Pirate Alley

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

When Geoff Noon arrived via boat at the beach in front of Ragnar’s lair, the press was waiting. Both the Italian and Fox News reporter/photographer teams were there filming him arriving in a punt powered by an outboard motor that gave off great clouds of white smoke.

Geoff waded ashore with his battered leather attaché case right into the middle of the mess.

“Mr. Noon, are you going upstairs to see Sheikh Ragnar?”

“Yes.”

“We wish to interview him.”

Noon ignored the Fox man with the massive mustache and concentrated on the Italian woman, Sophia Donatelli. He couldn’t help himself. He smiled at her.

“Where are your colleagues from the BBC?”

“They are filming ‘human interest’ stories,” Ms. Donatelli replied cheerfully, demonstrating her excellent command of the English language. She had a small, delightful accent. “How the people of Eyl live in their tropical paradise, fishing for fun and profit, the jolly life of a pirate at home…” Her cameraman was filming the conversation.

“What do you wish to ask Sheikh Ragnar?”

Mr. Mustache jumped right in. “It would be great if he could repeat his ransom demands on camera, and his threats to murder everyone if not paid.”

“I see.”

“That would be terrific television.”

“Doubtlessly. Anything else?”

“We want access to the fort to interview the prisoners. People all over the world are watching in huge numbers.”

“A perfect market,” Noon murmured. Ms. Donatelli grinned at him.

“We sell beauty soap, automobiles, wine and soft drinks,” she said cheerfully.

“If you will wait here,” Noon said, “I will go upstairs and ask Sheikh Ragnar if he will cooperate in your efforts to keep the wheels of commerce turning vigorously.”

With that, he walked toward the hotel, trailed by two pirate bodyguards.

Ms. Donatelli’s cameraman was named Carlo Luria, although everyone called him Joe. Just now a feminine voice spoke in English in his right ear. “Pan the building and zoom in on each floor.”

Unlike the other cameramen, who wore an earpiece in one ear so they could hear their producer’s comments and directions via the satellite link, Luria wore two, one in each ear. His producer in Rome had his left ear and used Italian. His CIA producer in Langley, Virginia, had his right ear and always spoke English, even though she understood Italian perfectly and listened to everything Joe and Ms. Donatelli said to each other and to their Italian producer, who didn’t know about the CIA connection.

Luria did as the lady in America requested. His camera habitually rode on his right shoulder so he had easy access to the controls with his right hand. With his feet planted, it was easy enough to scan the building, then zoom in and pan across each floor. A few seconds would be enough.

The digital feed from the camera was sent to a satellite transmitter that the third man on the team had set up in the town square, beside the satellite gear of both the other networks. All three transmitters were powered by diesel generators that were snoring loudly, making the necessary electricity. The satellite transmitters sent the signal up, and from there it went hither and yon.

Luria knew that in addition to the network control room in Rome, his digital signal was being recorded by the CIA in America. They could freeze the audio and video or slow it down and study it at their leisure.

The Americans rarely said much to him—only when they wanted a specific shot—and he only gave it to them when he thought his producer in Rome wouldn’t get suspicious.

When finished with the building, Luria panned the pier, the boats and the harbor. He carefully focused the camera on the anchored cruise ship, Sultan of the Seas, and zoomed in. The only sign of life was a wisp of smoke from the stack, almost invisible.

He swung the camera on to every ship he could see, almost a dozen of them, anchored, run onto mud flats or sandbanks, rusty with peeling paint, glass gone from the bridge windows, lifeboats gone or hanging haphazardly from davits, lines trailing over the side … It was a depressing sight.

Soon a pirate came from Ragnar’s building and motioned to the media people. They followed him inside and up the stairs. Luria kept his camera running, even though he carried it in his right hand as if it were an attaché case. The building reminded him of the crumbling tenement in Naples where he grew up, with the aroma of rotten food scraps mixing in with the smell of urine and feces.

Sophia Donatelli climbed ahead of him. He kept his eyes on her hips, which were the only things in Somalia worth looking at.

She was a smart, breezy woman, full of self-assurance, with a face and figure that blessed any camera that gazed at her. She was a reporter now, but in a few years, Luria believed, Sophia Donatelli would be one of the largest personalities on European television or a film star. She had it in her.

She marched right up to Ragnar and stuck out her hand. “Sophia Donatelli.”

The pirate was visibly taken aback. Carlo Luria caught the moment. Mustache came charging into the picture, babbling something. The fact that Ragnar spoke no English hadn’t sunk in. One of the pirates grabbed Mustache and jerked him away from the chief. Another stuck a rifle barrel in his face.

With the translation help of Noon, who had watched that little scene, an interview of sorts was accomplished. Ragnar leered at Donatelli, ignored Mustache, and generally proved he was a wart on the world’s ass.

“We are poor men,” Ragnar said. “They have stolen our fish and dumped poison in our oceans. Our people are starving. We will do as we must to live. We have no choice.”

“Do you condone murder?” Sophia asked. “The slaughter of innocent people?”

“We are pirates. Buccaneers. Gentlemen of adventure.” Ragnar had gotten this last phrase from Pirates of the Caribbean, the favorite movie of everyone in Eyl, but Donatelli didn’t know that. “We do not apologize. We have chosen this way of life in order to eat, to feed our families. Our cause is just. We do what we are forced to do. The ransom must be paid. Without it, the prisoners will die quickly and we will die slowly.”

Donatelli waited to ensure Ragnar had run down and Noon had finished translating. She said, “Various international aid agencies have tried to relieve the suffering of starving Somali people, yet armed bands of men prevent the delivery of aid. They steal any food and medicine that is delivered, sell it on the black market. They abandon the helpless, condemn them to starvation and death. Do you condone this behavior?”

Ragnar was frowning as he listened to this soliloquy by Ms. Donatelli, and was answering before Noon could finish the translation. “We have fought the Shabab and won here, in Eyl. They are strong other places. They fight for Islam. We fight for survival.

“But I did not make the world. The strong will live, the weak will die. It is that way. Since forever it is that way. You in Europe and America are strong. We have been weak. Europeans pollute our oceans and kill our fish. We will take what we must have. We will be strong.”

The pirate chief refused to answer more questions.

Ricardo tried anyway. He requested an interview with the captain of the Sultan. To his surprise, Ragnar nodded yes. Pirates escorted Mustache and his cameraman to the stairs and prodded them downward. The little procession was not seen again.

“You stay,” Ragnar told Donatelli. Soon tea was brewing, then being served. Ragnar laughed and joked with his men. Noon translated a word here, a word there, but contented himself with slurping tea. Donatelli looked calm and cool, as if she were drinking tea at a restaurant in Davos while the world’s economic leaders vied to be interviewed by her. She had that ability.

Carlo Luria captured it all on his camera, and his transmitter outside in the square fired it up to the satellite.

Ricardo and his cameraman rode in a technical to the fort and were reintroduced to Mustafa al-Said. “It is I who captured Sultan,” the pirate bragged, so Ricardo gave him a few more minutes of fame. After he got a quickie version of the action, Ricardo asked to see Captain Arch Penney. Last night he had not been permitted to see Penney, nor to enter the fortress. Al-Said led the way into the fortress.

They found Penney in the cooking area. The cameraman arranged and turned on his portable spotlight.

Penney’s clothes were rumpled and filthy. He was unshaven. Words were unnecessary. His haunted visage told the story. Still, he spoke slowly and softly into the microphone Mustache held near his lips. “Two passengers died last night of dysentery. Dehydration. We have almost no way to keep clean, the toilet facilities are holes in the floor, the people have nothing. All of us will eventually sicken and die unless we are released.”

Al-Said stood watching. He was happy. The suffering of the infidels would soon bring money. Much money. The more suffering the camera revealed, the sooner the money would arrive. In truth, he was used to suffering. He had watched children die of starvation all his life, had watched people waste away from terrible, untreated diseases, had lived with the rats, lived like a rat. He was a survivor who cared about no one but himself.

Ricardo interviewed some other people, who to their credit didn’t complain. One man, from the Midlands, praised Captain Penney and his crew. “They have done all they can do.”

“Should the owner of the ship pay the ransom?” Mustache asked callously, and the Brit turned his back and walked away.

He buttonholed a man standing nearby and asked him if his family would pay ransom to win his freedom. Two women shed tears in front of the camera, which Mustache encouraged with leading questions that would have wrung tears from a stone. “Do you miss your children? What will they tell your grandchildren if you are murdered by pirates, or die of some preventable disease? Do you have any last message for your loved ones?” Subtlety was not his shtick.

He would have probably interviewed everyone in the fort if his cameraman hadn’t told him the batteries in the camera needed recharging. The spotlight was also draining juice quickly.

Mustache decided to move his operation outside, and spoke to al-Said about it. To his amazement, he was told no.

“No. You no leave. Ragnar’s orders.”

“Wait! You don’t understand. We are members of the press. We are not passengers or crew of this ship you captured. We report your story to the world. We tell the world what is happening.”

“Tell it here,” al-Said said firmly. “You stay.”

And he walked out. Ricardo trailed behind him, protesting vigorously, but the guards at the entrance stopped him and the cameraman. They stood watching as al-Said climbed into the pickup that had brought them here and drove away.

When he had composed himself, Mustache assumed the position with his microphone in front of his mouth. The cameraman used the last of his battery juice to broadcast the sad truth: He and Ricardo were now prisoners of the pirates and wouldn’t be broadcasting anymore unless and until they found a way to charge the batteries in their equipment.

Then Mustache had one of those moments that earned him the big bucks from Fox News. He said, “So we too join the prisoners from the Sultan. We too will die here in this filthy, rat-infested fortress unless the ransom Ragnar demands is paid. Like all these people trapped by an evil they can not control or even comprehend, we hope that statement is not our epitaph.” He managed to say it matter-of-factly, with the emotion just under the surface, summoning his courage and steeling himself for the ordeal. He was commenting in the shadow of the gallows.

As he predicted, it was terrific television.

Rear Admiral Toad Tarkington watched the Fox News and Italian transmissions to the satellite in the Flag Ops spaces aboard Chosin Reservoir. Unfortunately he was not a connoisseur of cable news, so he almost gagged at Ricardo’s histrionics.

He had the technicians play Sophia Donatelli’s interview with Ragnar twice while he studied the man’s face, his expressions. He learned nothing that he didn’t already know. The pirates were vicious men playing hardball. So be it. The U.S military played hardball, too.

Soon the admiral was watching technicians in an intelligence space put together a model of Eyl on a large table that was usually used for map study. The model was being constructed with sand, plaster of Paris and wood bits that were used for buildings and shacks. The info to construct the model came from satellite and drone imagery, and was checked and verified against the images from Carlo Luria’s television camera. Distances had to be correctly measured, the topography of the terrain accurately reproduced, buildings correctly placed, at the right height and aspect.

The admiral was most interested in the area below the fort, near the road that led to the entrance. The wire from the fertilizer bombs ran down this road, and Carmellini said it terminated in a small shack with an old-fashioned DC generator. No one knew where the detonators were located in the explosive mixture. Carmellini had also reported antennas. If there were some kind of radio controls, there must be batteries and a capacitor. How many radio controls there were, their location and who had access were all unknown. With a push of a button or flip of a switch, the bomb could be detonated at any time.

Finally, the admiral and his experts didn’t know where the Shabab soldiers were located. There seemed to be a large number of armed men and pickups in a district, actually a separate small town, about a mile upriver of Eyl. Were these men Shabab, or pirates under Ragnar’s control? They had to be one or the other. In Eyl there were very few neutral persons.

Tarkington’s staff fired off a Top Secret message to Washington asking for any information the CIA had about the Shabab in Eyl. Hours later, the For Your Eyes Only, Top Secret reply was placed in Tarkington’s hands. The lead paragraph stated that Tarkington was to reveal the message’s contents only to those officers who needed the information for operational purposes.

Tarkington quickly realized why. He was reading a carefully written, detailed intelligence summary. The message named every Shabab soldier in the Eyl area, where he lived, who he lived with, the weapons and other military equipment the Shabab possessed and their communications setup. It included descriptions and summaries of the abilities and prejudices and weaknesses of Shabab commanders, from the top down.

It was brutally obvious that the information could have only come from a spy on the ground in Eyl, someone who knew every man in town. No doubt that was why the information was not to be shared.

The admiral went into the space where the mock-up of Eyl was taking shape and compared buildings to the locations set forth in the message. Yes, the Shabab warriors were concentrated in the village neighborhood in the old wash west of the downtown area. Aerial reconnaissance imagery clearly showed the armed pickups parked willy-nilly, and fuel tanks here and there. When Colonel Zakhem came into the space a few minutes later, Tarkington handed him the message.

“It’s gold or bullshit,” Zakhem said after he had carefully read the message twice and handed it back.

“We’re going to find out, Colonel,” Toad Tarkington said with a smile. “Want to make a small wager on which substance it is? Like a steak dinner next time we hit port?”

Zakhem laughed. “You want me to bet on bullshit, right?”

“I like filet mignon.”

I took E.D. and Travis with me when I went sneaking that night. We all had knives and .45s, and they carried silenced submachine guns, MP-5s. Me, I was loaded down with night-vision goggles and binoculars.

We hiked through the brush to the sentry outpost on the northern end of the Eyl airport and settled in for a good look around.

Yep, the pirates or Shabab holy warriors, whichever had the duty tonight, were doing their relaxed campout. No sentry. Nice fire, way too big, on which they were frying something in a big pan. Some kind of fish, I figured. Or a dog. Or a couple of rats. Perhaps I didn’t properly appreciate the local cuisine.

Two pickups parked nearby. One of them had a machine gun mounted in the bed, and of course there was that tripod-mounted machine gun that commanded the runway. It was perfectly adequate to perforate any airplane landing or taxiing or taking off. If these guys didn’t like you, you weren’t going flying.

The three of them were sitting around the fire laughing and jabbering, probably telling lies about their sexual exploits.

I lay there in the brush on my belly watching. They had a plastic can strapped to the side of one of the trucks, and occasionally one of them would wander over for a drink from it. Water, I suspected.

A couple hours passed. A bug somehow got inside my lower trouser leg and decided to feast on the lean white flesh he found there. Moving as slowly as possible, I squashed the little bastard and itched the bite. Wished to Christ I were in Paris with a gal I know and happen to like, eating French grub at some white-tablecloth place with a bottle of good vino in easy reach, and contemplating the prospect of getting laid later.

Finally, as the fire began to die and the three warriors for truth, justice and the Muslim way got busy spreading blankets and rags, I started crawling. Crawled completely around the fire and got the pickup with the water between them and me. Worked my way right up against that thing, where I could see them by looking under it.

Finally they lay down in their blankets. Arranged weapons within reach and settled in for a pleasant night.

I waited another hour, until the moon sliver was up, then got to my feet and walked carefully around the pickup. Took the cap off the water can and dropped in three pills. I was about to screw the cap back on when I thought, what the hell, and added two more. That should be enough dope to knock out an elephant.

We left them there, sound asleep, and E.D., Travis and I hiked the length of the runway.

The guys on the other end were already asleep. One was in the cab of his pickup, and the other two were near the fire, which was burning nicely. They had piled such woody roots as they could find on the thing to keep the snakes and critters away.

I waited for half an hour, just to be sure, then doped their water can. Then I saw another can, so I doped it, too.

When we were hiking to our hidey-hole, E.D. asked, “How long do you want them asleep?”

“Until Grafton’s plane gets here tomorrow afternoon.”

“If they drink some of that spiked water in the morning, they may be awake by the afternoon. Or somebody may find them all sprawled out.”

“It’s a risk, sure. If you got any other ideas, let’s hear them.”

“We’d better get there around noon and check on them.”

“If they are asleep, spike the machine guns.”

“Okay.”

“If they are awake when the plane lands and it stops at their end of the field, kill them and haul away the bodies in one of their pickups,” I said. “That’s Plan B. It’s our only possible choice.”

Neither man said a word in protest. Those guys had to be asleep or dead when that DC-3 landed. We didn’t want witnesses. So maybe they were going to die tomorrow. On the other hand, maybe we three fools would.

I assured myself that the Sultan passengers and crew had an excellent chance. We all had an excellent chance. Yeah.

Hell, we had Jake Grafton.