Task Force Desperate

by Peter Nealen

  Baardheere loomed against the river, a darkened hulk of buildings and trees. There were next to no lights visible; in a couple of places we could still see fires burning from the raid the day before. There didn’t look like there was a single electric light burning anywhere outside of a building, not even at the checkpoints where Kenyan forces were set up. I could see one on the northeastern outskirts of the town, mainly identifiable by the BMP that was sitting near the sandbagged emplacement. There was a faint glow to the south, probably where the main Kenyan FOB was, but even that seemed to be minimally lit.

  I watched the Kenyan outpost carefully as we rolled toward the north end of town. There was no activity, no sign that we’d been spotted, or if we had, that they had any interest in us. I found that disturbing, frankly. These were supposed to be the forces that were going to stop the Islamist takeover of Somalia; at least that was the line in the press, even after the disastrous reversals in Mogadishu, Kismayo, and Baidoa. But they were looking to be rather less than watchful, even after Awale’s raid in the morning. Were they that beaten? Or was Baird just that good at making sure they looked the other way while he worked?

  The UAZ led us to a small walled compound on the north side of the town; in fact it was the northernmost structure in the place, near as I could tell. There was what looked like a kind of superfluous extra wall sticking out at an angle from the south wall, and Baird led us into the funnel-shaped opening. The HiLux pulled aside, and I motioned for Jim to take us in after Baird; Alek obviously wanted the HiLux with the PKM furthest out.

  The UAZ came to a stop, and Baird and his driver got out. The driver was huge, easily 6’4” and, unless I missed my guess, around two hundred fifty pounds. He was also carrying a Galil like it was a toy.

  Jim shut off the engine, little more than a foot from the UAZ’s rear bumper, and we started piling out. Baird started into the compound, but Alek called out quietly for us to wait a second.

  “Bob, Nick, you’ve got vic watch,” he said. “Keep an eye on things. We’ll keep our radios on for the time being. This guy is apparently our contact--” he looked at Danny, who nodded. He’d apparently gotten the bona fides from Baird at some point since we’d linked up. “So, we should be on reasonably safe ground, but let’s not take anything for granted.” There were nods and murmurs of assent all around. Noticeably, none of us had either dropped kit or left our personal weapons in the trucks. Safehouse or not, we weren’t going to be relaxing much here.

  The big guy was waiting by the entrance. As Alek led the way in, he gestured for our gigantic host to go in first. I saw a flash of teeth in the dark as the guy grinned, and ducked through the low gate to lead the way into the compound.

  It looked like just about any other Third World compound I’ve ever been in. The concrete wall was topped with what looked like a low fence, and there were three small buildings against the north wall, one in each corner, with another about centered. The main house was against the west wall, and while it was the same stucco with ill-fitting windows and metal roof of all the rest of the buildings I’d seen in East Africa, it looked solid. A generator was chugging away around the corner from the entrance, but if there were lights on inside, the windows had been blacked out.

  As I glanced around, I saw that we weren’t alone in the compound with Baird and the giant. There were at least half a dozen men in the courtyard, all armed. None of them were smoking, which I found interesting. Smoking at night kills your night vision, but that’s a fact generally lost on Third World armies and militias. These guys were in kit, albeit light, armed, and held themselves like professionals. Just what kind of operation did the Agency have going here?

  Baird was nowhere in sight when I came through the gate, but Big Guy was next to the door to the main house, and pushed it open as the team approached. Golden light spilled out, confirming that the windows had indeed been blacked out from inside. I was also able to get a good look at Big Guy for the first time. He was white, with thick red hair, dressed in shorts and a t-shirt, with a Rhodesian chest rig across his massive torso. I also got a good enough look at his rifle to see it was not the Galil I’d initially thought it was. It was close, as the South African R4 was closely based on the Galil, but it was different enough to be noticed in the light, at least if you have an eye for those sorts of things.

  We filed into the house behind Big Guy, who walked across the room and leaned against the wall. Baird was standing next to a table that dominated the left side of the room. A small chest that at second glance was a storm case sat in the corner next to Big Guy, and several white plastic chairs were drawn up around the table. Another R4 was leaning against the wall. Other than that, and the rugs on the floor, the room was bare.

  Baird looked us over, as we returned the favor. He was black, though not quite as dark as most of the Somalis I’d seen. His hair was short, and going gray, as was the short, neat chin beard. He was also obviously in good condition, in spite of living in this hellhole for who knows how many years.

  He was also pissed. “Where do you people think you are?” he demanded. “For that matter, what year do you think it is? You think this is Iraq, in 2005, when the muj hid their faces, and never came out at night? You don’t own the night here, you don’t own the air, you don’t own anything. Yet you carry on after dark as if you have no signature, blazing beacons on your shoulders, and have the nerve to say you want to meet covertly!”

  I was about to respond, and not politely, but Alek wasn’t having any of it, either. “Slow down, Baird, none of us have any idea what the fuck you’re talking about. We didn’t get briefed on Al-Shabaab having any sort of modern capabilities, aside from AKs and RPGs, and we only found out that they were this close to Baardheere within the last twenty-four hours, anyway. Since you’re the man on the ground, you can calm the fuck down and fill us in, or you can shut the hell up and we can leave, to do what we can without your hysterics.”

  Baird looked shocked. “You mean…” He looked around at all of us, his gaze finally landing on Danny. He sat down heavily and shook his head in disbelief. “You really have no idea what’s going on down here, do you?”

  “Apparently not,” Danny said tightly. “So how about enlightening us?”

  Baird cursed under his breath. “I’ve been reporting to Langley about this situation for months, ever since Al-Khalidi showed up. Naturally they‘ve been sitting on it. Didn‘t fit with what their whiz kids had dreamed up.”

  That got Danny’s attention, fast. “Al-Khalidi? Which Al-Khalidi?”

  Baird raised an eyebrow at him. “Mahmoud Al-Khalidi--‘Al Masri,’ he’s calling himself here.”

  “Holy shit.” Danny seemed genuinely rocked. I was missing something. “Are you sure about this?”

  “Of course I’m sure!” Baird snapped. “Triple-sourced sure. I’ve even seen the man with my own eyes. It’s him.”

  “Somebody mind filling in the rest of us knuckle-draggers as to just who Mahmoud Al-Khalidi is?” Jim asked, his voice just a little too loud. Jim never was a fan of people talking inside baseball in front of him.

  Danny was still staring at Baird. “He’s the number two man in the Egyptian Mukhabarat, and the brother of Said Al-Khalidi, who has been formally anointed to succeed Yusuf Al-Qaradawi as the spiritual leader of the Islamic Republic of Egypt. He is a very, very big fish. Now just what the fuck brings him to Somalia?”

  “I think maybe we need to start this conversation over from the beginning,” I put in. There was a general murmur of agreement.

  Baird nodded, and waved to the plastic chairs around the room. “Please, sit down. This could take some time. You may as well bring your other two teammates in; this compound is secure.” Alek just looked at him for a moment, before finally nodding fractionally and motioning to Tim, who stepped out to bring Nick and Bob in. Baird looked over to Big Guy. “I should probably introduce my associate, and number two man of this little operation here. Jason Van Voorhees has been with me since the beginning,
when I was still an officer with our oh-so-well regarded colleagues in Langley.” Van Voorhees grinned humorlessly.

  “Wait a second,” Larry said, “I was under the impression that you were a CIA officer?”

  “I was,” Baird replied. “I retired a few years ago, but maintained some of my contacts, and my activities here have provided my former bosses with enough information that they have decided to generally look the other way and leave me alone.” He snorted. “As if they could touch me here, the way they’ve let their assets fall off in recent years. It’s worse than the nineties.”

  Danny looked over at Van Voorhees. “So where’d he dig you up, Jason?”

  “Special Task Force,” the big man said, in a soft, Afrikaaner-accented voice. He didn’t volunteer any further information, but if he was telling the truth, those three words pretty well established his bona fides, at least as a trigger puller. Special Task Force had been South Africa’s premier hostage rescue and counter terrorism force for a long time. It had suffered a lot from the corruption under the ANC administration, but still was probably some of the best on the continent, that I knew of.

  “All right,” Danny said, pulling up a plastic chair and levering his geared-up bulk into it, as the rest of us followed suit. There was some commotion as Bob, Tim, and Nick came in and situated themselves around the room. Funny, none of us had our backs to either the door or Van Voorhees. “We already knew you had some kind of assets here, we just didn’t know exactly what kind. Are you telling me you’ve got your own little company of shooters out here? What the hell for?”

  “Same reason I came back over here after I retired,” Baird replied. “To do something about the Islamists and the warlords.” He scratched his beard, and stared at the floor. “Haven’t managed to do all that much,” he admitted, “mostly running some support missions for the AMISOM forces here, and gathering information.

  “It was shaping up better when we first stood up. I had a good spread of former South African, British, and US military personnel, along with a handful of Kenyans and Somalis, mostly those who’d been somehow involved in the Jubaland Initiative.” Jubaland was to be the semi-autonomous Somali-Kenyan state in southern Somalia, much like Puntland and Somaliland to the north. It was intended by the Kenyans to serve as a buffer between Kenya and the nonstop violence and extremism of Somalia itself. “At the time, things were looking a bit better down here. Then Al Masri showed up.”

  Chapter 22

  “At first we didn’t have any idea who he was. Hell, we didn’t really care. He was small time, an up-and-coming Shabaab commander, but Shabaab was on the ropes. They were holding on to Kismayo, and that by their fingernails. They’d given up Mogadishu, and they’d lost Baidoa to the Ethiopians, bad. They’d been at each other’s throats a year before and almost wiped themselves out. That’s always been their biggest weakness; even when they had the NFPS outnumbered and outgunned, they couldn’t make it stick because one leader or another was always taking time off from the fight to attack his fellows. They expended more ammunition on each other than they did the NFPS, the Ethiopians, or the Kenyans.

  “The Kenyans, with a handful of NFPS troops, had had Kismayo surrounded for months. They were getting ready to push in; the only reason they hadn’t yet was a combination of supply problems and harassing attacks on their bases, mostly mortars and rockets. Shabaab threw a lot of rockets at the Kenyans, but they got lucky twice, hitting a supply dump and burning the entire thing to the ground the first time, and actually hitting a CP the second time. Several higher Kenyan commanders were killed.

  “But Al Masri didn’t show up in Kismayo. No, he showed up in Baidoa.

  “Somalia had never really seen the kind of bombings that have been used in Israel, Iraq, or Afghanistan. Even Shabaab kept their violence good and personal--shootings, kidnappings, beheadings...things of that nature. Bombings happened, but they just weren’t an East African method.

  “Until that winter. In the course of a week, fifteen bombs went off in Baidoa, mainly targeting Ethiopian patrols, but also the homes of two prominent Somalis who had welcomed the Ethiopian forces. Then the mayor disappeared, only to show up two days later hanging from a power pole with no head.

  “The Ethiopian troops were getting hit hard; they lost almost a platoon in one day. Three separate patrols were ambushed and cut off. One was apparently hemmed in by the crowd in the market; I heard they used trucks to close off the exits, then detonated them. Another was hit in the street in the middle of the day, in what sounded like a classic L-shaped ambush.

  “By this time, the Ethiopian troops were spooked, and they were starting to turn turtle, retreating into their handful of fortified FOBs within the city. It didn’t get any better when ‘Al Masri’ came on the loudspeakers of almost every mosque in the city, praising Allah, and declaring the rebirth of the Islamic Emirate of Somalia. It was a long speech; I’ve heard recordings. He wove in threats against the Ethiopians and their allies, along with invitations to them to abandon their invasion, submit to Allah, and join the brothers. That alone was new.

  “By this time, the Ethiopian command was barely keeping it together. They were being mortared or rocketed every night, and sniper fire was a constant. They tried pushing out a patrol one day. The point man got shot as soon as he stepped outside the wire, and the patrol mutinied, or so the story goes. They wouldn’t go.

  “A few days later, the Ethiopians pulled out of Baidoa, still taking losses the whole way. An IED hit the convoy leaving one of the FOBs, and killed about thirty troops who were riding in a troop truck. Al Masri and his troops weren’t letting up, and they were sending a message, too, that they wouldn’t be satisfied with just Baidoa.

  “I was still here at the time. We were doing some basic support work, trying to lay the groundwork to keep the AMISOM and Kenyan forces from shooting us when we started going at it for real. The Kenyans weren’t too keen on our being around, and AMISOM was even less so, but they appreciated the reporting we could do, and they had bigger fish to fry, so they tolerated us. I had developed enough contacts within the Kenyan command that I was hearing rumblings about what was going on in Baidoa. It sounded different enough from business-as-usual in this country that I decided we needed to check it out.

  “I went alone, with Nigerian papers and a cover story that I was an arms dealer with ties to Boko Haram. I circled well around Baidoa, approaching from the Shabaab-dominated areas to the north, so it didn’t look like I had somehow come from Kenyan-held territory as a ‘brother-in-jihad.’ I got searched thoroughly by a checkpoint as soon as I got within the city.

  “I had to establish my credentials, and got taken for a meeting with one of the Shabaab captains. It was Muktar Abu Kadir; maybe you know the name. We’d been hunting him for some time while I was still with the Agency, though never all that hard; he was small fry at the time. He never rose to the level of the really bad guys; he was a tool, a particularly savvy and savage field commander, but he never led more than about a company.

  “Two fighters loaded me into a truck and we wound our way into downtown Baidoa. It was still relatively crowded with people going about their business, but the atmospherics were all wrong. Everybody seemed furtive, on edge. When I saw the first few patrols, I understood why. Shabaab had Taliban-style ‘morality police’ out, and they were accosting and beating anyone who didn’t seem to be acting in an appropriately Islamic manner. Six of them were surrounding a man just outside the building where we stopped, and were kicking him and beating him with rifle butts. I never did find out why.

  “I’m not sure what the building was. It was three stories, painted light blue. It might have been a hotel at one time, but everything had been torn out of it, and it was Abu Kadir’s headquarters now. He was on the third floor, of course, and I was marched up to see him.

  “As soon as I walked in the room, I could see how much things had changed, and quite possibly why. Abu Kadir wasn’t alone. While he was obviously in charge, there were
three Arabs, either Libyan or Egyptian, sitting in a half circle beside him. My first reaction was that they were advisors. They weren’t armed the same as the Shabaab troops; one of them even had a SIG-Sauer carbine, and a modern assault vest, not the old AK chest rig or gunbelt that most of the Shabaab fighters were using.

  “They didn’t talk much, but let Abu Kadir do most of the jawing. He was shrewder than I’d expected, and I had to do some fancy talking to make my rather flimsy, thrown-together cover hold up. Funny what happens when you don’t have all the resources of the US Intelligence community backing you up. He wanted to see samples of what I had to sell; fortunately, I had brought a handful of Chinese CF-05s. I didn’t have any more to sell later, but he didn’t know that. He was impressed, but most importantly, he turned to his Arab advisors and handed them the one he’d picked up out of the truck. They looked it over, and told him that they would be good purchases, but not all that useful in open environments, or against Kenyan or AMISOM body armor. They recommended more AKs, or QBZ-95s, if I could get Chinese rifles.

  “I met with three more Shabaab commanders, and it was always the same. The commanders were Somali, but with Libyan, Sudanese, or Egyptian advisors, and they were all looking for weapons and gear, unless it was something they could get from Egypt or Sudan. One of them actually told me that, though I was pretty sure that was the case already by the time I talked to him.

  “I was able to leave without too much trouble, although as I left I saw more than a dozen bodies hanging from electric wires in the center of town. I learned before I left that they had been executed for apostasy.

  “It’s just gotten worse since then. The supplies are coming in mainly from Egypt by sea through Kismayo now, after the Kenyan blockade was broken by submarine strikes and small-boat suicide bombers. They aren’t sending the top-of-the-line stuff, most of which they got from us, but modernized small arms, anti-tank weapons, night vision, comms, it’s all coming in. Shabaab and their cronies have never had it so good.