“This could be our boy—starboard quarter, bearing 165 degrees.”
The boat commander looked with his own gyro-stabilized scope.
“That’s him. Call the boss.”
The boat’s communications man sent a message to Nacay over the encrypted radio. Thirty seconds later, a siren wailed over the mothership’s public address system. The entire ship was on alert-three status, meaning that every man had to be at his battle station within three minutes of the siren—but most were ready in one.
Four crewmen rolled the helicopter out of its container and began unfolding its rotors while two others launched a small commercial drone off the bow. The eight-engine drone had originally been designed for the movie industry and was capable of flying at sixty miles per hour, carrying a heavy camera, and an hour’s worth of flight time—all while remaining too small to be detected by a ship’s radar.
“Drone is up, good feed,” said the drone pilot over the radio. “Objective coming into view.”
Nacay watched on his laptop as an image of the ship emerged from the darkness. It was roughly seven hundred feet long and a hundred feet wide, a “coastal” tanker, small by tanker standards but perfect for smuggling oil into a sanctioned country. Though it was the type of ship they’d been told to expect, and where they’d been told to expect it, the route between the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca was the prime oil shipping route to Asia, and there were hundreds of similar ships afloat.
They had to be sure they had the right one.
“Drone, show me the stern,” Nacay said over the radio.
The target ship was moving at a steady fifteen knots as he read its name using the drone’s night vision camera.
Amjad.
“Target confirmed,” he said. “Drone, switch to thermal and fly a low orbit.”
The matte black drone descended to a hundred feet above the surface and flew a racetrack pattern around the tanker from a quarter mile away. The lower altitude and heat-sensing thermal camera would reveal any crewmembers who’d been obscured from overhead surveillance by a roof or other structure.
“We’ve got a single lookout on the bow, one on starboard quarter and one on port quarter,” said the drone pilot. “No sign of weapons.”
“Concur, three personnel on deck,” said Nacay. “Boat-1, the forward lookout is yours. Air-1, you have two targets, one on port quarter and one on starboard quarter.”
“Boat-1 has the forward lookout,” confirmed the team leader.
“Air-1, two targets, roger,” confirmed the pilot. He was already in his seat with the rotors turning and the Allison turboshaft engine warming up. Nacay was strapped in next to him as they waited on deck.
They let the tanker pass.
“All teams, stand by for launch orders,” said Nacay once the tanker was two miles in front of them. He entered positions, headings, and speeds for the target and the other vessels into a worksheet on his laptop.
“Air-1, launch on my mark . . . Boat-1, launch nine-one seconds from my mark . . . Boat-2, launch three-five seconds from my mark . . . 3-2-1, MARK.”
The helo lifted from the deck with its lights off and dove for the wavetops to avoid being silhouetted against the moon and stars as it flew toward the tanker. The Amjad was making fourteen knots. On its radar, moving at twenty-five knots on a parallel course, the helo would appear to be just another ship.
“Activating EW,” said the helicopter pilot.
Mounted under the aircraft’s fuselage was a Russian electronic-warfare pod that had been purchased from Cawar the arms dealer sixteen months earlier for ninety thousand euros. It immediately jammed the tanker’s radios, GPS, and satellite communications, cutting it off from the outside world. The pirates’ radios operated on a short-range, high-frequency band that was outside the jammer’s capabilities.
The helicopter tilted its rotor forward and accelerated to one hundred knots.
The high-capacity pumps aboard the two semisubmersibles began emptying their ballast tanks, raising them out of the water and turning them into speedboats. Boat-2 accelerated on schedule and was soon planing over the sea at forty knots, her pilot using an inertial navigation system and a gimballed thermal camera to guide her onto the target.
Fifty-six seconds later, Boat-2’s pilot hit the throttles and closed in from the opposite side.
Between the tanker’s enormous engine, the sea churning along the hull, and the noise of the wind, the deck of the ship was a noisy place, but the sound of an approaching helicopter, even the quiet MD 520, was impossible to conceal.
As the first faint image of the port-quarter lookout appeared in the snipers’ sights, they could see the man searching for the source of the noise, scanning the sea with binoculars, or possibly a night scope of his own.
But it didn’t matter.
Each of the airborne marksmen was equipped with a Polish SKW semiautomatic sniper rifle and FLIR thermal weapon sight.
It was an incredibly difficult shot, shooting from one moving platform to another, and the right-side snipers acquired their target and adjusted for shifts in trajectory and drag inherent in firing from a moving helicopter. They also adjusted their aim down slightly, to compensate for the fact that the clockwise-spinning bullets would generate additional lift as the airflow from the moving helicopter hit them from the left.
They fired at the same time and the sentry went down with two rounds in his chest.
The helo flew in an arc behind the ship’s stern until the other lookout came into view. This time the left-side snipers fired, aiming slightly higher to compensate for the clockwise spinning bullets’ tendency to bite into the air and pull themselves down.
One of the shooters missed.
But the second sniper caught the sailor in the edge of his hip. The round had knocked the man to his knees, but he staggered to his feet behind the ship’s railing.
Both marksmen fired a second time.
Two hits, and the crewman didn’t get up.
From first to final shot, the entire engagement had taken eleven seconds. The helo turned away and took up station half a mile behind the tanker, where the Amjad’s crew was less likely to notice it, but its electronic-warfare equipment would still isolate the ship.
The semisubmersibles converged on opposite sides of the tanker. On board Boat-1, the Turk shouldered a pneumatic cannon and fired a grappling hook over the ship’s gunwale. Standing next to him, the Italian was already in a climbing harness and hooked into the line. He used an electrically powered ascender to haul him up the sixty-foot side of the tanker in just five seconds. He attached two webbed climbing ladders to the railing and dropped them into Boat-1 so the rest of the team could climb aboard.
The first two men over the rail linked up and went forward.
It was four hundred feet to the bow. The pirates advanced steadily, their rifles up, their rubber-soled boots silent as they stayed in the shadows of the thick cargo pipes that ran the length of the ship.
The remaining lookout was on the starboard bow, about twenty feet back from the front of the ship. It was a warm night, and he was leaning against the railing, with his arms folded over the side. With the ship’s bow wake churning steadily below him, he hadn’t heard the helicopter or the suppressed gunshots.
The first pirate aimed for the center of the man’s back, but his teammate waved him off. He was concerned the body might tumble forward and fall overboard, and the pirate didn’t want to risk that a dead crewman with bullet holes in his back might be spotted floating in a busy shipping lane.
The steady churn of the ship slicing through the ocean grew louder as the second pirate slung his rifle behind his back and silently approached the bow. With his left hand, he reached around the sentry and grabbed the man’s chin. With his right hand, the pirate drew a nine-inch knife across the man’s throat and hauled him backward ont
o the deck.
Ten and a half minutes later, the last living member of the Amjad’s crew took his final breath, and the bodies were transferred to the ship’s walk-in freezer. Once the oil was offloaded, the ship would be scuttled and the crew would undertake their final voyage—to the bottom of the Java Trench, twenty-four thousand feet deep in the waters off Indonesia.
FORTY-FOUR
FIVE DAYS HAD passed since the Amjad disappeared.
Jake and Pickens drove the beige Daihatsu through the Hamar Weyne district of Mogadishu. Pickens was behind the wheel, navigating down a dusty street where children in ragged clothes lived in the ruins of crumbling buildings. Plastic water bottles lined with yellow glue littered the ground. With no food, the homeless kids sniffed the glue to get high, to sleep at night, and to escape the hell their lives had become. Fights among the street children were common, with even minor injuries occasionally leading to fatalities because of severely compromised immune systems and a lack of medical care.
The Port of Mogadishu came into view as Pickens turned west on London Road. A pair of rusty tramp freighters and a small container ship were tied up at the quay and a few puffy cumulus clouds floated out over the ocean—but they were too light and too distant to bring the life-giving rain the country so desperately needed.
Jake opened the glove compartment and spotted the Glock 19 he’d stashed there when he’d arrived in-country. As they stopped in front of a building with a distinctive, red-tiled roof, Jake removed the pistol and held it low at his side, down between the seats.
Clap and the Ground Branch team pulled in behind them. A blue SUV with tinted windows was waiting across the street.
A man exited the car holding a package of some sort. He crossed the road and held out a brown paper envelope.
“Open it,” Jake said. He visualized putting two quick rounds between the man’s eyes.
The man gave a toothy grin full of perfect white teeth and tore off the top.
“No bomb,” he said.
Inside were a few papers and maybe twenty photographs.
* * *
—
THEY VIDEOCONFERENCED GRAVES once they were back at the safe house.
“The Amjad is no more,” Jake said.
“Where is it now?” asked Graves.
Jake held a photograph up to his laptop’s camera. It was taken at night, with a time and date stamp, showing a ship called the Al Marzoqah sinking beneath the waves.
“They changed the name and scuttled it,” said Jake.
“Judging by the date, it looks as if they waited a few days,” Graves said.
“I’m sure they offloaded the oil before they sank it.”
“Excellent,” said Graves.
Jake was about to point out that they’d also sent twenty men to their deaths and put millions of dollars in a warlord’s pocket, but his position on the issue was already well known.
As if reading his mind, Graves said, “Better Yaxaas than the North Koreans. Maybe it will keep him docile for a while—the next mission isn’t going to be so lucrative.”
“What next?” said Jake.
“We’re monitoring a commercial fishing boat, allegedly working the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, but in reality, it’s headed for Sudan to supply the government with Iranian weapons.”
“I thought the new government had stopped supporting these corrupt regimes,” said Pickens.
“They have, John, and that’s why we need a guy like Yaxaas. When the new president and PM took over, they had the support of the people and the regular army, but not the Revolutionary Guards. The IRGC under General Shirizani is still just as corrupt and as insidious as it ever was.”
“And just about the only source of hard currency they have is smuggling weapons,” Jake added, seeing Graves’s plan.
“That transfer is in direct contravention of at least two UN sanctions,” said Ted. “I’m sure half a dozen nations would leap at the chance to stop that ship, but that would embarrass the new leaders of Iran, who we want to succeed. Our issue is with the IRGC, not the civilian government.”
“It’s just like the Saudi oil,” said Jake. “We’re trying to force a rift between Iran and Sudan.”
“Exactly,” said Graves. “When those weapons don’t arrive, the Sudanese are going to be pissed because they’ve already promised them to the Janjaweed militia, who needs them to slaughter more non-Arabs in western Sudan, but the IRGC is going to say that the ship left on time and should be there. Maybe the Sudanese security services will believe the Iranians, but it’s more likely they won’t. The IRGC is going to expect Sudan to pay for a second shipment while the Sudanese are thinking they’ve been ripped off once and aren’t going to fall for it a second time. There aren’t too many countries that can supply what Sudan wants, and if we can sabotage their relationship with the IRGC, we’ll save thousands of lives.”
“I get realpolitik,” said Jake, “and I’m all for stopping that ship. I just think there has to be a better option than Yaxaas.”
“Jake, there have been alliances of necessity since there were three cavemen. Do you think Roosevelt and Churchill linked up with Stalin thinking they were taking the moral high road? How about your work with the Saudis last year? Do you keep in touch with the king—maybe get together around the holidays and behead a few dissidents? Of course not, but you did it because it prevented a war. Sinking this ship is going to fracture the relationship between two bad actors and put a shipment of weapons at the bottom of the sea. Allowing Yaxaas to steal a few tankers full of oil might save a hundred thousand lives in Darfur.”
“We could sink it with an aircraft.”
“We could, but then we wouldn’t know if we actually eliminated the weapons. Yaxaas’s men need to photograph the ship and the cargo before they send it to the bottom—just like the Amjad.”
“Look, Ted, using Yaxaas to stop a shipload of oil is one thing, but a cargo of weapons is a different story. We can’t trust this man.”
“The IRGC is trying to destabilize a continent, evade UN sanctions, and smuggle weapons to the government that committed the largest genocide of the twenty-first century. Working with Yaxaas may not be a great option, but it’s the best one we’ve got.”
FORTY-FIVE
A WAKE OF DUST followed the small convoy as it sped through the cramped streets of Mogadishu. Two pickup trucks of gunmen were escorting Yaxaas’s armored Range Rover, and a man in the back of the lead pickup fired a long burst into the air from his AK-47 as the three vehicles approached a busy intersection.
The other traffic yielded.
The warlord’s motorcade continued on for several more blocks before turning onto a quiet side street and stopping at the end of the dead-end road. Yaxaas’s gunmen had dismounted their pickups and were patrolling the area on foot when Jake approached in the maroon Toyota Surf. Clap and the Ground Branch team were a car length behind him.
The sun was overhead as Jake stopped alongside the Range Rover and lowered his window. There were a few clouds offshore and a light breeze blowing in from the sea.
“We have another assignment for you,” he said.
“This time you pay me. I could have made twice as much on my original job.”
“Maybe you’d like to trade places with the crew,” said Jake. “It could be arranged.”
“I’m not like you, American. I do not fear death.”
“No one is Somalia is afraid of death because people like you have made it a living hell,” Jake said. “Besides, death would be the easy way out for you. We prefer to grab you out of your bed in the middle of the night and lock you in a six-by-six-foot room where the walls are concrete, the ceiling is concrete, and the floors are concrete. There’s no day, no night, no sound, and certainly no human contact. Think about that. You’d never see another living thing as long as you live—not even a fuc
king plant. Most people start to lose their minds after a few days or maybe weeks, but if you cross us, you’ll have your whole life to enjoy it.”
“The same thing could happen to you,” said the warlord.
“Except ten more will be right behind me, and a hundred more behind them, and they will never, ever give up.”
The warlord scowled.
“What is this next job?” he said.
“Two days from today,” said Jake, “a commercial fishing boat will pass through the Strait of Hormuz on its way to Sudan.”
Jake handed over a manila envelope. Inside were several photographs of the ship and a detailed route map. All were completely untraceable.
“It’s called the Saviz,” Jake said, “and it can’t make port.”
The warlord thumbed through the package, doing some arithmetic in his head. He would need to get his crew assembled, practice a few dry runs on land, and put the mothership to sea in four days to intercept the fishing boat before it entered the heavily patrolled Gulf of Aden. It could be done.
He nodded once.
“It needs to disappear without a trace,” Jake said. “No distress call, no survivors, no sign of the cargo—just like the tanker.”
The warlord’s face was an expressionless mask. Disappearing a ship and its crew he could handle.
“What is it carrying?”
“Not important,” Jake said. “It’s the ship itself that needs to be taken out.”
Jake raised his window and the Americans pulled away.
* * *
—
THE WARLORD SAT in the armored Range Rover for a few more seconds while his gunmen climbed back into their pickups. It didn’t require a great feat of reason to conclude that the American was lying, and Yaxaas didn’t know precisely what his men would find aboard the fishing boat, but he knew it wouldn’t be fish.
The warlord smiled as the Range Rover pulled away from the curb. He’d finally figured out how the Americans were going to help him defeat Badeed.
Black Flag Page 16
