Black Flag

by David Ricciardi

  The three men sipped their tea.

  “So what can I do for you?”

  “My associate is interested in investment opportunities in Somalia,” said Pickens. “He’s looking to generate some ‘offshore income.’”

  “I understand that some of the pirate syndicates accept outside investors,” Jake said. “And I’d like to make a substantial investment.”

  “There are a few syndicates that would welcome your money,” said Gadhka Cas, “but be cautious, very few boardings are successful. The shipping companies and the world’s navies have become much smarter.”

  “John has told me that there may be a new syndicate operating—one that has a much higher success rate, one that has professionalized the business. I’d be willing to accept a lower return for a more consistent payout. Are you familiar with it?”

  “Somalis are great fans of legends,” said Gadhka Cas, “so I will tell you what I have heard, but I cannot attest to its accuracy . . . There is a story of a young man who was one of the earliest pirates in its earliest days, but he was injured during an attack and could no longer go to sea, so he staffed his organization with professionals and began gathering advance intelligence—not just chasing targets of opportunity with guns and a few qat-chewing boys, like everyone else. The legend goes that he now runs a very large and very effective operation, but that is all I know.”

  “Do you believe it?” Jake asked.

  “There are parts of it that I find credible, but I also find it strange that this legendary figure and I have never crossed paths. Men such as ourselves operate quite openly in Somalia.”

  Gadhka Cas stood. The meeting was over.

  Jake and Pickens stood in the empty lot as the man departed with his security detail.

  “Sorry,” said Pickens. “I thought he was going to have a name for us. I’ll keep trying my other contacts . . . I’ve asked a couple of the arms dealers, but this ‘legend’ is probably one of their best customers, so nobody is talking.”

  Jake watched a barefoot man lead a donkey cart past the warehouse.

  “Do you remember when we were in that building in Kitadra?” he said.

  “Just before those four guys tried to kill us? Yeah, vaguely . . .”

  “On the wall it said something like ‘the building is a gift from Allah, a ladder, and a lion.’”

  Pickens laughed.

  “Seriously,” Jake said. “Gadhka Cas said the legend was injured during a boarding. Maybe the ladder broke and he fell into the ocean.”

  “And was eaten by a lion?”

  “Maybe it was a sea lion.”

  Jake said it as a joke, but Pickens wasn’t laughing anymore. “Do you remember when you told me I needed to go back to language training?”

  “I don’t, but it sounds like something I’d say. You don’t really think it was a sea lion, do you?”

  “No, but the Somali word for ‘lion’ is libaax and the word for ‘shark’ is libaax badeed,” said Pickens. “I told you that there are two warlords locked in a fight for control of Somalia, right?”

  “Yeah, the leader of the Darood and the leader of the Hawiye.”

  “Well the leader of the Hawiye is from Kitadra, and they call him Badeed.”

  SIXTEEN

  THAT NIGHT OVER dinner, Jake and Pickens decided to return to Kitadra. They needed to learn more about Badeed, but they’d also killed four of the warlord’s clansmen—in his hometown. The trip would be dangerous, but it was a risk they needed to take.

  They reached the outskirts of town around noon. An old fisherman was picking the morning’s catch out of a homemade wheelbarrow and throwing it into a broken refrigerator that had been flipped onto its back and repurposed as a cooler.

  “This place is so damned poor,” Pickens said as he stared out the window at the old man. “Nothing gets wasted here.”

  “Except maybe us,” said Jake. He was looking out the windshield at a Toyota pickup with flared fenders and chromed roll bars, parked on the side of the road. Three men with rifles were standing next to it in the shade of a palm tree.

  A checkpoint.

  Somalia was full of them, run by militias, clans, or civilians in uniform—basically anyone who thought he could make a buck and not get killed in the process. It was all about intimidation.

  The pickup lurched into the road and blocked traffic. Jake tried to swerve around it, but he was boxed in with a heavy truck on his rear bumper and traffic in the oncoming lane. He slammed on his brakes and skidded to a stop, denting the pickup’s fender in the last instant.

  “That’s not good,” Jake said.

  “Just be cool,” said Pickens. “They usually just want a few shillings.”

  No sooner had the words left Pickens’s mouth than the gunmen raised their weapons and started shouting for the two men to open their doors. Jake hesitated for an instant and the butt of a rifle stock shattered the glass. Two men yanked him from the car and threw him to the pavement. Pickens met the same fate. Both were quickly relieved of their guns, knives, and identification before having their hands bound and hoods thrown over their heads.

  Jake had been hopeful Pickens might be right about it only being a shakedown until the hoods came out. It wasn’t the sort of thing most people kept in their vehicles.

  The gunmen threw the two Americans into the truck bed and the creaky liftgate slammed closed. Jake tried to free his hands, but they’d been tied professionally—whoever had grabbed them had done it before.

  Pickens cursed when he heard a long burst of gunfire.

  “Pick?” Jake said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hang tough. We’re not going to die today, brother.”

  SEVENTEEN

  ONE OF THE thugs smashed his rifle stock into Jake’s side.

  “No talking,” he said in English.

  The blow had nearly cracked a rib, but it felt like a baby’s kiss compared to a beating he’d taken in Iran two years ago. He’d survive.

  The pickup’s tires squealed as it did an abrupt U-turn and accelerated. The two Americans slid around the truck bed as it swerved through the streets. There had been so many twists and turns and roundabouts that Jake had lost track of their direction. They could be heading north, south, east, or west.

  All were bad options.

  The pickup skidded to a halt on a patch of dirt.

  The gunmen rousted Jake and Pickens and led them, still bound and hooded, into a building. Pickens said something in Somali and received a blow that knocked him to the floor.

  “On your knees,” said a man in English.

  Someone removed the hoods. They were back inside the Exchange. A man in his fifties with a cane was limping around the interior, inspecting chips in the walls where bullets had struck the concrete.

  “You did this?” he asked.

  “Those bullets were fired at us,” said Pickens.

  “And yet those men are dead and you are alive.” The man bent over and picked up a lacquered steel shell casing. “Why were you here?”

  “We’re aid workers,” Jake said.

  “I thought aid workers were supposed to help people, not kill them.”

  “It was self-defense.”

  “You were well armed for aid workers.”

  “Somalia can be a dangerous place,” said Jake, glancing at the men holding them at gunpoint.

  The man smirked. “So why were you in my building?” He gestured to the walls around them.

  Silence.

  The man stepped closer. “Are you familiar with the Somali custom of diya?” he said.

  “Blood money,” said Pickens.

  “That is the Western translation, but diya is paid in livestock, not currency. However, given that you are foreigners, I wi
ll permit your debt to be paid in cash. Ten thousand U.S. dollars per dead man, forty thousand in total, to be distributed to the surviving family members two weeks from today.”

  “Forty thousand is a lot—”

  “Your employer will understand. Diya is often used to settle debts.”

  Jake and Pickens were untied and led outside. One of the gunmen had driven their car up from the checkpoint. He put the Americans’ weapons in the trunk and closed it.

  “You have two weeks,” said the man with the cane. He held up the men’s identification and put them in his pocket. “Do not make me look for you again.”

  “How will we find you?” Jake asked.

  The man smiled.

  “You can ask anyone in Kitadra. My name is Badeed.”

  EIGHTEEN

  JAKE HAD COLLECTED $50,000 from the local CIA station when he’d first arrived in Mogadishu. It was supposed to be used for developing sources, facilitation payments, and unexpected events—like paying off warlords so they wouldn’t kill you. The cash was locked inside the gun safe in Pickens’s basement, but the two men had decided on the drive home from Kitadra that they weren’t going to pay Badeed. It was increasingly apparent that he was the target of their operation, and why give $40,000 to a dead man?

  It gave them two weeks to confirm that Badeed was the pirate leader and bring the proof to Ted Graves.

  Jake opened his laptop once they were back inside the safe house. The SIGINT analytics team at headquarters had run the queries he’d requested before their trip to Kitadra. He’d asked the team to search for voice intercepts that had been flagged based on the callers’ numbers, keywords, or voiceprints. Additionally, he’d requested that the team review the entire universe of Somali mobile phone records a second time, but select for aggregate behaviors such as common times, telephone numbers, or locations that might lead to the identification of the rest of the pirates and hopefully tie them to Badeed.

  The results were waiting in Jake’s inbox.

  The pirate gang of eight had made dozens of calls to common numbers, but further analysis showed them to be prepaid mobile numbers: burner phones with no ownership information, and most had gone quiet after a few weeks of use. The intercepts were nonproductive as well, with no positive voice recognition and only ambiguous, coded texts.

  Dead ends.

  “The technology failed us,” said Pickens. “I guess we’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.”

  “Round up a posse and ride at dawn?”

  “First of all, fuck off,” said Pickens. “Now let’s find one of these degenerates that we can develop.”

  The two men returned their attention to the files on the eight pirates. If Jake and Pickens could find a few candidates for surveillance or interrogation, they could start to build out the pirate network and identify the rest of the players. Jake suspected that the eight men were not part of the tier-one boarding team that was driving the operations, but more likely support staff, given that they’d been involved in piracy during its first iteration and not off training with a foreign military.

  The number of potential targets dropped quickly as Jake and Pickens scrolled through the INTERPOL dossiers. Two men didn’t have photos on file, and four of them lived in sparsely populated areas far outside Mogadishu, where the two Americans would quickly be spotted as they had been in Kitadra.

  The remaining two pirates had each been accused of kidnapping and murder at sea. They’d been apprehended by international naval forces, but the high burden of proof in maritime law had resulted in their release after brief detentions.

  Jake studied a high-resolution satellite image of the first man’s home. On the outskirts of Mogadishu, it was at the end of a long dirt road with only one way in and one way out. It offered a great deal of privacy for what the Americans had in mind, but it would be a death trap if the operation went sideways.

  Pickens was looking at the profile of the last man.

  His name was Mahad.

  His file said that the pirates he’d been running with had boarded a container ship in the Gulf of Aden in 2013, only to discover that most of the crew had sealed themselves inside the ship’s citadel to wait out the attack in safety.

  The crew had followed standard procedure by sending a distress call over the radio, sounding the general alarm, and shutting down the ship’s engine. They’d huddled inside the steel-walled room for over an hour, watching CCTV feeds from the ship and listening to the pirates strike the watertight door with fire axes and pry bars. When that didn’t work, the pirates lit a fire and piled a rubber life raft on top of it, trying to smoke the crew out, but the citadel had been designed with an independent air source and the smoke-out was unsuccessful.

  When the assault suddenly stopped, the crew assumed that their distress call had been heard and a friendly naval force had rousted the pirates.

  But reality was far worse.

  A lone crewman had been working in a noisy mechanical area of the ship’s hold and had not heard the general alarm. By the time he finally ran for the citadel, it was too late. He was a hundred yards from the safe room when he saw the pirates climb onto the deck and fire their weapons into the air. The seaman knew the ship better than almost anyone, and he slid down a ladder back into the hold and ran along a catwalk until he found a good hiding place.

  But the devil was in the details.

  Two pirates were searching the hold, walking the catwalks, when a burst of static came over the crewman’s radio. The two Somalis found him inside ninety seconds and escorted him to the citadel—at gunpoint.

  Which was where Mahad had distinguished himself.

  He stripped the seaman of his clothes and hog-tied him with thick ropes. The pirate then grabbed the man’s hair, held his face up to the CCTV camera mounted outside the citadel’s watertight door, and began to flay him alive.

  The screams echoed through the metal companionway. In less than thirty seconds the rest of the crew voted to open the door. Seventeen of them were held for ransom and released within a year, three died in captivity, and the crewman who’d been partially skinned alive was tossed overboard and into the salt water before sunset.

  The survivors had each identified Mahad by name and photograph upon their release.

  “Forget about working with this sonofabitch,” said Pickens. “I’ve dealt with this kind of animal before and they only understand one thing: force.”

  Jake closed his laptop.

  “Then force it will be.”

  NINETEEN

  JAKE WAS BEHIND the wheel of the maroon SUV, rolling fast through the narrow streets of Mogadishu with its turbo-diesel motor humming and the hot night air blowing through the open windows.

  “Let’s not overthink this,” he said.

  “Never been a problem for me,” said Pickens. He jacked the cocking handle on the short-barrel M249 machine gun in his lap. It had a collapsible buttstock and a box magazine holding two hundred rounds. He had two more magazines at his feet.

  “Let’s not kill him either,” Jake suggested.

  “That’s his call. I’m going home tonight either way.”

  Jake whipped around a corner and sped down an alley. He and Pickens had cased the area twice earlier in the day. Mahad had done well for himself, with a gated home in a quiet residential area.

  “On target in sixty,” Jake said.

  On the SUV’s console was a compact electronic device known as an IMSI catcher. Among other things, it could trick Mahad’s mobile phone into revealing its location.

  “Pinging him now,” Pickens said. “He’s home.”

  “Thirty seconds,” said Jake. He swerved around a few men loitering on the side of the road and turned down a narrow street. “Hit it.”

  Pickens pressed another button on the device and Mahad’s mobile phone started to ring. The IMSI catcher sp
oofed the phone’s caller ID into displaying a number from one of the other pirates.

  Pickens killed the transmission the instant Mahad answered.

  Dropped calls weren’t unusual in Mogadishu’s buildings. The concrete walls often interfered with cell reception.

  “Hitting him again now,” said Pickens.

  Mahad’s phone rang again as Jake reached the end of the street.

  They were three hundred feet from the pirate’s house. As it had been both times earlier in the day, the gate was open. The pirate had grown complacent living in Somalia, where there were no consequences for the life he’d chosen.

  But that was about to change.

  “He’s on the ground floor,” Pickens said. The IMSI catcher also had direction-finding capability, indicating the azimuth and elevation of the signal it had locked onto.

  “Bring him out,” said Jake.

  Pickens initiated a call using another pirate’s caller ID and dropped it as soon as Mahad picked up. Now he was probably wondering what was happening.

  “Hitting him with the third number now,” Pickens said.

  They were a hundred feet from Mahad’s gate when Pickens spoke into the phone in Somali. “I’m outside. We have to—” he said before dropping the call again.

  Jake turned into the driveway and stopped fifteen feet from the front door just as it opened. The pirate shielded his eyes as the SUV’s high beams blinded him.

  “What’s going on, Badu?” the pirate said. “Jave is calling me too.”

  Jake stepped out and fired a Taser into Mahad’s chest. The two metal prongs blasted the pirate’s pain receptors with fifty thousand volts of electricity. Jake cut the power a second after Mahad hit the ground.

  Pickens slapped a piece of duct tape over his mouth, cinched flex-ties around his wrists and ankles, and frisked him for weapons before putting a hood over his head and tossing him into the back of the SUV.

  Jake backed out of the driveway and the men were back on the street twenty-eight seconds after they’d pulled in. They’d practiced the takedown half a dozen times that afternoon in an abandoned lot in Mogadishu.