Force Protection
Gordon Kent

For intelligence analysts who sort truth from lies.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Day One

1

2

3

4

Day Two

5

6

7

8

9

Day Three

10

11

12

Day Four

13

14

Day Five

15

16

17

Coda

About the Author

Praise for Gordon Kent

The Alan Craik Novels

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

The old bull elephant stamped.

The matriarch let the stripped acacia branch drop at her feet and turned her head a little. The bull stamped again, snorted. She took a step toward him and then looked down at her calf, unsure. He stamped again.

All through their band, heads came up.

The old bull’s ears shot forward, full display, and he stamped, louder, and trumpeted. There was a noise now, a noise they all knew, and the alien metal smell. Too close, the old bull was saying. She turned away, her calf at her side, and began to move along the nearly dry watercourse, away from the noise. She was the matriarch, and the others followed her lead. She moved quickly, easily, fitting her bulk between trees or just knocking older wood down. She wanted to get into deeper cover first, while the bull did his job.

Braaat. A noise like a tree being torn out of the ground right beside her. She whirled and her calf was gone. She started to go back. She could smell her own fear and that of her sisters all around her. Her calf was kneeling at the base of a tree, slumping down slowly, and she knew he was done. She keened a little, and Braaat sounded again. Something punched her in the head and stung her ear and she bellowed her pain. One of her sisters stumbled, fell, didn’t rise. The ripping noises were all around her, everywhere, and she watched another, younger bull go down heavily, his feet thrashing and tearing at the dry earth even as he gave his death cry. All their shrieks tore the air, audible for miles, the message clear to other elephants. Panic and death.

Angry and afraid, she whirled her bulk back and forth, looking for her assailants, looking for the predator killing her family. She hated with a wild hate, and called, standing over her dead calf, until the braaat finished her, too.

He was a big, confident white man with a sneering smile. His black soldiers feared him. He walked through the carnage, his ‘boys’ already cutting the ivory and in two cases taking the hides. Younger men were cutting the tails for bracelets. He shook his head at the two dead calves.

‘That’s a waste of ammunition,’ he said to a young black man, his own South African accent plain. ‘No reason to shoot ‘em. Nothing on ‘em worth taking back.’ He made ‘back’ sound like ‘beck.’ The boy nodded, his eyes still wide from shooting the elephants. The South African thought that killing elephants was an excellent way to train his men. He walked back to the big truck that they had come in to lay their ambush hours before, took a long drink of water to wash the red dust from his throat, and reached for the cell phone on the seat.

Sixty miles down the coast of Kenya, in the small city of Malindi, a man also reached for his cell phone. He was dark with sun but not African – Mediterranean, rather, perhaps Maltese or even Spanish. His English was accented but clear, slightly Americanized. He was a small man, not quite middle-aged, muscular. He was sitting in the well of a thirty-foot power boat in the Malindi marina, sipping Byrrh and looking at a handsome black woman in a thong.

‘Uh,’ he said into the phone.

‘This is Cousin Eddie.’

He knew the voice and the South African accent. A prick, but a necessary prick, was his view. ‘Uh,’ he said again. The topless woman was lying on the deck of the next boat over. Her nipples pointed skyward like little antiaircraft guns, he thought. He’d had experience of antiaircraft guns.

‘We got eleven nice pianos.’ ‘Pianos’ were elephants (because piano keys used to be made from elephant ivory).

‘Send them down. Everything okay? The kids, they’re okay?’ The ‘kids’ were fifty adult mercenaries, mostly Rwandan Hutus.

‘Kids are fine. They’re playing every day.’

‘Ready for the celebration?’

‘Can’t wait! Everything going nicely.’

‘I sent you three new kids with toy boats.’

‘Yeah, got here last night. Very eager.’

The man in Malindi thought that for what he was paying, they should have been very eager indeed, but he didn’t say anything about that. Instead, he said that the kids should be kept busy with their toy boats, and he didn’t want anything to go wrong at the celebration, was that perfectly clear? The South African at the other end said that was perfectly clear, in the voice that men use to show that they don’t take shit from anybody, to which the man in Malindi responded by grunting and shutting down his cell phone and watching the topless woman grease herself with lotion. Then he turned the phone back on and put in a call that went by way of a pass-through in Indonesia to a number in Sicily.

Carmine Santangelo-Fugosi was the son of a smalltime smuggler who had been born in a mountain village and who now lived in an eighteenth-century palace that had been built by the family that had once ruled this part of Sicily. The head of the family had been called ‘Count;’ that had lasted almost until Carmine’s father had been a young man. Now Carmine lived there, and people showed him even more reverence than they had shown the counts, and they called him Don.

He was tall for a Sicilian, slightly stooped, fifty, a solidly built man with thick features and a head of graying hair that he left long because he was trying to hide pattern baldness. He wore a collarless white shirt and pleated trousers and felt slippers, and from time to time he spat on the floor of his own terrace, big gobs, to show he was a peasant and came from peasants.

‘This is very nice,’ a small Lebanese man said in French from the shade of an umbrella, ignoring the spit. The umbrella was fixed in a cast-iron table with a glass top and rather too much filigree work in the legs – more of Carmine’s peasant taste – and matched by the chairs around it. The Lebanese wore sunglasses and a weary-looking cotton suit the color of muddy water. With him at the table was an almost pretty man who translated the French into Italian for Carmine Santangelo-Fugosi.

Carmine looked around at his terrace, his eighteenth-century palazzo, his flowers and his French doors and his tiled floors. Of course it was nice. Carmine was a fucking billionaire – what did he expect? ‘I don’t want any shit from Hizbollah,’ Carmine said.

The Lebanese made a gesture that indicated that shit was something that Hizbollah would never in a million years give him. He said in French that none of this would ever get back to Hizbollah and that if it ever did, he, the Lebanese, swore on his mother’s grave – he was a Christian – that he would kill himself.

Carmine looked at him as the translation came and said, ‘Tell him that if Hizbollah finds out, he’ll wish he’d killed himself today.’

Then Carmine’s cell phone went off and he turned away, the phone at his ear, and walked to the edge of his terrace, where a balustrade separated him from the twenty-meter drop to the town below. Down there were a street, a café, roofs, and then the port and the Mediterranean, sparkling away to Africa.

‘And?’ he said into the phone when the man in Malindi had finished his report. Carmine kept his voice low and his back turned to the table, which, because the terrace was so big, was too far away for anybody to have heard him, anyway. Plus the Lebanese wasn’t supposed to understand Italian, but Carmine never trusted things like that. People lied about themselves all the time. He leaned on the balustrade and carried on his side of the conversation in grunts and mono-syllables, turning slowly to look around the terrace. Two other men were there, one at each doorway, arms folded, impassive, both the children of his father’s relatives. Both armed.

‘So,’ he said. He covered the phone with his other hand so he could look at the Lebanese while he talked. The Lebanese was getting a lot of money to do the job, but could he do it? Carmine wondered if he should get rid of the man and start over. No, there wasn’t time. ‘I don’t care about that,’ he said into the phone when the other man started to give him details. ‘All I want is your assurance that everything will be ready for the celebration. Your absolute assurance.’ When he heard the reply, he grunted and switched off, but the grunt was a positive one. He trusted the man in Malindi.

He spat. He couldn’t spit like that without a certain run-up, a certain amount of sound not unlike retching. He went back to the table and waved a hand at one of the other men, who came over and poured him more coffee and then backed away.

Carmine took a biscotto in his right hand and, holding it between his thumb and third finger, used it to lecture the Lebanese. ‘I want the only face on this to be Muslim, you follow me?’ Carmine came from a village where they had still now and then been visited by puppeteers who did plays from the romances about Saracens and Christian knights; his sense of Islam was based in that half-sophisticated, half-ignorant past. ‘That’s what the world is to see. That’s what Jean-Marc is for.’ He gestured with the cookie at the handsome translator, who was actually a freelance television journalist and who smiled at them as if he was on camera. ‘You deliver Mombasa,’ Carmine said to the Lebanese. He dipped the biscotto, sucked the now-soaked end. ‘No mistakes. You don’t get a second chance. Eh?’

‘Of course, of course –’ The Lebanese was afraid of him and showed it – never a bad idea with Carmine, who liked fear in the people around him. The Lebanese tapped the glass top of the table. ‘I have everything arranged –’ He stopped. The translator was shaking his head at him.

Carmine hawked and spat and waved his left hand. ‘Don’t tell me details. Tell Carlo or somebody. Get out.’ He looked toward a door. ‘Carlo!’

The Lebanese was hustled out, his right hand halfway up to give a parting handshake, his mouth still open. He would be back in his Christian village in Lebanon by midnight. It might seem he would have nothing to fear there from somebody living in Sicily. But he knew better.

Carmine sat at the table with the translator, wiping his mouth with a cloth napkin. ‘What do you think?’ he said.

‘I think I don’t understand what is going on, Don,’ he murmured.

‘You don’t need to understand!’ Carmine’s head was down like a bull’s. ‘You do what I pay you to do – you talk nice, look pretty on the camera, you keep saying what I tell you. You don’t hear nothing, you don’t know nothing, you weren’t here today, and you didn’t meet this no-balls Lebanese! Yes?’

‘Yes, yes – of course – Don.’

Carmine sat back. He fingered a cigarette out of a pack on the table without looking. ‘You want to keep a secret, you chop it into pieces and you give each guy a piece. They look at it, they say, “I don’t know what I got here.” That’s how it stays a secret.’

He lit the cigarette and turned and looked across the terrace at the sea, his legs spread, his forearms on his knees and his hands joined, smoke blowing from the side of his mouth. The sea was empty but he seemed to see something there, because he said, ‘The US Navy, that’s what I worry about. Fucking US Navy.’

Day One

16 August 1999

1

Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Nairobi, Kenya.

Laura had tarted herself up so that she was quite a distraction, he thought, watching her approach the passport-control slot with her hidden contraband. She walked with a bouncy stride that wasn’t really her own, chest up and out, her rear also very much on view in tight yellow shorts that barely reached her hips. Her navel rode calmly in all this motion, its ring with the diamond chip winking. Laura had made herself, in fact, all distractions, and every male eye in the shed-like arrival area was on some part of her. The fact that she didn’t have a really pretty face was irrelevant.

Alan Craik grinned despite himself. She was enjoying it! He, on the other hand, was nervous, for her as much as for himself, and he tensed as she sashayed to the passport-control booth and started to chat with a security officer. More balls than he had, he thought. He had only to move a 9mm pistol through; she had something far more dangerous.

He flexed his fingers to relax them, felt the odd sensation in his left hand where two fingers were missing. Or, rather, were red stumps. He forced himself to look at them, felt disbelief, slight disgust. My hand. The fingers had been blown off by a bullet seven weeks before. There had been talk of his leaving the Navy.

He balled the hand into a fist and forced himself to concentrate. Back to work.

Alan laid his US passport, a twenty-dollar bill sticking from its top, in front of the black man at passport control. The man, too, had been looking at Laura, and Alan grinned.

‘Maridadi,’ Alan said. Pretty.

The man’s eyes flicked over Alan’s shoulder again to Laura, fifty feet away, and he growled Whore in Swahili, which Alan wasn’t supposed to understand. He stamped the passport and waved Alan through. The twenty had disappeared.

Alan took three steps, clearing passport control, and looked for her. For a moment he lost her, then saw the bright yellow of her buns swinging up the stairs to the balcony above. He guessed that she had seen the sign up there for a ladies’ room, used that excuse to bypass customs temporarily. Up there, however, farther along the balcony, was a uniformed Kenyan soldier with an automatic weapon, strategically located between the stairs and the exit at the far end that led directly to the terminal. He was there to turn back anybody who tried to get out that way.

The yellow shorts flashed and the door to the ladies’ room closed. Alan turned and walked out.

He waited for her in the terminal hall. His pulse had leveled off again, and the sweat that had threatened to leak down his sides had stopped. His part was over: he had moved the weapon and fifty cartridges through the airport’s security. Now, if Laura didn’t get arrested for moving drugs –

A wooden dhow moved south along the Kenyan coast, nearing Mombasa. It was going slowly under motor power, its sail useless in the humid breeze that blew from the shore. The men aboard could smell the land beyond, an odor slightly spicy, smoky, earthy, overlaid with the moist decay of the mangrove swamps where Africa met the ocean.

A dark man sat at the foot of the mast, waiting for the first sight of the city. Just now, he could see only blue-green haze where the land lay, and here and there a darker mass where a point thrust out. He had binoculars hung around his neck, but he did not use them. He was in fact seeing far more clearly with an inner eye, which looked beyond the haze, beyond Africa even, into his future.

In four hours, he would be in paradise.

He believed this more completely than he believed that he was sitting on a ship on an ocean on a ball rolling through space. He believed with both passion and simplicity; he believed utterly. He had no fear of the destruction of his physical self that would send him there. They had assured him that he would feel nothing: a flash, a pressure, and he would wake in paradise.

Another man approached him. He had a bag of tools in one hand and, in the other, a black plastic case that held a detonator. ‘Time,’ the man said.

The dark man shook his head. ‘Not yet.’ He returned to his contemplation of paradise.

‘Hey, man,’ he heard her voice say behind him.

‘My God, you made it!’

‘Piece of cake!’ She shrugged. Grinned. Held up a hand so that he could see that the fingers were trembling. ‘Little reaction after the fact.’ Laughed. Her distractions bounced, and Alan Craik, loyal husband, father, moral man, pursed his lips and thought that it was going to be a long three days – and three nights – before she went on to other duties.

‘How’d you get by the guy with the gun?’

‘Walked.’ She moved a little closer. ‘Want to see how I walked?’ She wasn’t wearing a bra, he knew – she had told him earlier – and her silk T-shirt was definitely a little small.

‘I think we ought to do our report.’

‘You’re a great partner, Craik. I tell you, man, I sure lucked out with you!’ She sighed. Laura Sweigert was a Naval Criminal Investigative Service special agent, good at her work, tough, but she had a reputation for liking what she called ‘contact sports’ when the workday was over. ‘I just scored big, man – you think I want to write some fucking report?’ He remembered a news report about a female tennis star who, after a big win, said she just wanted to get laid.

A long three nights.

He was saved by a voice, calling his name. Behind them and to their right was the exit lane from immigration, lined on both sides by a crowd of greeters – family, hustlers, tourist reps, women in saris, men with hand-lettered signs that said ‘Adamson’ and ‘Client of Simba, Ltd.’ The voice calling ‘Mister Craik! Mister Craik!’ came from there, and Alan searched the two crowds, feeling Laura’s hand on his bare arm. He thought he recognized the voice and searched for a face, a white face in the mostly black crowd, and then he saw a Navy ball cap and knew he had the right man, and he waved.

‘Craw! Hey, Craw!’

Master Chief Martin Craw had been one of the people who had got him through being an ensign. Craw had taught him the back end of the S-3. Craw had shown him how to massage old tapes and older computers and pull up targets from electronic mush. Craw had given him an example of what a Navy man should be.

Now Martin Craw came toward them, a little grin on his face as he took in both Alan and Laura, hand outstretched.

‘Laura, I want you to meet the best master chief in the US Navy. Martin, this is Laura Sweigert, who just brought a kilo of white powder through Kenyatta arrivals.’

‘Ma’am.’ Craw was in his early forties but seemed an ancient to Alan because of his great, quiet authority. His grin, however, and his quick appraisal of Laura, were not an old man’s. ‘How’d you do that?’

Laura rocked back a little and smiled at him. ‘I think it was the T-shirt.’

Craw reddened only a little. ‘Kinda dangerous.’ He didn’t make clear whether he meant the T-shirt or the white powder. Craw was from Maine.

She made a sound that pooh-poohed the idea. ‘Hell’s bells, Craik brought through a goddamned gun!’

‘Not so loud –’

‘And bullets!’

‘Laura, hey –’

She held up her hands. ‘Okay, okay.’ Her fingernails, like her toenails, were painted a glittery red. Her lipstick was pink, her eyeshadow violet, her hair a mousy brown that you ignored because it was gelled to look as if she’d just got very, very wet. ‘Entirely legit,’ she said. ‘We’re testing airport security for NCIS.’

‘I figured.’ Craw grinned. He jerked his head at Alan. ‘He’s always legit.’

Laura made a face. ‘So I’m discovering.’ She put a hand through Craw’s arm. ‘What are your plans for the next couple of days, sailor?’ Alan, caused abruptly to see Craw through her eyes, realized that the senior chief was a damned good-looking man.

Craw saw Alan’s look, blushed. ‘I’m goin’ to be working for Mister Craik.’

Alan bent and picked up his helmet bag, which held the H&K. ‘You want to bring me up to date, Chief? Like, um, what you’re doing here?’ He had last seen Craw on board the USS Thomas Jefferson a week ago, when he had had to fly back to CONUS to be deposed for a national-security case.

With Laura leaning against him, Craw explained that he had flown into Mombasa the evening before from the CV to set up the US hangar there as their home base while they shore-deployed. ‘Orders from the CAG.’ He raised his free hand, which held a black attaché case.

‘Yeah, I know, I got ‘em, too. But I didn’t expect to be met at Nairobi.’

‘Thought I could brief you flying back to Mombasa. The admiral’s goin’ to inspect us tomorrow.’ Again, he gestured with the attaché case. ‘Got some paperwork –’

‘What the hell, we just got here!’

‘Well, he’s makin’ a shore visit, so it’s some ship today, us tomorrow.’

That changed the price of fish. What he and Laura had just done – moving illicit items through airport security for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service – was a peripheral responsibility, a test of local conditions that would become part of a report. He had treated it as a game; however, with this return to the realities of his detachment, the pleasures of the game faded and the serious trivia of Navy life took over.

They began moving away from the arrivals area. ‘What’s our space like down there?’

‘Kinda filthy. One of the old air-force hangars at Mombasa airport. Not been used for a while – dust, gear missing – been a lotta thievin’, I’d guess. I put everybody to cleanin’ up, but the place is big – room for a couple P-3s in there and to spare, if you had to.’

They were walking toward the Air Kenya desk now to start the flight to Mombasa. ‘How many personnel?’

‘Aircrew for one plane plus seventeen – other plane comin’ in a few days.’

‘Staying where?’

‘Nyali International.’ American military, like government people, got put up in the big international hotels on the beach because they were supposed to be more secure than hotels in Mombasa itself. ‘But I told ‘em, you boys just plan to be in this hangar nonstop till the admiral’s blown through, then I’ll get you some rack time. They’re all good boys.’

They were, Alan thought; they were all good boys now, although when he and Craw had first encountered them some months before, they had been pretty bad boys. Detachment 424 was a one-shot unit put together to test-drive a 3-D radar-imaging system called MARI, and it had been almost run into extinction by its acting officer-in-charge before Alan and Craw and a few others had been able to shape it up. Now deployed with the Jefferson in the Indian Ocean, it had been ordered to fly off to Mombasa for two weeks as an advance party for a visit by the entire battle group.

‘Give me a rundown.’

The men on the dhow smelled Mombasa before they saw it – a dustier air, car exhaust, garbage, people. The dark man raised his binoculars but couldn’t penetrate the haze; Mombasa is a low city, anyway, most of its seafront masked by trees, and the dhow was still well out, although in the shipping lane so as to seem as much a part of normal traffic as it could. Other dhows and rusty merchant ships had passed them going the other way; once, a sparkling-white Kenyan Coast Guard ship had approached and the men had tensed, but it had passed without hailing.

The dark man gestured toward the deeper haze of Mombasa. ‘We go on past the city. Kilindini Harbor is beyond. Tell Simoum that he and the crew can take to the boat once he has sailed us into Kilindini.’

The other man – paler, nervous – squatted in front of him, holding out the tools as if they were an offering. ‘Haji, I am ashamed – I am losing my, my – I want to go with them.’

The dark man shook his head. His face was severe, but his voice was kind. ‘Pray. You will be with me in paradise. God is great.’

The other man began to weep.

They talked business, then a few personal things, then a little scuttlebutt, Laura laughing with them. When they got to talking about individuals in the det, Craw laughed – a loud, staccato sound, like a series of backfires – and said, ‘You know what Mister Soleck did now?’

Alan prepared himself. LTJG Soleck was their idiot savant, their divine fool. He had once managed to miss their departure from CONUS and then spend three days catching up with them because, as he had said quite frankly, there had been a bookstore he had had to visit.

‘What’s Soleck?’ Laura said.

‘My cross,’ Alan groaned. ‘A good kid, but a royal screwup – when he isn’t being brilliant.’

‘He’s a doozer,’ Craw said.

‘So what’d he do?’ Alan had a vision of a wrecked aircraft.

‘He was trolling for fish from the stern of the carrier.’

‘The fantail?’

‘No, sir, the CIWS mount.’ Craw pronounced it ‘cee-wiz’ – the cee-wiz mount. ‘Somebody saw him and told me and I didn’t believe it, so I went down and there he was, with a gawd-dam spinnin’ rod, just standin’ there like he was bass fishin’. And the CV makin’ better’n twenty knots!’

‘Well –’ He looked at Laura. ‘Soleck is a little, mm, eccentric. He didn’t do anything really, um, stupid, did he?’ He had a terrible thought. ‘He didn’t fall overboard, did he?’

‘No, sir. But he caught a fish! A gawd-dam big fish! Which he carried by hand all the way to the galley so’s they could cook it for his dinner.’ Craw’s smile became small, almost evil. ‘And not just his dinner.’

‘Oh, no.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘He didn’t.’

‘Yes, sir. Direct to the flag deck, courtesy of LTJG Soleck and Detachment 424.’

Laura guffawed. They were having a beer now in a crowded bar near the departure lounge. She leaned back to laugh, and conversation in the bar died.

‘Was it – edible?’

‘It was gawd-dam delicious! Some big red fish I never saw before, spines on it like a cactus, but it cut like steak and tasted like tuna. Admiral said it was the best fish he ever ate!’

Alan let out a sigh of relief. ‘That’s okay, then.’

‘Well, no. Next day, twenty guys was fishin’ there, and the day after, forty, so the ship’s captain put it out of bounds and sent a memo specially to Mister Soleck, telling him to stop having good ideas.’

Alan sighed. ‘I suppose I got a copy.’

‘Yes, sir. Ship’s captain would like a word with you when you’re back aboard.’

Alan nodded. Right. One week away in Washington, back one hour, and he was going to be up to his ass in Mickey Mouse. Welcome to the US Navy. He flexed his hands and glanced down to where the fingers should have been. Welcome to the US Navy.

Then they were moving down the ramp toward the aircraft that would take them to Mombasa. ‘Don’t worry,’ Craw said softly. ‘Everything’ll be fine.’

‘Right.’

‘We’ll make things shipshape for the admiral, then we got two weeks on the beach to relax.’

‘Right.’

Alan didn’t tell Craw that he had a set of orders that would keep them busy for longer than two weeks, or that his orders had a secret addendum that gave him the responsibility for assessing the consequences if the United States and the UN went back into Somalia. He was returning not only to assess Mombasa as a port of call, but to gather information for a war.

The dhow anchored in Kilindini Road. Ten minutes after she swung to rest on her anchor cable, a boat put over, and six men motored away for the distant shore. On the dhow, the dark man was standing by the landward side, peering through his binoculars. A distant gray vessel was barely visible in the haze at dockside, but he studied it for some minutes, then turned to the only two men left on the dhow with him.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Bring the detonator.’

Over the Indian Ocean.

LTjg Evan Soleck was worried.

The S-3 in whose right-hand seat he rode was mostly older than he was, but that wasn’t what worried him. They were flying at twenty-three thousand feet, two hundred miles from the carrier, and the gauge for the starboard fuel tank wasn’t registering, but that wasn’t what worried him. The man in the left-hand seat was a lieutenant-commander and hated his guts, but that didn’t worry him, either.

What worried Soleck was that in three days he was going to make lieutenant, and he didn’t know what he was going to do about a wetting-down party. It was tradition that you gave a party for your shipmates for a promotion, and you wet down the new bars with the most drinkable stuff available. Not giving a party wasn’t an option. Soleck had heard a story about a new jg in a squadron – nobody ever said what squadron it was, but everybody swore it was true – who had refused to give a party, and his CO had sent him away every weekend for months – courier duty, bullshit trips, hand-carried messages – until he broke and gave a party at last, and nobody went. Soleck couldn’t imagine that degree of isolation. You’d be frozen right out of a squadron. A pariah. He’d kill himself.

So he had to give a party. But it had to be just right. Really phat. Something they’d tell stories about long after he’d been ordered someplace else. So that when he was, let’s say, an old guy – a commander, a squadron CO, even – the nuggets would stare at him and nudge each other and say, ‘The Old Man’s the one that gave a party so cool that –’ That what? There was the problem.

‘You take it?’ the man beside him said.

Soleck snapped out of it. ‘Yes, sir!’

LCDR Paul Stevens was a difficult man. He didn’t like Soleck, the jg knew, because Soleck heroworshipped Alan Craik, their CO, and Stevens and Craik didn’t get along. What Soleck didn’t understand was that Stevens never would have liked him anyway, because Soleck was an optimist and a doer and a happy guy, and Stevens went through life with his own personal cloud raining on him all the time. Now he scowled at the much younger man and sneered, ‘You awake?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Stevens grunted. They had both been put up for the Air Medal for flying into a war zone seven weeks ago to pull out Craik and an NCIS agent and a spy they’d captured, and they’d flown back out with two Chinese aircraft pissing missiles at them and had lived to tell about it – but was Stevens happy? No. He’d done brilliantly, evading missiles with the slow, fat S-3, hoarding fuel long past the gauges’ limit, getting two wounded men back to the CV in time to get the blood they needed. But was he happy? No. All he’d said was, ‘That trip gets me O-5 and a medal, and I’m goddamned if I ever do anything that stupid again.’ The talk before had been that Stevens would get passed over for commander and would have to leave the Navy, but now he’d made O-5 and got a medal, and he remained as sour as a ripe lemon, a weight on the entire detachment.

‘I need to take a piss,’ he was saying. ‘Keep it level on 270 if you can manage it – you’re already three goddam points off.’

Soleck started to object, then shut up. ‘Anything you say, sir.’

‘Yeah, I bet.’

Stevens headed for the tunnel. Alone in the front end, Soleck brought the S-3 back on course and ran through the things he might have said. He knew what Stevens’s beef was: when Craik had taken over the det several months ago, Stevens had been acting CO and things had been a shambles. Craik had whipped them into a first-class outfit; then, with Craik home on convalescent leave after the wild ride out of Pakistan, Stevens had been made acting CO again, and the CAG had been right on his ass the whole time to keep him up to the mark. The CAG was Craik’s personal friend, Captain Rafehausen. ‘His asshole buddy,’ Stevens had sneered. Yeah, well, I admire both of them a hell of a lot more than I admire you, Stevens, Soleck said inside his head. You don’t even have a friend! Mister Craik gave you the chance that got you the medal and your fucking O-5, and you’re not even grateful! The trouble with you, Stevens, is that you’re –

He was what? Soleck was too young, too inexperienced to know that there are people incapable of happiness. He thought that Stevens was lazy, but he also wondered if Stevens was actually afraid of failure: better not to try than to fail.

Which brought him back to the wetting-down party: would he have to invite Stevens?

He slid into a reverie about a private banquet room somewhere, maybe champagne – champagne, really? did aviators even like champagne? – well, booze, certainly. And women. He didn’t know what kind of women or how he’d get them, but they’d remember a party with women, wouldn’t they? And a theme. Something Navy – maybe a few musicians playing Navy stuff –

‘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 quiet sarcasm, often so deep it was difficult to detect. He paused on the crowded sidewalk to ogle a local woman in blended Western and African clothes. Alan hustled him inside.

The interior of the Hard Rock was cool, pleasant, and entirely American; only physique and face shape made the crowd different from a bunch of American blacks in an American city. Most of them were speaking English. The Hard Rock franchise was genuine, unlike that in Bahrain; it had been hit hard by the Nairobi embassy bombing, but was still a bastion of burgers, milkshakes, and beer – and a magnet for sailors. One wall had plaques from ships of the US, British, and Canadian navies, and one from an Australian destroyer.

They sat at a table and ordered beers: Alan a White Cap, because it was Kenyan, Craw a Rolling Rock, because he was delighted to find it. Alan watched the city bustle by the huge picture window. He could see the park in front of the old British Colonial Office away to the left, surrounded by monolithic bank buildings – still a spiritual center of the town, although the real economic center had moved up Moi Avenue since he was last here. He was growing nostalgic for a town he had barely visited. ‘I know a great restaurant here, really world class, called the Tamarind Dhow,’ he said, still bursting with the notion of being in Mombasa. ‘Want to grab some food there after we visit the det? It’s on me.’

Craw smiled slowly, not raising his eyes from the menu of the Hard Rock. ‘I sort o’ have some plans, tonight, skipper, if you don’t mind. Rain check?’ he drawled, and then looked up with a sudden laugh.

‘Master Chief, do you have a date?’

‘That would be “need to know,” sir.’ He smiled again. He seemed happy about it. ‘Do you really need to know?’

‘Nope.’ Alan thought of saying Don’t hurt yourself, but he let it pass. ‘But if you’re going to sit here and drool over your good fortune, I’m going to shop.’ Craw smiled again. Alan couldn’t remember seeing him smile so often, at least since he had reached command rank. Craw waved him away. ‘It’s only Mombasa, skipper; I can find you. I’ll catch you in ten minutes. If I don’t see you in Old Town, I’ll catch you around Fort Jesus. Leave the helmet bag.’ He reached out for it. ‘I’ll watch it.’

‘I’m signed for it.’ Alan wrapped the handles around his wrist again. He waved, tossed an American tendollar bill on the table, and headed out into the street, checking his watch. Time to see if the same old silversmith was still in business.

The interior of the shop was dark and cool, a profound contrast with the white-hot street outside. Three young boys were working in the back, two of them drawing wire by pulling a core through ever-smaller holes in a steel plate. He had seen the same craft demonstrated at Colonial Williamsburg, but these boys did it better. They were doing it for real. The third boy was polishing silver with ashes and a lot of elbow grease. Alan smiled and called a greeting as he entered; later, he couldn’t remember what language he had used, but he would remember the slight tension in their body language as they turned to him. He knew the shop was off the beaten track, but couldn’t imagine they were against tourists.

A fine old sword stood in a niche behind the counter; that caught his eye as he ignored cases of bangles and earrings. Rose never fancied such stuff. He couldn’t remember the last time he had seen her in any earrings except military studs. But just under his hands, as he leaned on the counter, there was a heavy chain of solid links, almost like big beads; it was crisp and very well made. He smiled; it was usually so difficult to find anything for Rose.

‘May I see the heavy silver necklace?’

‘Oh, yes.’ One of the young men sprang down from the bunk-like bench where he was working and opened the case. Alan couldn’t pin down what was out of place, except that the young man should have been talking a great deal more.

The necklace was just as handsome close-up as in the case. He caught the young man’s eye. ‘Bei gani?’ he asked. He showed a US twenty-dollar bill. When here many years before, he had learned that it was easier to buy everything with US dollars. Cheaper, too.

The boy held up his hand and spoke rapidly without smiling. He went too fast. Alan thought he heard something like ‘Mia moja na thelathini na sita,’ which would have been a hundred and something. More than a hundred. That seemed unlikely; silver wasn’t that expensive.

‘Ghali sana. Pudunza bei kidogo, rafik’.’

The young man on the other side of the counter kept looking past him into the street, and Alan wanted to turn around, except that the other young men were just as interesting. They seemed to be listening for something, utterly still. Not getting much work done.

The boy at the counter muttered something about his father. Perhaps serious bargaining had to be done by an adult, although in most of Africa all three of the shop boys would be thought men. In Somalia they would have been fighting for years. One of them even looked Somali. Not impossible.

‘Lini?’ Alan couldn’t remember how to ask something as complex as when the father would be in. It might not even be polite.

‘Kesho!’ Did he really mean tomorrow? The young man at the counter waved his hand as if eager for Alan to go. He was eager. Then, swiftly, his expression changed and he retreated to his work area, his face blank, as a new, older man came in through a beaded curtain to the side of the counter. He was looking at the three boys in puzzlement, but he smiled as he looked at Alan. ‘My son. I do not know why he torments me this way. You are interested in the necklace? I made it myself.’

‘It is very good.’

‘It is, isn’t it? Too good, I think. Tourists want a cheap memento of Africa, not a good piece of silver.’ Alan liked him instantly; he had the directness that Alan associated with craftsmen. Men too busy for bullshit. The young men were listening; no wire was being drawn, no silver polished.

‘What price did my son quote you?’

‘Tafadhali, mzee. I did not really understand him. My Swahili is never as good as I think it is. Not nearly as good as your English, for instance.’

The older man polished the chain idly, unfazed by flattery. ‘Hmm. Yes. It is. One hundred twenty dollars.’

‘I could perhaps go as far as eighty dollars.’ Alan wanted it more now than when he had first looked at it. He also wanted an excuse to prolong the meeting. The older man was interesting, a type; and the young men were clearly on edge – waiting for something, something that a foreigner, an mzungu, was not part of.

The mzee looked at him, one eyebrow raised. Alan settled on to a bench by the counter with a sigh, as if ready for a long siege.

‘Perhaps if we had some tea?’ The mzee was happy to dicker; indeed, would have been sorry if the business had been concluded directly.

The plan to meet Craw was somewhere around the edge of Alan’s consciousness, but Craw wouldn’t worry and Alan knew where to find him. The tourist part of Old Town wasn’t more than a couple of streets, really. And tea, sweet cardamom tea, drunk in this medieval shop, would make Alan’s day. The det wasn’t going anywhere without him, either.

The older man turned to the boys and said something in Arabic, a language Alan didn’t speak but easily recognized. Arabic was the language of education in Old Town Mombasa, the language of the Koran. Alan’s attention sharpened. Nobody answered the mzee, and Alan was surprised, but it was of a piece; they were waiting for something. Finally, the one who had first come to the counter dropped his eyes and darted out of the main door. He returned with a small tray, rattled off some Arabic as he entered. Alan was reaching for a cup when the older man caught his eye and motioned with his hand. He looked very serious.

‘My son says there is a bad crowd in the street. Perhaps you should go now.’

Alan looked out the shop doorway, wondering how long the boy had been waiting for this ‘bad crowd.’ Then he could hear, in the distance toward Fort Jesus, a sound like waves on a beach.

The street in front of the little shop was empty.

Bad crowd?

Alan took his little cup of tea and drank it off, holding the other man’s eye. Now he was more than a customer; he was a guest.

‘How bad is it, mzee?’

‘I have no idea.’ The mzee was calm, attentive, dignified. ‘It might be better, after all, if you stayed here; these things soon pass.’ He picked up the necklace, studied it, said in the low voice of a man speaking to one who he thinks is sympathetic, ‘You understand: we are Muslims, and the government is not our friend.’

‘I appreciate your hospitality.’ Alan could hear the beach noise louder now, as if waves were breaking higher. It was a crowd, all right. But it didn’t sound angry.

‘But I should go. I have a friend looking for me by Fort Jesus.’

‘Please go carefully.’

‘I’ll be back for the necklace,’ Alan said. The noise was growing louder still, and the young men were restless.

‘Inshallah,’ the older man said with a bow.

The old man had had no idea there was trouble in the street. But the young ones had expected it.

‘Allahu Akbar,’ Alan said and hoisted the helmet bag through the door. God is great.

The crowd was thicker at the end of the street; men and women mixed, so not immediately dangerous. Still, the non-Muslim Kikuyu shops that pretended to be part of Old Town seemed to be closed, their half-Masai guards glowering from the height advantage of their steps. The street he entered from the back street with the silver shop was narrow at the best of times; now it was claustrophobic, with at least a thousand men and women jammed along its length. Alan began to shoulder his way along it, looking for Craw, for any white face, but there was none. He got as far as the gap between two ancient houses and he turned into it and pushed along through a smell of urine until he reached the next street, which was almost as full. He shoved himself toward Fort Jesus, navigating by the minarets of two mosques.

Men were pulling prepared signs about a jailed leader and economic conditions out of their houses. Some were in English, but all were labeled with the green sigil of the Islamic Party of Kenya – the IPK. Women were pulling the black abyas over their street clothes. He was acutely conscious of his color and of the fact that he was in the dressing room of a major demonstration – Old Town Mombasa was emptying into the streets that led up past Fort Jesus and into the center of town.

Despite his unease, he kept pushing his way along, apologizing – sameheni, pole, sameheni, pole. Twice, men bumped him hard or elbowed him; not enough to do damage, but enough to remind him to keep moving. His missing fingers itched and he felt trapped. If it hadn’t been for Craw, he would have gone around the other end, through the back alleys below the dhow port; he could walk that way and come out high up on Kenyatta Avenue. But if he did that, he’d be leaving Craw wandering Old Town in a riot.

He could see the corner and the peach flank of Fort Jesus rising beyond it, and then he caught sight of a white face and bushy eyebrows, a dark polo shirt. Craw. None too soon, he thought, and began to burrow toward him when three men off to his right registered as being different, somehow not part of the crowd. He couldn’t put a finger on it and he was eager to get Craw’s attention, but they were all three lighter skinned, carrying bundles that struck Alan as wrong. Some kind of tension. He hoped they had only swords or cudgels. The rest of the crowd seemed to keep them a little distant, too; he could see they were not ‘with’ anyone.

‘Craw!’ he yelled – pointlessly, as it turned out. There was too much noise. He kept burrowing. The three men were still there, just off to his right, and they were all looking at him now. Great. ‘Craw!’

Craw was standing on a step next to a half-Masai guard. The man was ignoring him, and Craw was looking up and down the street. Alan willed him to look a little farther back, and kept pushing, an inch at a time. Suddenly, as if a dam had broken, the crowd began to move the way he wanted to go, and the sound crested and crashed like the noise of the sea. Now Alan had to fight to reach the edge of the street and the human eddy where the Masai guard next to Craw was using a club to keep the crowd from his shop. Alan got clubbed on the shoulder as he struggled to get Craw’s attention.

‘Whoa, Ben, that’s my guy! Cool it!’ Craw stuffed a bill into the other man’s hand.

‘Glad to see you too!’ Alan shouted and got up on the step. From his new vantage point he could see the crowd sweeping up the hill out of the square at the base of Fort Jesus and into the park where the British colonial office had been. He couldn’t grasp how many they might be, but they didn’t seem any less packed in the larger area. They were loud, but almost half were abya-wearing women.

‘Riot?’

‘Protest, I think.’ But Alan couldn’t forget the three men he’d seen.

At the top of the park, as many as twenty trucks full of what appeared to be soldiers in camo with assault rifles were deploying. Alan leaned past the Masai guard and shouted into Craw’s ear. ‘General Service Unit. Nasty. Those guys will shoot first and ask questions later.’

The ground rose in a gradual curve uphill from Alan to the park, giving him a dramatic view over the heads of the crowd. The protestors had marched to the park on Nkrumah Road and now it was the only exit. A man with a loudspeaker was bellowing from an incongruous gazebo in the park’s middle, and a Kenyan cop with a bullhorn was yelling back at him from the top of a truck cab. The loudspeaker droned on. Alan couldn’t catch much of the Swahili, but the man in the gazebo appeared to be using the rhetoric related on the signs – demands for the release of Sheik somebody.

He shouted into Craw’s ear again. ‘I think we should get out of here the other way.’

‘What?’

‘I think we should get out of here the other way!’

‘What other way?’

‘Back through Old Town.’

Alan waved his hand toward the little street from which he had come. A flicker of motion in the second storey across the street caught his eye, and he watched, appalled, as the barrel of a rifle poked from the window and fired. The report was audible over the crowd noise. Alan was trying to point it out to Craw when the GSU officer with the bullhorn was cut off the truck cab and flung fifteen feet. The GSU response was immediate and brutal: a volley of fire swept the front of the crowd. Even from hundreds of feet away, Alan could see the mist of blood as the whole front of the crowd was cut down, and the rising scream of panic and hate that rose behind it. The rifle in the building across the street was firing steadily now. The crowd, trapped in the square, broke from the police guns and trampled their own dead, jammed the two exits, and then seemed to flinch away. The scream rose to an impossible pitch as the guns fired. Alan could smell the copper taint of blood on the air. He wanted to close his eyes. The line of fire from the GSU to the crowd meant that high shots went straight at their position on the step; bullets chipped the doorway behind him, and one creased Craw’s arm. Across the street, a group of young men were looking up and pointing, trying to get the crowd’s attention on the shooter in the window. The bulk of the crowd, sixty thousand strong, hovered in the cordite-filled killing ground between the choked exitstreets and the guns, and then with a high-pitched cry they charged the gun line. The GSU fired one long burst. Bullets that must already have taken a toll of lives spattered around Alan and Craw. The Masai guard died between them, the top of his head blown off.

Alan was down, huddled over the helmet bag, and Craw was lying flat on the step, but Alan couldn’t stop raising his head to watch, despite the dreadful rattling of the incoming rounds all over the coral concrete of the shopfront. He had a gun in his helmet bag but couldn’t think how he could change the situation.

A gasoline bomb arced over the crowd and exploded against the top of one of the GSU trucks. The wall of bodies hit the gun line and went over it, and all Alan could see of the action was a single reflection, a panga or a light axe, rise and fall, redder with every motion, set in isolation at the top of the carnage, and then the trucks were overrun. There were more trucks at the top of the square, and they were firing now, too.

But there were no longer rounds slamming into the concrete around them.

‘Come on!’ he shouted. Craw raised himself and followed.

Right under the peach walls of Fort Jesus Alan saw a trio of foreigners, obviously sailors, with open-necked shirts, khaki shorts, hats. One was black and another lighter, maybe Indian, but all were clearly Americans. Alan’s mind started to work again. He thought that the inside of Fort Jesus, with its five-meter-thick coral walls, might not be a bad place to ride out the riot.

Craw touched his arm and pointed wordlessly at the three sailors. Alan nodded, and in that moment accepted responsibility for them. The sailors were huddled against a wall fifty feet away. The street in front of the fort was almost clear except for the dead and wounded, and blood was everywhere, running over the cobbles and pooling in the gutters. Alan stepped on several bodies as he dashed across the street, and tried not to look down. There was a young woman dead; the bullet had entered her mouth and shattered her teeth, giving her face a feral look. Just beyond her lay one of the boys from the shop, gutshot, clutching his bowels and moaning.

Alan made it to the three men, who were still under the wall of the fort, with bodies at their feet and desperation engraved on their faces.

‘Lieutenant-Commander Craik, Det 424.’ They looked at him in shock. ‘You Navy?’

‘Merchant Marine!’ the Indian said. He was green under his tan, young. He looked and smelled as if he had already vomited. ‘I am Patel.’

Craw ran up and threw himself against the wall.

‘Kenyans have an APC!’

Something burning hit Alan’s arm and tinkled to the ground, then another. Shell casings. There were twenty or more on the ground beneath his feet, and he picked one up. They were coming from the top of the wall.

He looked up and saw the barrel of a rifle, matt black and hard to distinguish so far above his head. The shooter leaned out and again his casings fell at Alan’s feet.

So much for hiding in Fort Jesus.

‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ All the men nodded at him. ‘Follow me!’

Alan had a vague idea that the suburb behind the fort connected to the road to the port at Kilindini; anyway, it was the path of least resistance amidst the chaos all around them. There were buildings on the other side of the square that were on fire now; and the wall of noise didn’t seem to diminish. He recognized the sound of a heavy machine gun; its bullets raked the wall of the fort and sent a spray of high-velocity coral fragments into the street. The GSU, he thought, had discovered the sniper above him in the fort.

And then the earth shook.

Alan never actually heard the explosion – the screams of the wounded and the long combat wail of the mob drowned it out – but within seconds a fist of black smoke leaped into the sky over toward Kilindini. In his gut, Alan knew immediately that it was the docks – either a ship or the fuel farms. He thought fleetingly of his orders about Mombasa and their vague reference to ‘dissident’ elements who might resent the US presence.

‘Craw, bring these guys along. We’re getting out of here.’ His voice sounded absurdly steady. He thought again of the pistol in his helmet bag, but he was enough of a target now; he didn’t need to become a participant.

The first part would be the worst – left along the wall of the fort, screened from the square only by an old colonial office building too lightly built to stop a heavy military round. Even as he began to scuttle along the front of the fort, he watched puffs of coral appear silently along the front like flowers opening. He went anyway, got to the end of the wall, and dove into the cover of a big acacia tree. Patel appeared directly behind him and stood, confused as to where to go at the end of the wall. Alan hauled him down. The black guy appeared with Craw, and then the white guy, sprinting, and they were a hot, sweaty bundle in the marginal cover of the old acacia tree.

Alan looked for the next cover and their best path to a concrete building some meters off to the left. The effort of lifting himself from the ground seemed to take forever, and more willpower than the actual run. The storm of stray rounds was abating here; there were only a few marks in the stucco of the building’s wall. After him, the white guy came first, and then there was a pause so long that Alan feared he was going to have to go back. Then the black guy. Then, almost immediately, Patel and Craw. Craw was bleeding from the crease a bullet had cut in his head, a long tendril of blood that ran over his face, dividing it, and down the neck of his shirt, making his head look like a Mohawk mask.

They crossed the open ground and reached the edge of a neighborhood of lost affluence. Once, the place had been for British civil servants and their families, later for Indian shop owners; now it was up-and-coming Kikuyu. The little cottages had yards and trees and bushes, although the grass was gone now, worn dead by thousands of feet over the years, and the houses were so widely separated that each one offered a line of vision – and fire – back to the park. There was some cover, and a screen of big trees divided the neighborhood from the park and the square where the shooting still went on. Alan expected to start moving quickly here, but Craw grabbed his shoulder and pointed north, where a knot of men with weapons was moving parallel to them. Even as they watched, another knot left the cover of an old gazebo in the park and ran almost straight toward them.

Either the firefight with the GSU was lost or, worse, the wave front of the violence was spreading. Alan suspected the latter; there were still bodies in the road beyond the house where he was crouched, and the wailing noise seemed unabated.

‘We have to stay ahead of that,’ he said, pointing, and led them to seaward of the first house. There were pilings and a heap of concrete rubble, then a mudflat. The tide was down. Alan thanked heaven for a small miracle. He crawled down the concrete on to the mud, and found that it was firm and held his weight.

‘Smells like the ocean,’ Craw said. His Mohawkmask face was strained. Alan had never seen him afraid. He wondered what he looked like himself. Don’t stop to think. When they had all scrambled down, they began to jog along the mudflat. Mombasa was fifteen feet above them, and it was not until they had gone several hundred yards that Alan realized that he could hear again. The screaming was still there but distant, and his feet made little splashing noises as they slapped down on the wet mud.

Above them was a low cliff topped with trees. He didn’t know where they were; couldn’t remember having seen trees on this part of the island before.

He looked seaward and across to Likoni; he must be at the southern tip of Mombasa. He clambered up the low cliff, raising his head slowly, but there was no motion at the top except the slow flapping of a flag in the wind. He was looking over a sand trap at a fairway stretching off north; the grass was mostly brown and there was garbage everywhere, but no people. The crowd, far away now, sounded like breakers on a distant beach.

Alan waved the rest of his party to follow him up to the golf course.

He hadn’t even remembered that there was a golf course, and he was disoriented by the discovery. None of them had any water and there was none in his helmet bag, but the mental search for water reminded him of other things he did have: a hotel-supplied map of Mombasa and a tiny compass in his Swiss army knife holster. He shook his head, reached into the side pocket and retrieved them both. He opened the map and laid it in the dirt, placed the little compass beside it. He watched it steady down and resolve his problem. North. What he didn’t like was that in forgetting the golf course he had forgotten another mile of open ground and residential area before they could reach the water at Kilindini.

‘If we go that way –’ he pointed north and west – ‘we should cross Mama Ngina Drive and then Nyerere just above the Likoni Ferry. We can catch a matatu there for the airport.’

‘You’re the boss,’ Craw said. The map seemed to steady all of them. Alan noted that it seemed to resolve any doubts the three merchant marine sailors might have had about his leadership.

‘Why the airport, sir?’ the white sailor asked. ‘I’m Matt Jagiello, sir. Engine crew.’

‘I have a detachment, a naval detachment, at the airport,’ Alan said. He looked at the others. ‘I need to know your names. You’re Patel,’ and he motioned at the other man.

‘Les,’ the black man said in a curiously high voice. ‘Les White. I’m a cook.’

Alan subvocalized White, Patel, Jagiello. ‘Glad to meet you.’

Craw took out a somewhat mangled Snickers bar and cut it up into five sections with his big folding knife. They sat for a moment and chewed. It tasted like heaven but left Alan thirsty. They would need water soon, and reliable water was not easy to find in Africa. It was almost funny, to be lost and without water in a major African city. Burton would not have been proud.

‘Okay, we’re underway.’ Alan rolled to his feet and started to walk. Jagiello bounced alongside.

‘I can read a map and use a compass, sir. I mean, if you wanted me to. I taught orienteering…’ Alan spared the energy to turn and look at him and noted that his face was very white. Still a little shell-shocked. Every time Alan stopped concentrating on the problem at hand, he saw the broken teeth of the dead girl in the square, so he knew that they were all suffering from it. Too much violence with too little warning.

They needed water. It was easier to concentrate on that. Experience didn’t make violence any easier; it just gave the veteran an idea of what to expect, from his own body and from the violence. Alan was a veteran. He forced his mind to dismiss the broken girl and moved on.

They crossed the pale tarmac of Mama Ngina Drive almost immediately and were back on the short brown grass of the golf course. Alan could see that there were squatters under some of the bushes, but they were not moving much. The crowd noise in the distance was getting close, he thought. Alan suspected that they were moving down Ngina from the park and hoped that the Likoni Ferry wasn’t jammed.

It was. Nyerere Avenue was packed with burning cars, many turned on their sides or rolled right over, and men and women running. They had to stop at a gap in the fence as a knot of schoolgirls in tartan skirts and white shirts pushed past them into the golf course, clearly frightened.

‘We’re going right across. Don’t stop and don’t get separated. If you lose the party, stay on the coast and look for the Yacht Club.’ He didn’t stop to argue, although he could see that none of the men wanted to cross the road. Alan reached into the helmet bag and slipped a clip into his nine millimeter, then cocked it.

‘Ready?’ He forced a smile. ‘Here we go.’

He swung himself over the golf course fence and waited until he heard the thump of Jagiello’s landing behind him, and then he threw himself toward the road. Nyerere Avenue was thick with people; some seemed to be refugees from the rioting, while others seemed anxious to take part. They weren’t Muslims at all, but day workers or unemployed men. There were fewer women. Alan and his group hit the street in an open spot between two burning cars and, choking on the fumes, plunged across. Alan could hear sirens. He didn’t look up or back but kept his legs moving.

They were not going to catch a taxi here for the airport.

There was a small wooded area hard against the Nyerere traffic circle, and Alan pushed into it past squatters, rioters, and refugees. Only when he was safe among the branches did he look back. The rest of his people were right behind, with Craw bringing up the rear.

‘This whole city is a war zone,’ Craw said.

White shook his head. ‘Just a riot,’ he said. ‘Seen ‘em before. Looks worse ‘n it is.’

Alan suspected that it was worse than it looked, but Patel and Jagiello seemed to brighten up at White’s suggestion. He held his tongue.

‘How far to this Yacht Club, sir?’ Jagiello asked. ‘I’m kinda thirsty.’

‘We all are.’ Alan pointed at the sparkle of water ahead. ‘That’s Mbaraki Creek. Yacht Club’s right there.’ His mouth felt as if it was full of sand, and he wanted to sleep. He was worried about Craw’s head wound, too; it was seeping blood again, and he didn’t have a first-aid kit.

They left the wood and came out in a residential area that was obviously still prosperous. Hundreds of people were on the street and on the bare lawns, most sitting or lying down, none armed. Alan’s group attracted their notice, however, and people trailed along after them, asking questions in Swahili and English. They were desperate: he was white and looked like authority. Most of them shied away from Craw and the blood.

‘Pole, tafadhali,’ he repeated over and over. And kept moving.

It took them almost an hour to reach Liwatoni Road and the entrance to the Yacht Club, over two ravines and through a crowd of refugees from the fighting. They could still hear long bursts of automatic-weapons fire and see fire and smoke coming from the town center, but the greatest pillar of smoke Alan had ever seen was rising from the docks at Kilindini, which was closer here. He could see now that the smoke was rising from one of the piers. And then it struck him, for the first time, that the Harker and Laura and Admiral Kessler were all supposed to be pierside at Kilindini.

Alan had visited the Mombasa Yacht Club twice for functions, and he recognized it as a haven for oddball expats and round-the-world cruisers. Now its parking lot was packed with refugees, squatting on their heels and watching the smoke rise from the port. Alan crossed through them and pushed the door open and led his group inside.

Hundreds of photos and plaques adorned the walls, memories of happier days and more robust times. Two terrified black kids were behind the bar, and there was a handful of patrons, two with guns, all drunk. One rose from his chair and pointed a revolver at Alan.

‘Members only, old chap.’ It must have been a rehearsed line.

‘US Navy.’ Alan glared at the idiot, a fat man whose whole arm shook. He retreated. ‘Put the gun down, mister.’

The fat man looked at the gun as if it had just grown out of his fist.

‘We can’t be too careful –’

Alan ignored him and the other whites, and focused his attention on the two Kenyans behind the counter.

‘I need water and a first-aid kit.’ Alan spoke to the nearer one. ‘Baridi, tafadhali.’

Both Kenyans vanished and then bottles of water appeared as if by magic. Alan handed them around, watching to see they all drank before he took one for himself, although the plastic Evian bottle was cold and he wanted it with a passion bordering on lust. For a moment the club was silent except for the sound of five men guzzling water. Then a big, sunburned man leaned past the fat man.

‘Wha’ the fuck is happening out there?’ Aussie accent.

Alan finished his water.

‘Bad riot in Old Town. Lot of dead.’

‘Fucking Muslims.’

‘It was provoked.’ He realized that this sunburned Aussie was used to getting his way, but the man’s manner drove Alan to antagonize him. ‘The Muslims seem to have taken all the casualties, over in Old Town. Seems pretty convenient.’ He looked around.

‘Any of you here own a boat?’ The fat man raised his hand. A woman pointed at the sunburned man. ‘I need a motorboat that will carry five men.’

The Aussie looked away, but the fat man pointed to him. ‘Dirk, here, has a sweet little inflatable.’

Alan looked at him. ‘Good,’ he said calmly. ‘We’ll take it.’ He raised his hand to stifle protest. ‘Listen up, folks. There is a bit of rioting in Old Town. I need to get these men back to their ship. I’m an officer in the US Navy and I’d like to borrow the boat, and stock her up.’ He looked around, unaware that he looked like he had been through a battle or that he was radiating focus and energy. No one in the bar would have stood up to him, anyway.

‘I’ll help you get ‘er started, then,’ the Aussie said.

Alan collected another bottle of water from the bar, zipped his helmet bag, and followed Dirk outside to the club dock. Dirk kept up a constant stream of surly comments while Craw checked the inflatable, and it took the combined efforts of the Aussie and all three merchant sailors to get the engine to come to life.

‘I know all about guns,’ Jagiello said.

‘That’s great,’ Alan said, ‘borrowing’ some sandwiches.

‘No, really. I can shoot. I hunt deer. Well, my dad hunts. I mean, I’ve been with my dad –’

‘Sure,’ Alan said, now carrying the box of sandwiches out to the boat.

He needed to get going; the pause was costing him his edge. He couldn’t lose his own worst-case scenario that the Harker was the target of an attack.

Two minutes later, they were in the boat and headed down the creek to the harbor, the inflatable low in the scummy water, with five of them filling every inch of her hull and her little engine pushing them along.

It was less than a kilometer to Kilindini Port, a simple piece of navigation, given that they had only to traverse the creek and turn north, and that their boat drew less than six inches of water. Alan passed the helm to Patel; the merchant marine sailors were actually sailors, with experience in boats that Alan and Craw lacked. Various technical aspects and a lot of creeping, dirty water occupied Alan’s mind for the first few minutes, but after that he was a passenger, free to let his mind wander on what might be ahead of him and what he had left behind. And then they left the mouth of the creek and turned north, and suddenly all the devastation of the explosion was visible at once.

The Harker lay half on her side in the mud at the end of Pier One, her tops on fire. The gantry crane at her berth was toppled over and afire, and a barge of some sort, probably petroleum from the smoke, was ablaze from stem to stern at a mooring fifty yards out. The smoke from the burning barge was what had made the giant black fist in the sky, and the curtain of black smoke lit with bale-fire cut off Alan’s view of the northern part of the port. There appeared to be another fire up by Pier Six, although whether it was a secondary from the main explosion or a separate device he couldn’t tell.

Already he assumed the explosions were deliberate.

Jagiello said something in a choked voice. Patel’s knuckles were white where he gripped the tiller.

‘Holy shit,’ White muttered. He looked to Alan for direction. ‘We going there?’

Alan thought of the admiral’s inspection tour; of how he had dropped Laura at the Harker less than two hours ago.

‘Yes,’ he said tersely.

Patches of oil, some burning, heaved on the water. Alan directed the boat to the empty side of Pier One, whose bulk would protect them from the heat of the burning ship. A ladder ran up to the pier. He could see movement on the Harker’s superstructure, probably a fire party, but crouched down now in the lee of the structure.

Craw pointed up beyond the giant cranes and port offices to the blue metal of the main gate. GSU trucks and a crowd – difficult to see whether they were protestors or rioters, but then Alan saw the flash of rifles. The crowd was being swelled from the rear by people coming down Moi Avenue; some in front were trying to climb the fence. The man on the wire fence closest to him wore a Chicago Bulls T-shirt, and his head was bare. He was not a Muslim. The riot had become general.

The inflatable kissed the base of the ladder and sat there, rising and falling in the turbulence of her own wake. Alan tucked his pistol into his waistband at the back and grabbed the ladder with his maimed hand and hung. Then he reached up with his right hand and took a firmer hold and began to climb as Craw grabbed on below him. He had to climb slowly because his left hand couldn’t bear weight – climb, pause, climb, pause. At the top at last, he pulled himself on to the pier. It struck him an instant later that it was a shambles.

Whatever had hit the Harker had spread paper and cloth and jagged metal and several waiting cargoes over the pier. Fresh vegetables, probably intended for the battle group, had been stacked here by the ton; now they and their thin-walled wooden crates made a decomposing carpet.

A wave of heat from the burning oil barge struck him, enough to suck the air from his lungs. The stench of petroleum was overwhelming.

The fire crew on the Harker was yelling at him, but there was so much noise he couldn’t hear them. He turned and helped Craw up the last step of the ladder. Craw’s face showed the same shock that Alan assumed his had at seeing the orderly pier they had left that morning turned into a giant garbage heap. Oddly, where the superstructure of the Harker had stood between the pier and the blast, a few stacks of pallets still stood as reminders of what the pier had looked like before the explosion. Their survival told him that the explosion had occurred between the Harker and the oil barge.

‘That’s gon’ take a damn sight of cleaning,’ Craw said, his hands on his hips.

Something whickered through the petroleum-laden air between them. Alan was slow to grasp what it was, and Craw looked up at the superstructure of the Harker.

‘We got to call the Jefferson, Commander. This looks deliberate.’ He was taking in the angle of the explosion and its shadow.

Alan heard a high-pitched whine behind him, and his mind, filled with the fire, the damage to the ship, and the chaos on the dock, failed to understand it. If he thought about it, he marked it as another spent round, perhaps from the GSU up at the main gate. He was reaching into the helmet bag, rummaging for his international cell phone, when Craw leaped into the air and fell full-length on a heap of cabbage. Alan bent down: Craw’s face was ruined. A bullet had entered at his right temple and taken his lower jaw as it exited. But it didn’t matter. Craw was dead. Martin Craw was dead. Alan finally grasped that a sniper was shooting at them, had been shooting for three or four shots. His hand closed on the cell phone and it all made sense: the fire crew huddled behind the superstructure, trying to get their attention, the little signs of bullets in the air. He flattened himself in the garbage and a saw-like scrap of the crane ripped into his ribs. White’s head came up over the edge of the pier.

‘Sniper!’ Alan yelled. White ducked. Another round hit just to the right of Alan’s head, which he had thought was in cover.

Martin Craw was dead.

USS Thomas Jefferson.

The flag communications officer laid his hand on Peter Beluscio’s arm and interrupted him in mid-sentence. Beluscio, flag chief of staff and a captain with a recent date of rank and the touchiness to go with it, whirled, his eyes fierce. Beluscio was a tense man, at best; with the admiral ashore, he was right at boiling point. But the comm officer didn’t budge; instead, he pulled him away from the intel officer with whom he’d been talking. A rating who was watching expected an outburst but there was none: the chief of staff, seeing the other officer’s set, white face, let himself be led aside.

‘Maybe a terrorist act at Mombasa.’

The two men stared at each other.

‘A US ship called the Harker has had some kind of explosion in the harbor there. Comm just got a message from their radio, pretty garbled. Asking for help. Sounds like mass confusion there – something about rioting on the dock, gunfire; it isn’t clear.’

The chief of staff’s thin face was drawn very tight. ‘The Harker’s the ship the admiral was supposed to visit today.’ His face had lost its color, too. ‘You heard from him?’

‘You were the last one to talk to him – 0600 or thereabouts? Since then –’

‘Jesus. Check with his hotel. Bilton’s with him, flag lieutenant. See if he knows anything.’ He shot his lower jaw forward, always a sign he was near panic. ‘Jesus.’ He looked up quickly. ‘What kind of help they asking for?’

‘It’s still coming in. Radio guy said there’s wounded. Something about being hit by glass himself, plus there’s a sniper – it’s a real mess –’

Beluscio wiped his hand down the sides of his mouth. ‘Jesus. Oh, Jesus –’ He strode out of his office and along the passageway. ‘Walk me down to Flag CIC.’ He put his head in a doorway. ‘Dick! Come with me!’ Then he was out again and moving, his presence opening a path before him. ‘Get everything you can on this ship, why it’s there, the ball of wax. Get intel to prep a brief on known threats in the area, in case this was really terrorism. Also local facilities – Jesus, what’s the hospital situation there? – better put our hospital on alert in case we have to bring wounded here. Jesus, with AIDS and all, what’re the local hospitals like? There must be an advisory on that.’ His face was a deep scowl. He was thinking that he was six hours’ flank speed from Mombasa; should he order part of the BG there for a show of force? Christ, his ass would be grass if he did that and he was wrong. He needed information, more information, lots of it. ‘Check for local contacts – didn’t there used to be an air force unit there? And the naval attaché at the embassy, but, shit, he’s in Nairobi. He may have something, though. Now, this ship, the Harker, what’s the crew size? How many potential wounded we looking at? Get on it –’

Mombasa.

Alan raised his head and tried to take his bearings. The pier stretched away like a nautical garbage dump in front of him and, although the first crane was a wreck, toppled by the direction of the blast, the second and third still stood. Even as he looked at the cranes he saw a flash of movement in the cab of the crane by berth number two. The sniper. He was changing magazines. Alan rolled over the edge of the pier and grabbed the ladder with his good hand and found himself on the same rung as White.

‘Down.’

‘Where’s Mister Craw?’

‘Dead. Now, go down!’

Alan followed him down the ladder and fell awkwardly into the boat. He turned to Jagiello, now at the tiller. ‘Farther down the pier. Opposite berth three, if there’s a ladder.’

The little boat chugged into the shadow of the warehouse that dominated the north end of the pier and cut off any view of the main port. There was a ladder below berth three; the crane at Pier Two was invisible now on the far side of the pier. Alan set himself to climb the ladder; this time, he barely thought about it. White and Patel made to follow him. Alan waved them back.

‘Stay here. Try to raise somebody on the cell phone; I’ve got numbers for the Jefferson in memory.’ White nodded; he already had the phone in hand. ‘If I don’t come back in half an hour, get back to the Yacht Club and hole up there.’

‘Our mates are on the Harker.’

‘The Harker is on fire and your mates can’t reach it because of a sniper. You can’t help them unless you can find a way to get them off.’ Alan looked up the ladder. ‘Frankly, if I’m not back in half an hour, I don’t really give a shit what you do.’ He started climbing. Bad command style.

He raised his head over the edge. He was on the other side of the sniper’s crane now, and unless the man actually read minds, he was unlikely to switch his focus from the Harker to the empty end of the pier. Alan moved as quickly as possible, headed for the base of the third crane. As he rounded it he saw motion, and without volition he had his automatic in his hand and on the man’s center of gravity, and then he froze and forced the muzzle up and away from him. The man had a fixed smile on his face and everything about his posture said ‘no threat.’ He was big and very black, almost blue, naked to the waist, stinking of sweat even above the petrol fumes.

He put his hands up, but he smiled. ‘Hakuna matata, bwana!’ he said through very white teeth. ‘No problemo, man! I ain’ got no gun.’

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

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 –’

Some stringer, Dukas thought, his reactions flashing past as he switched off the answering machine. Some guy just happened to be there with a camera crew. And then he thought, Nothing just ‘happens,’ and he moved closer, squinting at the set to make the picture clearer, because he was an agent of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and if it was a Navy ship there would have to be an investigation. And this was evidence. The scene was frozen while a studio newswoman blathered and a line of type moved across the bottom of the screen: Bomb blast in Africa sinks US ship –

And then the guy with the French accent was back on screen. ‘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 – out of my way – hey, you –! Hey –’

The camera moved, bouncing as the cameraman pushed forward. The French commentator’s breathing was louder as he started to run. The telephoto lens caught several figures moving toward it along the dock. In the lead, half-trotting, was a tall, slender man in casual clothes, carrying a rifle.

‘Holy shit –!’ Dukas mumbled when he saw the man, and he bent down even closer to the screen.

The hurrying man was heading for the ship. The camera zoomed in. Another figure, back to the camera, ran toward him, and now the camera followed, the shot bouncing, the frame teetering, almost spinning. The newsman with the French accent panted, ‘That is him – that is him –’ and the running figure ahead of the camera half-turned to wave the camera on, and it was clear that it was the newsman, running toward the man who had come down from the crane. The newsman reached out to stop the tall man and somebody body-blocked him out of the way, and his muffled ‘Eh – merde – Hey –!’ came from the TV. The camera, however, kept moving, and it had almost caught the oncoming figure with the rifle when he thrust out an arm, then held up a hand to block the lens. There was a moment when his hand was clear, three whole fingers and the stumps of the two that were gone, and then the screen went black.

‘Holy shit,’ Dukas said, ‘Al Craik!’

He grabbed the telephone and punched the NCIS number up from the memory, and when the duty officer answered he shouted, ‘Dukas, special agent. Now listen good! There’s some shit going down in Kilindini, that’s the harbor for Mombasa, Kenya. Got it? Kenya! I want fifteen minutes with the deputy in –’ he glanced at his watch – ‘half an hour, no bullshit about he’s too busy. Number two, I want to know if we’ve got a ship calling at Mombasa. Get on it.’ He’d seen enough of the crippled vessel to know that it was not a fighting ship but some sort of transport, probably USNS, but still within his responsibility.

He looked back at the television. The anchorwoman was trying to make sense of what they had just seen, but she was stalling while somebody offscreen was no doubt trying to get data from the Navy or the Pentagon.

Somebody else, Dukas knew, would be going down a list of Africa pundits to see who would like to put his or her face on national TV at seven in the morning. In half an hour, they’d have a line on it and a story that, if not accurate, would at least have punch and legs. They’re a hell of a lot faster than we are, he acknowledged. But we get it right. Then they played again the clip of the French-accented stringer and the dock and the hurrying man with three fingers.

‘Al Craik! Jesus. Here we go again,’ he muttered. He had recognized Craik hurrying down the dock, recognized, too, Craik’s maimed left hand. Unconsciously, Dukas rubbed the still-red scar on his collarbone; he had got the wound from the same shooters who had hit Craik’s hand. Here we go again. Do I want to go that way again? Then the telephone rang and he picked it up, and it was the duty officer with the word that USNS Jonathan Harker was scheduled to call in Mombasa as of day before yesterday, leaving tonight, local time.

Here we go again. Do I want to get shot again?

He called his own office, and Leslie picked up on the first ring. When she heard who it was, her voice changed from brisk to tender, and she said, ‘Oh, Mister Dukas,’ in a way that made him wince again. ‘Did you get my call about the –?’

He cut her off. ‘Put a message in the deputy’s box; mark it “urgent”. Here’s the message; take it down and read it back to me when I’m done. “Special Agent Dukas urgently requests assignment to investigation of bombing at Kilindini, Mombasa, Kenya. Important that we move quickly and have a team on-site no later than tomorrow. Dukas will be very unhappy if he is turned down.’ Read it back. Good. You’re doing good, Leslie.’ He didn’t give her time to hero-worship; he hit the fourth number in the phone’s memory and got a house in suburban Houston, where it was only five a.m.

‘Hey, Rose, wake up, babe,’ he said, making his voice falsely light, ‘your husband’s on CNN. It looks like I got to go save his buns again.’ He spent two minutes telling Commander Rose Siciliano that her husband was alive and well and on CNN; then he stared at the wall, as people will when they are in the middle of a mess of details and they want a moment of clarity, and then he put his hand back on the telephone and dialed another number at NCIS.

‘Hey,’ he said. ‘It’s Dukas. Hey, Marie, check and see if a lieutenant-commander named Alan Craik was issued an international cell phone, will you? He was doing a favor for us and the FAA, checking out security in Nairobi, Kenya. I want to know if he got a phone and, if so, what the number is. Can you do that? You’re a sweetheart. I love you. No, it’s real love – Romeo and Juliet stuff. It may last, oh, until lunch.’ He made a big, smacking kiss noise.

On his television screen, Al Craik shot the sniper for the fifteenth time.

USS Thomas Jefferson.

Jack Geelin, Marine captain of the Jefferson’s thirty-man detachment, had a message thrust into his hand in the p’way as he made his way forward toward the flag deck. ‘On the double, Jack – Captain Beluscio wants you there ten minutes ago.’

‘What the hell –?’

‘Read it!’ The lieutenant-commander was already hurrying down toward frame 133 and the intel center. Geelin broke into a trot, trying to read as he went, dodging people hurrying the other way. Three sailors had flattened themselves against the bulkhead to let this explosion of activity go past. Whatever it is, it’ll be all over the boat in three minutes, Geelin thought. He managed to make out words of the message: Mombasa harbor…USNS ship…possible terrorist…immediate help being requested for…

He ducked into the next doorway and grabbed a phone. ‘Gunny! Captain Geelin! Roust ‘em out – full combat gear, on the double! Yeah, the whole goddam detachment – I want ‘em on the deck, ready to go ASAP – move ‘em! –’

One Mile from USS Thomas Jefferson.

LCDR Paul Stevens brought the S-3 to eight hundred feet as if he was parking it there and glanced down and around. Soleck, despite having his own tasks for the landing, was able to watch him, admiring the man’s competence despite himself. Stevens was so experienced, so good, that what to Soleck was thought and work was to Stevens a set of habits, yet habits that had not grown tired: Stevens seemed always ready for the unexpected in the flight – another aircraft too close, a change of wind, a turning of the CV. Always bad-tempered, he actually seemed calmer in emergencies.

Now, Stevens rattled through the landing checks, Soleck hardly able to keep up with his responses. The wonder of it was that Stevens was actually checking the stuff that he seemed to be hurrying through.

‘Fuel –’

‘Right tank uncertain –’ Soleck started to say.

‘Eight thousand,’ Stevens said, and went into the break. ‘Going dirty,’ he muttered, hitting slats and flaps, and the big, fat aircraft slowed as if it had been grabbed by the tail. Around it came, settling into the approach as steady as a kite towed behind the CV, losing altitude and speed and touching down to catch the two wire. Soleck thought how it must look on the Plat camera, how the LSO would rate it – another okay – and all the guys in the ready rooms saying, Nice job. Jeez, that guy can fly. ‘Nice landing,’ he said.

Stevens watched the yellow-shirt below him as they rolled to a stop. ‘Hey, coming from you, that means a lot to me.’

Three minutes later, loaded with helmet bag and kneepads and MARI tapes, Soleck was heading over the nonskid for the catwalk and a slider.

Why does Stevens have to be such a prick? he was thinking.

To his surprise, Stevens was waiting for him at the hatch. ‘Been thinking about your wetting-down party,’ he said. ‘Just buy everybody a beer.’ And went into the light lock without holding the door for the over-burdened Soleck.

Mombasa.

‘We need goddam muscle!’ Alan shouted into his cell phone.

‘Get us some cover, for God’s sake!’ He had managed to raise LantFleet intel in Norfolk – a number he knew by heart – on his new, supposedly international, cell phone, but the signal was weak and the reception spotty. On the other end, a confused duty chief was trying to figure out why somebody was shouting at him from somewhere in Africa.

‘Sir, this isn’t a secure line –’

‘Fuck security! We’re dying here!’

‘Sir, I got no authority.’ Over the satellite, it came through as Sir – got – o – auth – ty.

‘Chief, pass the goddam message, will you? Mombasa, Kenya; USNS Harker, hit by an explosion and under fire, I have a Navy admiral and an NCIS special agent missing –’

‘There’s ships in your area, sir –’

‘Chief, our comm is down to one mayday frequency! Pass the fucking word for us, will you!’

‘I can notify Ops –’ I ca – tify – ps.

‘And then call the naval attaché in Nairobi; he’s got to get us some onshore support here – cops, the army, whatever – we’re pinned –’

‘Choppers and Marines, sounds like what you need.’

‘Choppers’re just more targets until we can secure a perimeter! Chief, we’re a decoy – we’re helpless, we draw in choppers, they shoot them down. No choppers yet!’

Then he really started to break up: ‘You telling me the – sage – to – there, sir? Sir – me get – straight –’

At that point, his voice faded and the line began to crackle. Alan shouted, ‘You’re breaking up!’ and he heard incoherent babble from the other end. He punched the phone off, watching the battery signal flash at him. How much time left?

He looked at the Harker’s radio man. ‘I’ve gotta have a radio link.’ He threw the cell phone on the tilted desk. It had been shoved into his hand, still in its plastic wrapping, when he had left Norfolk – memory empty, ability to find satellites untested. Now he was concluding it was a piece of crap.

The communications man looked barely out of his teens. He had come through the explosion with a forearm slashed by flying glass, had stayed at his post, put out his calls for help. ‘I’m working on it. Can’t you make a local call someplace?’

Alan thought of local friendly assets. There used to be an air force unit at the airport, but they had been pulled out, and it was their abandoned hangars that his detachment was to use. The British had had a regiment up the coast for decades, but they were gone now, too. He thought of the two Kenyan officers he had fought alongside in Bosnia – what the hell were their names? And where were they now? And how would he reach them? The last thing he wanted to have to depend on was a third-world cell-phone network in the middle of a citywide riot. Would rioters tear down cell-phone towers? he wondered. Why not? As useful as burning cars, wasn’t it?

Suddenly, he said, ‘The Kenyan Navy – Jesus, they’ve got to be here somewhere! There’s got be a Kenyan naval facility at Mombasa!’ He picked up the cell phone and punched in a number that he hoped was right. ‘NCIS, Washington – they can find the Kenyan Navy for us. Shit –!’ He looked around a little wildly; the cell phone wasn’t connecting with a satellite. ‘All this fucking metal –!’ He stared at the communications man. ‘You got any local telephone numbers?’

The man opened his hands in helplessness, then gestured around them. The comm office was a mess; the ship had tilted, and what hadn’t been shaken by the blast was now tipped on the floor – pubs, gear, a cup of long-forgotten coffee.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Uh, Hansen – Joe.’

‘Hansen, we’ve got to get a number for the Kenyan Navy.’ He punched the numbers for NCIS Washington into the cell phone. It was ridiculous: he was halfway around the world and he was calling home. ‘If it doesn’t work, try a local operator. Try directory assistance, whatever the hell they call it here. Try our embassy; that’s in Nairobi. Try –’

A dark head popped in the broken door. ‘Fireboat is pumping water in – they think they got the fire limited now –’ It was Patel, the Indian who had come down from the riot with him.

Alan ran out to the catwalk that curved around the superstructure. Water began to fall on him like rain: the fireboat.

‘Great –!’

A bullet pinged off the steel bulkhead.

‘Oh, shit –!’ Instinctively, his wounded hand contracted into what was left of a fist.

Somebody had started shooting from one of the warehouses along the dock. Not a very accurate shooter, but real bullets. The few men available to do damage control on the Harker were belowdecks, thus safe from sniping; the wounded were up on the main deck now, protected for the moment by the ship’s list to port. But up here on the superstructure, they were exposed.

Three levels above him, Jagiello, another who had come with him from the city, was supposed to be sitting with the rifle Alan had taken from the sniper. He was a deer hunter, he had said. He’d drill anybody who tried anything.

Well, why wasn’t he shooting?

Alan crouched behind the solid starboard rail. ‘Hansen!’

‘Sir –?’

Alan looked up, waved him down. ‘Get down on the deck –!’

‘Get out here but keep down!’ When the younger man appeared, ape-like on toes and fingertips, he shouted, ‘Get down! Way down – that’s it. Try that cell phone out here.’

‘I’ve got to get a radio hookup.’

‘Try the cell phone – that’s an order.’

Neither of them was sure that Alan had official authority on the Harker, but Hansen seemed to recognize that Alan had authority of a different kind. He rolled on his elbow and began to punch the phone.

Alan drew the H&K and tapped two quick shots in the general direction of the sniper. ‘Fat lot of good that’ll do,’ he muttered. Where the hell was the guy with the sniper rifle? He peered out through the gap between the steel plates of the bulkhead. The warehouse had a long row of clerestory windows, the glass blown out of every one by the blast. The shooter could be in any of them. It hardly mattered; the range was ridiculous for a pistol, anyway. Still – He saw movement, aimed quickly, fired. Behind him, Hansen was muttering into the cell phone, his long hair plastered to his head by the falling water.

‘Got them?’

Hansen held up a hand, shook his head. Alan looked again at the warehouse, saw a silhouetted head, aimed more carefully and fired. Hadn’t there been some famous pistol shooter who enjoyed shooting at gallon jugs at a hundred yards? Oh, yeah. Do better throwing wads of Kleenex.

‘They won’t talk to me,’ Hansen said behind him. His young face was red with anger. He held out the phone. ‘They’re asking me for ID.’

Alan grabbed the phone. ‘They still there?’ He slammed the cell phone against his ear. ‘Hello! Now listen up. This is Lieutenant-Commander Alan Craik, US Navy.’ He rattled off his service number. ‘I’m under fire and I need help and who the hell are you?’

‘Uh – sir, this is Special Agent Gollub, NCIS Washington. Uh, sir –’

‘Goddamit, Gollub, don’t dick with me! I’m on a ship that’s been hit by an explosion, people are shooting at us, and I’ve got one goddam pistol! Get me some fucking help!’

‘Sir, we’re the Navy’s investigative serv –’

‘Then fucking investigate! I want the contact info for the Kenyan naval facility, Mombasa, Kenya. Right now! Do it!’

‘Uh, sir, your language is not –’

‘Do you know Mike Dukas?’

‘Uh, yessir, I know Special Agent Dukas by sight and repu –’

‘Well, if you don’t find me that information right now, I am personally going to have him tear your fucking throat out, because he is my asshole buddy! You follow?’ He put his eye to the gap in the steel plates, saw the head again, and fired. ‘Did you follow me, Mister Gollub? Hello? Gollub? Goddamit –!’

‘You want the Kenyan Naval Maritime Patrol Center, Kilindini, Kenya. The telephone is 596–987. They communicate on the following frequencies: a hundred and –’

‘Don’t tell me; tell this guy.’ Alan handed the phone to Hansen. ‘Get the phone number; screw the frequencies.’

He looked through the gap again, saw the head, fired three shots. There! Bang-bang-bang – body, body, head! Right? No, missed with every one.

Gallon jugs at a hundred yards. Jesus! ‘Where’s that guy with the sniper rifle?’ He tipped his head back, looked up the side of the superstructure. ‘Hey! Yo!’ What the hell was his name? Jagiello! ‘Jagiello, what the hell are you doing?’

He scuttled into the comm shack after Hansen. ‘You get the number?’

‘That guy said he was going to report you.’

‘Right, I’m really worried about that. Did you get the number?’

‘Yessir. What you want me to say?’

‘You say that Lieutenant-Commander Craik, US Navy, is asking – asking – for their support and cooperation. He is under fire on USNS Harker, hit by an explosion thirty minutes ago. We are in a hot zone – use those words, “hot zone”. They got a problem, give me the –’

Both men lifted their heads as the unmistakable sound of a rocket engine whooshed closer. Hansen’s eyes were wide. ‘Hit the deck!’ Alan shouted, but the missile was already by them, the sound decreasing, and then there was an explosion.

‘Sir, sir –!’ It was Patel, the lookout on the bridge. He came scrambling down the catwalk, half-fell into the room, still on all fours. ‘Sir, they are shooting missiles at the fireboat! Now it is on fire!’

Houston.

Rose Siciliano Craik was accustomed to waking with first light. Mike Dukas’s call had come a little earlier than that, but now, fifteen minutes later, she was up and moving quickly through the habitual motions of the morning. Brush teeth, shower, turn on television; dress in T-shirt and jeans and slippers, make coffee, watch the clip on CNN, check e-mails; feed the dog, check the kids (both still sleeping), drink coffee. Try not to think about where her husband was. Make lunches while standing at the kitchen counter, a book of engineering drawings of the space shuttle open in front of her, because she was beginning astronaut training. Try not to think about her husband.

Try not to think about her mother.

Her father had called her last night. Her mother, he said, had ‘gone funny.’ It had taken her a while to get him to explain what he meant. Her mother was forgetting things. Had been, he confessed, for some time. I didn’t want to worry you.

Thinking, when she wasn’t thinking about her mother, of that three-fingered hand coming up on the television screen, knowing how much the wound dismayed him. A proud man, perhaps vain, hating disfigurement; former wrestler, too aware now of holds he couldn’t make. Stupid little things really throw us, she thought. Poor guy. His first lovemaking had been awkward, hiding the hand. At dinner, he had kept it in his lap.

Her mother had got lost walking to the store, her father had said. She had been walking the route for twenty years. She worried that black people were coming into her house. He had found her nailing the windows shut.

Rose wrapped the lunches, hers and Mikey’s and the baby’s for day care. She flipped from channel to channel, looking for more news. Most of them had the story now, but CNN had the most, the best. Still, there wasn’t enough to know what was going on.

She worried. He could be dying. Dead.

She worried about him because he was a risk-taker, impetuous. A glory hound, some Navy people said. No. More like a poet with balls of steel – idealist, hardcase.

She had a tough day ahead. Two hours in the astronauts’ gym for VO2-Max and heart tests; an hour underwater in mock-zero-gravity, two hours hands-on on the engineering of the shuttle. Plus, just thrown at her by Mike Dukas, an obligatory half hour with NASA security to plan protection for her and the kids.

‘For what!’ she’d protested. ‘What am I being protected from, for God’s sake?’

Mike knew her temper and wasn’t phased by it. Mike was in love with her, but he wasn’t afraid of her. ‘From whoever blew up that ship, babe. Listen to me! The family of every man on that ship is going to get the same message today – maximum alert, get security, protect yourself! It’s Uncle’s standard OP when there’s terrorism.’

‘But why me? Mike, I’m up to my ass in work as it is!’

‘Because your husband’s on the ship now and because he put his face on TV for every goddam terrorist in the world to see. Babe! Trust me!’

‘Oh, yeah.’ She had pretended to argue, but she saw the point. If not for her, then for the kids. Dukas was to get on to NASA security as he soon as he had hung up from talking to her; she was to warn Mikey’s Camp and Bobby’s day care.

She wasn’t afraid for herself. But she’d kill to protect her children.

Reminded, she went back into the bedroom and slid open the drawer on her side. There, in a locked metal box, was her armpit gun, a Smith & Wesson Model 15. A revolver. Some guys had laughed at her for picking a revolver. But she liked the feel of it and the no-bullshit simplicity of it, and she liked the .38 Special plus-Ps that she shot in it. ‘Not a lady’s gun,’ the fat man in the gun shop had said to her when she bought it, and she had said, ‘I’m not a lady.’

She aimed it at a spot on the wall. The sights lined up as if they had been programmed. She dry-fired every day, hit a range at least once a week, shot fifty-yard combat courses for fun.

There’s an old saying: Be careful of the man – or woman – who owns only one gun. They’ll really know how to use it.

Two empty speedloaders were in the box with a carton of plus-Ps. She took them back to the kitchen and loaded them while she watched the news.

Nothing really new. Her husband was suspended in time and space, his three-fingered hand held out to the camera, trotting toward risk.

She worried. About him. About her mother. She didn’t even like her mother; what was she worrying about? Her father, whom she loved, and the effect on him? Or was the link to her mother too strong for ‘liking’ to even matter?

She worried.

She wanted to talk to her husband. She wanted to hear his voice. To know he was alive.

She went back to the television.

USS Thomas Jefferson.

Captain Beluscio’s voice sounded strangled with tension. ‘Now what?’

The comm officer had just been handed a message slip and was reading quickly. ‘A message from the Harker. “Mob action in city and at dock gates. Local fireboat hit by shoulder-fired missile or grenade. Recommend send no air or surface help until situation resolved. Signed Craik.”’

The captain stared. ‘Who the hell is that?’

‘Unh, the O-in-C of the S-3 det is named Craik. The guy they had to fly out of Pakistan a few weeks back, he lost part of his –’

Beluscio made an angry sound. Friend of Rafehausen’s. The chief of staff and Rafehausen were cat and dog – too close to each other in rank, with Rafehausen having only days of seniority; too different in temperament, the CoS tense, quick, Rafehausen laid back. And the two men too often treated as opposites by the admiral, who liked competition among his officers.

‘Craik,’ the chief of staff growled now. ‘I remember. What the hell is he doing in Mombasa?’

The other man dared to grin. ‘You can watch him on CNN, sir.’

Mombasa.

Alan duckwalked along a line of wounded men, six in all. Cook White had patched them up, but there was blood on the deck, and one man was pumping blood from an almost severed leg despite a tourniquet.

‘I got to get medical help!’ White was saying.

‘Nothing’s going in or out of the docks.’ He looked down at the blood that was spreading slowly over the chipped gray paint of the deck. ‘Anyway, we can’t use local blood. Navy policy.’

The black man stared at him. What Alan had said didn’t register. ‘They could send in a rescue chopper!’

‘Yeah, they could, if people weren’t shooting at us.’ He glanced back toward the dock, but the tilt of the deck hid everything; he saw only thin, gray cloud.

‘This man gonna die if he don’t get help!’

Alan gripped his big upper arm. ‘Save the ones you can save.’ That was the moment when he realized that they all might die there. It hadn’t occurred to him before – but here they were, cut off from the city, easy targets, with Alan the only shooter. He was carrying the sniper rifle himself now, because Jagiello, it turned out, had panicked and forgotten to take his safety off when the shooting started.

Alan looked up at the blown-out windows of the starboard wing of the bridge.

‘Patel!’

The dark head of the lookout appeared. ‘Sir!’

‘What’re the Kenyans up to?’

‘Very active in aid of finding the missile launcher! Twenty or more guys running about! Some shooting!’

Hansen had got on to the Kenyans twenty-five minutes before. Now, two hundred feet beyond where the Harker’s sloping deck met the water, the crippled fireboat, its radars shorn off and its deck littered with metal fragments, had stopped pumping water on the Harker but had stabilized itself. Alan had to be grateful for the hit on the fireboat, because, without it, the Kenyan Navy wouldn’t have come out.

Beyond the fireboat, a Kenyan Nyayo-class Thornycroft cruised slowly between the docks; beyond it, eighty yards from where he stood, he could see the tiny figures of Kenyan sailors swarming over an anchored dhow. He guessed that they were searching the ships there – too late – for more snipers and missile launchers.

It occurred to Alan that the hundred-foot Kenyan patrol boat carried a potent surface-to-surface missile that he hoped they wouldn’t decide to use in these close quarters. As if in answer, the boat could be heard to back its engines, bringing it to a stop, and at once a 20mm repeating cannon opened up. Instinctively, Alan ducked, but he heard the rounds hit behind him and knew that the Kenyans had solved the problem of the sniper in the warehouse: they had taken out what was left of every window in the wall – and the wall, as well. (And collateral damage beyond? he was thinking as he ran to a ladder and started for the bridge.)

It had turned out that the Kenyan Navy had a facility two docks down from where the Harker lay. They had gone on full alert when the explosion had gone off, putting their three boats to sea and hunkering down for some kind of assault, but they never explained why they had not at least sent somebody to gather intelligence on what had happened. Alan suspected some sort of wrangle between the Navy, a minor part of the Kenyan establishment, and the army, with the GSU thrown in on the army’s side. More to the point, perhaps, was the huge fuel depot that sat behind where he now knew the Navy installation was: they were guarding that, they said, because if the explosion that destroyed the Harker was repeated there, all of Kilindini, maybe all of Mombasa, could be afire. At least that was the explanation the government would give later, although by then there were rumors that somebody had ordered the Navy to stay in barracks to keep them from helping the Harker.

Alan ducked as he came out on the bridge’s wing. He glanced aside, saw the shattered roofline of the warehouse.

‘Done nicely,’ Patel said from the windowless bridge.

‘Very nicely.’

Alan went up one level to the communications space, where Hansen was still trying to patch in a secure transmission unit.

‘How you doing?’

Hansen had established a radio link to the Jefferson, but it wasn’t yet secure. Until he had secure communications, Alan couldn’t tell the CV anything but the bare bones of what was happening. He had been trying to raise LantFleet, Norfolk, on his cell phone again, but, as soon as he got somebody on the line, he’d lose the connection. He tried once more, waited two minutes, then gave it up. He laid the cell phone on Hansen’s table. ‘If they call back, tell them I tried.’

There was firing far up the dock. Presumably, the Kenyan sailors had found the missile launcher.

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.

‘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!’

‘It isn’t just this one – there’s a whole string of stuff. They want to use this one as motivation to make a punitive strike.’

‘They call for a punitive strike before there’s proof, and they’re wrong, this country looks like shit! What’d they do the last time – they blew up a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan! We’re not goddam Nazi Germany!’

‘The Agency and the Bureau say they can have the proof in seventy-two hours.’

Dukas banged his fist on the arm of his chair. ‘This is a Navy ship; we’re a Navy investigating unit; we do our own work. CIA and FBI stay out.’

Kasser looked at his hands again. ‘Tell me why I should send you.’

‘Because – Because I don’t belong in the office doing routine.’

Kasser nodded. ‘And because you got shot and you want to prove to yourself that you’re okay.’

Dukas shrugged.

‘You refused counseling, Mike.’

‘So would you have. What do I need counseling for?’

‘Post-trauma.’

‘Bullshit.’

‘Statistics show –’

‘I’m not a statistic! I want a job!’

Kasser swung around to look out his window at the tops of trees, blowing now in a warm wind. He sighed. ‘Okay, you got the case for now – for as long as I can fight off the Bureau and the Agency. What’s your plan?’

Dukas, suddenly sweating, ran through it: team, schedule, forensics, support. ‘I can be there tomorrow,’ he ended.

Kasser nodded, but he was frowning as if the most important thing hadn’t been said. ‘CIA will have somebody onsite before you get there – they’ve got a station there, can’t be helped. The Bureau, too – they’re international now. We can insist that you’re in charge for a while. But if you find something that doesn’t go along with what they want to find, you’re going to have a hell of a time.’ He pointed a finger. ‘You go, and go as fast as you can. You hit the ground running. I’m not going to be stampeded, Mike, but I think we can hold the line for only a few days. Maybe a week. Okay?’

Dukas jerked his head. ‘Okay.’

He held out his hand. ‘Go.’

Dukas went.

Houston.

For Rose Siciliano Craik, the television sets were like needles some malign power had left to jab her with. She’d manage to forget her husband and the idea that he might be dead, and then she’d pass a TV and would see some part of the Kilindini footage, and he’d be back at the front of her mind.

She had dropped the kids off and spoken with their teachers, and she had come on to NASA and spent her obligatory time with a woman in security. The idea that somebody who had blown up a ship in Africa would also reach into a day-care center in Houston seemed absurd. Dukas had said they had to ‘take precautions.’ Whatever that meant. Arm all the six-year-olds? String razor wire around day care?

‘I’ve got a weapon in my car,’ Rose told the security officer. ‘NCIS recommendation.’

‘Not on the base, I hope!’

‘It’s locked.’

‘That’s against the rules, very much against the rules, Commander.’ Rose thought that was a peculiar view for a security officer to take, but she was only beginning to glimpse the culture around her. It was more about rules and conforming and looking good than she had suspected. Or, a traitorous voice whispered in her mind, than she liked.

The security officer said that Rose was safe on the base and there was no reason for a gun. Rose volleyed back with an offer to check her handgun in and out every day at the gate. She would be a good little astronaut, but off base she wanted the gun. The security officer frowned and said that unfortunately she had no control over what Rose did off the base, but she advised against carrying weapons.

‘I’m not carrying it.’

‘Semantics.’

The security woman got on to Rose’s boss, a Colonel Brasher, and made an afternoon appointment to meet with somebody whose title was Director of Personnel Education, although she’d already learned a lot about the educating that went into the making of an astronaut, so she concluded that ‘education’ in this case probably meant something else. Like fitting in or getting along.

‘Fine,’ she said with a bright smile. She could feel the phoniness of the smile, like something she’d glued on. She hated that smile.

She was in the gym when they pulled her out for an ‘urgent’ phone call. She thought at once of her kids – a kidnapper? an attacker? – and then of Alan, and then of her mother.

It was Rafe Rafehausen, calling from the Jefferson.

‘Nothing yet, Rose, but I wanted you to know we’re trying. We can’t get a secure channel.’

‘Thanks, Rafe. Any idea how he is?’

‘I figure no news is good news. He’s tough, Rose.’

They were all tough. That was what they got paid for. Life was tough; they were tough. Rafe had a paraplegic wife who was pregnant; she was tough, too. She thought of her mother, who was not tough, who was a whiner, who couldn’t see beyond the end of her own comfort.

‘Keep me informed, will you, Rafe?’

‘The minute I know anything.’

Walking back to the gym, she decided she’d get a book on Alzheimer’s. Not for her mother’s sake, but for her father’s, because he was the one who was going to have to be tough.

Mombasa.

For the old silversmith whom Alan had visited that morning, who was not really old but was an ‘old man,’ an mzee, because he owned his own shop and had three sons, the hospitals were hell. He had always stayed away from doctors, cured himself with traditional remedies, avoided the clinics where Western medicine and modernity were doled out together, and now he was in a hospital and it was, as he had known it would be, hell.

This was his third hospital today. He had let his second son lead him through the streets from hospital to hospital, allowing himself to be pushed into doorways, pulled down behind a barricade, urged into a trot to escape the trucks and the soldiers. They had walked or run everywhere; there were no taxis, no cycle-jitneys, no matatus. Chaos. He wanted to go inside his house and shut the great wooden door and wait until it was over.

Instead, he was in hell. Hell had green walls, scuffed and nicked and stained, marked today with new blood in smears and spatters. Hell had a slippery floor where there was hardly room to place his small feet because human bodies had been put down everywhere. Mostly men’s bodies, young men, but some women, some children. Bleeding. Bandaged, some of them, with cloth torn from garments and now sodden.

Hell had four one-storey buildings with signs outside that said, in English and Swahili, ‘Maternity,’ ‘Outpatient,’ ‘Surgery,’ and ‘Wards.’ The signs meant nothing today, because the floor of every building was covered with human bodies. The wards were full; the families who had come to feed relatives who were regular patients shrank back around the beds as if protecting the sick from the wounded. The sick who were not already in the wards sat or lay in the shade of the acacias between the buildings and waited, their cancers and tuberculosis and AIDS and childbirth pushed aside by the inhabitants of hell.

The old man plodded between the lines of the wounded. He had small feet shod in heel-less slippers; he pulled up the skirts of his kanzu with his fingers to keep them out of the blood and dirt, thus revealing the feet and the slippers. His fingers wore silver rings, because he was a silversmith. He looked into faces as he stepped over ankles, shoes, bare feet.

Every young man looked like his son but was not his son. When, at last, he found his son in the Maternity building, his son was dead.

3

USNS Jonathan Harker.

The Harker lay at a twelve-degree angle, canted away from the dock with her portside deck edge awash, bowdown, a third of her keel on the mud of the bottom. More than six hundred feet long, she had been breached two hundred feet back from her bow, her slightly forward superstructure taking much of the force of the explosion. The portside wing of the bridge was now tangled steel; her radars were shorn off; her forward boom had broken at the hull so that it had swung up and back and pitched down again on the dock. Steel cable writhed along the deck, its whipping path marked by smashed boats and, at one place, a pool of blood, dried now to the color of oily rust.

Alan Craik, on what had been the starboard wing of the bridge, was looking down into this metal snakes’ nest. His face was streaked with smoke and dirt now, his knit shirt black with sweat. A Navy-issue compress was taped over his right side. After four hours on board, he looked both exhausted and eager, worn out and yet still keyed up.

It was three-quarters of an hour since the first SH-60s had arrived with the Jefferson’s Marines and medics, touching down at the far seaward end of the dock under Kenyan Navy cover, the Marines boiling out to secure first the landing area, then the dock itself, in leapfrogging moves that took them to the Harker. Now four Marines in combat gear guarded the deck below him, while medics worked to bring up bodies and what they hoped would be living sailors from below. The smell of burned rubber and hot metal still gripped the air. In the shade of the superstructure, the fittest of Harker’s crewmen crouched like refugees, spent from fighting the fire down below and trying to save their ship. Their wounded comrades had already been lifted off in an SH-60 heading for the Jefferson’s shipboard hospital.

Halfway along the Harker’s starboard side, a companionway had been jury-rigged back into usefulness, connecting the ship again to the dock. Aft, a damagecontrol assessment team were working their way forward, compartment by compartment. Outboard of the drowned port rail, two SEALs were in the water where the damage was worst.

‘What’s the situation down there now?’ Alan said, jerking his head toward the chaos of the deck. Next to him, the engineering officer of the Harker was just back from a tour below.

‘No electric, so no lights; water to level three everywhere forward of frame seventeen on the port side. Damage to the starboard side not assessed, but the senior chief from your carrier thinks there’s whole frames twisted down there. Two compartments are still too hot to get into. There’s some smoke – I was coughing like crazy down near the anchor locker. Something burning down there smells like truck tires. We got a Kenyan guy with acetylene from the dock; he’s trying to cut into the compartment where we think the, uh – where we think –’ He swallowed. ‘Where they may be.’ He meant the admiral and those with him.

Alan had ordered a search of every space on the ship they could safely go into. They – the admiral, his lieutenant, the ship’s captain, and Laura Sweigert – hadn’t been found. The other ship’s officers were thought to be ashore, but nobody was sure; of the crew of twenty, six were known dead, a half-dozen more injured badly enough to need hospitalization, five still working.

To Alan’s right sat the dock, littered with debris. On the far side, a Toyota pickup that had been chained to the deck of the Harker was upside down. Steel cable wound from the ship to the dock and back as if it was growing there, a gray vine; two corrugated-iron sheds on the dock were crushed front-to-back; a crane had been swiveled on its base and tilted at an angle away from the ship; meat and vegetables were everywhere, rotting now in the heat. Windows had been blown out all along the dock. Far up to his right, the Kenyan Navy had moved two trucks across the chain-link gate at the entrance to the docks and had taken up positions there, blocking the crowd outside from entering. Behind him, far beyond the cranes where the sniper had lurked, the remaining helo from the Jefferson was waiting, rotors turning, ready to take off at the first sign of trouble. With the other SH-60, it had come in over the water, avoiding the land areas where somebody with a shoulder-fired missile might lurk. Six body bags were lined up in its shade. In one of them, Alan knew, was all that remained of Master Chief Martin Craw.

‘How soon will they know whether they’ve found them?’ he said.

A head appeared over the rail one level above them. ‘Hey, Commander!’

It was Hansen. He was still trying to make sense of the ship’s communications. He had rigged sound-powered phones aft and down where the damage was, their lines adding to the confusion of the deck. Alan now had one headset that was more or less patched into Hansen’s radio link to the outside, another that was more or less patched into shipboard phones, although sometimes one worked and sometimes one didn’t.

‘Sir, I’m catching shit from your carrier. They say Washington’s trying to reach you and we got no secure channel. I’m working on it as fast as I can! They’re gonna have to go through the carrier, is all –’

‘Fine – that’s fine! Do the best you can.’ He turned back to the ship’s officer. ‘Sorry – where were we? Oh, yeah – how soon will we know something?’

‘Can’t say.’ The Harker’s engineering officer was a short, middle-aged man who had been far aft when the explosion had happened. He was uninjured but in shock, Alan could see; he was trying to act normal, but he kept giving himself away with a forced casualness that was grotesque in the presence of the body bags and the wreckage.

‘I want you to go see a medic, Mister Barnes.’

‘Hey, no way! This is my ship. I’m fine!’

‘You’ve done great, but I want you to get yourself looked at.’ He deliberately kept his tone light.

‘Hey, no problem. I just –’ Barnes’s careful cheerfulness vanished as his head snapped around: somebody had just started up from the gaping hole in the deck. But it was only one of the medics, coming up to cool off in the Mombasa heat. ‘Oh. I thought – you know –’

The comm man’s head appeared above Alan, one level up on the superstructure. ‘Mister Craik, I got the STU patched in. Can you talk to the Jefferson’s chief of staff on six? He’s hot to trot, man.’

Alan waved and pressed the earphone to his right ear.

‘Craik here, sir.’

‘Stand by for Captain Beluscio.’

He had already had two nonsecure conversations with the chief of staff. Alan had heard the man’s tension even over the raspy radio link, remembered Beluscio’s reputation for nerves. Beluscio had been an F-18 pilot, and a good one, they said; the tenseness hadn’t showed until he had got a squadron command. Then it had got worse with each promotion. Odd.

‘Craik! Captain Beluscio.’

‘Sir.’

‘Are we finally secure?’

‘My comm man says so, sir.’

‘Christ, at last. Any news on the admiral?’

‘Negative.’

‘What’s the situation?’

Alan told him pretty much what Barnes had told him and added that the Kenyans now had the gate under control and the sporadic firing out there had quieted.

‘That’s only local,’ Beluscio said. ‘We’ve got reports of massive rioting elsewhere in the city. Naval attaché says intel there is sure this is local Islamic fundamentalists – something called the Islamic Party of Kenya.’

Alan wanted to laugh, didn’t, and too late realized he should keep his mouth shut, because by then he was saying, ‘Pretty unlikely, sir; IPK isn’t fundamentalist and they aren’t the kind of –’

‘These people are experts, Craik! Don’t argue with me.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I want the area cleared of everybody but my Marines as soon as humanly possible. Evacuate people to your det area at the airport if you have to, otherwise, send them back in the choppers. You in touch with your det? I want them back here, too.’

‘Sir, they’re in a secure area at the airport –’

‘Goddamit, I said don’t argue with me! I’m dealing with the big picture here! You get your ass out of there and organize removal of all personnel but my Marines, period! Got it?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Then Beluscio made him repeat it all. Alan didn’t say that he had secret orders to stay in Mombasa from a level higher than Beluscio’s. Well, he’d deal with that when he’d got himself to the det spaces at Mombasa airport. One thing at a time.

‘Anything on the admiral?’ Beluscio said.

‘They’re cutting in with acetylene. They should know something soon.’ He didn’t bother to say that if the admiral was in a space so close to the blast that they had to use acetylene, he was gone. Well, maybe he wasn’t there. Maybe he was – somewhere. And Laura?

Nobody was sure where they had been on the ship, but a wounded sailor had seen the admiral, an aide, the captain, and a woman heading down a ladder one level up and slightly aft of what was now the point of maximum damage. Where there was now a large hole in the hull; where, two levels up, the side was bent in as if a fist had punched it; where, along the deck, rivets had popped and steel plates had been lifted into the air, to land on the dock and in the water, dozens of yards away. Where they had found the mangled bodies of two crewmen.

When he spoke now, Beluscio’s voice was bleak, the voice of a man who knew that he was in over his head. ‘Keep me informed.’

Alan started to say something then, because he saw activity around the hatch by which the medics were getting down to the worst area. He started to tell Beluscio to hang on, that some news might be coming, and then he decided it was better to wait. No point in adding to the man’s tension. Instead, he handed the comm set to Patel, and he went to the forward rail of the bridge and looked down at the scene below. Overhead, a Kenyan Navy ‘gunship’ – an ancient Westland Wasp retrofitted with gun pods – whupped and chuffed its way landward, hunting for shooters.

Beside him, Barnes was leaning a lot of weight on the same rail. Trying to follow the chopper’s progress, he looked distinctly worse – eyes hot, skin pasty, sweat only a thin film despite the Mombasa heat.

‘Patel!’

‘Sir.’ Patel’s cinnamon skin seemed chiseled, his lean face intent.

‘Take Mister Barnes aft to the medic station and get him immediate attention.’

‘Hey –’ Barnes protested.

‘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.’

Beluscio hesitated and then, nodding, pulled off the headset and handed it over, as if it was a crown he was passing on. ‘I, uh – you know I’ll back you all the way, Rafe.’

The two men’s hands touched. Rafe took the headset and, putting it on with his right hand, grasped Beluscio’s arm with his left and squeezed.

‘Alan!’

‘Hey, Rafe –’ They were old friends.

‘Fill me in, the short version.’

‘Medics brought up parts of three, maybe four bodies in one bag, all cut up from shrapnel. One was an NCIS female agent who was known to be with the admiral. They found a Navy collar with two stars, same location. I’ve had the bag loaded for transfer to the Jeff so your guys can make a real ID, but – there’s no place left to look, Rafe.’

‘Okay. I’m assuming command of the BG, Al. What’re your orders?’

‘Beluscio ordered us out, including my det – the embassy told him the city’s rioting, something about Islamic fundamentalists – but that’s bullshit, Rafe. The Kenyans –’

‘No time. Answer me one question: you want to stay or fly back?’

‘I’ve got a mission here.’

‘Good. New orders: continue as before, your det to hunker down at Mombasa airport. I’ll send your second bird as soon as Stevens can have the guys ready. Okay, listen up, Al, I gotta go, but I’m depending on you there. You’re the Navy’s point man until you hear otherwise, you hear me? One, I want to know what happened to that ship; two, we want the bastards who did it if it’s a terrorist thing; and three, we want you to protect your people and the ship. Got it?’

‘You authorizing me to investigate?’

Beluscio had handed Rafehausen a quickly scrawled note. He scanned it and said to Alan, ‘NCIS is putting a team together, but that’ll take time. You’re on the spot – make the most of it. I’ll support you every step of the way. For now, hang on there. As far as I’m concerned, you’re in command of the Harker. Can you hack it?’

Alan tried to laugh. ‘I think the Navy’ll say I don’t have the right designator for command at sea.’

‘Yeah, well, you aren’t putting to sea, are you?’

‘It would help if I could contact my det at the airport. We can’t raise them.’

Rafehausen scowled. ‘Neither can we. All we can figure, they don’t have their comm on. We’ll keep trying.’ He glanced at the clock, then at the men and women around him. They were all looking at him, he realized. They knew. ‘Marines are to be attached to your det, under your command. Dispose them as you see fit. What else have you got for defense?’

‘One nine-millimeter handgun and a sniper rifle and some maybe-maybe support from the Kenyan Navy. They saved my ass from a missile attack, Rafe, so if you can send some sort of message of thanks, it’ll help. Right now, they’re back in their bunker. Maybe they’ll come out again to help us if things get bad and I say “please” really nice. But the situation’s iffy.’

Rafehausen made a face, glanced at the clock. ‘We’ll turn the choppers around as fast as we can; one should get back to you by –’ he squinted – ‘maybe 2200 local.’ He looked at Beluscio’s note again. ‘Captain Beluscio has been prepping the gator freighter to send in more support, but it looks like tomorrow before they can get there. Can you hold out?’

He heard Alan give a wry, small laugh. ‘We’ve made it this far.’ He hesitated, then said in a rush, ‘Martin Craw bought it.’

‘Oh, jeez.’ Rafehausen, Alan, and Craw had been in the same aircrew in the Gulf War. ‘We’ll be praying for you, Al.’

Rafe switched off the mike and squared his shoulders. Raising his voice, he said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have good reason to believe that Admiral Kessler was killed this morning on a visit to USNS Harker in Mombasa. As senior officer on board, I’m assuming command of the battle group. I’d like to meet at once with Captain Beluscio, Lieutenant-Commander Byng, Commander Nesbitt, and Commander Manfredi.’ He turned to a jg standing with Beluscio – the flag lieutenant’s gopher. He lowered his voice. ‘Dick, contact the chaplain, schedule a memorial service for tomorrow, subject to positive ID of the remains. But first, get ship’s captain on comm and let me speak with him personally, please.’

Going out, he grabbed Beluscio’s arm again. ‘Pete, Metro mumbled something to me about a tropical depression that’s coming the wrong way south of Sri Lanka; get a clarification and see what it means for us, will you?’ He let go and turned to the flag intel officer. ‘Get us a contact at the embassy in Nairobi; I want to be able to reach them twenty-four hours a day. Tell them to get my guy some protection at Kilindini – they need to lean on the Kenyans – tell them I don’t want to have to bring the BG off Mombasa to make the point – okay?’ He grabbed somebody else. ‘Dick, we’re going to have to refuel the gator freighter’s Seahawks for the trip to Mombasa. Here’s how I see it –’

Beluscio, left to follow in his wake, had already fallen back into the role of subordinate. He liked Rafehausen no better but felt a painful gratitude to him, as if, in over his head, he had been rescued by a stronger swimmer.

USNS Jonathan Harker.

Alan handed his comm set to Patel and ran his hand over his sweaty, spiky hair, thinking about Rafe Rafehausen as acting commander of the BG. A hell of a lot better than Beluscio. Far away, fire sirens wailed, and a seabird sailed on the wind above him, swung back as if to look again at the crippled ship, then soared away. A distant gunshot sounded.

Alan’s and Patel’s eyes went to the shoreline. The shot had been a long way away, Alan was thinking – somewhere up in the city, even. He heard a police hooter. He looked at Patel.

‘They won’t get in here again,’ he said more confidently than he felt.

‘I am not worried, sir.’ Patel’s lean head lifted. He looked like a Roman aristocrat. Then his eyes flicked over Alan’s left shoulder and he made a small motion with his head.

‘Sir,’ Alan heard behind him. Geelin, the Marine captain, was standing there, looking truculent. ‘You wanted to see me, sir?’

‘Yeah, thanks – you got my request to post a guard below?’

‘Haven’t got the men, sir. Sorry.’

Alan thought about having called it a ‘request.’ He grinned. ‘Something else has come up. You probably know – it looks like Admiral Kessler is dead. The acting commander of the battle group has ordered me to take command here. You and your Marines are being attached to my det.’ He smiled again.

‘I gonna get that in writing? Sir?’

‘In time, I’m sure you will.’ He smiled for the third time and lowered his voice. ‘Geelin, I need a guard on the space where we think the admiral died so that there can be an evidence chain. Okay?’

‘I’ll have to take somebody off the dock.’

‘Do what you gotta do.’

‘What’re we looking at – Arab mobs?’

‘More like a few real badasses and maybe some street action, demonstrations, like that. This isn’t Palestine, Geelin, and it isn’t Somalia. We’re not at war.’

Geelin looked down at the damage. ‘Somebody is.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s what we’re here to find out. You with me, Geelin?’

‘Call me Jack. I’ll get a man down below – sorry, I didn’t understand before, the way it came to me –’

Alan was starting to speak when Geelin whirled about and leaned over the rail and shouted, ‘What’s that goddam woman doing down there! Bring that woman up here! On the double! On the double –!’

Woman? His thoughts jerked to Laura Sweigert, as if she might still be alive –

Alan looked down at the dock and saw that there was a woman down there. But not Laura. Foreshortened by the angle from the bridge, she still looked too tall, too pale, too – what? Sort of limp, as if her bones were made of something softer, like plastic. His respect for Geelin went up: he had never known anybody before who had eyes in the back of his head.

A Marine began half-dragging, half-coaxing the woman up the ladder.

She was white, red-haired, a little overweight, and she was, surprisingly, laughing her ass off.

She raised one white arm and reached across her own head to pull some hair out of her eyes. ‘Hi!’ she said.

Geelin was all but gritting his teeth. He thrust his helmeted head at hers, ‘What the hell are you doing inside a goddam military perimeter –?’

Alan put out a hand. ‘Hey, hey –’

‘She could get killed! She could get my men killed!’

‘Hey, Geelin – easy –’

‘I haven’t got the men to nursemaid women!’ He whirled on the woman. ‘Are you a goddam journalist?’

‘Belay that, Captain Geelin.’ Their eyes met. Geelin’s shifted away, as if he had remembered rank and discipline. Alan said, ‘I’ll take care of the lady.’

Geelin’s eyes swung back. ‘I’ll do my job, then, sir.’ He nodded – a substitute for a salute? – and went around the woman without acknowledging her and started down the ladder, calling over his shoulder for the Marine to follow him.

The woman was again laughing her ass off. Alan wondered if it was nervous laughter, maybe even something near hysteria. In the movies, you always slapped the woman at this point, and she broke into tears and fell in love with you. Bad move.

‘ID, please?’ he said.

She used that same gesture, the raised arm reaching across to mess with her hair, the arm a frame around her head, her armpit bare and dead white, and she said, ‘I’m Sandy Cole?’ Squinting at him from slightly pop-eyes as the last of the sun splashed golden light on her from behind him. Then she was scrambling in a huge shoulder bag that was full of junk – he saw address books, checkbooks, lipsticks, tampons, maybe a pair of panty hose, pens, coins, combs, lists, keys – and tossing out phrases, half-finished sentences. She gave him an embassy ID badge. Her passport. A State Department card.

‘Uh, Miz Cole – what are you doing here?’

‘Oh, I came as soon as I saw it on TV. To investigate? I’m the Legat!’

Legat, legal attaché – from the Nairobi embassy, must be. Okay. Meaning that she was also FBI. Not so okay. He studied the documents, which looked authentic enough. ‘Were you ordered here, Miz Cole?’

‘Oh, no, God –’ She started laughing again. ‘I just got into my car and drove.’ She held a hand over her eyes and squinted. ‘You want me to look at the body or the engine first?’

He hesitated. ‘What engine?’

‘The boat engine. There’s a V-8 –’ She made a sweeping gesture toward the dock with an arm; the other was over her head again, the hand in her frizzy hair, head tipped. That way, she looked like a dancer or a model, her flexible bones bending and willowy despite her size. ‘An old car engine with a propeller shaft, I think from the dhow.’

He felt stupid but wary. ‘What dhow?’

‘The dhow that carried the bomb.’ She looked back at him quickly. ‘It came in from over there –’ Pointing with one hand, pulling hair off her face with the other. The hair business was getting to him, driving him a little nuts. ‘It looked like it was going to the other dock, but it came very wide and then –’

‘How do you know this?’

‘There’s an eyewitness? They have him over at the Kenyan Navy base? They also have somebody, he’s totally in shock and really out of it, but I think he’s either from the crew here or maybe he was even on the dhow, although they would have been suicide bombers and, you know –’ She shrugged, gave a smile with her mouth closed. Played with her hair. ‘The eyewitness says he thought somebody jumped off the dhow before it hit, so maybe he’s a bomber? And he was in the water when the bomb went off, and he’s suffered concussion or whatever?’

‘You interviewed an eyewitness?’

‘No, the Kenyans are being real selfish. They told me that’s what he said.’

Alan was thinking that they hadn’t told him any of this, but maybe Lieutenant Ngiri hadn’t known any of it. Or maybe he had, and that’s the way the ball was bouncing. He remembered the Kenyan sailors who had been searching the ships on the opposite dock. Of course they’d found eyewitnesses. He looked again at her documents. ‘How’d you get in here?’ he said. He looked up the dock at the blocked gate.

‘Oh, I came in through the tank farm.’ Pointing again with one of those white arms. ‘I got an embassy shield on my car. Special plates. You know, they’re very hierarchical here – special plates make a big difference.’ She scrabbled in the big bag again and came up with the sort of leather case that cops carry shield and ID in. She was laughing. ‘And I used this.’ It had a courtesy card from the National Association of Sheriffs, unimpressive except for the big embossed eagle, and a shield that said ‘Special Police’ and ‘007.’ ‘I got it on the Internet,’ she said, laughing and playing with her goddam hair and showing him her armpit.

‘You’re lucky you didn’t get shot.’

She shrugged. ‘You want me to look at the body or the engine first? They say you shot a sniper. Wow.’ She waved toward the crane. ‘I better look at the body first. He’ll be pretty ripe in this heat. It is a he, isn’t it? I’d hate it if it was a woman.’

‘What do you want to look at the body for?’

‘I’m trained to look at bodies. I took an extra twelve hours in forensics. After law school?’ She wrinkled her nose and looked at the sky. ‘I don’t want to do it in the dark. But I brought a flashlight? So maybe I could. I don’t know –’ She laughed. ‘Or I could look at that engine. Engines have numbers, you know.’

It was just what he needed, he thought – a pale woman in a long dress. A perfect target. Well, nobody was shooting. And dusk was falling. And Rafe had told him to investigate, and she said she knew how to investigate. Oh, he believed her credentials well enough, and he believed her story about using the patently fake police stuff. He’d been tempted to get himself just such crap, in fact – a badge, any old badge, went a long way in some parts of the world. ‘I think I’d like you to start with the body,’ he said. He smiled, not entirely pleasantly. If she worked inside the crane, at least she’d be protected, and the smell was her problem. ‘You can examine the engine with your flashlight later.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘cool!’

Right.

Half an hour later, he had a call from Harry O’Neill.

‘Hey, Harry!’ Alan shouted. For this man, Harry O’Neill, he was able to be truly hearty. ‘How the hell’d you find me?’

‘Al, you’re into some bad stuff, man.’ Harry O’Neill had not picked up his tone; instead, he sounded severe. The cellphone connection was suddenly lots better, he thought, if he could recognize severity. ‘This is bad, bad, Al.’ Harry had been a shipmate during the Gulf War, then had left the Navy and joined the CIA, jumped from that when he had lost an eye on a mission; now he ran a private security company in Africa and the emirates.

And he had converted to Islam.

‘I’m not getting you, Harry.’

‘It’s all over the TV and the Net, Al – Islamic terrorists have hit another US target, all that shit. It isn’t Islamic terrorists!’

‘How do you know?’

‘I know! No, I don’t know, but – fuck, Al, not everything bad that happens in the world comes from Islam! The TV is jumping at it like dogs, like – wolves. It makes me sick.’

Alan turned to look aft. The long sweep of the deck was empty of people, only the containers, jumbled by the explosion, breaking the straight lines. ‘Harry, you’re way ahead of me – I don’t know what you’re saying, man. I’m standing on a ship that’s had a hole blown in it; I’ve got a bunch of people killed, a bunch more injured. What’re you telling me – it didn’t happen?’

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