He slashed through a section of market stalls, knocking some onions off a pile – impolite, but there was zero time for niceties, and he was busy hailing anyway. This was weird. He was two blocks out and still getting nothing.
Somewhere in the back of his mind he thought he should perhaps be thinking more about his own tactical situation, rather than focusing singlemindedly on his task. And as he skidded around a corner, he quickly gained a really salient piece of tactical battlespace intel: it wasn’t weather or microwaves fucking with their radio traffic.
No, it was the al-Shabaab guys themselves, rolling into town like bosses and rocking a portable/tactical radio/RF jammer. You could buy these things on the Internet now, and this one jihadi dude was sitting half in and half out of a truck, one foot on the ground, hugging the backpack-sized device in his lap.
Zack even recognized the make and model.
And with that, and no other preamble, three AK barrels appeared from nowhere and got stuck right in Zack’s face as a group of a-S guys walked him down. Zack’s eyes slitted and he silently cursed himself, knowing he’d blown it. Before he could even react, he felt rough hands binding his arms and bundling him into the back of the truck. It all happened too damned fast. And he never moved even an inch to draw his weapon – a gorgeous HK USP Tactical .45.
Which he now knew he might never get to fire in anger.
* * *
Zack lay face down in the back of the truck, sucking air through a foul burlap hood, a foot pressed into his back, listening to the engine burble up. He was lacerating himself with self-recriminations, all the while knowing full well why he was so angry with himself. It was because Rule Number One in this region was:
DO NOT FUCKING GET KIDNAPPED.
This rule was in place because nearly anything was better than being taken alive. You’d much rather take your chances in a street shoot-out than end up squinting into a knock-off Chinese camcorder, kneeling over your own grave, which you just dug, while some monobrowed assclown with a keffiyah over his face stands behind you ranting in Chechen-accented demotic Arabic and waving a machete around.
Just… no.
This was all understood in the special operations community, the intel services, even amongst the adventure journalists and aid workers now. Basically, they were not going out like punks.
And yet there Zack lay. As the vehicle jerked and rumbled forward, he started counting off the seconds of travel time, marking the turns, and memorizing sound markers – clucking chickens, a jingling doorbell, chanted prayers. But that was all just the training, just muscle memory. All pro forma.
Because the first thing the a-S guys did, after disarming him, was to locate his phone and fling it as far as humanly possible – all jihadis who’ve lived this long understand cellphones to be basically homing beacons for Predator-launched AGM-114 Hellfire missiles. But in the end their greed got the better of them.
And they kept his tablet.
Zack grinned at this. Because they did it not knowing, or perhaps not caring, that the bigger device was every bit as trackable as the satcom/tri-band GSM phone they just left in the weeds. Jesus, Zack thought. At this point even civilians can click on “Find My iPad.” And civilian tablets didn’t have satcoms plus radio transponders. So Zack knew that, basically, about 15 minutes after he didn't turn up, and Baxter and the tactical boys saw his transponder signal making a run for Gebily or some other outlying shithole, they would scramble a quick reaction force (QRF) from Camp Lemonnier.
Or closer, if Zack was lucky.
He was now lying on a sheet of plywood, surrounded by debris and rags and terrible smells, and as the truck bounced on the dirt and gravel, his spine took a pummeling. Also, the question of where he was being taken made him ardently hope for the closer QRF option. Because his captors might not just make a run for the bush of outlying Somaliland. They might go south instead, into the (also semi-autonomous) Galmudug Region – an amazingly lawless and dangerous place, even by local standards.
There was a time not so long ago when al-Shabaab controlled half the territory of Somalia – including both Mogadishu and the major port city of Kismaayo. But after relentless hunting by government forces, they had finally been pushed out of the cities and into the bush. And rumor, plus Zack’s best intel workup, had their last big stronghold, a veritable Islamist fortress, located somewhere in the Algula District of Galmudug.
And, as much as Zack would like to prove his pet theory about this, he didn’t want to do it by becoming a human homing beacon for a thousand-pound GBU-16 laser-guided smart bomb. Because the stronghold was believed to be hard enough of a target that it couldn’t be taken down by a light-footprint SOF raid.
And that would mean destruction from the air.
Zack didn’t know the exact location, but he did know it existed. How he knew was because of Abo – Zack’s CI inside al-Shabaab. His asset. Abo had actually been to the stronghold himself, twice – though blindfolded going in and out. And he had described the place in detail. Zack wondered if he’d ever hear from Abo again.
Then again, he might be seeing him in person, all too soon…
But, assuming he didn’t end up at the stronghold, and depending on who the QRF on duty was, and how the rescue played out, Zack knew he would either be killed in the takedown, or else actually rescued. And he knew his historical odds weren’t great there. Hostage rescues were very hit-and-miss things. But both of those outcomes, as well as the smart-bomb one, actually, were so much better than the beheading-video scenario that he almost didn’t care which.
So he figured he could kind of kick back and relax now.
In fact, speaking of the horrors of East Africa, he was almost more worried about the hood on his head, and where it had been kept – in animal shit? – as well as when the guys who tied him up had last washed their hands, if ever. Because these were very strange days they were having, public health-wise… One got a sense of this when one had access to the intel feeds, as Zack did.
He could hear the guys up front barking into their radio, presumably on some channel they weren’t personally jamming. It was Arabic, which Zack could follow perfectly well, and they were telling their guys in the other three trucks to bail – as well as that they had a hostage in the back of theirs. Between this and there not being any audible gunfire, Zack assumed their op simply didn’t go down. The bad guys had withdrawn – but the good guys will have too, presumably unhurt and all accounted for, which wasn’t a terrible outcome.
Zack had time to appreciate this, as well as generally to ruminate, as the vehicle stopped bouncing on what passed for roads in Hargeisa, and got out onto one of the World Bank-financed inter-city roads, the ones with pavement. Though this fact also ramped his anxiety back up, as it meant he was more rapidly crossing the distance between the safehouse and the place where he and his head might part ways.
Zack remembered that, despite his earlier bravado, he was still only an analyst – not an operative, never mind a operator (or shooter). And he had certainly never been kidnapped before. So, the longer he had to let his mind run, the more scared he got. On the other hand, he was in some ways prepared for this – he had seen a lot of very sketchy shit go down, much of it ending badly and bloodily.
This was what came from fourteen nearly consecutive deployments to the region.
Yes, he’d seen an enormous amount of madness in the Horn, mostly while attached to CJTF-HOA – Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa. But it went back further than that. To appreciate Zack’s outlook, and the full horror of his situation, one had to understand how hard he had worked, and for how many years, simply to get the hell out of there. And how desperately he had needed to get away. As well as the kind of man he once was, and had once wanted to be.
But had now become.
Child of the Horn
Zack was a child of colonial Africa – in the most literal sense.
His mother had been an English public-school girl – well-spoken, perfec
tly turned out, hardy, proud, self-reliant, equally at home on a show horse or a working farm animal. His father had been a Swahili-speaking Kikiyu, a legacy of the Mau Mau Uprising – privileged, self-made, at least as smart and proud as his mother.
And at least as impossible.
His parents were both farmers, in love with the lush central uplands of Kenya – and desperately in love with each other. This love had entailed costs for them both. Zack never met any of his grandparents, for reasons that might be guessed.
His family was isolated when he was a boy – looked down upon by the British and Irish settlers of the “White Highlands,” and distrusted by the Kikuyu, the Masai, and the other black Africans. Zack never spoke English, Kikiyu, or Swahili quite right. He also never looked right, and never really felt at home, even when he was at home – in the three-story baronial house that anchored their 2,400 hectares of farmland.
So he withdrew, studied obsessively, and applied only to universities in the U.S. and UK. He was accepted to Princeton (at age 16), packed his bags – and prepared never to look back.
Even introducing himself to his classmates in New Jersey had been perilous. It revealed, in very few syllables, that he was a child of two worlds, and a bastard in both. His last name was “Altringham” – impossible even to pronounce without sounding like an English aristocrat. But his first name was “Zakwani.” Taken together, they pretty much said it all.
He chose to go by Zack, also for reasons easy to imagine.
Having finally escaped Africa, he committed himself to never going back. But, then, in his last year at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, the Twin Towers came down – just 55 miles up the Jersey Turnpike. He could almost hear them hit; and he could definitely feel them. And, with that, everything changed – including his sense of obligation to the country that had offered him escape and a new life.
A few months later, he visited the CIA table at a campus jobs fair. And, giving the matter way less critical thought than it probably deserved, he let himself be recruited. And, to his unfeigned but no-less-ridiculous surprise, it was about five seconds after his Junior Officer Training at the Farm that he was posted straight to Djibouti.
Right back to the Horn of Africa.
With his language and cultural skills, and with the shadow wars against a-Q and other Islamist militias ramping up in East Africa, there was never any possibility of any other outcome for him. In later years, when he reflected on it, he could only think that on some level he must have wanted this. Nothing that life-altering, not to mention ironic, could happen as the result of a mere oversight.
In eighteen years of service to the United States of America, and to the Agency, Zack had not known two consecutive months of work anywhere but there.
Also, as he came slowly to understand, lying face down in the back of that truck, all of that meant that today was probably inevitable.
* * *
Gunfire.
Small arms, faint and windblown at first. Then louder, closing the distance, and heavier, too.
Then firing from inside the truck – 7.62 at full auto, one AK, then two. That dull, throaty, hammering report that Zack knew too well – but which he had never heard from such close quarters, never mind in an enclosed space. It overloaded the air inside, beating him like a wave, even as the heavy shell casings poured down around him, banging on the floor of the truck – or landing on him and burning his flesh. He twisted and writhed, his eyes widening pointlessly in the darkness beneath the hood.
Amidst the firing, there came a wet meaty sound, like a watermelon hitting the pavement, and then a shout, and the truck veered to the left, leaving the road – and then rotated around on its long axis, the pull of gravity pivoting ninety degrees as Zack’s body slammed against the unyielding body panel beside him, a hundred pieces of crap coming loose and taking flight. The truck skidded on its side for another few seconds, the scraping and whooshing sounds filling the cabin and Zack’s sensory-deprived world.
And then silence, for exactly two beats.
Then more shouting, then screaming, then more gunfire, 5.56 this time, from very close, point-blank range. Then a last couple of empty brass casings tinkled dully on the ground. And a single word, crisp, relaxed, and perfectly in control.
“Clear.”
Something blotted out the sunlight in front of him, then dexterous hands pulled his hood off. It was Dugan, his chiseled, stubbled jaw stuck right in Zack’s face. He rotated Zack by the ears, checking his pupils. “You okay, man?”
Zack blinked heavily. “Yeah, not bad. What’s up with you guys?”
At this, Dugan cracked a smile. “Didn’t much feel like waiting for the QRF.” Drawing his MPK Titanium knife from its boot holster, he unbound Zack with two quick slices, then hauled him out of the truck and to his feet. Upright now, and outside, Zack could see that the jihadi truck was over on its side in a shallow culvert. Bright red blood covered much of its interior, in particular the windscreen.
Parked up a few feet away was the team’s armored, tricked-out, souped-up Chevy Tahoe, the engine running smoothly. Maximum Bob stood behind the engine block, his assault rifle pointed across the hood. Zack worked out from all this that these two had simply hopped in it and hauled ass up the road after him – the minute they worked out what had happened. He choked up slightly to think that these two felt so protective over him.
I guess I must be doing something right around here…
“Thanks, guys,” he said.
“No problem, Zack. Let’s roll.”
Everyone on that roadside knew that al-Shabaab, like most Islamist fighters, always came back to gather their dead, in order to perform the proper burial rites. Somewhere, probably not very far away, there were three more truckloads of these guys.
And they would soon be here.
Dugan started to shove Zack into the Tahoe, but there was a lot of blood on him, from the dead guys in the truck, and Zack decided that, given current events, he didn’t want it there. He decided to risk the thirty seconds he needed to strip down to his skivvies and toss the clothes. He then climbed in the back of the Tahoe and started rummaging through the supplies in back for new fatigues. And a new weapon.
And hand sanitizer.
By the time he was dressed and buckled in, they were most of the way back to the safehouse, Bob driving 110mph as a standard defensive maneuver. Zack never understood that one – even in a war zone, even in IED Alley, you were more likely to die in a car crash than an ambush. He checked his watch. It was exactly 19 minutes since he had leapt down those back stairs.
You can keep your CAG and DEVGRU, he though to himself, sinking back into the soft leather of the truck seat. If you asked Zack, the Agency had the best shooters and tactical guys anywhere. Half of the guys in their Special Activities Division (the Agency’s paramilitaries) came from JSOC, most of the rest from vanilla SEAL teams and Army Special Forces. And by the time they got to the Company, they generally had an entire career’s worth of operational experience, not to mention several million dollars worth of training. Plus they’d survived it all. And on top of that, they were volunteering to go again!
Zack paused to wonder where these two hard men had been when he was in grad school at Princeton. Probably not New Jersey.
Finally, the Tahoe slipped into the narrow streets of north Hargeisa, then peeled around the side of the safehouse, dust billowing. They drove under the covered awning, all piled out, and closed and locked the goddamned gate. Some part of Zack was disappointed, or at least surprised, not to have been a human target marker for smart bombs in that al-Shabaab stronghold.
Get ’em tomorrow, he thought.
For today, he would live on.
Back from the Dead
It was only after they got back that Zack remembered his tablet, the one the a-S guys had taken off him. Oh, well, fuck it, he thought. It was probably shattered from the crash, or covered in blood, or both. And he had more wher
e that came from. Later, when he had time, he could get on the net and see if it was still running; and, if so, remotely wipe it.
When he stuck his head back in the TOC, Baxter looked at him like he was back from the dead. Baxter’s cropped, sandy, curly hair, his square head, oval-framed glasses, and absurdly youthful features all made Zack feel like he’d just warped back in to the freshman dorm. Baxter was also effortlessly lean and lanky in that annoying twenty-three-year-old way.
Give it time… Zack thought.
“JSOC team extract?” he asked
“Yes,” Baxter said, looking up at him. “Back to CLUVille.” That was the nickname for the residential area of Camp Lemonnier in nearby Djibouti – endless rows of Containerized Living Units. Lemonnier was the headquarters of CJTF-HOA, as well as of the entire U.S. Africa Command. In addition to hosting humanitarian and demining efforts, Lemonnier served as the home planet for virtually all CT, drone, and shadow-war activities for the entire region.
“JSOC want a formal debrief on the busted op?”
“Not at this time. I gave them the high-level. They said they’ll let us know, when and as.”
Zack laughed once, not even sure whether he was amused by this. It was like that more often than anyone would guess.
“What else?”
“Nothing. The a-S Victors are being tracked, persistent eye-in-the-sky. I went ahead and briefed the desks at Langley, plus Foggy Bottom. They’re considering just doing a drone strike, while we’ve got eyes on. Lock in the gains, instead of going for live captures.”
Zack nodded. “Makes sense. I’m going to shower.” He mustered up a weary smile, then started to withdraw.
“I saw it,” Baxter said, drawing him up short.
“…It?”
“I didn’t see you get taken. Though we do have that on one of the feeds. But I saw Dugan and Bob take down the truck you were in. I saw them get you back.” He was still looking at Zack at a slight angle, like he was trying to work out if he was really alive.
Arisen : Genesis Page 2
