Force Protection

1 Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Nairobi, Kenya. Laura had tarted herself up so that she was quite a distraction, he thought, watching her approach the passport-control slot with her hidden contraband. She walked with a bouncy stride that wasn't really her own, chest up and out, her rear also very much on view in tight yellow shorts that barely reached her hips. Her navel rode calmly in all this motion, its ring with the diamond chip winking. Laura had made herself, in fact, all distractions, and every male eye in the shedlike 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 U.S. 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 belieKent, Gordon is the author of 'Force Protection', published 2004 under ISBN 9780385336291 and ISBN 0385336292.