Black Flag
Page 14
Jake had at least two AK-47s pointed at him.
The CIA team had had a prearranged signal to take the Somalis out, but Clap had made it clear that Ted Graves was calling the shots, and the friction between Jake and Graves had escalated to the point that Jake didn’t want to press his luck.
Yaxaas’s life might be more valuable than his.
He lowered the pistol and released the warlord’s son.
Nacay seethed, but Yaxaas once again motioned his men to stand down. The warlord lit a cigarette and pulled out a chair, as if he’d been expecting Jake for lunch. Jake sat down and motioned for Nacay to leave the two of them alone. The son walked to the other side of the restaurant, but the Ground Branch men blocked him from leaving.
Yaxaas scrutinized the man sitting opposite him. He was young, Caucasian, and spoke excellent Arabic. He possessed a steely calmness despite all the guns and the tension.
“At last we meet,” said the warlord.
Jake reached across the table and took a piece of pita bread off Yaxaas’s plate. “Do you know why I’m here?”
The warlord poured two glasses of tea and waited for Jake to continue.
“I represent the government of the United States.”
“And what brings you to Mogadishu?” said the warlord. He exhaled a cloud of smoke into the air.
“I’m here to solve a problem,” Jake said.
“Many people come to me with their problems.”
“This isn’t my problem. This is your problem.”
“Your country doesn’t make the rules in Somalia.”
“There are no rules in Somalia.”
“Ah, but there are. The customs of Xeer have been passed down through the noble clans of Somalia for over a thousand years.”
“And who enforces Xeer?”
“I do,” said Yaxaas.
“Why you?”
Yaxaas was not an educated man, but he was a smart man. He knew that his authority did not come from a popular vote or even heredity. He ruled because he had the power to impose his will—and the Americans’ brash display was meant to show him that a more powerful force had entered the equation.
He stubbed out his cigarette.
“From time to time,” Jake said, “we will require you to intercept certain vessels at sea.”
Yaxaas raised an eyebrow. “I am a simple businessman. I know nothing of the sea.”
Jake took a sip of the sugary tea.
“Those eight tankers didn’t disappear by accident.”
The warlord lit another of his Turkish cigarettes. “What is to become of these vessels?”
“That will be decided on a case-by-case basis. You’ll be given enough time to plan accordingly.”
“I expect to be well compensated. Mounting such operations is costly.”
Jake shook his head. “Consider it the cost of staying alive. Somalia can be a dangerous place.”
“Indeed,” said Yaxaas. “Especially for foreigners.”
Jake rose from his seat and dropped a cell phone on the table. “We’ll be in touch.”
“CIA?” the warlord asked in English.
“GFY,” Jake corrected.
Yaxaas knew many of the U.S. military units and intelligence agencies that operated in his country, but his puzzled look indicated that he’d never heard of this one.
“You’ll figure it out.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
NACAY MADE A call on his mobile phone the moment the Americans left.
Yaxaas took a long pull of his cigarette and waved his son back to the table.
“Are we out of business?”
The warlord exhaled.
“Quite the opposite. They want us to intercept ships for them.”
Nacay cocked his head. “I hadn’t expected that . . . Is it one of their intelligence services or their military?”
“The line has blurred between the two,” said the warlord, “but their military has a navy, so it must be an intelligence agency.”
Yaxaas picked at his red snapper, but he’d lost his appetite.
Nacay’s phone pinged. He held it up and showed two photos to his father.
“These were taken several days ago at Aden Adde.”
The first picture was of Jake walking across the tarmac. The second image of was of him climbing into the CIA jet.
“That’s him,” Yaxaas said. “What of the plane?”
“A Gulfstream. I have someone looking into it.”
The men speculated about the Americans’ intent for several minutes until Nacay’s phone rang. He asked a few questions but mostly listened before hanging up.
“The jet is owned by a holding company and the man entered the country on a nonofficial American passport. It’s probably a false identity.”
Yaxaas shooed the flies away from his cold fish.
“Send that picture to our Albanian friends and find out if it’s the same man they encountered in Athens.”
“I could get a bomb aboard the plane and stop this nonsense before it gets out of hand.”
Yaxaas turned to face the sea. Except for a few light clouds on the eastern horizon, the sun was continuing its relentless attack on Somalia.
“No,” said the warlord. “We cannot afford another enemy right now.”
“So what do we do?”
“We wait. The United States has never understood Africa. It is only a matter of time until they make a strategic mistake, and once they do, we will use them to finish off Badeed once and for all.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
YOU’VE GOT YOUR first mission,” said Graves via videoconference. It had been just two days since Jake’s meeting with Yaxaas. “There’s a Saudi tanker leaving for North Korea that needs to disappear.”
“Why is the Agency handling this? This is as black and white as it gets.”
“Jake, you’re a talented operative, but you still have a lot to learn about politics. Relations with Saudi are still tense after the drone strike on Mecca.”
“I thought I resolved that.”
“At the end of the day, it was still an American aircraft. Now the Saudis are testing us, seeing how much slack we’ll cut them because of any latent guilt we might have.”
“Sinking their ship should clear that up.”
“That’s why we’re using Yaxaas. If the U.S. Navy stopped the ship, the Saudis would say that it wasn’t going to North Korea and the ship would turn around. They’d sell the oil somewhere else and blame us for not trusting them.”
“It’s like dealing with a manipulative child.”
Graves nodded. “Welcome to international relations.”
“So we sink the ship, the Saudis never know exactly what happened, and they lose twenty million dollars’ worth of oil.”
“Now you’re catching on,” said Graves.
“Except a Somali warlord gets the twenty million and the entire crew has to die—all because the president doesn’t want to call the Saudi king and tell him to knock it off?”
“There’s that, but this also sows distrust between the Saudis and the North Koreans. Both parties will think twice before trying something like this again.”
“I still don’t agree with it,” Jake said, “but I get it. What do you need me to do?”
THIRTY-NINE
A FEW WISPY CLOUDS hung in the sky over Mogadishu, glowing pink in the late-day light.
The dusty lot was surrounded by a mangled fence, its rusty chain links and broken gate providing more than enough security for the litter and empty shipping containers that had been dumped there over the years. Lying on the ground were a few homeless boys, half-stoned and half-dead from sniffing glue they’d poured into discarded plastic water bottles.
It was a run-down area, in a run-down city, in a run-down country.
A pickup truck filled with half a dozen gunmen in back pulled around the corner ten minutes later, followed by Yaxaas’s black Range Rover. The warlord’s SUV drove through the open gate and stopped next to Jake and Pickens, passenger side to passenger side. The warlord lowered his window. Jake’s was already down.
“We have a mission for you,” Jake said.
“When?” said Yaxaas.
“Two weeks.”
“Impossible. We depart tomorrow for another job.”
“I’m not asking.”
“It will cost me millions.”
“Not necessarily,” Jake said. “It’s a tanker.”
The warlord raised an eyebrow.
“It’s right out of your playbook,” Jake continued. “The ship is called the Amjad. It’s owned by Bahri, the Saudi national carrier. You’ll pick it up in the Indian Ocean and send it to the bottom.”
Yaxaas nodded.
The warlord took notes as Jake gave him the details he’d need to identify and intercept the sanction-evading vessel.
“And the crew?”
Jake shook his head.
FORTY
INTERCEPTING THE AMJAD and sending it to the bottom would take Yaxaas’s team only a few hours, but the warlord would need a full week to prep the crew and get them into position. It presented Jake with his first downtime since arriving in Africa, and he decided to use it to visit Greece. He told Graves that he was worried Athena Romanos might change her mind and go to INTERPOL, but the truth was, Jake wasn’t completely sure why he was going.
The Agency Gulfstream landed uneventfully in Athens and Jake retrieved a rental car. While he’d once considered Greece out of the pirates’ reach, he was more vigilant since Athena had been run off the road and nearly killed. Jake knew that men like the warlord could never be trusted. The international criminal network that he was a part of was more accustomed to violence than to rolling over and playing nicely.
Jake drove an extensive surveillance detection run as he headed southwest. Athena was at her office in Glyfada but had asked him to meet her at the family home in Vouliagmeni. He took the highway and local roads, he made cover stops at a gas station and a convenience store, and as he pulled through the open gates of the Romanos estate and drove into the olive grove, he knew that he hadn’t been followed.
It was an unseasonably warm day in Greece and Giánnis was lounging on the sunlit terrace. The shipowner was attired in his typical casual elegance, white pants and a thick cashmere sweater. Jake was still wearing the frayed khakis and untucked shirt that had become his de facto uniform in Mogadishu, but Giánnis greeted him warmly and asked one of the household staff to open a bottle of Malagousia wine. Neither man was particularly hungry, but the staff whipped up a spread of souvlaki and spanakopita to politely obscure the fact that it wasn’t much past ten thirty in the morning.
With some prompting from Jake and the wine, Giánnis began to regale the younger man with tales of his past. Though the shipowner often struggled to recall minor details from his short-term memory, he could recount stories from fifty years earlier as if they were happening right in front of him. He spoke of a deal where he’d made a fortune buying eight half-finished tankers from a shipyard that had gone bankrupt at the bottom of a cycle, and he told of the time he’d purchased a pair of cutting-edge deepwater drillships at the absolute peak of the market. He lost half a billion dollars on the two ships by the time he finally found a buyer to take them off his hands, but Giánnis told both stories with equal enthusiasm, grateful to have been in the game and lived to fight another day.
Jake had many stories of his own, but most were classified and he still had to maintain cover. Officials from the State Department’s Maritime Security Division didn’t evade Iranian assassination teams and prosecute drone strikes in Yemen, so Jake revealed the loss of his parents at a young age and told how it had troubled him until he’d found camaraderie and a sense of belonging in college. He spoke of pouring himself into his friendships and his career, until he’d once again lost everything that was important to him—Jake couldn’t reveal that his change of identity drove the seclusion that troubled him—but he could see in the shipowner’s eyes that the older man’s dementia was isolating him in much the same way. Though the two men had led very different paths, they had much in common and had built a natural rapport during Jake’s visits to the family compound.
They’d already uncorked a second bottle of wine and were sitting in a pair of lounge chairs, overlooking the sea, when Athena returned home midafternoon.
Giánnis spoke in a stage whisper.
“Shhhh,” he said with a conspiratorial grin. “The boss is home.”
Athena beamed as the two men rose to greet her. She had changed from her work clothes into a lavender sarong and a white silk blouse that she’d tied at the waist. Her hair was down and there was no grimace on her face, no phone in her hand, and no shoes on her feet. She had a firm hug for her father and soft kisses on both cheeks for Jake.
For the first time since Jake had met her, she looked at peace.
A complicated wave of emotions washed over him. He felt truly at home with Giánnis and he and Athena had opened up to each other in a way he hadn’t done in years. The joy that Jake had been missing in his life had finally returned, displacing the loneliness and despair that gnawed at him when he wasn’t on the job. It was as if he were part of a family.
And it tore him apart, knowing that he had to lie to them.
Athena took him by the arm.
“Is he dead?” she said.
“Soon,” Jake said.
“I hope you don’t think I’m being morbid, but we should celebrate.”
“You need to keep those gates closed outside,” Jake said.
“You worry too much,” she said. “I’ve moved our business away from the agent, but I’m stringing him along—promising him more business down the road. He doesn’t suspect anything.”
She led Jake to the dining room. The table was set for three, with a white tablecloth, silver flatware, and a champagne bucket. Giánnis caught sight of his daughter, animated and grinning as she led Jake to the seat across from hers. The old man smiled. It had been a long time since he’d seen her so happy. Everyday life might have been slipping past the shipping magnate, but he was still processing things that were important to him.
“You have him?” Giánnis asked.
Athena tightened her grip on Jake’s arm, although the older man had been referring to the pirate.
“We have a plan,” Jake said.
He felt profoundly guilty. These kind and generous people trusted him, they’d helped him in the pursuit of a greater good, and it turned his stomach knowing that he was working with the man who’d killed their son and brother.
Athena popped the champagne cork and handed Jake a glass. She wasn’t wearing the engagement ring. He looked up and met her eyes. She smiled. It was a smile of contentment, of closure.
“Yamas,” Athena called out. “To our health.”
They sipped their champagne. It was vintage Dom Perignon, but it burned like acid as it slid down Jake’s throat. Athena picked up on his body language and cocked her head a few degrees, subtly inquiring about his mood.
“Just tired,” Jake said, compounding his lies.
He was miserable, but Athena’s enthusiasm was unyielding, relentlessly prodding Jake until the mood in the room turned lively and even humorous, with the three of them exchanging playful barbs. Jake teased her about the overinsured tankers and even Giánnis piled on, chastising his daughter for not insuring the ships for even more. Athena would have none of it and put both men in their places by pointing out that it had taken a woman to figure out the agent’s treachery when none of them could.
By the
end of the meal, Jake was grinning, making jokes, and feeling more at home than he had in years. It was the closest he’d felt to a family since he’d lost his parents.
They’d just finished dessert when Giánnis spoke up.
“It’s a warm night,” he said. “It would be a lovely evening for a walk on the beach.”
“We’d be happy to take you, Mr. Romanos,” said Jake.
“I would like nothing better,” he said, pausing for effect, “than to go to bed.”
“Then Jake and I will go,” said Athena. “I’ll walk you to your room, Father.”
She took his arm and looked at Jake. “Maybe you could bring the car around again?”
Jake squinted at her. He was still feeling playful.
“You don’t know how to drive a stick, do you?”
She scowled at him. “I can’t walk on the driveway in bare feet.”
“Or find a pair of shoes, apparently . . .”
Jake departed for the gravel driveway with a grin. Athena was waiting for him by the time he returned with the Land Rover. With the olive grove behind her, and silhouetted by the landscape lighting, she looked like an angel. He walked to the passenger side and held her door.
She brushed by him so close that he could smell her.
A warm breeze was blowing in off the night sea, and Jake left his jacket in the truck and rolled up his sleeves when they reached the beach. Athena wrapped her arm inside his and placed her other hand upon his bare forearm as they walked over the sand. The surf broke gently on shore.
“I don’t know if you noticed it,” she said softly, “but you frightened me when we first met.”
“You must be joking,” Jake said. “Is that why you threw me out of the house?”
“I suppose I’ve learned to attack before I get hurt.”
“I’ve been known to do that myself on occasion,” Jake said, although he wasn’t talking about his emotions.
“It was your eyes. I felt as if you were looking into my soul.”
“I suppose I was.”