Black Flag

by David Ricciardi

  Specifically, his.

  He inspected the safety gear that Yaxaas’s men had procured: Soviet-era gas masks, a scuba tank and regulator, latex examination gloves, spray bottles, and several other well-intentioned but wholly inadequate items for handling a potentially weaponized pathogen.

  But as it was with the rest of his assignment, the doctor did not have a choice. He donned a pair of gloves and a gas mask with an expired canister and slowly removed the first vial from the container’s foam padding.

  The test subjects had been divided into three sets based on the method of transmission. It was a small sample size, but the doctor suspected he already knew the outcome of the tests and had chosen to waste as few lives as possible.

  First up were The Breathers. Using an eyedropper, the doctor transferred a single drop of the virus to a plastic spray bottle and mixed it with several milliliters of water. He approached each individual and misted them in the face. The captives were not naïve. None of them saw the holding pens, gas masks, and armed guards as good omens, but when faced with a spray bottle or an AK-47, the decision at the time seemed obvious.

  In time, it would seem much less so.

  The next group were The Touchers. The doctor used a cotton swab to apply a small amount of the virus to the skin of the test subjects. Cutaneous transmission was less common for bacterial infections, but not unheard of, and Yaxaas had insisted upon exploring the possibility.

  Last were The Drinkers. Each was given a bottle of water mixed with a drop of the virus. The older man in the pen took his bottle from the doctor and threw it back at him without taking a sip.

  The man with the bandoliers was standing outside. He didn’t have gloves or a gas mask, but he did have a Browning Hi-Power pistol strapped to his hip. He approached the man who’d refused to drink, shot him once in the gut, and left him in the dirt, howling in pain.

  The others finished their water.

  * * *

  —

  THE SUBJECTS WERE given food and clean water to drink—probably more than they’d had in a week outside the camp—but despite Muslim rules of modesty, bodily functions were taken care of inside the pens for all to see.

  While still displeased with his task, the doctor attempted to be scientific about the results. He observed when the subjects became symptomatic and noted that there was little difference attributable to age or gender.

  Six hours from contact, most of The Touchers had developed visible rashes. For whatever reason the young women displayed symptoms more quickly than the others, but the difference would prove tragically insignificant before the day was out.

  Twelve hours after inhaling the virus, each of The Breathers had developed a cough. Short and raspy at first, the coughs rapidly evolved into painful and persistent deep-chest spasms that contained blood and other, less easily identified bodily fluids. The older man fell to the ground and curled into the fetal position.

  Slowest to react were The Drinkers. Most took twenty-four hours before they began to display symptoms. What began as severe abdominal pain soon gave way to vomiting, diarrhea, and intestinal bleeding, leading the physician to suspect some sort of hybridized hemorrhagic fever, but he never had a chance to confirm his suspicions in a lab, because within forty-eight hours, all of the subjects were dead, including the doctor.

  But while the test subjects had died from the effects of the biological weapon, the physician had succumbed to a more immediate fate—a bullet to the back of his head.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  TWO HUNDRED MILES to the east, the town of Afgooye was situated in the Shebelle River basin. For centuries, the fertile land had attracted the farmers and herders that were the backbone of the nation’s economy. More recently, Afgooye had also become a refuge for those who’d lost their homes, families, or livelihoods because of famine or the civil war. While Somalia had traditionally been a large recipient of foreign assistance, donors tightened their purse strings over the years as they watched most of the aid be siphoned off by a combination of warlords, corrupt politicians, and al-Shabaab. Maybe 10 percent of it actually made it to the people in need.

  Tens of thousands of these internally displaced persons were forced to travel, often on foot, along the lonely road west from Mogadishu, in search of a place where they could live in peace and escape the ravages of war.

  Makeshift tents, made from plastic tarps and cotton blankets and anything else that might block the sun, had sprung up in fields, along dirt roads, and wherever else the refugees thought they might be able to grow some food. Men with sunken chests and distended bellies hobbled through the Afgooye camp. Women whose depleted bodies had no milk to give cradled their infant children in their arms, watching them suffer, feeling them die, and enduring pain only a mother can know.

  Other children, clad in dusty clothes, ambled barefoot through the camp, begging for food from people who had none. A man with hollow cheeks and ribs that nearly burst through his skin lay in a wooden wheelbarrow, waiting to die.

  In the eastern section of camp was a well.

  It was the main source of drinking water for a quarter of the camp’s sixteen thousand inhabitants. Though it was pumped by hand and of questionable purity, after two years of drought the residents were grateful for anything that might sustain life for just one more day. Nearly a hundred men, women, and children stood in line, buckets in hand, awaiting their turn at the well.

  But dehydration and starvation were not the only dangers faced by the camp’s inhabitants.

  Ninety-five percent of Somalia’s population belonged to one of the country’s six noble clans, and Afgooye had been Hawiye clan territory since the time of Samaale’s sons, so no one expected anything good to happen when two olive-drab pickup trucks filled with Darood gunmen arrived at midday. They were seated on plywood benches with their legs hanging over the sides and rifles held across their chests.

  Mixing between most clans was strongly discouraged and intermarriage was absolutely forbidden, with conservative elements often bestowing beatings or death upon newlyweds in lieu of gifts.

  Still, one of the men in the Hawiye camp had taken a Darood bride when they were living in Mogadishu, where anonymity came more easily and clan ties were easier to obscure, but the bride’s eldest brother, a disfigured Darood enforcer named Masaska, had always suspected that something was amiss with her new husband. When the building housing their ground-floor shop and second-story apartment was destroyed a few months earlier by an al-Shabaab truck bomb, their newfound poverty forced husband and wife to relocate to a camp.

  The Hawiye camp.

  Masaska and his Darood militiamen jumped down from their pickups, stripped the well’s two security officers of their weapons, and tore the facility apart—wrecking the shanties and terrorizing the refugees until they found his sister and her husband, cowering in their tent.

  Made from bamboo stalks that had been lashed together, then covered with blankets and a tarp, the tent was little more than a sun shade. The brother knocked it down in less than a minute.

  With his own sister begging for mercy at gunpoint, he forced the offending couple to lie in the wreckage of the tent. The gunmen wrapped them in the tarp and blankets and carried them on their shoulders, like a rolled-up carpet, toward the pickup trucks.

  But the Darood did not go to the vehicles. They stopped at the well, and the brother fired a long burst from his rifle over the heads of those queued up for water.

  The crowd scattered.

  The henchman advanced toward the well with the screaming couple still wrapped in the blankets. A man ran to them and fell to his knees, pleading for mercy.

  Masaska shot him in the face, as casually as he might check the time on a wristwatch, then pointed to the well.

  The Darood goons dumped the couple into the well.

  They fell thirty feet to the bottom, screaming as they tumbled agains
t its rock walls.

  The brother looked down the shaft and saw movement at the bottom—the couple thrashing in the waist-high water. His sister yelled to him in tears, begging for mercy.

  He pointed his AK-47 down the well and squeezed the trigger. The rifle jerked wildly in his hands as he emptied the magazine.

  The yelling stopped.

  The brother and his henchmen returned to their trucks and sped from the camp, laughing as they struck and killed a pedestrian who’d been too weak and slow to get out of the way.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  YAXAAS RETURNED TO his compound in Mogadishu as soon as the tests were completed. Badeed’s intelligence operation had eyes and ears everywhere, and the Hawiye warlord had used past absences as opportunities to stir up trouble.

  He didn’t realize that the balance of power was about to change.

  “We could kill hundreds of Hawiye,” Nacay said, “maybe thousands.”

  Father and son were in Yaxaas’s office with the French doors open to the courtyard. Below them, Little Yaxaas was resting motionless on the banks of the pond with his enormous mouth open to cool his body. Though towering cumulus clouds had blown in from the sea over the past few days, no rain had come.

  “Killing Badeed will be a technical challenge,” said Yaxaas. “He is a wise fool.”

  “So we target their leadership,” said Nacay, “then start a rumor of a mystical Sufi curse brought on by Badeed’s evil actions. Once the people closest to him start dying mysteriously, the rest of the Hawiye will seal him in one of his own barrels and throw him into the sea.”

  “‘The Shark Plague,’” mused Yaxaas. Victory was close. He could feel it. He needed only to develop the delivery system he envisioned.

  He’d just begun to explain it when his mobile phone rang.

  “It’s the American.”

  * * *

  —

  JAKE ENDED THE call. “He won’t discuss it over the phone.”

  “Meeting in person is a bad idea,” said Pickens. The big man had been pacing around the safe house since Jake had come up with his plan.

  “Concur,” said Clap. “It could be an ambush.”

  “And it could be that Yaxaas has no idea what he has,” said Jake. “If we can buy the weapon crates back from him before they’re opened, he might play ball.”

  “He sure as hell won’t give them up if he learns he’s got a weapon of mass destruction in there,” said Pickens.

  “Ignoring the danger isn’t going to make it go away,” Jake said. “Bioweapons are engineered to be highly contagious and resistant to treatment. If enough people are infected before they become symptomatic, it could kill half of Mogadishu inside a few months—call it a million people. In a year it could decimate the entire Horn of Africa. It has to be destroyed.”

  “We’ll support you—whatever you decide,” said Clap, “but let us put together a tactical plan that makes sense. We choose the time. We choose the place.”

  The Ground Branch team members were mostly special-ops combat veterans in their forties and had all been working with unsavory types a lot longer than Jake.

  “Listen, brother,” said Pickens, “you’ve got to trust me on this. Yaxaas is not going to negotiate. He’s going to kill you.”

  “Not if we kill him first,” said Jake.

  “Graves won’t like that,” said Pickens.

  “Fuck Graves,” said Clap. “He’s lost sight of why we’re here.”

  “But he’s still our lawful authority,” Pickens said.

  “Is Black Flag lawful?” said Clap.

  “Probably,” said Jake. “We’re not directly involved with piracy.”

  “But we’re perpetuating it,” said one of the other Ground Branch men. “What was Dante’s line? ‘The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain neutrality in times of moral crisis.’”

  “Look, if it’s not Yaxaas, it’ll be somebody else,” said Pickens. The discussion was getting heated and he was pacing around the room again.

  “Are we going along with Graves because it’s the right thing to do or because it’s the path of least resistance?” Jake said.

  There wasn’t a man in the room who thought Graves was doing the right thing.

  “OK,” said Pickens, “but what can we do about it? Yaxaas has the entire clan militia behind him.”

  “I don’t think there are many problems that the men in this room can’t solve with a little cunning and a lot of force,” Jake said.

  Heads nodded.

  “This is outside our orders,” Clap said, “so I can’t speak for the men on my team, but I’m in.”

  The other Ground Branch men nodded without hesitation.

  “All right,” said Pickens. “I’m in too.”

  It was unanimous.

  Jake looked around the room. He was a solo operator, and a damn good one, but it felt good to be part of a team again.

  “So what’s the plan?” said Pickens.

  “We snatch him and force him to trade the weapon for his life.”

  “Or call our bluff,” said Pickens.

  “He’s a megalomaniac, not a martyr.”

  “Agreed,” said Clap. “Saving his own ass will always be his primary objective.”

  The tension left the room as everyone coalesced around the new plan. Jake looked over at Clap.

  “There’s one thing I’ve been meaning to ask you . . . What kind of name is ‘Clap’? Is it short for something? A nickname? What’s the story?”

  Clap rolled his eyes. The rest of the guys on his team snickered.

  “It’s a nickname—a gift from the cadre at my operator training course. My initials are V.D.”

  Pickens broke into a wide grin.

  “You could be Somali with a nickname like that,” said Jake.

  “So . . . about Yaxaas,” Clap said, eager to steer the conversation elsewhere.

  “Right. I’d like you to plan the operation,” Jake said. “We’ll probably be outmanned and your team has ten times the experience I do.”

  Clap nodded. The real number was probably closer to a thousand times, but at least Jake knew what he didn’t know. That awareness would improve their odds of coming out of this thing alive.

  “Well,” said Clap, “the first thing we’ll need to do is get him out in the open.”

  FIFTY-SIX

  THE BAKAARA MARKET looked like an enormous maze that had been packed with people. Men in long pants and dress shirts and women in brightly colored hijabs walked haphazardly across the dusty ground and between the densely packed collection of outdoor stalls. Nearly everything that was for sale in Mogadishu was available within its borders, and all of it would be taken home in the back of a three-wheeled Bajaj.

  Many stalls were little more than an umbrella, a man in a plastic chair, and a few ceramic pots or maybe a box of vegetables that had escaped the drought. The more established storefronts had sun-bleached tarps strung across wooden frames. One vendor served nothing but clay bowls filled with rice while the butcher next to him left rare and expensive slabs of raw beef hanging from a tree branch in the afternoon heat and swarming with flies.

  Yaxaas had agreed to meet at the market, but only in the Abdalla Shideeye section. It was a black market within the Bakaara—a place to acquire counterfeit items such as identity cards and passports, or stolen items, such as rifles and RPGs.

  Clap and the rest of the Ground Branch team arrived early to conduct pre-mission reconnaissance and run a communications check. Everyone including Jake was wearing a covert microphone and earpiece. The team had two vehicles parked nearby and all the gear they’d need for the snatch: a fast-acting sedative, weapons, flash-bangs, restraints, and even a disguise for Yaxaas if it became necessary to get him through a checkpoint.

  The Bakaara Market was a centra
l fixture of Mogadishu life and had attracted several IED attacks over the years. Bombs had been hidden in everything from fire extinguishers, toolboxes, and flashlights to cars and trucks. The Ground Branch team quickly identified several men as potential threats, but it was impossible to know if they were terrorists, undercover guards employed by the market, or Yaxaas’s goons.

  It was midday, and the heat was oppressive in the congested bazaar. A pregnant woman walked by, sweating profusely under her hijab and dragging her purchases behind her in a canvas sack. A skinny old man passed by in the opposite direction, leading an even skinnier mule to what could only be its grave.

  Jake pretended to browse the stalls while he waited for the warlord. Clap and half the team were positioned across the small square, about a hundred feet away, with compact submachine guns hidden inside their loose shirts and their vehicle parked behind a nearby shop. The rest of the team was parked a block away and shadowing Jake in a loose formation. The dense crowd complicated everything.

  Jake passed a stall selling canvas bags and approached a row of shops selling fabrics. He spoke into the microphone hidden in his shirt collar as Yaxaas emerged from one of the shops, surrounded by half a dozen armed men.

  “Look alive, ladies,” said Jake.

  “Eyes on target,” Clap responded.

  The other Ground Branch operatives checked in as well, but direct lines of sight to the warlord were broken up by the throngs of people, and Yaxaas’s own security would make the job more challenging.

  “You were supposed to sink the ship and its cargo,” said Jake.

  “Two of my men died and four more were injured. Consider it compensation.”

  “Those weren’t the terms of our deal.”

  “Deal?” Yaxaas scoffed. “We had no deal. There is give-and-take in a deal. You have given me nothing, so I have taken my due.”