Force Protection. Gordon Kent

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