Pirate Alley

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Sheikh Ragnar found out about the Rosen e-mail less than three hours after Rosen hit the SEND icon on his computer. The pirates and the Shabab had shortwave radio setups: the Shabab used theirs to communicate with fellow Islamic terrorists, and the pirates monitored international merchant ship traffic and the activities of the international antipiracy naval task force in Pirate Alley and the Indian Ocean.

The pirates’ allies got on the radio first with the news, which was headline stuff in America, Europe and Asia. Ragnar, his sons and his most trusted captains, including Mustafa al-Said, conferred in the penthouse of his lair. Al-Said pointed out that Rosen was a captive aboard Sultan, incommunicado. “What could he know?” he asked rhetorically.

Ragnar instinctively knew that the truth of the e-mail was not the issue. The only question that mattered was how it would be received by the local Shabab leaders, whom he assumed already had it or would get it within minutes. Would Yousef el-Din discount the e-mail as a Western provocation initiated by the infidel Americans, or would he suspect the statements might accurately predict the reaction of the pirates to Shabab treachery?

Ragnar was acutely aware that el-Din, a homicidal paranoid sociopath, would shoot first and think later. He began issuing orders to call his men to arms.

As Ragnar suspected, el-Din and his lieutenants didn’t even consider the possibility that the e-mail was a fraud. They heard about it from al Qaeda operatives in Pakistan, where the news of Rosen’s e-mail was on television and the Internet. The Shabab indeed intended to betray the pirates, take the ransom money and kill all the hostages, so if the pirates learned of their plans, of course they would react violently. The only question in el-Din’s mind was whether he could strike before the pirates were ready to defend themselves. The holy warriors awoke their troops, who grabbed weapons and ammo and ran to their armed pickup trucks.

“The Shabab is on the move in Eyl West,” the drone controller reported to the Flag Ops Center aboard Chosin Reservoir. Everyone on the net heard the report in their headsets.

“They’re excited in Eyl East,” the drone operator reported less than a minute later. “Manning pickups, warming them up, armed men running to get aboard.” I was wearing a headset and recognized Wilbur’s voice.

I was standing with Jake Grafton, High Noon and the two Mossad agents Grafton had brought with him, Zahra and Ben, just inside the entrance to the fortress. Two emergency lanterns provided a little light, though not much. The Israelis were eyeing an Arab in decent, though rumpled, clothes who had had the ill luck to walk up on the group of strangers. The expression on his face was wondrous to behold as the fact sank in these two might be Mossad agents, or at least Israelis. Or perhaps it was just his conscience. He walked quickly away back into the gloom of the interior. The Israelis glanced at one another. I heard one say, “Mohammed Atom.”

A pickup with a machine gun in the bed, a technical, came racing up the hill just as Wilbur announced on the net, “Lots of action in Eyl West. Armed men running everywhere.” As I watched, a man got out of the passenger side of the pickup and conferred with the guards, who sent runners to pass the word to all the men in foxholes around the fortress.

Then the guy got back into the pickup and it roared off down the hill, its unmuffled exhaust rattling through the building as it faded.

When it was gone, I turned around, but the two Mossad agents had disappeared. “Who is Mohammed Atom?” I asked Grafton.

“An agent for Iranian interests throughout the Arab world. I think the guys would like to have a chat with him.”

The television news teams were flaked out in a shack a hundred yards or so south of Ragnar’s building, a shack with an old shirt for a door, candles for lights and a privy out back. The owner, a woman, was all smiles when they arrived, directed there by High Noon, who apparently knew everyone in town.

Sophia Donatelli got the best bed in the house, an old mattress suspended on ropes through a wooden frame. She inspected it while the BBC reporter, Rab Bishop, and Ricardo from Fox chattered away on their satellite telephones to their producers in England and America. Donatelli had seen worse accommodations, when she was just getting started in the business, and had thought that bug-infested beds and dirt floors were well behind her. She decided to sleep with her clothes on, as did everyone else. The ringing of a satellite telephone brought them awake about 3:00 A.M., which meant it was midnight in London and 7:00 P.M. in New York. While Rab Bishop was listening to someone tell him of the Rosen e-mail, they heard truck engines start, men running and shouting, and saw pickup headlights spear the night.

Ricardo grabbed his satellite phone and was the first to charge out of the shack. The rest of the crews were right behind him. They paused in front of the shack to watch. The sound of a distant machine-gun burst was quite audible and made the men boarding the pickups pause to listen.

“Whatever is happening, we’ll have a devil of a time broadcasting it,” Rab Bishop remarked. “Still, I suppose we can try. Let’s get the generators going so we can datalink to the satellite.”

Ricardo ran toward Ragnar’s building. He was within feet of the door when he met a pirate coming out. The man had an AK at high port and was on a dead run. When he saw Ricardo with his satellite phone glued to his head, talking a blue streak, he halted.

He gestured once, back toward the south, and when Ricardo didn’t instantly obey, triggered a burst right by the reporter’s ear.

No fool, Ricardo turned and ran. Talking all the way, breathlessly. Literally a running commentary. His producer in the States put the conversation on the network. Within minutes, millions of people were listening to Ricardo’s voice. The audience grew exponentially. All over America, people stopped what they were doing to watch Fox and listen to Ricardo.

The SEALs came out of the ocean silently, almost invisibly. They were in black wet suits, had black balaclavas on their heads and wore night-vision goggles. They crawled up onto the beach and scanned the empty Eyl town square and Ragnar’s building with the night sights on their rifles.

Four pickups with machine guns surrounded Ragnar’s lair. Other pickups roared up the river road toward Eyl West. Sounds of gunfire and muzzle flashes came from that direction.

The SEAL team leader, Chief Petty Officer Al Dunn, scanned the dark city with his night-vision binoculars. He saw men moving from house to house, carrying weapons. No women. No kids. Just armed men. He counted … and quit when he reached a dozen.

Dunn keyed the mike on his headset. “Blue Leader from Red Leader. Let’s be ready with suppressing fire on those people in town when I give the word.”

“Roger, Red Leader.”

Aboard the Sultan, Bullet Bob Quinn settled in behind his .50-caliber sniper rifle. He could see people through his night-vision scope. His spotter, just beside him, would call his targets. Under the Rules of Engagement, he could only shoot people who had weapons. He relied upon his spotter to confirm the weapons.

Settling in a good shooting position with the rifle on a solid rest, loaded, Bullet Bob stared through his scope and watched the crosshairs move as the ship he was on rose on the ocean swells. The crosshairs moved regularly in a predictable, slow, sinuous dance.

The last of the pickups headed west on the river road, each crammed with armed men, some with RPG-7 launchers and bags of warheads, some with AKs, leaving only the four around Ragnar’s building.

Through his night sniper scope, Quinn studied the four machine-gun emplacements on Ragnar’s roof. He could see people moving around, standing up, looking here and there, carrying ammo belts.

Each gun was surrounded by a little wall of sandbags, making a nice little fortification for protection from small-arms fire. Nothing else. Still, since they were six stories above ground level, the machine-gun crews had positions that commanded the square and town.

Quinn took stock of his breathing and heart rate. Normal, he decided. He took several deep breaths, then willed himself into a shooter’s calm.

Aboard Chosin Reservoir Rear Admiral Toad Tarkington checked to see where his drones were, then the fighters from the carrier. They were airborne and in about five minutes would be at the Initial Point, where they would hold until needed. If they were needed. Their ability to hold was finite. Fuel was always a consideration. Tankers were in the air, but they could merely top off tanks, not keep a strike force airborne indefinitely.

The MEU was not ready to storm Eyl. Tomorrow it would be, but not tonight. Tomorrow marines would come ashore in armored personnel carriers to the north and south of town. They would land on the beaches and get ready to roll into Eyl. They could kill every pirate and holy warrior in the place, rescue the hostages and be out of there in a couple of hours. Tomorrow.

Grafton’s objective tonight was the radio controls for the bomb in the trenches around the fortress. The SEALs would neutralize the explosive potential of the cargo of the freighter grounded near it. If the trench bomb or shipload of fertilizer exploded, there would be no Sultan passengers or crew alive to rescue.

Jake Grafton wanted, if possible, to let the pirates and Shabab kill each other while he disabled the trench bomb. Every pirate and holy warrior who got launched for Paradise tonight was one less the marines and SEALs would have to face.

In the flag spaces aboard Chosin Reservoir, Rear Admiral Toad Tarkington tried not to think about the possibility of the bombs detonating. He already had SEALs on the beach and ships in the harbor. If those bombs exploded, he was going to lose American fighting men … and everyone in that fortress, including Jake Grafton, Toad’s friend and mentor for many years. Toad tried to take his mind off Jake Grafton. Stop worrying about the marines. About the SEALs. About the eight hundred and fifty civilians imprisoned in that fortress. Stop worrying about how their families would feel losing these people. Think about how to win.

Toad knew what Grafton would say, because he knew Jake Grafton. Put all those people out of your mind, Toad. Concentrate on the job in front of you. And with a free and easy mind, go forth and give battle.

The battle west of town, up the river, was heating up. A cacophony of automatic weapons could be heard, almost a continuous background noise. The pirates and Shabab were shooting it out.

Jake Grafton took Captain Arch Penney’s arm and pulled him to one side. I sidled closer so I could overhear what he said. Eavesdropping is one of my failings.

“The pirates have buried explosives in a trench around this building, Captain. Tons of them. They say they will blow the fort up and kill everyone if the ransom isn’t paid. We need to find the radio receivers and batteries that power the detonators. To do that, we’re going to have to eliminate the guards.”

“Eliminate?”

“We are going to kill them,” Grafton said flatly. “After we do, I want you to get some of your men and carry the bodies down to the beach. There is a sand overhang at the high tide level. Put them alongside it and cave it in, covering them up.”

I could see Penney mulling it.

“What if some of them are only wounded?”

“Finish them off. Think you can do it?”

“They threw some of my wounded men into the ocean to drown. Yes.”

Jake nodded, then turned to me. “Tommy, give me that Ruger.” I had the silenced assassin’s pistol in my hand.

That was Jake Grafton. Make no mistake, he could pull a trigger. One time in Hong Kong I saw him—

Now he glanced at the guards, who were intent on the drama in the plaza in Eyl, about a mile away but plainly visible. Muzzle flashes strobing the darkness, the burning pickup …

I pulled the Kimber from my waistband.

“No,” Grafton said. “No noise yet. Give me the Ruger.”

“No,” I said. My voice came out a croak. “You’re the brains. I’m just a shooter.”

I knew this was coming, so I didn’t freak out on the spot. I didn’t think Mrs. Carmellini’s boy Tommy was going to get much older, but what the heck! I had the silenced Ruger .22 in my hand. The magazine held nine rounds, and I had a spare loaded magazine in my pocket.

I looked at the faces around me, Arch Penney, his wife, the chief steward, and behind them passengers, their faces barely visible in the dim light.

Grafton slapped me on the back, then used his headset to tell E.D. and Travis I was coming out. Heard them Roger the heads-up. In a way, that was comforting. With night scopes on their rifles, those two snipers were almost as deadly after dark as they were during the day.

I stepped outside, walked toward the two gate guards, who were nervously watching the battle in the town. They glanced at me, didn’t pay me much attention.

I put the pistol right behind one man’s ear, pulled the trigger, then shot the other one before the first one hit the ground.

A forty-grain .22 bullet isn’t much of a weapon unless it’s fired into the skull at point-blank range and penetrates the bone into the brain mass. A solid point is best for this kind of work; a hollow point may explode against the skull and not penetrate the brain case. Still, only one bullet may not kill, may merely put the victim in the hospital with a horrible brain injury, making him a vegetable. Eyl didn’t have a hospital, but still. I shot each man again in the head while he lay on the ground.

Then I picked up their assault rifles and the bags that held their extra magazines and hustled back to Grafton, who was standing in the portal to the fortress.

I gave him one rifle and an ammo bag, and he set off up the stairs toward the roof. I followed.

“We have to take out the men in the foxholes,” he said over his shoulder. “The bomb dudes gotta disconnect the radio receivers from the batteries.” On the roof he waved me toward the north side of the big roof, and he ran toward the south side.

The crenellations in the wall around the roof, designed so that cannons could blast away at ships in the roadstead or troops advancing along the beach, gave us excellent fields of fire. We were looking down into the foxholes, which weren’t really foxholes at all, but merely mounds of earth. The guards had been on the outside, so they could look toward the fort and keep people from crawling out the gun portals, but now they were on the inside of the mounds, looking out. Survival instinct, I guess. Down there in the darkness were the muzzle flashes. Nothing was happening in the fort.

They were hard to see at first, but as my eyes became adjusted to the low light leaking from the gun portals I could just make out the guys hunkered down in the first guard position, with their backs to me.

Since I didn’t have an ounce of sporting blood in me, I shot them both in the back as fast as I could pull the trigger. Ducked down and ran to my left, toward the next portal.

These guys were looking around in all directions, trying to figure out what was happening. I popped the first one, but the second guy hosed a bullet my way. Must have gone over my head toward Arabia, because I didn’t hear it smack into the stone. I shot him before he got off a second shot.

Somewhere behind me I heard the boom of the Sako. E.D. or Travis was helping Grafton nail the guards over there. Grafton’s rifle cracked repeatedly.

By the time I got to the third guard position, it was empty. The guys were probably boogying down the hill toward the beach. I got a glimpse of one and sent a bullet after him to speed him on his way.

The easternmost guard position was empty.

Grafton left me on the roof while he went below to get the bomb disposal guys into action. In a minute I saw the three of them working with a shovel below my position, along the wall of the fort, digging around an antenna that disappeared into the earth.

Things were quieting down in Eyl. Every now and then a heavy machine gun aboard Sultan—I saw the muzzle flashes—put a burst into Ragnar’s lair, probably just to keep their heads down.

A couple of sharp cracks reached my ears, different from the reports of AKs or machine guns. Or the Sako. I couldn’t place them.

“E.D., where are you?”

“In the brush up on the hill above the fort.”

“Keep an eye peeled.”

More gunfire. Several RPG explosions. I saw two launchings, the signature flames unmistakable, and heard the warheads detonate. Eight or ten minutes passed, and the battle up the river road quieted down. An ominous silence settled over this corner of Africa.

On my headset I heard the SEALs giving orders. Any pickups coming into town from any direction were to be disabled.

After perhaps ten minutes, Grafton called me on the headset. “Come on down, Tommy.”

He was waiting at the portal with the Mossad bombers.

“It wasn’t AN in that trench,” he told me, his voice tired. “It’s PVV-5A. Tons of it. Looks like they laced it with a little diesel fuel as a booster for the fuses. We found six radio-controlled detonators, each powered by three pickup-truck batteries. That’s all of them, I hope, but who the hell knows? The only way to be sure is to find one of their garage door openers or radio triggers and push the button.”

I just nodded. Grafton was a gambler with absolutely no nerves. He could clean out Las Vegas.

“We have to check out Ragnar’s hive,” he muttered.

I nodded.

Grafton keyed the transmit button on his belt and spoke into the headset mike. “Red Leader,” Jake Grafton said. “This is Team Leader. Light them up.”

“Aye aye, sir. Blue Leader, anytime you are ready.”

I heard the words in my headset. Then I saw more muzzle flashes from the Sultan. A heavy machine gun sprayed the side of the hotel. I could see the sparkles of glass cascading down, hear the smacks as .50 caliber bullets tore into the side of the building, hear the ripping bursts carrying over the water.

For a second I thought of Nora Neidlinger, who was in that building, but then I pushed her out of my mind. She elected to stay … that was her choice.

By some miracle, Ricardo’s cameraman had his camera running and the feed going to the satellite. He was standing in the door of the shack, Ricardo right beside him still on the satellite telephone, talking excitedly about what he could see.

The cameraman aimed his camera at Ragnar’s building, scanned the pickups. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe it was luck. Whichever, he caught everything that happened in the next thirty seconds.

As the .50 caliber machine gun opened up, Bullet Bob Quinn settled on a machine gunner in the back of one of the pickups. The lights of the hotel were behind him, limning him. He was a nice target. The ship’s movement brought the crosshairs onto him, and Quinn pulled the trigger. The recoil made him disappear.

“Got him,” the spotter said. “Try the gunner on the truck to the left.” Quinn shifted his aim.

Then an RPG round shot toward Sultan trailing a streak of fire, the rocket exhaust. Simultaneously the machine guns in one of the pickups opened up on the Sultan. It got off two bursts before the fifty chewed into it. Pieces flew, and the fuel tank exploded. Two other technicals got under way, only to be hit by automatic weapons fire that seemed to be coming from the beach. The last one started moving … and was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. It too exploded and began burning brightly. A man with his clothes on fire managed to bail out and run about ten feet before he collapsed. The barrel of the machine gun in the bed pointed at Mars, up there somewhere in the night. Flames and flashes lit up the plaza as machine-gun ammo and RPG warheads in the beds of the trucks cooked off. It looked as if a string of large firecrackers was popping.

All four pickups had been destroyed in about fifteen seconds.

“Hellfire inbound.” That was the voice of the controller aboard the flagship. The drones were shooting.

The first Hellfire missile exploded on the right front corner of the roof, a bull’s-eye on the machine-gun nest. Two seconds apart, three other missiles impacted.

Through his scope, Quinn could see that the guns were gone, the sandbags lying about haphazardly. No one moved. No doubt they were all dead.

His spotter called a target, a man in the door of a house to the right, aiming an RPG-7 launcher. Bullet Bob fired first, and the RPG went soaring into the night sky. The rocket exhaust must have ignited the house, because it burst into flame.

“Go,” Grafton said and slapped me on the back.

“Okay.” I started walking into the darkness toward Eyl. The Israelis were right behind me. I keyed my mike. “Red Leader, this is Carmellini. Coming down.”

“Roger that.”

We broke into a trot, which soon became a run. Down the hill in the darkness, running, breathing hard, the sounds of gunfire in our ears … I confess, I was getting into the combat zone where it didn’t matter if I lived or died. I had been there before, and it is addictive. Maybe it’s the adrenaline. Or the knowledge you are cheating the devil.

The pickup that had been on fire was now just a glowing mass of twisted metal. Some bodies lay scattered about as I ran across the open space, followed by my two Israelis, but I was following a crowd. Four SEALs in black were ahead of me. I slowed my pace as they charged into the building.

There was the stutter of a submachine gun, just a short burst. Taking my time, I walked into the entrance and paused. The electric lightbulbs were still illuminated, so the generator was still going. Somewhere. I didn’t hear it. A pirate’s corpse was arrayed on the floor against the far wall, still bleeding from multiple chest wounds. Maybe his heart was still pumping. I didn’t know or care. The SEALs were gone, up the stairwell.

The two Mossad agents had pistols in their hands. They looked around, then nodded at me. I could lead them or follow them. I was tempted to sit down in one of the old stuffed chairs and let them do their thing. However, if I did that and the trench bomb around the fort went off, destroying it and murdering everyone in the place …

That damn generator. Radio controls would probably be battery operated, but if there were a landline to the detonators, the generator was probably rigged to power it. It wouldn’t be high in the building since it used diesel fuel. The pirates wouldn’t want to carry cans up the stairs. The basement, then.

A burst of submachine-gun fire rattled down the staircase. Then a couple more. The SEALs were cleaning the place out.

I went around the stairs, found a door and opened it. There was an electric lightbulb on the ceiling, illuminating stairs going down. Now I could hear the low, steady throb of a diesel engine.

I found the Kimber .45 in my hand. When I drew it I don’t know. Suddenly I realized it was there. I cocked the hammer and put the safety on. Some people carry those things cocked and locked, but without a holster to put the thing in, I never had that kind of sangfroid. Sooner or later I would have managed to shoot myself. I laid the assault rifle on a chair and, with both hands on the pistol, started down.

Mike Rosen was in the e-com center aboard Sultan when he heard the .50 caliber machine gun the SEALs had brought aboard open up. There was no mistaking the trip-hammer rips of a heavy machine gun firing bursts for anything else.

One of the windows popped. Rosen could see a hole in the glass, small, with cracks radiating out from it. Although he didn’t know it, a bullet from the machine gun in one of the pickups in the Eyl square had found its way here. Just one. The only casualty was the glass.

He looked out the window and saw the burning pickups in the square in front of Ragnar’s lair, saw muzzle flashes from automatic weapons and the distant flashing on the hills, up toward Eyl West.

He got back on his computer and began typing. The words poured out as fast as he thought them. He was a good typist and he was good with words, which were his stock-in-trade. Every minute or so he hit the SEND button; the Internet could crash anytime, and even if it didn’t, he wanted to report as close to real time as he could.

At Rosen’s radio home, KOA Denver, the e-mails were put on the Net at the same time the announcer read them over the air. All up and down the front range of the Rockies, people pulled their vehicles to the berm of the highway or the edge of the street and turned the volume of their radios up. Rosen wrote for them. He could see them in his mind’s eye, and he wrote word pictures just for them.

“Captain, we have all three pirate skiffs on radar.”

“Range?”

“Eight miles.”

USS Richard Ward, an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer, approached Eyl from a course slightly north of west. The commanding officer, Commander Millicent C. Fjestad, had her ship inbound at ten knots. Her crew referred to her as The Old Woman, just as male commanding officers were traditionally called The Old Man. Less reverently, she was called Big Mama behind her back. Still, every man and woman aboard Richard Ward respected the captain. She was a highly competent naval officer who cared about her crew.

Her mission tonight was to sink all pirate skiffs at sea off the port of Eyl so that SEALs could egress without opposition. “Sanitize the area and keep it sanitized,” flag ops said.

Like all American destroyers now in commission, Richard Ward had but one gun. It was a dilly, a Mark 45 Mod 4, in caliber 5"/62. This weapon fired a shell five inches in diameter weighing 70 pounds at a muzzle velocity of 2,650 feet per second. Its effective range was over 20 miles. Aimed by radar and computer, it was accurate and deadly.

The pirate skiffs, however, were not conventional enemy warships, with decent freeboards and a superstructure. They were boats, and their gunwales extended about a foot above the water. They were small, difficult targets. Big Mama Fjestad didn’t intend to miss. She wanted them closer, not hull down on the horizon.

She worried about the depth of the water as she approached the Somali coast. There was a submerged sandbar about three miles offshore, and the channel across it was farther north. Of course the skiffs were inside the bar, cruising up and down, looking for God knows what. The sonar was giving the bridge crew a constant real-time reading on the depth of water.

Not a light shown from Richard Ward as she glided toward the coast. On the deck forward the gun barrel was alive, tracking the northern-most target as the destroyer closed the range.

At three miles from the skiffs, five miles offshore, the water shallowed to less than a hundred feet. Commander Fjestad turned her ship northward to parallel the coast.

Meanwhile, aboard the skiffs, the fireworks and muzzle flashes from Eyl were plainly visible. The crews were not searching the dark sea for enemy ships, but staring toward Eyl as their captains tried to raise someone on their hand-held radios.

Ten seconds after Ward was steady on her new course, the tactical action officer (TAO) called on the squawk box. “We are stabilized on all three targets, Captain. Request permission to shoot.”

“Send them to hell,” Big Mama said, then stuffed her fingers in her ears.

Two seconds later the Mark 45 rapped out three shots, about a second apart. The propellant gases still burning as the shells left the gun muzzle strobed the darkness. Now the gun barrel traversed at 30 degrees a second to the second target and stabilized. Boom, boom, boom, three more ear-splitting reports assaulted the bridge team, most of whom had fingers in their ears or were wearing ear protectors. Traverse to the next target, three more muzzle flashes and trip-hammer reports.

It was all over in twelve seconds.

Five seconds later the bridge squawk box came to life. “Captain, the targets have disappeared.”

“Good shooting, people! Well done.”

The Hellfire missiles that took out the machine guns on the roof of the lair cratered it. Chunks of brick, mortar, concrete and wooden beams were blasted down into the penthouse. Sheikh Ragnar was hit by a large piece, which knocked him unconscious. His two sons were there, and they too went down under the onslaught.

Nora Neidlinger was in the bedroom, under the bed, when the roof caved in. She wasn’t hurt. For a long moment the air was opaque with dirt and dust and explosive residue, but gradually the sea breeze carried it out. From the outside it looked like smoke.

She crawled out and looked around. The lights were still on. She made her way through the rubble and found the three pirates on the floor of the main room. U.S. currency notes were scattered everywhere, like confetti. One of the sons was obviously dead, with a large splinter of wood through his neck. He had bled some, but not much. She couldn’t see his face, which was covered with dirt and small debris.

The other son was still alive. The butt of his rifle was under him. She grabbed it and tugged. It came slowly, then quickly when out from under his dead weight.

She examined it, then pointed it at the man’s head and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

She fiddled with a lever on the side. Tried it again. This time it hammered. The recoil was unexpected and the rifle leaped from her hands. Fell into the blood-and-grime mess that had been his head.

Nora went over to Ragnar and scrutinized him. He was lying faceup, with a bloody spot on his skull, in a bed of currency. His eyes were open and blinking. He was trying to swallow.

Not too much stuff on him. She found his pistol on his belt and jerked it out. Threw it across the room.

Turned and wandered away. There was a rope in the corner, coiled up. Not too thick. Clothesline thickness. But long.

She went into the kitchen area, also a shambles, and rooted through the debris until she found a knife. Went back to the rope and began cutting six-foot lengths. It was difficult. The knife was not very sharp, so she had to work at it.