Читать книгу Force Protection - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 9

USNS Jonathan Harker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan waved and pressed the earphone to his right ear.

‘Craik here, sir.’

‘Stand by for Captain Beluscio.’

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

‘Craik! Captain Beluscio.’

‘Sir.’

‘Are we finally secure?’

‘My comm man says so, sir.’

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

‘Negative.’

‘What’s the situation?’

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

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

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

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

‘Yes, sir.’

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

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

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

‘Yes, sir.’

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

‘Anything on the admiral?’ Beluscio said.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Patel!’

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

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

‘Hey –’ Barnes protested.

‘Do it!’

Below him, a black medic had pulled himself out of the distorted hatch opening. He glanced up at Alan, then looked away as if guilty. Another man was looking down into the hole, reaching forward. A third medic appeared, and together they began to wrestle a litter up from below. It held a body bag.

The black medic, the one with the guilty look, made his way to the ladder and began to climb toward the bridge. Alan watched the litter and the body bag come out. Two men were straining from below, two lifting from above. Finally, they got it over the edge of the hatch and hauled at it until more than half was beyond the edge and the two on the deck could rest, part of the body bag still sticking over the open hatch, and they stood there, bent over, panting, looking at each other, waiting for the others to come up from below.

‘Commander Craik?’ the medic said behind him. He knew what they had been looking for and what finding the admiral would mean. Only a young man, maybe twenty or so, he had seen blood and injuries, and he knew what death was; like a nurse or a doctor, he had a manner to protect himself from other people’s pain. But now he was moved, barely able to speak. He said an odd thing, holding out a hand for Alan to see: ‘I’m sorry.’

Alan thought it was a piece of wood, then realized it was too thin to be wood. Leather, maybe – the sort of thing they bought for the dog to chew on. Then he touched it, and he knew it was cloth, blood-soaked cloth. Half of the collar of a Navy warm-weather uniform shirt that had been khaki and was now deep brown. Hidden by the medic’s darker thumb, as if he didn’t want them to exist, were two silver stars.

‘Shit,’ Alan said. He looked at the medic. ‘I’ll have to identify him.’

‘No, sir.’

‘I have to –’ his eyes went to the man’s name tag – ‘Green.’

Green shook his head. ‘Nothing to identify, sir.’

‘I’ll be the judge of that.’ And, because it had sounded harsh, he said, ‘I have to try. They can’t just take my word for it.’

He moved past the medic and went down the ladder to the deck. They had marked out a safe lane with yellow tape, and he went along that, stepping over cable that they hadn’t had time or hadn’t been able to remove. The smell of fire was stronger, the smell of the sea, too, the offshore breeze shifting as the end of day came near. The four medics who had pulled the body bag out stood a little away from it. As he came near, one stepped forward; he checked the man’s tag: Hyman, First Class.

Alan indicated the body bag. ‘The admiral?’

Hyman’s shoulders rolled, a kind of shrug, maybe a suppressed shiver. He was wearing a T-shirt that was brown with rust and smoke. ‘We got what we could. We think there’s, um, parts of four people in there.’

He absorbed that. ‘Is there more to get out?’

‘Well – not without – Maybe with a – special tools, like that.’

Alan nodded.

‘Open it.’

Hyman unzipped the bag. A smell of overcooked meat burst up. Most of what he saw was unrecognizable, but he made out the shape of a skull, the hair burned off, the skin black. Teeth plain where the lips were gone. He saw a hand. Ribs.

‘You sure there are four people in here?’

‘Sir, I’m not sure of anything. There’s at least three, I know that. We tried to count, you know? but there isn’t enough – you know? There’s pieces of metal everywhere – sharp as hell – they were cut to pieces.’

Alan jerked his head. Hyman unzipped the bag the rest of the way. At the bottom, another hand, browned, shriveled, seemed to reach up from the mass. Above the wrist, it was wearing the stained remains of Laura’s pink shirt.

‘Okay, close it up.’ He turned away and took deep breaths. Suddenly, saliva poured into his mouth, and with it the taste of salt. He looked for something to support himself on.

A black hand appeared just below his nose. The sharp odor of ammonia filled his nostrils, and his head cleared. ‘You okay, sir?’

‘Yeah.’ The ammonia had helped. ‘Yeah.’ He put a hand on Green’s shoulder.

‘Breathe deep.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Okay now? It gets to everybody.’

He nodded. ‘Send that bag back on the next helo and mark it. They’re going to have to do some kind of forensics on it to be sure. Where’d that piece of collar get itself to?’

‘I got it, sir.’ Green was still standing close to him, as if waiting for him to faint. He held up a plastic bag. ‘We know the drill, Commander. Always gotta do ID.’

‘Right.’ He tried to breathe slowly, deeply. ‘Mark off the area where you found them – put up some kind of sign, whatever. I don’t want anybody in there until we get some forensics.’ Thinking, It’ll be my career if we screw up the ID of a dead admiral.

He made his way up to the bridge again and stood there, trying to sweep the stink of cooked flesh out of his nostrils with the sweet, damp breeze from Mombasa. When he was better, he got on the comm to the Marine captain and told him to post a guard on the space where the bodies had been found.

He was thinking that the situation was bad and getting worse: a ruined ship, an American island in a rioting city – now a dead admiral. Could they hold on here to the little they had left?

Far down the dock, they were loading the body bags into the chopper.

USS Thomas Jefferson.

Pete Beluscio winced when he looked at the wall clock. It was too late, he knew. There had been too much time. If the admiral was alive, they’d know by now: more time, likelier death. He felt a queasiness in his gut. He’d have a hell of a night now, no matter what happened after this. He’d be up, taking pills, sitting on the can, feeling like hell. The perks of command. Yeah.

Fuck command, he thought. Some people were born to be flyers, not to take command. Nobody knew better than he did himself that he’d reached his max when he was an exec. But the Navy said, ‘Up or out,’ and he’d kept moving up. Now –

A face he distrusted appeared at the far door; it took an instant for him to realize it was Rafe Rafehausen’s. He felt that momentary hatred, suspicion, fear that came from seeing the face of a rival, then almost relaxed as he admitted that maybe Rafehausen was about to take the whole problem off his hands. Bitter, bitter though that loss would be.

‘Pete, what the hell’s going on?’

Beluscio was pleased to see that Rafehausen was stretched tight, too. ‘We’re keeping you informed, Rafe.’

‘Jesus, it’s more than four hours – they must know something!’

‘You’re on the links, what do you think, we’re holding back?’ Beluscio had let his own tension show; his tone had been harsh. A second class at a terminal looked around at them, looked away. Beluscio lowered his voice. ‘The moment I hear anything –’

‘Lieutenant-Commander Craik on four, Captain!’

Beluscio clapped his right hand over the earphone and swung away from Rafehausen. ‘Yes!’

Rafe Rafehausen was puzzled by Pete Beluscio, who seemed to him tricky, overcomplex. Rafe himself was a fairly simple man, one who believed that the best direction was always straight ahead. Beluscio seemed to him always to be going one step sideways for every step forward. Like now, getting antsy over nothing, turning away when he might be getting the word at last.

Not a cynic, Rafehausen was still capable of suspecting that Beluscio might try to hold on to his temporary command of the battle group by demanding some absolute, legalistic confirmation of the admiral’s death long after it was clear the man was gone. If he did –

‘How long ago?’ he heard Beluscio say.

Rafehausen moved closer; at the same time, Beluscio swung back to look at him.

‘This is confirmed?’ Beluscio’s head was down now, his eyes not meeting Rafe’s. He listened for what seemed far too long, then muttered, ‘All four?’ After a few seconds, he said, ‘Well – the collar seems pretty, um, definite. Yeah, yeah, we’ll have to have the legal eagles confirm, dental and all that, but –’

Beluscio looked up then and met Rafe’s eyes. Switching off his mike with his left hand, he said softly, ‘Craik has evidence the admiral’s dead.’

The two men looked at each other. Rafe felt his heart surge with adrenaline, then with relief that Beluscio was going to do the right thing. He held out his hand. ‘I’m taking command of the BG, Pete.’

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

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

‘Alan!’

‘Hey, Rafe –’ They were old friends.

‘Fill me in, the short version.’

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

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

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

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

‘I’ve got a mission here.’

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

‘You authorizing me to investigate?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

USNS Jonathan Harker.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Haven’t got the men, sir. Sorry.’

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

‘I gonna get that in writing? Sir?’

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

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

‘Do what you gotta do.’

‘What’re we looking at – Arab mobs?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan put out a hand. ‘Hey, hey –’

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

‘Hey, Geelin – easy –’

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

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

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

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

‘ID, please?’ he said.

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

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

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

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

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

He hesitated. ‘What engine?’

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

He felt stupid but wary. ‘What dhow?’

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

‘How do you know this?’

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

‘You interviewed an eyewitness?’

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

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

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

‘You’re lucky you didn’t get shot.’

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

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

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

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

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘cool!’

Right.

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

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

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

And he had converted to Islam.

‘I’m not getting you, Harry.’

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

‘How do you know?’

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

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