Black Flag

by David Ricciardi

  And then, like everything in life, Pickens’s arms cache became a matter of perspective. A weaponized virus could survive heat, air, and sunlight far better than the natural version. It wasn’t just dangerous, it was evil, just like Yaxaas.

  And evil did not die from exposure, or time, or hope.

  Evil had to be killed.

  EIGHTY-ONE

  JAKE REACHED INTO his pack and took out three thermate grenades.

  Known officially as AN-M14 incendiary hand grenades, each was about the size of a can of beer. Made from aluminum powder, iron oxide, and barium nitrate, the first one Jake had seen had been in Pickens’s safe. The big man had wired it to the lock, along with an anti-lift switch and enough heavy-load explosive detonating cord to obliterate everything inside. Once ignited, the thermate burned at four thousand degrees Fahrenheit. It even generated its own oxygen so it could work underwater.

  Nothing on earth could survive its wrath.

  Jake took the grenades, wrapped them twice with detonating cord and a fistful of blasting caps, and duct-taped the assembly to the crate. One grenade probably would have been enough, but Jake wasn’t fucking around.

  He unspooled another fifty feet of det cord out the back of the truck just as the helicopter roared by overhead. Bullets thudded into the dirt around him as the helo banked steeply and turned back toward the van. The helicopter’s high speed and rapidly changing angle had probably saved him, but Jake had seen the snipers in action. It wouldn’t take long for them to adjust their aim.

  He jumped on the dirt bike and ignited the det cord. Unlike a timed fuse, the explosive cord burned almost instantaneously, detonating the blasting caps and the grenades in a few thousandths of a second. A blinding light radiated from the back of the van as molten slag incinerated the plastic container and began destroying the virus.

  The helicopter finished its turn and was zeroing in on his position. Jake twisted the throttle and launched the dirt bike forward. The helo was closing the distance quickly. In another few seconds, the snipers would have his position dialed in. Jake turned the bike ninety degrees and climbed into the hills—toward the oncoming helicopter. The distance closed immediately and the snipers lost sight of Jake as he passed underneath the aircraft.

  Jake flipped his night vision goggles into position and accelerated into the hills. The bike spit a wake of dirt and debris as it scaled the soft earth. Behind him, the thermate slag had melted through the van’s chassis and ignited its fuel line. A hundred gallons of burning diesel engulfed the truck and sent flames a hundred feet high—illuminating the valley in every direction.

  But the aircrew was tenacious. The pilot slewed the helo to the side and the snipers rained down more gunfire. A bullet tore through Jake’s backpack and more rounds crashed into the earth around him as he accelerated up the hill.

  He crested the ridge with the throttle wide open and launched the bike into the air—flying forty feet over the ground before landing in a ravine. The helicopter doubled back, but the glare of the burning truck and the ravine’s steep sides shielded Jake from view. The helicopter made another tight turn to the east to cut off Jake’s access to the main road.

  But Jake headed away from the road and away from Mogadishu. He turned northwest and drove through the low hills, shifting into high gear and opening up the distance with his pursuers with every passing second.

  He caught sight of the MD 520 crisscrossing the countryside several times over the next twenty minutes until it finally abandoned its search and flew away.

  EIGHTY-TWO

  JAKE STOWED THE dirt bike in the back of the pickup before starting the drive back to Mogadishu.

  He drove the old Toyota like he stole it, speeding recklessly through the darkness and swerving around animals and slower vehicles. Once he was in cell phone range, he placed an anonymous call to AMISOM headquarters about the mysterious explosions near Dujuma.

  IEDs were so common that they had become a business. Bomb-builders turned to almost assembly line construction to increase output. They bought supplies in bulk and regularly used the same blasting cap and booster charge combination—usually Russian or Chinese Semtex—to ignite base charges of homemade explosives.

  Come daylight, African Union ground troops would arrive. Explosive experts would use spectrographs to analyze the debris and search for the bomb-maker’s signature, but the bomb technicians would be in for a worrisome surprise when they saw the results of this site. The presence of the thermate and the biological agents would quickly be shared with U.S. forces in the region and ring alarm bells at the Pentagon and Langley.

  Graves would undoubtedly piece the parts together.

  Good, Jake thought. Here’s your proof, Ted.

  But Jake wasn’t celebrating. Yaxaas still had Pickens, and there was no telling how the old crocodile might vent his rage once they reached Mogadishu.

  Jake had been lucky in Dujuma.

  He would need a miracle in Mogadishu.

  He skidded to a stop outside the safe house and went straight to the basement. He walked among the stacks of weapons and explosives, looking for inspiration, looking for anything that would give him a fighting chance. Thoughts formed and faded, but one man simply couldn’t assault a force that was twenty times larger and expect to live.

  He spotted the two crates of British PE8 plastic explosives stacked in the corner. Jake had used the blocks in the top crate to hit Yaxaas’s Range Rover and to create the diversion that had drawn the helicopter off the delivery van.

  He’d need a similar diversion tonight to distract.

  Jake moved the empty wooden box to the floor and popped the latches on the second one.

  He stared at it for the better part of a minute.

  It was nearly empty.

  A disturbing idea crept into his head—regardless of how hard he tried to block it out. It was ridiculous, really, and Jake chided himself for wasting time and got back to work, collecting weapons and gear for his assault on Yaxaas’s compound.

  Jake went to the safe for fresh batteries for his night vision equipment.

  He entered the combination and picked through the shelves. Up top were stacks of dollars and euros. He lifted a brick of hundreds and briefly considered trying to buy Pickens’s safety, but there were simply too many guards to bribe. A single loyal soldier would ruin everything. Jake kept looking. On the second shelf were the electronics, including more night optics and a device known as an FTIR spectrometer.

  Jake looked at the spectrometer. He’d used one briefly during ordnance training back in the States. It was a high-tech gadget but simple to operate. Similar models were in the hands of U.S. soldiers, sailors, and marines throughout the world. It analyzed and identified the type of explosives used in an IED to assist in identification of the bomb-maker.

  Jake found fresh batteries for his night vision goggles and the laser on his pistol. He was about to close the safe, but his analytical mind was still having trouble reconciling events as they appeared with facts he knew.

  He took the spectrometer down from the shelf. It was a little larger than a brick and about half the weight. He pushed the power button, half wishing that it wouldn’t turn on, but the display lit up, ready for action.

  Jake returned to the bottom crate of PE8 and used his knife to slice open one of the remaining packages. He pointed the spectrometer at the exposed block and in just a few seconds it completed its analysis: 12.5 percent binding agents and 86.5 percent RDX.

  No surprise there—those were the plastic and the explosive in plastic explosives.

  But the remaining 1 percent was something called a taggant, and it was a highly specific chemical included by manufacturers to allow product identification, like a serial number. In this case it was 1 percent dimethyl-dinitrobutane, and its precise formulation identified the explosive as British PE8.

  No surprise ther
e, either.

  Jake had pulled it fresh from the crate.

  But his legs felt impossibly heavy as he walked upstairs—like a man walking to his own execution. He rummaged through his bedroom until he found the shirt he’d been wearing weeks ago when his own car had been hit by a roadside bomb. He’d thrown it in a corner and forgotten about it. The shirt was still covered with fragments of glass, dried blood, and bomb residue.

  He pointed the spectrometer at it.

  PE8.

  Jake aimed at a different part of the shirt and took a second reading, just to be sure.

  PE8.

  And for the second time in as many days, Jake looked into the distance and muttered to himself.

  Motherfucker.

  EIGHTY-THREE

  JAKE RETURNED TO the house and removed the cell phones from Pickens’s dresser.

  He scrolled through the text messages until he found what he was looking for.

  Jake sent a message of his own.

  If he didn’t survive the night, and even if he did, Graves would argue that what Jake was about to do should have been left to others—teams of highly skilled men who operated as a unit and trained constantly, but Jake’s head was spinning. He wasn’t following orders. He wasn’t on CIA business anymore.

  He spent the next hour laying out the equipment he’d gathered for the assault: explosives, weapons, and assorted gadgets. It was enough to equip a squad of soldiers, but he wasn’t a squad of soldiers. He was a single man, going up against a numerically superior and better armed force. Stealth would be more important than firepower.

  He stripped away everything that wasn’t absolutely essential, declining even to bring a rifle. Jake was an exceptional pistol shot, and tonight’s work was going to be up close and personal. He reloaded the compact Heckler & Koch pistol he’d used in Dujuma. The HK45 was accurate, deadly, and completely reliable. By the time he’d finished paring down his gear, he could carry everything he needed on a tactical vest and a small backpack.

  He was standing at the kitchen table, taking one last look at online satellite images of the warlord’s neighborhood, when the mobile phone pinged.

  He’d gotten a response to his text.

  Midnight, Jake sent back.

  It was the last piece of the puzzle.

  He grabbed the backpack, set the alarm, and rolled from the safe house in a white Suzuki Alto. The online maps he’d been studying were low-resolution and had provided only basic details of the area. Jake needed to get eyes on target while there was still daylight.

  He had two hours.

  Jake pushed the small car to its limit, racing the wrong direction up one-way roads, careening onto cross streets through oncoming traffic, and dodging pedestrians while speeding down narrow alleys. Maintaining cover was a thing of the past. Jake now cared only about arriving without a tail.

  He entered the Yaaqshiid district of eastern Mogadishu and approached Yaxaas’s neighborhood from the south. Trash blew across the roads, abandoned buildings outnumbered those that were occupied, and emaciated residents wandered aimlessly through the streets.

  The warlord’s compound filled an entire block. The satellite images had shown a square building in the middle, with a courtyard and what looked like a pond in its center, but all Jake could see from the street was a high wall. The roads on three sides of the block were wide and exposed, and would be dangerous for Jake to cross, but the street on the western edge was no more than a narrow alley bordered by a cluster of shanties.

  Jake turned down the alley. Though there were thousands of similar cars in Mogadishu, the little white Suzuki with the tinted windows attracted hard stares from the warlord’s guards. Jake counted four of them stationed outside the compound’s walls—all carrying Kalashnikovs and wearing radios strapped to their belts. There were sure to be more men inside.

  On his left were the shanties, dozens of palm trees, and the wall to Yaxaas’s compound. It was twelve-foot-high poured concrete, topped with barbed wire. Jake drove slowly and studied the layout through the heavily tinted windows. The canopy of palm trees had hidden the alley and the shanties from the satellite images—and given Jake his infiltration point.

  He drove out of the district and spent hours winding his way through the city streets, killing time, until it was time to kill.

  He returned two hours after dark.

  Jake parked four blocks away and infiltrated on foot. The night air was hot and dry, and he wore an open shirt over his tactical vest and a small pack on his back. A gentle breeze rattled the overhead palm fronds while candlelight and the occasional kerosene lamp flickered inside the shanties. Despite the rats’ nest of power lines directly above, none of the makeshift homes had electricity.

  He moved silently between the shacks, catching snippets of unintelligible conversations and seeing occasional shadows. He paused only once, when a growling dog blocked his path, but Jake knelt on one knee, drew his pistol with his right hand, and slowly extended his other one. The mutt lowered its head, sniffed Jake’s hand, and licked it once. Jake scratched the mongrel behind the ears and holstered his weapon.

  He continued on to a single palm tree that towered above the others and duct-taped a block of plastic explosives and a radio detonator to its trunk.

  Across the alley was Yaxaas’s compound, bordered by more trees. The same four guards were patrolling the walls.

  Up and back.

  Up and back.

  Even after the melee in Dujuma, it was a monotonous routine, and Jake crouched in the shadows until the nearest guard passed by, his senses dulled by the endless repetition.

  Jake walked silently across the alley and shimmied up one of the larger palm trees until he could see over the wall into the compound. He counted three more guards, all armed, including one barely fifty feet away. The main building was a square mass of cinder blocks and steel doors. Against the far wall were four pickup trucks.

  And the battle-scarred Range Rover.

  Jake settled in, concealed in darkness, with his feet propped against the compound wall and his back against the tree. The western guard passed by underneath him at least a dozen times without ever looking up.

  It was midnight when the mobile phone vibrated in Jake’s pocket. He checked the camera feed from the security system and saw a man standing outside the safe house.

  Jake buzzed him in.

  Five minutes later, a second man arrived.

  But instead of buzzing him in, Jake dialed another number and punched a four-digit code into the phone.

  The sky over central Mogadishu turned orange and a rumble like a thousand claps of thunder rolled across the ground.

  Yaxaas’s men assumed the massive explosion was another al-Shabaab IED targeting Villa Somalia.

  But they were wrong.

  EIGHTY-FOUR

  IT WAS THE CIA safe house.

  Jake pressed the radio firing device on his vest, detonating the plastic explosives he’d planted a hundred feet away at the base of the palm tree. The big tree snapped in two and fell to the ground—taking the overhead power lines with it.

  The neighborhood plunged into darkness.

  Jake moved quickly. The element of surprise was his greatest tactical advantage—and it wouldn’t last long. He flipped his night vision goggles into place and activated the infrared laser on his pistol.

  Inside the compound, a metal door burst open and four men with flashlights ran from the main building. They started the pickup trucks and sped through the gate to block the intersections around Yaxaas’s compound with the vehicles. The guards who’d been patrolling the exterior linked up with the trucks, weapons at the ready, while two more guards slid the gate shut and took up station inside the compound.

  The warlord’s men were sealing the perimeter—focused on external threats—just as Jake had hoped.

 
With one hand on his NVGs and one hand holding his weapon, he dropped over the wall and rolled onto his side to absorb the impact. He came up on one knee with the pistol in both hands, scanning the interior of the darkened compound.

  Another man ran out of the building with a submachine gun in his hands. Jake recognized him as one of the guards who’d been shadowing Pickens in Dujuma.

  Jake blew out his heart with two .45-caliber bullets from close range. Secondary explosions from the safe house drowned out the suppressed gunshots.

  Jake skulked along the wall, in the darkest shadows where the moonlight failed to shine, and made his way to the main entrance. The remaining two guards were seventy-five feet away, shouting to each other from either side of the gate. Jake raised the pistol in a two-handed grip, exhaled, and placed the infrared laser dot on the first man’s chest. He fired twice, then shifted his aim to the other guard and put two rounds in his back before the man realized what had happened.

  Jake jogged over and anchored each of them with a round to the forehead.

  He dragged the bodies away from the gate and cleared the rest of the parking area. From the southwest corner of the building, candlelight flickered through a second-floor window.

  Yaxaas.

  With his weapon in his right hand, Jake shoved the door open with his left. It struck something halfway. Jake pushed harder—and felt someone push back.

  “Al’abalah,” Jake yelled. It was Arabic for “idiot.”

  The man yelled back.

  It wasn’t Yaxaas or Pickens.

  Jake fired two rounds through the door and the resistance stopped. He looked around the door and recognized the man on the other side. It was one of the goons from the Bakaara Market.