Black Flag

by David Ricciardi

  While kidnapping for ransom wasn’t as popular as it had been in the heyday of the pirates, grabbing a couple of foreigners off the streets of Kitadra was about as easy as it got. Soft targets, hard currency, and no consequences whatsoever.

  “John, out the windows!”

  Jake took two steps and vaulted through one of the openings in the back wall. Chips of concrete flew as one of the gunmen opened up with his Kalashnikov and stitched a line of bullet holes in the wall where Jake’s head had been a few seconds earlier.

  Pickens landed on his feet next to Jake. He and Jake drew their weapons and started running.

  The neighborhood was a maze of foot paths and small houses. Jake sprinted down the nearest path with Pickens right behind. The two CIA officers nearly collided with a group of children playing in the sand before darting through a cluster of one-room shacks made from discarded building materials and plastic tarps.

  A burst of gunfire rattled through the neighborhood. The gunmen weren’t far behind.

  The Americans turned down another footpath, between a pair of cinder-block homes and two old men sitting in plastic chairs. At the end was a small palm grove.

  Jake stole a look over his shoulder. The Somalis were thirty yards back. Jake and Pickens made a series of random turns through another group of shanties until the alley opened onto a dusty patch of open ground.

  Half a dozen young boys were playing soccer with a ball made from discarded duct tape when one of the Somalis fired a burst from his rifle, narrowly missing the boys. Jake turned down another alley to keep them out of the line of fire and the Americans piled on the speed, banging out a five-minute-mile pace through the tiny residential neighborhood. Though Pickens was nearly fifteen years older, he was right on his partner’s heels. They ran down another dirt path, looking for a place to hide or a car to steal, but there were too many people and almost no cars.

  The ground opened up at the end of the path.

  They’d reached the edge of town.

  The land was flat and empty for miles.

  Another burst of automatic weapon fire ripped through the air behind them while the Mitsubishi SUV appeared from a side street and blocked their escape.

  The Americans were going to have to resolve the threat.

  Jake ducked inside a darkened shed and motioned Pickens into an open doorway. It placed them in an L formation where they could cover two approaches and concentrate their fire.

  Jake took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, trying to slow his breathing and his heart rate. He listened to his surroundings, isolating the different sounds: the breeze rustling the trees, the children playing nearby, the Mitsubishi’s engine shutting down.

  The Somalis were being patient. Time was on their side.

  Jake needed to go on the offensive. He lobbed his cell phone twenty feet away into a cluster of scrub brush. Thirty seconds later, the timer he’d set started ringing.

  There were footsteps . . . running . . . stopping . . . then advancing slowly as the phone continued to ring.

  Two of the Somalis rounded a corner with their rifles up. They glanced in Jake’s direction, but he remained invisible inside the darkened shed. The gunmen fanned out, one on each side of the small alley, and turned toward the sound of the phone.

  Jake fired twice and dropped the first Somali to his knees, then switched his aim and put three shots into the second man just as he was turning around. He crumpled in a pile of arms and legs. The first man was still on his knees, holding his rifle, and screaming in pain.

  Jake fired again.

  The screaming stopped.

  The timer was still ringing, but it wasn’t fooling anyone anymore.

  Jake caught a glimpse of a third gunman and raised his pistol, but the man disappeared before he could take the shot.

  A panicked woman burst from one of the nearby shanties and ran in front of Jake’s muzzle with two children in her arms.

  He took a deep breath. There were too many innocent bystanders around.

  A minute later he heard a muffled, one-sided conversation. It was another one of the Somalis, on his mobile phone, coordinating a counterattack.

  Smart.

  It wasn’t a quality Jake appreciated in an adversary.

  He dashed across the alley into the abandoned shanty, pushing aside the hanging carpet that was its door and ducking under some laundry drying on a clothesline inside. There were footsteps outside, moving slowly, scraping against the dirt and gravel.

  Jake switched out his half-empty pistol magazine for the full spare he kept on his belt and watched the alley through a thin cotton curtain.

  A shadow passed the house.

  Jake pushed open the hanging carpet.

  “Drop the gun,” Jake said in Arabic.

  His pistol was trained on the center of the man’s back, less than ten feet away. The bullet would destroy his heart if it didn’t sever his spinal column.

  The man hesitated.

  “Live or die,” Jake said. His finger slid toward the Glock’s trigger, but the man laid the gun on the ground.

  Jake ordered him back into the house and slammed him to the floor, face first.

  “Who sent you?” Jake said in Arabic.

  But before the man could answer, Jake caught sight of Sunglasses outside with a pistol in his hands, heading toward Pickens. A second later the Somali turned around a corner and disappeared from view.

  Jake wasn’t equipped to take prisoners. He yanked the clothesline from the ceiling, hog-tied the Somali, and stuffed a dish towel in his mouth.

  Jake grabbed the man’s Kalashnikov, checked the magazine, and stepped onto the street.

  He was worried about his partner. Pickens was strong and fast and knew how to handle himself in a street fight, but he didn’t have the paramilitary experience Jake did. Though the two men joked about the difference in their ages, it was their training that set them apart. Most case officers went their whole careers without carrying a weapon, much less getting into a gunfight.

  Jake moved quickly but deliberately, his eyes scanning every potential hiding place and his ears listening for any indication that Sunglasses had doubled back to ambush him. Jake reached an intersection of two alleys and followed a set of footprints that looked fresher than the rest.

  Up ahead, twenty feet away, Sunglasses was stalking Pickens’s position.

  Jake raised the AK-47 just as his partner stepped into the alley. Pickens and the Somali were facing each other when Sunglasses started shouting and waving his pistol in the air.

  Pickens spotted Jake in his peripheral vision and glanced over.

  Sunglasses’s eyes followed.

  Pickens fired five rounds into his chest from four feet away.

  The Somali fell to the ground and Pickens met Jake’s eyes.

  “Thanks, brother.”

  FOURTEEN

  JAKE AND PICKENS skipped the meet that had brought them to Kitadra and returned to the safe house. That night they split a bottle of twelve-year-old Macallan scotch that Pickens had smuggled into the country and speculated whether the attack in Kitadra had been spontaneous or targeted—but there was no way to know.

  Jake awoke early again the next day. He sat at the kitchen table and checked his email, the room lit only by the bluish glow from his laptop screen. There were dozens of overnight cables on developments in Africa and across the globe—several of which Jake read, and an urgent request for a status update from Ted Graves—which Jake deleted.

  He was pleased to also find a message from the technical staff at CIA.

  They’d come through with his data request.

  It was a large amount of information in two distinct files, and Jake heated a teakettle while they downloaded. Drinking copious amounts of tea was a habit he’d acquired while working in the Middle East. With alcohol forbidden
by sharia law, Muslims often served tea at social events, but Jake had taken to it because dysentery, gastroenteritis, and diarrhea commonly afflicted foreigners in the region, and drinking hot tea was an inoffensive way to guarantee the local water had been boiled before consuming it.

  The tea was made and drunk before the files were decrypted, but the team at headquarters had come through with everything he’d asked for. His initial attempt to tie Pickens’s sources to the pirate attacks through phone records had failed—the men had all been onshore and using their phones at some point during the attacks—but it had also given Jake an idea.

  He opened the first file. There were seven wireless companies in Somalia, and NSA computer network exploitation teams had been able to retrieve data from six of them, capturing 94 percent of all mobile phone users in-country.

  The file on his computer contained detailed call histories for the dates around the seven pirate attacks.

  Jake had been an analyst before joining the operations side of CIA, and he’d asked the technical team back at Langley to format the information so it could be searched based on multiple variables. He wanted to roll up his sleeves and triage the data on his own.

  The first vessel to be attacked had been a Suezmax tanker owned by a privately owned Greek shipping company. Jake entered the date of its disappearance, set parameters for five days before and five days after the attack, and queried the database. He was searching for negatives, reasoning that anyone not using his phone for ten days straight might have been out of the country, possibly on a business trip, or a vacation.

  Or maybe on a ship.

  There were over eight thousand hits.

  What the hell?

  He added the same parameters for the second pirate attack and the results dropped to 2,200 names.

  By the time he entered the seventh attack, the list was down to sixty-two individuals. It was still a big number, and his intuition told him he wasn’t dealing with a force that large, but that was why he had the second file.

  It was INTERPOL’s Global Maritime Piracy Database—every person who’d ever been detained or suspected of involvement in the trade. There were thousands of names from all over the globe, with brief summaries of where, when, and why they’d shown up on INTERPOL’s radar. Jake cross-referenced the sixty-two names from the mobile phone records search with the INTERPOL list and found eight names in common.

  Eight known pirates who hadn’t used their phones during seven out of seven pirate attacks.

  Now he had a list he could use.

  Pickens wandered into the kitchen, still half asleep. “What’s got you up so early?”

  “I got the records from cyber.”

  Pickens refilled the teakettle and turned on the heat.

  “We’ve got eight individuals who are in the INTERPOL piracy database and didn’t use their mobile phones during seven out of the seven attacks.”

  “Your very own gang of eight,” Pickens said as he pulled out a chair and sat backward on it. “The gang of eight” was the nickname for the congressmen and senators who were responsible for oversight of America’s intelligence agencies.

  Jake spun the laptop around so Pickens could see the analysis. “Check it out.”

  Pickens shrugged. “So damned analytical . . . I told you, espionage isn’t about numbers, it’s about people.”

  “Maybe back in your day,” Jake said with a smile, “but now we fuse multiple streams of intel to find our targets.”

  Pickens flipped him the finger. “Speaking of your youth and inexperience . . . How’d you end up in Special Activities at such a tender young age?”

  Though they were both part of the Agency’s Directorate of Operations, the two men were from different divisions. Pickens had taken the traditional route after college, coming up through the clandestine service trainee program before beginning his career in the field as a case officer. His main job was recruiting sources.

  But most of Jake’s peers in the Special Activities Center were military special operations veterans who had ten to twenty years of experience in the armed forces before joining the Agency. Jake was considerably younger than his contemporaries, and it was impossible not to notice.

  And impossible for Jake to answer.

  “Look,” Jake said. “We have photos, names, and last known addresses for the eight subjects. Now we just need to pay them a visit and figure out who’s who in the zoo.”

  “You and I can’t run that kind of operation alone. We’ll get made in a heartbeat—especially you.”

  “Racist . . .” Jake muttered jokingly as he started typing on his laptop again, drafting another request to the cyber services team in CIA’s Directorate of Digital Innovation. “I’m asking headquarters to run call chains on our gang of eight and build an association matrix. Maybe if we see who is talking to who, it will lead us to whoever is running this thing.”

  Pickens nodded and stepped outside to take a call on his mobile phone. He returned to the kitchen twenty minutes later.

  “While we’re waiting on that”—he gestured to the laptop as if it were toxic—“I got us another meet for this afternoon, and you’re going to want to take this one.”

  FIFTEEN

  THE TWO MEN left the safe house in a maroon Toyota Surf SUV.

  “Head on a swivel, brother,” Pickens said as they approached a car with its hood up on one side of the road and a stopped minibus on the other. There were six inches to spare on each side of the SUV. “Sometimes the locals stage this shit to funnel people into ambushes.”

  Jake’s hand was already resting on the pistol concealed on his waist, but he relaxed when he saw steam rising up from the car’s engine compartment and an old man pouring a jug of water into the radiator.

  “Have you met this guy before or is this going to be another battle royale?” Jake asked.

  Pickens smirked. “Only once, at a local arms dealer’s warehouse. This guy isn’t a street thug, though. He runs half of the Bakaara Market. I’ve been trying to get this meet since I learned you were coming.”

  Jake was watching the side-view mirror. A silver hatchback with peeling paint and mirrored windows had followed them through three turns.

  “What made him finally agree?” Jake asked, keeping his eyes on the mirror.

  “He was doing his due diligence on me. One nice perk of my arms redistribution assignment is that it establishes my bona fides with some serious dudes.”

  “Some seriously bad dudes.”

  “They’re generally the best sources,” said Pickens.

  The silver hatchback turned away and a pair of camels loped down the center of the busy street with numbers branded into their hindquarters.

  “What’s with the numbers?” Jake asked.

  “The Somalis call them ‘license plates.’ They’re the owner’s mobile phone number.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Those ugly things were worth $3,000 a head before the drought, maybe $5,000 now. Steal one and you’ll get your hand cut off.”

  Pickens did a 270-degree turn around the block and they headed west through the Hawle Wadag district. While nowhere in Somalia was considered safe, the Hawle Wadag was a particularly dangerous area. The neighborhood was littered with burned-out cars, buildings pockmarked from bullets and artillery, and craters from IEDs. Armed men loitered on the streets, watching the SUV roll by.

  The two Americans drove past a colonial-era church that was overflowing with displaced Somalis and turned into an area with even deeper scars: scorched buildings, downed power lines, shattered windows. Trash littered the roadside. The stench of sewage was suffocating.

  “We’re here,” Pickens said.

  He pointed to a dusty lot behind a chain-link fence and enough barbed wire to secure a prison. Empty and abandoned shipping containers littered the foreground. In the back was a one-story war
ehouse with its garage door raised.

  Pickens approached slowly. A man holding an AK-47 was guarding the entrance. He waved the Americans inside and gestured to the back of the warehouse. Pickens crept forward, past a dozen armed men and several vehicles, including a four-door Nissan Navara with dented fenders and a Russian RPD machine gun mounted in its bed.

  “One way in and one way out,” Jake noted without enthusiasm.

  “Look, brother, I’ve got four kids back in the States, and even though I don’t get back there much, I still want to see them again. We can trust this guy.”

  A new Mercedes-Benz SUV was parked in the rear. Half a dozen gunmen with Kalashnikovs stood alongside.

  “I thought you said this guy ran half of the Bakaara Market,” Jake said.

  “The illegal half,” said Pickens. “Just take everything nice and slow.”

  He stopped their SUV fifty feet from the Mercedes, and he and Jake stepped out with their empty hands in clear view.

  A man emerged from the passenger seat of the Mercedes. Tall and wiry, he was dressed in a crimson shirt and yellow pants.

  “I am Gadhka Cas,” he said. “As-salaam-alaikum.”

  “Wa-alaikum-salaam,” said Pickens.

  The Somali motioned to three chairs and a serving of tea.

  “How did you get your nickname?” Pickens asked.

  “You speak Somali?” Gadhka Cas smiled. “My beard turned gray at a young age and it is a tradition here to color such a thing with henna for one’s wedding—so the bride does not feel as if she is marrying her grandfather.”

  The Somali took his seat and laughed. “It looked ridiculous and my friends stuck me with ‘Gadhka Cas’ forever.”

  “It means ‘red beard,’” Pickens said for Jake’s benefit.

  “Somali nicknames can be cruel,” Jake said.

  “Life can be cruel,” said the Somali, suddenly serious, “but the nicknames are honest—maybe the most honest thing in Somalia.”