Pirate Alley: A Novel (30 page)

Noon made this statement, drawing himself up as he did so. To my relief, Ragnar didn’t object. I got the impression that Grafton didn’t care one way or the other.

When we reached the bottom of the stairs and exited the building, Grafton had my arm. The reporters were out in the square and ready with cameras and lights. “We’ll get to them in a minute,” he said. He wrapped a hand around my arm and gently pulled me for a block or so, then into the doorway of a building so dirty and old that I looked for the sign
DR. LIVINGSTON SLEPT HERE
. With his mouth only six inches or so from my ear, he told me his plan, and my part in it. The exposition took fifteen minutes. I could feel the panic start way down inside me, well up like hot lava. The hairs on the backs of my arms and hands stood to attention.

I had objections, of course. What if I failed to achieve the results he wanted? What if the pirates killed me?

“They won’t,” he said dismissively.

There are some things about Jake Grafton that I am not skeptical about anymore. He is the coolest, most calculating gambler alive, he will stake everything on his ability to force events to unfold as he wills them, he has ice water in his veins and no nerves at all, and when he strikes, he does so suddenly, violently and ruthlessly, with devastating accuracy and effect. In truth, he is the embodiment of the perfect warrior.

There are days when I think he should forgo clothes and wear a steel suit, complete with helmet, chain-mail gloves, sword and lance. This was one of them.

“Sir Jake,” I muttered as he went into greater detail about my role in his drama.

“What?”

“Nothing. A brain fart. Forget it.”

Ten minutes later we went out into the square. Ricardo was getting set up. His photographer told me the generator would take a few minutes to get enough charge on his batteries to get him back in business.

Grafton wasn’t waiting. He was chatting with Sophia Donatelli and the BBC dude, Rab Bishop. The Brit was pretty buttoned-down, I thought. He wanted to know Grafton’s background, a subject the admiral wasn’t interested in throwing much light on.

In a few minutes, Ricardo was ready to go. As the three cameras focused on him, Grafton spoke easily, as cool as a congressman just reelected by a landslide.

“I have been having discussions with Sheikh Ragnar. The sheikh has agreed to allow two helicopters from Task Force 151 to provide humanitarian aid to the passengers and crew of the
Sultan
. They should land on the fortress in a little more than an hour. Meanwhile, I shall relay his ransom demands to my superiors, who of course have given them careful consideration, and will do so again. The British and American governments are philosophically opposed to paying ransom to pirates, yet there are humanitarian considerations here that must be weighed carefully. Sometimes public policy must bow to the sanctity of human life. We will know more in a few hours, I hope. If you have any questions, I will try to answer them within the scope of my authority, which, as you may suspect, is very limited.”

I knew Grafton was slick, but he had a talent as a liar that would have done credit to Bernard Madoff. He should have been a politician.

They had questions, and he deflected most of them. They would have to wait.

Then he was done and walked away. I went with him. The press got busy packing up and moving up the hill to photograph the choppers arriving and departing.

The evening was upon us. The ocean to the east was shrouded in darkness.

I was tired, and I realized I wasn’t going to get any sleep. Grafton sat on a piece of a box that had washed up on the beach and talked awhile on his handheld radio. It didn’t have much range, but he was chatting with Toad Tarkington aboard
Chosin Reservoir
; I doubted if the ship was over ten miles away. Just in case, I suspected the E-2 Hawkeye from the aircraft carrier farther north was overhead to relay the signal, and of course Tarkington probably had an Osprey or two aloft. Plus drones. I wondered if Ragnar realized how tight the net already was.

*   *   *

Ragnar, his two sons, and Mustafa al-Said huddled around a radio set up in a room on the third floor of his building. The radio had come out of a captured ship and could run through the UHF and VHF frequencies that the allied task forces used to communicate. The technician spoke some English, enough to get the drift of remarks, but tonight he was having his problems.

All the tactical transmissions among the ships and SEALs and planes were encrypted. About the only plain-language transmissions he could intercept were aircraft control freqs in use around the ship, and were quite useless to him, most of the time. Other than the fact that certain aircraft were airborne, and how many, a nonexpert listening to this stuff heard most of it as useless tidbits, and numbers could easily be over- or understated to confuse eavesdropping baddies.

However, tonight the technician had found and was listening to Jake Grafton’s plain-language discussion with Toad Tarkington. Grafton told the admiral afloat that he wanted two helos, all the clean water they could carry, soap, medicine for intestinal problems and a doctor. He wanted the choppers to land on the roof of the fortress, off-load their supplies and evacuate sick people. The technician translated as much of that as he could for Ragnar and his men.

Then Grafton got into the amount of money Ragnar wanted. Toad read Grafton snippets of messages that, he said, were pouring out of Washington. After fifteen minutes, Ragnar learned that Grafton had the authority to agree to pay two hundred million in cash to Ragnar, but the money wouldn’t arrive aboard ship until the following day. Toad recommended a delivery Friday morning, after Grafton had agreed on the amount and the method of transport of the prisoners after they were released.

What Ragnar didn’t know, of course, was that all this was merely good theater. Still, he and his men discussed the conversation they had overheard, and were pleased. They had won. The allies were going to cave. They were going to be filthy rich.

Two miles inland, at the headquarters of the Shabab in the village beside the river, Yousef el-Din was also listening.

He and his lieutenants made their plans. If Ragnar and his pirates were dead when the two hundred million arrived, they could collect it in their place and use it to fund jihad. The irony of using infidel money to buy weapons from infidels to kill infidels was delicious to contemplate.

Of course, the Shabab would kill all the prisoners. “God’s curse be upon the infidels,” says the holy Koran. “Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Deal firmly with them. Know that God is with the righteous.”

This triumph would be the ultimate terror strike against the Great Satan. The power of the Shabab would be on display for all the world to see. America and her allies would react violently, of course, and that bloodletting would unite the faithful worldwide in the ultimate jihad, the final cataclysmic battle between good and evil.

Since they fought God’s battles, the warriors of the true faith would win, once and for all. Their reward in Paradise would be great indeed. The Koran promised endless virgins to deflower and boys to bugger, prospects that appealed mightily to Yousef el-Din, who did his best to anticipate his reward right here on earth.

Yousef el-Din and his lieutenants could scarcely contain themselves.

Allah akbar
!

*   *   *

After a while Jake Grafton and High Noon strolled into Ragnar’s building to see the man. No doubt they were going to negotiate some more on how much ransom the good guys were going to pay. I was sure Grafton would be a super-hard sell yet eventually capitulate, filling Ragnar’s hard little heart with greedy hope … but, of course, I now knew that Grafton intended to pay nothing, nada, zip point zilch more than the million he had already laid on Ragnar.

Knowing Grafton, I suspected he would also figure out a way to get most of that million back. No doubt he planned a tiny role for me in that repossession.

I sat on a handy rock and surveyed Ragnar’s building. The Italians built it, I knew, back when this was Italian Somalia. Balconies faced the sea, but the other three sides had only windows. The walls had the usual decorations, little ledges and cornices. I estimated the distance between them. Yes, the building could be free-climbed.

The windows were bright with electric lights. Obviously the building had a generator. As far as I could see, it was the only one in town. Everyone else had candles and lanterns to keep the night away, so the town was much darker than one would see in Europe or the Americas.

I sat watching the crowd as the evening deepened. One of the television reporters was busy chattering into the cameras as the portable lights illuminated the scene. The other two reporters were already up at the fortress. Hordes of local kids stood behind the reporter, mugging for the cameras. The technician running the diesel generators was passing out candy bars to the kids. He tried to make the goodies last, but soon he was out and the kids abandoned him to his noisy machine.

A few entrepreneurs had set up grills and were selling food. I wasn’t tempted. The locals ate the stuff with their fingers. I didn’t see a single Somali woman in the crowd. Lots of kids, men with AKs and unarmed men just wandering around, but no women. Every now and then one of the kids or men would relieve themselves in the sand. Or on the plaza.

A bonfire burned in the plaza. The flickering light made the scene look like something out of Dante.

The hot wind blew gently off the desert, and waves flopped on the beach. By all appearances, it was just another night in Somalia.

Up on the point I could see some light leaking out the gun ports of the old fortress. Eight hundred fifty people hunkered in there …

I stood up, dusted off my fanny and hoisted my backpack, and walked across the plaza toward the road that would take me up the hill. I wanted to be there when the helos arrived.

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

Susan B. Grant
was the name of the freighter lying in the mud below the fort on the north side of the harbor. The slope of the hill came down to the beach at perhaps a thirty-degree angle, and the beach was perhaps fifty yards wide. The six-thousand-ton bulk carrier lay two hundred yards from the beach. She had been anchored there in June. Her bulk had caused the discharge from the small river to slow there, and silt to accumulate. In addition, the natural movement of sand southward along the beach was disrupted, so sand mixed with the silt.
Susan B. Grant
now rested solidly on the silt-sand mixture, which was building up around her hull. At most, only ten feet of water circulated around her rusty sides.

Ten feet of water was plenty for the SEALs. Five of them swam in after darkness had fallen and used grappling hooks to scale the seaward side of
Susan B. Grant
. Once aboard, they began inspecting the ship, searching for pirates and weapons and anything else that looked interesting.

Petty Officer First Class Doggy Reed was the senior man, and he kept
Chosin Reservoir
Ops appraised of his progress. Thirty minutes after he and his mates had boarded, he was convinced that the SEALs were the only people aboard. They went into the hold and began testing the cargo. It was fertilizer, all right, with a lot of ammonium nitrate mixed in. A few simple chemical tests proved that.

The bad news was that hundreds of tons appeared to be missing. The stuff had apparently been shoveled out by hand; mounds of it were strewn about the weather deck. Not to worry, however; at least five thousand tons remained aboard in the holds.

Someone had squirted a large quantity of diesel fuel from the ship’s bunkers into the fertilizer, perhaps a hundred tons of it, and the fuel had been absorbed by the fertilizer, discoloring it and giving it a distinctive petroleum odor.

The people who had rigged this crude bomb then placed five explosive charges to ignite it, charges that would be triggered by a radio signal. The radio receiver was there, the trigger mechanism, batteries, a capacitor and the explosive charges, the detonators, to ignite the whole mess.

Simple, crude and effective, Doggy Reed concluded, and relayed that opinion over the radio to the ship.

The SEALs then set about taking the pirates’ radio receiver and controller out of the system. They merely unhooked the wires and carried the radio unit topside.

While his men finished the work, Doggy Reed went out on deck for a careful squint at the fort. Just for kicks, he used a laser range finder to establish the exact distance that separated the ship and fort. Three hundred twelve yards.

Oh boy. If the AN in the ship’s hold exploded, the blast would probably collapse the nearest walls of the fort, which would bring the ceiling down and bury anyone inside.

Reed turned his night-vision goggles toward the town of Eyl, which lay about a mile away. The explosion might well flatten Eyl, too.

It would take a callous man to set off this bomb, Reed decided. He wondered who had rigged it, the pirates or the Shabab?

Five thousand tons of ammonium nitrate. God almighty!

His next thought followed that one. Had his team found all the original radio triggers? If they missed even one …

*   *   *

Aboard
Sultan of the Seas,
Mike Rosen was getting frustrated. His ship had swung enough on the tide that he had a quartering view of the Eyl plaza from his stateroom. He saw the television reporting teams’ lights, and the bonfire, and knew in his bones that something important was happening. Unfortunately, High Noon hadn’t been aboard all afternoon to escort him to the e-com center, so he had missed his evening Internet fix. He also hadn’t had anything to eat since he gobbled some stale bread this morning, and he was hungry.

It was Tuesday night. The pirates’ deadline wasn’t until Friday noon, but there must be news on the Internet, maybe even e-mails from the newsroom of his radio station, about whether someone was going to pay the ransom. Or talk Ragnar into joining civilization.