Force Protection

‘Bingo,’ Djalik said.

USS Thomas Jefferson.

Captain Beluscio stood in the Tactical Flag Command Center with his left hand on his hip, his eyes on a television screen that showed the CNN tape, right forefinger pressing a miniaturized headset to his ear. Listening intently to the headset, he was nonetheless giving orders to subordinates with his hands and eyes. Standing in front of him now was the Marine detachment commander, a wiry, muscled man whose short-sleeved shirt already revealed goose bumps on his arms from the frigid air-conditioning. Crew cut, scowling, the Marine looked like a boxer waiting for the bell. Beluscio held up a finger of his free hand to tell the Marine to hang on one more second.

Beluscio listened. ‘But –’ he said into the headset. ‘But –’ Then, ‘Goddamit, no, but –’

He threw his head back and rolled his eyes; clearly, somebody was really giving him an earful. He looked up at a wall clock. Reaching a hand forward as if he was going to touch the Marine captain’s cheek, he said softly, ‘Okay, suit up and join your boys. But nobody goes until I give the word!’

The Marine was gone as soon as he stopped speaking.

Beluscio glanced at the TV screen, now back to a talking head, and turned his attention again to the headset. ‘I know that, sir –’

He waved over an aide and murmured into his ear. ‘I want to know how fast Yellowjacket can put her Marines into Kilindini Harbor – at least a company.’ USS Yellowjacket was a Wasp-class gator freighter – a small aircraft carrier with VSTOL aircraft, choppers, and nine hundred Marines. Beluscio had decided to send the Jefferson’s Marines to Kilindini; the idea was that the helos could stay off the coast for at least an hour if need be, then divert to Mombasa airport if the landing zone was still hot. The chief of staff held the man from running off. ‘Tell them my Marines are on the way as advance guard; Yellowjacket is a lot farther away, and what I want to know is how fast they can be there in force, with logistics for at least a week. Go!’ He locked eyes with a female officer across the room and, eyes open in a question, mouthed the name: Craik? The woman shook her head, shrugged, palms up.

The captain swung around and pressed his whole hand against his ear and all but shouted, ‘No!’ He listened, eyes wide, mouth open. ‘I don’t care who you are, you’re not giving me that order! No!’

He gestured savagely at a lieutenant-commander a few feet down the space. He made equally savage writing motions; somebody pushed a message pad into his left hand. He was so angry that his handwriting became a tangle of points and edges as he wrote: Message to CNO URGENT. Get these assholes off my back! CIA – FBI – whoever!

He pushed the pad at the lieutenant-commander and returned to the headphone. ‘Sir, you do that! Go right to the White House! You tell them you’re going to override Navy authority in this area! I hope they ream your ass good. Until then, I’m in charge here, and I’m in charge of the situation at Kilindini! The Harker is Navy responsibility, and the Navy will investigate, and the Navy is in charge! Now get off my comm channel so I can do some real work!’

A sailor materialized in front of him. ‘Comm has a secure link with Lieutenant-Commander Craik on the Harker, sir.’

‘Well, thank God, finally –’

‘And, uh, sir, Captain Rafehausen is on channel four for you.’

Beluscio had an instant realization that everybody, even this sailor, knew of his and Rafehausen’s rivalry, and then he was on channel four and trying to sound neutral. ‘Captain Beluscio.’

‘Hey, Pete, Rafe. What’s the situation?’

‘I’m up to my ass in alligators, but everything’s under control, okay? We’re on top of it up here.’

‘What’s the word on the admiral?’

Beluscio hesitated. They were both thinking the same thing, he knew: if the admiral had been badly injured, the BG would need a new commander, and Rafehausen had the seniority. ‘Nothing as yet. We’re assuming that he’s alive and well until we hear otherwise.’

Then it was Rafehausen’s turn to hesitate. ‘Keep me posted, will you?’

Beluscio repressed a bitter answer and said something neutral. Switching channels, he snarled, ‘Get me this Craik – now!’

Washington.

Mike Dukas strode up the corridor toward his boss’s boss’s office, his face severe, hardly acknowledging the hellos and nods of passing people. The meeting he had asked for early this morning was going to take place three hours late. Not really his boss’s boss’s fault; he had been summoned to a meeting with the head of NCIS and reps from both the CIA and the FBI, and he had decided that meeting Mike Dukas was probably less important.

Dukas had spent his time finding out who was available to go with him to Mombasa and what sort of support he could hope for. He had tried to raise Al Craik half a dozen times on the supposedly international cell phone NCIS had given him, without success; two of the times, at least, Craik’s phone had been busy, so he was probably still alive. Otherwise, news from Mombasa was iffy, to say the least, that coming from the television increasingly so, as the stations went more to spin and less to simple fact. There had been a couple of long camera shots of the city, with distant smoke that the voice-over said was from the crippled ship, but who the hell knew how accurate that was? As with most TV news, what you had to look at most of the time was the newspeople themselves, who seemed to believe that they were really what was happening. Dukas had been particularly taken with a blond Brit who had worn a bush jacket and said he was broad-casting from ‘the edge of Mombasa city,’ although Dukas, who knew Mombasa a little, believed the guy was really at a tourist lodge about fifty miles away. Palm trees are palm trees, right?

NCIS had nothing in Mombasa. Neither had the Navy. The nearest presence was the naval attaché in Nairobi, and he didn’t seem to know squat until ten a.m. Washington time, when he called to say that ‘an asset on the spot’ said that there was rioting by the Islamic Party of Kenya, which the General Service Unit was putting down with maximum violence and minimum concern for human rights. (Actually, he hadn’t said the last part; that was what Dukas had added from his own experience.) The attaché added details over the next hour: hospitals filling; some people with gunshot wounds, a rarity in Kenyan demonstrations; firing heard from Kilindini, some of it described as machine guns; the dock area closed off; the big fuel dump by the docks safe so far. (The closing of the docks explained the end of the CNN coverage of the Harker, Dukas thought – also the disappearance of the French newsman who had tried to interview Alan.)

By eleven, Dukas was getting itchy. He wanted to go. He had even managed to get a tentative promise of a forensics team and an aircraft they called the Flying Trocar, an airborne forensics lab bundled into a 747. But only if he moved fast; in a few hours, somebody else would have a better claim on it.

Almost running now in his eagerness to get going, he nonetheless diverted from the straight path to Kasser’s office to put his head into one of the cubicles where the special agents spent their days when they weren’t on a case. A bright-looking, tousle-headed woman named Geraldine Pastner was sitting there, surrounded by photos of dogs.

‘You in?’ Dukas said.

She grinned. ‘Better than DC. We going for sure?’

He shook his head. ‘I’ll know in a couple minutes. Meantime, do me a favor? The clip on CNN – I want to know how they got it and who shot it. Get us a copy if you can, unedited if it’s available.’

‘Ask or order?’

‘Ask, ask, Jesus! We don’t want to get crosswise of them. Anyway, you can’t order media to give up sources, you know that.’

‘I know that.’ She smiled; he smiled; the smiles meant that under certain conditions you certainly could lean on the media, but this wasn’t one of the conditions.

Then Dukas pushed his heavy body to Kasser’s office, summoned by a phone call that to him was three hours late. He didn’t smile this time but shook the other man’s hand, took note of the wall of citations and certificates and trophies without acknowledging them, and sat. He preferred Geraldine Pastner’s dogs.

‘Okay,’ Kasser said, ‘it’s this ship at Mombasa.’ He was sixty, a career NCIS man, deputy to the overall honcho.

‘Right. I left you a mes –’

Hand held up to stop him. ‘I got it. You got bumped by CIA and the Bureau.’ He sat back, joined his hands, looked up at Dukas. ‘They want it.’

‘Like hell.’

‘That’s what my meeting was about: they want it. “Major international incident, part of worldwide movement, big picture; NCIS lacks the facilities, the personnel, the experience, the –”’

‘That’s bullshit!’

Kasser smiled. ‘Not the word I used.’ He had been a special agent for a long time. Now he was polished a lot smoother than Dukas, but he was still a Navy cop. ‘Make your case, Mike.’

Dukas hadn’t thought he’d have to do so. He thought the case made itself. Still – ‘This is a Navy service ship, considered as Navy property. In this situation – any war or combat situation – it falls under the command of the local authority, who in this case is the commander of BG 9, now the flag on USS Jefferson.’ He tapped the desk. ‘I checked with legal.’ Kasser nodded. Dukas went on. ‘Explosion, cause not yet known, but TV says a bomb, and we got no better information. But that’s what we need to investigate, right? No, this is not, repeat not, an Agency or a Bureau matter! They’ll get the reports; we’ll share with them just as generously as they share with us –’

‘Now, now –’

‘They think information comes in suppositories and should go up their ass for safekeeping.’

Kasser grinned and then got serious again. ‘There was also somebody from State at my meeting, plus two guys from the Joint Chiefs. They’d rather work with the Bureau.’

‘They’ve got nothing to do with it!’

‘They say they have. They’re saying what everybody on the TV is saying – Islamic fundamentalists, Islamic extremists, whatever. There’s already pressure to carry out a punitive strike.’

‘Without an investigation?’

‘Osama bin Laden. They’ve got a contingency plan.’

‘This only happened a few hours ago!’