Black Flag

by David Ricciardi

  Pickens dropped the sword and clutched his crotch. Practically delirious, he staggered backward onto the terrace, tripped over the warlord’s body and crashed into the railing. He tried to prop himself up but his injured leg couldn’t support his weight and he tumbled into the courtyard.

  Jake heard a thud.

  Then a splash.

  Then a scream.

  He walked to the edge of the balcony and switched on his night vision goggles. In the middle of the compound was the large courtyard he’d seen from the satellite images, complete with ferns, flowers—and a pond.

  And in the middle of the pond was a fourteen-foot-long crocodile, pulling Pickens to the bottom.

  Little Yaxaas.

  EIGHTY-SEVEN

  JAKE WAS SEATED alone in a booth at the back of the restaurant, watching a split-screen video feed on his laptop. Not much had changed onscreen since he’d arrived, but the same could not be said for Somalia—the deaths of the two warlords had upended the entire nation’s balance of power.

  Infighting among the Darood and the Hawiye had weakened the two clans as competing factions struggled to assert control the only way they knew how—the man with the bandoliers and Badeed’s chief of intelligence were each assassinated by rivals within twenty-four hours—and their deaths had been only the start of the bloodshed.

  Foreign and domestic security services leapt into the mix, leveraging the chaos to sow discord among the other warlords. Disinformation campaigns, false-flag operations, and more assassinations led to a period of intense fighting among the minor clan militias. The violence cost them all dearly in men and in weapons, and with Cawar dead, the largest arms trafficker in Africa was no longer able to restock their armories.

  Predictably, Islamic terror groups attempted to fill the power vacuum, but AMISOM forces, U.S. special operations personnel, and CIA pursuit teams used the relative peace afforded by the interclan strife to increase operations and kill anyone foolish enough to assume a leadership position.

  It had been an inflection point for the nation’s citizens as well. Most Somalis were firm believers in qadar, the Islamic tenet of predestination, and it was that faith—that they were following God’s will—that had allowed them to maintain hope during the humiliation of colonial rule, the bloodshed of civil war, and the hardship of famine. But belief in fate was more than just a salve for adversity. As news spread of the warlords’ deaths and the terrorists’ setbacks, the population—long fearful of retaliation—sensed an opportunity for lasting change. Many cooperated with the security services, and hundreds of extremists were subsequently hunted down and jailed or killed. The Somali people’s willingness to collaborate despite persistent threats of retaliation was yet another example of their almost superhuman resolve to recover from tragedy.

  Perhaps, Jake reflected as he took a sip of wine, they’d inherited their resilience from the land. The thunderstorms that had blown through had been the start of a proper rainy season and, within days, grass and wildflower seeds that had lain dormant for years had sprouted and returned life to the barren countryside. Ranchers who’d managed to save a few head of livestock for breeding were once again grazing their animals and restoring the herds that were the bulk of the nation’s food supply and the backbone of its economy.

  A sliver of normalcy had returned.

  Jake had witnessed it on his last day in-country as he’d driven past the Liido Seafood restaurant where he’d first encountered Yaxaas. The wide sand beach had been empty then, but on his way to the airport, Jake had seen maybe a dozen families laughing, smiling, and playing in the surf. It was a little thing, to be sure, but it foretold a brighter future for the people of Somalia.

  * * *

  —

  JAKE’S FUTURE, ON the other hand, was still very much undecided.

  He had contemplated it often since the night of Athena’s death. She’d given him a glimpse of a normal life—and he’d gotten her killed. It was another ache he’d have to live with on a list that just kept getting longer, but somehow each personal setback made him a little better at his job: a little harder, a little sharper, a little quicker on the draw. More than once he’d considered that maybe he just wasn’t cut out for a normal life.

  Athena had asked him point-blank how he dealt with all of the treachery and the duplicity. Jake said it was because he felt a burning need to protect others, and it was true, but he now realized that the treachery and duplicity that was eating at him was coming from inside CIA.

  It was coming from Graves.

  * * *

  —

  JAKE TOOK A sip of his Malagousia wine and looked across the crowded Varoulko Seaside restaurant as the shipping agent answered his mobile phone. It was the same phone Athena had compromised on another Friday night exactly two months earlier. The restaurant was noisy, as it had been that first night, and the agent walked outside to take the call—leaving his fashion model dining companion alone at the table.

  With tousled hair, a low-cut dress, and sky blue eyes, she attracted the attention of half the restaurant’s patrons, including Jake, who scrutinized her as she absentmindedly lifted her date’s champagne flute, took a sip, and set it down.

  And even though he’d been watching for it, Jake still missed the exact moment she slipped the poison into the agent’s glass.

  It would take effect in about six hours, when he would be home in bed, alone—disappointed that his flirtatious and enticing date had chosen not to spend the night. There would be no one at his side to call emergency services, no one to inject him with an antidote. The coroner’s toxicology report would list the cause of death as an overdose of the drug Ecstasy laced with black-market Chinese fentanyl, and the police would close their investigation upon discovering more of the tainted drug in the agent’s medicine chest.

  The man who had sent so many others to their deaths would become just another statistic in a spate of synthetic-drug-related deaths over the past few years—including two rough-looking men who’d been gunned down just days earlier at the nightclub where they worked. Though the masked shooters were never located, the victims were reputed to be members of the Albanian mafia, and authorities suspected the attack was carried out by a rival organized crime syndicate over drug distribution territories.

  * * *

  —

  JAKE RETURNED HIS attention to the laptop. There was activity on the left side of the screen.

  Sixty thousand feet over the western Indian Ocean, a U.S. Navy MQ-4C surveillance drone was tracking an airborne helicopter. A thermal imaging camera under the drone’s fuselage kept the helicopter centered on the screen as it began a wide right turn.

  On the right-hand screen was a feed from another navy asset, a P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft. Essentially a highly modified Boeing 737, the P-8 had the ability to collect intelligence, track objects above and below the surface of the sea, and prosecute targets. It was flying wide orbits thirty-two thousand feet above the sea while it stalked a small freighter steaming east through the Indian Ocean.

  Before Jake left Mogadishu, the Somali banker had come to him and complained bitterly that one of the pirates had taken over the operation and was no longer paying the banker. The former Norwegian commando was reputedly splitting the proceeds among the team members, just like the pirates of old.

  The two images on Jake’s screen converged as the helicopter landed on the deck of the ship.

  He activated the encrypted Bluetooth headset he was wearing and cupped his hand over his mouth as he spoke.

  “Red Flag is a go. Repeat, Operation Red Flag is a go.”

  A Harpoon anti-ship missile dropped from the Poseidon aircraft and fell nearly to the surface of the sea before igniting its turbojet motor and skimming over the wavetops toward its target. Jake watched as the five hundred-pound warhead detonated against the side of the pirate mothership, filling
both screens with an enormous thermal bloom.

  The big Harpoon had been overkill for the small merchant ship and when the explosion died down the screens showed nothing but small fragments, barely a few feet across, slowly sinking below the surface. The rest of the ship, and all of the men aboard, had been vaporized in the explosion.

  * * *

  —

  JAKE WAS STILL staring at the laptop when he sensed someone approaching the booth.

  “I can come back if you’re busy,” the man said.

  “Not at all,” Jake said as he closed the laptop. He rose to his feet and smiled at Giánnis.

  “I was just taking care of some unfinished business.”

  A portion of my royalties from each copy of Black Flag sold goes directly to Children of Fallen Patriots Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charity whose mission is to provide college scholarships and educational counseling to military children who have lost a parent in the line of duty. The organization is dedicated to serving the families of service members who have died as a result of combat casualties, military training accidents, and other duty-related deaths.

  If you have lost a parent in the line of duty, or would like to help those who have, please visit FallenPatriots.org.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  A keen outdoorsman, David Ricciardi incorporates many personal experiences into his work. He's backpacked through the mountains of the western United States and Alaska, received extensive training from law enforcement and U.S. special operations personnel, and once woke up for a two A.M. watch aboard a sailboat only to discover that it was headed the wrong way through the Atlantic sea-lanes in heavy weather, with one of the crew suffering from hypothermia. In addition to being an avid sailor, David is also a certified scuba-rescue diver and a former ski instructor.

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