Force Protection

He didn’t, either, or if he did, it was very cunningly hidden. The man didn’t look dangerous. He looked excited, even interested.

‘Who are you?’

‘I da crane man, bwana.’ He bobbed his head. ‘Big blast come, booom! An I get down real fas’. Then crazy man start shootin’ an’ I stay down.’

‘Does this crane work?’

‘She mine an’ she work fine!’

Alan took the plunge. ‘I have to get the sniper up there. From this crane.’

The other man looked at him and whistled. Alan ignored him and started up the ladder inside the crane’s pedestal, but the other man caught at his leg.

‘Where you get him from?’

Alan looked up the interior. He had never been in one of the giant cranes, and he had no idea how to get around one. He had intended to improvise.

‘I don’t know.’

‘I get you into the cab. You go out the arm, yeah? And maybe I give you a little help from the crane. It still have powah; I can feel it.’

Alan shrank against the side of the ladder and let the big man go by. It was odd, because the big man’s plan sounded much better, but Alan missed the surge of adrenaline that had carried him this far. He wanted to get it over in a rush. He followed the man up into the cab, another long climb that made his left hand ache.

The cab had had Plexiglas windows, but they were long gone, probably ripped out by the operators when the airconditioning failed. Alan ducked as soon as he got into the compartment; he was at the same level as the sniper now and could see him clearly less than fifty meters away. Close enough for a good man with a rifle to kill them both in two or three shots, even through the metal sides of the cab, and far enough away that Alan’s pistol had no realistic chance of hitting him.

Alan’s only consolation was that the sniper was not terribly good. He had fired at least four times before he hit Craw; that argued for a poor shot. But Martin Craw was still dead. Alan didn’t want to face the fact that he had probably got Craw killed. Not yet.

He moved cautiously up to the bow of the cab, where a small door let out into the triangular structure of the arm – two beams below with metal plates for flooring, a single beam above, the three joined by a spiderweb of cross pieces that left a central opening wide enough for a man to walk stooped over. The arm pointed ninety degrees away from the sniper’s crane.

Alan looked back at the operator. ‘Will the arm reach crane two?’

‘Fully extended, she will, bwana.’ He smiled and hit a button, and the arm started to extend, internal engines powering a second, inner arm out of the first. Alan nodded and moved out along it. He felt the energy again. He was moving. He caught up with the back of the slowly extending inner arm and clambered on it, banging his hip and almost losing his grip. Now he was moving out under power, and he had to watch to keep his feet on the angular braces between the beams. The inner arm didn’t have a floor.

Lateral motion shocked him, and he grabbed overhead struts convulsively, suddenly and painfully aware of how high above the ground he was. The arm was swinging, slowly at first and then faster, until he began to fear that the impact would break the arm or throw him clear. He wrapped arms and legs around the supports and clung, no longer worried about fire from the sniper; that seemed like the least of his concerns.

The arm slowed. He could see only poorly up the length of the arm, but very clearly out the sides and down, where it was a twenty-meter drop to the pier. Now the arm was pointing almost directly at the crane at berth two and extending steadily, the diesel engine that powered it chugging along so that Alan thought his target must hear him coming. Through the open sides, he could see the barge on fire and the Harker, and Craw’s body lying still on the dock. He looked back along the tunnel into the cab, but he couldn’t see the operator anymore. Instinct told him it was time to make his move.

He crouched over with the pistol held in the ruin of his left hand and his right hand ready to catch at the supports and began to move as quickly along the arm as he could, trying to run on the supports. It was an odd, quirky run, and twice he missed his rhythm and sat heavily, bruising his legs and only just holding on to the pistol. But now he was almost at the end of the arm. It was swaying violently, and the intense heat from the burning barge was creating a wind; his own antics made it move even more. From the end of the crane to the other cab was a ten-foot gap, and the other cab was smooth plastic and steel, with nothing to grab, turned now so that even if the sniper could see him, he had no position from which to shoot. Nor could Alan see him. He wiped sweat away with the back of his right hand.

Then his crane began to move back to the right. It moved only a few meters before the inner arm started to slide out again and Alan realized that the operator must have seen his dilemma; now this arm was moving to cross the other crane’s arm. Alan threw himself to the end, regardless of consequences; he had to be there when they touched, because if the sniper was unaware up until now, he would know he was under attack the second his crane was hit by the other crane.

Alan stood in the triangular opening, his legs straddling the cable that ran the heavy winch, and watched the other arm get closer and closer. He would have to leap between the struts into the interior of the other arm only twenty meters from the sniper and fire immediately down its shaft into the cab. He took a deep breath, didn’t look down, and leaped just before the cranes touched.

He went cleanly through the opening in the struts, caught himself on the deck plates, and rolled to a crouch, changing the gun from his left to his right now that he was stable and he could see a blurry form over his sights. Then he fired, double tap, and ran forward. He didn’t feel himself yell, but someone was screaming as he pounded down the crane arm, firing as he went, and into the cab, where he tripped over the sill and went flat behind the console.

When he raised his head, the sniper was a little above him, slouched over the console, quite dead. Later, Alan would find that he had put six rounds into the man. Just at that moment, he was grateful to be alive, and sorry, so sorry, that he had lost Martin Craw.

2 (#ulink_806ff706-6974-5760-aace-48e9f79822eb)

Mombasa.

Jean-Marc Balcon had got to the port’s gate before the riot started, and he had scolded and bullied his two-man crew into setting up a camera position where they could cover the event. The cameraman was as cynical as most of his sort, a Serb who had been kicked out of Kosovo and was now bouncing around the world, freelance and usually stoned, and he said that for stock shots of a fucking nigger port, he could put the fucking camera anywhere.

‘The ship,’ Balcon had said, ‘I want good shots of the ship there.’ He had pointed at Pier One and the gray Navy supply ship that floated there.

‘What the hell for?’

‘Because I say so.’ Balcon had sworn to himself for the tenth time that he’d get rid of the Serb as soon as the shoot was over.

Then the dhow had come in and the bomb had gone off, and Balcon had started running with his crew behind him as soon as the rain of debris was over. They couldn’t get really close because of all the crap on the dock, plus a small tanker was on fire and Balcon was afraid it would blow, too, and then shooting had started and the Serb had said he was getting the hell out of there, he’d had enough of this shit in Kosovo, and Balcon, because he needed him, had promised him an extra fifty and had said they could pull back some toward the gate.

And then an incredible guy, whoever he was, had gone up the crane, and Balcon had directed the filming of him as he went out the long arm and jumped – actually jumped a gap between two cranes, twenty meters in the air – then walked up behind the sniper and blasted away with a handgun. Balcon had seen it on the camera’s viewfinder, zoomed in tight, incredible stuff for which he’d do a voice-over the instant they were done. And the shooting had stopped. Balcon was thinking that he’d be famous, getting the credit for this shot, and somebody in the crowd said the guy was CIA, another that he was US Navy, a SEAL or a Marine, and Balcon thought of the man in Sicily saying ‘the fucking US Navy,’ and he made a face. He wouldn’t say it was the US Navy on air; that way, the man in Sicily wouldn’t get enraged at him.

By then, the riot in Old Town had spread, and the street outside the gate was filling. Part of the crowd had been driven through the gates to keep from being mashed; now they milled around Balcon and his little crew, curious as people always are and hoping to get their faces put up on global TV. Balcon paid no attention to them except to push one kid out of the way of the camera lens; he was calculating right then how much he could get for the film and how soon he could get it on a feed. He was walking around the camera, talking on his cell phone to his agency, watching the guy start down from the crane and twice stopping to do a ten-second bit into the camera – silver-blond hair blowing a little in the hot breeze, blue shirt open, safari jacket casual and perfect. Very blue eyes.

‘He’s down,’ somebody said in African-accented English. The crowd pushed around him and moved toward the hell of the dock.

‘Get it, get it!’ Balcon shouted at the Serb. He got in front of the camera and pushed to make a path for it, and now the camera followed, bouncing, almost spinning. Balcon was panting, ‘That is him – that is him –’, and he half-turned to wave the Serb on, pushing his hair into place with one hand and fending off a heavy woman with the other, his microphone hand. Then they were as close as they could get and the people around him were cheering and clapping: the gunman who had gone up the crane had just come out of the cab and was walking toward them along the dock.

‘Eh, Rambo!’ somebody shouted, and the crowd laughed and applauded.

‘Use the fucking telephoto!’ Balcon screamed at the Serb. ‘Zoom in, you moron –! Frame him, for God’s sake – I want just him, not these goddam –’

He switched his microphone on and his voice got crisp. ‘Jean-Marc Balcon, here on the dock at Kilindini, Kenya, where we have just witnessed this heroic moment by a special-forces agent. Here he comes – An incredible feat – this man climbed a dockside crane and took out a terrorist sniper, armed with only a pistol – Here he comes –’

Balcon tried to push through the last fringe of the crowd so he could climb up on a truck that had been overturned by the explosion, but somebody pushed back and he stumbled. ‘Eh – merde – Hey –!’ The Serb kept zooming in, kept walking forward, lifting the camera over the heads around him and looking up into the finder, and the heroic CIA specialist, or whoever he was, held up a hand – perhaps a greeting, perhaps an attempt to block his face – and the hand was clear, silhouetted against the rising smoke, three-fingered, maimed.

Then there was shooting from the street behind them and everybody scattered.

Mombasa.

Three General Service Unit trucks came down Moi Avenue side by side, herding the people in the street ahead of them like birds. The trucks were moving slowly so that the people could stay ahead, their goal not to run them down but to move them. Even so, a man was run over when he tripped and fell, the driver too excited to notice the bump among the other bumps that the already-dead made; hyper-ventilating, the driver stared wide-eyed through the windscreen, looking for men with guns, looking for the bullet that would shatter the glass and kill him. Like the other drivers, he drove bent over the wheel like a man in pain.

Black smoke was rising from the far end of Moi Avenue. Closer to them, two cars had been pushed into the street and turned over, and men in kanzus and white caps, men in shirtsleeves, men in T-shirts that said ‘Ball State University’ and ‘AIDS Sucks!’ were waiting behind them. Three men were siphoning gasoline from other cars into Tusker Beer bottles, and a boy was stuffing torn strips of rag into the mouths. The running men ahead of the trucks reached the overturned cars and dodged behind them, and a woman carrying a baby, coming more slowly behind the young men, looked over her shoulder at the trucks and wept and tripped on the curb as she tried to reach a doorway. Pulling herself to her knees, she scrambled out of the road. As the nearest truck missed her feet by inches, somebody fired a shot and they drove on.

The drivers stopped the trucks fifty yards from the overturned cars as Molotov cocktails began to fall. They scurried out of the cabs. Soldiers erupted from the rear of the trucks and began to fire through the flames.

Washington.

Fat-eyed, fleshy, scowling, Mike Dukas stood naked in his sublet living room. The television burbled about the problems facing the US administration. A cheerful woman was trying to make news where none existed, contrasting the incumbent with his predecessor to suggest differences that would be all but invisible to, let’s say, a European leftist. Dukas watched her, suffered through the views of two experts, one from the far right, one from the center-right (so much for balance), scratched his belly.

‘I hope they both lose,’ he growled and headed for the shower. He had first heard it said by a black woman happening on a televised football game between Alabama and Mississippi: I hope they both lose. Right on. The upcoming election disgusted him. Two rich jerks, he thought as he turned on the water. The likely choices had nothing going for them but their limitless ambition – and their pedigrees. How is it, he thought as he stepped into the hot water and winced as it hit his chest, that in the biggest democracy in the world, the two best guys we can find are both from private schools and the Ivy League? He soaped himself and bowed his head under the water as if praying. Reaching to expose an armpit to the spray, he winced again: only weeks before, he had taken a bullet in his collarbone, and he still had trouble raising his arms. Out of the shower, he wiped fog from the mirror and stared at the scar, which started just above his breastbone and circled his lower throat like a bubblegum-pink necklace where the bullet had split and plowed two paths along his clavicle. Above the scar, a dissatisfied face stared back at him, pouchy around the eyes, getting lines around the mouth.

‘Not a happy camper,’ he muttered and reached for a towel. He ambled back into the living room, an ugly brown space with nothing of his own about it: he had sublet it, spent as little time there as possible. Still drying himself, he punched his answering machine, and an adolescent-sounding female voice said, ‘Hi, Mister Dukas, it’s me.’ She giggled. Dukas winced. The voice belonged to a smart, naive twenty-year-old named Leslie Kultzke, who was his assistant and who had begun, he was afraid, to hero-worship him. ‘How are you this morning?’ she said. She giggled again. ‘I got in early and brought some Krispy Kreme donuts; I know you like Dunkin’ Donuts, but I think you should just try Krispy –’

But Dukas had cut her off and was staring at the television, where CNN had dumped the doldrums of politics and got itself a red-hot story that was happening in real time. Dukas heard ‘US Navy’ and saw a picture of chaotic motion, a street, a surging crowd, and, as the camera panned, a distant ship half-sunk by a dock, its superstructure tilted away and smoke rising from its far side.

‘– Kilindini Harbor in coastal Kenya, Africa!’ a Frenchaccented voice was saying, his panting breath audible. ‘A ship has been bombed here – nobody quite sure what has happened yet; sources dockside say it is –’ pushing somebody away, breathing heavily – ‘a US vessel and that the bomb was timed to coincide with Islamic demonstrations in this port city.’ The shot zoomed in on the crippled ship. ‘I am at the scene now but –’