Testament

19

Almost exactly twenty-four hours later, Zaheed pulled up at a fenced compound on the outskirts of Mogadishu, the flat scrubland of the coastal plain on one side and the azure expanse of the northern Indian Ocean on the other. Jack was sitting in the jeep beside him and Costas was in the rear, having been picked up at the airport after his flight from England two hours previously. The compound was surrounded by rolls of razor wire and patrolled by pairs of Somali marines with Kalashnikovs, two of them having already approached the vehicle with their rifles at the ready.

“This is the new Somali navy operational command center,” Zaheed said, switching off the engine and unclipping his seat belt. “It’s used as a base for training marines, but you can see a couple of patrol boats in the harbor. Security’s tight because they’ve recently had to fend off an attack by the Al-Shabaab extremists, a drive-by shooting, and then a drive-in suicide bombing. Stay here while I do the formalities.”

He opened the car door, raised his hands to show the marines they were empty, and then got out, allowing them to surround the vehicle and frisk him. They gestured for Jack and Costas to do the same. An officer took Zaheed’s papers and Jack and Costas’s passports, scrutinizing them on the bonnet of the jeep. He spoke into a radio and asked Zaheed to follow him, and the two of them disappeared into the guardhouse at the entrance to the compound. A few minutes later they reappeared, Zaheed looking more relaxed, and the officer gestured for Jack and Costas to enter the compound. Zaheed spoke quickly to them on his way back to the jeep. “I’m leaving you two here while I go off to attend to some business. You’ll be seeing the base commander, Captain Ibrahim, the second in command of the Somali navy. He’s a good guy, one of the best. Where we go next really depends on what transpires here. Call me when you’re finished.”

Jack nodded, and they stood back from the dust as the jeep roared off. Two of the marines escorted them past the guardhouse and toward a complex of buildings that abutted the wharf. “Amazing,” Costas said, gesturing at the patrol boat they could now clearly see in front of them. “That’s an old Soviet-era Osa II missile-armed fast attack craft. Last time I saw one of those, it was hurtling toward my ship off Kuwait during the Gulf War.”

“I remember them well,” Jack said, following the marine to the entrance of one of the buildings. “While you were in the engine room of your destroyer, I was up the Shatt al-Arab laying charges under three of those boats with my team.”

“To think we were so close, but we didn’t even know each other then.”

“It was a different world. There may have been a war on, but at least back then you could sail past the Horn of Africa without being attacked by pirates.”

They entered a conference room with British Admiralty charts pinned around the walls and a table in the center. “Sit here,” the marine said curtly, pointing at the chairs on the opposite side of the table.

“That’s sit here, sir,” said a Somali officer who had followed them in. “This is Captain Howard, Royal Naval Reserve, and Commander Kazantzakis, United States Navy Reserve.”

“I am very sorry,” the marine said, flustered, looking at Jack. “It is my poor English. I meant no disrespect, sir.”

“No problem,” Jack said, smiling at the marine and then leaning across and shaking hands with the officer. “Captain Ibrahim? Thanks for meeting with us at such short notice.”

“It’s my pleasure.” He shook hands with Costas and they sat down. Two other officers had followed him in and took chairs on either side.

Ibrahim was a slender, fit-looking man with a neatly trimmed gray-flecked beard and two rows of medal ribbons on his shirt. Jack looked at them, intrigued. “UK Operational Service Medal and Distinguished Service Cross?”

Ibrahim nodded. “After school in England and Dartmouth Naval College, I spent twelve years in the Royal Navy before transferring here. My father was a Somali diplomat in London and my mother’s English. I was in Afghanistan with the SBS.”

“Huh,” Costas said. “Jack’s unit. We were just talking about old times.”

“My experience was nothing like Afghanistan,” Jack said, waving his hand dismissively. “I was only on the active list for a year.”

“You say that, but we knew all about you,” Ibrahim said. “One of the chief petty officer instructors with the SBS had been with you during the Gulf War. They still use your operation up the Shatt al-Arab as a model for how to insert an underwater demolition team at night from an inflatable.”

“That was a long time ago.” Jack gestured at the window, where three patrol boats were visible. “What’s the state of the Somali navy today?”

Ibrahim gave him a rueful look. “You’ve just seen it. Altogether we’ve got five of those patrol craft and two search-and-rescue boats. You’ll recognize the Osa-class missile boat, obviously. It’s the same craft you were up against in the Gulf War, with a few modifications. The P-15 Termit anti-ship missile is a bit of a Cold War relic, but it’s still reliable. There’s always a large amount of unexpended fuel in the nose tank of those missiles even after a long-distance flight, and that acts as an incendiary to complement the hollow-charge warhead, meaning you get something like an old-fashioned sixteen-inch battleship shell combined with napalm. Put that into a pirate trawler and it’s curtains for them.”

“Infrared as well as active radar homing?” Costas asked.

“Correct. We’ve just finished the upgrade. It increases the missile range to more than ten nautical miles.”

“Any interdictions yet?”

Ibrahim shook his head. “We’re only on the cusp of becoming properly operational again. The navy didn’t even exist a few years ago, having been disbanded more than twenty years back when the country went into meltdown. That’s how the problem with piracy really took hold. Even now we’re barely effective as a coast guard, with three thousand kilometers to patrol.”

“What’s the range of your vessels?” Costas asked.

“Eighteen hundred nautical miles at fourteen knots,” he replied. “The two boats that aren’t here are based further up the Horn of Africa, so we can reach anywhere in the Economic Exclusion Zone within twelve hours. It’s not enough boats to give us the response time to a call of distress from a merchant ship that we’d like, but it’s better than nothing. From the northern base we’ve operated joint patrols with the Yemeni navy into the Red Sea and around the island of Socotra.”

“What’s their armament other than missiles?” Costas said.

“Two AK-230 twin thirty-millimeter guns, two thousand rounds apiece. It’s yet more ex-Soviet equipment, but we look after it well and it works.”

“What is the situation with piracy at present?” Jack asked. “The current commander of Combined Task Force 150 in Bahrain is an old friend of mine, but I’ve left contacting him until liaising with you first.”

Ibrahim leaned back. “CTF 150 have kept things at bay over recent years and the number of incidents has dramatically decreased. But with the new US administration reconfiguring its role in the war on terrorism, the increased focus on tension with Iran, and the need for a greater Mediterranean naval presence to counter terrorism there, the naval assets off the Horn of Africa are no longer what they once were. We’ve learned the hard way that once a problem appears to be resolved and others take the limelight, the political will of supporting nations to continue their commitment dries up.”

“There’s just too much else going on,” Jack said.

Ibrahim nodded. “The continuing refugee crisis in the Mediterranean, the war in the Middle East sucking in more and more players, the conflict with the terrorists in Libya, our own battle against Al-Shabaab in the south of the country. Meanwhile, the fishing economies of the Somali coastal villages have collapsed again, as the foreign factory ships have returned to transgress in our territorial waters, something we’re virtually powerless against with a few patrol boats. As a result, our fishermen have become desperate and are open once again to offers of money to go out and prey on foreign merchant ships, and the problem with piracy has reignited. Over the last six months alone there have been eight attacks, with millions paid in ransoms. Of course, hardly any of it goes to the men who actually do the dirty work.”

“There’s always a paymaster,” Jack said grimly. “Who’s behind it all?”

Ibrahim pursed his lips. “For the terrorist organizations, the Somali coast is more important as a recruiting ground for foot soldiers. We’re not talking about suicide bombers, fanatics, but about cannon fodder, low-cost mercenaries who are expendable and easily replaced. It’s these guys we’re killing when we take on the terrorists just as much as the naïve Western recruits and the hard-core jihadists.”

“So the extremists aren’t interested in the actual piracy operations.”

Ibrahim shook his head. “A few million dollars raised annually from ransoms would be nothing for them compared to the huge amounts they’re making from controlling the oil supply in the Middle East and Libya. They know that if we detected that kind of involvement in piracy, the Western response might count badly against them. We’re not talking drone strikes, military action, but about cyber warfare, shutting down bank accounts and stopping transactions. Unless a ransom is paid in hard cash, those demanding it have to reveal banking details somewhere along the line in order to get paid, and that’s their Achilles heel. Most of the terrorist organizations have astute financial management and are very careful to avoid anything like that. Even their recruiting activity among the villages is difficult to pin down, because they use the same agents as the ones used by those who bankroll the pirates. A few hundred dollars changes hands, a few more young men disappear either out to sea or to the terrorist training camps in the north, and some of them never return. Gradually the fishing communities have the lifeblood sucked out of them. It’s become the way of life here.”

“So who pulls the purse strings for the pirates?” Costas asked.

Ibrahim gave them a grim look. “Western investment consortia, hedge fund operators, working through so many layers of financial complexity that they’re impossible to identify. We’re not talking about some evil mastermind here, just about those same brokers who will quite happily put money into arms companies that sell to despotic regimes, or drug companies that hike up their prices when they have a monopoly. When you try to understand how a child soldier can gun down his neighbors in central Africa, or a mother die untreated in a village because she can’t afford the drugs, it’s the same as seeing a bullet-ridden pirate floating in the sea off Somalia or a terrified hostage in a ransom video. The real culprit is the ordinary investor living in Western affluence where these realities can barely be imagined, who hands his money to a broker with instructions to reach a certain profit margin. For those down the line who channel the money to the frontlines, it makes no odds whether it’s oil exploration or mining or pharmaceuticals or armaments or piracy, and morality rarely comes into it.

“You can add to that list the problem we have with overfishing. With the upwelling of the current along this coast, these should be the richest waters off Africa, and yet our fishermen are among the poorest. Why? Because foreign fishing companies underwritten by Western investors took advantage of the anarchy in Somalia to dispatch large trawlers and factory ships into our waters, knowing that we had no way of policing them. The result is that our fish stocks were decimated and have only just begun to recover. More Western investors reap profits, more of our people fall below the breadline as a result. That’s the reality of capitalism and the Third World for you.”

“We see something of the same with treasure hunting,” Jack said. “The investors who fund it through similar kinds of consortia are often decent people who are likely to be appalled when they see images of the destruction of ancient sites by terrorists, and who love to visit museums with their children. Few of them have any idea that their money is contributing to the wanton destruction of archaeological sites in the search for loot.”

Ibrahim nodded thoughtfully, and then straightened up, looking at his watch. “So. What can I do for you? Zaheed is an old friend, and of course I wanted to meet the famous Jack Howard. But you didn’t come here to fight pirates.”

Jack took out his phone, opened a photo, and pushed it across the table. “What do you know about this vessel?”

Ibrahim glanced at the image. “Deep Explorer. Zaheed told me you were on her trail. We’ve been tracking her for the past three days, since she came up on our screens. She’s owned by a salvage company of the same name, specializing in shipwrecks. You, of course, will know all about them.”

“Costas and I were the UN monitoring team two weeks ago that checked out a Second World War wreck off Sierra Leone they were intending to rip apart. Let’s just say the outcome didn’t exactly go in their favor. I know their boss personally, a guy named Landor, what makes him tick. Our own IMU satellite monitoring told us that they’d sailed from Sierra Leone around the Cape and into these waters. Have you seen anything to indicate why they’re here?”

“They’ve stayed just beyond territorial waters, so they’re outside our jurisdiction. When they first appeared, we ran the usual background check and everything seems legitimate: registration, officer qualifications, all the paperwork in order. There was no obvious cause for concern — that is, until yesterday morning.”

Jack stared at him. “Go on.”

Ibrahim gestured to one of the officers beside him, a young bearded man, immaculately turned out. “I’d better let Lieutenant Ahmed take over. This has been his operation.”

The officer stood up abruptly, speaking perfect English. “Firstly, Dr. Howard, let me say what a huge pleasure it is to meet you. I’m a keen diver and an avid follower of all your adventures, those of Dr. Kazantzakis too,” he said, nodding toward Costas. “If there’s anything I can do to help, especially underwater, please let me know.”

“Much appreciated, and we will,” Jack said, smiling. “Now, tell us what you’ve got.”

Ahmed pointed at the chart on the table. “At about 1100 hours yesterday, four crewmen from Deep Explorer came ashore in a Zodiac at this village on the northeastern Somali coast. We have informants in all of the main coastal villages, so we were kept abreast by phone of everything that went on. They recruited one of the most notorious of the pirate gangs. The pirates call themselves badaandita badah, ‘saviors of the seas,’ which the leader of this gang has abbreviated to Badass Boys. Unlike the local Somali men who have been forced into piracy by unemployment, the Boys are thugs from Mogadishu and further inland, former street gunmen who have only known war. Their leader, who spent his teenage years in America and goes by the name of the Boss, has only just got out of jail. Each time he’s imprisoned he gets out on a technicality, we think because the Western investment operatives who fund him pay backhanders to the judiciary. He and the Boys have orchestrated half a dozen ship seizures over the past year and several million in ransom payments. He’s also a brutal sadist, responsible for numerous murders, including his own gunmen when they displease him.”

“I can’t believe the Deep Explorer people have gotten involved with piracy,” Costas said, shaking his head. “They may be unscrupulous, but that would be sheer madness.”

“They’ve recruited the pirates as players, but we believe their objective has nothing to do with piracy.” Ahmed sat down, pulling his chair up and leaning forward, looking at Jack intently. “My club has dived the Somali coast extensively since things became more settled here, and we know the location of many shipwrecks. Several of us have a special interest in wrecks of the Second World War, and we’ve researched them comprehensively, including original documentation from Italian, German and Allied observers who were based in this region. There aren’t that many along this coast because it was away from the main theaters of war, but one of the most intriguing is the account of a Type XB U-boat, U-409.”

Jack stared at him. “What do you know about it?”

“She was last seen on the twenty-sixth of May 1945, almost three weeks after the war with the Nazis had ended. Her last known position was off the southern Somali coast, when she was spotted by a USAF Liberator out of Aden carrying out a routine patrol. It was assumed that she’d surfaced preparatory to surrendering, but she dived after the aircraft came into view and was never seen again.”

“What was her course?”

Ahmed laid a ruler on the chart. “According to the Liberator’s log, the U-boat was heading at approximately 230 degrees. From her recorded position, that puts her on a course directly for the Socotra archipelago.”

Jack looked keenly at Ahmed. “Is anything else known about her?”

Ahmed shook his head. “Very little. It’s as if she’d been erased from history.”

“At that point there were U-boats taking fleeing Nazis and their possessions to safety, weren’t there?” Ibrahim said. “Isn’t that how some of them reached South America?”

“The northwest Indian Ocean seems a pretty unlikely place to try and establish a new Reich,” Ahmed said.

Costas looked at him. “Weren’t the Type XB cargo subs used in the secret trade between Germany and Japan?”

“Exactly what I was thinking,” Jack replied, remembering what Louise had told them a few days earlier. “The exchange of gold for raw materials and technology. U-234 is a documented example, captured at the end of the war in the North Atlantic with arms, medical supplies, optical glass, even a broken-down Me 262 jet fighter, all destined for Japan in exchange for gold.”

“If gold is in the offing and the Deep Explorer researchers have got wind of it, then that’s surely enough to explain their presence here,” Ibrahim said.

Jack thought hard for a moment. He remembered his encounter at the National Archives with Collingwood, the indications that he had been on to something new for Deep Explorer and Landor to find in these waters. Everything was beginning to fall into place.

“U-234 was carrying something else, wasn’t she, Jack?” Costas said quietly.

Jack felt himself go cold, and swallowed hard. “Yes, she was,” he said. “It was classified for years after the war, kept secret by the US intelligence officers who emptied her after her capture. She was carrying fifty lead cubes about ten inches across labeled U-235, as well as gold-lined lead cylinders with the same label. U-235, just to be clear, is not a U-boat designation.”

“Uranium-235,” Ahmed said. “Uranium oxide.”

“About twelve hundred pounds of it, enough to yield almost eight pounds of U-235 after processing,” Jack said. “It’s thought that the Americans who captured it sent it on in secret for use in the Manhattan Project, and that it may even have ended up in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, a terrible irony if so, given that it had been destined originally for use by Japan. It would have made up about ten percent of the fissile material needed for one of those bombs. In its unrefined state, anyone with basic bomb-making knowledge could use it to make dozens of dirty bombs, enough to irradiate cities across the world.”

“Good God,” Ibrahim said quietly. “That raises the stakes horrifyingly.”

“Landor wouldn’t stoop to that, would he?” Costas said. “The only possible takers would be terrorists.”

Jack gave him a grim look. “I don’t think he has much in the way of morality left.”

Costas tapped the map. “What I still don’t understand is where the U-boat was going. Were there any supply bases in this area?”

Ahmed leaned forward, looking at Costas intently. “With this coast being under Italian control in the early part of the war, it seemed conceivable that they might have built a secret pen for their long-distance submarines. The breakthrough came when my club was diving off the village of Bereeda in the northeastern extremity of Somalia, only fifty nautical miles from the nearest islands in the Socotra archipelago. An old fisherman who knew of our interest in Second World War wrecks told us that he had seen an Italian cargo ship anchor close to one of the islands during the summer before the war started, and unload heavy machinery. The ship remained there and men carried on working at the island for several months afterward, and then they disappeared. There was little to be seen for all their efforts except a small naval coast guard station, and he and the other fishermen were warned off when they got too close. He never returned to the island after the war, as the fishing was no longer any good.”

Costas looked at Jack. “What drives a U-boat captain to take his sub to a secret pen way off the route between the Atlantic and Japan after Germany’s war is finished?”

“Turn the question on its head,” Jack replied. “What would drive a U-boat captain to continue delivering his cargo to Japan? Not all U-boat captains were fervent Nazis, and by that stage many of them probably just wanted the war to be over. And even for the Nazis among them, there was little love lost for the Japanese and little interest in furthering their cause after Germany had been defeated.”

“So you’re saying he found a bolthole to ride it out, a secret pen far from the war zone?”

“Possibly more than that,” Jack said. “If he was also carrying a consignment of gold, he and his crew might have been able to get something out of the war after all.”

“Providing they hadn’t irradiated themselves as well,” Costas said. “Maybe that’s why the fish all died out.”

Jack turned to Ahmed. “Can we speak to the fisherman?”

Ahmed glanced at Ibrahim. “He disappeared two days ago. His boat is still in the harbor, and his wife said that men came in the night for him. I’m afraid that happens quite a lot around here, but there’s been a particular development that might explain this case. Over the last few days, since Deep Explorer arrived offshore, there have been questions asked all along the coast about the location of wrecks. The men asking the questions are the same agents who normally recruit for the pirates or for the terrorists, and we think they’ve been paid by someone who came ashore from the ship. One of them was questioning fishermen in Bereeda the day before the old man disappeared.”

Jack exhaled forcefully. “Do you know where the island is?”

Ahmed put a finger on the chart. “Near the islands of Samhah and Darsah, within the archipelago that lies between Socotra and the Somali mainland. The island is uninhabited, though nominally under Yemeni control. We haven’t had a chance to get out there yet.”

Jack turned to Ibrahim. “Let’s assume that our friends on Deep Explorer have got hold of this account of U-409. How do you think they are going to play it?”

Ibrahim thought for a moment, and then pointed at the chart. “Deep Explorer is here, about two days’ sailing from Socotra. We know they’ve employed the Badass Boys from their base about two thirds of the way up the coast, only about a hundred nautical miles from the island. During piracy raids, the Boys operate from a trawler that acts as a mother ship to the fast skiffs they use to board the merchant vessels. Here maybe Deep Explorer is the mother ship, and the trawler is the vessel that’s going in. The trawler would be far less conspicuous, a factor of particular concern with the Iranians beginning to fly aggressive sorties along that sector.”

Jack’s mind was racing. If there were a secret U-boat base on the island, could it also have been a place used by the Ahnenerbe to store the artifacts they had stolen during their expeditions in northeast Africa, from places such as Magdala? It would have made sense to transport the artifacts back to Germany by U-boat, a plan that might have been stalled indefinitely while the sea lanes were controlled by the Allies. He stared at the chart, looking at the island of Socotra and the smaller cluster to the west, midway between the Horn of Africa and the Arabian shore. Then he glanced up at Ibrahim. “You say you have good cooperation with the Yemeni navy?”

The other man nodded. “The trouble is that they’re about as well equipped as we are, and preoccupied with their own civil war as well as the Iranian situation.”

“I’ll speak to my friend in command of Combined Task Force 150,” Jack said. “But my guess is that they’ll only be able to react if there is an imminent threat or an incident, and what we’re able to tell them now with certainty won’t be enough to justify sending a warship when they’re under such pressure elsewhere. Our own research ship, Seaquest, is getting here as fast as she can from her current project off Sri Lanka, but that will be several days, and I’d only be willing to commit her to those waters with a CTF 150 escort, especially given the increasing threat of air attack from the Iranians.”

Ibrahim sat upright. “Then we have no choice. This is a situation that calls for direct action. I’m going to authorize the deployment of our own assets.”

“How soon can you get us out to that island?”

Ibrahim glanced at the officer on his other side. “Commander Fazahid and I will work up the operational details. My plan would be to send one of the two missile boats based in the northeast of the country, the closest we have to the island. We’ll fly you up with a section of marines by helicopter to join the boat and be ready to embark within twelve hours. I will take command of the vessel myself. Even if we overtake the trawler, we have to work on the assumption that the pirates might already be on the island, and that there could be a showdown. The Badass Boys sound like a joke, but I assure you they are not. They’re hardened fighters from Mogadishu who were involved in numerous atrocities before they were recruited into the gang. They show no mercy, and we will show them none either. With these people, you shoot to kill.”

Jack got up, took out his phone and glanced at his texts. “Zaheed’s outside waiting for us now. I need to update him and get in touch with IMU, and then visit the British Embassy.”

Ahmed got up as well, picking up his cap. “If we’re looking at a submarine pen dug into the rock, it’s going to be at least partly submerged. I’m guessing that we might be needing some diving equipment.”

“Always a good idea,” Jack said. “You can liaise with Costas about that. And he had a point about the possibility of radioactivity. We’ll want NBC suits just in case, enough for all of the marines and crew as well.”

Ahmed nodded, and Ibrahim got up too. “We plan to meet back here at 1800 hours ready to go. We’ll gear you up and feed you in the mess. And one thing before you go. Are you armed?”

“Zaheed is, but we’re not.”

“You need to watch your back in Mogadishu. This place is crawling with kidnappers, and with informants. By now someone will have noticed you and passed on the word, and your friends on Deep Explorer will probably know. If that old fisherman could be snatched in broad daylight, then so could you. The last thing we want is Jack Howard being held for ransom, or, more likely, found floating face-down off the coast with a bullet in the back of his head. On your way out, the corporal here will escort you to the armory and have you issued with side arms and body armor. Only do what’s absolutely necessary in Mogadishu and get back here as soon as possible. Two of my marines will accompany you in Zaheed’s vehicle.”

“Understood,” Jack said. “Thank you.”

Ibrahim gave Jack a steely look and offered his hand. “It will be a pleasure working with you.”

Jack gripped it. “Likewise.”

Costas finished penciling a list of equipment requirements, and slid the note over to Ahmed. “No expense spared. We’ll cover it all and then give you and your club the dive trip of your lives when Seaquest arrives and this is all over.”

Ahmed beamed at him. “That would be excellent. I can’t wait to tell them.”

Costas scratched his stubble and peered up at Jack. “Looks like we’re in it again. Game on?”

Jack pocketed his phone and took a deep breath. “Game on.”

20

Two hours after leaving the Somali naval headquarters, Jack stood inside the heavily fortified compound of the British Embassy in Mogadishu, itself within the security perimeter of the international airport. He was wearing the body armor that they had been issued at the naval armory along with side arms, but he had removed his helmet and handed in the Beretta to the Royal Marines sentry when he had entered the compound an hour before. He looked up at the Union flag flapping over the entrance, feeling the heat of the sun on his face. Like the Somali navy, the embassy had been shut down when the city had descended into anarchy in 1991, and had only been re-established at its new site a few years ago.

Gone were the days when Mogadishu was the most dangerous place on earth, a lawless battleground for rival clans, but the war against the Al-Shabaab extremists was a constant backdrop, and gang violence bubbled just beneath the surface, kept at bay only by the African Union military presence, which meant that large parts of the city were in virtual lockdown. Three times on the way in they had heard eruptions of gunfire, the distinctive clacking sound of Kalashnikovs, and Zaheed had driven at breakneck speed between the checkpoints. Like so many who were now trying to save Somalia, he had fled Mogadishu in 1991 as a teenager to live in the West, but he had been back long enough to know the dangers of travel through a city that was always at risk of another meltdown.

Jack returned to the entrance and retrieved his helmet and Beretta from the sentry, checking the magazine before replacing the gun in the holster on his waist. He had needed to visit the embassy to explain their presence in Somalia to the ambassador, and to outline a possible aid program for the fishing communities with a visiting UK international development official. Meanwhile, Zaheed and Costas had gone to the National Museum to deliver a restored Arabic manuscript that Costas had brought with him from the IMU conservation department; they had dropped Jack at the embassy and sped off in the Toyota, Zaheed still at the wheel and the two Somali marines in the rear seat. That had been over an hour ago, and they were due back soon.

Jack checked his phone, seeing only the text that Costas had sent him ten minutes before, saying that they had left the museum. He wanted to get back to the naval base so that Costas could liaise with Ahmed and check through the diving equipment they had requested. He was feeling jittery, anxious to get on the move, his thoughts already dominated by the long trip on the patrol boat toward the island they had planned for that night, excited and apprehensive about what might lie ahead.

There was another burst of gunfire, this time much closer than previously, somewhere near the airport perimeter. Two long bursts of Kalashnikov fire were followed by a succession of single shots from a handgun, and then there was silence. The marine sergeant in charge at the sentry post spoke into his shoulder mike. “Shooting incident on the outer perimeter. Red alert. I repeat, red alert.”

Four of the marines immediately assumed prone positions behind sandbags on either side of the entrance, their rifles aimed, and another hurried from the sentry post with a scoped sniper rifle, taking position behind a berm some ten meters along the wire. The marine sergeant glanced at Jack. “There’s usually some kind of shootout on the airport perimeter a couple of times a month. A suicide car bomber is our main concern, the possibility of a vehicle getting through the perimeter security and heading our way.”

Another four shots rang out, handgun again rather than rifle, followed by another burst from a Kalashnikov. Jack had been counting the pistol shots. That was fifteen, a full Beretta magazine. He suddenly felt a cold jab of apprehension, and then his phone rang. It was Costas, barely audible. “Jack, I’m all right. Zaheed’s been hit. We got as many as we could. I think they’re going to take me. I’m…” There was a loud crackling sound, and the phone went dead.

Jack turned to the marine sergeant. “You need to get me there. Those are my people.”

The sergeant nodded, pointing to two others in the sentry box. “Anderson, Bailey. On me.” He ran to the jeep that was parked behind the box, followed by Jack and the other two. They all got in, the two marines in the back and Jack in the front passenger seat, and the sergeant gunned the vehicle through the entrance and down the airport approach road, screeching round a corner as they approached the perimeter. He had radioed ahead as he drove to the commander of the African Union detachment providing airport security, and the gate was already open. He pulled to a halt, leaned out of the window, and spoke briefly to the Kenyan officer in charge, then gunned the jeep forward. “It wasn’t a terrorist attempt on the perimeter after all,” he said. “It looks like it was specifically targeted at your people. A contract killing or a kidnapping. Sounds pretty bad.”

They rounded another corner, racing out of the perimeter into the city streets, and then came to a screeching halt. A scene of carnage met their eyes. Zaheed’s four-by-four was resting at a crazy angle half on the pavement, smoke pouring out of its engine, its tires all shot out. Sprawled around it in pools of blood were six bodies, two of them the Somali marines who had accompanied Zaheed, the rest evidently attackers. Cartridge casings were strewn everywhere, but all the weapons had been removed and there were tire tracks through the blood and over one of the bodies.

Jack saw Zaheed on the far side of the jeep, leaning over one bullet-ridden door. “Wait here,” he said to the sergeant. “There’s one still alive.” He took out his Beretta, opened the door, and got out, running over to the vehicle.

Zaheed dropped heavily to the pavement, sitting upright for a moment and then falling on his elbows, twisting to one side. Jack knelt beside him, and he gestured weakly with one arm. “They’ve taken Costas. Not Al-Shabaab. The Badass Boys. I recognized them from the fishing village. One of them was the Boss. They headed off in a Toyota, going north.”

Jack could see where a bullet had penetrated Zaheed’s chest under his left arm, one place that was not protected by the body armor. He coughed, bringing up blood, and then lay back, a slew of blood spreading beneath him from the wound and more coming from his mouth and nose. Jack knelt down and held his head, trying to make him more comfortable. His face was ashen, and he coughed more blood, this time weakly. “Jack,” he whispered, his breath rasping. “In my wallet.”

Jack quickly felt in the zip pocket of the combat trousers Zaheed was wearing and pulled out his wallet, opening it up. Zaheed raised one arm weakly and fumbled in it, half pulling out a photo and then letting his arm drop. Jack pulled it out completely, showing it to him. “I can’t see it,” he whispered, barely audible, his eyes staring sightlessly past Jack. “My wife and daughter. We talked about them. I wanted you to see them.” His face crumpled, and then he was gone, his eyes half open and his jaw slackening.

Jack pulled off the blood-soaked scarf that Zaheed had been wearing and placed it over his face, then got up and looked around. Already a crowd was gathering, the children with the glazed eyes of those who were used to this kind of scene, their minds already elsewhere. A police car swerved up onto the pavement, and he could see two African Union armored cars hurtling toward them from the perimeter post. The police would assume that this had been an Al-Shabaab attack, and soon the whole area would be in lockdown, roadblocks in every direction. If he did not get out now, he could be trapped here for hours.

Jack knew he had no time for sentiment, only for cold, clinical reaction. Costas would be kept alive only as long as he was useful to the kidnappers’ paymaster, and that might be no longer than the instant of their arrival at the island and their discovery of the U-boat pen. He stepped away from Zaheed’s body, keeping the wallet and the photograph, and ran back to the jeep, where the marines had stayed put with their weapons at the ready. He jumped back into the passenger seat and turned to the sergeant. “I need you to take me to the Somali navy command center. You know where it is?”

“Yes, sir. We help train their marines.”

“I’ve got to get there now.”

“I should get clearance.”

Jack gestured at the naval ID card for the embassy that was still hanging from his neck. “You know who I am?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then you’ve got all the clearance you need.”

“Yes, sir.”

The sergeant shoved the gearstick forward and roared off, swerving around a corner and then hurtling along the main road parallel to the shore in the direction of the naval headquarters. “We can’t use lights and sirens, as it makes us a target for Al-Shabaab,” he said, dropping a gear to pass a donkey cart. “Fortunately there are no speed limits.”

Jack was coursing with adrenalin, his hands shaking. He took out his phone and punched the number he had preset for Captain Ibrahim. The phone was answered almost immediately, and Jack quickly filled him in. “This is what I’d like you to do. We go ahead with the mission as planned. You dispatch the patrol boat toward the island, with a marine contingent on board. We can’t know for certain that’s where they’ve taken Costas, but if the kidnappers were who Zaheed said they were, then there’s a good chance they’ll drive him up the coast and put him on the trawler. But I’d like to take a small diversion first, if you can help me. The Somali defense force has a couple of Hueys, right? I’d like to be dropped on Deep Explorer. There’s someone on board I need to have a word with. And you might want to follow that up by sending a team to intercept them with your second patrol boat. I have a feeling Deep Explorer will be changing course and heading into Somali territorial waters, without permission and with suspicious intent. You won’t even need to invoke international law to seize them.”

He gave Ibrahim the license plate number of the jeep they were in so that the naval guards at the compound would be forewarned, and then he pocketed the phone and stared ahead, bracing himself against the potholes and bumps in the road. They would be there in ten minutes, probably less. He felt preternaturally alert, as if he were seeing the people they were passing in slow motion, slow enough for him to scrutinize them as threats. He knew that it was the result of adrenalin, a natural defense mechanism. He thought of Zaheed. He was still clutching the picture, the blood already drying on it. Zaheed had planned to stop by his home on the way back that afternoon so that Jack could meet his wife and daughter. They had talked about the trials and joys of fatherhood, and Jack had told him about Rebecca. When this was all over, he would go and see Zaheed’s family. Right now, there was only one thought running through his head, only one thing he had to do. Payback.

Four hours later, Jack gazed out over the Indian Ocean from the door of the UH-1N Twin Huey as the distinctive red hull of Deep Explorer came into view, her wake showing that she was continuing to steam north toward Socotra, exactly as the satellite surveillance images had revealed. He leaned forward beside the door gunner, his helmet muffling the worst of the rotor noise and his visor giving the sea an unearthly green hue. He remembered the last time he had seen Deep Explorer, two weeks earlier, as he and Costas were taken off by the British Army Lynx following their dive on Clan Macpherson.

He remembered how he had felt then. His relief had been tempered by the uneasy feeling he always had after his encounters with Landor. With his close knowledge of Jack, and his press conferences that so adeptly whitewashed his operations as legitimate archaeology, Landor had always seemed one step ahead, like a criminal taunting a detective who never quite had the evidence to make an arrest. Jack had dealt with some intractable enemies in his career, with warlords who ruthlessly controlled the antiquities trade, with sadists who were driven by twisted ideology. With Landor, it was different, more complex. Archaeologists and treasure hunters were inevitably at loggerheads, their motivations so radically different, the moral case for archaeology unambiguous. Yet the personal element, the old friendship and the shared passion for diving in those formative years, had always stopped Jack from confronting him head-on, and Landor knew it. Sometimes it seemed as if Landor were his doppelgänger, a parallel version of himself in a universe with little morality, with no higher purpose, and yet with that shared passion that had set Landor apart from so many of the others he had come up against in the past.

This time, though, was different. This time Landor had gone one step too far, had let his greed and his bitterness, his desperation after his failure to raise the gold from Clan Macpherson, lead him into waters that were over his head. Jack was certain that he had ordered the gang to kidnap Costas as a bargaining chip to keep Jack out of the way until they had found the U-boat at the island. He had known that Landor would one day make a mistake that would destroy him, something more than his minor run-ins with governments in the past, but he had never guessed that it might be something this personal. He had spent most of the flight trying not to think of where Costas was now and what might be happening to him. He still had Zaheed’s blood under his fingernails, and that photo of his wife and little girl in his pocket. One thing was for certain: the Jack that Landor thought he knew was very different from the one who was going to be confronting him now.

The gunner drew back the bolt on the 50-caliber Browning machine gun and trained it on Deep Explorer, traversing it so that those watching from below could see. The pilot expertly maneuvered the helicopter over the stern of the ship, dropping to fifty feet and mimicking the ship’s course and speed. The loadmaster hooked Jack’s harness to the winch and gave a thumbs-up as the door light went green. Jack dropped out, feeling the rush of air from the rotor, and seconds later was down on the aft deck of the ship. There had been no formalities, no courtesy call to explain their intentions. Deep Explorer was just outside the exclusion zone, so the Somalis had no jurisdiction here. But legal niceties mattered little on the high seas when a ship was confronted by a machine gun capable of ripping apart the bridge and any crew in its sights, not to speak of the destructive potential of the twin rocket pods under the airframe. Landor had hired pirates whose livelihood was attacking unarmed ships in international waters; now the tables were turned, and he was about to reap his own whirlwind.

Jack took off his helmet, unclipped the carabiners, and cast off the line, pushing it out of the way as the loadmaster winched it up. The Huey drew forward and clattered deafeningly over the bow, the helmeted gunner with his machine gun clearly visible through the side door. Jack knew exactly where he was going, and went quickly up the steps to the bridge, pushing past several crewmen who had been ducking against the downdraft from the rotor. He pulled open the sliding door and stepped inside. The captain was at the helm, staring up at the helicopter with a mike in his hand. Jack shut the door noisily, and the captain turned round and saw him.

“Where’s Landor?” Jack snarled. The captain paused, as if judging the best response, then quickly picked up a phone. “Make a call now and they will shut you down,” Jack said, pointing out at the helicopter. “Your ship will be impounded and you will relocate to a stinking Mogadishu jail while I do all I can to block any attempt to release you.”

The captain held the phone and the mike for a moment longer, then lowered them both and jerked his head toward the door of the chart room at the back of the bridge. “Mr. Landor isn’t here, but Macinnes is. You can take whatever problem you have to him.”

Jack gestured at the helm. “Change course to bearing 320 degrees.”

“But that will take us into Somali territorial waters.”

Jack pointed up at the Huey again. “Do it, or he’ll empty one of those rocket pods into your rudder and screw, and you’ll drift with the current toward shore anyway.”

The captain pursed his lips, but stood behind the helm and did as he had been told. Jack checked the bearing, and then took out several plastic ties from his pocket. “Hands behind your back.” He put a tie around the man’s wrists and used another to attach it to a rail. “Apologies for the plastic,” he said. “The Somali navy officer who’ll be boarding in about half an hour when you enter territorial waters and impounding your ship has some real handcuffs.”

Jack pulled open the door to the chart room. Macinnes, the operations director he had last encountered off Sierra Leone, was sitting in the easy chair behind the chart table, tapping a mobile phone and putting it up to his ear, then trying again. “It’s called electronic countermeasures,” Jack said coldly. “No comms to or from this ship while the helicopter’s outside. That’s the Somali navy.”

Macinnes put the phone down, leaned back in the chair, and put his hands behind his head. “So, Dr. Howard. We meet again. The Somali navy? That’s a joke. We’re in international waters, and they can’t touch us. Mr. Landor has gone ashore in our helicopter to broker an agreement with the Somali government so they get a cut of anything we find, our usual percentage. We find that generally works in Third World holes like this. Whichever naval officer is in charge of this puny operation is about to lose his job. Now, get off this ship and go home.”

“We’re talking murder,” Jack said. “The murder of three Somali citizens, two of them marines, the third one a government employee in the museums service. That gives the Somali navy the right to make an arrest.”

“You’re in way out of your depth, Howard. You should stick to your dinky toy excavations and your bits of broken pot. This is the big time.”

“Yes, it is,” Jack said. “If you had any nautical sense you’d have noticed by now that the ship has changed course. In fifteen minutes you’ll have crossed into Somali territorial waters. That means you and everyone else on this ship will be arrested as accessories to murder. Next stop Mogadishu central jail, a really nice place for Westerners accused of messing around with this country, I hear.”

Macinnes got up, angrily pushing the chair aside. “This is outrageous. Get out of my way. I need to see the captain.” He advanced on Jack, who unholstered his Beretta and leveled it at him.

“One step closer, and I shoot.”

Macinnes sneered at him and tried to shove him aside. “Get out of my way. You haven’t got the guts.” Jack pushed him back, leveled the Beretta again and fired a round close to Macinnes’s ear, a deafening crack that made him reel back in pain. Then he kicked him into the chair, keeping the gun leveled.

“I know Landor’s not at some meeting in Mogadishu, as the naval commander has explained his implication in the murders to the Justice Minister and he’d be arrested on sight. In fact, he’s nowhere near Mogadishu. He’s gone for a trip to an island with your new friends, hasn’t he? Right now, I don’t care about that. I can deal with him later. All I want to know now is where is Dr. Kazantzakis?”

Macinnes held his left ear, blood trickling down his hand. He looked at Jack, and guffawed. “That loser? I’m amazed you bother with him. That dive off Sierra Leone was one of the most incompetent things I’ve ever seen, all that fancy IMU equipment that doesn’t work. But when a little birdie told us you’d arrived in Somalia and were probably on our trail again, we knew your clown sidekick would be along as well. Lo and behold, he shows up. Take my advice, you’re well rid of him.”

That was enough. If Landor knew they were in Somalia, there was no question about who was behind the kidnapping. Jack remembered the last time he had seen Macinnes, having to toe the line and endure his snide comments after he and Costas had boarded Deep Explorer for the UN inspection. This time, Jack was in charge. He lunged forward, kicked the chair back, and reached for the scruff of the man’s neck, pulling him up bodily and slamming him against the bookcase behind. He punched him as hard as he could in the face, let him collapse, and then picked him up again, the blood pouring out of his nose and down his chin. He pressed the Beretta behind Macinnes’s ear, pushing it as hard as he could, his other hand around his throat. “I don’t think I heard your answer. Where is Dr. Kazantzakis?”

21

The trawler slammed into the waves again, sending a tremor through the hull that seemed to jar every bone in Costas’s body. Over the past few hours he had learned to accommodate himself to the boat’s movements, tensing as it dropped into a trough and then relaxing as it rode the swell, the engine grinding against its mounting one way and reverberating and shuddering the other. Twice he had nodded off and lost the rhythm, and had paid the price in an excruciating jolt. Sleep, he knew, would be an impossibility as long as the sea was this rough, but they were probably past the halfway point and the rest of the trip was a matter of endurance. He guessed they were heading toward the island near Socotra, the one that Ahmed had identified as the site of the U-boat pen; from their embarkation point at a fishing village several hours north of Mogadishu they should reach the island not much after first light. It was a question of lasting out the remainder of the night, of keeping alert and learning anything he could from the noise and the smell, of seizing any opportunity that presented itself to overcome his captors and escape.

He shifted slightly, bracing his feet against the engine mounting and his left shoulder against one of the timber frames of the hull, trying to find a better angle for his wrists. They had been handcuffed behind his back with a cable tie, and for several hours now he had been trying to cut the cable, pressing it hard with each jolt of the hull against an upturned metal edge beneath him. He had been blindfolded since being hustled out of the Toyota in the village and could only guess at his surroundings, but he knew that it was a large fishing vessel, undoubtedly the trawler that Captain Ibrahim had described, the mother ship for the pirate gang. He knew it was a fishing vessel from the appalling stench that had hit him when he was first pushed down the hatch into the hold, and the fish guts that slopped around his feet as the boat pitched and yawed. That and the stale sweat of the crew had made him gag and retch, but as soon as the engine had coughed to life he had been engulfed by diesel fumes and the reek of overheated oil. All he had been able to sense for some time now was a cloying in the back of his throat, whether from diesel fumes or blood from the beatings he could not tell. He felt as if he were a mountaineer in the death zone, knowing that no matter how much he breathed there was never going to be sufficient oxygen in this place to keep him alive. He desperately needed fresh air, and soon.

The engine coughed and spluttered, running on idle for a few moments, and then hacked back to life again. The hatch above him clanged open and someone dropped into the scuppers. He could tell from the stink that it was his captor, his tormentor. He clenched his jaw tight, knowing what would come next. The blow when it came was still a shock, snapping his head sideways, and he felt his mouth fill up again with blood. A hand roughly grasped his jaw, and he smelled the man’s breath again, the reek of tobacco and khat and marijuana. “Hey, English,” his captor said, his voice heavily accented. “I bring you water.”

“I’m not English,” Costas said hoarsely. “For the last time, I’m American.”

“No Americans here,” the man said, taunting. Costas felt the muzzle of a gun thrust under his chin. “No American Embassy, no George Bush, no Obama, no Clinton. No help for you, English.”

Costas strained his head up. “Your engine,” he said. “It’s bad, kaput. I can fix it. I’m an engineer.”

He heard the rasp of a lighter and a deep inhalation, and then he smelled the smoke. The last thing they needed down here was a spark to blow them all to kingdom come — himself, his stoned captor, the others on the deck above. “The engine,” he tried again, speaking more loudly. “It’s kaput, finished. I can fix it.”

The mouth of a bottle was pressed hard into his teeth, ripping at his gums. He drank as much as he could, trying to ignore the coppery tang of his own blood. The bottle was upturned as he drank, and most of the water spilled down his front. He heard the man inhale again, and his voice close against his ear, blowing smoke as he spoke. “No George Bush, no Obama, no Clinton,” he repeated. “No one to help you, no ransom. Soon it is you who will be kaput, English.”

The engine spluttered again. A voice shouted down from above, and the man answered, speaking quickly in Somali. The other replied angrily, and there was a heated exchange. The man seemed to concede, and spoke to Costas again. “Okay, English. The Boss wants you to look at the engine. You look, you tell me what to do. Anything funny, you kaput, you understand?”

Costas flexed his wrists, trying to keep the circulation going. He had no way of knowing how close he had come to cutting the tie, but he knew that he had at least made a notch in it. He felt the blindfold being pulled off, and then a searing pain in his left eye as the pressure was removed from it. He remembered the blow to his head after Zaheed and the marines had been gunned down, and then a confusion of memory as he recovered consciousness in their attackers’ vehicle some time later. He blinked, able to see nothing through the swollen eye, and then caught sight of his captor for the first time, leering at him in the gloom.

The man was scrawny, with sunken cheeks and eyes and yellow teeth, and of indeterminate age, probably much younger than he looked. He wore a grubby vest, and on one shoulder Costas saw the distinctive Badass Boys tattoo that Ibrahim had shown them, a stylized bird with a crescent above, and beneath that a dozen or so raised welts signifying how many people he had killed. He was holding a Kalashnikov with the wire butt folded in, the muzzle aimed at Costas’s gut. He leaned close, his eyes hazy and his chin covered with wispy hair, and took a final drag from his joint, flicking what was left into the scuppers and causing a small eruption of blue flame where leaked diesel ignited. Then he grabbed Costas by the hair and pulled him forward on his knees in front of the engine, holding the rifle to his head. “Now, English, you fix, okay?”

Costas pretended to scrutinize the engine, and then got up on one knee, nodding toward the stern. “I need to see over there, the propeller shaft,” he said. The man backed off slightly and Costas started to rise, lurching sideways with the roll of the boat, his head bowed under the low ceiling of the deck. The boat jarred into another wave, and in that instant he saw his chance. He pulled his wrists apart and broke the tie, in the same movement swinging his arms around and slamming his hands into his captor’s head, pushing him off balance. The man fell hard against one of the frames, clutching his left leg in agony, his weapon falling into the bilge. Costas lunged for it, but was brought up short by a savage blow to the head. He fell forward on his knees, a searing pain in his neck, and looked up blearily to see the Boss standing over him, his own Kalashnikov raised.

“Not so fast,” the man said, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. “Has my boy been giving you trouble?” He swung his rifle toward the downed man, firing a ten-round burst that ripped up his chest and into his head, exploding it like a watermelon. Costas stared in horror, his ears ringing from the noise, and then slumped back, wiping the spatter of blood off his face. The Boss grinned, showing a mouth full of gold. “See? No more trouble.” He took out the cigarette and spat a jet of khat juice on to the corpse. “Plenty more where he came from.” He sniffed exaggeratedly. “Man, it stinks down here. We need to get you some fresh air.”

Costas rolled back, looking at the man. He had spent hours listening to him in the Toyota and through the hatch in the boat when it had been left open, but this was the first time he had seen him. He was young, too, but better fed and sharper-looking than the other one had been, his eyes less hazed by drugs. He spoke in a curious patois that seemed to owe something to hard-edged Hollywood gang movies of recent years, but that could have been a result of time spent in the US or Canada. Now he sat down beside the body, placed the Kalashnikov across his knees and offered Costas the cigarette. When he refused, the Boss leaned forward, looking him over with an exaggerated expression of surprise and contempt. “I’m examining my merchandise, and I don’t like what I see,” he said, digging a lighter out of the fallen man’s pocket and flicking it under Costas’s chin, examining his bruises and shaking his head. “I don’t see anyone paying a ransom for you any time soon, my man.”

“If you kill me, your paymaster from Deep Explorer isn’t going to be too pleased, is he? Nor are my friends in the Somali navy.”

The Boss stared at him, his jaw dropping theatrically, then sniffed and spat at his feet before suddenly letting out a high-pitched peal of laughter and slapping his knee. He jabbed the hand with the cigarette at Costas. “You trying to frighten me, man?”

“Just putting you in the picture.”

“I’ll tell you about the picture.” The Boss leaned forward, his face contorted. “That man Landor? He’s here now, upstairs. He’s different, he understands us, knows what makes us tick. The rest of you are all the same, Americans, English, you come here thinking you can take us on, and you run away as soon as you get a bloody nose. The Somali navy? Give me a break, man. And you know what? I’ll take his money, yes. But he and I have an agreement. Part of what’s on that island is mine. What we’re going to find now.”

“You might want to take care. It may be a little hot for you to handle.”

The Boss got up, staring, the whites of his knuckles showing where he was clutching the rifle. “Are you doing it again? Are you doing it again?”

“Just a friendly word of warning.”

Costas knew what was coming. He had provoked it, but he had known it was going to happen again at some point and he just wanted it over with. The blow when it came threw him back against the side of the hull, a blinding pain exploding behind his eyes. Then he felt nothing.

Jack gunned the Zodiac forward, twisting the throttle as it rose out of a deep trough and then easing it back again as he dropped down the other side, trying to keep a steady speed. Rather than taking the patrol boat’s larger rigid-hulled Zodiac he had opted for the four-meter inflatable with its forty-horsepower outboard, keeping their profile as low as possible and reducing the chances of anyone on the trawler spotting them. If he had tried to plane over the waves, the shriek of the propeller rising out of the water between the peaks might have given them away. Stealth was of the essence, and their progress so far had been good enough, meaning that they should be closing in on their target before dawn.

He lowered himself to the floorboards, sitting with his back against one pontoon and his feet against the fuel tank, holding the tiller of the outboard with one hand and the painter line with the other. Wedged in the bow was Lieutenant Ahmed, keeping as far forward as possible so that his weight would stop the boat from flying upward as they rose above each trough. As soon as Jack had extracted confirmation from Macinnes on Deep Explorer that Costas was on the trawler, Ahmed had immediately volunteered for the mission, and Jack had seen the necessity of having two men in the boat, doubling the firepower. This operation was about rescuing Costas, but confronting the pirates was also a Somali naval responsibility, and Ahmed was the spearhead of their new rapid-reaction force, trained at the US Navy SEALS base at Quantico. With the plan they had devised with Captain Ibrahim for dealing with the trawler, Ahmed’s diving skills would also come in very useful.

They were about two nautical miles ahead of the patrol boat and less than half a mile now from the trawler, all of them heading in a line toward the little island to the west of Socotra. Jack glanced back, throttling down even further to reduce the phosphorescence in their wake, thankful for the rough seas that should help to keep them concealed. He pulled the tiller sideways to aim at a rogue wave, climbing it and then pushing the tiller to get back on course, trying to keep his profile as inconspicuous as possible in the event that anyone in the trawler ahead was actually keeping a lookout. Everything was as close to black as they could make it — their wetsuits, their faces — and it was a moonless night, still more than an hour away from dawn. He ran again through a mental checklist of their equipment. Both men wore three-liter air tanks that would give them about twenty minutes or so underwater, with octopus rigs so that they had two regulator mouthpieces each. In backpacks beside the cylinders they carried small fins and low-volume face masks, with Jack carrying a second set. Around their waists they wore equipment belts with holstered 9mm Beretta pistols, spare magazines, fragmentation and stun grenades, and in Jack’s case a flare gun as well. Ahmed also had an MP5 submachine gun and a bandolier on his chest with additional magazines, his role being to provide suppressing fire to allow Jack to find and extract Costas.

All they could do now was to keep going, to hope that the timing was right, to pray that nobody in the trawler saw them. An hour earlier, a drone launched from the patrol boat had seen the trawler’s skiff leave and go on ahead, taking one white man who could only be Landor and at least a dozen others of the gang toward the island. It meant that there would be a reception for Jack and Ahmed if they did get to the island themselves, but that was too far ahead in the plan to think about now. The immediate consequence was fewer men to deal with on the trawler itself, a slightly higher chance of success if they did get on board. It was an audacious plan, but there had been no other way of interdicting the trawler without making their presence known in advance, potentially jeopardizing Costas’s chances even further.

Jack had tried not to think about that, having blocked the worst-case scenario from his mind. Costas was only valuable to Landor as long as he thought his capture was deterring Jack from following him to the island. Landor himself might have bitten off more than he could chew. The gang boss was by all accounts a shrewd operator, wily enough to guess that the value of whatever lay on that island was a lot greater than he had been promised as payment. Landor might have offered him a cut, but that in itself might be seen as a sign of weakness, as if Landor were desperate. What seemed certain was that Costas would have little interest to them as a hostage for ransom, that his life would be forfeit the instant they knew that Jack was on their trail, the moment any of them saw the Zodiac approaching. Even if he were not killed immediately, Jack knew there would be little chance of reasoning with the gang, most of them probably off their heads on drugs, their boss a ruthless psychopath. All he cared about now was Costas, and the certainty that without their plan his friend would die.

He kept his eyes glued ahead, seeing the dark shape of the trawler each time the inflatable crested a wave, and ahead of that the first hint of the island, a low shape on the horizon. He glanced at his watch, and nodded at Ahmed. They knew that Ibrahim on the patrol boat would have his binoculars trained on them, and that the larger Zodiac with a section of Somali marines would be prepped and ready for the follow-up action. He watched Ahmed crouched at the ready in the bow, holding his MP5 close to him against the spray. Less than an hour from now they would know one way or the other.

Jack huddled beside the outboard, checking his equipment with his spare hand, making sure the regulator hoses were wound around his neck to keep them from catching on anything, feeling for his holster. He remembered what had happened to Zaheed, the look on his face in those final moments, and what Ibrahim had told him about their adversaries ahead: that these were not fishermen forced into piracy but sadistic thugs from inland, murderers and torturers and rapists. He felt his adrenalin flow, his body tense. He would show them no mercy.

22

Twenty minutes later, Jack angled the Zodiac into the wake of the trawler, now no more than five hundred meters ahead. He could see a dim light from the deckhouse, but still no sign of movement. With the skiff having departed for the island full of men, it was impossible to know how many were left on the trawler, but he and Ahmed had guessed at least half a dozen, perhaps twice that. Ahmed extended the retractable stock on his MP5, pulled the cocking handle to check that a round was chambered, and held it slung over his shoulder, the silencer poking out above the pontoon. His job was to take out anyone who might happen to appear at the stern railing; the silencer would reduce the chances that the noise might alert any others. They had entered the critical phase of the operation, within gunshot range of the trawler. A single round from the pirates into the inflatable and it would be game over, with any hope of rescuing Costas instantly lost.

They were closing in now, with less than two hundred meters to go. Jack concentrated on keeping within the slipstream of the wake, riding the wave that was angling out from the starboard quarter. A momentary lapse of attention and the Zodiac might be swept off the wake into the sea alongside, where it would be more visible; getting back into position would mean gunning the throttle, also attracting attention. As they followed the churning phosphorescence behind the trawler’s screw, Jack ran over what he would do once Ahmed had leaped aboard. He would need to make sure that the Zodiac was not pushed away, that he kept it against the hull so that he could attempt to get on board himself. With nobody to man the throttle to keep it in position, it was going to have to be a split-second leap, a matter of finding any handhold before the inflatable was taken by the waves and spun away out of control.

In the pre-dawn glimmer, he could now see the condition of the trawler more clearly: the rusting hull, the derricks for dragnets at the stern, which had probably been unused for months, the deckhouse above the accommodation block. He had never encountered pirates before, but he had been thoroughly briefed by Ibrahim and Ahmed and he had some idea of what to expect. Hostages released after ransom had said that the Badass Boys were continuously high, making their behavior erratic, more dangerous. Jack was sure that he could smell the marijuana above the diesel fumes that were now enveloping them. It meant that the danger for Costas was multiplied, the risk that one of the pirates might decide on a whim to murder him, but it could also mean that his guards were less alert, easier to overwhelm. Jack’s role was to go below and search for him while Ahmed held off any opposition above. He checked the holster with the Beretta on his right side, making sure it was shut. He would know the nature of the opposition soon enough.

They were less than fifty meters away now. One of the pirates suddenly appeared at the back rail, lurching, a Kalashnikov swinging from one hand, a joint in the other. Without hesitation, Ahmed snapped up the MP5 and fired a five-round burst. The man toppled over the rail and fell into the wake, his body bobbing past them. The gunshots had barely been audible, little more than a staccato coughing, but the man had dropped his own gun with a clatter and one of Ahmed’s bullets had pinged off something metallic behind him, ricocheting into the distance. Another man appeared, evidently alerted by the noise, and Ahmed repeated the exercise, this time dropping the man onto the deck.

Jack gunned the boat forward. It was now or never. Ahmed slung the MP5 over his back and picked up a grapple line from a bucket in the bow. The Zodiac rammed into the stern of the trawler, bounced against it and then held fast, the engine screaming. Ahmed threw the grapple, watching as it caught on the stern rail, and leaped out, impacting the hull hard as he pulled himself up above the wake. Jack throttled back, swerved sideways out of the wake, and came back again at the trawler along her starboard side. Above him he heard a ripping sound as Ahmed emptied his MP5 forward, and the noise of ricochets and shattering glass. He squatted up on the floorboards, holding the tiller with one hand and his own grapple with the other. He swung the tiller hard, threw his grapple and then leaped out himself, slamming into the side of the trawler just as a deafening burst from a Kalashnikov ripped into the inflatable, shredding one pontoon and causing it to flip over and spin off in the wake.

He hung on to the line, the spray lashing his face, his body half in and half out of the water. He summoned all his strength and pulled himself up until he reached deck level, swinging his left leg until his foot caught behind one of the railing posts aft. He heaved himself up against the railing and looked across the deck. A few feet away lay the crumpled body of the man who had fired the Kalashnikov, rivulets of blood spreading along the divides of the deck boards around him. Ahmed had already advanced forward of the main hatch, and was squatting behind the derrick machinery, his MP5 aimed at the deckhouse. Jack stared at the hatch, the place where fish would normally be spilled through into refrigerator compartments below. If Costas was anywhere, that would be it. He looked forward again to Ahmed. There was no need for stealth now, just speed. “I’m right behind you,” he bellowed. “I’m going for the hatch. I need suppressing fire.”

“Roger that.” Ahmed dropped the half-empty magazine from his weapon and loaded a new one. “On your call.”

Jack flexed his arm muscles and peered at the top of the railing, judging his timing. He took a deep breath and yelled, “Ahmed. Now.” Ahmed fired a long burst that shattered the remaining deckhouse windows, spraying rounds from left to right. Jack heaved himself up the railing, dropped over the other side, unholstered his Beretta, and scrambled over to the hatch, pulling at the handle. From somewhere ahead a Kalashnikov opened up and rounds went everywhere, ricocheting off machinery and gouging sprays of splinters from the deck boards.

Jack ducked down, his hands over his head, and looked across at Ahmed, who had taken out a stun grenade and pulled the pin. “Fire in the hole,” Ahmed yelled. They had agreed not to risk fragmentation grenades until they knew for certain where Costas was being held, but a stun grenade might at least buy them time. Jack pressed his hands against his ears, and watched Ahmed toss the grenade at the deckhouse. Seconds later there was a deafening crash, followed by a few seconds of silence and then sounds of commotion, high-pitched voices yelling orders in Somali. “I can just about make out what they’re saying,” Ahmed called. “I think there are three of them, and one down below. He must be guarding Costas. You need to get down there now.”

He fired another long burst at the deckhouse, and Jack got up on his knees. Over the port railing he could see the island clearly now, no more than half a mile away. He held the Beretta ready with one hand, and pulled hard at the handle with the other. It suddenly gave way, and he pushed the hatch up, staying behind it for cover. A burst of fire came up from below, two rounds tearing through the wood only inches from his torso. He let the hatch drop open, in that instant seeing his assailant and firing half a dozen rounds into him, the impact throwing the man back down the ladder. Jack followed, Beretta at the ready, swinging it round as he peered into the gloom. “Costas,” he yelled. “Costas. Are you there?”

He listened hard, hearing only the throbbing of the engine and the slapping of the sea on the hull outside. He reached the bottom of the ladder and turned forward, slopping through fish entrails in the scuppers, trying to keep himself upright as the ship pitched and rolled. He called again, but there was still no response. Then he saw a body splayed backward between the hull frames, the head an unrecognizable pulp. Whoever it was had been killed some time earlier; the blood had dried and was swarming with flies. It looked like an execution. He suddenly felt sick. They could not be too late. He peered more closely, seeing the unfamiliar clothes, the brown skin. He heard a moaning from further forward and squatted down beside the body, pistol at the ready. As he crept slowly ahead, he saw the Hawaiian shirt, matted and bloody, and the battered face. “Costas. Can you hear me? It’s Jack. We’re here to rescue you.”

One eye opened; the other was black and sealed shut. “It’s about time,” he mumbled. “Got whacked on the head. Dude over there with the tattoo.”

“Okay. He’s gone. Anyone else down here?”

“Nobody alive.”

“We need to get out of here. Can you manage it?”

Costas blinked hard. Jack picked up a half-empty water bottle that had been beside him and put it to Costas’s lips, holding his head up. He drank noisily, shook his head, grimaced, and then pushed himself up on his elbows. “Okay, Jack. Get me out of this hellhole.”

Jack squatted beside him, heaved Costas’s arm up over his shoulder, and helped him to his feet. Costas lurched sideways, and Jack caught him again, holding him upright. “We’re going up the ladder through the hatch. Ahmed is there and most of the crew are gone. It looks as if the Boss has already gone ashore with some of his boys.”

“He’s the one I want,” Costas said, reeling. “Point me in his direction.”

“Time for that soon enough. Right now we’re going for a swim. Some friends of ours are about to light this boat up, and we need to be out of here.”

“You’re wearing a three-liter cylinder with an octopus rig,” Costas slurred, staggering sideways. “So I kind of guessed that. The tool belt I like. Anything in it for me?”

“All in good time. We need to get you out of here first.” Jack shouted up through the hatch. “Ahmed, I’ve got him. We’re coming out now.”

“Roger that,” Ahmed shouted back. “Suppressing fire now.”

Jack heard the familiar rip of the MP5 as he pushed Costas ahead of him up the ladder and then jumped round to finish pulling him out. He helped him to his feet and they staggered to the back railing. “A swim will do me good,” Costas murmured. “Clear the head. I need that if I’m going to take on that guy. Which I am.”

Ahmed backed off from his position until he was alongside them. The shoreline was now alarmingly close, only a couple of hundred meters away, and the engine was still going full blast. Ahmed took the second grenade from his pouch and pulled the pin. “Fragmentation this time. Fire in the hole.” As he tossed it, Jack pushed Costas behind the port-side derrick, holding his hands against his ears. A deafening blast blew a hole in the left side of the deckhouse, sending burning chunks of wood clattering onto the deck around them. “There might still be a couple of them left,” Ahmed said. “We need to get out of here now.”

Jack turned to Costas. “There’s a Somali navy patrol boat commanded by Captain Ibrahim closing in on us. As soon as they see this flare, a P-15 Termit missile will be launched at this trawler. Do you understand?”

Costas looked back at him, less groggy now, nodding. “Sounds like a plan.”

A burst of gunfire erupted from the remaining part of the deckhouse, one of the bullets grazing Costas in the left forearm and another knocking the flare pistol out of Jack’s hand. He lunged for it, catching it just in time as it spun across the deck toward the stern. Ahmed leveled his MP5 at the deckhouse, firing off the remainder of his magazine, then quickly loaded another, emptying that too in one long burst. He dropped the gun, grabbed Costas and yelled, “Now!” just as another burst erupted from the deckhouse. Jack fired the flare gun high in the air, and then hurled himself at the other two, all three of them going over the stern railing and hitting the sea together as rounds jetted into the water on all sides.

He pulled them underwater, swimming down as hard as he could. After a few meters he stopped and quickly unwound one regulator, passing the mouthpiece to Costas, who began breathing off it as he helped Jack with his; Ahmed did the same a few meters away. They equalized their ears as they sank deeper, and Jack struggled out of his backpack, opened it and passed Costas a mask and fins. He grabbed his own and let the pack drop, then put the mask on, blowing air into it to clear it and seeing that Costas had already done the same. Pulling on their fins, they powered away from the shadow of the hull, Ahmed close behind, knowing that every second counted.

A minute after they had hit the water, a shock wave threw them forward, and a flash of red lit up the surface. Looking back, Jack could just make out the shattered form of the trawler sinking to the seabed, the bodies of the gunmen pirouetting away from it, smudges of blood shrouding the ones who had just been killed in the missile strike.

Costas tapped Jack on the shoulder and pointed at the blood curling up into the water from the bullet wound on his arm, then made a biting motion with his hand. Jack peered at the injury, a nasty graze rather than a penetrating wound, and scanned the reef around them. Costas was right: blood in the water would act as a magnet for sharks, and they would go for the living before they went for the dead. They were only a hundred meters or so from the rocky shoreline of the island, but even that would consume most of the air in their tanks. He pointed emphatically up the slope, and Costas and Ahmed both gave okay signals. Without buoyancy compensators or weight belts, they were struggling to counter the natural tendencies of their bodies to sink or float — Jack the former, Costas with his greater bulk decidedly the latter, with only Ahmed having something close to neutral buoyancy.

About five minutes into the swim, Costas transferred from Jack’s to Ahmed’s octopus regulator, knowing that Jack’s tank would be close to depletion. They had been swimming at about eight meters’ depth, below the oscillation of the swell, but as the bottom shelved up, they were forced into shallower water where they began to be pushed around by the ocean’s movement. There were fewer coral heads in the shallows than in the deeper water but plenty of jagged limestone outcrops to scrape against, not to mention numerous spiny sea urchins that seemed to loom up toward Jack every time the swell dropped him close to the seabed.

They had not included pressure gauges with their tanks to economise on space, but Jack knew that he must be down to his final few minutes of air, and he looked along the surf line for a possible egress point. Ahmed and Costas were off to the right, and Costas gestured forcefully for him to follow, his arm trailing tendrils of blood. A white-tipped reef shark appeared below them, swimming in wide circles, and then another joined it. Jack tensed; where there were small sharks, bigger ones were sure to follow. The last thing they needed was for it all to end in a feeding frenzy, just when they were so close to their goal. He swam determinedly toward Costas, keeping at least two meters below the surface. Ahead he saw a cavernous opening between rocky outcrops and the shoreline that he knew must be Costas and Ahmed’s objective, somewhere that promised calmer waters beyond, a place where they might surface unseen. He sucked hard on his regulator, knowing that he only had a couple of breaths left, but kept going. To surface now, still more than ten meters from shore, would be to risk being driven against the rocks before reaching that entranceway, and also being seen by those of the gang who were ashore and might be searching for survivors from the trawler.

He dropped down to the shingle-strewn entrance to the cavern, took a final breath from the tank and then powered forward behind the other two, swimming beyond the protective rock wall of the entrance and ascending inside, exhaling to avoid an embolism as he came up. As he reached the surface, he spat out his regulator, took a few deep breaths and then looked around, treading water hard to keep afloat. The sun had risen above the eastern horizon and bathed the rocks in light, sparkling off the water. They were in a small pool that formed a narrow inlet, protected on both sides by a rocky shoreline that rose several meters above the level of the water, the shingle sloping to form a rough beach. The other two were already making their way out, and Jack followed them, pulling himself up and sitting in the shallows. He stripped off his mask and fins and unstrapped his cylinder, dropping it beside him, and then crawled over to Costas, who was lying inert on the shingle, the sun on his face. He leaned over him, dripping water, and opened Costas’s good eye, inspecting the pupil.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Costas said, sounding half asleep. “This is my beach time.”

“Just checking for concussion. You look fine. Anything broken?”

“A few teeth. Maybe my jaw. Nothing too serious.”

Jack unzipped the main pouch on his belt, took out a bottle of coagulant powder and spilled it on the wound, then wrapped it in a shell dressing and pinned it. Ahmed scrambled down from the side of the inlet where he had gone to check out their surroundings. “Okay,” he said, squatting down, speaking quietly. “There are two guys with Kalashnikovs about three hundred meters west, inspecting the bits of wreckage that have come ashore. Another guy’s marching up and down talking on a phone, gesticulating. I’m guessing he’s the gang leader, the Boss. The skiff’s nowhere to be seen, but I imagine the entrance to the submarine pen must be somewhere nearby, and that’s where it’s gone. I can see where we need to go.”

Jack peered at Costas. “If you’re not up to it, you can hold down the fort here while we go in. If all goes according to plan, there should be a section of Somali marines coming ashore from the patrol boat within the hour.”

“Are you in contact with them?” Costas asked.

Ahmed shook his head. “Radio contact is too risky. There’s a chance of being overheard. But I’ve set a locator beacon on that rock above us, something they can follow. This inlet will be a good beaching point for their Zodiac.”

Jack reached into the pouch on his back and pulled out a waterproof package, passing it to Costas, who unwrapped it, revealing a second Beretta in a holster. “Thoughtful of you, Jack.”

“What was it you said a few days ago? The buddy system. We look after each other.”

“Right on.” Costas staggered to his feet, shook himself and pulled back the slider on the pistol, chambering a round. “Full mag?”

“Full mag. Two more with the holster.”

Costas slotted the holster over his shorts, held the gun down and paused. “I wanted to ask about Zaheed. Last I saw of him he’d taken a round in the chest.”

Jack gave him a grim look and shook his head. Costas nodded slowly. “I thought so. No way am I waiting this one out. There’s someone here I want to meet again.”

“Me too,” said Jack. He stared down at the shingle. For the first time in as long as he could remember, the thought of Landor did not make him feel apprehensive, uneasy, the old sense of guilt. Seeing what they had done to Costas had removed all that. Now all he wanted was to get into that pen and end the job, to see Landor finished for good.

Costas looked at Ahmed. “You good to go?”

Ahmed pulled the slider on his own pistol. “Good to go.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Let’s move.”

23

Ahmed led them forward over the rocky edge of the inlet, Costas following and Jack bringing up the rear. Before leaving, Jack had made Costas eat the energy bar that had been in a pouch on his belt, and they had checked him again for signs of concussion. The Somali naval base doctor and two medics had come along in the patrol boat in anticipation of casualties, with a standby arrangement for medevac by helicopter to a French fleet auxiliary ship with a full operating theater, part of the Combined Task Force flotilla currently off the coast of Yemen.

Jack’s friend who headed the anti-piracy force had offered to divert a Royal Australian Air Force P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft over the island, part of the routine anti-piracy patrol carried out between Oman and the Horn of Africa that had recently been retasked to deal with the threat of naval incursion from Iran. Captain Ibrahim had advised against it until they were certain that Costas was safe. Like the terrorists, the pirate gangs were not easily intimidated by Western military force, having seen it come and go with political change and knowing that the task force might be prevented from interdiction by restrictive rules of engagement. Seeing an aircraft might only stoke up the pirates’ defiance, and result in even more erratic violence. Ibrahim could request task force assistance once his marines were engaged and under fire, but until the landing team arrived in their Zodiac the three of them were on their own. Their priority now was to discover the U-boat pen and secure its contents before any damage could be done, particularly if those contents included potentially lethal radioactive materials.

Ahmed signaled for them to stop, and they squatted down among the rocky outcrops, looking around. A light breeze had sprung up from the east, bringing with it the smell of burning from the wreckage of the trawler. For the first time Jack could see the island in its entirety, a desolate rocky outcrop less than a kilometer across, almost flat and with hardly any vegetation. The rock had been eroded by sea and wind into a variegated surface of fissures and gullies, something that might slow their progress but would provide cover as they approached their target. Ahead of them, where Ahmed had earlier seen the two men inspecting the wreckage, lay the beginning of another inlet like the one they had just left, only much wider and cutting deeper into the island. There was nowhere else obvious for the skiff from the trawler to have gone, and this was their best bet for the U-boat pen.

Ahmed signaled them forward, and Jack acknowledged. They crept on, weapons at the ready, and a few minutes later reached the edge of the inlet, taking cover behind a crest of rock that overlooked the water about twenty meters away. “We need to get in there fast,” Ahmed said. “If they discover we’re here, they’ll make a fortress of it, and this could go on for days. But from inside we can clean them out like ferrets in a rat hole.”

Two men appeared seemingly from nowhere on the rough ground about thirty meters in from the back of the inlet. Ahmed took out a small pair of binoculars from his belt, stared for a moment, and then put them away again. “I think that’s an entrance into the pen,” he said. “But it’s going to be tricky for three of us to take it by storm. The same problem applies: that once they know we’re outside, they can make it virtually impregnable.”

Jack looked at the inlet. “How much air did you have left in your tank?”

“Not yet sucking, but can’t be more than a few minutes’ worth.”

“I have an idea. We think the U-boat got into that pen, right? There must be a channel underwater large enough to take it. If I can swim through there, I might be able to achieve an element of surprise.”

Ahmed thought for a moment. “Okay. Let’s do it.” He scrambled back and returned a minute later with his diving rig and Jack’s mask and fins. “I’ve got two fragmentation grenades left. You can have one, we’ll have the other. As soon as we hear yours go off, we’ll toss ours down that entranceway.”

Jack quickly put on the gear, checked his Beretta and made his way down the rocky slope toward the inlet. A man with a Kalashnikov suddenly appeared a few yards in front of him; he had barely had time to register his surprise when three jets of blood spurted out of his back and he fell. Jack glanced over his shoulder and saw Ahmed’s Glock with its silencer poking out from behind a rock, a wisp of smoke curling up from the muzzle.

When he reached the water’s edge, he slipped in, then pulled on his mask and fins and dropped down, putting his regulator in his mouth and swimming quickly in the direction of the inlet. As he had suspected, the inlet was deep, eighteen meters according to his dive watch, and wide enough for a U-boat to make its way in. He swam toward the dark patch that he knew must mark the entrance into the pen, swiftly finning under the rocky overhang and hoping that none of the men had spotted his bubbles. Ahead lay blackness, and no certainty that he would be able to get through; he doubted he had enough air to make it in and out again if the way was blocked. But he had no choice now, and he kept going, running his hand against one rock-cut wall for guidance in the dark.

His breathing began to tighten as the tank emptied, but he tried to keep cool, to keep his swimming measured. A few seconds more and he saw a smudge of green light, and then it became clearer, the shapes around him more defined. He realized that the huge bulk that had appeared to his right was the stern end of a submarine, its rudder and screw now clearly visible. He had no time to be astonished at the sight; his air was almost gone. He saw an iridescent patch above him and rose into it, taking out his mouthpiece as he broke surface and trying to keep as quiet as possible.

He was on the edge of a rock-cut platform forming one side of a dock that had been designed to take two submarines. There was artificial light from bulbs strung up on the far side of the chamber, and he could hear the hum of a portable generator. Glancing at the submarine, he could now clearly see that it was a U-boat, rusted but intact, with its forward gun still in place. On the conning tower he could see its designation painted in black letters: U-409. Ahmed had been right. The U-boat had been sitting there for over seventy years, since the end of the war, with a cargo inside that could be as lethal to the world today as it might have been back then, had it reached its intended destination.

He crawled up onto the dock, slipped off his fins and mask, and began to unstrap his rig. Suddenly there was a shout from the platform ahead, and he froze. The crack of a rifle reverberated in the chamber, and a bullet slammed into the rock just behind him. He quickly pulled out his Beretta, found his target, and fired five rounds, dropping the man. Then he got to his feet and ran forward behind a concrete revetment. He could see where four more men had been coming down the rock-cut stairway that must mark the entrance, about fifteen meters away; they were now all crouched down. He pulled out the grenade, pulled the pin and threw it in their direction, falling prone with his hands pressed hard against his ears.

He felt the detonation more than he heard it, a shock wave that coursed through his body. He remained where he was, hoping and praying for the second grenade from Ahmed, and seconds later it detonated, sending a shower of rock fragments in his direction from the entranceway. He got up again just as Ahmed and Costas appeared at the top of the stairs, advancing down in a flurry of gunfire as they finished off any of the pirates who were still alive.

While Ahmed replaced the magazine in his Glock and began to skirt round the dock, Costas walked cautiously along a gantry toward the deck of the U-boat. Jack ran toward him, passing a slew of carnage where the grenades had exploded, and joined him beside the conning tower. Costas beckoned him forward. “The Boss wasn’t among them,” he whispered. “Nor was Landor. The Boss had a lot of interest in what he thought might be inside the U-boat, so I think he’ll be in there.”

Jack nodded, then followed Costas up the ladder and into the conning tower, holstering his pistol as he made his way down the rungs. At the bottom, Costas brought his finger to his lips and put on a headlamp that Ahmed had given him, and together they crept round the control room, heading toward the forward torpedo tubes. Costas took out something else that Ahmed had brought, a small Geiger counter, and activated it, sweeping it over the deck. As they approached the tubes, the pinging became more frequent. One of the tubes was open, and they could see that it was stacked full of lead cubes labeled U-235. Jack felt his stomach go cold. “How safe is it?” he whispered.

“A bit heightened, but nothing for us to worry about as long as we don’t linger. Someone has recently opened that tube up, as you can see. My guess is we’ve got company forward.”

They turned and headed back toward the conning tower. Further forward, Jack saw a smudge of light and heard noises. They crept past the periscope and the wardroom, watching intently. Suddenly a shot rang out, then another. Jack ducked into the captain’s cabin. To his horror, he saw a skeleton slumped over the table, the mildewed remains of a Kriegsmarine uniform shrouding it and a Luger pistol in one hand. What had happened here was anyone’s guess, but the captain had not died peacefully; a large section of his skull was missing. Another shot rang out, and Jack followed Costas further down the corridor. Costas caught Jack’s attention and pointed at his Beretta. “It’s jammed,” he whispered. “And it’s the Boss ahead, I can smell him. He seems to be out of his head and talking to himself, but he’s still got his Kalashnikov. I need a weapon.”

Jack remembered the Luger he had seen in the captain’s cabin. It had looked in reasonable condition, and there was a chance it might still be functional. He peered along the passageway, and then slowly got up and made his way back, stepping through the cabin doorway. He went over to the skeleton and prised the finger bones from the pistol, peeling the mummified skin off the grip. He had no thought of repugnance for what he was doing, only of survival. He quickly inspected the Luger. It had been well oiled and had a layer of discoloration on the metal parts, but there was no obvious rust. He pressed the catch on the grip and pulled out the magazine, seeing that it still held rounds. He had no time to eject them and check the number, but the two he could see at the top, along with the one in the chamber, would at least give him a fighting chance. He pulled the toggle; at first there was resistance, but then it opened entirely and he ejected the round that had been in the chamber. He worked the toggle several times to loosen the action, pressed the round into the magazine, pushed the magazine back in and cocked the pistol with the toggle, letting it snap forward.

Out in the corridor again, he kept hold of the Luger and passed his Beretta to Costas. “Twelve rounds,” he whispered. “Be careful.”

Costas pointed ahead. “He’s mine.”

They advanced along the corridor, weapons at the ready. Sitting against the hatch through the next bulkhead was the Boss, his Kalashnikov over his knees, a dusty half-finished bottle of brandy with a Nazi label in one hand and a joint hanging from his lips. “Eh, Landor, my man, about time,” he said, waving the bottle without looking, taking a drag on the joint. “Where you been?”

“Not Landor,” Costas said coldly, the Beretta aimed at the man’s head. “English, remember?”

The Boss looked at him hazily, then waved the bottle again. “Ah, American, yes. Sit down, have a drink.”

Jack saw to his alarm that the Boss had several of the lead cubes in a pile on one side of him, and under a cloth he saw something else, the dull yellow of a gold bar. “Where’s Landor?” he demanded.

“Eh?” The man’s eyes rolled. “Who are you? Gone to get me some more gold bars. More of my cut. Then we’re going to get out of here, find a helicopter to pick us up and take us away. What was all the shooting outside? Some pretty big bangs.”

“Come on, Costas, let’s go,” Jack said. “He’s out of it, and this place stinks.”

“Hey, not so soon, English.” The Boss whipped out a Glock and aimed it at Costas. Jack pulled the trigger on the Luger, and at the same time Costas fired three rounds from his Beretta. The Boss slumped back, his eyes half open, blood running from his chest.

“That’s for Zaheed,” Costas said quietly. “And for my black eye.”

From above they heard a clattering, and then Ahmed’s voice shouting down. “Jack. Costas. I think I’ve found what we’re after.” They quickly retraced their steps back to the conning tower and climbed out, following Ahmed down onto the deck and across to the dock on the other side of the U-boat. “Up there,” he said, pointing at a rusted metal ladder leading to a balcony about ten feet high, robustly built and with a rock-cut entranceway at the top.

They heard a noise from the entrance passageway on the other side, and all three turned and trained their weapons. A Somali marine came cautiously down, his rifle at the ready, followed by two more. Ahmed whistled and showed himself, and then pointed to Jack and Costas. More marines entered and began to spread around the pen, checking and searching, kicking the bodies of pirates on the way. Jack turned to Ahmed. “Only one bad guy still missing. Where the hell is Landor?”

Ahmed pointed up to the balcony. “Let’s go and check it out.”

Jack climbed the metal ladder onto the balcony and peered round the corner into the passageway, Luger at the ready. Ahead of him, recessed into the rock, was a metal door, the bolt open, with a symbol the size of his palm stamped into the front. He stared at it, his mind racing. It showed a sword facing downward within a loop, and surrounding it an exergue with the words Deutsches Ahnenerbe. He turned back to Costas, who had followed him up, Ahmed close behind. “This looks like a strongroom.”

Costas edged closer, panning his headlamp beam over the door. He put his shoulder to it, but there was no movement; it presumably opened outward. “I don’t suppose you packed any C-5 into that belt of yours?”

“I didn’t, but Ahmed did.”

“Just a word of warning. This door would normally be padlocked and bolted from the outside. It presumably has some kind of latch on the inside as well. What I’m saying is that there could be someone in there.”

Ahmed passed Costas a plastic-covered package that looked like plasticine, and a pair of pencil-shaped detonators. Costas immediately set to work pressing a wedge of the explosive into the edge of the door, and slotted one of the detonators into it. “Okay. I’m setting a thirty-second timer. We need to get out of the way. Ready?”

They quickly backed out, taking shelter behind the rock face on either side of the entrance. Costas looked at his watch. “Fire in the hole.” They covered their ears and pressed themselves against the rock. Seconds later the charge went off with a violent crack, sending a spray of debris out over the balcony and clattering onto the U-boat below. They waited while the dust cleared, and then Costas ducked back around, followed by the other two. The metal was dented, but the door was still intact. Jack and Costas each held one of the padlock retainers and pulled hard, inching the door outward. Once it had moved far enough, Costas went behind it and heaved, coughing in the dust, until the door was completely open and they were staring into the chamber beyond.

At first Jack could see very little, the dust still filling the space and his headlamp beam only penetrating a few meters. Then, as the dust settled, he saw a breathtaking sight. What had seemed a narrow passageway was in fact a wide chamber stacked from floor to ceiling with gold bars, hundreds of them, a cache that must have represented more than one U-boat cargo. Beyond the gold lay the open door of a further chamber, stacked trays and racks with objects on them just visible on either side.

In that instant Landor emerged from the dust, lunging toward Jack, barreling into his midriff and pushing him out onto the balcony. Costas and Ahmed watched in shock, their weapons out but unable to shoot for fear of hitting Jack. Landor swung him round against the railing above the water, putting a knife to his throat. “This is our final showdown, Jack. You lost me that gold on Clan Macpherson, but you’re not going to lose me this.”

Jack looked up, feeling the vice-like grip, remembering that it was Landor who had always won the wrestling matches at school. There was no point in struggling, and with the edge of steel against his neck, even the slightest movement might prove fatal. He could see Ahmed trying to aim his Glock to get a head shot, but it was too close to try. “Tell your friends to drop their weapons,” Landor snarled.

Ahmed and Costas did so without being prompted, laying them on the balcony and backing off. Jack could feel the knife against his throat as he spoke. “Do you remember our dive in the quarry, Anatoly? Amazing we made it back up with the gear we had. Me jamming my valve against that beam, us buddy-breathing all the way up, you dropping our only flashlight. And then the next day we went back and did it all over again. Those were the days.”

“Don’t try to sweet-talk me, Jack. Diving doesn’t mean anything to me any more. What I remember is that you turned away from me to go and grub around in the dirt with Hiebermeyer.”

“Wrong. I turned away from you because of what you were becoming. What you’ve become now.”

“You’re not getting out of this one. Not this time.”

“Do it, then. Just do it.”

Jack tensed. In that instant of hesitation he knew that he had been right, that Landor could not do it. In one swift movement he brought his left elbow hard into the other man’s abdomen, making him drop the knife and double back against the railing, taking Jack with him. Ahmed and Costas quickly retrieved their weapons, trying to train them on Landor. Jack twisted round, holding Landor back by the chin, struggling to keep his balance. “It looks as if we’re going diving again together after all,” he said, jerking his head down to the water beside the U-boat. “It’s about ten meters deep, and I’ve got a minute or so of air left in this little tank on my back.”

Landor went wide-eyed, tottering on the edge, his arms wrapping around Jack’s regulator hoses as he tried to get at his throat. “You know my medical condition. You know even that would give me a bend.”

“That’s your call. You can stay up here and be shot, or go down there and take your chances.”

They had both leaned out too far, and suddenly they were falling, tumbling down beside the U-boat into the water. They hit the surface in a tangle and went down a few meters, and then Landor released himself and swam down quickly into the gloom toward the base of the chamber, his weak leg trailing behind him as he pulled with his arms. Jack grabbed one of his regulator hoses and put the mouthpiece in, taking a breath and dropping after him. Without a mask, the water was a blur, but he could see Landor on the bottom, looking up, his arms held wide, blowing the remaining air out of his lungs.

Landor had deliberately gone too deep to surface by himself without drowning. But Jack knew him well enough to know that this was not suicide. Landor was playing him, again, and Jack had no choice but to go along with it. Landor knew that Jack would not let him die, not like this, not underwater, when there was a chance of rescue. It would go against all their training, everything they had learned together all those years ago. It was not suicide, but the depth was enough that if Jack gave him air from his tank, it would almost certainly bring on another bend, enough to require immediate medical attention. Landor would have guessed that they would have brought medics with them, and that a naval vessel from CTF 150 would be on the way, probably with the only recompression chamber in miles and one to which the medics would be obliged to send him. He knew that the game was up, that he was not getting away now with any of the gold, and he was seeking a way out. To be captured unharmed by the Somalis would mean festering in a Mogadishu jail; to be medevacked out to a ship in international waters might mean a chance of escape, a chance for Deep Explorer’s lawyers to get involved and for Landor to live to play this game another day.

All of that flashed through Jack’s mind as he sank to the bottom. He pulled in the octopus rig and tested the purge valve, holding the mouthpiece at the ready. He could see Landor watching him, eyes wide, suddenly terrified, wondering if he had miscalculated. Then Landor grabbed the regulator and breathed from it, hard and fast, the bubbles billowing above him. Jack knew they only had seconds before the tank would run empty, and he pulled at Landor’s arm, trying to kick up toward the surface. Landor resisted, hyperventilating, knowing that the more air he breathed under pressure the more likely he would be to have a bend. Jack felt his own breathing tighten, and then he pulled the octopus regulator away, pushing Landor back. This time Landor kicked hard and began to ascend, breathing out as he did so, Jack following close behind. They both broke surface to the glare of headlamps from the Somali marines who were standing on the dock with their weapons trained, Costas and Ahmed squatting alongside, ready to help.

Jack gave an okay signal, and looked over to where Landor was bent double in the water, struggling to keep his head up. “Get him on pure oxygen,” he said, seeing the medic among the marines. “And then get him out of here.”

Half an hour later, Jack stood with Costas again at the entrance to the Ahnenerbe chamber. He had stripped off his tank and his tool belt and drunk several water packs brought along by the marine medic, quickly revitalizing himself after his encounter with Landor. All of his attention now was on what lay in front of him. The scene beyond the bullion room was astonishing, one of the most extraordinary sights of his archaeological career. The chamber revealed by their head torches was small, the size of a modest bedroom, but was crammed from ceiling to floor with ancient artifacts, as if they had opened the treasury of a latter-day King Tut. Jack could immediately make out objects of Abyssinian origin on one set of shelves to his left, elaborate gold crosses of a distinctive Ethiopian shape, chalices and cups, a golden crown set with emeralds and rubies. On the other side were trays of artifacts that he recognized from the report that Zaheed had shown him of material that had disappeared from the museums in Somalia and Ethiopia at the time of the fascist occupation, and from the churches.

“Congratulations, Jack,” Costas said. “It looks like we’ve hit pay dirt.”

“It’s fantastic,” Jack replied. “When I was reading Captain Wood’s account of his Abyssinia experience in 1868, I researched all of the treasures known to have been looted from Magdala, and their present whereabouts. Hardly anything was recorded of the drumhead auction that General Napier held afterward, and a lot of artifacts disappeared without a trace into private hands. But this collection shows that some of the missing items thought to have been looted then were in fact taken from Abyssinia years later by the Nazis.”

“You told me that the Patriarch mentioned that secret chamber beneath the church at Magdala, and the Ahnenerbe men spending days scouring the place. Maybe they found other secret caches that the Abyssinians had managed to conceal from the British.”

Jack held up the crown, and looked pensively at the ground. “I only wish Zaheed had been able to see this. It would have made his day. It’s going to put Ethiopia and Somalia back on the map archaeologically.”

“Finding this stuff and getting it back to the museums is the greatest credit you can give Zaheed. We wouldn’t have got here without him.”

Jack made his way through exotic furniture and other artifacts cluttering the floor to a heavy wooden chest in the far corner of the chamber. He lifted the lid, and gasped. “I’ve never seen anything like this outside a Hollywood movie.”

Costas came over and knelt down beside him, his jaw dropping too. The chest was full of gold and silver coins, thousands of them, of all shapes and sizes. Jack plunged his hands in, grasping what he could and pulling them out, letting the overflow cascade back down and inspecting what was left. “Incredible,” he said. “I’m seeing lots of medieval issues of the sultanate of Mogadishu, and Axumite gold coins of the fourth and fifth century, many of them mint issues. Look at that one: the inscription reads ‘Basileus Axomitus,’ King of the Axumites. I’d say the Ahnenerbe must have got hold of a couple of hoards. But there are also lots of others, Egyptian, Arabian, Indian, gold dinars, lots of Byzantine Roman issues of Theodora and Justinian. Some of those have holes in them showing they were reused as jewelry, very common in India. It looks as if the Ahnenerbe scoured the whole of the Indian Ocean region for this, not just the Horn of Africa. It’s a fantastic porthole into the Indian Ocean trade in antiquity, and it’s going to occupy numismatists for years to come. Not to speak of being a spectacular centerpiece for a museum display.”

Ahmed appeared at the entrance, leaning in. “That’s the place secured. Landor’s in custody pending evacuation to a secure military hospital in Mogadishu. We’re not letting him out of the country. Captain Ibrahim has radioed to say that a second patrol boat is on the way, as well as a frigate from CTF 150, with a team prepped to deal with removing the uranium. And it’s game over for the Badass Boys. None of them are left alive. We’re scouring the place in case there are any Nazi munitions that need to be made safe.”

Costas looked up, dropping the gold coin he had been holding. “Ordnance disposal? Count me in.”

“Not a chance,” Jack said. “You’re helping me here.”

Ahmed suddenly saw what Jack was doing. “Merciful Allah,” he exclaimed. “That’s incredible. It looks as if you’ve got your hands full here too.”

Costas rocked back on his haunches, looking thoughtfully at Jack. “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum,” he sang quietly.

Jack turned to him, his arms half buried in gold. “Don’t go there. I mean, just don’t. We are not pirates.”

“Have you seen yourself? I wish I had a camera. Jack Howard gone over to the dark side.”

Jack hastily withdrew his hands, self-consciously brushing off a few coins. “Remarkable find,” he murmured. “We need to get these cleaned and into plastic sleeves.”

“Not all pirates were bad, were they?” Costas continued. “I mean, Robin Hood was a kind of pirate, and he took from the rich and gave to the poor. And you can’t tell me that all your Howard nautical ancestors were goody-goody. There must have been the odd Blackbeard among them, right? You must have just a little bit of pirate in you.”

“I like the sound of giving to the poor. That’s where all those gold bars outside are going. As for this stuff, getting it into museums in the countries where it belongs is going to enrich far more lives than just my own.”

“You’re telling me that kneeling there up to your elbows in gold, you didn’t just slightly reach out to your inner pirate?”

Jack looked around at the room, at the treasures he had been holding, suddenly awash with excitement at what they had discovered, at the wonders he would soon be able to reveal to the world. He turned to Costas, his eyes glinting. “My inner pirate? What do you think?”

Costas slapped him on the back. “I think you’re a hopeless case.”

Jack put his arm around his friend, tired but elated. “You know me. I’m just an archaeologist.”