by Brad Thor
“There could be any number of reasons for that meeting in Cyprus.”
“Really?” he stated, reaching down and removing two more folders from his briefcase. He held them out over the table and then let them drop. “Would any of those reasons be the same, or different, for why your team was seen in both Egypt and Libya before those governments collapsed?”
She would’ve stressed again that it wasn’t “her team,” but she was too stunned by his remarks to utter the words. The Americans in those photos had not only been let go from the CIA; they had been let go with prejudice along with big black marks in their records. What was this all about?
Lydia Ryan was good at reading people, so whatever intelligence Nafi Nasiri had, she could see he was one hundred percent confident in it. Which meant, by extension, so was his boss, and very likely, the King of Jordan himself. Otherwise, Nafi wouldn’t have been sent here to meet with her like this.
“I don’t know what to say,” she finally offered.
The Jordanian pushed the folders across the table to her. “Tell me you’ll read what’s in these files.”
“Of course, but—”
“And that you’ll get me some answers.”
“Nafi, I can’t make you any promises.”
Nasiri looked at her, his face implacable. Reaching down, he removed a final folder from his briefcase, but he didn’t open it. He didn’t push it across the table, either. He just sat there tapping his index finger on the cover.
“I’m sorry to have to do this,” he finally said.
“Sorry for what?”
“Understand that we take any threat to the survival of the Kingdom of Jordan very seriously.”
There was now another tone in his voice, and she didn’t like it. “What’s in the folder, Nafi?”
The Jordanian lifted the cover, but only high enough so that he could see inside. From where she was sitting, Ryan couldn’t make out a thing.
“Over the winter, we infiltrated a terror cell that has been moving bomb makers, bomb materials, and martyrs into Syria via Lebanon. While inside the cell, our asset learned of an advanced plot targeting the United States.”
Ryan’s eyes went wide. “You’ve known of an attack being mounted against the United States and this is the first you’re telling us? Give me that file. I want to see what’s in it.”
Nasiri shook his head. “We’ve been monitoring the situation.”
“Monitoring the situation, my ass,” said Ryan, her anger growing. “You know what, Nafi? Fuck you, and fuck your monitoring. You can’t sit on information like that.”
“We didn’t want to come to you until we were confident.”
“This is blackmail. The Kingdom of Jordan is blackmailing the United States. That’s what’s going on here. You’re not going to give me what I want, until you get what you want.”
The Jordanian slid the file back into his briefcase and stood.
Ryan’s blood was boiling. She knew her emotions were getting the better of her and that that was wrong, but she couldn’t control her anger. “You haven’t given me a shred of proof. What makes you think my superiors will even believe you?”
Nasiri frowned as he reached the conference room door. “I think a country like America should be confident enough to trust its allies. That’s what I think. Have a good flight home, Lydia.”
With that, the Jordanian was gone, and in his wake, the CIA had been dropped into a nightmare involving a terrorist plot that might or might not exist, and no way to even begin running it to ground.
CHAPTER 2
COAST OF SOMALIA
MONDAY
From the beginning, everyone had told Scot Harvath that his plan not only was flawed and would never work, but was absolutely insane. The three men who disagreed had been hired on the spot.
Parachuting onto the rear deck of the supertanker Sienna Star was considered a kamikaze mission, but they’d made it. One of the team members was injured on the landing, but they still managed to retake the ship and free its crew. What they hadn’t bargained for, though, was that the tanker’s captain had been smuggled to shore earlier as an insurance policy against any such rescue attempt. This had placed Harvath and his team in a very difficult position.
The assignment called for the successful recapture of the ship and the recovery of the entire crew. In order to beat out the other private contractors for the job, Harvath’s boss had proposed an exorbitant fee, but with the caveat that the ship’s owners owed them nothing unless the operation was one hundred percent successful.
As a former Navy SEAL with a storied career now working for a private intelligence agency, he lived for this kind of work. That said, it was an extremely risky operation and it wasn’t the first they had been forced to take. Recently, his employer and the company’s namesake, Reed Carlton, had been targeted for assassination. The killers had also targeted the Carlton Group’s top operations personnel. Harvath and Carlton had been lucky enough to survive, but they had lost so many key players that their organization was unable to function at its previous level and ended up losing its biggest and sole government contract with the Defense Department. Because of that loss, they had been forced to take any and all assignments — sometimes under ridiculous terms — in order to rebuild their organization.
The Old Man, as Harvath referred to Carlton, had put everything on the line for this assignment, advancing a small fortune that included funding a secondary team out in the Gulf of Aden to conduct drone reconnaissance on the Sienna Star for the last week and a half.
Despite this surveillance, though, no one had realized that the pirates had smuggled the captain off the tanker. It wasn’t until Harvath and his team had retaken the ship that they discovered his absence. At that point, they were left with only one option. They had to recover him.
Their hope was that the last thing the pirates would ever expect was that their pursuers would risk following them to their own village.
As was typical with Somalis, the pirates had imported engineers — mostly from Kenya — who could operate the hijacked vessels until their owners, or more often their insurance companies, paid whatever ransom was being asked for. In the case of the Sienna Star, though, the tanker’s navigator had been murdered in the initial throes of the hijacking and the ship’s owners wanted to send a message. They wanted all of the pirates killed.
Considering that the Somalis had murdered a crew member, Harvath didn’t have a problem with that. If any of them posed a threat, they’d be dealt with accordingly. That was exactly how his team had handled retaking the ship. The Kenyan engineer recruited by the pirates was another matter entirely.
Not only had he been helpful on board the Sienna Star, but Mukami had assisted Harvath in drawing up a rescue plan for the captain. He knew where the pirates were holding him and had even offered to take Harvath there, if the price was right. Harvath had agreed to his terms.
Mukami had come up with the idea to turn the tables on the pirates by hijacking their own supply boat when it came out to resupply the tanker with food, water, and fresh khat.
In addition to getting paid, the man had requested only one additional item. He had asked that his cousin Pili, also an engineer from Kenya and who would be coming out on the resupply boat, not be harmed. Harvath had agreed to that as well.
Leaving their injured colleague plus an additional man behind to hold the Sienna Star, Harvath and his remaining teammate — a former SEAL named Matt Sanchez — used a smiling and waving Mukami as bait and successfully took the pirates’ resupply boat when it pulled up alongside the tanker. Within seconds of the three dead Somalis being tossed out of the resupply boat, the great white sharks that infested the Gulf of Aden tore the corpses to shreds.
Mukami’s cousin, Pili, simply thought he was coming out to take over the Sienna Star for a few days. The shooting of the three pirates had taken him completely by surprise. He was in a state of quasi-shock, and so Mukami piloted the resupply boat into port.
They would berth at the northern end of the small harbor where the supply boats normally picked up and dropped off. The car Pili and Mukami shared was already there waiting. While Pili stayed with the boat, Mukami would drive Harvath and Sanchez past the house the pirates owned, in order to give them a quick look. He would then drop them off around the corner and continue on to the house himself.
It wasn’t unusual for the Kenyan engineer, upon arriving back in port, to show up at the walled compound to be paid, before proceeding on to his hotel. Usually, the pirates invited him to drink, smoke the hookah, and gamble with them. If they did so tonight, Harvath had told him to accept their offer.
Mukami was carrying a satellite phone Harvath had given him, along with a plausible excuse for it. If the phone was discovered, he would state that the Sienna Star was experiencing an electrical issue and that he needed to be available should his cousin require technical assistance.
Once inside, Mukami was to try to ascertain where the Greek captain was being held and transmit that information to Harvath and Sanchez. The two former SEALs would handle the rest.
When they were done going over the operation, Harvath had a personal question for Mukami. “Why?”
“What do you mean, why?” the Kenyan replied.
“Why do all this? Why work with the pirates?”
“For the same reason everyone else does. For money.”
“But the pirates are bad people.”
“Unfortunately, in Africa,” said Mukami, “we don’t have the luxury of deciding from whom we take our money.”
“But you and your cousin seem like good guys. You’re educated. You’re polite. You speak multiple languages. For men like you, there have to be other ways to make money.”
“No, not true. Not for the kind of money we need.”
“I don’t understand,” said Harvath.
“My sister and Pili’s sister went abroad. They paid bad men to smuggle them into Europe. They were told they would be given jobs and would be starting over with an opportunity for a better life. It was a lie. They were trafficked. That was two years ago. We have not seen or heard from them since. The men tell us that for more money they can get our sisters back. This is why we have been working for anyone who will pay us, and pay us well.”
It was one of the millions of heartbreaking stories that existed throughout the third world. It was also none of his business and Harvath was sorry he’d asked. A hush fell over the boat and there was only the sound of the diesel engines as they made their way toward shore.
When the resupply boat pulled into the pirates’ port it was well past midnight. The pier they tied up to was completely deserted, except for a few other supply boats, their crews long since returned home for the evening. On the other side of the tiny harbor they could see a stem-to-stern string of pirate mother ships and fast attack boats. While Somali piracy may have been down overall, this village still seemed to be making a very good living at it.
Peering out of the boat’s wheelhouse, Harvath and Sanchez took one last look up and down the pier before allowing Mukami to disembark and ready his vehicle. Pili would stay aboard and wait for everyone to return.
They watched Mukami walk down the dock to a battered brown Mercedes sedan with one white door and a missing rear window. Once the car was fired up and running, he turned the lights off and then back on to signal the coast was clear.
After one more thorough look around the harbor, Harvath and Sanchez stepped out of the wheelhouse and onto the dock. Though they had taken steps to disguise themselves with Somali clothing they’d found aboard the Sienna Star, they would never fool anyone up close. That was fine by both men, though, as they didn’t plan to get personal with anyone other than the people they intended to kill.
As soon as his passengers were inside the car, Mukami turned onto a side street and made for the pirates’ stronghold. He knew better than to drive up the narrow main drag.
The village wasn’t very big, but judging from the satellite dishes clustered on the rooftops, as well as the expensive foreign cars parked in front of some rather impressive compounds, Harvath’s opinion about the profitability of the local piracy trade had been right on the money.
Mukami slowed as they approached one such stronghold and told Harvath and Sanchez it was coming up on the left. Music could be heard from inside and lights could be seen from the upper windows. There were no guards in front, which Sanchez immediately remarked upon.
“They’re pirates,” replied Mukami. “They have many, many guns. Who would be dumb enough to steal from them?”
Just because it hadn’t ever happened didn’t mean it wouldn’t, and the fact that even Somalis suffered from normalcy bias made Harvath shake his head. The pirates were about to learn a very painful and hopefully very expensive lesson.
Pulling around the block, Mukami dropped his passengers at an abandoned fisherman’s shack, its windows missing and its roof caved in.
“You know what to do?” Harvath asked.
Mukami nodded and, before Harvath could ask another question, drove off.
Sanchez watched the old Mercedes recede into the darkness. “Do you think he can keep his shit together?”
Harvath nodded. “He’s nervous, but I’ve made it worth his while. He’ll do it. Let’s get inside.”
The two men hid themselves in the dilapidated dwelling and waited.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, they received a text message from Mukami. The captain was at the compound and was being kept in a room on the first floor. There were at least thirty men inside.
Sanchez let out a quiet whistle. “Thirty. That’s a lot of man-skirts.”
“That’s a lot of guns.”
“And RPGs.”
“And RPGs,” Harvath agreed. “Let’s see if we can’t peel some of them off. Ready?”
Sanchez nodded as Harvath switched frequencies on his radio to hail the heavily armed support boat that had been doing the reconnaissance on the tanker. It was now hovering just out of sight offshore. “Shotgun, this is Norseman. Do you copy? Over.”
A moment later, the response came back. “Norseman, this is Shotgun. We copy. Over.”
“You are cleared hot. I repeat. You are cleared hot. Bring the rain. Over.”
“Roger that, Norseman. Shotgun is cleared hot. Bringing the rain. Ninety seconds. Shotgun out.”
Looking at Sanchez, Harvath said, “Beers are on me when we’re done.”
Sanchez smiled. “Roger that. Let’s roll.”
CHAPTER 3
Harvath and Sanchez stepped from the shack and listened. They were close enough that they could hear the RPGs as they began to be fired from the Shotgun team on board the support boat. They could feel the ground tremble as one after another of the mother ships and their fast attack craft down at the port exploded. Instantly, the village erupted in pandemonium.
Harvath and Sanchez took advantage of the mayhem to advance unseen on the pirate stronghold. They held up behind a parked car and watched as at least twenty men poured out of the compound and rushed down to the harbor. They gave it another sixty seconds and when no one else came out, they decided to go in.
The gate had been left wide open and Harvath slipped inside first, followed by Sanchez. They split the pie, with Harvath engaging two pirates to the left and Sanchez one to the right. Utilizing speed, surprise, and overwhelming violence of action, they kept moving and firing as they pressed on into the main structure.
From inside the house, a frightened Somali hopped up on khat began firing before the two Americans had even neared the door. As Harvath returned fire with his suppressed MP7, Sanchez flanked the Somali and shot him through a window, killing him instantly.
Entering the structure, the firefight continued as three Somalis on a balcony overlooking the living room fired on them. This time it was Sanchez who return
ed fire while Harvath attempted to maneuver for a cleaner shot. The only problem was, he couldn’t get one. From their high ground position, the Somalis had total control of the room, and they knew it.
Harvath searched for a way to take them out, and then it came to him. Signaling Sanchez, he counted to three and then charged across the living room.
While Sanchez kept them pinned down, unable to return fire, Harvath slipped beneath the wooden balcony, pointed his weapon straight up, and fired. The high-velocity rounds of the MP7 tore through the planks, chewing the pirates above to bits.
As soon as Sanchez gave him the “all clear,” he stepped from under the balcony and moved back across the living room.
There were two hallways available to them and Harvath was about to suggest they take the one to the right when two more skinnies popped out of a room at the end of the hall to their left. He and Sanchez dropped both Somalis instantly.
Hoping that was the room where the captain of the Sienna Star was being held, Harvath and Sanchez moved quickly for it.
At the door, Sanchez reached for the knob and when Harvath nodded, threw it open.
Inside, they found the last remaining Somali pirate along with two other men — the Greek tanker captain and the Kenyan engineer who had led them into the village. The satellite phone Harvath had given him was sitting in his lap, and pressed against Mukami’s head was the barrel of the pirate’s AK-47.
Before Harvath could shout wait, urge calm, or even get off a shot of his own, the pirate pulled his trigger and the air was filled with a pink mist as the wall beyond the bed was splattered with blood, bone, and pieces of Mukami’s brain.
As the Kenyan engineer’s body fell to the ground, Harvath unloaded his weapon into the Somali pirate. He didn’t stop until his magazine was empty.
“Damn it,” he said. “Damn it. Damn it. Damn it!”
Sanchez didn’t reply. There was nothing he could say. Instead, he turned and faced the hallway to make sure they didn’t get ambushed from behind.
