Pirate Alley

CHAPTER TEN

EYL, SOMALIA, NOVEMBER 12

It was a bad night in the fortress. The people imprisoned there were too keyed up to fall asleep easily, yet when they finally became tired enough they had to sleep on a stone floor with their own clothes as blankets and pillows. Due to the amount of garbage that had accumulated from past imprisonments of merchant mariners, the place was infested with rats and mice, which scurried about fearlessly in the dark hunting for food. People screamed, cursed and swatted at them, which merely sent the rodents to entertain a new audience. There were also snakes, hunting the mice, but they were shy and avoided people, if they could.

Already the toilet facilities reeked. There was no privacy, not with all these people trying to use just three holes in the floor. Many people found squatting difficult, especially on a wet, filthy, slick floor amid the miasma of human excrement.

Eight hundred fifty tired, dirty and emotionally exhausted people welcomed the dawn.

Captain Arch Penney, who had only managed two hours’ sleep and spent the rest of the night reliving the murders of his officers and men, went to see his chief steward, who soon had water boiling for tea. The chief had a small army of crewmen carrying water, cooking and trying to scrape up old garbage for removal.

Penney took a cup of tea back to his cubbyhole for his wife, who accepted it gratefully. Marjorie had joined them and was still asleep beside her.

“What’s going to happen to us, Archie?” she whispered.

“I don’t know.”

“We can’t stay here very long. The older people are going to get sick. Soon we’ll have people in real medical distress.”

“All I can do is talk to the pirates. I think we are here because they have nowhere else to put us. Still, dead hostages won’t get them any money. I’ll see what I can do.”

In the early light he could see her smile, a wan, tired smile. She squeezed his arm and went back to her tea.

The ship’s doctor was a Nigerian in his early thirties, educated in London. He looked stressed to the max. “I brought the medical supplies I could carry with me, Captain. Left a lot aboard in the dispensary. I am afraid we are going to need everything and then some. I’d like to go back to the ship with some crewmen and bring everything.”

“I’ll talk to the pirates,” Arch Penney promised.

People buttonholed him right and left, some with complaints and some with suggestions. Everyone wanted bedding and blankets and more eating utensils.

“I’ll see what I can do,” the captain said.

But he knew he could do little. Only what the pirates permitted, and the hostages’ comfort was not their concern, he thought. The Somalis he saw through the cannon ports on guard duty outside the fortress were in foxholes watching the sky, waiting.

Waiting for an assault, he suspected.

He went to the entrance of the fortress, which had no door, and told the guards there he wanted to talk to Mustafa al-Said. “Mustafa al-Said,” he repeated, slowly and loudly. “Talk.”

They merely nodded and motioned him back inside.

Through a cannon port Arch glimpsed the sun rising on a shiny sea.

INDIAN OCEAN, NOVEMBER 12

Admiral Toad Tarkington read the messages over his morning coffee. Jake Grafton was in charge of the Sultan hostage “situation,” he read, and smiled grimly. Toad had been Jake’s aide, then executive assistant, for years. If the powers that be had put Grafton in charge, Toad suspected the pirates were in for a rough time.

One of the messages was a personal from Grafton asking him for his recommendations on several questions. Could the hostages be rescued? How would he do it? How would he transport them if the Sultan were inoperable? What resources did he have that he could use, and what did he need? The message also asked for all the reconnaissance Task Force 151 could muster. Grafton wanted to know what was happening in Eyl every hour of every day.

Toad called his staff together. They discussed the problem over breakfast in the flag wardroom.

“Why a rescue?” Flip Haducek wanted to know. “Are the ship owners going to pay the ransom, or not?”

“Two hundred million dollars?” Ops asked. “Are you nuts?”

“The pirates will take less. That’s just their opening position for negotiations. And that ship is worth more than that. Maybe twice that. The insurance company will fall all over themselves taking the cheapest option.”

“So what are the people worth?”

“In this day and age, not much. World is full of people.”

“We should offer the pirates ten bucks and their lives and see what they say.”

Tarkington cut off the chatter. “I don’t know what our government intends. I don’t know what the ship’s owners or insurance company want to do. I don’t know what other governments think or their intentions or willingness to cooperate. Let’s answer the questions we have been asked, and people paid more than we are can worry about all of that. Get your people together and start planning. In the meantime, shut down all unofficial Internet access from this task force. No satellite telephone calls. I want no leaks. None.”

“I think there is a journalist aboard, sir. From France. It’s a woman, I believe.”

“She is now incommunicado. Nothing goes out but official encrypted message traffic. Jump on this recon request ASAP.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Several hours later Toad took the time to read the routine messages, which had been sorted by date-time group and placed on a clipboard. It was then that he learned the Justice Department had decided to try the three Somalis the task force had pulled from the water. The admiral was told to put them on a carrier-on-board delivery plane when able and send them to the States, where they would be indicted and tried for piracy.

Well, we gotta do something with them, Toad thought, but we’re so far behind the eight-ball it’s pathetic.

He said a common, crude word, and turned to the next message.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Jake Grafton soon found himself awash in information from Sultan of the Seas. The pirates had Mike Rosen pounding out e-mails to his radio station, and the folks there immediately put them on the wire services as news. Grafton got it about the same time as the cable news shows, which was within minutes after Rosen clicked on the SEND icon.

Rosen could have put everything in one giant e-mail, but he didn’t bother. When he had filled up a page or so, he sent it and began another missive.

Mike was handicapped by the fact he was being held aboard ship and his shipmates were all ashore, except for a couple of guys in the engine room keeping the diesel running that turned the generator that provided a minimum power level to the ship—and to the e-com center and server. He was putting anything that Ragnar wanted the world to know in the e-mails, such as the amount of ransom it would take to buy the kidnapped passengers and crew out of hock, the names and nationalities of the people Ragnar held, how wonderfully they were being treated and vague threats of what might happen to them if the ransom demands weren’t met. The hostages were, Ragnar said through Mustafa, under Ragnar’s protection, secure from the terrorists and unwashed savage hordes that roamed the northern Somali coast. Without the benevolent protection of Sheikh Ragnar … well, the reader was left to consult his fevered imagination for the answer to that contingency.

Yet after he had typed the messages from Ragnar to the world, Rosen typed what he, Mike Rosen, wanted the world to know about the passengers and crew of Sultan of the Seas. The pirates didn’t care what he wrote. After all, they couldn’t read English. Rosen wondered if they could read any of the earth’s languages. The pirates merely talked back and forth between themselves and watched him type.

He e-mailed physical descriptions of Ragnar and Mustafa al-Said, described what he had been told by various witnesses about the events aboard ship, and editorialized shamelessly, which after all was his shtick at the radio station.

A half-dozen of these cyber essays landed on Jake Grafton’s desk at Langley all in a heap. It was late in the evening in Washington and the admiral was exhausted, but he had another sip of coffee and settled down to read them in the order in which they were sent.

Thirty minutes later, just as he finished that pile, his secretary brought him two more. Man, that Rosen could type!

He was just about finished when his desk phone buzzed and his secretary informed him he had a visitor, Sal Molina. A lawyer from Texas in his former life, Molina was the president’s right-hand man. Or executive assistant. Or chief hatchet man. No one knew Molina’s real title at the White House; perhaps he didn’t have one. Apparently he got paid regularly with taxpayer’s money, and he certainly had the Big Dog’s ear.

Molina looked right and left and parked his butt on the couch.

“Congratulations.”

“For what?”

“For screwing Jurgen Schulz in front of an audience. If you’d told me ahead of time you were going to do it, I’d have paid money to film it. How did you know it was his staff that jerked Tarkington around?”

“I’m psychic.”

“I doubt that. I call it shit-house luck. What if it had been the president’s two favorite butt-boys who had their fingers in the pie?”

“You would have cut their fingers off.”

Molina chuckled. “So how in hell are you gonna get those Sultan people outta there?”

“I don’t know. Yet.”

A young aide appeared in the doorway. She had a sheaf of file folders in her hand. “These are just the first ones, sir. They’ll have more later today, they said.”

“Fine. Thank you.”

Jake opened the folders and spread out the contents, which were satellite photos of Eyl, Somalia. They were taken on different days, at different times, at different angles, as the satellites, for there were more than one, swung over the area. The information their sensors obtained was radioed to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which used computers to construct these images.

Jake sorted them by date and time as Molina watched.

“You couldn’t have obtained all of this since the president appointed you.”

“No. I ordered this stuff as soon as Tomazic and I got back from New York. Took a while, but the info is beginning to dribble out of the pipe.” Grafton got a magnifying glass from his desk and began scrutinizing selected photos.

“You didn’t know you were going to get this job.”

“Of course not. Still, Omar Ali had something interesting to say, so I thought I had better get started checking it out.”

“You mean about the Shabab murdering everyone?”

“Oh, no. The interesting thing was that he said he knew about the assault on the cruise ship weeks before we snatched him.”

Molina the lawyer was dismissive. “He may have been lying just to get some leverage with the prosecutors. Hell, he had three weeks to offer us something, and he didn’t.”

Jake put down the magnifying glass. “Either the pirates were out there on the ocean randomly cruising around trolling for prospects, or they planned this assault. At least six pirate skiffs—one report says eight—simultaneous assaults on two cruise ships, shooting when threatened … No, this was carefully planned.” He tapped his fingers on the photos. “Ragnar had plenty of time to prepare his defenses, make a plan with a high probability of success. Not just to capture a cruise ship full of people, but a plan to prevent their rescue unless someone paid his price.”

“So they planned it. So?”

“These people aren’t stupid, Sal. The plan to capture the cruise ship is worthless unless they can force someone to pay ransom. The pirates have to plan for the worst. What is the worst thing that could happen, from their point of view?”

Molina’s eyes narrowed. “A military attack to rescue the hostages.”

“Right. They knew that when they contemplated capturing a cruise ship. That was the problem that they had to address and solve.” Grafton stirred the photos around. “We’ll have these gone over by experts tomorrow. I’m just an amateur.”

“So…”

“Sal, you and I and the pirates know we can apply overwhelming military force. Anyone who refuses to surrender immediately will die. Their only defense is the threat to harm the hostages. How? Shoot a few as we come thundering in? Or murder them all if we pull one trigger?”

“So what’s your timetable?”

“We’ll have answers in few days, I hope. A week. Maybe a little longer. What we need is time.”

Molina frowned. “We’re going to have to say something to the press about the ransom demand. The news is all over every network on earth. Got any suggestions?”

“The usual,” Grafton said airily. “We’re consulting with the owners of the ship, the insurance company, the British government … Add anyone you like. And get those aides pounding the phones. Do consult. Make it look good.”

“The press will ask bluntly if we will pay if the Brits won’t.”

Grafton propped his feet on the lower drawer of his desk. “Don’t give me that shit, Sal. Your press guy can dance around a direct question like that for weeks. We’re negotiating. The president is pondering, consulting Congress and the UN, reading tea leaves … whatever. Just don’t commit us to anything until I give the word.”

Molina looked amused. “You’d lie to the press?”

“Everyone else does.”

“That Rosen guy will probably tell us what the pirates’ sword of Damocles is.”

“He’ll tell us what the pirates tell him to say. Be kinda nice to know the true facts before we put people in harm’s way.”

Molina sighed. Through the windows one could see the lights of the grounds, very tasteful and decorative, designed to make security airtight. He could hear the faint sounds of classical music emanating from the windowpane vibrators, sounds so faint he couldn’t even follow the music. It was just noise. Molina hated this building. Hermetically sealed off from the outside world and the rest of humanity, the secure spaces reminded him of graves.

“The president says not a dime.”

Grafton waved away that comment with a dismissive flip of his fingers. “If you’re willing, I have a favor to ask,” Grafton continued. “When the sun comes up, how about talking to the secretary of the treasury. I need two hundred million counterfeit dollars, just in case. Make it hundred-dollar bills.”

Molina rolled his eyes.

Grafton pretended not to notice. “We need to keep all our options open until we figure out precisely what Ragnar has planned, what his capabilities are. We may have to buy him off, get the Sultan people out, then go back and liberate the money and whack him. Or we may decide to pay the ransom with counterfeit bills. We’ll make the decision, real or fake, when we know what cards Ragnar is holding.”

Molina’s face now wore its usual expression, eyebrows up, brows knitted, jowls sagging, his lips slightly pursed.

“The Shabab guy, Feiz al-Darraji,” Grafton added. “We’ll have to string him along, too. If we buy off Ragnar, we want the people out, not murdered. We don’t want the Shabab to get homicidal before we are ready.”

“Counterfeiting, now.”

“Ink and paper are cheap. The stuff’s gotta be good enough that it’ll pass for real, yet later we can tell the world the bills are bad and what to look for. Tell Treasury to get cracking. I need it in three days.”

“Just a thought,” Molina murmured. “If Treasury prints it and the government issues it, the courts may decide it’s real money, even if we put Johnny Depp’s picture on it.”

Jake Grafton snorted. “If I had a fart in me, I’d turn it loose, Sal. We get the hostages home alive, everybody safe and sound, I don’t give a damn what the courts decide five years down the road.”

They talked for another few minutes; then Molina left.

Grafton had had enough. He closed and locked his door, left the photos stacked on his desk, stretched out on his couch and was almost instantly asleep. He had met some pirates back when he was young, and he dreamed about them.

At seven that morning he made a telephone call to the Israeli embassy. At eight o’clock he entered a breakfast joint for working men and women in a strip mall shopping center in Silver Spring, Maryland. There was an empty booth in the back of the row, and he asked the woman at the register for it. He ordered coffee, eggs, bacon and dry wheat toast. He was sipping his second cup of coffee and waiting on the eggs when a man walked in wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and sat down across from him.

The man’s name was Sascha Meissl; he was the Mossad liaison officer to the CIA. His official title at the embassy was something else; Grafton didn’t know what it was, nor did he care. Meissl was a short, heavyset man with a square jaw and a head of curly, wire-density hair. He and Grafton conferred about once a week, on average. Grafton suspected Meissl had other espionage duties at the embassy, but he never asked and didn’t want to know what they were. The FBI could worry about Mr. Meissl’s extracurricular activities, if any.

After the usual pleasantries, Grafton got right to it. He explained that he had been appointed to be the chief negotiator for the Sultan hostage crisis in Somalia, and wanted whatever help Meissl’s agency could give.

Grafton explained his theory that the pirates must have a deterrent to military attack already in place. “They have planned this for at least a month. And they are not stupid.”

“A bomb,” Meissl said, then watched the waitress approach. He ordered coffee and orange juice and a short stack of pancakes.

When the waitress was gone, Grafton resumed. “I need all the information that you can give me, and I need it yesterday.”

“I thought you might call,” Meissl said with a grin.

“I’m too predictable.”

“We don’t really know anything about Somalia. However, we think one of Hamas’s head bomb makers went to Africa for a working vacation about six weeks ago. He went to Cairo, then disappeared. We think he’s probably in Somalia.”

“Name?”

“God only knows what his parents named him. He goes by the nom de guerre of Al-Gaza. About thirty to thirty-five, technically astute, believes in jihad, has built and exploded bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan and Palestine. His specialty used to be bus bombs, but he’s branched out into bigger and better things.”

“Could he work with ammonium nitrate? Fertilizer?”

“Sure. Detonators, radio controls, all of it. Rather good at what he does. Not suicidal himself, but he likes to help martyrs start their journey to Paradise. Or wherever in hell they end up.”

The coffee and OJ came. Meissl sipped the juice, then attacked the coffee. The waitress brought Jake’s breakfast and filled his coffee cup. Jake dawdled over the eggs.

“You got any guys who know this dude?”

Meissl nodded.

“I’d like to borrow them, if I could. For a couple of weeks, no more. Give them a free trip to Somalia. If they can spot this guy or whoever their bomber is, lend us some expertise, I’d really appreciate it.”

“Al-Gaza might not be there.”

“Someone there knows explosives. As a rule, pirates don’t have much experience building bombs. The Shabab in those parts doesn’t blow stuff up, either. Just shoots people, rapes women, steals food and fuel and weapons and anything else they can physically move.”

“I’ll talk to Tel Aviv. If these guys find our man, we don’t want him walking away.”

“Something can probably be arranged,” Jake said dryly. His eyes crinkled and the corners of his lips turned up slightly. That was his smile. Sascha Meissl smiled back, showing his teeth.