The crenellations in the wall around the roof, designed so that cannons could blast away at ships in the roadstead or troops advancing along the beach, gave us excellent fields of fire. We were looking down into the foxholes, which weren’t really foxholes at all, but merely mounds of earth. The guards had been on the outside, so they could look toward the fort and keep people from crawling out the gun portals, but now they were on the inside of the mounds, looking out. Survival instinct, I guess. Down there in the darkness were the muzzle flashes. Nothing was happening in the fort.
They were hard to see at first, but as my eyes became adjusted to the low light leaking from the gun portals I could just make out the guys hunkered down in the first guard position, with their backs to me.
Since I didn’t have an ounce of sporting blood in me, I shot them both in the back as fast as I could pull the trigger. Ducked down and ran to my left, toward the next portal.
These guys were looking around in all directions, trying to figure out what was happening. I popped the first one, but the second guy hosed a bullet my way. Must have gone over my head toward Arabia, because I didn’t hear it smack into the stone. I shot him before he got off a second shot.
Somewhere behind me I heard the boom of the Sako. E.D. or Travis was helping Grafton nail the guards over there. Grafton’s rifle cracked repeatedly.
By the time I got to the third guard position, it was empty. The guys were probably boogying down the hill toward the beach. I got a glimpse of one and sent a bullet after him to speed him on his way.
The easternmost guard position was empty.
Grafton left me on the roof while he went below to get the bomb disposal guys into action. In a minute I saw the three of them working with a shovel below my position, along the wall of the fort, digging around an antenna that disappeared into the earth.
Things were quieting down in Eyl. Every now and then a heavy machine gun aboard Sultan-I saw the muzzle flashes-put a burst into Ragnar’s lair, probably just to keep their heads down.
A couple of sharp cracks reached my ears, different from the reports of AKs or machine guns. Or the Sako. I couldn’t place them.
“E.D., where are you?”
“In the brush up on the hill above the fort.”
“Keep an eye peeled.”
More gunfire. Several RPG explosions. I saw two launchings, the signature flames unmistakable, and heard the warheads detonate. Eight or ten minutes passed, and the battle up the river road quieted down. An ominous silence settled over this corner of Africa.
On my headset I heard the SEALs giving orders. Any pickups coming into town from any direction were to be disabled.
After perhaps ten minutes, Grafton called me on the headset. “Come on down, Tommy.”
He was waiting at the portal with the Mossad bombers.
“It wasn’t AN in that trench,” he told me, his voice tired. “It’s PVV-5A. Tons of it. Looks like they laced it with a little diesel fuel as a booster for the fuses. We found six radio-controlled detonators, each powered by three pickup-truck batteries. That’s all of them, I hope, but who the hell knows? The only way to be sure is to find one of their garage door openers or radio triggers and push the button.”
I just nodded. Grafton was a gambler with absolutely no nerves. He could clean out Las Vegas.
“We have to check out Ragnar’s hive,” he muttered.
I nodded.
Grafton keyed the transmit button on his belt and spoke into the headset mike. “Red Leader,” Jake Grafton said. “This is Team Leader. Light them up.”
“Aye aye, sir. Blue Leader, anytime you are ready.”
I heard the words in my headset. Then I saw more muzzle flashes from the Sultan. A heavy machine gun sprayed the side of the hotel. I could see the sparkles of glass cascading down, hear the smacks as.50 caliber bullets tore into the side of the building, hear the ripping bursts carrying over the water.
For a second I thought of Nora Neidlinger, who was in that building, but then I pushed her out of my mind. She elected to stay … that was her choice.
* * *
By some miracle, Ricardo’s cameraman had his camera running and the feed going to the satellite. He was standing in the door of the shack, Ricardo right beside him still on the satellite telephone, talking excitedly about what he could see.
The cameraman aimed his camera at Ragnar’s building, scanned the pickups. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe it was luck. Whichever, he caught everything that happened in the next thirty seconds.
* * *
As the.50 caliber machine gun opened up, Bullet Bob Quinn settled on a machine gunner in the back of one of the pickups. The lights of the hotel were behind him, limning him. He was a nice target. The ship’s movement brought the crosshairs onto him, and Quinn pulled the trigger. The recoil made him disappear.
“Got him,” the spotter said. “Try the gunner on the truck to the left.” Quinn shifted his aim.
Then an RPG round shot toward Sultan trailing a streak of fire, the rocket exhaust. Simultaneously the machine guns in one of the pickups opened up on the Sultan. It got off two bursts before the fifty chewed into it. Pieces flew, and the fuel tank exploded. Two other technicals got under way, only to be hit by automatic weapons fire that seemed to be coming from the beach. The last one started moving … and was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. It too exploded and began burning brightly. A man with his clothes on fire managed to bail out and run about ten feet before he collapsed. The barrel of the machine gun in the bed pointed at Mars, up there somewhere in the night. Flames and flashes lit up the plaza as machine-gun ammo and RPG warheads in the beds of the trucks cooked off. It looked as if a string of large firecrackers was popping.
All four pickups had been destroyed in about fifteen seconds.
“Hellfire inbound.” That was the voice of the controller aboard the flagship. The drones were shooting.
The first Hellfire missile exploded on the right front corner of the roof, a bull’s-eye on the machine-gun nest. Two seconds apart, three other missiles impacted.
Through his scope, Quinn could see that the guns were gone, the sandbags lying about haphazardly. No one moved. No doubt they were all dead.
His spotter called a target, a man in the door of a house to the right, aiming an RPG-7 launcher. Bullet Bob fired first, and the RPG went soaring into the night sky. The rocket exhaust must have ignited the house, because it burst into flame.
* * *
“Go,” Grafton said and slapped me on the back.
“Okay.” I started walking into the darkness toward Eyl. The Israelis were right behind me. I keyed my mike. “Red Leader, this is Carmellini. Coming down.”
“Roger that.”
We broke into a trot, which soon became a run. Down the hill in the darkness, running, breathing hard, the sounds of gunfire in our ears … I confess, I was getting into the combat zone where it didn’t matter if I lived or died. I had been there before, and it is addictive. Maybe it’s the adrenaline. Or the knowledge you are cheating the devil.
The pickup that had been on fire was now just a glowing mass of twisted metal. Some bodies lay scattered about as I ran across the open space, followed by my two Israelis, but I was following a crowd. Four SEALs in black were ahead of me. I slowed my pace as they charged into the building.
There was the stutter of a submachine gun, just a short burst. Taking my time, I walked into the entrance and paused. The electric lightbulbs were still illuminated, so the generator was still going. Somewhere. I didn’t hear it. A pirate’s corpse was arrayed on the floor against the far wall, still bleeding from multiple chest wounds. Maybe his heart was still pumping. I didn’t know or care. The SEALs were gone, up the stairwell.
The two Mossad agents had pistols in their hands. They looked around, then nodded at me. I could lead them or follow them. I was tempted to sit down in one of the old stuffed chairs and let them do their thing. However, if I did that and the trench bomb around the fort wen
t off, destroying it and murdering everyone in the place …
That damn generator. Radio controls would probably be battery operated, but if there were a landline to the detonators, the generator was probably rigged to power it. It wouldn’t be high in the building since it used diesel fuel. The pirates wouldn’t want to carry cans up the stairs. The basement, then.
A burst of submachine-gun fire rattled down the staircase. Then a couple more. The SEALs were cleaning the place out.
I went around the stairs, found a door and opened it. There was an electric lightbulb on the ceiling, illuminating stairs going down. Now I could hear the low, steady throb of a diesel engine.
I found the Kimber.45 in my hand. When I drew it I don’t know. Suddenly I realized it was there. I cocked the hammer and put the safety on. Some people carry those things cocked and locked, but without a holster to put the thing in, I never had that kind of sangfroid. Sooner or later I would have managed to shoot myself. I laid the assault rifle on a chair and, with both hands on the pistol, started down.
* * *
Mike Rosen was in the e-com center aboard Sultan when he heard the.50 caliber machine gun the SEALs had brought aboard open up. There was no mistaking the trip-hammer rips of a heavy machine gun firing bursts for anything else.
One of the windows popped. Rosen could see a hole in the glass, small, with cracks radiating out from it. Although he didn’t know it, a bullet from the machine gun in one of the pickups in the Eyl square had found its way here. Just one. The only casualty was the glass.
He looked out the window and saw the burning pickups in the square in front of Ragnar’s lair, saw muzzle flashes from automatic weapons and the distant flashing on the hills, up toward Eyl West.
He got back on his computer and began typing. The words poured out as fast as he thought them. He was a good typist and he was good with words, which were his stock-in-trade. Every minute or so he hit the SEND button; the Internet could crash anytime, and even if it didn’t, he wanted to report as close to real time as he could.
At Rosen’s radio home, KOA Denver, the e-mails were put on the Net at the same time the announcer read them over the air. All up and down the front range of the Rockies, people pulled their vehicles to the berm of the highway or the edge of the street and turned the volume of their radios up. Rosen wrote for them. He could see them in his mind’s eye, and he wrote word pictures just for them.
* * *
“Captain, we have all three pirate skiffs on radar.”
“Range?”
“Eight miles.”
USS Richard Ward, an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer, approached Eyl from a course slightly north of west. The commanding officer, Commander Millicent C. Fjestad, had her ship inbound at ten knots. Her crew referred to her as The Old Woman, just as male commanding officers were traditionally called The Old Man. Less reverently, she was called Big Mama behind her back. Still, every man and woman aboard Richard Ward respected the captain. She was a highly competent naval officer who cared about her crew.
Her mission tonight was to sink all pirate skiffs at sea off the port of Eyl so that SEALs could egress without opposition. “Sanitize the area and keep it sanitized,” flag ops said.
Like all American destroyers now in commission, Richard Ward had but one gun. It was a dilly, a Mark 45 Mod 4, in caliber 5"/62. This weapon fired a shell five inches in diameter weighing 70 pounds at a muzzle velocity of 2,650 feet per second. Its effective range was over 20 miles. Aimed by radar and computer, it was accurate and deadly.
The pirate skiffs, however, were not conventional enemy warships, with decent freeboards and a superstructure. They were boats, and their gunwales extended about a foot above the water. They were small, difficult targets. Big Mama Fjestad didn’t intend to miss. She wanted them closer, not hull down on the horizon.
She worried about the depth of the water as she approached the Somali coast. There was a submerged sandbar about three miles offshore, and the channel across it was farther north. Of course the skiffs were inside the bar, cruising up and down, looking for God knows what. The sonar was giving the bridge crew a constant real-time reading on the depth of water.
Not a light shown from Richard Ward as she glided toward the coast. On the deck forward the gun barrel was alive, tracking the northern-most target as the destroyer closed the range.
At three miles from the skiffs, five miles offshore, the water shallowed to less than a hundred feet. Commander Fjestad turned her ship northward to parallel the coast.
Meanwhile, aboard the skiffs, the fireworks and muzzle flashes from Eyl were plainly visible. The crews were not searching the dark sea for enemy ships, but staring toward Eyl as their captains tried to raise someone on their hand-held radios.
Ten seconds after Ward was steady on her new course, the tactical action officer (TAO) called on the squawk box. “We are stabilized on all three targets, Captain. Request permission to shoot.”
“Send them to hell,” Big Mama said, then stuffed her fingers in her ears.
Two seconds later the Mark 45 rapped out three shots, about a second apart. The propellant gases still burning as the shells left the gun muzzle strobed the darkness. Now the gun barrel traversed at 30 degrees a second to the second target and stabilized. Boom, boom, boom, three more ear-splitting reports assaulted the bridge team, most of whom had fingers in their ears or were wearing ear protectors. Traverse to the next target, three more muzzle flashes and trip-hammer reports.
It was all over in twelve seconds.
Five seconds later the bridge squawk box came to life. “Captain, the targets have disappeared.”
“Good shooting, people! Well done.”
* * *
The Hellfire missiles that took out the machine guns on the roof of the lair cratered it. Chunks of brick, mortar, concrete and wooden beams were blasted down into the penthouse. Sheikh Ragnar was hit by a large piece, which knocked him unconscious. His two sons were there, and they too went down under the onslaught.
Nora Neidlinger was in the bedroom, under the bed, when the roof caved in. She wasn’t hurt. For a long moment the air was opaque with dirt and dust and explosive residue, but gradually the sea breeze carried it out. From the outside it looked like smoke.
She crawled out and looked around. The lights were still on. She made her way through the rubble and found the three pirates on the floor of the main room. U.S. currency notes were scattered everywhere, like confetti. One of the sons was obviously dead, with a large splinter of wood through his neck. He had bled some, but not much. She couldn’t see his face, which was covered with dirt and small debris.
The other son was still alive. The butt of his rifle was under him. She grabbed it and tugged. It came slowly, then quickly when out from under his dead weight.
She examined it, then pointed it at the man’s head and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
She fiddled with a lever on the side. Tried it again. This time it hammered. The recoil was unexpected and the rifle leaped from her hands. Fell into the blood-and-grime mess that had been his head.
Nora went over to Ragnar and scrutinized him. He was lying faceup, with a bloody spot on his skull, in a bed of currency. His eyes were open and blinking. He was trying to swallow.
Not too much stuff on him. She found his pistol on his belt and jerked it out. Threw it across the room.
Turned and wandered away. There was a rope in the corner, coiled up. Not too thick. Clothesline thickness. But long.
She went into the kitchen area, also a shambles, and rooted through the debris until she found a knife. Went back to the rope and began cutting six-foot lengths. It was difficult. The knife was not very sharp, so she had to work at it.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jake Grafton, Arch Penney and four of the Sultan’s officers and supervisors were standing by the portal to the fort when a technical roared out of the brush and screeched to a halt in a shower of gravel. It had come cross-country, avoiding the road. A ma
n swung the machine gun in the bed back and forth, looking for targets, as another man jumped out of the driver’s seat and ran for the entrance. Penney and his officers ran for cover.
Jake propped the AK against the stone that formed the side of the entrance, took careful aim and fired a single shot. The man on the machine gun toppled. The other man slowed. Grafton put a bullet into the dirt at his feet. He stopped dead, his weapon in his hand.
“Drop it!”
He knew enough English to understand that command. The assault rifle fell to the ground.
Penney came over to Grafton’s side. “That’s Mustafa al-Said,” he said. “He led the pirates that captured my ship. He killed my officers. Murdered my passengers.”
Grafton handed Penney the AK. “You do the honors. Get him in here. Don’t kill him. We may need him later.”
Penney walked out with the rifle at his shoulder, aimed. He took a pistol from al-Said, then marched him toward the portal.
Once they were there, Penney handed the pistol to Jake Grafton. Al-Said stood with his hands up. Grafton said to Penney, “Get something to tie him up with.”
“We don’t have anything. Someone will have to watch him every minute.”
Jake Grafton bent over, checked the pistol in the dim light. Then he pointed it at al-Said’s leg and pulled the trigger. The bullet tore into the pirate’s knee; he toppled, screaming.
Grafton walked over to him. At point-blank range he shot him in the other knee.
“He’ll stay put now,” Grafton told Penney. “Get the keys to that truck. We may need it later.” The Sultan’s officers were gawking at him, with their mouths open.
The admiral handed Penney the pistol, then climbed the stairs leading to the roof. He wanted to see the rest of the battle, what there was of it, and radio reception was better up there.
* * *
The problem with going down stairs is that your feet arrive before you do. The sound of the shot in that basement was like a cannon going off, but I didn’t notice. The bullet burned my left leg and it folded, which was just as well. By then I was in the process of diving toward the bottom headfirst.
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