“What did you see?”
“I saw someone strong, and kind, and generous.”
Athena smiled and they walked in silence for a few minutes.
“Would you like to join us for Christmas,” she said, “or are you going back to America?”
Though he loved his country and loved what it stood for, there was no one for Jake back in the United States.
“I’d like that very much.”
They stood in the sand as the breeze blew her hair across her face.
“When do you think you’ll get him?” she asked.
“The pirate?”
She brushed her hair back into place and nodded.
“As soon as I get the order.”
“How do you deal with all the treachery, all the duplicity?”
She’d meant a career in espionage, but Jake’s guilt from working with Yaxaas rose quickly to the surface.
“I believe in what I’m doing—protecting those who can’t protect themselves—but it comes at a cost. Sometimes I miss normal life.”
They walked to the water and stood with their feet in the surf.
“You should be thinking about your future.”
He looked at her in the moonlight, with the breeze ruffling her hair and the surf washing rhythmically over their feet.
“I should be getting back.”
FORTY-ONE
THE SUN WAS high in the Somali sky, with only a few cottony clouds floating in the upper atmosphere, when the four SUVs turned off the cracked pavement and onto a dirt road. Barely more than a pair of tire tracks, the path wound through steep hills for almost a mile until it reached a rural camp about the size of a football field. It was set in the middle of a valley with a winding river on its western edge and the narrow road was the only way in or out.
The two-year drought had parched the life from the countryside. The grasses in the hills and lining the riverbank were withered and brittle and the river was nearly dry except for the few feet of muddy water that snaked down the middle of its wide banks. The skeletal remains of several animals littered the dry riverbed, picked clean by scavengers and bleached white by the sun.
The camp’s gate slid open and a tall man, wearing a sleeveless shirt and bandoliers of machine gun ammunition draped across his chest, met the four vehicles in the center of camp. Camp workers unloaded the trucks while the man with the bandoliers led the newly arrived men into one of the camp’s crude buildings.
Yaxaas was waiting inside.
Though the warlord had no formal education, he was a student of history.
The earliest Somali pirates had been men with no schooling and no hope, men like Badeed who’d had taken to the sea in small skiffs, targeting ships that were anchored or sailing close to shore. They would threaten the crews with guns, steal their possessions, and maybe score some portable electronics if they were lucky.
Glorified muggers.
But the ships adapted quickly and sailed farther offshore—out of range of the little fishing boats and their smoky outboard engines.
But the Somalis adapted too. They used larger fishing boats, often seventy feet long, to tow the skiffs offshore where they could wait for targets of opportunity in the shipping lanes. Once a ship was spotted, the skiffs would race after it, firing automatic weapons and sometimes RPGs at the bridge until the ship’s master stopped the vessel.
The strategy worked for a few more years, with minor evolutions in tactics on both sides—the most significant of which was when the Somalis started kidnapping crews for ransom. Some of the hostages were held on the ships, some on land. Some were released within days and some were held for years. Some died in captivity.
The rising tide of violence eventually led to defensive measures that worked: armed vessel protection detachments, razor wire, water cannons, and increased involvement from the world’s navies.
By 2015, the age of the Somali pirates had come to an end.
But Yaxaas knew there was still money to be made.
The country’s strategic location on the Horn of Africa hadn’t changed. It was only the pirates’ rudimentary tactics and equipment that had been outmatched. He’d studied the world’s top special operations forces and concluded that if the pirates could devise new tactics and keep them secret, they could be victorious once again.
He started by recruiting from the competition.
It wasn’t difficult. The twenty-first century’s global surge in special operations forces had invariably left a few men out in the cold, men who’d felt they weren’t adequately appreciated or appropriately compensated by their governments. Others were just out for a thrill—after years of combat and intense training, they didn’t want the adrenaline rush to subside, ever.
The result was the same. They were for sale.
Yaxaas didn’t look at contractors from established firms. He wanted independent operators: mercenaries who’d accumulated a black mark or two over the years—sailors and marines who had tier-one skills but lacked the moral compulsion to use them the way in which they’d been trained. He wanted men who cared more about the tactical situation than the strategic one.
The warlord had laid out two rules: First, there would be no Americans and no Russians. Though it was for different reasons, the warlord trusted neither. Second, with the exception of his fellow Somalis, no more than two men could come from the same country. Yaxaas had a keen understanding of human nature and he knew that he was hiring renegades. He didn’t want any factions developing within the team that might challenge his authority.
The Norwegian had been the first to join. Trained to be one of his nation’s elite Marinejegerkommandoen, he was six feet two inches of lean muscle, with piercing blue eyes that were constantly in motion and analyzing everything he saw. But while he could look at any man and instantly assess the threat he presented, the Norwegian had no such ability with the fairer sex. After a string of weddings, affairs, and divorces, he found himself deep in debt, so he started pulling private security jobs in combat zones, where the pay was five times higher than he’d been earning working for his country. Yaxaas promised him double that.
The second hire was the Pole. He’d spent eight years as a member of the Polish Jednostka Wojskowa Formoza, serving four tours in Afghanistan, where he’d earned a reputation for being highly accurate with a rifle but too quick on the trigger. He’d once nearly started an international incident when he killed several noncombatants in pursuit of a high-value target. The JWF had discharged him for it, but he was exactly the type of man Yaxaas was looking for.
The rest of the warlord’s men had similar stories and were hired from the Kenyan Special Boat Unit, the Turkish Maroon Berets, the Italian Gruppo Operativo Incursori, and the South African 4 Special Forces Regiment. Yaxaas added several Somalis as well, men who’d proven themselves in the early years of piracy and could learn from, and support, the foreigners.
But there could be no learning on the job if the warlord’s plan was going to work. As always, secrecy was paramount. There could be no outside knowledge of the team, much less its tactics. The men trained for months before their first mission. Selection was conducted. Men who washed out of the top-tier boarding teams were recycled into boat crews or shore teams. Those who still couldn’t find a home simply disappeared.
Forever.
But manpower was only half the battle. To succeed, the next generation of pirates had needed modern training and weapons. And while most of the objects of their desire were available on the black market, in other cases they’d simply adapted the military tactics they’d learned to dual-use civilian equipment. The goal had never been to match the world’s navies but merely to leapfrog the shipping industry’s security measures—to hit the ships so hard and so fast that the world would never learn how the pirates had done it. The world’s navies couldn’t respond to a threat they didn’t unders
tand.
* * *
—
NACAY UNROLLED A waterproof map and a paper schematic of the ship atop a large folding table, scrounging rocks from the camp building’s dirt floor to hold down the corners.
Obtaining the plans for the Saudi tanker had not been difficult.
It was one of a series from a South Korean shipyard, and Nacay had asked a contact in the shipping industry to acquire the drawings for one of the sister ships under the pretext of potentially purchasing it. The ship broker had initially demurred, until two days later, when he’d received a dozen photographs of his eight-year-old daughter in the mail. The pictures had been taken at her school while she’d been studying, outside her home while she’d been playing, and from the foot of her bed while she’d been sleeping.
They received the plans the next day.
“Why are we hitting this piece of junk?” the Turk said as he examined the plans. The Saudi ship was about twice the age and half the size of their recent prizes.
Nacay glared at the Turk, and there was no further discussion of the topic.
“The target will be exiting the Persian Gulf in six days,” Nacay continued. “We’ll head east while it heads south, and the intercept point will be here, around 13 north latitude and 72 east longitude, on the core route from the Strait of Hormuz to the Strait of Malacca.”
Nacay drew a red circle on the surface of a map.
“Will we be tracking her on AIS?” asked the Kenyan.
“I doubt she’ll be transmitting,” said Nacay.
A ship’s automatic identification system was meant to improve safety at sea by transmitting a vessel’s name, type, and location to everyone monitoring the system, but participation was voluntary and, not surprisingly, smugglers and pirates were not heavy users. It was another data point that told the men this wouldn’t be a normal takedown.
“We’ll set a picket line across the shipping lane here.” Nacay marked an area just north of the 13th parallel. “The mothership will set up in the middle, Team One will be three miles to the east, and Team Two will be three miles to the west. We’ll move south at three to five knots, each varying speed so it doesn’t look as if we’re traveling together, and wait for the target to pass.”
Yaxaas handed a printout of the ship’s plans to the man with the bandoliers. “Set it up.”
He left the building and began directing the camp workers. Men paced off distances and marked lines in the sand. They placed movable walls around the interior—some no more than bedsheets on wooden frames, while others were plywood panels with makeshift hatches and doors, but they were all placed precisely according to the ship’s plans, so the boarding team would know exactly what to expect from the moment they hauled themselves over the sides of the Amjad and onto her deck.
When the deck level was complete, the workers moved to another section of camp and set up the superstructure, the engine room, and the ship’s control rooms, where the oil was pumped and monitored.
Other support personnel set up the assaulters’ gear inside the camp mess hall. Each man used the same core kit, in the same configuration, to ensure interoperability. The rifles were short-barreled AKS-74Us, the pistols were Glock 17s, and the body armor was made from Dyneema, a synthetic fabric that could stop bullets and was buoyant enough to act as a life preserver.
The boarding team suited up in the mess hall once Nacay had finished his briefing and, half an hour later, they were back outside under the relentless sun and brilliant blue sky. The boat captain and assaulters from Team One were on the port side of the mockup while their counterparts from Team Two were on the starboard side.
Nacay stood atop a platform on the camp’s northern wall, from which he could see the entire exercise. He opened his laptop, ran through a quick radio check, and gave the order to begin.
The clock started ticking.
The boarding team simulated the climb up the ship’s sides and stepped over the lines drawn in the dirt. They were on deck. Nacay had stationed camp staff throughout the mockup, acting as the ship’s officers, crew, and security personnel. All of the weapons were loaded with blank cartridges, but the sound of gunfire and the sight of a dozen highly trained naval commandos wielding rifles was real enough to get everyone’s adrenaline pumping. Nacay started calling out random equipment malfunctions and other surprises—heavy seas on the port side, a jammed rifle, a locked door—but the team kept pushing. They pushed through the failures, they pushed through the choke points, they pushed through the opposition.
The assault team performed well, completing their first run-through in seventeen minutes and thirty-one seconds, with two assaulters suffering simulated non-life-threatening injuries. Nacay moved the “defenders” to different parts of the model, and ran it again.
By the fifteenth repetition, the pirates flowed through the target in thirteen minutes and forty-seven seconds and not a single defender got off a shot.
The assault team was ready.
FORTY-TWO
THE HELICOPTER LIFTED into the air over Mogadishu as the pilot pulled back on the collective.
Kenyan by birth, he had been trained by his country’s Defence Forces to fly Russian Mi-17 transport helicopters. The twin-turbine Mi-17 was large and capable, but frequently down for maintenance due to a shortage of spare parts. With a low mission capability rate, the pilot’s flying time suffered, and he put in a request to transition to the smaller Hughes OH-6.
It felt like a sports car compared to the lumbering Mi-17.
And the pilot treated it like one—routinely flying between trees at high speed, occasionally doing aerial loops, and once, just for fun, landing on the bed of an unsuspecting flatbed truck as it drove down a highway at fifty miles per hour.
It was the last stunt that had gotten him discharged—the Kenyan military was not awash in excess funding and the pilot’s superior officer didn’t want to have to one day tell his commander that they’d lost a precious rotorcraft while one of his men had been hotdogging.
But the skill and the audacity of the stunt had also gotten the pilot his current job.
The MD 520 he flew for Yaxaas was almost identical to the OH-6, except the new helicopter lacked a tail rotor, instead using high-velocity air to control its heading. Several manufacturers had experimented with the unusual design, but it added weight and maintenance expense and had remained a niche segment of the market. But it was an important niche that had one significant advantage over its tail-rotor-equipped brethren. It was quieter.
Much quieter.
* * *
—
WITH THE HELICOPTER’S doors removed and its main rotor spinning overhead, the air blowing through its cabin was a welcome change on the ninety-seven-degree day. The pilot flew northeast along the sandy coastline for fifteen miles until they reached a deserted stretch of land and abruptly turned out to sea.
Nacay was in his usual seat to the pilot’s left, and he entered a set of coordinates into the GPS as the helo accelerated to 125 knots. The ocean blurred beneath them as the helicopter flew just fifty feet above the surface. The pilot climbed to three hundred feet once they were ten miles offshore and out of sight of land.
Forty minutes later, he backed off the cyclic and slowed the aircraft.
“Mothership in sight,” he said over the intercom.
It was an unremarkable general cargo vessel, one hundred thirty feet long, with a white pilothouse above her stern and a crane mounted amidships. She could make fourteen knots when she left the shipyard twenty years earlier, but Yaxaas had repowered her when he’d bought her. With a new engine, a new shaft, and a new propeller, she could now do twenty-one knots—a significant advantage when closing on unsuspecting adversaries.
She was named the Triomphe and flew the flag of France; except when she was called the Bonassola, out of Genoa, Italy; or known as the Miro, registered i
n the Marshall Islands. Even the color of her hull changed frequently, often after every mission. Sometimes she berthed in the Port of Mogadishu but was just as often tied up farther south in Kismaayo. There were usually three forty-foot containers on her deck, except when there were six.
The thirty-two men on board had boarded solo or in pairs, staggered over a period of five hours to mask their number. The mothership itself required only a crew of six, but each of the two semisubmersibles carried six assaulters and a boat crew of four, plus two ground crew and four snipers for the helicopter. Another container in the hold had been fashioned into a bunkhouse. It wasn’t luxurious, but it had lights and air conditioning, and most importantly, it could be sealed and locked if the ship was ever boarded and inspected by naval forces.
The Turk and the Italian were on deck at the bow, smoking cigarettes and watching a pod of dolphins swim alongside when the helicopter landed.
Ten minutes after the helo powered down, the ground crew had folded its rotors and wheeled the entire bird inside one of the containers on deck—to hide it from prying eyes, and to prepare it for attack.
They had four days.
FORTY-THREE
IT WAS NEARLY time.
Boat-1 had been motoring south for almost four hours. For most of its time afloat, the thirty-eight-foot assault craft looked like a go-fast Cigarette boat, but it was actually a semisubmersible, a relatively new class of vessel that was capable of sealing itself up tight, filling ballast tanks with seawater, and moving slowly through the ocean with no more than eighteen inches—just enough for the windshield and a few instruments—riding above the waves.
She was invisible to the human eye and to radar.
Boat-1 was running at three knots with its navigation lights off and its ballast tanks full when the former Polish commando spoke up. It was just past 02:00 hours and he was inside the sealed hull, looking through a small periscope.
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