remember a party with women, wouldn’t they? And a theme. Something Navy – maybe a few musicians playing Navy stuff –

‘Jeez, you’re on course.’ Stevens dropped back into the left-hand seat. ‘You get any reading on that gas gauge?’

‘No, sir.’

They were flying in tandem with the det’s other S-3, running MARI scans on surface ships in the Aden-India sea lane. Slowly, they were building a library of computer-stored images, and someday, when a classification system was evolved, you’d be able to bring an unknown contact up on MARI, and the computer would scan the data banks and give you an ID. Great stuff, but this part of it was really tedious.

‘Sir –’ Soleck began.

Stevens ducked his bullish head as if prepared for a blow. ‘Yeah?’

Soleck swallowed. ‘Sir, what did you do for a wetting-down party when you made lieutenant? If you don’t mind me asking.’

Stevens stared at him. He hunched his shoulders, shook himself deeper into the seat and put his hands on the con. ‘I got it.’ Stevens looked away from him then, checking the gauges, doing a quick visual check out the windows. He was the best pilot in the det, maybe the best on the carrier, you had to give him that. Why was he such a prick?

‘I bought everybody a beer at the O Club. That’s what everybody does.’ He started to say something else and then thought better of it, but his tone had been kinder than Soleck had ever heard. Soleck wanted to say something more but could think of nothing. The moment passed, and when Stevens next looked at him, it was the old, sour face he turned. ‘Forty minutes to turnback. Call Preacher and tell them section’s forty from RTF, right tank uncertain, but estimate fuel okay to touch down.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Soleck decided then that he’d have to ask Mister Craik. He wouldn’t see him for some days – the word was they’d fly off to Mombasa within the week – and then, when they were more or less alone sometime, he’d just ask him. The way he’d asked Stevens. Craik would know. He’d know if women or music or goddam fireworks were in order. Or if he should just buy everybody a beer and let it go.

But what would be memorable about that?

USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inbound Channel, Straits of Gibraltar.

‘You know Al Craik?’ asked a lieutenant-commander in a rumpled flight suit. He wore an old leather flight jacket against the forty-knot wind that blew through the Straits of Gibraltar. He was short, compact, and thin-faced, and the pocket of his flight jacket, embroidered in the blue and gold of VS-53, said ‘Narc.’

‘Never met him. But I went through AOCS with his wife. Rose Siciliano, then. Man, she’s a tough chick. Great pilot, too.’ He grinned at the memory and turned to look up at Narc as he descended the ladder from the O–3 level to the hangar deck. He, too, wore a flight suit and a jacket, only his was embroidered with the black and white of chopper squadron HS-9. It said ‘Skipper Van Sluyt.’ They were both officers in the same air wing: CAG 14, six days away from transiting the Suez Canal to relieve the USS Thomas Jefferson off Africa.

Narc nodded. ‘She’s at NASA, going to fly the shuttle.’

‘No shit? Well, good work if you like that sort of thing.’ Skipper Van Sluyt started down the ladder again.

Narc followed him down, surprised. ‘What, the publicity?’ Narc did like that sort of thing. He had an Air Medal of which he was very proud.

‘Yeah, Narc. That and the ever-present corporate –’ Van Sluyt had turned his head, perhaps wondering if his anti-NASA speech was going to have the right effect on Narc the Navy Yuppie, when the carrier hit the crosscurrent at the entrance to the Mediterranean. Ninety-five thousand tons of carrier are not easily moved, but the constant flow of water between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic creates something like a wall. The great ship gave a lurch, and Skipper Van Sluyt’s feet jerked out from under him. He fell down the rest of the ladder, his tailbone breaking on the second to last step and his collarbone at the bottom. As he said later to his wife, ‘That’s what you get for bad-mouthing NASA.’

Mombasa.

From the landward walls of Fort Jesus, he could see the Muslim neighborhoods of Old Town laid out at his feet like a map, although the streets were tiny and twisted like a collection of old rubber bands. The fort served to draw the tourists, and nearest to it were prosperous shops owned by Kikuyu or Hindus with money; plastic Masai spears and plastic Masai beads woven in China grabbed at the attention of German and American tourists, and sad-looking tall men with heavy spears and a trace of Masai in their veins guarded the shops. Farther off toward the dhow port were the real shops of the Muslim residents, tiny shops with deeply embrasured doors and windows capable of resisting a siege. The smell of cardamom and curry carried even to the top of the wall. And to the north, he could see the slow rise of the ground into the natural amphitheater of the park in front of the old colonial offices.

The man atop the walls squatted in the coral ruins of a tiny sentry kiosk on the landward side and carefully unwrapped the burlap package under his arm. Seventy feet above the streets of Old Town, he exposed the receiver of an AK-74 and inserted a clip.

Alan Craik loved Africa. He’d seen the bad parts – Rwanda, Zaire, Somalia. He’d seen the parts in Tanzania and South Africa that looked like wildlife shows on the Discovery Channel. But this is where his love of Africa had had its birth, at the top of this narrow Mombasa street that ran down from the shiny oddness of a Hard Rock Café to a fifteenth-century mosque and the Old Town of Mombasa. He smiled broadly, boyishly, looking at the coral walls of Fort Jesus, where he had first tried his halting Swahili, and at the glint of the water in the dhow harbor beyond. It wasn’t like coming home, but it was like returning to a beloved vacation spot. He didn’t even realize he had started walking down toward Old Town until Martin Craw’s hand grasped his arm.

‘Whoa, there, Commander. We got less than an hour before we’re due at the det.’

Alan smiled back at him. I’m in Africa! was what he wanted to say, but he swallowed it. Then he thought, Screw the command image.

‘You’re the one who said we should leave them alone until they got the place straightened up, Martin. That’s why I’m still lugging this ball and chain.’ He indicated the heavy helmet bag in his maimed left hand, the two green loop handles wrapped around his wrist to keep the pressure off the stumps of his fingers. ‘I thought dropping Laura at the Harker would take longer.’ USNS Jonathan Harker was a ship supplying the battle group, in port for three days. Laura had drawn the duty of checking with the captain and crew on their experience of Mombasa as a liberty port – plus, as she had found when they had pulled up at the dock, the BG’s flag was making a tour of the ship, and she’d got roped into his party. She hadn’t been a happy force-protection investigator.

Craw smiled as if he wished it had taken longer and looked at his watch again. ‘If I let you loose in an African city, you’ll be out till all hours.’

‘Martin, you look to me like a man who needs a beer.’

‘Beer? And air-conditioning? That’s a big yes.’

‘We’ll have one, repeat, one beer here, and then I get to cruise Old Town for thirty minutes.’

‘Yes, sir!’ Craw’s reply was deliberate overenthusiasm; he was a man capable of quiet sarcasm, often so deep it was difficult to detect. He paused on the crowded sidewalk to ogle a local woman in blended Western and African clothes. Alan hustled him inside.

The interior of the Hard Rock was cool, pleasant, and entirely American; only physique and face shape made the crowd different from a bunch of American blacks in an American city. Most of them were speaking English. The Hard Rock franchise was genuine, unlike that in Bahrain; it had been hit hard by the Nairobi embassy bombing, but was still a bastion of burgers, milkshakes, and beer – and a magnet for sailors. One wall had plaques from ships of the US, British, and Canadian navies, and one from an Australian destroyer.

They sat at a table and ordered beers: Alan a White Cap, because it was Kenyan, Craw a Rolling Rock, because he was delighted to find it. Alan watched the city bustle by the huge picture window. He could see the park in front of the old British Colonial Office away to the left, surrounded by monolithic bank buildings – still a spiritual center of the town, although the real economic center had moved up Moi Avenue since he was last here. He was growing nostalgic for a town he had barely visited. ‘I know a great restaurant here, really world class, called the Tamarind Dhow,’ he said, still bursting with the notion of being in Mombasa. ‘Want to grab some food there after we visit the det? It’s on me.’

Craw smiled slowly, not raising his eyes from the menu of the Hard Rock. ‘I sort o’ have some plans, tonight, skipper, if you don’t mind. Rain check?’ he drawled, and then looked up with a sudden laugh.

‘Master Chief, do you have a date?’

‘That would be “need to know,” sir.’ He smiled again. He seemed happy about it. ‘Do you really need to know?’

‘Nope.’ Alan thought of saying Don’t hurt yourself, but he let it pass. ‘But if you’re going to sit here and drool over your good fortune, I’m going to shop.’ Craw smiled again. Alan couldn’t remember seeing him smile so often, at least since he had reached command rank. Craw waved him away. ‘It’s only Mombasa, skipper; I can find you. I’ll catch you in ten minutes. If I don’t see you in Old Town, I’ll catch you around Fort Jesus. Leave the helmet bag.’ He reached out for it. ‘I’ll watch it.’

‘I’m signed for it.’ Alan wrapped the handles around his wrist again. He waved, tossed an American tendollar bill on the table, and headed out into the street, checking his watch. Time to see if the same old silversmith was still in business.

The interior of the shop was dark and cool, a profound contrast with the white-hot street outside. Three young boys were working in the back, two of them drawing wire by pulling a core through ever-smaller holes in a steel plate. He had seen the same craft demonstrated at Colonial Williamsburg, but these boys did it better. They were doing it for real. The third boy was polishing silver with ashes and a lot of elbow grease. Alan smiled and called a greeting as he entered; later, he couldn’t remember what language he had used, but he would remember the slight tension in their body language as they turned to him. He knew the shop was off the beaten track, but couldn’t imagine they were against tourists.

A fine old sword stood in a niche behind the counter; that caught his eye as he ignored cases of bangles and earrings. Rose never fancied such stuff. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen her in any earrings except military studs. But just under his hands, as he leaned on the counter, there was a heavy chain of solid links, almost like big beads; it was crisp and very well made. He smiled; it was usually so difficult to find anything for Rose.

‘May I see the heavy silver necklace?’

‘Oh, yes.’ One of the young men sprang down from the bunk-like bench where he was working and opened the case. Alan couldn’t pin down what was out of place, except that the young man should have been talking a great deal more.

The necklace was just as handsome close-up as in the case. He caught the young man’s eye. ‘Bei gani?’ he asked. He showed a US twenty-dollar bill. When here many years before, he had learned that it was easier to buy everything with US dollars. Cheaper, too.

The boy held up his hand and spoke rapidly without smiling. He went too fast. Alan thought he heard something like ‘Mia moja na thelathini na sita,’ which would have been a hundred and something. More than a hundred. That seemed unlikely; silver wasn’t that expensive.

‘Ghali sana. Pudunza bei kidogo, rafik’.’

The young man on the other side of the counter kept looking past him into the street, and Alan wanted to turn around, except that the other young men were just as interesting. They seemed to be listening for something, utterly still. Not getting much work done.

The boy at the counter muttered something about his father. Perhaps serious bargaining had to be done by an adult, although in most of Africa all three of the shop boys would be thought men. In Somalia they would have been fighting for years. One of them even looked Somali. Not impossible.

‘Lini?’ Alan couldn’t remember how to ask something as complex as when the father would be in. It might not even be polite.

‘Kesho!’ Did he really mean tomorrow? The young man at the counter waved his hand as if eager for Alan to go. He was eager. Then, swiftly, his expression changed and he retreated to his work area, his face blank, as a new, older man came in through a beaded curtain to the side of the counter. He was looking at the three boys in puzzlement, but he smiled as he looked at Alan. ‘My son. I do not know why he torments me this way. You are interested in the necklace? I made it myself.’

‘It is very good.’

‘It is, isn’t it? Too good, I think. Tourists want a cheap memento of Africa, not a good piece of silver.’ Alan liked him instantly; he had the directness that Alan associated with craftsmen. Men too busy for bullshit. The young men were listening; no wire was being drawn, no silver polished.

‘What price did my son quote you?’

‘Tafadhali, mzee. I did not really understand him. My Swahili is never as good as I think it is. Not nearly as good as your English, for instance.’

The older man polished the chain idly, unfazed by flattery. ‘Hmm. Yes. It is. One hundred twenty dollars.’

‘I could perhaps go as far as eighty dollars.’ Alan wanted it more now than when he had first looked at it. He also wanted an excuse to prolong the meeting. The older man was interesting, a type; and the young men were clearly on edge – waiting for something, something that a foreigner, an mzungu, was not part of.

The mzee looked at him, one eyebrow raised. Alan settled on to a bench by the counter with a sigh, as if ready for a long siege.

‘Perhaps if we had some tea?’ The mzee was happy to dicker; indeed, would have been sorry if the business had been concluded directly.

The plan to meet Craw was somewhere around the edge of Alan’s consciousness, but Craw wouldn’t worry and Alan knew where to find him. The tourist part of Old Town wasn’t more than a couple of streets, really. And tea, sweet cardamom tea, drunk in this medieval shop, would make Alan’s day. The det wasn’t going anywhere without him, either.

The older man turned to the boys and said something in Arabic, a language Alan didn’t speak but easily recognized. Arabic was the language of education in Old Town Mombasa, the language of the Koran. Alan’s attention sharpened. Nobody answered the mzee, and Alan was surprised, but it was of a piece; they were waiting for something. Finally, the one who had first come to the counter dropped his eyes and darted out of the main door. He returned with a small tray, rattled off some Arabic as he entered. Alan was reaching for a cup when the older man caught his eye and motioned with his hand. He looked very serious.