Pirate Alley

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Encrypted Top Secret Flash messages were launched into the ether at the speed of light from desks in Washington, Langley and the Indian Ocean, and at most of the military commands in between, and other encrypted Flash messages came zipping back, again at the speed of light.

Toad Tarkington received an avalanche of demands to be told in exquisite detail all that had happened in Eyl to date and what was going to happen in the future. Was or was not the trench bomb safe? Tarkington was given orders to report on the state of health of the Sultan prisoners, the status of the television news teams and the status and circumstances of any civilian casualties caused by the U.S. military or anyone else.

For his part, Toad informed the bureaucrats that Jake Grafton, the American envoy, was the prisoner of Yousef el-Din, the local Shabab banana, and that Ragnar was dead.

Toad and Grafton had a plan, of course, that they had made and massaged since the president appointed Grafton, and Toad undertook to state to the powers that be that the plan didn’t require any participation from Grafton.

Then he turned the whole message mess over to his chief of staff, who could draft answers and kiss ass at the speed of light whenever required.

In Washington the president took another smoke break with Sal Molina. “Whaddaya think?” the elected one asked after that first blessed drag of cigarette smoke.

“You know Grafton,” Molina said. He stretched out his feet as far as they would go and jammed his hands in his trouser pockets. “Ragnar got his lesson, and now it’s the Shabab’s turn. The thing about Grafton: Anything can go wrong, and if it does, he has probably prepared for that eventuality.”

The president spun his chair so he could look out the window at the floodlit Washington Monument rising like a giant phallic symbol against the black night sky.

“This military adventure won’t go over very well in Europe. They call us unprincipled cowboys now; if there are any significant casualties, they’ll call us worse.”

“The Shabab did the pirates. God only knows how many of those bastards they slaughtered, but we didn’t do it.”

“Grafton’s a genius.”

“Maybe the queen will knight him.”

“I just have this suspicion,” the president mused, “an inkling perhaps, just an itch between my shoulder blades, that this whole thing is out of control. It’s like a televised debate, with the cameras on and the swine reporter grinning like a moron on crack, and you just know the son of a bitch is going to ask you an unexpected question that will make you look like a friggin’ idiot in front of everyone on the planet. That’s the feeling. I got it big-time. This whole pirate gig is going to turn out badly.”

“Grafton is the best—”

The president smacked the table with one hand. “Homicidal Muslims, grinding poverty in Africa, people starving by the millions, polluted oceans, vicious pirates—this isn’t Johnny Depp swaggering in front of a camera wearing more eye shadow than a whorehouse full of sluts. This is real as a heart attack. That Grafton … he can certainly smash things. That’s the easy part. I have to pick up the pieces.”

Sal Molina sighed. After twenty-five years in politics, he thought most politicians had the courage of mice, present company included. They were constantly congratulating themselves on having the fortitude to take political risks, when the worst that could happen was losing some votes. Molina tried to recall just what the president had done about poverty and starvation in Africa, vicious pirates and polluted oceans. Maybe he made a speech or two. Tut tut.

All the guts inside the Beltway wouldn’t be enough for a Vienna sausage, Molina thought savagely.

I woke up with the sun in my eyes. I got up, went to the eastern edge of the roof and pissed through a gun port as the warm desert wind pushed on my back and the sun warmed my face. One of the guards eyed me, thought about shooting me and apparently changed his mind. Everyone has to piss, even infidels. He settled for a rude gesture.

Ahh, morning in fabulous Eyl. With any luck, this would be my last one. Tomorrow morning I’d either be dead or someplace else.

I turned on my headset. Not a lot of battery left, but maybe enough.

“Red Control, Tommy. Where is Grafton?”

“Good morning, Tommy. All indications are he’s in a hut in West Eyl. We’ve counted over two hundred armed men in that vicinity.”

“Thanks. I’ll get back to you.”

I went downstairs and found Arch Penney, who was conferring with his crew, trying to figure out how to feed eight hundred fifty people and not poison them. It was a tough problem. My personal contribution was to refuse to eat anything. Fasting wouldn’t give me the trots, although the water might. I had to drink it anyway.

“Did you bring binoculars from your ship?” I asked the captain.

He nodded.

“May I borrow them?”

His wife had them. He told me where she was and I went.

Nora Neidlinger was still asleep, and the women were talking in hushed tones. Nora’s daughter was asleep beside her. No one asked me what had happened to Nora, and I wasn’t letting on that I knew.

Lying on my belly on the roof, looking through a gun port, I surveyed the beach. A few kids were fishing in the surf, but there were no SEALs lying around. I wondered where they were. Looked the Sultan over. Probably aboard her, but I saw no one. She appeared to be a derelict.

Lots of guys with assault rifles wandering around Eyl. Up on top of the lair amid the rubble, in pickups in the plaza, stealing food from the locals. I could see men literally carrying pots out of the houses scattered about while women screamed at them and children cried. Those holy warriors … The distance was too great to see much detail. I needed to get closer.

I needed to get out of here. I got up, put the binocs in my backpack and wandered along the wall, looking at the guards and brush and considering possibilities.

In midmorning two guards came for Jake. He hadn’t eaten, nor had he been given any water. He was hungry and thirsty, but tried to ignore it.

His captors put him in a pickup, and away they went driving fast toward the beach. Roared into the plaza and screeched to a stop in front of Ragnar’s lair. Grafton saw that the plaza had been cleaned up, somewhat. The remnants of two pickups were still there, but the less-damaged ones had been removed, no doubt to be mined for parts, and the bodies carried off.

A group of hard cases with AKs watched Grafton get out of the bed of the pickup, and watched his two escorts take him inside.

Although he didn’t know it, Yousef el-Din had had a group working for hours cleaning up most of the mess in the penthouse. They disposed of broken glass and rubble and trash by the simple expedient of tossing it off the balcony and out the windows on the south side of the building, none of which had any glass left.

Jake was prodded up the stairs, all of them, to the penthouse. The roof looked as if it would cave in if even a mild breeze arose, but most of the rubble was gone. The bodies of the Ragnars, father and sons, were somewhere below under all that debris.

Yousef was waiting in the penthouse, seated on a carpet with his legs folded, looking every inch like an Arab slave trader waiting to haggle. Standing beside him was Geoff Noon, High Noon himself, still wearing that filthy old white linen sport coat with a bottle of gin in the side pocket. The pocket on the other side was empty, so he looked unbalanced. He glanced at Grafton but showed no sign of recognition. Also standing there was a white man of medium height, trim, wearing slacks and a short-sleeve pullover shirt with a polo pony on the left breast. He was obviously the cleanest man in the room.

“I’m Mike Rosen,” he said to Grafton, extending a hand.

Grafton shook and pronounced his name.

“Yousef wants to talk about money,” Noon said.

“Okay.”

“When and how it will be delivered.”

“Tell him that two helicopters will arrive at noon tomorrow. Each will have money suspended on a pallet below it. The choppers will put the pallets in the plaza, then fly over to the fort and land on the roof.”

Noon chattered a while, then listened as Yousef talked; then they went back and forth. Grafton put his hands in his pockets and inspected the holes in the roof. Those Hellfires had done a job.

Finally Noon asked, “Why pallets under the helicopters?”

“Two hundred million dollars in currency weighs over two tons. That is a ton for each chopper. In this heat, that is a safe load.”

More jabber.

Grafton interrupted. “Of course, after the money is paid we will want to transport all the people in the fortress out of here. We will use helicopters, take about a dozen people at a time. It will obviously take the rest of the day to fly eight hundred and fifty folks out to the ship. As each helicopter is loaded and takes off, another one will land on the roof.”

Yousef listened impassively to this statement.

Grafton continued, “I suspect that Yousef and his followers will wish to take the money and leave immediately. If they try any treachery, we will of course kill every single one of them and take the money back or destroy it.”

Yousef’s face darkened as he listened to Noon, and he rose swiftly to his feet. He had a pistol in a holster on his belt, and his hand went to the butt.

“We are Muslims of the Shabab,” he said, according to Noon. “Not liars and thieves and blasphemers and sinners, like the pirates were. They are dead, gone. The Shabab will not be insulted.” The men standing around listening made appreciative noises upon hearing this. They were Allah’s chosen. “You will do as you have said. If you try to betray our agreement in any way, all the hostages will die. Every last one. They will be shot and bombed until every single one of them is but crushed bone and bloodstains on the stone.”

He pulled a radio control device from his pocket and tossed it on the carpet on which he had been sitting.

Jake Grafton didn’t seem impressed. “We’ll want the Sultan, too,” he said. “A team of sailors will arrive tomorrow by boat after the money is paid. They will go aboard, start the engines, raise the anchor and sail her away.”

Yousef wanted more money. Grafton stood his ground. He had made a deal with Ragnar. There was no more money.

“Two hundred million for the people, another hundred million for the ship,” Noon reported.

After thinking it over, taking his time, Grafton said, “We will sell him the ship for a hundred million. We will give him a hundred million for the people and he can keep the ship. Maybe start up a cruise ship line. Eyl to Rome, via Suez and Athens.”

It was an argument for show. Yousef played to his followers, with much back-and-forth with them that wasn’t translated.

After a while Yousef caved. “Two hundred million, and you can have the people and the ship.”

Grafton merely nodded. He looked a question at Noon. “You taking Rosen back to the ship?”

Noon nodded.

Grafton turned toward Rosen and said, “Put it on the Internet.” He turned on his headset, arranged it on his head and had a short conversation with Admiral Tarkington. Then he turned it off to save the battery.

Yousef issued orders, and Grafton’s escorts led him to the stairs and down. They ended up in a room on the third floor. Still some trash about. Grafton looked out the shattered window and the one that still had glass, then sat down. He paid no attention to the guards.

High Noon accompanied Mike Rosen back to the ship. They waded out from the beach and managed to heave themselves into the boat without tipping it over, and the boatman started the little one-cylinder engine. Away they putted.

When they were back aboard the Sultan of the Seas and climbing stairs to the e-com center, Rosen asked, “What happened to Ragnar?”

“He is no longer with us.”

“And the rest of the pirates?”

“The same, I am afraid. Yousef el-Din and his men did their level best to kill them all. Oh, no doubt a few of them are hiding in the brush, but only a few.”

“That e-mail I sent?”

“Oh, yes. It stimulated them vigorously.”

“And whose idea was it to send that?”

Noon grinned and didn’t answer.

When Rosen’s computer was online, over a hundred e-mails vomited forth.

“We will send the Shabab’s communiqué first,” Noon said, “then the substance of the conversation between Yousef el-Din and Mr. Grafton.” He extracted a grimy sheet of paper from a pocket. “Send them to your radio station. Your colleagues will, I assume, put them on the Net where the world can read them.”

He handed the paper to Rosen, who spread it out on the desk and read it carefully. It merely stated unequivocally that unless the two hundred million dollars was paid by noon tomorrow Eyl time, the Shabab would kill all the prisoners. A couple of sentences of boilerplate followed, exhorting the faithful to jihad.

“Apparently Allah’s soldiers have inherited the pirates’ business,” Rosen muttered.

“Their assets and their debts,” Noon said, uncorking his gin bottle. “Start typing.”

It was close to noon when I heard trucks coming up the hill toward the fort. A man would have had to be deaf not to hear them, since none of them had a working muffler. Sounded like a NASCAR race.

I figured the guards were going to change, so trotted over to the other side of the fort. Sure enough, the holy warriors were walking around the fort. For just a moment, there was no one on the eastern side. I didn’t waste a second; just vaulted over the side into the loose dirt twelve or so feet below. Then I shot off down the hill toward the beach. Went about fifty yards and then flopped onto my belly.

Waited a minute or so for shouts, or shots, or someone running after me. Nothing. I started crawling. My leg hurt every time I moved it.

After I had done about a mile on my stomach around the north side of that rock pile and was thoroughly fagged out, with cactus stickers in my hands and knees, I decided to get on the net. Got my headset on and turned on the transmitter/receiver and keyed the mike. “Control, this is Tommy. Where is the admiral?”

“He’s in Ragnar’s lair.”

“E.D.? Travis?”

“Yo.”

“Where are you? We need to talk.”

Julie Penney was standing at a gun port looking at the sea when Tommy Carmellini landed in the dirt in front of her, picked himself up and galloped into the brush.

She recognized him, even though she didn’t see his face. Big, rangy, athletic, lean … Grafton’s assistant, the man who brought Nora back from Ragnar’s hellhole.

Marjorie was there and came over to the porthole. She had gotten a glimpse of the falling body, but hadn’t seen who it was.

“Tomorrow’s the deadline,” Marjorie reminded the captain’s wife. “One more night.”

Suzanne Ranta heard that remark and joined the conversation. “Out of here tomorrow. Or we’ll be dead.”

“Arch says the ransom will be paid,” Julie Penney reminded them. “Let’s keep our chins up.”

“Stiff upper lip,” Irene mocked, as British as she could.

Julie Penney wandered off to check on other passengers. She had had a little talk with her husband in the wee hours of the morning, after the shooting died down, and he had said, “It’ll be tonight.” She asked why, and was told, “The locals can’t see in the dark. The Americans prefer it. If there is going to be trouble, it will be tonight.”

Tonight. Conceivably, this could be the last day of life for a great many people.

So … if you knew this might be your last day, how would you spend it? Almost by instinct Julie Penney chose to spend it trying to buck up her husband’s passengers.

It was nearly four o’clock when I reached the rendezvous, what with crawling and sneaking along. The Shabab had patrols out, and they kept showing up at inopportune times. Sometimes I am lucky that way.

Our rendezvous was a big pile of rock overlooking Eyl West. It was just below the rim, a pile of hard rock that had resisted the rain and wind through the ages. I wouldn’t have been surprised if hundreds of thousands of years ago Homo erectus hadn’t huddled on random nights on the very spot where Travis had built a tiny, smokeless fire to brew coffee and warm up MREs. In Africa, you think about things like that.

It wasn’t just Travis and E.D., either. It was my whole snatch team. Harry, Doc, Willis, Buck, Wilbur … all of them.

“This is like a high school reunion,” I said. “Who brought the beer?”

“Jesus, Tommy, you look bad! What did you do, crawl the whole way?”

“Damn near. Where’s Orville?”

“Up on top of the rock. We have a drone up keeping watch.”

“I’ll recommend a Christmas bonus for all you guys.”

“Want a beer?” Buck asked.

“You are a prince among men. Wanna meet my sister? I’ll fix you up.”

E.D. handed me the satellite phone. “The navy wanted to talk to you as soon as you showed up.”

“I kinda thought so.”

“They weren’t expecting Admiral Grafton to get himself into a hostage situation. I think they want you to take care of that.”

“Did you guys get all those radio detonators?” Willis asked me.

“If you hear a really big bang, the answer is no.” I opened a can of beer and looked at E.D. “Anything else they want to ask me?”

“Now, Tommy, no one knew if you were going to get out of that fort before dark. We were Plan B.”

“I see.”

“What with you here, we’ll go back to Plan A.”

“The airport?”

“Yep. The Shabab boys are sitting up there looking mean. Kinda too bad about the pirates. When the Shabab came in shooting, the pirates’ machine guns split their barrels when the first round was fired. The battle was a little lopsided. Very tragic.”

I set about making the satellite phone do its magic. By the time the task force ops officer was on, I was halfway through my second can of beer. Even warm, it tasted delicious.

While I talked the guys worked on my leg. Got an antibiotic on it and a coagulating pad, then a tight bandage. At least now it wouldn’t bleed. Damn thing was sore, and the best I could do was a hobble.

When the ops officer was finished and had answered my three questions, I turned off the phone. I looked at my little band and told them, “We eat, then get at it. Timetable is unchanged. The airplanes are in the air.” They knew all that, of course. “E.D., you and Travis are going to cover me with the Sakos.”

They just nodded and handed me some MREs. I began wolfing them down. Damn, I was hungry.

E.D. sat down beside me. “I heard some shooting last night. Did you guys get any kills?”

He shrugged. Looked around to see who was listening to us. Apparently no one. “We missed,” he allowed in a low voice.

“Oh, come on!”

“Shit, Tommy. Shooting at people running around like crazy in the dark isn’t like shooting at a damn target. You know that! The damn guys wouldn’t hold still.”

“I thought you guys—”

“For the love of Christ!” he hissed, trying to keep his voice from carrying. “Of course I’ve been in combat before. A dozen times. Sprayed lead and threw grenades and called in air strikes and patched up wounds and all that soldier shit. We got those guys about to do you on the road, didn’t we? Sure, we were trying last night, but the crosshairs kept dancing and those guys wouldn’t hold still. You know what I’m saying?”

“It’ll be my neck on the chopping block tonight,” I pointed out.

“We scared ’em last night. Kept their heads down. When they got their heads down they’re outta the fight. We’ll take care of you.”

“Yeah. Sure. Anything happens to me, you’d better get off this planet. Shoot straight, damn your eyes.”

“Oh, of course, Tommy. Sure as shootin’.”

“Fuck you, Erectile Dysfunction.”

“Hey! Watch your mouth.”

“Fuck you, Limp Dick. Is that better?”

“Cocksucker.”

“Don’t drink any more of this horse-piss beer before we go, either.”

Properly motivating people is a fine art. It comes natural to me. It’s a gift.

We sorted our gear, made sure everyone had what he needed. Willis Coffey was leading the rest of the guys to the airport. Since they had farther to go, they left early. E.D. and I helped ourselves to more water. The sun had slipped below the hills to the west, but still made the ocean sparkle. When the sun was gone and the ocean turned gray, we started sneaking.

For some reason, the sky turned bloodred as the night came on. Perhaps the upper atmosphere was full of dirt from the desert to the west. Some kind of lensing effect, I suppose.

We finally reached our position just after dark. E.D. settled in beside me and set up the legs of the Sako’s bipod. Got his spotting scope beside him, focused it on Ragnar’s lair, used the laser range finder …

“Two hundred ninety yards,” he whispered.

That was well within the capability of the night scope on the rifle. Unfortunately it was too close for comfort. One of the advantages a sniper enjoys is that he can kill from beyond the range of enemy weapons, and it is this edge that often is the only thing keeping the sniper alive.

Using the night scope, we checked for other positions. After a couple of shots, E.D. was going to have to move. Probably retreat, if the opposition tried to encircle him with more people than he could take down. We picked out places.

“Just don’t shoot unless you have to,” I told him. “But if you do shoot, kill the son of a bitch. One shot, one kill.”

He didn’t say anything. The dumb bastard. Shooting and missing last night! Jesus! Sniper my ass.

I lay there stewing as I looked over Ragnar’s lair with binoculars. I could see people in some of the windows, and people in the penthouse. A couple on the balcony. None of them was Grafton, not that I expected to see him. They probably had him in one of the back rooms under guard.

In the plaza were six pickups with machine guns, technicals, tastefully arranged around the burned-out hulks of the two trucks that caught fire last night.

The gunners in the trucks were nervous, and kept looking out to sea, scanning. They weren’t stupid. The truck carcasses and side of the building had plenty of .50 caliber bullet holes. Anyone with eyes could see that a heavy weapon had been used. From a patrol boat? A launch? Or from the Sultan?

Even as I watched, two squads of armed men, about eight in each bunch, walked out to the beach and carried two boats into the surf, where they climbed aboard. Other men brought them machine guns, one for each boat, which the people in the boat mounted on a tripod. They didn’t waste any time, but set sail immediately for the Sultan. Once there, the first boat went alongside while the other laid off about a hundred yards and covered it. Six or so of the Shabab warriors went aboard. Truth is, these guys should have done this twelve hours ago. Maybe el-Din just thought of it, or maybe he was too busy praying or writing reports to his superiors to attend to business.

I hoped the SEALs were ready. It was a couple hours too early for the party to begin. A shootout aboard ship would alert this bunch here, complicating the problem of extracting Grafton. And the Sultan passengers. And crew. Plus my snatch team. And me.

Bullet Bob Quinn saw the boats set off from the beach and assumed the worst. Like Carmellini, he knew that shooting at dusk would jeopardize the entire operation. He and the men could just go over the side and swim away … but there was the big fifty on the bridge. One look at that gun and its ammo and the Somalis would catch right on. At least now they were only suspicious.

He sent a runner to the e-com center to warn Rosen and High Noon. The Somalis expected them to be there, so that was fine. Indeed, that was where some of them would go first, just to check. He stationed two men there.

He and the other SEALs took up positions here and there throughout the ship. He hoped to take out the holy warriors one at a time, if they would just cooperate.

Bullet Bob stood just around a corner from the pilot landing, which of course was still open. He heard the boat bump against the grate and heard them clamor aboard. These guys weren’t silent. Didn’t know how. People were supposed to flee from the righteous violence of their guns, from the wrath of Allah.

The pirates hadn’t, and their corpses were lying in a pile between Eyl East and West. Of course, most of them had been ambushed, but …

Quinn waited until the last man had taken a ladder upward, then followed him. At the top of the staircase he saw the guy looking around, slightly awed at the size and opulence of the ship, and apparently undecided about which way he should go. The man paused to listen, held his rifle tightly.

He made a selection and walked along, looking at this and that, obviously ready to shoot someone if only he could find someone. Anyone.

Bullet Bob kept low, stayed behind, as quiet as a shadow. His chance came when the pirate thought he heard something behind a closed door and approached it, intent upon it.

Quinn’s garroting wire went over his head and the SEAL pulled with all his strength. The rifle fell, the man grabbed at his throat. They all did that. It was instinct.

As violence goes, garroting ranks right up there with slashing with a cutlass. To be good with a garroting wire you have to like the weapon. You must like pulling with all your strength on the handles and feeling the victim buck and writhe helplessly as the wire cuts into his throat, then slices into his jugular veins, severing them. The lack of air would eventually kill the victim, a strangulation, but the loss of blood to the brain brings an almost instantaneous unconsciousness. The victim never wakes up.

The trick is to keep tightening the wire after the victim passes out. Tighten until it cuts the veins. It helps if the man pulling on the handles is strong, with well-developed shoulders and back muscles. Bullet Bob was. He was only a few inches taller and twenty pounds heavier than the Somali male, but he was twice as strong. It wasn’t a fair contest. It was a quick, silent assassination.

When the blood erupted from the holy warrior’s neck, Quinn lowered him to the floor. Pulled his wire off and wiped it on the back of the man’s filthy shirt in a place the blood had yet to reach. Then he moved on.

The SEAL lieutenant was on the bridge, hidden in the doorway of the navigator’s office, when he heard a man come along the starboard passageway and pass through the open door. Sure enough, he saw the big machine gun lying there on the floor immediately and stepped toward it to take a look. As he passed the open door, Quinn stepped out behind him, grabbed his mouth with his left hand and cut his throat with his right. The fighting knife slashed through tissue as if it were soft cheese.

Quinn stepped back into the office and waited. Sure enough, within less than a minute another Somali came exploring. He saw the first guy lying on the deck in a pool of his own blood and stopped. This put him about six feet from the doorway. Quinn launched himself toward the man, with his knife swinging. The swipe caught muscle, tissue, tendons and cartilage; blood erupted from the man’s neck. His eyes glazed and he tumbled to the deck, unconscious and bleeding out.

Five minutes after they came aboard, it was all over. All six were dead. One of the SEALs skinned out of his clothes, donned a dead man’s, grabbed his AK and went on deck to wave off the two circling boats.

Quinn watched. It was a necessary gamble.

It paid off. The boats moved off to the other ships.

Bullet Bob went up a deck to the e-com center. Noon was fairly well pickled, his usual late-afternoon condition, and Rosen was working on his e-mails. Neither knew the Shabab warriors had come aboard, and Quinn didn’t tell them.

“We’re going to have to get ashore before the darkness becomes too thick,” Noon said. “I must signal for our boat.”

“Plan on staying aboard tonight,” Quinn said. “If the boat comes, we’ll wave them off.”

“I wonder if the cruise line would mind if we helped ourselves to some of their fine cuisine?”

Rosen turned off the computer. “I know where the peanut butter is, and if the bread hasn’t spoiled…”

The SEALs were in the kitchen and had a simple dinner prepared when Quinn came in with Rosen and Noon. The two ship’s engineers were already there, drinking their pints, celebrating their return from belowdecks. They looked happy and serene; no doubt they would get happier and more serene if they kept swilling the beer.

The last of the light was fading from the sky.

Quinn checked his watch, then said to Finnorn and the others, “You guys get that gun mounted on the bridge. Show starts in two hours and five minutes. While you are going that way, throw those corpses over the side.”

Rosen stopped forking food. “Corpses?”

“We had uninvited guests. They are on their way to Paradise. Or Hell. Allah will figure it out.”

As the light faded completely, I switched to night-vision goggles. I had everyone located, I hoped. There were the six pickups, all in the plaza, all illuminated by the evening fire. No women or children around, just men, and all armed. They were roasting something in the fire … If there was a pickup on the far side of the building, I couldn’t see it from my vantage point.

The generator was running again, powering lights in every room. I got glimpses of people in the penthouse, two visible on the second floor … a couple guys on the balcony with rifles, walking around looking things over.

I could see two machine guns mounted on the roof. They were the belt-fed 7.62 mm Russian models that were in all the pickups. These two must have been carried up from the weapons horde in the basement.

When the night was as dark as the inside of a black cat, I pointed out my route to E.D., who wasn’t talkative. “Don’t shoot unless it’s absolutely necessary. If you do shoot, don’t miss.”

He grunted.

My leg had stiffened up. Oh, man, that thing was sore.

I crawled forward.

Aboard Chosin Reservoir, Rear Admiral Toad Tarkington was watching the action unfold on computer screens. Real-time video and infrared presentations from three drones over Eyl played on monitors. SEALs were in the water and approaching the Eyl beaches. Marines were landing on the beaches above and below the town in armored personnel carriers. They had some light artillery and plenty of machine guns with them. Three Ospreys carrying SEALs were orbiting high over the Eyl airport. They would parachute into the airport and help Tommy Carmellini’s snatch team secure the place after the CIA operatives had taken out as many of the defenders as possible. Carmellini’s team would attack at the airport at the same time SEALs crawling onto the beach assaulted Ragnar’s old lair, the move that would open the ball. Thirty minutes prior to the assault, F/A-18s and F-35s would launch from the aircraft carrier seventy-five miles offshore; they would be overhead with plenty of ordnance, should it become necessary.

The whole plan was overkill: the naval intelligence professionals thought the Shabab around Eyl had at the most 150 men, and probably less after last night’s battle. Tarkington was hitting the place with enough firepower to destroy a division. Simply, he could not be certain that Grafton and his Mossad colleagues had managed to disarm the detonators for the trench bomb. He needed to hit the Shabab with overwhelming force, take them down within seconds, and make any resistance impossible. Tarkington was trying to save lives—the hostages in the fort and the marines and SEALs.

He had had several satellite conversations during the day with his boss, the fleet commander, the Pentagon and the White House. All offered advice, no one issued orders. It was a military miracle, Toad thought. Yet there are two sides to the total responsibility coin: Screw this up and you alone take the fall.

“Swarm them,” he told Sal Molina at the White House this evening, “and we’ll have minimum casualties. Piddle around and it’s going to be a mess.”

“Why don’t you just blow up Ragnar’s building with missiles?” the president had asked. “Obliterate it.”

“That was the original plan, sir, but Admiral Grafton is being held hostage in there. So I’ve changed the plan.”

“I see,” the president said thoughtfully. What he meant was, his hands were clean. If Grafton or any of our guys get killed, I’ll give them a medal. Spend an hour in the East Room in front of cameras holding hands with the widows.

Politics. It was enough to gag a maggot.

Toad wasn’t betting everything on the initial assault. He had every destroyer in Task Force 151 in a trail formation, one behind the other, ready to steam just off the beach and shell any target. He had every marine in the MEU on alert to go ashore as fast as helicopters and Ospreys could get them there. He had airborne ordnance from the aircraft carrier USS United States that could be delivered in a continuous stream as fast as the carrier’s crew could work the flight deck and rearm the planes. Finally, all the destroyers and both cruisers had targets selected for their Harpoon missiles.

Tarkington had enough military power at his command to wipe this corner of Africa off the map. If anything happened to the hostages, he intended to use it. He had told all his superiors that, and none of them said no.

Yet, if anything happened to the hostages, he and Grafton had lost.

Tarkington didn’t intend to lose.

Just now he watched a small green spot moving on an infrared image captured by a drone over Eyl. There were plenty of other green spots, some of them moving, but the computer techs said this one was Tommy Carmellini crawling for Ragnar’s lair. Jake Grafton was in there.

Toad tried to see the telltale traces of SEALs crawling up onto the beach. Nothing. Since they were wearing wet suits, which were indeed wet, their forms should be colder than the sand still warm from the sun. As the water dried, the cold signature would disappear. As the heat of the men’s bodies slowly exceeded the temperature of the cooling sand, they would again become visible in infrared. But not yet.

Tarkington hoped the Shabab didn’t have night-vision or infrared technology. He and Grafton had made this plan assuming that they didn’t. Watching Carmellini creep along, Toad crossed his fingers.

“Thirty minutes, Admiral. Battlestar”—the United States—“is launching aircraft.”

“Thank you.” Toad arose from his chair and went to the head. There wouldn’t be time later.

Yousef el-Din had spent most of the afternoon and evening in conversation via shortwave with his colleagues in southern Somalia, who of course knew his plans quite well. They informed him about media coverage of the Sultan hostage incident, and the fact that the two hundred million in cash was on its way to the task force via air. That fact had been splashed across every newscast in the world.

Ragnar’s shortwave radio was in shambles, so the Shabab had transported theirs from West Eyl to the lair and lugged it to the penthouse, where the reception would be better due to the height, and the fact that, unlike East Eyl, the beach town didn’t sit in a river valley surrounded by rimrock hills.

When he wasn’t chattering to his colleagues, Yousef el-Din prayed on his regular schedule. He normally prayed five times a day, unless he was in combat.

Yousef was deeply devout. He knew that he and his men would need Allah’s help after they had the money and killed the hostages. Still, the Shabab’s friends all over the Muslim world would grow in prestige and power, and Allah be praised, the final battle between good and evil would be one giant step closer.

Yousef did not think he would survive the wrath of the allied task force. To go to Paradise as a martyr, with the blood of infidels on his hands, after having fought Allah’s war against the nonbelievers … well, it was heady stuff for Yousef el-Din. He could feel the Prophet’s spiritual presence, giving him strength for the days ahead.

When he finished praying, he thought again about the money. Two truckloads of currency. He would have his men hide it in the desert, at a place known to his Shabab colleagues in the south. If he didn’t live, they would find it and use it to fund jihad.

Allah akbar.

But the Americans! After he blew up the fortress, or machine-gunned the hostages, they would be outraged, naturally, and would lash out, like snakes. One of the places they would storm was this building—and the basement was full of explosives! He had inspected the weapons treasure trove earlier this afternoon.

The weapons were tempting, enough to outfit hundreds of men, but with two hundred million dollars the Shabab could buy a shipload. Perhaps even several nuclear warheads. The North Koreans were a reliable source, and of course there were the Bulgarians. And these days the Iranians were anxious to tangibly assist anyone who was the enemy of their enemies, of whom they had many.

After his evening prayer, Yousef gathered his lieutenants and issued orders. They must be ready for tomorrow.