Force Protection. Gordon Kent

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