The Kill List

Chapter 15

They tabbed in a loose line astern, with Curly as the lead scout to give warning of the first sign of opposition. There was none. David the captain was second. He swung his imaging system from side to side, but no other warm-blooded creatures showed themselves.

Dai had his comm set in his rucksack at the top of his Bergen, behind his head, and a plug in one ear to listen to anything from Tampa via Djibouti, which were watching them from the stratosphere. At ten to four, he advanced to David’s side and whispered: “Half a mile, boss.”

They advanced the next eight hundred yards at a crouch, each man bowed by the forty kilos on his back. While they marched, high above them clouds appeared in the sky, lowering the light level.

The captain stopped and made a gentle wave-down motion with one arm. The rest sank toward the sand. David produced a monocular night vision scope and peered ahead. Then he saw it, the first of the squat cuboidal houses of the village. The Silva compass had brought them to the threshold of the target.

He stowed the monocular and pulled on the goggles. The other six followed. For each man, the vision changed from slowly diminishing starlight to a brighter, almost sub-aqua-green tunnel. All the NVG does is to capture every scintilla of ambient light and concentrate it into one forward tunnel. The wearer loses spatial awareness and must turn his head to see anything left or right.

With the target in sight, the men had no need of the Bergens but great need of the ammunition and grenades inside them. They lowered the packs to the ground, slipped out of the shoulder straps and filled every pocket on their jumpsuits with ordnance. Their M4 rifles and sidearms already had full chambers.

David and the Tracker crawled forward together. They were staring at exactly what one of the angled shots from the Global Hawk had freeze-framed for them back at Djibouti. There was an alley that led from the village center to the desert where they crouched. Somewhere up it, on the left side, was the larger house identified as that of the headman, now taken over by the Preacher’s party.

A small pye-dog trotted down the alley, stopped and sniffed. Another joined it. They were both mangy, possibly rabid, accustomed to foraging amid the garbage, eating excrement or, on feast days, the entrails of a slaughtered goat. They sniffed again, suspecting there was something out there but not yet alarmed enough to bark and trigger a multi-dog alarm.

The Tracker took something from a breast pocket and threw it like a baseball pitcher toward the dogs. It landed with a soft phut in the sand. Both dogs jumped, then sniffed again before barking. Raw beefsteak. They approached, sniffed again, and the lead dog swallowed the tidbit in a single gulp. Another followed for his friend. The second treat disappeared.

The Tracker sent a salvo of meat chunks into the mouth of the alley. More dogs appeared, nine in all, saw their leaders gulping down the treats and did the same. There were twenty morsels, more than two each. Every cur got at least one. Then they sniffed around to see if there were more.

The original eaters began to stumble. Then their legs failed and they fell over, lying on their sides, kicking feebly. Finally, they ceased to move. The remaining seven did the same. Within ten minutes of the first throw, they were all unconscious.

David rose to a crouch and gestured forward, rifle at the port, finger on trigger. Five followed him. Barry remained to scan the exteriors of the houses. A donkey brayed from deep inside the hamlet. Nothing moved. The enemies ahead of them either slept or waited in ambush. The Tracker believed it was the former. The men from Marka were also strangers, and the dogs would have barked at them also. He was right.

The attack group entered the alley and approached the house on the left. It was the third up, facing the square. The masked men could make out a door on the alley, thick old timber, brought once from somewhere else, for only scrubby camel thorn bushes grew nearby. The plank door had two ring handles but no lock with keyhole. David tested it with fingertips. It did not budge. Barred from the inside, crude but effective. It would take a battering ram. He beckoned to Tim, the munitions man, pointed at the door and withdrew.

Tim was holding what looked like a small wreath. He applied this to the crack between the left- and right-hand halves of the double door. Had it been metal, magnets or putty would have worked. Being timber, he used thumbtacks. There was no hammering, just pressure from his thumb. When the wreath was fixed, he set the short fuse and waved the others back.

They withdrew fifteen feet and crouched. Because it was a shaped charge, there would be no outward explosive force. The fury of the PETN plastic explosive would all be forward, cutting the wood like a chain saw in a fraction of a second.

When it came, the Tracker was surprised how low the noise was: a muted crack like a twig snapping. Then the first four were through the door, which swung weakly to the touch, its inner crossbar splintered and broken. Tim and Dai remained outside, covering the square with its three pickup trucks, tethered donkeys and corralled goats.

The para captain was first in, the Tracker at his shoulder. There were three men rising, half asleep, from the floor. The hitherto silent night was ripped by two M4 carbine on automatic mode. All three were from the Marka party. They were the Preacher’s bodyguards. They were dead before they got upright. Yells came from an inner room beyond a farther door.

The captain paused a moment to ensure all three were very dead; Pete and Curly came in from the alley; the Tracker kicked the inner door and went through. He prayed Opal, wherever he was, would have responded to the first fusillade by diving for the floor, preferably under a bed.

There were two men in the room. Unlike their companions in the hall, they had requisitioned two of the family’s beds, rough charpoys with camel’s hair blankets. They were up but sightless in the pitch-blackness. The burly one, the fourth bodyguard, had been perhaps dozing but not fast asleep; clearly he was the night watch, supposed to stay awake. He was up, with a handgun, and he fired.

The bullet went past the Tracker’s head, but what really hurt was the blaze of light from the muzzle, magnified many times by the goggles. It was like a searchlight in the face. He fired blind but on auto, sweeping right to left. His bullet stream took both men, the fourth Pakistani and the one who turned out to be Jamma, the private secretary.

Outside at the entrance to the square, as agreed, Tim and Dai raked the house across the square, the one sheltering the Sacad clansmen from Garacad. The paras fired long streams through each window. There was no glass in them, just nailed-up blankets. They knew their bullets would be above bed height, so they slammed in fresh magazines and waited for the reaction. It was not long.

In the headman’s house there was a low scuffling noise and a hint of movement. The Tracker swung toward it. A third truckle bed, tucked away in the corner. Someone beneath it, a hint of baseball cap.

“Stay there,” he shouted. “Don’t move. Don’t come out.” The scuffling stopped, the cap was withdrawn.

He swung around to the three men behind him.

“Clear in here. Go help with the northern gang.”

Out on the square, six from Garacad, convinced they were betrayed by those from Marka, came across the square in a charge, Kalashnikovs held low, dodging between the donkeys, which screamed and reared on their halters, and the three parked vehicles.

But they were in darkness. The clouds now covered the stars. Tim and Dai picked out one each and “slotted” them. The muzzle flashes were enough for the other four. They brought up their Russian guns. Tim and Dai went facedown fast. Behind them, Pete, Curly and their captain came into the alley, saw the muzzle flashes from the Kalashnikovs and also went down.

From prone positions, the five paras took out two more of the running men. The fifth, firing on empty when his magazine ran out, paused to slot in a fresh one. He was clearly visible beside the goat pen, and two M4 rounds took his head off.

The last was crouching behind one of the technicals, out of sight. The firing died and stopped. Trying to find a target in the darkness, he popped his head around the front of the engine block. He was unaware his enemies had NVGs; his head was like a green football. Another round blew his brains out.

Then there really was silence. There was no more response from the house with the pirates, but the paras were two short. They needed eight; they had taken down six. They prepared to charge and risk taking casualties, but there was no need. From way behind the village, they heard more shots, three in all, spaced a second apart.

Seeing the village well roused, Barry had abandoned his useless vigil outside the alley and raced around to the back. With his NVGs, he saw three figures running out of the back of the pirate house. Two were in robes, the third, stumbling and pleading, being hustled along with the two Somalis, had a thatch of blond hair.

Barry did not even challenge the runners. He rose from the camel thorn scrub when they were twenty yards away and fired. The one with the Kalashnikov, Duale, of the one eye, went first; the older man, later identified as al-Afrit, the Devil, took two spaced bullets in the chest.

The huge para walked over to his kills. The blond lad was between them, on his side, in the fetal position, crying softly.

“That’s all right, son,” said the veteran sergeant. “It’s over. Time to take you home.”

He tried to raise the teenager to his feet, but his legs had given way. So he picked the lad up like a doll, put him over his shoulder and began to stride back to the village.

The Tracker stared through his goggles at the room where the last of the Marka party had died. All but one. There was a doorway to one side; not a door but a hanging blanket covering the aperture.

He went through it on a rolling dive, staying below the likely firing line of a shooter in the room. Inside, he jumped to one side of the doorway and brought his M4 to bear. There was no shot.

He stared around the room, the last of the house, the best, the headman’s room. There was a bed with a coverlet, but it was empty, the blanket thrown to one side.

There was a fireplace and a cluster of still-glowing embers, painfully white through the goggles. A large armchair, and sitting in it, watching him, an old man. They stared at each other for several seconds. The old man spoke quite calmly.

“You may shoot me. I am old and my time has come.” He spoke in Somali, but, with his Arabic, the Tracker could just understand it. He replied in Arabic.

“I do not want to shoot you, Sheikh. You are not he whom I seek.”

The old man gazed at him without fear. What he saw, of course, was a cammo-uniformed monster with frog’s eyes.

“You are of the kuffar, but you speak the language of the Holy Koran.”

“It is true, and I seek a man. A very bad man. He has killed many. Also Muslims, women and even children.”

“Have I seen him?”

“You have seen him, Sheikh. He was here. He has”—the old man would never have seen amber—“eyes the color of fresh-drawn honey.”

“Ah.” The old man waved a hand dismissively, as one gesturing away something he did not like. “He has gone with the woman’s clothes.”

For a second, the Tracker felt a punch of disappointment. Escaped, swathed in a burqa and hijab, hiding in the desert, impossible to find. Then he noticed the old man was glancing upward, and he understood.

When the women of the hamlet washed their clothes in water from the well, they dared not hang them to dry in the square for the goats, who could feast off camel thorn spines, would tear them to shreds. So they erected frames on the flat roofs.

The Tracker went out the door across the room. There was a set of steps running up the side of the house. He leaned his M4 against the wall and drew his sidearm. His rubber-cleated jump boots made no sound going up the brick steps. He emerged on the roof and looked around. There were six drying frames.

In the half-light, he examined them all. For the women, dishdashas; for the men, white cotton lungis, the sarongs of the Somalis, draped over twig frames to dry. One seemed taller and narrower. It had a long white Pakistani shalwar kameez shirt, a head, a bushy beard, and it moved. Then three things happened so fast they almost cost the Tracker his life.

The moon came out from behind the clouds at last. It was full and dazzlingly white. It destroyed his night vision in a second, blinding him through the light-concentrating NVGs.

The man ahead of him was charging, and the Tracker tore off his goggles and raised his Browning thirteen-shot. The assailant had his right arm raised, and there was something in it that glinted.

He squeezed the Browning’s trigger. The hammer fell — on an empty chamber. A misfire, and, on a second squeeze, another. Very rare but possible. He knew he had a full magazine in there but nothing in the chamber.

With his free left hand, he seized a cotton dishdasha, bunched it into a ball and threw it at the descending blade. The steel hit the fluttering cloth, but the material wrapped itself around the metal so that when it hit his shoulder, it was blunted. With his right hand, he threw down the Browning and from a sheath on his right thigh he drew his U.S. Marine fighting knife, almost the one thing he still had that he had brought from London.

The bearded man was not using a jambiya, the short, curved but mainly ornamental knife of Yemen, but a billao—a big, razor-sharp knife used only by Somalis. Two slashes from a billao will take off an arm; a lunge with the needle point will go through a torso from front to back.

The attacker changed grip, twisting his wrist so the blade was held low for an upward thrust, as a street fighter would hold it. The Tracker had his vision back. He noted the man in front of him was barefoot, which would give him a good grip on the clay-brick roof. But so would his own rubber soles.

The next attack from the billao came fast and low to his left side, rising for the entrails, but that was where he expected it. His own left hand came down on the rising wrist, blocking it, the steel tip three inches from his body. He felt his own right wrist also gripped.

The Preacher was twelve years younger and hard from a life of asceticism in the mountains. In a trial of brute strength, he might win. The billao point advanced an inch toward his midriff. He remembered his parachute instructor at Fort Bragg, a seasoned fighting man apart from teaching free fall.

“East of Suez and south of Tripoli, they’re not good street fighters,” he explained once over a beer or three at the sergeants’ club. “They rely on their blades. They ignore the balls and the bridge.”

He meant the bridge of the nose. The Tracker pulled back his head and snapped it forward. He took his own pain on the top of the forehead and knew he would have a bump; but he felt the crack as the other man’s septum shattered.

So also did the grip of the hand holding his wrist. He tore his hand free, drew back and lunged. His blade went clear between the fifth and sixth ribs on the left side. A few inches away from his face, he saw the hate-filled amber eyes, the slow expression of disbelief as his steel drove into the heart, the light of life fading away.

He saw the amber fade away to black under the moon and felt the weight sag against his knife. He thought of his father on the bed in the ICU and leaned forward until his lips were just above the full dark beard. And he whispered: “Semper Fi, Preacher.”

The Pathfinders formed a defensive ring to wait out the hour until dawn, but the watchers in Tampa were able to reassure them there was no hostile intervention heading their way. The desert was the province of only the jackal.

All the Bergens were recovered from the desert, including Pete’s medical pack. He tended the rescued cadet Ove Carlsson. The lad was infected with parasites from his weeks in the dungeon in Garacad, undernourished and traumatized. Pete attended to what he could, including a shot of morphine. The cadet went into a deep sleep, his first in weeks, on a bed in front of the stoked-up fire.

Curly examined all three technicals in the square by torch light. One was riddled with M4 and Kalashnikov fire and would clearly not roll again. The other two were roadworthy when he had finished with them and contained petrol-filled jerrycans, enough for several hundred miles.

At first light, David talked with Djibouti and assured them the patrol could use the two technicals to drive west to the Ethiopian border. Just across it was the desert airstrip they had designated as their best extraction point, if they could make it. Curly estimated two hundred miles, or ten hours’ driving, accounting for fuel stops, some tire changes and presuming no hostile action. They were assured the C-130 Hercules, long back at Djibouti, would be waiting for them.

Agent Opal, the jet-black Ethiopian, was hugely relieved to be free of his increasingly dangerous masquerade. The paras broke open their food packs and made a passable breakfast, of which the highlight and center point was a blazing fire in the grate and several mugs of strong, sweet milky tea.

The bodies were dragged out to the square and left for the villagers to bury. A large wad of local Somali currency was found on the body of the Preacher and donated to the headman for all his trouble.

The case containing one million dollars in cash was found under the bed from which the Preacher had fled to the roof. The para captain made the point that, as they had abandoned half a million dollars of parachutes and para packs in the desert, and as going back in the wrong direction to look for them would not be a good idea, could they not reimburse the regiment from the booty? Point conceded.

At dawn they rigged a truckle bed in the open rear of one of the technicals for the still-sleeping Ove Carlsson, hefted their seven Bergens into the other, bade farewell to the headman and left.

Curly’s estimate was pretty accurate. Eight hours from that speck of a hamlet brought them to the invisible Ethiopian border. Tampa told them when they crossed it and gave them a steer toward the airstrip. It was not much of a place. No concrete runway, but a thousand yards of dead-flat, rock-hard gravel. No control tower, no hangars; just a wind sock, fluttering fitfully in the breeze, of a baking day about to die.

At one end stood the comforting bulk of a C-130 Hercules, in the RAF livery of the 47th Squadron. It was the first thing they saw, a mile away, across the Ogaden sand. As they approached, the rear ramp came down, and Jonah trotted out to greet them, along with his two co-dispatchers and the two packers. There would be no work for them: The seven parachutes, at £50,000 a pop, were gone.

Standing beside the Herc was a surprise: a white Beech King Air, in the livery of the United Nations World Food Programme. Two deeply tanned men in desert camouflage stood next to it. Each soldier on each shoulder wore a flash bearing a six-pointed star.

As the two-truck convoy came to a halt, Opal, who was riding in the back of the lead pickup, jumped out and ran over to them. Both embraced him in fervent man hugs. Curious, the Tracker walked across.

The Israeli major did not introduce himself as Benny, but he knew exactly who the American was.

“Just one short question,” said the Tracker. “Then I’ll say good-bye. How do you get an Ethiopian to work for you?”

The major looked surprised, as if it was obvious.

“He’s Falasha,” he said. “He’s as Jewish as I am.”

The Tracker vaguely recalled the story of the small tribe of Ethiopian Jews who, a generation ago, was spirited in its entirety out of Ethiopia and the grip of its brutal dictator. He turned to the young agent and threw a salute.

“Well, thank you, Opal. Todah rabah. . and mazel tov.”

The Beech went first, with just enough fuel to make Eilat. The Hercules followed, leaving the two battered pickups for the next party of desert nomads that might happen along.

Sitting in a bunker under AFB MacDill, Tampa, M.Sgt. Orde watched them go. He also saw a convoy of four vehicles, well to the east, heading for the border. An al-Shabaab pursuit party, but far too late.

At Djibouti, Ove Carlsson was taken into the state-of-the-art American base hospital until his father’s executive jet arrived with the tycoon onboard to collect him.

The Tracker said good-bye to the six Pathfinders before boarding his own Grumman for Northolt, London, and Andrews, Washington. The RAF crew had slept through the day. They were fit to fly when refueling was complete.

“If I ever have to do anything that insane again, can I ask you guys to come with me?” he asked.

“No problem, mate,” said Tim. The U.S. colonel did not recall when he was last called mate by a private soldier and found he quite liked it.

His Grumman took off just after midnight. He slept until it crossed the Libyan coast and chased ahead of the rising sun to London. It was autumn. There would be red and gold leaves in northern Virginia, and he would be dearly glad to see them again.