Force Protection

‘Do it!’

Below him, a black medic had pulled himself out of the distorted hatch opening. He glanced up at Alan, then looked away as if guilty. Another man was looking down into the hole, reaching forward. A third medic appeared, and together they began to wrestle a litter up from below. It held a body bag.

The black medic, the one with the guilty look, made his way to the ladder and began to climb toward the bridge. Alan watched the litter and the body bag come out. Two men were straining from below, two lifting from above. Finally, they got it over the edge of the hatch and hauled at it until more than half was beyond the edge and the two on the deck could rest, part of the body bag still sticking over the open hatch, and they stood there, bent over, panting, looking at each other, waiting for the others to come up from below.

‘Commander Craik?’ the medic said behind him. He knew what they had been looking for and what finding the admiral would mean. Only a young man, maybe twenty or so, he had seen blood and injuries, and he knew what death was; like a nurse or a doctor, he had a manner to protect himself from other people’s pain. But now he was moved, barely able to speak. He said an odd thing, holding out a hand for Alan to see: ‘I’m sorry.’

Alan thought it was a piece of wood, then realized it was too thin to be wood. Leather, maybe – the sort of thing they bought for the dog to chew on. Then he touched it, and he knew it was cloth, blood-soaked cloth. Half of the collar of a Navy warm-weather uniform shirt that had been khaki and was now deep brown. Hidden by the medic’s darker thumb, as if he didn’t want them to exist, were two silver stars.

‘Shit,’ Alan said. He looked at the medic. ‘I’ll have to identify him.’

‘No, sir.’

‘I have to –’ his eyes went to the man’s name tag – ‘Green.’

Green shook his head. ‘Nothing to identify, sir.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ And, because it had sounded harsh, he said, ‘I have to try. They can’t just take my word for it.’

He moved past the medic and went down the ladder to the deck. They had marked out a safe lane with yellow tape, and he went along that, stepping over cable that they hadn’t had time or hadn’t been able to remove. The smell of fire was stronger, the smell of the sea, too, the offshore breeze shifting as the end of day came near. The four medics who had pulled the body bag out stood a little away from it. As he came near, one stepped forward; he checked the man’s tag: Hyman, First Class.

Alan indicated the body bag. ‘The admiral?’

Hyman’s shoulders rolled, a kind of shrug, maybe a suppressed shiver. He was wearing a T-shirt that was brown with rust and smoke. ‘We got what we could. We think there’s, um, parts of four people in there.’

He absorbed that. ‘Is there more to get out?’

‘Well – not without – Maybe with a – special tools, like that.’

Alan nodded.

‘Open it.’

Hyman unzipped the bag. A smell of overcooked meat burst up. Most of what he saw was unrecognizable, but he made out the shape of a skull, the hair burned off, the skin black. Teeth plain where the lips were gone. He saw a hand. Ribs.

‘You sure there are four people in here?’

‘Sir, I’m not sure of anything. There’s at least three, I know that. We tried to count, you know? but there isn’t enough – you know? There’s pieces of metal everywhere – sharp as hell – they were cut to pieces.’

Alan jerked his head. Hyman unzipped the bag the rest of the way. At the bottom, another hand, browned, shriveled, seemed to reach up from the mass. Above the wrist, it was wearing the stained remains of Laura’s pink shirt.

‘Okay, close it up.’ He turned away and took deep breaths. Suddenly, saliva poured into his mouth, and with it the taste of salt. He looked for something to support himself on.

A black hand appeared just below his nose. The sharp odor of ammonia filled his nostrils, and his head cleared. ‘You okay, sir?’

‘Yeah.’ The ammonia had helped. ‘Yeah.’ He put a hand on Green’s shoulder.

‘Breathe deep.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Okay now? It gets to everybody.’

He nodded. ‘Send that bag back on the next helo and mark it. They’re going to have to do some kind of forensics on it to be sure. Where’d that piece of collar get itself to?’

‘I got it, sir.’ Green was still standing close to him, as if waiting for him to faint. He held up a plastic bag. ‘We know the drill, Commander. Always gotta do ID.’

‘Right.’ He tried to breathe slowly, deeply. ‘Mark off the area where you found them – put up some kind of sign, whatever. I don’t want anybody in there until we get some forensics.’ Thinking, It’ll be my career if we screw up the ID of a dead admiral.

He made his way up to the bridge again and stood there, trying to sweep the stink of cooked flesh out of his nostrils with the sweet, damp breeze from Mombasa. When he was better, he got on the comm to the Marine captain and told him to post a guard on the space where the bodies had been found.

He was thinking that the situation was bad and getting worse: a ruined ship, an American island in a rioting city – now a dead admiral. Could they hold on here to the little they had left?

Far down the dock, they were loading the body bags into the chopper.

USS Thomas Jefferson.

Pete Beluscio winced when he looked at the wall clock. It was too late, he knew. There had been too much time. If the admiral was alive, they’d know by now: more time, likelier death. He felt a queasiness in his gut. He’d have a hell of a night now, no matter what happened after this. He’d be up, taking pills, sitting on the can, feeling like hell. The perks of command. Yeah.

Fuck command, he thought. Some people were born to be flyers, not to take command. Nobody knew better than he did himself that he’d reached his max when he was an exec. But the Navy said, ‘Up or out,’ and he’d kept moving up. Now –

A face he distrusted appeared at the far door; it took an instant for him to realize it was Rafe Rafehausen’s. He felt that momentary hatred, suspicion, fear that came from seeing the face of a rival, then almost relaxed as he admitted that maybe Rafehausen was about to take the whole problem off his hands. Bitter, bitter though that loss would be.

‘Pete, what the hell’s going on?’

Beluscio was pleased to see that Rafehausen was stretched tight, too. ‘We’re keeping you informed, Rafe.’

‘Jesus, it’s more than four hours – they must know something!’

‘You’re on the links, what do you think, we’re holding back?’ Beluscio had let his own tension show; his tone had been harsh. A second class at a terminal looked around at them, looked away. Beluscio lowered his voice. ‘The moment I hear anything –’

‘Lieutenant-Commander Craik on four, Captain!’

Beluscio clapped his right hand over the earphone and swung away from Rafehausen. ‘Yes!’

Rafe Rafehausen was puzzled by Pete Beluscio, who seemed to him tricky, overcomplex. Rafe himself was a fairly simple man, one who believed that the best direction was always straight ahead. Beluscio seemed to him always to be going one step sideways for every step forward. Like now, getting antsy over nothing, turning away when he might be getting the word at last.

Not a cynic, Rafehausen was still capable of suspecting that Beluscio might try to hold on to his temporary command of the battle group by demanding some absolute, legalistic confirmation of the admiral’s death long after it was clear the man was gone. If he did –

‘How long ago?’ he heard Beluscio say.

Rafehausen moved closer; at the same time, Beluscio swung back to look at him.

‘This is confirmed?’ Beluscio’s head was down now, his eyes not meeting Rafe’s. He listened for what seemed far too long, then muttered, ‘All four?’ After a few seconds, he said, ‘Well – the collar seems pretty, um, definite. Yeah, yeah, we’ll have to have the legal eagles confirm, dental and all that, but –’

Beluscio looked up then and met Rafe’s eyes. Switching off his mike with his left hand, he said softly, ‘Craik has evidence the admiral’s dead.’

The two men looked at each other. Rafe felt his heart surge with adrenaline, then with relief that Beluscio was going to do the right thing. He held out his hand. ‘I’m taking command of the BG, Pete.’