* * *
Mike Rosen was frustrated. Alone on an anchored ship with only emergency power, he felt as if he were the last man left alive on Spaceship Earth. Obviously there were some crewmen aboard in the engine room spaces, making sure the emergency generator stayed online, but he didn’t see or hear them. They were imprisoned there, and he was imprisoned in his stateroom or the e-com center. Every now and then he heard noises, which he assumed were guards or Eyl citizens scavenging.
He wondered about Geoff Noon. The Brit was filthy-and so, Rosen suspected, were most of the things and people in northern Somalia-and an alcoholic. The possible fate of Rosen and the other people from Sultan didn’t seem to cause him a moment’s angst. Doesn’t give a damn about anyone or anything except his bottle, Rosen decided.
Gin. What a pissy drink.
Rosen opened the door to his stateroom. The pirate was right there, sitting on a chair, chewing khat.
“I’m hungry.”
The man stared at him uncomprehendingly. “Food.” Rosen pantomimed eating.
The pirate gestured, Back inside. Jabbed at him with his rifle barrel, trying to force him back in the room.
“Prick,” Rosen said. “You are a scummy little prick and your mother was a mangy hound dog.”
He was just getting wound up when the man jabbed him in the chest with the rifle so hard he involuntarily stepped backward into the room. The pirate pulled the door shut.
“Asshole,” Rosen roared at the closed door. “Fucking asshole.”
He was furious at himself. He should have grabbed the rifle, jerked it out of the pirate’s grasp and shot the son of a bitch with it. Blown his fucking khat-addled brains all over the corridor.
Well, why hadn’t he done that?
* * *
The black inflatable boat was powered by an electric motor that made no noise. The U.S. Navy SEAL lieutenant in the bow, Bullet Bob Quinn, could hear the tiny slap-slap of waves as the boat worked through the seas, but that was the only sound.
Quinn surveyed the Eyl harbor and anchorage with night-vision binoculars. He had the magnification set as low as possible due to the motion of the boat, which made it difficult to keep the binoculars focused on any one item.
When he was satisfied that there were no boats under way in the harbor, he turned his attention to a ship that was grounded against a sandbar on the south side of the harbor. Her anchor was out and she was listing slightly, but not a light showed. From all appearances, she was a derelict.
Her name, he believed-he couldn’t pronounce it-was Greek. Someone said the ship was named after a goddess. Bullet Bob didn’t know if that was true, nor did he care. The message traffic said she had been captured several months ago. The crew had been ransomed, but the insurer refused to pay ransom for the ship, which was almost forty years old, so, Greek goddess or not, she had been abandoned to the pirates.
Her bow was pointed toward the town, her stern the open ocean. From her bow to the pier in front of the largest building in Eyl, Ragnar’s six-story skyscraper, was a distance of 842 yards, according to the air intelligence techs who studied the drone photographs and compared them to satellite imagery. From her bridge to the fortress on the northern peninsula was 3,100 yards, over a mile and a half. The Sultan lay between, anchored in the main channel, 712 yards from the derelict’s bridge.
Satisfied that no one was aboard the Greek freighter and the harbor was still, Bullet Bob tapped the man beside him on the shoulder, pointed to the freighter and gave a thumbs-up. The man checked his luminous wrist compass, then rolled backward off the gunwale of the inflatable, holding his mask and mouthpiece in place. He was wearing scuba tanks, but Quinn hoped the man could make the swim on the surface. The tanks were for an emergency, if he had to get below the surface and stay there.
Ten seconds later, the second man followed the first into the water.
Quinn checked his watch.
The coxswain throttled back, put the engine in reverse and kept the little black boat almost stationary against the tide, which was coming into the harbor.
There were four men left in the boat: the coxswain, Quinn and two more SEALs. All wore black wet suits and carried black gear. Submachine guns were snugged up tight to their bodies, short-barreled things. The boat rocked gently in the swells.
Bullet Bob found himself checking his watch. As usual, there were time constraints. He wanted all his men and their gear aboard the derelict and the boat out of the harbor into the open sea by moonrise, which was only an hour and a half away.
He looked back at the open sea, using the light-gathering binoculars, trying to spot the two skiffs that were running back and forth, patrolling the entrance to the harbor. Yes. They were still going back and forth, slowly, from north to south and back again. These were the lookouts, tasked with warning the pirates if enemy ships or boats appeared. Quinn’s inflatable had slipped by them by hugging the shore, almost in the surf. A black boat, black-clad men, a dark night … the gamble had paid off. They were inside with the pirates none the wiser.
He hoped. Well, if there had been radio transmissions, the tactical watch officers aboard ship would have been warned him on his handheld.
Twenty-two minutes after he dropped the swimmers, his handheld radio did come to life. “We’re aboard.”
“Roger.”
Now the men had to check out the ship, to ensure that they were the sole occupants. This would take another fifteen or twenty minutes. They would use black light, invisible to the naked eye, to find their way around inside the ship, where the darkness would be total.
The waiting was the toughest part of the job, Bullet Bob thought, much more difficult than being in motion, doing something. Anything. When you waited you thought too much.
He looked again for the skiffs. He spotted them with the night-vision binoculars, still moving slowly on their patrol routes. When he lowered the glasses the darkness hid them. As it hides us, he thought.
The minutes dragged. Quinn heard a boat motor fire up inside the harbor. He looked. Yes, a boat near the beach, men in the surf, climbing aboard.
Harbor patrol? A fishing boat? Or a skiff getting under way for a pirate cruise? He tried to count people. About a dozen, he thought. Which would make it a pirate boat. Two or three men would be enough for a harbor patrol.
Quinn watched the crew get the boat got under way. In just a moment it was motoring past the Sultan for the open sea. Speeding up, making a nice bow wave. The pirates were past the harbor mouth when their wake rocked the inflatable as the SEALs clung tightly to the lines.
Then the sound faded and the harbor again grew silent.
“Night Owl, come on in.”
Bullet Bob clicked his mike twice and motioned to the coxswain, who had heard the transmission.
In two minutes they were on the side of the Greek freighter that faced the shore. Several lines dangled over the side. The coxswain hooked the inflatable to the lines and held it there with the engine while the men in the boat snapped lift lines to the largest black bag in the bottom of the boat. Up it went, slowly. The lines came back down and two more bags went up. Then Quinn and the two men went up.
On deck the lieutenant took a look around with his regular night-vision goggles.
“Two men were aboard. We took them out.”
“Let’s get the boat up.”
The coxswain hooked the inflatable to the lift lines, and it was the last thing brought aboard.
The SEALs quickly went about their business. The largest bag contained a.50 caliber machine gun. This was carried to the bridge. The second bag contained two.50 caliber Barrett sniper rifles, and the third, the heaviest, food and ammo.
On the bridge Bullet Bob again used the night-vision binoculars. Yes. This would be a good place. The town of Eyl, the Sultan, and the boats on the beaches were all in range of the.50s, which were effective to a mile and a half. The machine gun and sniper rifles were, in effect, light artillery. When the time came to sanitize t
he Sultan, they could simply motor over in the boat, taking their weapons along.
As the men set up the guns a sliver of moon rose over the ocean. It didn’t throw much light, but it made the harbor and town and abandoned ships easier to see with the naked eye.
Quinn supervised the placement of the weapons, reported via radio to the flagship, then settled down with his men for a snack and drink of water.
* * *
“I’ll need a million bucks in fifties and hundreds, used, packed in a duffel bag,” Jake Grafton said as matter-of-factly as he could manage. “Put a lock on it and give me the key.”
Sal Molina looked up from the messages he was reading and eyed Grafton warily. “I’d like a million in cash myself, just for pocket change, you understand.”
“This will be a down payment on the ransom. Proof of my bona fides, so to speak.”
“What about the other hundred and ninety-nine million? The funny money you wanted Treasury to make.”
“Pack it on pallets. Damn stuff will weigh about four and a half tons, I figure.”
“Pallets.”
“Then send it to Admiral Tarkington aboard Chosin Reservoir as soon as possible.”
“FedEx or UPS?”
“What’s your beef, Sal?”
“Why are you going to Somalia?”
“The name of this game is rescuing as many of the Sultan people as possible, with the minimum amount of friendly casualties. I want to see the situation, smell it and touch it, then we’ll figure out how to unscrew this mess.”
“You really think you can pull this off?”
“Pretty sure. The only question is how much blood it will cost. We have Jurgen Schulz and his staff to thank for maneuvering us into this corner.”
“You’re not going to make that crack to a reporter, are you? Or to Congress?”
“Hadn’t planned on it. However, if Schulz tries to sit in Washington and tell me what to do, then I might.”
“You obviously think you can wow this pirate, Ragnar, convince him not to kill you.”
Grafton smiled.
“What if you’re wrong?”
“Well, Sal, I expect you to wear a decent suit and tie to my memorial service. None of those rag-bag Texas lawyer threads. And send some flowers. Callie likes flowers.”
Molina stood. “When are you leaving?”
Grafton glanced at his watch. “I’ll be leaving for Andrews in about an hour, after I talk to the director. We’ll take off whenever you get that bag full of money onto the plane. In the meantime, have the Fed put out a call for hundred-dollar and fifty-dollar bills to all the national banks. Get some stories in the press. We’re lucky they asked for used bills. That gives us some time.”
“Okay.” Sal Molina stuck out his hand. “Luck,” he said.
“Yeah.”
After Molina left, Jake opened his desk drawer and took out a pistol and ankle holster. He strapped the holster to his left ankle and checked the pistol, a Walther in.380 caliber. The magazine was full. He chambered a round, popped out the magazine and added one more cartridge to it, then put it back in the pistol. He holstered the weapon and pressed the Velcro safety strap firmly in place.
He debated taking another magazine. He didn’t think they would search him, but if they patted him down, he didn’t want them to find a magazine in his pocket.
No. One magazine-load would have to be enough.
Grafton shook his trousers down and checked his image in the glass of the window. He saw a lean man in his mid-sixties with short, thinning salt-and-pepper hair combed straight back and a prominent nose. Clean-shaven, square jaw, a reasonable tan. He was wearing a fairly expensive gray suit and off-white shirt, no tie. Leather shoes.
He looked, he hoped, like a pirate’s idea of a successful senior bureaucrat or political appointee. Not the Sal Molina type, but the Jurgen Schulz type. On a sabbatical from Wall Street or the Ivy League. A guy who could talk about a couple hundred million as if it were small change.
Jake Grafton ensured all the drawers and cabinets in his office were locked, then picked up his small suitcase and walked out, turning the lights off before he pulled the door shut.
* * *
Ten miles north of the promontory that formed the northern side of the Eyl harbor, six SEALs in wet suits crawled through the surf onto the beach. They put out sentries, checked the consistency of the sand, which was hard above the high water line, then hoisted their boat, which contained their bags of gear, and trotted into the dunes.
Thirty minutes after they arrived, they established radio contact with Chosin Reservoir and reported beach conditions, distance to the dunes, the fact that the beach was deserted in every direction as far as they could see. Inland, the dunes turned to desert scrub and ran on for a mile or so before the foothills started. The hills were low and irregular, covered with scrub.
The senior man, a first-class petty officer named Ben Bryant, thought this beach would make an excellent landing area for marines, and he passed that observation on to the ship.
The only problem, as he saw it, was the tracks of pickup trucks in the sand above the high water mark. Up and down the beach, again and again. They had made a rutted road. Apparently they liked to drive the beach and look for things or people who shouldn’t be there, like shipwrecked millionaires or stranded submarines … or U.S. Navy SEALs.
Ben Bryant told the folks on Chosin Reservoir about the tracks, and began looking for an ambush site. He figured the time might come in the not-too-distant future when the bad guys’ beach rides might become an annoyance. If and when, that was an itch he could scratch.
* * *
Another SEAL team landed on the beach six miles south of Eyl. Again, the beach was straight, the sand was packed hard above the high water mark, and the dunes behind were empty. A half mile south of their landing place stood a fisherman’s shack on the edge of the dunes. A boat rested on the beach, tied to a rock so a large wave couldn’t carry it away.
Without a word, two SEALs trotted that way to check it out.
There were two men and a woman asleep in the shack. No kids. No weapons. No food in the place except for a couple of half-rotted fish. The SEALs used plastic ties on the Somalis’ wrists, binding them in front, and fed them MREs. They wolfed the food down.
There were tire tracks on the beach here, too. The Somalis couldn’t speak English and the Americans not a word of Somali, but through signs the Americans came to believe the pickups came by every two or three days.
The SEALs looked at each other. A pickup truck with a machine gun in the bed would be a nice souvenir of their African adventure. Perhaps they could even find a proper use for the gun.
* * *
Ten miles farther south along the beach, a helo settled onto the dirt road that led to Eyl and a team of six Force Reconnaissance marines piled out. They carried two machine guns and several cases of ammo in addition to their packs and personal weapons. The chopper was on the ground less than a minute, then rose and skimmed the earth eastward, toward the sea.
Two other roads led into Eyl. One from the north and one that wound its way through the mountains from the interior. Both were dirt, mere rocky tracks through the desert. Teams of Recon marines were landed in both places.
The teams quickly took positions, positioned their machine guns to control the roads, sent out scouts and reported back to the ship.
Eyl was cut off. No one was going in or out without a fight.
* * *
It was nearly eight o’clock in the morning in Eyl, Somalia, when the door to Mike Rosen’s stateroom opened and Geoff Noon walked in. “Good morning.”
“Knock next time, shithead.” Noon was wearing the same clothes he wore yesterday. Maybe he slept in them.
“And a pleasant morning to you, too, sir. If it’s not too much trouble, the gentlemen of Eyl request that you accompany me to the computer center, where you can check the news from Merry Old England and the former colonies. If you please.”
Noon smelled of gin. Already. Bastard had already had his morning tots. More than one, Rosen was sure. As they walked, with the pirate guard trailing, whiffs of Noon’s body odor nauseated Rosen.
“When was the last time you had a bath?”
“What a coincidence you should ask! My chambermaid is drawing my bath as we speak. When we are finished with our errand, I shall leave you to enjoy the squalor of this abandoned ship and go home to my mansion on the hill, to a luxurious hot bubble bath, clean clothes and a noon feast prepared by my personal chef and served by professionals in white livery. Then gin fizzes on the verandah and a wonderful Cuban cigar. One can live quite well in these climes on a modest income, as I do.”
“I haven’t had anything to eat since noon yesterday.”
“I’ll talk to the pirates.”
“Great.”
“They’re roasting a goat on deck by the pool. Perhaps-”
“No goat. I can root around in the galley and find a can of something, if they’ll let me.”
In the e-com center Noon settled into a chair like a bird returning to its nest and took a nip from his gin bottle. Rosen fired up his laptop, which was sitting just as he left it. As long as the pirates left it alone, Rosen mused, it was probably less likely to be stolen here than at Rosen’s condo in Denver.
Almost sixty e-mails awaited his attention. He scanned the list. A U.S. military sending address caught his eye, so he opened it.
This is what he read:
Mr. Rosen,
The company that owns MV Sultan of the Seas, the company that insured it, and the governments involved have appointed me chief negotiator for the release of the passengers, crew and ship. I will arrive in Eyl tomorrow evening. Please pass this message along to the pirates and ask them to meet me at the Eyl airport.
Sincerely,
Jacob L. Grafton
Rosen printed out the message and handed the copy to High Noon, who put on his glasses and perused it. “Any previous messages from Mr. Grafton?”
“No. That’s the first one.”
“What does ‘MV’ mean?”
Pirate Alley Page 20
