In Cold Blood (17 page)

And then Beatrix saw it: a pencil thin and yet blindingly bright blast of red light that was aimed behind them at the building.

She followed the red tracer to its origin. One of the SEALs was painting the building with a laser designator.

Oh
fuck
.

It was too dark to see anything, but she knew what was coming.

A Reaper.

“
Incoming!
”

FARAX HAD been sheltering on the first floor on the house. He had taken three men to the old bedrooms up there. The windows were narrow, almost like slits, and they had offered excellent protection when they opened up on the Americans. He and his men were well armed and determined. The Americans were frightening, but they would not take the house without bloodshed. Farax had heard tales of what had happened in Mogadishu all those years before. He knew that the Americans had no stomach for casualties. He was prepared to gamble that if they made it difficult enough, made it obvious that the cost of taking the house would be high, then they would baulk and retreat.

He swivelled into the window and emptied the magazine of his AK.

He realised: the Americans were not there.

They were falling back.

“Keep firing!” he yelled out. “They are falling back.”

They were fighting them off.

Praise be to Allah!

They were doing it!

Farax glanced back through the window and saw the men sprinting away from the house. A woman followed behind them.

What?

It was the hostages.
His
hostages. The Americans must have freed them and now they were trying to escape.

He turned back into the room.

“Give me that!” he shouted to one of the others. The man had just reloaded their RPG.

He hefted the launcher onto his shoulder and poked the grenade through the window. They were close, only fifty feet away. It was an easy shot. He couldn’t miss from here.

His finger curled around the trigger.

He had started to squeeze it when he was momentarily blinded by narrow beam of bright red light that shone across the front of the house. The intense red painted a pattern across his eyes and he blinked to clear it away.

His vision returned just in time to see the object in the sky, carving through the air towards them.

Allahu akbar.

Allahu akbar.

Allahu…

THE CONCUSSIVE blast wave from the explosion came first, picking Beatrix up and tossing her ten feet through the air, dropping her on her back onto gritty asphalt.

The second bomb detonated seconds after the first and a huge fireball rolled outwards and over the top of her, singeing her clothes and her hair.

She rolled over and pressed herself up onto hands and knees, dazed, the ringing in her ears the only noise that she could hear.

Other sounds became audible: a man yelling out, hungry flames, collapsing masonry. She scrambled to her feet and turned. The house wasn’t there any more. Three of the walls had been demolished, leaving the fourth still standing like a sick reminder of what a thousand pounds of high explosive could do. The rest of the structure had been obliterated as thoroughly as if a giant fist had smashed down onto it. The basement was exposed and a thick pall of smoke was unfurling over the rousing town. A rushing, roaring burning crackled through the air.

Every al Shabaab fighter in a ten mile radius would be awake now.

The ringing in her ears continued. The blast like that, danger close, must have damaged both eardrums.

“We’re missing two men,” the captain yelled.

She checked quickly. He was right: two were gone.

“Too close to the blast. They’re dead.”

“What… I…”

“You’ve got to keep running.”

“I can’t just…”

She grabbed his wrist and yanked him. “Come on! Run!”

They sprinted again, following the road down to the sea.

A sudden wave of lethargy washed over her just as she jumped down from the concrete jetty to the beach below and she stumbled and tripped, falling face first into the wet sand.

The captain stopped and dragged her to her knees. “Are you hurt?”

“Tripped,” she said, although she had no breath and she had to gasp the word out.

He hauled her upright. Her strength returned sufficiently for her to stand unaided and she carried on, jogging with heavy legs towards the surf.

The SEALs had boarded the raiding craft and were gunning them hard towards the Mark V. The first boat skimmed across the surface and slid up the ramp that had been dropped at the stern.

The second was just behind it.

Beatrix aimed her MP-5 into the sky and emptied it.

“Hey!” the captain yelled and waved.

The others joined in. “Hey! Hey!”

They were spotted. A shout went up, the Mark V’s engines flared and the boat swung around.

If the SEALs mistook them for tangos, they were finished. The Gatling guns would cut them to shreds.

But they didn’t fire.

The second raiding craft changed course, curving around, its wake frothing behind it.

They were coming back for them.

Beatrix felt a moment of relief. “You’re alright from here,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“They’ll have you out in a couple of minutes.”

“What?” He looked at her, baffled. “You’re not coming?”

She had already thought about it. It would have been the easiest way to exfil, but the men had all seen her execute Joyce and the other man. There was no way she would be able to answer their questions without betraying her cause. The CIA would take her into custody. Pope would get her out, eventually, but how long would that take? A month? Two months? She was already dealing in months. She had an expiration date. She didn’t have the luxury of spare time to squander on petty administration. There was still a lot for her to do.

“You’ll be fine.”

She was buffeted by another dizzying wave of fatigue and then, on its heels, a shiver of pain that almost brought her to her knees.

It was impossible to hide it.

“You’ve got to come with us.”

“Good luck, captain.”

She turned her back on him and ran back into the town.

SHE FOUND an old Soviet era Lada. It was parked in a narrow alley beneath a sheet of orange tarpaulin halfway back in the town. She opened the door, clashing it against the wall of the alley, and squeezed between it and the body of the vehicle until she was inside. She used the point of her
kukri
to snap off the plastic cover on the steering column. She thumbed through the harness connector for the wires that led to the battery, ignition and starter, stripped away the insulation from the battery wires and twisted them together. She sparked the starter wire to the battery wire and the engine spluttered and turned over. She fed in revs until the engine was established.

She checked her watch: it was four in the morning.

She didn’t want to be here when the sun came up.

It was way past time to go.

There had been activity in the town as she made her way to the vehicle. Armed fighters were gathering at the smoking remains of the house, warily looking seaward at the fast disappearing lights of the SEALs. That was in Beatrix’s favour. They would not have expected any of the enemy to have remained behind and they certainly would not have expected to find anyone heading inland, away from safety. She moved in the darkness, breaking cover only when she was sure she was unobserved and then running as hard as she could until she was back into the embrace of the shadows again. Now she was trembling with exertion and her clothes were soaked through with sweat.

She slapped the palm of her hand against the side of her head to try and clear the constant ringing but it had no effect.

No time to worry about that.

She put the car into gear and rolled out onto the road.

She turned to the north and headed out of town.

BEATRIX DROVE quickly. It was much too early for traffic, but people were stirring. Some were at their windows or on the roofs of their buildings, looking towards the sea and the finger of thick grey smoke that was reaching into the darkened sky. Others were stumbling from their doorways, half dressed, roused by the thunderous blast. Some of them, the young men, had weapons. They looked askance at the old Lada as it raced by, bouncing across the uneven surface, all of them too slow to think of stopping it.

She thought she was going to make it until she turned the final corner onto the Barawa Road and saw the two Technicals reversing so that they were tailgate-to-tailgate, blocking the road. There were a dozen fighters there, all of them with AKs, and the two 12.7mm-calibre DShK machine guns were manned and aimed down the road towards her.

They were hundred feet away.

Beatrix was closing at fifty miles an hour.

The machine guns opened fire and tracer screamed out at her.

She weaved.

A round went through the windshield, throwing glass back into her face.

She yanked the wheel to the left, almost rolling the car as she sent it skidding and sliding off the road and onto the patch of rough that passed for the front yard of the huts that hemmed the road in. The machine guns kept firing and she heard the
chunk-chunk-chunk
as three big rounds pulverised the bodywork, punching through the panels behind her and exploding through the seats.

The broken glass had sliced her face open.

The suspension shrieked in protest as she bounced over the rocky ground. She stamped on the brake, fishtailing the car as she aimed for the narrow space between the nearest two shacks. The side of the car slapped against one of them before the tyres found traction. She made it into the gap as the wooden boards detonated in a shower of splintered shards, another couple of rounds slamming into the rear of the car.

She felt warm blood on her lips.

The terrain behind the huts was rough, full of rocky outcrops and rutted sandy stretches. She could see the straight path of the Jilib road to her northwest, but even if she could pilot the Lada over the precarious ground, she knew that she wouldn’t be able to outrun the Toyotas for very long. The sedan was horribly underpowered and in bad condition.

They would come after her and there would be nothing that she could do about it.

Deal with that when you have to.

She was halfway to the road when she saw the first Technical, its lights scouring across the lightening darkness, bouncing along the road in her direction.

Half a mile away and closing fast.

She stamped on the gas as the second jeep appeared just behind the first.

The road was a couple of metres above the floor of the desert. Beatrix slalomed through a field of wheel-sized rocks and then buried the pedal. The Lada, protesting mightily, still picked up speed. She was doing forty as she ascended the slope, leaping into the air as she launched off the crest, slamming down onto the road. She stamped on the brakes and skidded through ninety degrees, pointing the car towards Jilib, then she hammered the gas again.

The car ticked quickly up to fifty.

The first Technical was five hundred feet behind her.

The machine gun roared out again.

THE US AIR FORCE had stationed an RQ-4 Global Hawk over Eastern Somalia to monitor the operation. It was loitering at fifty thousand feet now, a little below its operational ceiling. The pilot was thousands of miles away in a bunker at Beale Air Force Base in California. His orders had been to stay over the town for the duration of the operation and to provide intelligence to the SEALs on the ground and to mission control on the
Tortuga
.

The Hawk had recorded everything: the SEALs’ approach, the gun battle, the confusion in the aftermath. It had watched the SEALs falling back into the sea and what looked like a determined pursuit from the group of hostiles that had emerged from inside the house. Footage from the Hawk had been critical in green lighting the order to destroy the house. It had watched as the two massive bombs pulverised the house into brick dust and killed everyone inside.

It turned out that what had looked like a pursuit was actually the escape of the hostages. The Hawk had watched as the survivors had transferred from the assault craft to the Mark V. It had watched as they started on their way to the
Tortuga
and safety. The operation, which had looked like it was going to be a catastrophic failure, was, instead, a partial success. He didn’t know how the hostages had escaped. Perhaps the SEALs had done enough.

Whatever the reason, the military had been lucky.

And the hostages had been even luckier.

Now the Hawk observed the three vehicles that were speeding out of Barawe. The pilot adjusted the track that the aircraft was following and focussed the cameras. He zoomed in: there was a sedan and two pickups. They were moving fast. As if they were trying to get away.

He called it in.

BEATRIX PRESSED the gas all the way to the floor. The sedan was up to fifty-five, the engine struggling, the rev counter dangerously in the red. She doubted it would be able to maintain the same pace for long before the pistons were wrecked.

She glanced up in the mirror: the pickups were four hundred feet behind her and still gaining. They were going to reel her into range of their big guns and then tear her to pieces.

She gritted her teeth.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go down.

She saw the muzzle flash from the machine gun and heard the rapid
thud-thud-thud
as it fired. The remnants of the rear windshield exploded into the cabin and rounds sliced through the air, some arcing through the left-hand side of the car and others passing harmlessly through the denuded front window.

Beatrix yanked the wheel to the right, popping onto two wheels for a moment as she swerved off the road. There was a sudden dip in the terrain and the Lada lurched and then thumped down into it with a clang as the exhaust broke free, scraping a track through the sand and grit.

The manoeuvre put her out of reach of the big guns, but it allowed the pickups to close further.