The Aden Effect (2 page)

“Of course, Faisal. Is there anything else?”

“Yes. Do you still have relatives in England?”

“I do, Faisal. Two cousins in Birmingham. They have many friends.”

“Birmingham,” he pondered. “Yes, Birmingham is far enough yet also close enough. Are they capable?”

“One fought in Mogadishu.”

“That does not tell me he is capable.”

“For enough money they will do whatever you want.”

“Good. There is a man in Scotland I wish them to kill. I will pay them and their friends well.”

“They will do it. What is the man's name?”

“Connor Stark.”

T
he air-conditioning wasn't working—again. It was the fourth time in two weeks, but with the summer solstice weeks behind them she could at least look forward to shorter days ahead. Caroline Jaha Sumner kicked off her shoes and ran her fingers through her short black hair. They came away wet with perspiration. The light blue shirt and white cotton skirt that set off her dark skin were wilted and damp, but at least she could shed her summer-weight jacket, relieved that she had no meetings scheduled with the locals today.

“Madam Ambassador?” said Lt. Col. Raphael Tyler, drawing her attention away from her discomfort and back to the two men seated in her office. The Marine managed to look stiff and starched even when sitting. “We don't seem to be making any progress in our efforts to stop the violence. If anything, it's worse than it was before you arrived two months ago. Two bombings near the embassy and seven attacks by pirates on the oil rigs. If we can't stop this, the Yemenis are going to run out of oil in four or five years. And then what will happen to this country?”

Sumner rose and walked over to the bulletproof window, wishing she could open it for a breath of air. The view wasn't much, but she could see one of the nearby marketplaces. The booths were shuttered at this hour while the shopkeepers were home for lunch, but the street was still crowded with men in long white robes and shrouded women. The bustling street seemed strangely silent viewed from the confines of the fortified, soundproof office.

Not for the first time C. J. wondered if she had done the right thing in coming here. She had a unique relationship with the administration—with the president—and could have selected other assignments, a subcabinet position
at the State Department or a preferred ambassadorship like France. Instead she had chosen a difficult assignment in one of the least stable parts of the world. She brushed away more perspiration and walked back toward her desk, gently sliding her fingers along its polished maple surface. It reminded her of the varnished maple on the back of her mother's revered cello. She curled her bare toes into the hand-woven silk Persian rug and then sat on the front of the desk rather than returning to her chair behind it.

She had faced challenges in the Foreign Service, on Capitol Hill, and in the White House, and had overcome all of them. This assignment was not going to be her first failure. Sumner gently twisted the thin gold necklace she had purchased at the
suk
in Bahrain during the layover on her way to Yemen. The elderly merchant had claimed that she looked like his youngest daughter, like a
habesha
of Ethiopia or Eritrea. Her large, wide-set brown eyes were fringed with long lashes that seemed even more prominent in contrast to her thin eyebrows, small nose, and wide forehead. Her slim build was due to genetics, but the strict exercise regimen she had maintained since she was a high school field and track athlete would have mitigated any weight she picked up—she had surprised more than one man with the amount of food a slender five-foot-tall woman could consume at a good restaurant. She had smiled gratefully at the merchant who knew how to work a customer and paid half his asking price.

“Raphael,” she said to the defense attaché. The subtle flattening of the Marine's lips was the only sign of his displeasure with the informality she had insisted on using since she assumed her post. “I think we need to look at the whole picture again.”

“Colonel, may I?” asked Bill Maddox.

“Go ahead,” Sumner cut in before the Marine officer could respond. Bill was an old friend, and she trusted him to be both objective and supportive.

“Madam Ambassador, we're in for some real challenges in the next few months.”

“‘We,' Bill? Or your company?”

“‘We' as in all of us. You. My company. Our government. Even our military.”

She swung her dark, well-toned legs against the desk, her toes brushing across the rug.

Maddox continued. “Maddox International has been hired only to build the oil rigs, and even that has been tougher than expected because of all the attacks on our supply ships. If the Yemenis don't think we can finish the job,
they may award the rights to extract the oil to someone else—someone who may not act in the best interest of the United States.”

“Bill, when you started arming yourselves a couple of years ago, you should have thought about the consequences—about the way the Yemenis would view it.”

“It was my legal right to develop a maritime security firm that would look out for my company's people, platforms, and materials.”

“And defense contractors did so well in Iraq with the local populations during the war,” she sighed. “I saw the report, Bill. Your security force's attack on the dhows last year is one of the reasons the Yemenis won't talk to me now.”

“My ships defend our people and our investments because the U.S. Navy isn't here to do it. The captain of my ship did exactly what he should have done, and as he had done several times before. The pirates approached our oil platforms and started firing at our people. We chased them off, and when the pirates decided to fight, our ship responded in self-defense.”

“Perhaps I could interject something here,” said the Marine colonel, his eyes coming to rest on C. J. after following the verbal exchange like an observer at a tennis match. “Mr. Maddox is right, ma'am. Central Command has determined that private interests are now on their own to defend themselves for the immediate future. We don't have the soldiers available to do it. And with our recent naval cat-and-mouse games with Iran and North Korea, we don't have the ships or aircraft to patrol this area either. Since the administration decided to reassign all the assets of Combined Task Force 151—the unit that used to combat piracy here—the companies that do business here are SOL. Our primary mission now, ma'am, is to diplomatically engage with the Yemenis to secure continued rights to the oil fields south of Socotra before someone else does.”

“I know that,” she said patiently. “But part of that is convincing them that we can do the job whatever happens. What if something goes wrong? Or already has gone wrong. What if yesterday's earthquake had affected the offshore wells Maddox International has already dug, Bill? I know we need the oil. But even if we get the rights to pump it, we still have to secure the platforms.”

“That's why we need the Yemenis to work with us to secure those waters,” Maddox said.

“Reaching out to the Yemeni government hasn't worked, gentlemen. They still won't meet with me. I need a way in.” She paused for a moment to think and seemed to come to a conclusion. “Raphael, would you please excuse us? I think Bill and I need to discuss a few things.”

The Marine rose and left the office without saying a word.

“He's right about one thing, Bill.”

“Only one thing, Madam Ambassador?”

“No one else is in here, Bill. Please drop the ‘madam ambassador.' ‘C. J.' is fine. It's not like we haven't worked together before.”

“That was more than a decade ago, C. J. And it didn't exactly go well, remember?”

She let his comment slide by. “Bill, the fact is, Washington won't do much to help us. Yemen is just one more place that never gets covered by the nightly news. We're on our own, but we can do some good here. It's why I came.”

“Maybe, we can do our job better when we
don't
make the news,” he said.

She swung her dangling legs against the front of the desk. “So far, we're not doing the job at all. I've tried everything, used every trick I learned on the Hill. And I've gotten nowhere. The one advantage we used to have here isn't currently at my disposal.” She stared at him, half-hoping he wouldn't answer.

“Connor Stark will not return here, C. J.”

“Maybe not willingly,” she fired back with a determined look that Bill Maddox recognized all too well. “I need the agreement, and that means talking to the right people. I read my predecessor's reports. I don't know what the secret to Connor's success here was, but I know he negotiated all the agreements you had with the Yemenis. Can't you ask him to come back?”

“It's not that I can't. It's that I won't,” Bill replied turning his back on the ambassador. “He and I agreed that he would set up the maritime security forces for my company and then he was out of here. Once our first oil platform was completed, he was done. And that was before you came on the scene, C. J. There's no way he'd come back if he knew you were here.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We need him, Bill.”

“C. J., leave it alone and find another way.”

She paused, contemplating the few remaining options open to her. “Too bad,” she finally said. “My mission—this mission—takes priority. Thanks, Bill, we're done here. You know your way out of the building,” she said dismissively as she reached for the phone.

When the person on the other end picked up, she didn't even bother with a greeting.

“I need a favor.”

After speaking briefly with the harried-looking flight attendant, the swarthy, black-haired man took a seat next to a woman in her fifties who could barely wedge herself into the passenger jet's narrow seat. He hated coach class. With packing his few belongings, cleaning out his apartment, and filling out inane administrative forms, he hadn't slept in nearly two days. He sank into the seat and closed his eyes, but couldn't block out the piercing brightness of the sun rising over the Capitol dome. He waved his finger at his seatmate in a motion that suggested she slide the window curtain down. She ignored him.

Ten minutes into the flight, he was still trying to settle in and get comfortable, but in his rush to be seated he had neglected to remove his jacket. It was an annoying blunder for someone so fastidious in his dress. He hated wrinkles. Fidgeting, he pinched the bridge of his aquiline nose, moving his head from side to side in continued disbelief at his bad fortune.

“Ouagadougou,” he sighed, more loudly than he had intended. “Ouagadougou.”

In his peripheral vision he saw his seatmate's thick neck snap her oversized head toward him and realized that she had heard the words meant only for himself. The concern in her face made it evident that she wasn't curious. No, she was afraid. He had seen it all too often before. His mere appearance was enough to strike fear into Westerners. Before the divorce, his first wife had taken to sneering at his dark skin and well-groomed goatee. That he was of Persian and not Arab heritage didn't matter to his seatmate—or to his wife, for that matter. He suspected the gray-haired woman next to him would have just as easily confused a turbaned Indian Sikh for a Saudi Islamic fundamentalist. Damien Golzari sighed and stood to remove his jacket, forgetting for one crucial moment the shoulder holster he was wearing beneath it.

At the sight of his holstered gun, the woman screamed and began trying to get away from him, an impossible endeavor as she was in the window seat and had nowhere to go. “He has a gun! He was saying something in Arabic!” she shrieked. “Someone stop him!”

His jacket was halfway off and his arms were still in the sleeves when he was tackled from behind by one man and then another.
Damn it, not again
, he thought. The right side of his face met the carpet of the airplane's aisle, grating a layer of skin off his right temple. The first assailant jerked Golzari's forearm behind his back as the second tackled his torso. The first man quickly
handcuffed him and confiscated Golzari's nickel-plated gun, in the process tearing the armpit of his British-tailored suit. Golzari made no effort to resist. He had been through this before, as both recipient and contributor.

The speed and expertise with which Golzari's assailants took him down indicated law enforcement training, confirmed when the second assailant gruffly said, “TSA.” Golzari sighed and accepted his fate at the hands of the Transportation Security Administration air marshals, hoping the unpleasantness would end soon.

His nose was firmly planted in the cheap, foul-smelling carpet, unable to escape the reeking filth left by thousands of shoes. But that carpet now constituted his entire field of vision. He could only mumble, “Ooo-waa-doo-waa. Ooo-waa-doo-waa!”

The younger of the two air marshals grabbed a handful of Golzari's thick jet-black hair, lifting his jaw off the carpet so they could understand him. “What are you saying?”

“Ouagadougou. It's a city in Africa. In Burkina Faso to be exact. Bloody hellhole. Probably the poorest country in the world. Nothing in it. Nothing near it. I'm condemned to go there on my next assignment. And it's not an Arabic word,” he added, punctuating his dry sarcasm with a polite nod toward his seatmate. She sniffed and patted her hair back into place.