Decoy Zero

by Jack Mars

  Meanwhile, Hannibal would fish for leads by mentioning hearsay about the South Korean heist and see if he got any bites. If at any point the Somalis caught on or their cover was blown, Reidigger would cause a distraction with a couple of flash-bangs.

  Easy, Zero thought. Then he laughed at himself. But you say that before every op right before things go sideways, don’t you?

  The satellite phone vibrated against his thigh. Maria, seated alongside him, frowned as he pulled it out of his pocket. The number was, of course, blocked but he knew who it would be.

  “Zero,” he shouted into the phone, pushing it hard against his head and plugging his other ear with a finger.

  The voice on the other end was still muffled.

  “You have to speak up!” he told her. “I’m on a very loud and questionably stable plane!”

  “…hear me now?” Penny’s British-accented voice had to shout back.

  “Yes! I can hear you. What do you have for us?”

  “Nothing good, I’m afraid. I’ve just been alerted that a Gulfstream G650 was impounded at Bole Airport in Addis Ababa. I dug deeper… it seems your friend Foxworth is being detained at the US embassy there.”

  Dammit! Not only had they lost their pilot, but they’d lost their jet and the rest of the supplies in it that they hadn’t been able to carry. They’d taken everything that seemed necessary and then some, but there were some toys in that black footlocker that Zero would rather have and not need than need and not have.

  “Shaw?” he asked, wondering if the CIA director ordered the arrest of the pilot.

  “Presumably, but not confirmed,” Penny told him. “Will Foxworth talk?”

  “I hope so.” If Chip was at all savvy, he’d claim Zero and his team forced him to fly to Ethiopia, threatened him. Admitting that he flew them willingly and defied not only CIA orders but US government regulations would get him blacklisted at least, imprisoned at worst.

  “I’m not sure it will matter,” Penny admitted. “Shaw is certainly aware that you didn’t go to Korea, yet there hasn’t been a whisper of disavowing anyone. He’s waiting for you to cock up.”

  “With my track record, I’m sure he won’t be waiting too long,” Zero mused. “Wouldn’t want to disappoint him.”

  “This is serious, Zero. I know you have a reputation for breaking rules and getting away with it because you get results. But Shaw isn’t like your other bosses. He’s not going to send someone to try to put a bullet in you and write it off as KIA. He’ll build a case, one that’s meticulous and tight enough that even the president would look bad trying to revoke it. If he wants you gone he’ll do it publicly, by ruining your reputation in whatever way he can. Don’t give him any fuel for that fire.”

  “Says the girl who gave me big guns,” he muttered.

  “What was that? I didn’t catch it.”

  “I said, we’re going to be landing soon. I have to go. Don’t worry about me, Penny. Just keep your eyes and ears open and let us know anything we can’t find out for ourselves.” He ended the call. It was kind of her to worry for him and he was growing more trusting of her with each phone call. But she was new to this. Shaw couldn’t touch him and the director knew it. This was petty backlash from a frustrated bureaucrat because the system he’d helped build was now failing him. But Zero would not. With Maria and Alan at his side, he was going to find this weapon and the perpetrators.

  For some reason, Maria’s words from earlier rang through his head, back when they’d first read Walsh’s operation report.

  They’ve got drones, Navy ships, satellites, the works looking for this thing.

  Then screw it, Alan had said. Consider it a mini-vacation. Let the Navy find it.

  Zero couldn’t do that. He had to find it now. From the moment they’d taken off from the runway at Dulles, he’d committed himself to it. Even before that, when they’d accepted Penny’s furtive help. But why? Why did he feel so devoted, so bound to accomplish a mission that had seemingly been engineered for his failure and possible undoing?

  To prove a point, he realized grimly. To prove I can, and to prove that men like Shaw don’t hold all the power.

  He didn’t quite like that acknowledgment. It was easy to flip it, easier to call it something noble in the name of country and his fellow man. But the truth was that his own headstrong attitude, the same one he’d passed on to his daughters, had one hand on the wheel.

  He didn’t like admitting that, and he didn’t like the roaring Cessna engine that forced him to stay quiet and stew in his own thoughts. He’d rather walk straight into a pirate port—which was convenient, since that was exactly what they were about to do.

  *

  Mercifully, Hannibal set the small Cessna down in one piece and without incident, though the wheels did bounce twice on the tarmac before settling. The four of them piled into a waiting orange Jeep with no roof or doors, supplied by some associate of the smuggler’s, and set off for Hamar Port, four miles to the southeast.

  “Remember the plan,” Maria warned Hannibal from the passenger seat alongside him, her blonde hair whipping about in the open air. “You need a recap?”

  “Not at all.” The smuggler waved dismissively. “Easy as pie.” He laughed. “I’ve always found that an amusing saying. My pies are terrible.”

  From the backseat, next to Alan, Zero watched Mogadishu go by. The city’s downtown was in the distance to the west, with all the crime and violence that came with it. At least that might have felt familiar. Here, near the Indian Ocean, was a bizarre dichotomy that Zero was struggling to reconcile. On one hand, there were palm trees, white sand beaches, and crystal-blue water that could rival any tropical resort destination. There were also crumbling, dilapidated structures, rampant homelessness, trash littered nearly everywhere, and more than one shell of a burnt-out car that they passed in the short drive from the airstrip to the port.

  Hannibal seemed completely unaffected by it, driving casually with one palm on the steering wheel while fishing a pair of aviator sunglasses from his shirt pocket. “Now listen up,” he said loudly. “Couple of things going into this. First, no one is going to be happy to see you, even if you are with me. Hell, I don’t exactly get warm greetings myself. This is business and that’s it. I know you lot might find me charming and affable, but it doesn’t get far with them.

  “Second, don’t do anything stupid or reckless. These guys love their guns. They love waving ’em around. They might even stick one in your face. But trust me on this: they don’t shit where they eat. They’re not going to shoot you in port, but they do like to look tough. With your training I’m betting instinct is to whip out your own, but try to resist so we don’t all get dragged onto a boat and tossed to the sharks.”

  Zero frowned at Alan, not only because he didn’t like the sound of that but also because Hannibal was right; his kneejerk reaction to staring down the barrel of a gun was to disarm and retaliate.

  Maria glanced back at them over her shoulder as if reading his mind. “Guns in your bags,” she ordered. “I don’t like it much either, but we’re not here to incite an incident. We’re observing and reporting.”

  Zero unclipped the holster from his hip and slid it into the bag. The Ruger LC9 was strapped to his ankle; for a moment he considered leaving it there, but that would only be a chance to invite disaster. Into the black backpack it went too.

  Hannibal slowed the Jeep and turned left, heading through a break in a chain-link fence that had so many sagging sections and holes cut in it that it was hardly worth standing at all. He eased the Jeep to a stop and parked right on the port.

  Zero climbed out and took a quick look around. Hamar Port, at a glance, seemed fairly innocuous. The concrete ran right up to the edge of the ocean and spanned the coast for at least half a mile down its length, thick rusty eye bolts affixed into its surface to moor the boats that parked there. Small mountains of freight littered the dock, from enormous boxcar-sized cargo containers to stacks of wooden crate
s, to pallets piled high with miscellanea, wrapped and tied with coarse rope. Dark-skinned men worked to load or unload the boats that were docked there, parallel to the concrete abutment, some not even tied to anything but secured by a man with one foot in the boat and the other on land.

  If it wasn’t for the guns this might have even looked commercial. But they were glaring in their incongruity, tucked into pants, dangling from straps, or even cradled in arms.

  “Hello!” Hannibal called out, waving his three-fingered right hand to two approaching Somalis. One was clearly older, perhaps around Zero’s age (difficult to tell, considering the very different lives they’d each led), missing his left arm from the elbow down and carrying a machine pistol in the other.

  The second Somali was stunningly young. He couldn’t have been a day over sixteen. Sara’s age. And he held an AK-47 tightly in his hands.

  “I’ll talk to them,” Hannibal muttered as the two men approached. “Start looking for your missing boat. But don’t wander too far from me, it’ll look suspect.”

  The pair of pirates (Zero assumed they were pirates, since they were armed and in a pirate port) said something to Hannibal in their native Somali, something that sounded harsh and unwelcoming. Hannibal responded in kind, almost flawlessly, holding his hands palm out as a sign of no ill intent. Whatever they were saying, it seemed the two men did not like the look of Hannibal’s crew.

  “We need to do this quickly,” Zero said. He hadn’t been this nervous in a while. Something was telling him to get the hell out of there, fast. “See anything?”

  “Nope,” Alan conceded, his trucker’s cap keeping the sun out of his eyes. “Small skiffs, a repurposed tugboat, couple of fishing boats…”

  “Same,” Maria said flatly. “Would be great if we could use a pair of binoculars right now without sending these guys into high alert.”

  Zero scoffed. He didn’t want to believe this had been a waste of time, but it was clear right before his eyes. This port was wide open and right on the water; there was nowhere to hide a stolen ship. There was nowhere for a boat to go but out to sea. There was no…

  Wait a second.

  “Alan,” he asked quietly. “Have you ever been to Hamar Port?”

  Reidigger shook his head. “Can’t say that I have… oh.” Alan realized the same thing Zero had just been thinking. The CIA’s intelligence had traced the pirate vessel back to Hamar Port, but the agency would have damn well known if this was what it looked like. A satellite image would have told them in mere moments that the stolen Korean ship wasn’t here, and if that was the case, there would be no reason for the battleships dispatched from Diego Garcia to head here.

  “This isn’t Hamar Port,” Zero told his teammates. They’d been duped.

  “My friends!” Hannibal called out as he made his way over to them. “Bad news. My contacts haven’t heard a peep about any South Korean ship, stolen or otherwise.”

  Zero was barely listening. In his periphery he saw the two Somalis edging closer, grips tight around their weapons. There were others approaching from the sides, a half dozen in all, maybe more behind them. Closing in.

  “You speak Somali,” Zero said to the smuggler.

  Hannibal nodded. “Arabic too.”

  “And Russian?”

  The smuggler flashed him a smile. “Afraid so, Agent.”

  He’d heard. Back in the Addis Merkato, Hannibal had known exactly what Zero had said to Maria in Russian. He’d heard and understood their exchange, Zero reminding her that she didn’t have the authority to expunge Hannibal’s record and Maria’s noncommittal response to try to get Penny to do it.

  “What now?” Alan adjusted the strap on his backpack. The smuggler flinched. None of them could go for their guns, secured in their bags. They’d be shredded by bullets in an instant. Hannibal had cleverly gotten them to stow their weapons, close as could be but woefully out of reach. “You going to kill us?”

  “Kill you? Goodness no.” Hannibal laughed. “No, these gentlemen are paying me for you. I’ve told them who you are and where you came from. Not sure if you know this, but Somali pirates make most of their money from ransoming hostages.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Let’s get those hands up,” Hannibal instructed.

  Zero did so, putting his hands at about shoulder height while slowly scanning in a semicircle. Eight Somalis in total were surrounding them, every one of them armed with at least a semiautomatic weapon if not one that would pump a dozen bullets into him in half a second.

  “Hannibal,” Zero said in Russian, “you know these men will never get their money. The CIA will disavow us. No one will pay a ransom.” The unspoken part of that was their inevitable death and watery grave in the Indian Ocean when the Somalis grew tired of waiting.

  “Huh.” The smuggler stroked his bushy chin. “I suppose you’re right. But see, Agent Zero, I get paid either way.”

  The nearest Somali to him, the young one that Zero had ascertained was little more than a teenager, punched the air with the barrel of his AK-47 and barked an order in his native language. “Go!” he shouted in English. “There!”

  All three of them glanced over their shoulder as two of the pirates pulled open the doors to a steel cargo container, empty and black as night inside.

  “If we go in there, we’re never coming back out,” Maria muttered. “Got any ideas?”

  “One or two,” Alan grunted. “But they probably won’t end up well for us.”

  Zero glanced around desperately, his brain churning for an answer. There were too many guns on them… but one notably missing. Hannibal had his sidearm, the Desert Eagle, strapped to his hip. But he hadn’t drawn it. Did he think it wasn’t necessary, with the Somalis closing in?

  Or was part of what he told us actually true?

  “Zero…?” Maria said nervously as they edged backward in small steps toward the container.

  “Give me a sec!” If Hannibal was trying to avoid this from becoming a bigger incident than it needed to be, then maybe there was some truth to his statement. He racked his brain for what he knew about Somali piracy. In 2007, they’d killed a Chinese sailor when ransom was denied. It had made international news, because such events were rare. In fact, in most of the hijackings he’d heard of, the pirates had tried very hard not to kill anyone—because they were valuable. In 2009, a British couple, the Chandlers, was held by pirates for three hundred eighty-eight days, released when the seven-figure ransom was finally paid.

  They don’t want to kill us. It was still an enormous gamble, and he still had no idea if the jacket he’d taken from the footlocker was graphene-infused or not. Worse still was that while he and Maria had opted for one, Reidigger was without any potential additional protection.

  “Their bags!” Hannibal shouted as they neared the dark maw of the cargo container. “Take their bags!”

  A Somali edged closer, the barrel of his gun directed at Zero’s center mass.

  The bags…

  Zero slung it down from his shoulders, holding it in both hands as if he was going to hand it over. “Graphene?” he hissed to Maria through clenched teeth.

  “Not sure. Worth a try…”

  “Alan, with me,” he told them. “Split off.”

  “When?”

  The Somali reached for the black bag.

  “Now!” Zero surged to the right, toward the water, holding the backpack at face level and roughly shoving the Somali aside. Alan darted along with him, and Maria broke off in the opposite direction.

  A chorus of angry voices rose, shouts filling the air, the backpack blocking his view of what he was sure was a small army of furious Somalis charging them.

  But no gunshots rang out.

  “Hey!” Hannibal roared. “Shoot them!”

  Zero sprinted along the dock, Reidigger keeping a surprising equal pace despite his size, and scooted into a homerun-slide behind a stack of wooden crates. Alan collapsed beside him.

  “They have gu
ns!” the smuggler shouted, and then again in Somali. The warning seemed to give the pirates enough pause to not outright pursue them around their cover.

  “That might have bought us ten seconds,” Alan panted.

  “Good. Give me some cover—” Zero winced as a thunderous gunshot split the air and half a crate exploded a few feet from his head.

  He hazarded a quick glance through the hole it had made. Hannibal had his Desert Eagle out, aimed, ready to squeeze another shot, when three Somalis grabbed his arms roughly, spitting foreign curses that could only be sharp rebukes.

  “Get off a me!” he hissed at them, but two more joined to take the large New Zealander to the ground. “Get off!”

  “They don’t want to shoot us,” Zero said breathlessly, “because we’re worth money.” He tore open the backpack, intent to assemble the Beretta PMX, when a rip of automatic gunfire erupted, peppering the crates but not penetrating.

  “They don’t want to kill us,” Alan corrected. “I’m not sure maiming is out of the question.”

  “Fair point.” There wasn’t time to assemble the machine gun. Instead his hand closed around something else in the bag—a smooth, thin canister. A flash-bang. Either of the pistols in his bag would be of no use against so many automatic guns, but the stun grenade would.

  “Zero!” Alan pointed. About twenty yards away, near the edge of the concrete dock, was a large steel drum, painted blue and rusting at the lip. He understood immediately; if it was filled with oil, or fuel, it could be a useful distraction. But if it was empty…

  Screw it. They’d already gambled with their lives, might as well go all-in. “Flash-bang out!” He yanked the pin and tossed the canister in a high arc over his shoulder, past their wooden crate barricade.

  Then he covered his ears with his arms and squeezed his eyes shut.

  Even with his head covered, the one-hundred-seventy-decibel blast rattled his bones. The stun grenade wasn’t intended to kill or even grievously injure, but the enormity of the blast and the flash of brilliant light that accompanied it would blind and disable anyone within ten to fifteen yards for up to a full minute.