Force Protection

She worried. He could be dying. Dead.

She worried about him because he was a risk-taker, impetuous. A glory hound, some Navy people said. No. More like a poet with balls of steel – idealist, hardcase.

She had a tough day ahead. Two hours in the astronauts’ gym for VO2-Max and heart tests; an hour underwater in mock-zero-gravity, two hours hands-on on the engineering of the shuttle. Plus, just thrown at her by Mike Dukas, an obligatory half hour with NASA security to plan protection for her and the kids.

‘For what!’ she’d protested. ‘What am I being protected from, for God’s sake?’

Mike knew her temper and wasn’t phased by it. Mike was in love with her, but he wasn’t afraid of her. ‘From whoever blew up that ship, babe. Listen to me! The family of every man on that ship is going to get the same message today – maximum alert, get security, protect yourself! It’s Uncle’s standard OP when there’s terrorism.’

‘But why me? Mike, I’m up to my ass in work as it is!’

‘Because your husband’s on the ship now and because he put his face on TV for every goddam terrorist in the world to see. Babe! Trust me!’

‘Oh, yeah.’ She had pretended to argue, but she saw the point. If not for her, then for the kids. Dukas was to get on to NASA security as he soon as he had hung up from talking to her; she was to warn Mikey’s Camp and Bobby’s day care.

She wasn’t afraid for herself. But she’d kill to protect her children.

Reminded, she went back into the bedroom and slid open the drawer on her side. There, in a locked metal box, was her armpit gun, a Smith & Wesson Model 15. A revolver. Some guys had laughed at her for picking a revolver. But she liked the feel of it and the no-bullshit simplicity of it, and she liked the .38 Special plus-Ps that she shot in it. ‘Not a lady’s gun,’ the fat man in the gun shop had said to her when she bought it, and she had said, ‘I’m not a lady.’

She aimed it at a spot on the wall. The sights lined up as if they had been programmed. She dry-fired every day, hit a range at least once a week, shot fifty-yard combat courses for fun.

There’s an old saying: Be careful of the man – or woman – who owns only one gun. They’ll really know how to use it.

Two empty speedloaders were in the box with a carton of plus-Ps. She took them back to the kitchen and loaded them while she watched the news.

Nothing really new. Her husband was suspended in time and space, his three-fingered hand held out to the camera, trotting toward risk.

She worried. About him. About her mother. She didn’t even like her mother; what was she worrying about? Her father, whom she loved, and the effect on him? Or was the link to her mother too strong for ‘liking’ to even matter?

She worried.

She wanted to talk to her husband. She wanted to hear his voice. To know he was alive.

She went back to the television.

USS Thomas Jefferson.

Captain Beluscio’s voice sounded strangled with tension. ‘Now what?’

The comm officer had just been handed a message slip and was reading quickly. ‘A message from the Harker. “Mob action in city and at dock gates. Local fireboat hit by shoulder-fired missile or grenade. Recommend send no air or surface help until situation resolved. Signed Craik.”’

The captain stared. ‘Who the hell is that?’

‘Unh, the O-in-C of the S-3 det is named Craik. The guy they had to fly out of Pakistan a few weeks back, he lost part of his –’

Beluscio made an angry sound. Friend of Rafehausen’s. The chief of staff and Rafehausen were cat and dog – too close to each other in rank, with Rafehausen having only days of seniority; too different in temperament, the CoS tense, quick, Rafehausen laid back. And the two men too often treated as opposites by the admiral, who liked competition among his officers.

‘Craik,’ the chief of staff growled now. ‘I remember. What the hell is he doing in Mombasa?’

The other man dared to grin. ‘You can watch him on CNN, sir.’

Mombasa.

Alan duckwalked along a line of wounded men, six in all. Cook White had patched them up, but there was blood on the deck, and one man was pumping blood from an almost severed leg despite a tourniquet.

‘I got to get medical help!’ White was saying.

‘Nothing’s going in or out of the docks.’ He looked down at the blood that was spreading slowly over the chipped gray paint of the deck. ‘Anyway, we can’t use local blood. Navy policy.’

The black man stared at him. What Alan had said didn’t register. ‘They could send in a rescue chopper!’

‘Yeah, they could, if people weren’t shooting at us.’ He glanced back toward the dock, but the tilt of the deck hid everything; he saw only thin, gray cloud.

‘This man gonna die if he don’t get help!’

Alan gripped his big upper arm. ‘Save the ones you can save.’ That was the moment when he realized that they all might die there. It hadn’t occurred to him before – but here they were, cut off from the city, easy targets, with Alan the only shooter. He was carrying the sniper rifle himself now, because Jagiello, it turned out, had panicked and forgotten to take his safety off when the shooting started.

Alan looked up at the blown-out windows of the starboard wing of the bridge.

‘Patel!’

The dark head of the lookout appeared. ‘Sir!’

‘What’re the Kenyans up to?’

‘Very active in aid of finding the missile launcher! Twenty or more guys running about! Some shooting!’

Hansen had got on to the Kenyans twenty-five minutes before. Now, two hundred feet beyond where the Harker’s sloping deck met the water, the crippled fireboat, its radars shorn off and its deck littered with metal fragments, had stopped pumping water on the Harker but had stabilized itself. Alan had to be grateful for the hit on the fireboat, because, without it, the Kenyan Navy wouldn’t have come out.

Beyond the fireboat, a Kenyan Nyayo-class Thornycroft cruised slowly between the docks; beyond it, eighty yards from where he stood, he could see the tiny figures of Kenyan sailors swarming over an anchored dhow. He guessed that they were searching the ships there – too late – for more snipers and missile launchers.

It occurred to Alan that the hundred-foot Kenyan patrol boat carried a potent surface-to-surface missile that he hoped they wouldn’t decide to use in these close quarters. As if in answer, the boat could be heard to back its engines, bringing it to a stop, and at once a 20mm repeating cannon opened up. Instinctively, Alan ducked, but he heard the rounds hit behind him and knew that the Kenyans had solved the problem of the sniper in the warehouse: they had taken out what was left of every window in the wall – and the wall, as well. (And collateral damage beyond? he was thinking as he ran to a ladder and started for the bridge.)

It had turned out that the Kenyan Navy had a facility two docks down from where the Harker lay. They had gone on full alert when the explosion had gone off, putting their three boats to sea and hunkering down for some kind of assault, but they never explained why they had not at least sent somebody to gather intelligence on what had happened. Alan suspected some sort of wrangle between the Navy, a minor part of the Kenyan establishment, and the army, with the GSU thrown in on the army’s side. More to the point, perhaps, was the huge fuel depot that sat behind where he now knew the Navy installation was: they were guarding that, they said, because if the explosion that destroyed the Harker was repeated there, all of Kilindini, maybe all of Mombasa, could be afire. At least that was the explanation the government would give later, although by then there were rumors that somebody had ordered the Navy to stay in barracks to keep them from helping the Harker.

Alan ducked as he came out on the bridge’s wing. He glanced aside, saw the shattered roofline of the warehouse.

‘Done nicely,’ Patel said from the windowless bridge.

‘Very nicely.’

Alan went up one level to the communications space, where Hansen was still trying to patch in a secure transmission unit.

‘How you doing?’

Hansen had established a radio link to the Jefferson, but it wasn’t yet secure. Until he had secure communications, Alan couldn’t tell the CV anything but the bare bones of what was happening. He had been trying to raise LantFleet, Norfolk, on his cell phone again, but, as soon as he got somebody on the line, he’d lose the connection. He tried once more, waited two minutes, then gave it up. He laid the cell phone on Hansen’s table. ‘If they call back, tell them I tried.’

There was firing far up the dock. Presumably, the Kenyan sailors had found the missile launcher.