Читать книгу Force Protection - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 7

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.