Force Protection. Gordon Kent

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.