Force Protection. Gordon Kent

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      ‘Jeez, you’re on course.’ Stevens dropped back into the left-hand seat. ‘You get any reading on that gas gauge?’

      ‘No, sir.’

      They were flying in tandem with the det’s other S-3, running MARI scans on surface ships in the Aden-India sea lane. Slowly, they were building a library of computer-stored images, and someday, when a classification system was evolved, you’d be able to bring an unknown contact up on MARI, and the computer would scan the data banks and give you an ID. Great stuff, but this part of it was really tedious.

      ‘Sir –’ Soleck began.

      Stevens ducked his bullish head as if prepared for a blow. ‘Yeah?’

      Soleck swallowed. ‘Sir, what did you do for a wetting-down party when you made lieutenant? If you don’t mind me asking.’

      Stevens stared at him. He hunched his shoulders, shook himself deeper into the seat and put his hands on the con. ‘I got it.’ Stevens looked away from him then, checking the gauges, doing a quick visual check out the windows. He was the best pilot in the det, maybe the best on the carrier, you had to give him that. Why was he such a prick?

      ‘I bought everybody a beer at the O Club. That’s what everybody does.’ He started to say something else and then thought better of it, but his tone had been kinder than Soleck had ever heard. Soleck wanted to say something more but could think of nothing. The moment passed, and when Stevens next looked at him, it was the old, sour face he turned. ‘Forty minutes to turnback. Call Preacher and tell them section’s forty from RTF, right tank uncertain, but estimate fuel okay to touch down.’

      ‘Yes, sir.’

      Soleck decided then that he’d have to ask Mister Craik. He wouldn’t see him for some days – the word was they’d fly off to Mombasa within the week – and then, when they were more or less alone sometime, he’d just ask him. The way he’d asked Stevens. Craik would know. He’d know if women or music or goddam fireworks were in order. Or if he should just buy everybody a beer and let it go.

      But what would be memorable about that?

      USS Franklin D. Roosevelt, Inbound Channel, Straits of Gibraltar.

      ‘You know Al Craik?’ asked a lieutenant-commander in a rumpled flight suit. He wore an old leather flight jacket against the forty-knot wind that blew through the Straits of Gibraltar. He was short, compact, and thin-faced, and the pocket of his flight jacket, embroidered in the blue and gold of VS-53, said ‘Narc.’

      ‘Never met him. But I went through AOCS with his wife. Rose Siciliano, then. Man, she’s a tough chick. Great pilot, too.’ He grinned at the memory and turned to look up at Narc as he descended the ladder from the O–3 level to the hangar deck. He, too, wore a flight suit and a jacket, only his was embroidered with the black and white of chopper squadron HS-9. It said ‘Skipper Van Sluyt.’ They were both officers in the same air wing: CAG 14, six days away from transiting the Suez Canal to relieve the USS Thomas Jefferson off Africa.

      Narc nodded. ‘She’s at NASA, going to fly the shuttle.’

      ‘No shit? Well, good work if you like that sort of thing.’ Skipper Van Sluyt started down the ladder again.

      Narc followed him down, surprised. ‘What, the publicity?’ Narc did like that sort of thing. He had an Air Medal of which he was very proud.

      ‘Yeah, Narc. That and the ever-present corporate –’ Van Sluyt had turned his head, perhaps wondering if his anti-NASA speech was going to have the right effect on Narc the Navy Yuppie, when the carrier hit the crosscurrent at the entrance to the Mediterranean. Ninety-five thousand tons of carrier are not easily moved, but the constant flow of water between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic creates something like a wall. The great ship gave a lurch, and Skipper Van Sluyt’s feet jerked out from under him. He fell down the rest of the ladder, his tailbone breaking on the second to last step and his collarbone at the bottom. As he said later to his wife, ‘That’s what you get for bad-mouthing NASA.’

      

      Mombasa.

      From the landward walls of Fort Jesus, he could see the Muslim neighborhoods of Old Town laid out at his feet like a map, although the streets were tiny and twisted like a collection of old rubber bands. The fort served to draw the tourists, and nearest to it were prosperous shops owned by Kikuyu or Hindus with money; plastic Masai spears and plastic Masai beads woven in China grabbed at the attention of German and American tourists, and sad-looking tall men with heavy spears and a trace of Masai in their veins guarded the shops. Farther off toward the dhow port were the real shops of the Muslim residents, tiny shops with deeply embrasured doors and windows capable of resisting a siege. The smell of cardamom and curry carried even to the top of the wall. And to the north, he could see the slow rise of the ground into the natural amphitheater of the park in front of the old colonial offices.

      The man atop the walls squatted in the coral ruins of a tiny sentry kiosk on the landward side and carefully unwrapped the burlap package under his arm. Seventy feet above the streets of Old Town, he exposed the receiver of an AK-74 and inserted a clip.

      

      Alan Craik loved Africa. He’d seen the bad parts – Rwanda, Zaire, Somalia. He’d seen the parts in Tanzania and South Africa that looked like wildlife shows on the Discovery Channel. But this is where his love of Africa had had its birth, at the top of this narrow Mombasa street that ran down from the shiny oddness of a Hard Rock Café to a fifteenth-century mosque and the Old Town of Mombasa. He smiled broadly, boyishly, looking at the coral walls of Fort Jesus, where he had first tried his halting Swahili, and at the glint of the water in the dhow harbor beyond. It wasn’t like coming home, but it was like returning to a beloved vacation spot. He didn’t even realize he had started walking down toward Old Town until Martin Craw’s hand grasped his arm.

      ‘Whoa, there, Commander. We got less than an hour before we’re due at the det.’

      Alan smiled back at him. I’m in Africa! was what he wanted to say, but he swallowed it. Then he thought, Screw the command image.

      ‘You’re the one who said we should leave them alone until they got the place straightened up, Martin. That’s why I’m still lugging this ball and chain.’ He indicated the heavy helmet bag in his maimed left hand, the two green loop handles wrapped around his wrist to keep the pressure off the stumps of his fingers. ‘I thought dropping Laura at the Harker would take longer.’ USNS Jonathan Harker was a ship supplying the battle group, in port for three days. Laura had drawn the duty of checking with the captain and crew on their experience of Mombasa as a liberty port – plus, as she had found when they had pulled up at the dock, the BG’s flag was making a tour of the ship, and she’d got roped into his party. She hadn’t been a happy force-protection investigator.

      Craw smiled as if he wished it had taken longer and looked at his watch again. ‘If I let you loose in an African city, you’ll be out till all hours.’

      ‘Martin, you look to me like a man who needs a beer.’

      ‘Beer? And air-conditioning? That’s a big yes.’

      ‘We’ll have one, repeat, one beer here, and then I get to cruise Old Town for thirty minutes.’

      ‘Yes, sir!’ Craw’s reply was deliberate overenthusiasm; he was a man capable of СКАЧАТЬ