Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Janson Option (Paul Janson) (2 page)

Maxammed tore after them before they accidentally killed valuable hostages, or damaged equipment vital to running the yacht. Taking her was only a start. His battle to keep her had just begun.

The shooting stopped.

He heard women scream.

Bounding up the stairs past a window, he saw one of his men covering rich Europeans in a fancy lounge. He continued up a final flight to the bridge, swaggered into the sharp cold of the air conditioning, and drank in the huge, glassed-in command center. He could see out over the ocean in every direction and forward and back the full length of the yacht. There was a helicopter in front, and a bigger one in the middle—a magnificent Sikorsky—and a swimming pool sparkling like a blue gem.

Farole, his cadaverous second in command, was pointing his weapon at a middle-aged man and a striking blond woman. Maxammed had been shown their photographs, and he recognized his two most valuable hostages: the American who owned the yacht, and the rich Italian countess. Somali women were famous for their extraordinary beauty. There were truly none in Africa—none in the world—more beautiful. But this countess woman would give them a run for their money, even wide-eyed, pale, and trembling.

Maxammed gestured for Farole to move the hostages out of his way and strode over to the ship’s instrument panels to shut down the GPS, radios, radar—any instrument that would send out signals that naval patrols could track. He knew what he was looking for, and it took only moments to unplug the ship from the world it came from. Then he put the engines on manual control and throttled them back so they could haul their skiff aboard.

The middle-aged American took Maxammed for the pirates’ leader and turned on him, red-faced with anger. “Do you have any idea who you’re fucking with?”

Having grown up in cities, Maxammed spoke several languages: Somali, Italian, and English; and originally from the coast, he could converse in Swahili when he had to deal with Arabs or East African mercenaries. English was his favorite, being riddled with puns and multiple meanings that were tailor-made for Somali wordplay. But he had the least occasion to speak it, so it took a moment for the meaning of the angry American’s “who you’re fucking with” to sink in. When it did, Maxammed grinned with pleasure.

“I am
fucking
with you. You are
flirting
. With death.”

“You’re the one flirting with death!” the American shouted back. “I paid your pirate king for safe passage.”

“Meet the new king,” said Maxammed. “Bashir retired.”

“I spoke to him yesterday.”

“But not today.”

“I’ll get him on the phone right now.” Adler pawed a satellite phone from its clip on his belt.

Maxammed leveled his SAR at the patch of skin between the American’s eyebrows. “Not today.”

“You going to shoot your richest hostage?” the American shouted.

“I do not need all of you,” Maxammed replied. “If your insurance pays only ten percent of the price of your yacht, I will be the richest man in Somalia.”

The American raised his hands.

Maxammed shouted orders.

Two of his men herded the rich people he had seen below up to the bridge.

Maxammed looked them over carefully. There were two couples and a single woman. She was tall and dark-haired with arms and legs as thin as sticks. She was the French model. One of the couples was very old, the man frail, the woman hard-faced and haughty. They were the United Nations employees who had retired long ago—not rich, but related by marriage to the rich owner. The other couple was younger, in their fifties, and clutching hands. The woman’s arms clanked with bracelets. A band of white skin on the man’s suntanned wrist showed where his watch had been; a bulge in his trouser pocket indicated, Maxammed guessed, a hastily hidden gold Rolex.

All of them looked fearful. None would resist.

The rest of his men brought the crew at gunpoint.

Maxammed counted six guests and nineteen crew: chief engineer, first mate, bosun, cook and helpers, deckhands, stewardesses, and helicopter pilot.

“Where is the captain?”

No one spoke.

Maxammed searched their faces and selected the youngest crew member, a yellow-haired girl wearing a white stewardess costume with a short skirt that exposed her thighs. He pressed his gun to her forehead.

“Where is the captain?”

The girl began to weep. Tears streaked her blue eye makeup.

A middle-aged Chinese in a stained cook’s uniform spoke for her. “Captain locked in safe room.”

“Where?”

“By engine room.”

“Does he have a satellite phone?”

The cook hesitated.

Maxammed said, “You have one second to save this girl’s life.”

“Yes, he has a phone.”

Maxammed ordered Farole and two men below. “Tell the captain that I will shoot the stewardess if he does not come out. Hurry!”

They waited in silence, the crew exchanging glances, the guests staring at the deck as if afraid to meet one another’s eyes. The blond beauty, Maxammed noticed, had withdrawn into herself, either frozen with fear or simply resigned. His men returned with the yacht’s vigorous-looking American captain and handed Maxammed the sat phone.

“Who did you call?”

“Who do you think?”

“Tell him, for chrissakes!” shouted the owner. “You’ll get us all killed.”

“I called the United States Navy.”

“Did you give them our position?”

“What do you think?” the captain asked sullenly.

“I think you put a lot of innocent people’s lives at risk,” said Maxammed. He turned to Farole and ordered in Somali, “Load the captain and his crew into a tender. Take the boat’s radios and wreck the motor.”

“You’re letting them go?”

“We’ll keep the rich people.”

“But the rest of them?”

“Too many to guard and feed. Plus, we’ll look good on CNN.”

Farole grinned. “Humanitarians.”

“Besides, who would pay big money for crew?” Maxammed grinned back. The practical reasons were true, but there was more that he did not confide to Farole. This rich prize of a ship and wealthy hostages would make him a potent warlord in his strife-torn nation, more than just a pirate. A pirate who freed innocent workers and held on to the rich was a cut above—a Robin Hood, a man of consequence.

“Give them plenty of food and water, but don’t forget to wreck the motors. By the time they’re picked up, we’ll be safe in Eyl.”

A
LLEN
A
DLER WAITED
to make his move until the pirates got distracted launching the tender. Putting the tender in the water involved slowing
Tarantula
to three knots, and opening the sea cocks to flood the well deck, then opening the stern port so the tender could drift out. It could all be done from the bridge, where the release controls were stationed by the big back window, if you knew what you were doing. To his surprise, they did. Sailors were sailors, he supposed, even stinking pirates. They turned on the work lamps, bathing the stern in light, and went at it as neatly as if Captain Billy were running the operation.

Adler edged toward the stairs.

What the pirates didn’t know, what no one else on his ship knew, not even the captain, was that
Tarantula
had in the bottom of her hull a one-man escape raft that could be launched under the ship in total secrecy and inflated on the surface. The raft carried food and water for a week, as well as a radio, GPS, and a sat phone. The reason no one knew was that there was no point in having a secret escape hatch if it wasn’t a secret; otherwise the crew would be fighting to get inside it. He had rehearsed this move numerous times, sometimes for real, sometimes in his head. It was vital not to panic and to remember to lock doors and hatches behind him as he ran.

All the pirates and all his guests were watching the release of the tender in the work lights. The stern port opened. The boat started sliding out the back and into the water behind the ship. Adler ran.

Maxammed and Farole saw him reflected in the glass, whirled as one, striking on instinct as cats would claw at motion. Maxammed fired two shots before he realized the fool had nowhere to go. It was too late. Shatteringly loud in the confined space, they knocked Adler’s legs out from under him. He skidded across the teak deck and crashed into the railing that surrounded the stairs.

“I hope you didn’t kill him,” Maxammed said to Farole.

“We both shot him.”

“No, I pulled my gun up. Only you shot him.”

Farole shook his head, knowing that was not true. He changed the argument, saying, “But you said you didn’t need him.”

“To frighten him, you idiot. He’s the richest of all.”

“We still have the ship.”

“If the ship is worth half a billion dollars,” Maxammed asked scornfully, “how much is its owner worth? Pray you didn’t kill him.”

Adler clutched the back of his thigh in both hands and tried to sit up. His face was slack with shock. He looked around the bridge, cast a disbelieving look at the pirates and hostages grouped at the aft windows. Then he sank back on the deck, still holding his leg.

Maxammed watched the rich people gather around him, the women holding hands to their mouths, the men staring wide-eyed. “Oh my God,” whispered one. “Look at the blood.”

There was so much blood on the deck that Adler appeared to be floating on it. He looked, Allegra Helms thought, like a swimmer doing the backstroke in a red pool. The New York woman whispered, “We have to stop the bleeding. It severed an artery. See how it’s pumping?”

It was spurting rhythmically, the pulsing against his trousers as if a mouse trapped in the linen were trying to batter its way out.

“Tourniquet,” said the white-haired diplomat. “He needs a tourniquet.”

Maxammed shouldered them aside and knelt in the blood. He unbuckled Adler’s belt, yanked it out of the loops, dragged his trousers down to his knees, shoved one end of his belt under his leg, pulled it above the ragged wound the bullet had furrowed in his flesh, slipped the tongue through the buckle, and pulled it tight.

The blood kept spurting. He couldn’t hold the belt tightly enough.

“Use this,” said Allegra, handing over her scarf. Maxammed tied it around Alder’s thigh and thrust his SAR in the loop and turned it like a lever, drawing the cloth so tightly that it bit into the flesh. At last the blood stopped spurting.

“Hold this here,” he told her.

She knelt beside him in the blood and held the gun in both hands. She fancied that she could feel Adler’s heart beating through the steel. It felt very weak, and she was struck by her ignorance. She knew not even the most basic first aid, and she was helpless to save his life.

He opened his eyes and they locked on hers. She felt the beating slow. He tried to speak, and she leaned closer to hear. “Hey, Countess? Don’t hate your father for groping the servants.”

In a moment of insight as sharp as it was unexpected, Allegra Helms realized it was probably the gentlest thing the man had ever said, and she whispered as intimately as pillow talk, “I don’t hate him. He’s just not my favorite relation.”

“Who’s your favorite?”

“Cousin Adolfo. Since we were children.”

“Kissing cous—?” Adler’s body convulsed. Allegra lost her grip on the tourniquet. She tried desperately to tighten it again. Then she saw that it didn’t matter. Where his blood had spurted, it now just dripped.

“Oh my God,” said someone.

Allegra stood up and backed away. But she could not tear her eyes from Adler’s face. The slackness had vanished. Dead, he looked more like himself: aggressive, and confident that he was invulnerable. She was truly afraid for the first time since the attack began. With Adler dead and Captain Billy sent away in the boat, she could not imagine anyone else on the yacht who could protect them.

The ridiculously imperious wife of the retired UN diplomat began to cry. Her husband patted her awkwardly on her shoulder. Hank and Susan, the New York couple, who were constantly holding hands, were gripping so tightly their fingers turned white. Poor Monique was biting her lips and shaking her head.

The pirate spoke. “This is your lesson. Do what I tell you. No one makes trouble. No one else dies.”

Allegra Helms stiffened. She had been afraid. She had felt useless. But suddenly she was outraged. “You didn’t have to kill him.”

The pirate shouted back, “No more trouble, no more die.”

“Where could he run? You have his ship. He had no place to hide.”

“No more trouble, no more die,” Maxammed repeated. To Farole he said, “Punch in a course for Eyl.”

“Can’t.”

“Why not? You said you have run ships.”

“I have run ships. But the instruments are all dead.”

“What about the radar?”

“Burned up, it seems,” said Farole, who had studied electrical engineering. “I bet the captain fried it with some kind of electric surge.”

“No radar?” Maxammed echoed, his heart sinking. The radar was vital. They could steer by compass, and even without a compass the fishermen among his crew could navigate home by the shape of the swells and the light in the sky. But they needed the radar to warn them of the Navy patrols.

“Where is that boat?” he asked angrily.

“Drifted away.”

“Find it.”

“Why?”

“Run it down! Drown that devil captain.”

Farole laid a hand on Maxammed’s arm. “My friend, we must get the ship to Eyl. We have no time for revenge.”

Maxammed’s face was tight with rage, eyes bulging, lips stretched across his teeth. Farole prayed to God that he would come to his senses before he exploded like a volcano.

“Humanitarians, my friend. Remember?”

48°9' N, 103°37' W
Bakken Oilfield
North Dakota, near Montana

P
aul Janson steered a drunk out of the path of an ambulance racing from the Frack Up Bar & Grill’s parking lot. Then he shouldered through a crowd of derrick hands, pipe wranglers, and rig mechanics who were cheering two men fighting in a cage made of chain-link fence.

The night was cold and the air stank of diesel exhaust from the trucks men left running to warm up in between bouts. A hundred-foot pillar of fire burning waste gas off a flare stack behind the bar lighted the cage bright as day.

The bigger fighter had blood dripping from his nose into his chest hair.

A bare-legged woman in a short down jacket circled the ring with a cardboard marking Round Two. Phones flashed as fans took her picture. When she stepped out and closed the gate, Janson asked, “Where’s the sign-up sheet?”

“Nowhere. Dudes on law enforcement radar won’t write their particulars. You want to fight, get in line.”

“Where’s the line?”

“The end of it’s that truck driver getting his head stomped by the dancing Chinaman. Cranked-up dude put three in the ambulance. Everyone else decided to call it a night.”

The “dancing Chinaman” was a rangy, six-foot-two Chinese-American bouncing in a frenzy on the balls of his feet. He had a head full of shaggy dreadlocks that he shook like a mop, and he was cranked up, indeed, his eyes yawning wide with crystal meth. But his body was rock hard, and he moved, Janson observed, with the lethal grace of a martial-arts sensei.

He was showboating, playing to the crowd. A blazing-fast backflip drew cheers when he bounced high off the canvas, turned over in the air, and landed on his feet in icy command. A second backflip landed him closer to the truck driver. The driver—inches taller and sixty pounds heavier—lunged, throwing skillful combinations.

The Chinese-American jabbed him twice in a heartbeat and bounced out of range, leaving a circle of cuts and bruised flesh around his eye. The truck driver lunged again, willing to take punishment to get close enough to bring his size and weight to bear. The Chinese-American swirled into another of his seemingly impossible backflips. This time he landed on one foot, off balance, it appeared, until his other foot rocketed up in a shoulder-high kick that dropped the trucker with a heel to his jaw.

The crowd whooped and whistled. Cell phones flashed. The bare-legged woman signaled her assistants to carry the loser out of the cage. The winner cursed the crowd, daring men to fight.

Paul Janson took off his windbreaker and stepped into the cage. The floor was slippery with blood.

The Chinese-American greeted him with a backflip and ran in circles, taunting Janson. “Gray dude? What you doing in here? Run away, old man.”

Janson spoke softly.

“
What?
Who are you? How the
fuck
you know my name?” The meth made Denny Chin too impatient to wait for an answer. He jumped, levitated into another backflip, and ran circles around Janson, herding him into the middle of the cage. He flipped again, landed on one foot, and launched a kick.

Janson stepped close and hit him hard.

The dreadlocked fighter landed on his back. He tried to sit up. Janson dropped onto him. The man’s neck was strong but not thick. A broad hand spanned both carotid arteries. When Chin stopped struggling, Janson hoisted him over his shoulder and carried him out of the cage.

The woman yelled, “Where you taking him?”

“Home.”

“ASC
DON’T FUCK AROUND
” was an oil-patch homage to American Synergy Corporation’s management standards. There was nothing likeable about the arrogant sons of bitches, but no one worked harder or smarter than ASC’s 68,000 employees.

In the dead of the night in Houston, Texas—1,800 miles south of the Bakken fields—seven men and two women to whom those 68,000 answered “sir,” and “ma’am,” quick-marched into a secure conference room atop the Silo, their round thirty-story bronze-glass headquarters tower beside the Sam Houston Tollway.

Night meetings didn’t waste valuable daytime. And while the Manual of Employee Conduct cited no dress code for post-m
idnight
appearance, not one of the division presidents taking their seats at the rosewood table would have looked out of place at a Federal Reserve Board meeting or a funeral.

Kingsman Helms, the tall, handsome, thirty-eight-year-old president of the Petroleum Division, set the standard. His shirt was crisp, his gray windowpane suit pressed, his English bench-made cordovan wingtips polished to a “gentleman’s buff.” A linen handkerchief raised three equal points from his breast pocket. A red necktie decorated with Petroleum Club of Houston sunbursts was knotted dead-center at his throat. Helms’s Petroleum Division led in revenue and earnings, which made him the second wealthiest at the table, but he was just as hungry as his rivals for the power that eluded them all.

The wealthiest, their reclusive chief executive officer and board chairman Bruce Danforth—known to the tiny inner circle allowed in his presence as the Buddha—was rich beyond counting and doled out power with maddening calculation. For forty years, Danforth had hammered a conglomerate of Texas oil drillers, producers, pipelines, and refineries into a free-booting global enterprise that wielded more power than all but a few independent nations. He was pushing ninety now, and looked every year of it, with sunken cheeks, wrinkled brow, and hooded eyes. But those eyes were clear—blazing like twin high beams between a thick crown of snow-white hair and a vandyke beard still speckled with black. And his heart and his lungs seemed so strong that his division presidents feared he would never die.

The Buddha’s hearing was acute, the sharpest in the room, and when his mind wandered, those he frightened most knew they had made the mistake of boring him. His voice was reedy yet commanded total attention, even when he opened a meeting with the credo everyone had heard a thousand times before.

“If you think oil money is easy money, you aren’t making enough of it.”

Each division had sixty seconds to report what it was doing to make more of it. Kingsman Helms went last, the place of honor, though he was acutely aware that Douglas Case, American Synergy’s president of Global Security—as rugged a man as Helms had ever seen in a wheelchair—was seated next to the Buddha. Supposedly, there was more room at the head of the table to park Case’s wheelchair. But the chair on the Buddha’s right had been Helms’s chair before the Isle de Foree debacle—a recent defeat still seared in the Buddha’s memory.

Hopes had run high when Helms’s Petroleum Division scientists discovered the mother of all petroleum reserves in the deep waters off Isle de Foree. ASC had almost won control of the West African island nation by staging a coup. If they hadn’t dropped the ball, the corporation would have had exclusive access to the “ground resources” of a Gulf of Guinea version of Saudi Arabia, minus the misery of Arab politics. There had been plenty of blame to go around both inside and outside the corporation. Kingsman Helms had dodged as much as he could, but the cold reality was staring across the table: before Isle de Foree, the Security Division hadn’t even been allowed in the room. After, Doug Case—guardian against cyberattack, headstrong dictators, whistle-blowers, and rebel assaults on Nigerian offshore oilfields—sat beside the Buddha, with full division privileges.

The Buddha interrupted Helms halfway through his sixty seconds.

“Yes, yes, yes, but where have you been the last two weeks?”

“At undisclosed locations.” Helms smiled easily. Danforth knew full well he was working East Africa in general and Somalia in particular. But the old man loved his hocus-pocus spy talk, having staked a career in clandestine federal service, a normal man’s lifetime ago, before turning his ambition to oil.

The Buddha did not return Helms’s smile. “I mean closer to home, Kingsman. Where in hell—”

The phone in Helms’s breast pocket rang behind the folds of his handkerchief.

Anger blazed in the Buddha’s eyes. “The rule is no calls, but for life and death.”

Helms snatched up his phone. The assistant who was calling him, the matronly Kate Clark, whom he had poached from the top tier of Doug Case’s own Global Security Division, knew the rules, and he trusted her judgment.

“What?”

What she said was so unexpected, so absolutely out of left field, that he could not breathe more than a single whispered word. “Pirates?”

None of the division presidents, not even Case, heard him.

But the bat-eared Buddha had, and, as Helms walked out of the meeting, Danforth beckoned him close and muttered, “Deal with it. Quickly. Before the goddamned Chinese eat your lunch.”

Helms hurried out the door and heard the old man raise his voice. “Meeting’s over, everybody—Doug, you stay.”

Helms looked back. Doug Case was wheeling his chair closer to the old man, and Helms would have given a year of his life to hear what they were going to talk about.

D
OUGLAS
C
ASE WAITED
until the last division president out closed the door behind her.

“May I ask what that was about?”

The Buddha ignored the question and stared at Case. Case dropped his gaze, tacitly admitting that he had crossed a forbidden line. He waited, staring at his lap. When at last the old man spoke, what he said came straight out of the blue.

“Earlier today, I had an interesting conversation with Yousef.”

Doug Case sat up straight, stunned with admiration. That the Buddha could continue bargaining with Yousef in Italy while he was consumed with ASC petroleum prospects in Somalia was a powerful reminder that no global oil corporation CEO in the world could work with more balls in the air. Of course, the Buddha and Yousef’s family went way, way back.

American Synergy Corporation had done business with the dictator since before the Cub was born. The Buddha had enriched Yousef’s father—and himself—underwriting infrastructure in good times and trading embargoed oil as the old man got crazier. When the so-called Arab Spring blew their cozy arrangement to hell, the Buddha had quietly, secretly, persuaded the Italian government to contract with Paul Janson’s Catspaw Associates to exfiltrate Yousef before they hanged him from an oil rig.

The Italians had hoped to get credit for offering asylum that would end the fight. The Buddha had taken the longer view, convinced that Yousef was the one member of the family with the brains and ambition to take power back when the revolution fell apart.

“I admire Yousef,” said Case. “He’s a patient planner, not a reactor. And he knows what he wants.”

The Buddha raised a cynical eyebrow. “Yousef wants what he thinks should be his inheritance—his own country afloat on oil. At the same time he feels the International Criminal Court breathing down his neck.”

“I heard he lit out from Sardinia. Is he back?”

Another question the old man would not answer. He stared Case down again.

“I promised Yousef that ASC will offer legitimacy, both in worldwide public relations and in lobbying Congress. Yousef promised to return the favor with access. And this time he will keep order—as he tried to for his psychotic fool of a father—with high-tech security and secret police to jail and assassinate the opposition.”

“You were right to rescue him.”

“Damn right. This time around Yousef will be in charge and no longer serving his idiot father. And I don’t mind telling you, Doug, you were right about Paul Janson.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Doug Case’s part in the rescue had been to convince the Buddha that no private operator was better qualified to snatch Yousef from chaos than Paul Janson. Janson’s research was the best, his analytic skills the sharpest. Janson had taken the rescue job, despite misgivings about Yousef, because it had offered “white-hat” good-guy results. A swift end to the bloody civil war would not only save countless lives but would also keep the dictator’s arsenal of shoulder-fired rockets and heavy machine guns out of the hands of the Sahara Desert jihadists who would turn them in a flash on Algeria and Mali.

“Janson will regret taking the job,” said the Buddha, in a voice suddenly harsh. “Can you still guarantee that he doesn’t know who got it for him?”

“Guaranteed. Even if the Italians talked too much, they knew only middlemen. Neither you, nor me, nor ASC left any prints. Janson has no idea we set it up.”

“I was surprised at the time that he took it.”

“Optimism is Janson’s Achilles’ heel,” said Case.

Paul Janson had to have known that Yousef was no fool, known too that Yousef was even less a white hat. But hope for a good-guy outcome had caused him to underestimate Yousef’s ambition.