Death Wave

15

That woman isn’t really your wife, is she?” Lia asked.

“Um, no,” Carlylse admitted. He looked embarrassed. “She’s a waitress at a restaurant in Puerto Naos. I met her a couple of days ago, and we kind of hit it off.”

“You need to get rid of her.”

“Damn, she’s been up there in my room for over an hour. She’s going to be wondering where the hell I am.”

“We think that a hooker gave Jack Pender’s room key to some JeM assassins,” she told him. “If this is the same sort of setup, someone else could be waiting for you in your room.”

“Gem? What’s gem?”

“Jaish-e-Mohammad,” she told him. “The Army of Mohammad. Thoroughly nasty characters who blow up buses filled with civilians, among other unpleasant things.”

“Shit.” He shook his head. “But Carmen is such a nice girl …”

“Sure she is. Let’s go up to your room together, and you’ll explain to her that the date is off for tonight.”

“Uh … I gave her my key.”

“I’d rather not knock. Get another key from the front desk.”

“Yeah, sure.” Carlylse seemed distracted, even a bit dazed. He wasn’t thinking straight.

On the way up to the room, Lia pulled her P226 from her pocketbook and snapped a loaded magazine into the butt. The muzzle was threaded to receive a sound suppressor, which she screwed on tightly. If this was a setup, it was possible that a couple of JeM assassins were waiting in the room for Carlylse’s return, and Lia was taking no chances. At the door to room 312, she stood with her back to the wall, the pistol in both hands, muzzle pointed at the ceiling. “Open it,” she whispered, “and then get the hell out of the way.”

Carlylse nodded and slid the keycard through the reader. The door clicked open, Carlylse stepped back, and Lia rolled around the corner and into the room.

The woman was in the king-sized bed, naked and half asleep. As Lia spun into the room, her pistol aimed two-handed at the woman, the waitress sat up and shrieked.

Lia pivoted, checking each corner of the room, but the woman had been alone. Now she was out of bed, snatching up stray items of clothing from the floor and bolting for the door, still screaming.

“Damn it, you scared the poor girl half to death!” Carlylse thought about it a moment. “You scared me half to death!”

“Grab your things.”

“Huh? What do you—”

“If this was a setup, she’ll be talking to the assassins as soon as she gets her clothes back on. If it wasn’t, she’ll be talking to the desk manager, and he’ll have security up here in a few minutes. Do you really want to wait here and answer their questions?”

“Um, no.” He gave her a hard look. “Look, who are you, anyway?”

“I showed you my ID.”

“I saw an ID for someone named Cathy Chung. I think the ID was for the U.S. State Department, but I’ve never seen one of those, so I have no way of knowing if it was real. If you’re real.”

“While you try to figure that out,” Lia told him, “grab your suitcase and let’s get out of here.”

“Look … did my ex send you?”

“What?”

“Did my ex-wife send you to screw up my sex life?”

“Art Room,” Lia said.

“What?” Carlylse asked, looking puzzled at the non sequitur.

“Here, Lia,” Jeff Rockman said in her ear.

“Give me some bio on this guy. Stat.”

“Coming right up, Lia.”

“Who are you talking to?” Carlylse asked, suspicious.

“My electronic backup,” she told him. “Never leave home without them.” Rockman began reading a file into her ear. Lia listened a moment, then began repeating select lines. “Okay … you’re Matthew Vincent Carlylse but you’ve gone as Vince since high school. You were born in Peoria, Illinois, on May 2, 1972. U.S. Army from 1991 to 1995. Married June Hanson in 1994, but she divorced you twelve years later after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. The voices told her you were sleeping with other women. You started writing after your discharge, and your first book was published in 1998. The book was called Gray Terror: The UFO Abductors, and was a minor commercial success—”

“Hey!”

“You met John Pender at a book convention in Atlanta the following year, and—”

“All right Hold it! Hold it! What’s the point of this?”

“To prove to you that I am a U.S. federal agent with access to a great deal of background information on you. Information that foreign terrorists wouldn’t have.”

“I don’t know. My wife was a foreign terrorist after she was hospitalized the first time. She would know all of that stuff.”

“And she wouldn’t have told me that she was schizophrenic. Her medical records, however, are another matter. Mr. Carlylse, can we please continue this discussion in my room? Unless you really want to discuss me with hotel security or a couple of assassins from the Army of Mohammad.”

Reluctantly, he began gathering his things.

The place still hasn’t recovered, Ahmed Babkir Taha thought as he walked along the sand through the darkness. Not completely. I wonder if it ever will?

Even now, well past sunset, the pounding of hammers could be heard farther up the hill from the beach, as small handfuls of people continued to rebuild. A few lights shone here and there. It was late enough in the year that the wind coming in off the ocean was quite chilly. Unfortunately, it was also dry, with the promise of yet more crippling drought.

God the most merciful had not been merciful to the town of Hafun — Xaafuun, in Somali. Drought, crushing poverty … and on December 26, 2004, an earthquake fifty-four hundred kilometers away, off the distant coast of Sumatra, had generated a tidal wave that had swept across the Indian Ocean, wreaking untold damage and killing 230,000 people in eleven countries.

Hafun, a fishing village located on a sand spit just above sea level here at the very tip of the Horn of Africa, had been the population center hardest hit on the entire African continent. Some 280 people had been killed or missing, though only nineteen bodies in all had been recovered. Eight hundred homes had been washed away, the wells poisoned by saltwater, the fishing boats destroyed. The land here was parsimonious, barren, and unforgiving; some families had maintained small plots where they’d grown peas or lentils, but fishing had been the principal local industry. The tsunami had left the local people with nothing.

Picking his way through the darkness, Taha made his way out of the town, following a worn track across the sand toward the ocean, guiding on a small cluster of flickering lights on the beach. The pound-pound-pound of hammers, he thought, was a beautiful sound. The sound of rebuilding.

The sound of life.

Since the beginning of 2005, the town had started to rebuild, though this time the structures were rising higher up along the ridge of sand, some five hundred yards from the sea. The people were terrified that the waters would come again. Foreign aid had come to the impoverished area, and UNICEF had been attempting to establish a school for the local children, a school for girls as well as for boys, of all things. While anything resembling a real government in Somalia had collapsed in 1991, this northeastern corner of the country, the Horn of Africa, had stabilized somewhat over the past few years, with an uneasy balance between the Transitional Federal Government, operating out of Ethiopia, and the opposition party, the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia.

It hadn’t been perfect. ARLS antiaircraft guns had repeatedly fired at aircraft bringing emergency food and medical supplies to the region, and the rivalry between the TFG and the ARLS continually threatened to slip back into civil war. Still, it had been a start, a small one, back to sanity and self-sufficiency. The Bars region around Hafun had long traditionally belonged to the Majeerteen sub-clan of the Osman Mahmoud. They were the true power here, the true government. Or they had been.

Then the outsiders had come.

With the TFG ruling from next-door Ethiopia, most of south and central Somalia was still held in the grip of various rival Islamist gangs — the most powerful being the Hizbul Islam and the rival al-Shabaab. United African forces — Kenyan and Ethiopian troops, mainly — had been alternately battling and attempting to appease the Islamist militants.

Neither military intervention nor negotiation had made much headway.

He was approaching the camp on the beach now. One of the guards stepped out of the shadows, blocking his way. “In the name of Allah and His Prophet,” the man said, “you will halt!”

Man? It was a boy, a child no more than fifteen years old. The AK-47 rifle he held with wavering hands looked nearly as large as he did.

Taha raised his hands chest high, palms out, to show he carried no weapons. “God willing, I am here to see General Abdallah,” he said. “He knows me. I’ve been here before.”

The boy seemed uncertain, and Taha felt sick fear prickling at his spine. These people were perfectly capable of shooting a man dead in the street for no reason at all save that they mistrusted him, that they didn’t like his looks or his demeanor, that they thought he’d failed to show proper respect.

“I’ll take him, Oamar,” another voice said. Abdiwahid Eelabe Adow stepped out of the night. “It’s all right.”

Oamar gave Taha a surly look, then nodded, lowering his rifle, and Taha relaxed slightly. He knew Adow, one of Abadallah’s chief strongmen and the cleric of the group. At least Adow wouldn’t shoot him on sight.

Adow gestured toward a fire burning in a drum on the beach a dozen meters away. “And what brings you to our humble camp this time, Taha?” Adow asked pleasantly.

“News from Addis Ababa,” Taha replied. “A possible target with a fabulously rich payoff.”

Adow snorted. “Better than the last few targets, I hope. The Westerners have been guarding their ships more and more closely. Business has become … very difficult, of late.”

“This one,” Taha replied, “is unprotected. God willing, it carries a cargo of great value.”

“We’ll see. There’s the general.”

Taha despised the group known as al-Shabaab, Arabic for “the Youth.” Principally active in southern Somalia and in the capital of Mogadishu, they’d been fighting a bitter war there against the TFG. In recent months, they’d moved into the Hafun area as well, a region long under TFG control and protection. Ostensibly, they’d come with their boats, offering help. In fact, they were pirates, heavily armed raiders who set to sea every few days in hopes of catching one of the fabulously wealthy cargo ships passing through Somali waters. They would board a likely-looking vessel, hold the ship and crew hostage, and demand a ransom from the company or even the country owning the ship.

It was more dangerous than fishing, but much easier, and the potential rewards meant inestimable wealth and power for those who succeeded.

General Abdallah, Taha knew, was not a real general. He’d been part of the crew that had seized the Ukrainian merchant ship MV Faina in 2008. That vessel had been carrying thirty Russian tanks and tons of ammunition and weapons to Kenya when it was seized. The owners had paid 3.2 million American dollars for the Faina’s release — and Taha knew that many of the machine guns and RPG launchers on Abdallah’s boat had come from the Faina’s hold. His share of the ransom had made him obscenely wealthy by Somalian standards, and he’d used that wealth to buy and outfit a larger boat with which to score even greater successes. It was no secret that Abdallah planned to consolidate his political and military power, carving out his own personal warlord’s empire from the northeastern Somali coast.

Adow led Taha into the wavering circle of firelight cast by burning scraps of lumber in a two-hundred-liter drum. Abdallah and several of his chief lieutenants stood there, warming themselves against the chill of the evening. Nearby loomed the ruin of the village’s tumbledown salt factory, a shell built by the Italians in the 1930s, long abandoned. Beyond, at the end of a long and rickety pier, Abdallah’s boat creaked and thumped with the movement of the surf. Other armed guards moved at the edge of the light, and Taha knew there were more in the ruins. The salt factory had become Abdallah’s fortress.

“So, my old friend Taha!” General Abdallah said, looking up from the burning drum with a broad, toothy grin. The looks on the faces of his lieutenants were darker, less open. “What news from our esteemed Ministry of Ports and Sea Transportation?”

Ahmed Babkir Taha had grown up in Hafun, but he’d moved to Mogadishu as a teenager, gone to work for a well-to-do uncle, and eventually been able to get an education in neighboring Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa. With his uncle’s import-export firm, he’d traveled as far as Cairo and Damascus, attracted the right attention, and finally been appointed as an assistant undersecretary of the Ministry of Ports and Sea Transportation within the Somalian transitional government-in-exile. His position gave him access to important information about what ships and cargos were entering Somalian waters.

That was information for which some groups paid handsomely.

“General Abdallah,” he said, bowing, then awkwardly saluting. “Your Excellency!” He was never quite sure of the proper protocol when dealing with these people … and a mistake, an insult, could be instantly fatal. “Excellent news!” he continued. “A cargo ship will be entering our waters in two days. A Russian ship, the Yakutsk. Her cargo is primarily machine parts and tools, but I was given information that she has another cargo on board, a highly secret cargo hidden among the crates of tools. My sources say that it is an extremely valuable cargo. The Russians will pay anything you demand to recover it.”

“And what cargo would that be?” Mohammad Fahiye asked. Fahiye, Taha knew, thought that he was a TFG lackey and did not trust him.

There was some truth in that, of course. Taha did work for the Transitional Federal Government, certainly … though his personal loyalties lay elsewhere. Like most of the locals, he believed that the government-in-exile was weak, a tool of the African Union and other foreign interests.

Then again, al-Shabaab was linked with the foreign al-Qaeda. Everyone in Somalia these days had foreign ties.

And in truth, Taha was less a supporter of the TFG than he was an enemy of the fundamentalist Islamic groups like al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam.

“Tell me about this ship,” Abdallah said, his dark eyes glinting in the firelight.

“She is a small and aging freighter, Shanghai to Haifa, with stops in Singapore and Karachi,” Taha said. “Twelve hundred tons. Speed less than twenty knots, a crew of twenty-one. There may be small arms aboard, but the ship otherwise is unarmed.”

“Allah be praised!” Adow said. “This may be what we’ve been looking for, my friends!”

Allah be praised indeed…

Taha was a devout Sunni Muslim. He believed implicitly in the power, the protection, and the mercy of God.

With that merciful God’s help, he would destroy these monsters.

Taha stood quietly as the pirates discussed the news. Adow, especially, seemed eager to go after the Russian ship, but Abdallah was hanging back, suspicious, perhaps, of such an apparently easy target. The foreign, Western navies had made things far more dangerous at sea lately. But as the earnest discussion continued, it appeared that Abdallah might be growing more interested as well.

Take it, Taha thought. Take the bait!

“Then this Russian ship with its valuable cargo will be moving up the Red Sea?” Abdallah asked. “There with Allah’s help, we will have her.”

The militia’s leaders burst into cheers and wild cries of “Allahu akbar!”

“You can’t stay here,” Lia told the writer as he sat down on her bed. “My people are making arrangements to fly you back to the States.”

“But … I’m not done here.”

“Done with what?”

“My research!”

“Mr. Carlylse, have you heard a word of what I’ve been telling you? The JeM wants you dead!”

“Yes, but why? I’m not a threat to anyone!”

Lia shook her head, exasperated. Carlylse seemed to live in a tightly wrapped little world of his own and had trouble seeing beyond his next deadline.

“Look, just tell me some more about this book of yours, the one about 2012 and the tidal wave.”

Carlylse fished around inside the zippered outer pocket of his suitcase and produced a paperback book. The cover showed the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., beneath ominous black skies, with a gray-green ocean wave towering hundreds of feet above the dome. The title, Death Wave: The 2012 Prophecies Fulfilled, showed in stark contrast against the dark and lightning-shot clouds.

“You know about the 2012 prophecies, right?” Carlylse asked her.

“Not much. Something about the ancient Mayans, right?”

“Right. The Mayans had a fantastically accurate calendar. They divided up history into four ages, or ‘Suns,’ each under the light of a different sun god, each one doomed to destruction. We’re in the Fourth Sun, the fourth age, now — and it ends in December of 2012.”

“And you think that an earthquake on La Palma is going to usher in the end of the world?”

“Certainly the end of the world as we know it. This island, this little fragment of lost Atlantis, is a kind of time bomb. When it goes, hundreds of cubic miles of rock will fall into the ocean and raise a tidal wave nine hundred feet high. Six hours later, that wave will start hitting the U.S. East Coast, up in New England, and by that time the waves will be down to a hundred fifty feet high, and they’ll smash over ten miles inland.”

“That doesn’t sound like the end of the whole world.”

“With the United States crippled? Our economy literally washed down the drain? The United States could be reduced to third-worldnation status. The financial collapse would bring down industrial economies all over the world. You’d have the radical Muslims claiming that Allah was ushering in a new age. You’d have hungry populations crossing borders like locust plagues, eating everything in sight. You’d have—”

“I get the picture.” She turned the paperback over, read the backcover blurb, and smiled. “Tell me, Mr. Carlylse, do you actually believe the stuff you write?”

“Well,” he said, and he sounded sheepish, “first and foremost, I am in the entertainment business.”

Taha returned to his home an hour after meeting with Abdallah and his lieutenants. He was still alive — and all praise to Allah for that small fact — and the al-Shabaab pirates had taken the bait.

It was now out of his hands, and in the hands of Allah the compassionate, the Most High.

Taha’s home was one of the older buildings, a mud-brick dwelling belonging to his father and his uncle. He greeted his father and mother in the front room, then excused himself as quickly as he politely could to go to the room in the back that served as his bedroom when he was in Hafun.

Here, one wall had been partially broken down by the tidal wave and crudely patched over with lumber and sheets of plywood. It was wet and it was drafty, but it served well enough when he wasn’t in Mogadishu or Addis Ababa. He went to the back corner next to the patchwork and began moving aside scraps of wood.

Perhaps, because of what he’d done this evening, Abdallah, Adow, and the rest would soon be gone. He prayed that that would be the case …

Like Taha and the others native to Hafun, Abdallah and his al-Shabaab militiamen were Sunni Muslims, but theirs was a different flavor of the holy faith, a faith largely alien to the fishermen of the northern coast, the region known as Puntland. It had been one thing when Abdallah had arrived with his boat, offering to help the fisherfolk of Hafun. It had been something quite different when Adow and other Sunni clerics with the group had begun imposing their beliefs on the locals.

The fact that Abdallah and his people were pirates meant little. Then inhabitants of Hafun made their meager livings by fishing, and everyone knew that more and more Somalian fishermen had been switching over to more lucrative means of earning an income these past few years. It had started innocently enough when some Somalian fishermen had begun boarding and seizing the fishing boats of other nations — Kenya and Djibouti, especially — that were entering Somalian waters to fish illegally. With no working government, no coast guard, no navy to keep the poachers out, the fishermen had begun taking matters into their own hands in order to preserve their own livelihoods.

It had not been long before they’d discovered that they could make far more money by capturing foreign cargo ships or the yachts of rich Europeans and holding them for ransom. That was all simply business, and a means for survival. Taha had done quite well for himself and his family by selling information on foreign ship movements to various pirate gangs.

No, the piracy meant nothing. Al-Shabaab, though, had become a monster.

For over a year now, Abdallah and his people had been terrorizing the inhabitants of Hafun and nearby Foar and Jibalei, implementing the shari’a, religious law, with a brutal, insanely self-righteous fervor. Taha knew well that the path of submission to Allah required sacrifice and hardship. Simply attempting to eke out an existence in Puntland required sacrifice on a daily basis.

But this was something more.

Since their arrival last year, al-Shabaab’s clerics had begun enforcing their version of shari’a on the region’s female population — ordering families not to allow their daughters to attend the foreigners’ schools on pain of death, ordering families to have “the cutting” carried out on all of their daughters in accord with ancient tradition, ordering the wearing of scarves and veils as well as the traditional head coverings to comport with their ideas of what constituted proper modesty.

Perhaps the most bewildering of all was the recent ban on bras, seen as “deceptive,” and therefore in violation of Islamic law. Beginning in Mogadishu in 2009, al-Shabaab militia gangs had been rounding up women and inspecting them in the streets. Those found to be wearing a bra were publicly stripped, given twenty lashes, and forced to shake their breasts in front of the militiamen after the whipping.

Women found to be wearing trousers could receive forty lashes, the maximum allowed by shari’a, after being stripped and shamed.

What, Taha wondered, could a just and merciful God possibly care about women’s clothing when the people were starving to death? The local people couldn’t protect themselves, were too poor, too hungry, too demoralized to attempt to flee.

In any case, where could they go?

Even worse was the enforcement of the cutting.

Taha still felt a certain fearful ambiguity about that. The cutting of a girl’s genitals when she approached marriageable age had long been sanctioned by Islamic culture and was common across Muslim Africa. What was not well known, however, was that the cutting was not required by the holy Qur’an; rather, it was an outgrowth of local cultures, something likely practiced here long before the Prophet’s message had come.

The militants like al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam claimed that only a rigid adherence to traditional Sunni values and religious law would save the people in the eyes of Allah — and that included everything from proper modesty to the cutting. Taha, however, had seen enough of the world to know that the interpretation of Islamic law and custom was different in, say, Cairo, where female genital mutilation was actually against civil law, than it was in a small village on the Horn of Africa.

He’d first begun to recognize the importance of those differences in interpretation when his ten-year-old sister had died in agony from an infection two weeks after she’d undergone the cutting.

Even in Egypt, most women still required their daughters to undergo the ordeal. Lately, though, more and more of the people, especially the younger ones, and especially the women, had been saying that perhaps the foreigners were right — that if the cutting was not enjoined by the holy Qur’an, then it was not necessary. They said that education, even of girls, was more important than the blind observance of ancient custom.

The outsiders, the militants from the South, carried a different message, and in Taha’s eyes, their message was not religion but an abomination, and Taha was determined to fight them in any way that he could.

Beneath the pile of scrap lumber, he found the radio, carefully swaddled in plastic. The battery was growing weak; he would need to get a new one on his next trip to Addis Ababa, but it should last for the next week or two. He switched the device on, placed the earphones on his head, and picked up the microphone.

“Black Bull, this is Sand Shark,” he said, as he’d been trained. He kept his voice low, because he didn’t want his parents to know. “Black Bull, come in, please …”