The pirates hadn’t, and their corpses were lying in a pile between Eyl East and West. Of course, most of them had been ambushed, but …
Quinn waited until the last man had taken a ladder upward, then followed him. At the top of the staircase he saw the guy looking around, slightly awed at the size and opulence of the ship, and apparently undecided about which way he should go. The man paused to listen, held his rifle tightly.
He made a selection and walked along, looking at this and that, obviously ready to shoot someone if only he could find someone. Anyone.
Bullet Bob kept low, stayed behind, as quiet as a shadow. His chance came when the pirate thought he heard something behind a closed door and approached it, intent upon it.
Quinn’s garroting wire went over his head and the SEAL pulled with all his strength. The rifle fell, the man grabbed at his throat. They all did that. It was instinct.
As violence goes, garroting ranks right up there with slashing with a cutlass. To be good with a garroting wire you have to like the weapon. You must like pulling with all your strength on the handles and feeling the victim buck and writhe helplessly as the wire cuts into his throat, then slices into his jugular veins, severing them. The lack of air would eventually kill the victim, a strangulation, but the loss of blood to the brain brings an almost instantaneous unconsciousness. The victim never wakes up.
The trick is to keep tightening the wire after the victim passes out. Tighten until it cuts the veins. It helps if the man pulling on the handles is strong, with well-developed shoulders and back muscles. Bullet Bob was. He was only a few inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than the Somali male, but he was twice as strong. It wasn’t a fair contest. It was a quick, silent assassination.
When the blood erupted from the holy warrior’s neck, Quinn lowered him to the floor. Pulled his wire off and wiped it on the back of the man’s filthy shirt in a place the blood had yet to reach. Then he moved on.
The SEAL lieutenant was on the bridge, hidden in the doorway of the navigator’s office, when he heard a man come along the starboard passageway and pass through the open door. Sure enough, he saw the big machine gun lying there on the floor immediately and stepped toward it to take a look. As he passed the open door, Quinn stepped out behind him, grabbed his mouth with his left hand and cut his throat with his right. The fighting knife slashed through tissue as if it were soft cheese.
Quinn stepped back into the office and waited. Sure enough, within less than a minute another Somali came exploring. He saw the first guy lying on the deck in a pool of his own blood and stopped. This put him about six feet from the doorway. Quinn launched himself toward the man, with his knife swinging. The swipe caught muscle, tissue, tendons and cartilage; blood erupted from the man’s neck. His eyes glazed and he tumbled to the deck, unconscious and bleeding out.
Five minutes after they came aboard, it was all over. All six were dead. One of the SEALs skinned out of his clothes, donned a dead man’s, grabbed his AK and went on deck to wave off the two circling boats.
Quinn watched. It was a necessary gamble.
It paid off. The boats moved off to the other ships.
Bullet Bob went up a deck to the e-com center. Noon was fairly well pickled, his usual late-afternoon condition, and Rosen was working on his e-mails. Neither knew the Shabab warriors had come aboard, and Quinn didn’t tell them.
“We’re going to have to get ashore before the darkness becomes too thick,” Noon said. “I must signal for our boat.”
“Plan on staying aboard tonight,” Quinn said. “If the boat comes, we’ll wave them off.”
“I wonder if the cruise line would mind if we helped ourselves to some of their fine cuisine?”
Rosen turned off the computer. “I know where the peanut butter is, and if the bread hasn’t spoiled…”
The SEALs were in the kitchen and had a simple dinner prepared when Quinn came in with Rosen and Noon. The two ship’s engineers were already there, drinking their pints, celebrating their return from belowdecks. They looked happy and serene; no doubt they would get happier and more serene if they kept swilling the beer.
The last of the light was fading from the sky.
Quinn checked his watch, then said to Finnorn and the others, “You guys get that gun mounted on the bridge. Show starts in two hours and five minutes. While you are going that way, throw those corpses over the side.”
Rosen stopped forking food. “Corpses?”
“We had uninvited guests. They are on their way to Paradise. Or Hell. Allah will figure it out.”
* * *
As the light faded completely, I switched to night-vision goggles. I had everyone located, I hoped. There were the six pickups, all in the plaza, all illuminated by the evening fire. No women or children around, just men, and all armed. They were roasting something in the fire … If there was a pickup on the far side of the building, I couldn’t see it from my vantage point.
The generator was running again, powering lights in every room. I got glimpses of people in the penthouse, two visible on the second floor … a couple guys on the balcony with rifles, walking around looking things over.
I could see two machine guns mounted on the roof. They were the belt-fed 7.62 mm Russian models that were in all the pickups. These two must have been carried up from the weapons horde in the basement.
When the night was as dark as the inside of a black cat, I pointed out my route to E.D., who wasn’t talkative. “Don’t shoot unless it’s absolutely necessary. If you do shoot, don’t miss.”
He grunted.
My leg had stiffened up. Oh, man, that thing was sore.
I crawled forward.
* * *
Aboard Chosin Reservoir, Rear Admiral Toad Tarkington was watching the action unfold on computer screens. Real-time video and infrared presentations from three drones over Eyl played on monitors. SEALs were in the water and approaching the Eyl beaches. Marines were landing on the beaches above and below the town in armored personnel carriers. They had some light artillery and plenty of machine guns with them. Three Ospreys carrying SEALs were orbiting high over the Eyl airport. They would parachute into the airport and help Tommy Carmellini’s snatch team secure the place after the CIA operatives had taken out as many of the defenders as possible. Carmellini’s team would attack at the airport at the same time SEALs crawling onto the beach assaulted Ragnar’s old lair, the move that would open the ball. Thirty minutes prior to the assault, F/A-18s and F-35s would launch from the aircraft carrier seventy-five miles offshore; they would be overhead with plenty of ordnance, should it become necessary.
The whole plan was overkill: the naval intelligence professionals thought the Shabab around Eyl had at the most 150 men, and probably less after last night’s battle. Tarkington was hitting the place with enough firepower to destroy a division. Simply, he could not be certain that Grafton and his Mossad colleagues had managed to disarm the detonators for the trench bomb. He needed to hit the Shabab with overwhelming force, take them down within seconds, and make any resistance impossible. Tarkington was trying to save lives-the hostages in the fort and the marines and SEALs.
He had had several satellite conversations during the day with his boss, the fleet commander, the Pentagon and the White House. All offered advice, no one issued orders. It was a military miracle, Toad thought. Yet there are two sides to the total responsibility coin: Screw this up and you alone take the fall.
“Swarm them,” he told Sal Molina at the White House this evening, “and we’ll have minimum casualties. Piddle around and it’s going to be a mess.”
“Why don’t you just blow up Ragnar’s building with missiles?” the president had asked. “Obliterate it.”
“That was the original plan, sir, but Admiral Grafton is being held hostage in there. So I’ve changed the plan.”
“I see,” the president said thoughtfully. What he meant was, his hands were clean. If Grafton or any of our guys get killed, I’ll give them a
medal. Spend an hour in the East Room in front of cameras holding hands with the widows.
Politics. It was enough to gag a maggot.
Toad wasn’t betting everything on the initial assault. He had every destroyer in Task Force 151 in a trail formation, one behind the other, ready to steam just off the beach and shell any target. He had every marine in the MEU on alert to go ashore as fast as helicopters and Ospreys could get them there. He had airborne ordnance from the aircraft carrier USS United States that could be delivered in a continuous stream as fast as the carrier’s crew could work the flight deck and rearm the planes. Finally, all the destroyers and both cruisers had targets selected for their Harpoon missiles.
Tarkington had enough military power at his command to wipe this corner of Africa off the map. If anything happened to the hostages, he intended to use it. He had told all his superiors that, and none of them said no.
Yet, if anything happened to the hostages, he and Grafton had lost.
Tarkington didn’t intend to lose.
Just now he watched a small green spot moving on an infrared image captured by a drone over Eyl. There were plenty of other green spots, some of them moving, but the computer techs said this one was Tommy Carmellini crawling for Ragnar’s lair. Jake Grafton was in there.
Toad tried to see the telltale traces of SEALs crawling up onto the beach. Nothing. Since they were wearing wet suits, which were indeed wet, their forms should be colder than the sand still warm from the sun. As the water dried, the cold signature would disappear. As the heat of the men’s bodies slowly exceeded the temperature of the cooling sand, they would again become visible in infrared. But not yet.
Tarkington hoped the Shabab didn’t have night-vision or infrared technology. He and Grafton had made this plan assuming that they didn’t. Watching Carmellini creep along, Toad crossed his fingers.
“Thirty minutes, Admiral. Battlestar”-the United States-“is launching aircraft.”
“Thank you.” Toad arose from his chair and went to the head. There wouldn’t be time later.
* * *
Yousef el-Din had spent most of the afternoon and evening in conversation via shortwave with his colleagues in southern Somalia, who of course knew his plans quite well. They informed him about media coverage of the Sultan hostage incident, and the fact that the two hundred million in cash was on its way to the task force via air. That fact had been splashed across every newscast in the world.
Ragnar’s shortwave radio was in shambles, so the Shabab had transported theirs from West Eyl to the lair and lugged it to the penthouse, where the reception would be better due to the height, and the fact that, unlike East Eyl, the beach town didn’t sit in a river valley surrounded by rimrock hills.
When he wasn’t chattering to his colleagues, Yousef el-Din prayed on his regular schedule. He normally prayed five times a day, unless he was in combat.
Yousef was deeply devout. He knew that he and his men would need Allah’s help after they had the money and killed the hostages. Still, the Shabab’s friends all over the Muslim world would grow in prestige and power, and Allah be praised, the final battle between good and evil would be one giant step closer.
Yousef did not think he would survive the wrath of the allied task force. To go to Paradise as a martyr, with the blood of infidels on his hands, after having fought Allah’s war against the nonbelievers … well, it was heady stuff for Yousef el-Din. He could feel the Prophet’s spiritual presence, giving him strength for the days ahead.
When he finished praying, he thought again about the money. Two truckloads of currency. He would have his men hide it in the desert, at a place known to his Shabab colleagues in the south. If he didn’t live, they would find it and use it to fund jihad.
Allah akbar.
But the Americans! After he blew up the fortress, or machine-gunned the hostages, they would be outraged, naturally, and would lash out, like snakes. One of the places they would storm was this building-and the basement was full of explosives! He had inspected the weapons treasure trove earlier this afternoon.
The weapons were tempting, enough to outfit hundreds of men, but with two hundred million dollars the Shabab could buy a shipload. Perhaps even several nuclear warheads. The North Koreans were a reliable source, and of course there were the Bulgarians. And these days the Iranians were anxious to tangibly assist anyone who was the enemy of their enemies, of whom they had many.
After his evening prayer, Yousef gathered his lieutenants and issued orders. They must be ready for tomorrow.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I managed to reach the back corner of the building without being seen. I had crawled the whole way, taking advantage of every shadow, every turned head, and eventually I reached the corner of the building on the dark side, away from the fire in the plaza.
I had my headset on, so I could hear reports from everybody involved in this operation, if they were on my freq. I thought the SEALs were, but they hadn’t said much. A few minutes earlier I had heard Willis Coffey say that he was in position. I triggered the mike. “Tommy going in.” I got a Roger.
I took one more quick look around, then began free-climbing the building.
I had studied that building since I arrived in Eyl, and knew precisely how it could be done. During my college years I was a rock climber, which was the perfect sport for a guy who aspired to burglary. I had an interesting youth, one that I tried to avoid discussing in polite company. Of course Jake Grafton knew-he knew everything. The thought occurred to me a few years ago that he had spent so much of his life around straight arrows that he was amused by bent ones.
I gained the second floor in just a few seconds, hauling myself up by my fingertips. Try it sometime. If you think chin-ups are difficult, this will be an interesting challenge for you.
I reached a window, devoid of glass. Maybe it had been shot out in the excitement last night … or some kid threw a rock through it just to piss off Ragnar.
I looked in, saw no one and crawled through in less time than it takes to tell.
The lightbulb hanging from the ceiling was lit. I reached up and unscrewed it. It’s something in my character-I feel safer in the dark. I pulled the Ruger from my backpack and checked the safety.
The hallway was empty. I checked each room, then listened in the stairwell. Heard people coming down. Ducked into an empty room and waited. I felt naked with all these lightbulbs burning. Should have completely disabled the generator, not just turned it off. Maybe I should ask for a do-over.
Three of them, by the sound. They went on down.
I went back to the stairwell, listening carefully. Went on up to the next floor and eased my head around the corner for a look. There sat a guy on the floor outside one of the rooms. No one in the other direction.
The man was about twelve feet from me, more or less. Chewing khat and looking bored. His rifle rested on his lap. If I didn’t drop him with the Ruger and he shouted, this gig could go south fast.
For a few seconds I hoped he would get up, walk away, or toward me. Anything but just sit there. Yet even as I thought about it I heard someone come into the lobby down below. Two of them, and their voices came up the stairwell, which was a sounding pipe. I heard footsteps on the stairs.
Out of time. I stepped out, squared around and, as the startled guard turned toward me, shot him in the face. He swayed, his mouth opened to scream. I ran the three steps to him, put the muzzle of the silencer against his forehead and pulled the trigger.
Tried the door. Unlocked. Pushed it open, grabbed the AK and dragged the guard inside.
Jake Grafton was sitting against the far wall, watching me. He started to say something, and I put my fingers to my lips, silencing him.
The guard was still alive. At least his eyes were fluttering, though unfocused. I don’t know much about brain injuries, don’t want one myself, and if I ever get one, hope someone will quickly send me along to the next adventure. That’s what I did for the guard. Took his hea
d in one hand, twisted sharply and broke his neck. His body went limp.
Voices in the hallway were coming this way. I left the guard where he lay, tossed Grafton the AK and stepped back out of sight.
Voices. Gabbling. Probably remarking that the guard was supposed to be here. They came through the door together, saw the guard and froze for just a second. I shot them both above the ear. Down they went.
“I’ve got Grafton,” I whispered into my headset mike.
“Roger that.”
I helped myself to an AK, motioned to Grafton, and we slipped out the door.
Paused to listen.
Down the stairs to the second floor. Grafton wasn’t quiet. He was trying, but to me we sounded like a symphony warming up.
I froze to listen some more. People talking in the lobby.
We had to chance it.
Down to the ground floor. A squint into the lobby. Two guys standing there talking, one with an AK, the other with an RPG-7 launcher and a bag of warheads over his shoulder, looking out into the plaza. Fortunately the window glass was long gone, so there would be no reflections.
I could just hear the hum of the generator in the basement.
I motioned to Grafton. I wanted him to step through the door, then turn left and go down the stairs to the basement armory. When I saw that he understood, I checked the guys, then gave him a nudge. He went. When he had made it, I followed. The diesel generator was louder here.
Going down was going to be iffy. Someone in the basement was going to get another free shot at our legs.
Well, we couldn’t stay here, and the noise helped mask our footsteps. Suck it up and do it, Tommy.
I led off, the Ruger in my right hand and the AK in my left.
Thank God the room was empty. We cleared the stairs and I walked over for a look into the other room. Just piles and piles of weapons.
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