A group of hard cases with AKs watched Grafton get out of the bed of the pickup, and watched his two escorts take him inside.
Although he didn’t know it, Yousef el-Din had had a group working for hours cleaning up most of the mess in the penthouse. They disposed of broken glass and rubble and trash by the simple expedient of tossing it off the balcony and out the windows on the south side of the building, none of which had any glass left.
Jake was prodded up the stairs, all of them, to the penthouse. The roof looked as if it would cave in if even a mild breeze arose, but most of the rubble was gone. The bodies of the Ragnars, father and sons, were somewhere below under all that debris.
Yousef was waiting in the penthouse, seated on a carpet with his legs folded, looking every inch like an Arab slave trader waiting to haggle. Standing beside him was Geoff Noon, High Noon himself, still wearing that filthy old white linen sport coat with a bottle of gin in the side pocket. The pocket on the other side was empty, so he looked unbalanced. He glanced at Grafton but showed no sign of recognition. Also standing there was a white man of medium height, trim, wearing slacks and a short-sleeve pullover shirt with a polo pony on the left breast. He was obviously the cleanest man in the room.
“I’m Mike Rosen,” he said to Grafton, extending a hand.
Grafton shook and pronounced his name.
“Yousef wants to talk about money,” Noon said.
“Okay.”
“When and how it will be delivered.”
“Tell him that two helicopters will arrive at noon tomorrow. Each will have money suspended on a pallet below it. The choppers will put the pallets in the plaza, then fly over to the fort and land on the roof.”
Noon chattered a while, then listened as Yousef talked; then they went back and forth. Grafton put his hands in his pockets and inspected the holes in the roof. Those Hellfires had done a job.
Finally Noon asked, “Why pallets under the helicopters?”
“Two hundred million dollars in currency weighs over two tons. That is a ton for each chopper. In this heat, that is a safe load.”
More jabber.
Grafton interrupted. “Of course, after the money is paid we will want to transport all the people in the fortress out of here. We will use helicopters, take about a dozen people at a time. It will obviously take the rest of the day to fly eight hundred and fifty folks out to the ship. As each helicopter is loaded and takes off, another one will land on the roof.”
Yousef listened impassively to this statement.
Grafton continued, “I suspect that Yousef and his followers will wish to take the money and leave immediately. If they try any treachery, we will of course kill every single one of them and take the money back or destroy it.”
Yousef’s face darkened as he listened to Noon, and he rose swiftly to his feet. He had a pistol in a holster on his belt, and his hand went to the butt.
“We are Muslims of the Shabab,” he said, according to Noon. “Not liars and thieves and blasphemers and sinners, like the pirates were. They are dead, gone. The Shabab will not be insulted.” The men standing around listening made appreciative noises upon hearing this. They were Allah’s chosen. “You will do as you have said. If you try to betray our agreement in any way, all the hostages will die. Every last one. They will be shot and bombed until every single one of them is but crushed bone and bloodstains on the stone.”
He pulled a radio control device from his pocket and tossed it on the carpet on which he had been sitting.
Jake Grafton didn’t seem impressed. “We’ll want the Sultan, too,” he said. “A team of sailors will arrive tomorrow by boat after the money is paid. They will go aboard, start the engines, raise the anchor and sail her away.”
Yousef wanted more money. Grafton stood his ground. He had made a deal with Ragnar. There was no more money.
“Two hundred million for the people, another hundred million for the ship,” Noon reported.
After thinking it over, taking his time, Grafton said, “We will sell him the ship for a hundred million. We will give him a hundred million for the people and he can keep the ship. Maybe start up a cruise ship line. Eyl to Rome, via Suez and Athens.”
It was an argument for show. Yousef played to his followers, with much back-and-forth with them that wasn’t translated.
After a while Yousef caved. “Two hundred million, and you can have the people and the ship.”
Grafton merely nodded. He looked a question at Noon. “You taking Rosen back to the ship?”
Noon nodded.
Grafton turned toward Rosen and said, “Put it on the Internet.” He turned on his headset, arranged it on his head and had a short conversation with Admiral Tarkington. Then he turned it off to save the battery.
Yousef issued orders, and Grafton’s escorts led him to the stairs and down. They ended up in a room on the third floor. Still some trash about. Grafton looked out the shattered window and the one that still had glass, then sat down. He paid no attention to the guards.
* * *
High Noon accompanied Mike Rosen back to the ship. They waded out from the beach and managed to heave themselves into the boat without tipping it over, and the boatman started the little one-cylinder engine. Away they putted.
When they were back aboard the Sultan of the Seas and climbing stairs to the e-com center, Rosen asked, “What happened to Ragnar?”
“He is no longer with us.”
“And the rest of the pirates?”
“The same, I am afraid. Yousef el-Din and his men did their level best to kill them all. Oh, no doubt a few of them are hiding in the brush, but only a few.”
“That e-mail I sent?”
“Oh, yes. It stimulated them vigorously.”
“And whose idea was it to send that?”
Noon grinned and didn’t answer.
When Rosen’s computer was online, over a hundred e-mails vomited forth.
“We will send the Shabab’s communique first,” Noon said, “then the substance of the conversation between Yousef el-Din and Mr. Grafton.” He extracted a grimy sheet of paper from a pocket. “Send them to your radio station. Your colleagues will, I assume, put them on the Net where the world can read them.”
He handed the paper to Rosen, who spread it out on the desk and read it carefully. It merely stated unequivocally that unless the two hundred million dollars was paid by noon tomorrow Eyl time, the Shabab would kill all the prisoners. A couple of sentences of boilerplate followed, exhorting the faithful to jihad.
“Apparently Allah’s soldiers have inherited the pirates’ business,” Rosen muttered.
“Their assets and their debts,” Noon said, uncorking his gin bottle. “Start typing.”
* * *
It was close to noon when I heard trucks coming up the hill toward the fort. A man would have had to be deaf not to hear them, since none of them had a working muffler. Sounded like a NASCAR race.
I figured the guards were going to change, so trotted over to the other side of the fort. Sure enough, the holy warriors were walking around the fort. For just a moment, there was no one on the eastern side. I didn’t waste a second; just vaulted over the side into the loose dirt twelve or so feet below. Then I shot off down the hill toward the beach. Went about fifty yards and then flopped onto my belly.
Waited a minute or so for shouts, or shots, or someone running after me. Nothing. I started crawling. My leg hurt every time I moved it.
After I had done about a mile on my stomach around the north side of that rock pile and was thoroughly fagged out, with cactus stickers in my hands and knees, I decided to get on the net. Got my headset on and turned on the transmitter/receiver and keyed the mike. “Control, this is Tommy. Where is the admiral?”
“He’s in Ragnar’s lair.”
“E.D.? Travis?”
“Yo.”
“Where are you? We need to talk.”
* * *
Julie Penney was standing at a gun port lo
oking at the sea when Tommy Carmellini landed in the dirt in front of her, picked himself up and galloped into the brush.
She recognized him, even though she didn’t see his face. Big, rangy, athletic, lean … Grafton’s assistant, the man who brought Nora back from Ragnar’s hellhole.
Marjorie was there and came over to the porthole. She had gotten a glimpse of the falling body, but hadn’t seen who it was.
“Tomorrow’s the deadline,” Marjorie reminded the captain’s wife. “One more night.”
Suzanne Ranta heard that remark and joined the conversation. “Out of here tomorrow. Or we’ll be dead.”
“Arch says the ransom will be paid,” Julie Penney reminded them. “Let’s keep our chins up.”
“Stiff upper lip,” Irene mocked, as British as she could.
Julie Penney wandered off to check on other passengers. She had had a little talk with her husband in the wee hours of the morning, after the shooting died down, and he had said, “It’ll be tonight.” She asked why, and was told, “The locals can’t see in the dark. The Americans prefer it. If there is going to be trouble, it will be tonight.”
Tonight. Conceivably, this could be the last day of life for a great many people.
So … if you knew this might be your last day, how would you spend it? Almost by instinct Julie Penney chose to spend it trying to buck up her husband’s passengers.
* * *
It was nearly four o’clock when I reached the rendezvous, what with crawling and sneaking along. The Shabab had patrols out, and they kept showing up at inopportune times. Sometimes I am lucky that way.
Our rendezvous was a big pile of rock overlooking Eyl West. It was just below the rim, a pile of hard rock that had resisted the rain and wind through the ages. I wouldn’t have been surprised if hundreds of thousands of years ago Homo erectus hadn’t huddled on random nights on the very spot where Travis had built a tiny, smokeless fire to brew coffee and warm up MREs. In Africa, you think about things like that.
It wasn’t just Travis and E.D., either. It was my whole snatch team. Harry, Doc, Willis, Buck, Wilbur … all of them.
“This is like a high school reunion,” I said. “Who brought the beer?”
“Jesus, Tommy, you look bad! What did you do, crawl the whole way?”
“Damn near. Where’s Orville?”
“Up on top of the rock. We have a drone up keeping watch.”
“I’ll recommend a Christmas bonus for all you guys.”
“Want a beer?” Buck asked.
“You are a prince among men. Wanna meet my sister? I’ll fix you up.”
E.D. handed me the satellite phone. “The navy wanted to talk to you as soon as you showed up.”
“I kinda thought so.”
“They weren’t expecting Admiral Grafton to get himself into a hostage situation. I think they want you to take care of that.”
“Did you guys get all those radio detonators?” Willis asked me.
“If you hear a really big bang, the answer is no.” I opened a can of beer and looked at E.D. “Anything else they want to ask me?”
“Now, Tommy, no one knew if you were going to get out of that fort before dark. We were Plan B.”
“I see.”
“What with you here, we’ll go back to Plan A.”
“The airport?”
“Yep. The Shabab boys are sitting up there looking mean. Kinda too bad about the pirates. When the Shabab came in shooting, the pirates’ machine guns split their barrels when the first round was fired. The battle was a little lopsided. Very tragic.”
I set about making the satellite phone do its magic. By the time the task force ops officer was on, I was halfway through my second can of beer. Even warm, it tasted delicious.
While I talked the guys worked on my leg. Got an antibiotic on it and a coagulating pad, then a tight bandage. At least now it wouldn’t bleed. Damn thing was sore, and the best I could do was a hobble.
When the ops officer was finished and had answered my three questions, I turned off the phone. I looked at my little band and told them, “We eat, then get at it. Timetable is unchanged. The airplanes are in the air.” They knew all that, of course. “E.D., you and Travis are going to cover me with the Sakos.”
They just nodded and handed me some MREs. I began wolfing them down. Damn, I was hungry.
E.D. sat down beside me. “I heard some shooting last night. Did you guys get any kills?”
He shrugged. Looked around to see who was listening to us. Apparently no one. “We missed,” he allowed in a low voice.
“Oh, come on!”
“Shit, Tommy. Shooting at people running around like crazy in the dark isn’t like shooting at a damn target. You know that! The damn guys wouldn’t hold still.”
“I thought you guys-”
“For the love of Christ!” he hissed, trying to keep his voice from carrying. “Of course I’ve been in combat before. A dozen times. Sprayed lead and threw grenades and called in air strikes and patched up wounds and all that soldier shit. We got those guys about to do you on the road, didn’t we? Sure, we were trying last night, but the crosshairs kept dancing and those guys wouldn’t hold still. You know what I’m saying?”
“It’ll be my neck on the chopping block tonight,” I pointed out.
“We scared ’em last night. Kept their heads down. When they got their heads down they’re outta the fight. We’ll take care of you.”
“Yeah. Sure. Anything happens to me, you’d better get off this planet. Shoot straight, damn your eyes.”
“Oh, of course, Tommy. Sure as shootin’.”
“Fuck you, Erectile Dysfunction.”
“Hey! Watch your mouth.”
“Fuck you, Limp Dick. Is that better?”
“Cocksucker.”
“Don’t drink any more of this horse-piss beer before we go, either.”
Properly motivating people is a fine art. It comes natural to me. It’s a gift.
* * *
We sorted our gear, made sure everyone had what he needed. Willis Coffey was leading the rest of the guys to the airport. Since they had farther to go, they left early. E.D. and I helped ourselves to more water. The sun had slipped below the hills to the west, but still made the ocean sparkle. When the sun was gone and the ocean turned gray, we started sneaking.
For some reason, the sky turned bloodred as the night came on. Perhaps the upper atmosphere was full of dirt from the desert to the west. Some kind of lensing effect, I suppose.
We finally reached our position just after dark. E.D. settled in beside me and set up the legs of the Sako’s bipod. Got his spotting scope beside him, focused it on Ragnar’s lair, used the laser range finder …
“Two hundred ninety yards,” he whispered.
That was well within the capability of the night scope on the rifle. Unfortunately it was too close for comfort. One of the advantages a sniper enjoys is that he can kill from beyond the range of enemy weapons, and it is this edge that often is the only thing keeping the sniper alive.
Using the night scope, we checked for other positions. After a couple of shots, E.D. was going to have to move. Probably retreat, if the opposition tried to encircle him with more people than he could take down. We picked out places.
“Just don’t shoot unless you have to,” I told him. “But if you do shoot, kill the son of a bitch. One shot, one kill.”
He didn’t say anything. The dumb bastard. Shooting and missing last night! Jesus! Sniper my ass.
I lay there stewing as I looked over Ragnar’s lair with binoculars. I could see people in some of the windows, and people in the penthouse. A couple on the balcony. None of them was Grafton, not that I expected to see him. They probably had him in one of the back rooms under guard.
In the plaza were six pickups with machine guns, technicals, tastefully arranged around the burned-out hulks of the two trucks that caught fire last night.
The gunners in the trucks were nervous, and kept look
ing out to sea, scanning. They weren’t stupid. The truck carcasses and side of the building had plenty of.50 caliber bullet holes. Anyone with eyes could see that a heavy weapon had been used. From a patrol boat? A launch? Or from the Sultan?
Even as I watched, two squads of armed men, about eight in each bunch, walked out to the beach and carried two boats into the surf, where they climbed aboard. Other men brought them machine guns, one for each boat, which the people in the boat mounted on a tripod. They didn’t waste any time, but set sail immediately for the Sultan. Once there, the first boat went alongside while the other laid off about a hundred yards and covered it. Six or so of the Shabab warriors went aboard. Truth is, these guys should have done this twelve hours ago. Maybe el-Din just thought of it, or maybe he was too busy praying or writing reports to his superiors to attend to business.
I hoped the SEALs were ready. It was a couple hours too early for the party to begin. A shootout aboard ship would alert this bunch here, complicating the problem of extracting Grafton. And the Sultan passengers. And crew. Plus my snatch team. And me.
* * *
Bullet Bob Quinn saw the boats set off from the beach and assumed the worst. Like Carmellini, he knew that shooting at dusk would jeopardize the entire operation. He and the men could just go over the side and swim away … but there was the big fifty on the bridge. One look at that gun and its ammo and the Somalis would catch right on. At least now they were only suspicious.
He sent a runner to the e-com center to warn Rosen and High Noon. The Somalis expected them to be there, so that was fine. Indeed, that was where some of them would go first, just to check. He stationed two men there.
He and the other SEALs took up positions here and there throughout the ship. He hoped to take out the holy warriors one at a time, if they would just cooperate.
Bullet Bob stood just around a corner from the pilot landing, which of course was still open. He heard the boat bump against the grate and heard them clamor aboard. These guys weren’t silent. Didn’t know how. People were supposed to flee from the righteous violence of their guns, from the wrath of Allah.
Pirate Alley Page 29
