Black Flag

by David Ricciardi

  Now Jake wanted to see the life drain from the warlord’s face as the man took his last breath.

  Graves called several times, but Jake ignored the calls. More than once it crossed his mind that Ted might have been responsible for the blast that had killed Athena. As Clap had said, car bombs were one of Ted’s specialties. But for the immediate future it almost didn’t matter whether Jake had been disavowed and targeted for elimination or the explosion was merely a coincidence. With two dead on the Ground Branch team, and now Pickens, Graves was going to shut Jake down one way or another—leaving Yaxaas free to unleash a biological weapon on the citizens of Somalia.

  Jake couldn’t let that happen.

  He was going to have to stop it by himself.

  But first he would have to find it.

  He knew Yaxaas was storing the weapon in a camp outside the city, but Somalia was a rural country, with thousands of dirt roads and too many buildings to count. Yet, like a good analyst, Jake broke the job down into manageable pieces and got to work. He began searching online satellite maps using the only other data point he had—according to the men he’d overheard while being held in the warehouse, the location was within walking distance of a river.

  An hour later, he pushed back from the computer and cursed.

  Somalia had a lot of rivers.

  There were two main ones, the Shebelle and the Jubba, and like the Tigris and the Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the basin between the two rivers was the most fertile land around and where most of the population had settled.

  The Shebelle was closer to Mogadishu, but for most of its length it ran through territory that had belonged to the Hawiye for centuries—an unlikely spot for a Darood warlord to build a camp.

  So Jake focused on the Jubba.

  It meandered south from Ethiopia to the Indian Ocean . . . for 550 miles.

  Two hours later, he pushed back from the computer and cursed again.

  There were seventy-one facilities that had the potential to be armed training camps, so Jake eliminated anything that was in a city or town, along a main road, or in the populated areas along the coastline—they would all be too conspicuous.

  Which left thirty-six possible locations.

  Thirty-six places to hide a deadly biological agent.

  Thirty-six possible targets, Jake thought.

  He started ranking them but stopped a third of the way through. It was pointless with the satellite images he’d found online. Jake had been a strategic weapons analyst in his prior life at CIA and had been an acknowledged expert at analyzing overhead imagery, but the low-resolution images he was now using simply didn’t have enough detail to differentiate between them, even for him.

  What he needed was a Predator or some other surveillance aircraft to overfly the sites. Their sophisticated sensors could search for radio-frequency emissions and perform multispectral analysis—searching for heat signatures and other signs of recent human inhabitation, then further explore areas of interest with high-resolution imaging equipment. In different circumstances, Jake could have passed the coordinates over to JSOC or CIA’s aviation wing and have the data collected on all thirty-six sites in a matter of hours.

  It would have been an easy ask if he weren’t persona non grata back at the Agency.

  He was mindlessly staring at the computer screen when it hit him.

  Someone had already done it.

  Jake went to the basement, triple-checking that he’d disabled the self-destruct system before he opened the hatch—just about the only way his day could get any worse was if a dozen blocks of plastic explosive detonated underneath his feet at twenty-six thousand feet per second.

  He wandered through the stacks of weapons, still amazed and dismayed by the firepower Pickens had been able to acquire on the black market. With Pickens dead, Jake would at some point have to contact his superiors at CIA and notify them about the arms cache. He certainly wasn’t going to call Cawar and sell the weapons back to the largest illicit arms trafficker in Africa.

  Back against the far wall was the large gun safe where Pickens had stored sensitive electronics, classified materials, and even batteries. Jake had given his partner a hard time for leaving millions of dollars of weapons loose in the basement and locking up twenty dollars’ worth of batteries, but the big man had protested with his big laugh that he liked to keep them with the electronics for convenience.

  Pickens’s eight years in IED-ravaged Somalia had made him an expert in security, and in explosives. Using detonating cord, a blasting cap, and a thermate grenade, he’d wired a self-destruct system to the safe’s electronic lock. While the grenade wouldn’t explode violently, it would burn at over four thousand degrees Fahrenheit, ensuring that nothing in the safe, or anyone near the safe, would survive if he entered the wrong combination.

  Jake wiped his sweaty hands on his pants and began slowly punching in the code.

  Like most Special Activities officers, Jake had been taught the basics of identifying, building, and defeating various explosive devices by members of the Agency’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal team. He knew that thermate had low sensitivity to external impulses, but he also knew that some of the third-world blasting caps used to ignite the grenades did not, and he didn’t want a drop of sweat or a spark of static electricity to trigger it by accident.

  The safe beeped twice and the lock clicked open. Inside were bricks of U.S. dollars and euros, shelves filled with batteries and electronic gadgets, and two boxes of manila folders.

  Jake found what he was looking for in the second box—a folder containing the overhead reconnaissance images Major Steve had shared at their first meeting. They’d been taken when an Air Force U-28 turboprop and a pair of RQ-1 Predators had searched the region looking for the three trucks with fake Kenya Defence Forces markings.

  Analysts from SOCOM had reviewed the take from the aircraft, including the multispectral and ultra-hi-res images Jake didn’t have access to, and instead of thirty-six facilities, they’d narrowed the list down to two.

  Jake glanced at the two photos and immediately agreed with Pickens’s earlier assessment of the facility outside Jilib. It was a disused commercial farm, dried up and probably abandoned sometime during the drought.

  Jake examined the second image. His partner had dismissed it as an empty livestock farm, based on its stockade walls and location bordering a river near rural Dujuma, but Jake gave it a hard look, and his trained eyes spotted features inconsistent with a cattle ranch that hadn’t been used in years: The fences were solid, high, and in good repair. The dirt roads were well worn in an area otherwise overrun with vegetation. Though it was near a river, there was no pasture or grazing area. It was located in a hilly region, ill-suited to raising cattle.

  As Jake ticked off the list of inconsistencies in his head, he came to the inescapable conclusion that it wasn’t a cattle ranch.

  It was a training camp.

  SEVENTY-ONE

  JAKE SLEPT SOUNDLY that night. For the first time since he’d arrived in Africa, he knew exactly what he needed to do. It was a dangerous plan—somewhere between reckless and suicidal—but he wasn’t living for himself anymore. He was living for Athena and Pickens and the men from the Ground Branch team.

  He was living for the people of Somalia.

  Jake went to Pickens’s bedroom and rummaged through his friend’s personal effects. The top drawer of his dresser was filled with “pocket litter”—generic receipts, business cards, and other miscellany that supported his cover identity. The second drawer contained more pocket litter, but for Pickens’s alternate cover as an arms dealer—a fake passport, rolls of cash held together with rubber bands, and several cell phones—with their passwords written on a sheet of note paper that was taped to the bottom of the drawer.

  CIA security would not be impressed.

  But it was inside a hand-carved wooden
box that Jake found what he was looking for: a picture of Pickens with his ex-wife and their four kids, taken several years ago during happier times back in the States.

  Jake found a pen and wrote a letter to Pickens’s children, telling them of their father’s death. He told them how brave John had been, how he had served his country nobly, and how much he had loved them. The distance, the uncertainty, and the loss were burdens born by the families of intelligence officers and military personnel everywhere. The people at home could never know precisely what their loved ones had been working on or how the final moments of their lives had played out, but Jake wanted Pickens’s family to know that they were always on their father’s mind and in his heart.

  Jake sealed the envelope and sat back from the table.

  He should write a death letter of his own.

  But he had no one to send it to.

  * * *

  —

  HE RETURNED TO his bedroom closet to find a set of camo fatigues. Stacked against the wall was a sniper rifle, more precisely, Clap’s sniper rifle—a semiautomatic Delta Level Defense CT-M110 that could put a .308-caliber round into a man’s eye socket at two hundred yards. It was the same gun Clap had used to take out the bomb-maker in Iraq, and there was a note taped to the massive Nightforce scope that sat atop it.

  With you in spirit.

  Jake sat on his bed and held the rifle for a few minutes while he thought about the risks Clap had taken and the hell he’d gone through to take out that bomb-maker. Going after Yaxaas wouldn’t be any easier.

  Jake donned the fatigues, folded a boonie hat into his pocket, and loaded up a beige Toyota pickup with everything he thought he might need to accomplish his mission. There were so many guesses and estimates in his planning, so many variables in the composition of his adversary, that he needed a lot of options. He needed to be able to change his plans on the fly when something inevitably went wrong.

  He covered all the gear in the truck bed with a canvas tarp and tied it down. Even in war-torn Somalia, the pickup truck’s cargo would raise a few eyebrows. Jake, fully dressed, caught a few hours of shut-eye and was on the road before dawn. He passed swiftly through the deserted streets of Mogadishu, stopping briefly at the British embassy to mail the letter to Pickens’s children, before turning southwest on the coastal road to Dujuma. The entire trip would take eight to ten hours.

  The sunrise was muted by thick cloud cover as Jake drove along the ocean road. A strong easterly wind had been blowing for days, building heavy seas and an endless procession of whitecaps that kept even the ubiquitous small fishing boats onshore—no mean feat in a nation rocked by famine.

  He reviewed his plan as he drove, constantly refining it and planning for contingencies, but there were more unknowns than knowns, and the permutations were endless.

  Jake didn’t fear death, but he did fear failure. He’d used that fear in the past to drive him forward, to elevate himself to the task in front of him, but letting fear be his motivator and not his master was a tricky balance to maintain.

  He was six hours into the drive when he turned onto a road that paralleled the Jubba River. Flowing south from Ethiopia, the twisting waterway was a critical vein of life through Somalia’s barren interior. For hundreds of years, its fertile floodplains had provided for the farmers who’d settled along its banks and the herders whose livestock had once been the backbone of the region’s economy.

  The tiny village of Dujuma was one such settlement. Situated on a wide bend in the Jubba, it had a few dirt roads and maybe thirty buildings, the most luxurious of which had cinder-block walls, glassless windows, and a solitary goat lying in the shade of its corrugated tin roof.

  Past the village, another dirt road disappeared into the hills. According to the overhead reconnaissance photo that Jake was now using as a map, the road led to Yaxaas’s camp. Jake wanted a closer look, but he drove past without slowing. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself in case the warlord had scouts in the village.

  Jake drove until sunset before turning around and returning to a desolate plain two miles from the village. He doused his headlights, eased the pickup off the road, and parked it under an acacia tree. The wind howled through the tall grasses as Jake stepped into the darkness. Distant peals of thunder and an occasional animal call were the only other sounds. There wasn’t another man-made object in sight.

  A drop of rain splattered against his face.

  It was time.

  He topped off the truck’s fuel tank with a pair of twenty-liter gas cans he’d brought from Mogadishu and started unpacking his gear. Ten minutes after he’d started, there was only one thing left to unload.

  He leaned a wooden plank against the pickup’s liftgate and rolled a 450cc dirt bike down from the bed. He’d camouflaged the motorcycle with a few cans of matte tan and green spray paint, using the overhead images taken a few weeks ago as his guide. He tossed a camouflage net over the truck and gave the starter a swift kick. The two-stroke motor came to life. Jake shouldered his pack, flipped on his night vision goggles, and set off for camp, stopping frequently to look and listen as he followed a series of game trails toward the river. While the trails were preferable to hacking through thickets of thorn bushes and stands of sharp grasses with a machete, the fact that the trails been made by large animals did not escape him. In addition to several species of antelope, Cape buffalo, and cheetahs, crocodiles and the occasional prides of lions also roamed the area.

  He passed the skeleton of what he guessed was a zebra, with flies buzzing through its empty eye sockets, and rode south along the grassy riverbank for half a mile until the trail disappeared into the muddy river. It was the kind of place where a lion or a crocodile might lie in wait for animals looking for a drink in the cooler temperatures that followed sunset, but Jake had to dump the bike and cross the river, and he soon accepted that he would be both predator and prey for the duration of the mission.

  He shut off the bike and hid it in the tall grass, marking the location on the GPS receiver on his wrist. He would infiltrate the rest of the way on foot.

  Like everything else in Somalia, the drought had taken its toll on the Jubba, and the once mighty river had been reduced to little more than a stream meandering through the mostly dry riverbed. Jake slung his rifle in front of his body and waded into the warm water up to his knees. The current was so slow as to be nearly imperceptible, trickling softly as it passed over the occasional rock or stump. He spied a few animals drinking along the water’s edge—antelope mostly—but no crocs, no lions, and most importantly, no humans.

  He reached the opposite bank in less than a minute.

  Jake surveyed the low hills through his magnified rifle scope and hiked to a hilltop he’d marked on his map. In the shallow valley on the other side was a sprawling camp the size of a football field. Shielded by the valley walls, it was invisible from the surrounding area. It had stockade walls and a metal gate topped with barbed wire. Inside were several buildings, maybe a dozen goats in a small pen, and a few armed men—including one with bandoliers of rifle ammunition slung dramatically across his chest.

  But there was no sign of Yaxaas or the bioweapon.

  Jake had hunted in his youth and was skilled with a gun, but he wasn’t a trained sniper. Even with the precision rifle Clap had left him, Jake wouldn’t be killing Yaxaas with a thousand-yard high-angle shot through a valley swirling with thermals and crosswinds.

  He needed to be closer.

  He hiked down the ridge, ensconced in darkness and searching the area for sentries, until he spotted movement on another hilltop and froze. He clipped a night vision device in front of his rifle scope, and spied two men who had a commanding view of the approach road and the camp—and a mounted machine gun.

  The machine gun nest wasn’t on the reconnaissance photo. Jake zoomed in further. The AN/PVS-27 night vision device’s catadioptric lens illu
minated the scene crisply, and he spotted one of the opposition staring out over the valley behind a belt-fed PKM machine gun.

  There were many challenges ahead: Jake was still three hundred yards from camp, vastly outnumbered, and facing a crew-served weapon that could cover the entire valley. But the machine gun nest was new, and several PKMs had been stolen from the Saviz.

  Jake lowered himself into the tall grass, released the straps on his rucksack, and grunted with relief as the eighty-pound pack slid to the ground.

  He’d found the right camp.

  SEVENTY-TWO

  THE RAIN MOVED in.

  At first it was just a few drops splattering on Jake’s boonie hat as he lay behind the rifle, but by midnight it had turned into a steady drizzle. The camp workers went about their business under the lights of a portable generator, until that too was shut down a few hours later.

  It was a darkness unlike any Jake had experienced. The light wasn’t muted. It wasn’t dim. It was simply gone—as if someone had extinguished the sun and stolen the stars. Nothing penetrated the thick clouds. Even with his night vision goggles, Jake could barely see around him. The goggles couldn’t amplify what didn’t exist.

  The rain intensified throughout the night, blown into the valley by strong winds and even stronger gusts. By morning, the east wind had brought a downpour. The dense, gray clouds had finally released the moisture they’d accumulated over weeks at sea.

  At first, the men in camp stood in the courtyard and marveled at the falling rain like a group of children. But like children, the wonder wore off quickly, and the man with the bandoliers soon came out and prodded them to get back to work.

  The rain intensified as the day passed.

  Jake sat motionless in his post, observing the camp, watching the men, looking for anything out of the ordinary, but the camp workers simply went about their duties, performing routine maintenance and repairs—and already cursing the wind and rain that had turned easy tasks into muddy projects.