Force Protection

If they could secure the area – if, the Big If, and if the Kenyans would stay with them – he could call the Jefferson and tell them to fly in Marines and medics. It was an irony of the situation, of course, that when he could do that, they would already be more or less secure.

Twenty minutes later, Alan was heading below to check on damage control when a snappy-looking black man in a pale blue uniform shirt and body armor came striding over the deck toward him. He was smiling, but he was clearly not going to kiss any white man’s butt.

‘Ngiri, Maiko, lieutenant, Kenyan Navy.’ He gave a partial salute. ‘You are in charge?’

Alan nodded.

‘You are civilian?’

‘Craik, Alan, lieutenant-commander, United States Navy.’

‘Oh!’ Ngiri snapped to, really saluted, put on his helmet and fumbled with the chin strap. ‘Sorry, sorry, sir, they said this was a civilian ship –’

Alan waved all that away, pulled the man into the shade and relative privacy of a bulkhead. ‘What’s the situation up the dock, Lieutenant?’

‘Neutralized.’ He got the buckle fixed and snapped to again. ‘One shore party, under my direction, sent to neutralize missiles launched against our fireboat: mission accomplished, sir.’

‘What’d you find down there?’

‘Two Islamic terrorists, sir. One launcher, I think a bazooka. Bazooka?’

‘Yeah, could be – bazooka-type, yeah, could be one that hit your fireboat.’

‘And two surface-to-air missiles.’

Alan stared at him, stunned. A SAM could have taken out a helo – of course, that had been the intention. The explosion on the Harker was supposed to bring in help; the SAMs and the snipers would then destroy the help. Alan thought that through, then jumped back to something the lieutenant had said. ‘Islamic terrorists. You sure?’

The lieutenant smiled. ‘Nothing else they could be, sir. We have a so-called political party, the Islamic Party of –’

‘IPK, yeah, yeah –’

‘You know? Well, then!’ He squared his shoulders. ‘I am a Christian.’

Alan decided to let that pass. ‘You killed both of them?’

‘We did.’ With some satisfaction.

‘We’ll want to examine the surface-to-air missiles, if we may.’

‘They are the property of the Kenyan Navy, sir.’

Alan stared at him, nodded sharply. Embassy business. ‘Can you tell me what kind of SAMs, lieutenant? Country of origin, manufacturer –?’

Ngiri bristled because he did not know. ‘I am not an expert, sir. You must ask my superiors.’

Above, on the superstructure, Hansen was waving at him. ‘Come with me,’ Alan growled.

‘I have been ordered back to my base, sir.’

Out in the open water, the Kenyan patrol craft was still idling between the docks, its guns threatening the shoreline. Alan pointed at it. ‘Your guys are still out there. Hang on for a couple of minutes, okay?’ He guessed that Hansen had got his secure comm link at last. Could he now order in helos, with the possibility that a couple more SAMs were waiting somewhere in ambush? ‘Lieutenant?’

Ngiri’s face was blank. ‘I will ask my superiors.’

Alan started away, turned back. ‘What’s it like out there on the end of the dock now?’

‘Very quiet.’

‘Room to bring in a helicopter?’

Ngiri had never brought a helo in anywhere, he guessed. Still, the lieutenant said, ‘Oh, yes, maybe – perhaps –’

Alan took a step closer to the Kenyan. ‘Lieutenant, Mwakenya na mwamerika ni rafiki – kweli?’

Ngiri wasn’t taken in by the white-man-speaks-Swahili ploy. He lowered his head half an inch to acknowledge Alan’s feat, but he didn’t smile. ‘Yes, we are friends,’ he said, using English as if he was closing a door.

Alan didn’t give up. ‘Rafiki yangu, nitaka saidi yako.’ It was pretty bad Swahili, actually – he never could get those agreements of the prefixes – but it got across his plea for help. ‘Tafadhali.’ That meant ‘please.’ In Arabic, sucked into Swahili by the force of convenience on this coast that had been trading with Arabs for two thousand years.

Ngiri gave a flicker of a smile, held up a long, thin hand like an Ethiopian saint. ‘I will try.’

Alan started for the superstructure at a trot. He passed the wounded men sprawled in the shadows. The man who had been bleeding was dead.

Bahrain.

Harry O’Neill tried to ignore the knock on his office door. His house staff knew better than to trouble him when he was on the phone in his home office. He shuffled his slippered feet in annoyance.

The caller, a rich Saudi with a lucrative security contract to give, required careful handling, and any interruption of the conversation would almost certainly be taken as an insult. O’Neill, a black American with a security business in the Middle East, had learned to be careful with every nuance of courtesy.

‘Harry?’ Dave Djalik, ex-SEAL and Harry O’Neill’s best contract operative, was leaning in the door to his office.

‘Busy, Dave.’ Harry waved his hand and hardened his voice to convey the seriousness of the situation and went back to his telephone call.

‘Harry, you’re going to want to see this.’

‘I’m on the phone with an influential –’ Harry looked up and caught the expression on Djalik’s face. He leaned down to the phone and murmured an apology in Arabic. The response made him wince, and then he hung up. Djalik was already gone, and Harry followed him out of the office space in his house and through the foyer where a fountain played on ornamental rocks under a clear dome, and down a short hallway to the one room in Harry’s compound that held a television.

‘I’ve already watched it twice,’ Djalik said. He laughed.

On the screen, a slender man in shorts was climbing out on what appeared to be the derrick of a dockside crane. The yellow lettering at the base of the image said ‘CNN Mombasa, Kenya.’ The camera panned across wreckage and then back to the crane.

‘The man on the crane is unidentified, but CNN sources suggest that he is a member of the US Navy,’ a hushed voice from the television said. Djalik laughed again.

‘A member of the US Navy! Wait till you see who it is, Harry –’

One of the cranes was moving, the man on the derrick a passenger, the tension of his grasp on the supports around him clear even at a distance. The crane swung until its arm neared another crane, and the passenger was up and moving, jumping from one to another. A circle appeared around the man.

‘We think he’s firing here, Jean,’ one of the reporters said. In the background, Harry could hear somebody talking in French. The camera zoomed in, and he could see the man firing one-handed. Moments later, there was a close-up of the man as he walked along the dock, and Harry saw the man’s maimed hand and it all came together for him.

‘Alan Craik,’ he said aloud.