Pirate Alley: A Novel (15 page)

He could feel the situation slipping out of his control. With the ship moving toward Eyl, which was only a couple of hours away, there was little the Americans could do to stop him. But here, dead in the water, drifting, the Americans had more options. Mustafa didn’t know exactly what they were, but he felt the threat—and he was worried.

His men were pirates, not soldiers. They wanted money and were willing to risk their lives to get it. But they weren’t willing to die for nothing. That was a hard fact. If pressed … well, if pressed hard, Mustafa didn’t know what they would do. Surrender, he suspected. A man could always go pirating another day.

They had already seen what the Americans could do. The pirate killed by a sniper after he shot a swimming passenger had been an object lesson. Mustafa wondered if any of his men could be induced to kill another passenger.

He stuffed another wad of khat in his mouth. The khat would keep his fingers from shaking.

*   *   *

Admiral Toad Tarkington believed the pirates would surrender rather than drown or be shot. He was acting upon that belief.

Toad, his chief of staff, Captain Haducek, and his ops officer had a plan, and they were busy telling everyone their part in it. People who jumped would be pulled into rafts. Anyone armed would be shot.

The pirates couldn’t fight it out. Shooting hostages would do no good. They would be in a real corner.

“Have the captains check out their loud-hailers,” Toad reminded Flip Haducek. “I want Somali speakers on those things.”

“Yessir.”

“We may have casualties,” Toad told his staff. “Passengers may jump into the water; we must be ready to rescue them. Innocent people may get shot. I know all that. Still, I think the benefit of rescuing these people and thwarting the pirates is worth the casualties, which we will do our very best to minimize. I want Recon marines to rappel onto that ship as soon as the pirates surrender. They are to check below deck for casualties and evacuate any wounded they find. Kill anyone who offers resistance.”

“Sir,
Ward
has its marines aboard.”

“Very good. Load up the Recon guys and let’s get this show under way.”

Colonel Zakhem had marines in helmets lining the flight deck walkways. Several platoons waited on deck behind the island for the flight deck to clear.

*   *   *

Watching the ships, Ospreys and helicopters through binoculars, Mustafa al-Said realized that the Americans were up to something, and whatever it was, it was going to happen soon.

He couldn’t shoot it out with the Americans. He couldn’t run. His only option was to threaten the hostages. He had serious misgivings, but no other options, so that is what he decided to do.

He gave terse orders. His men were to herd the passengers up on deck and line them up against the rails. They were to hide behind them, and shoot them if he gave the order.

Mustafa didn’t think it would work. He knew his men. Oh, they were perfectly willing to kill people, but they weren’t willing to die to win victory. After the hostages were dead, what then? The Americans would slaughter the pirates, and they all knew it. Still, maybe the Americans would chicken out. Maybe they didn’t have the stomach for blood.

He used the ship’s loudspeaker system to give the orders in Somali. In seconds he could hear shouts and screams and the sound of running feet.

This would work or it wouldn’t.

Mustafa had a man on the bridge take the two women out on the wing of the bridge and stand behind them. He grabbed the captain and led him to the other wing of the bridge. Jammed his rifle in his back.

*   *   *

USS
Chosin Reservoir
was a mile away from
Sultan,
making two knots, when a yeoman ran up to Toad on the flag bridge and handed him a message.
Richard Ward
was approaching the cruise ship from the other direction, which was bow on to her. Marines with rifles were all over the weather decks.

Toad took a deep breath, exhaled and glanced at the message. From Washington.

“Reference your message”—there was a date-time group—“notifying us of your plan to confront the pirates. Permission denied. Risks to noncombatants judged to be too great. Do not allow any of your vessels to approach within two miles of
Sultan
without permission from this headquarters. All flights to remain clear by at least two thousand yards.”

Toad Tarkington wadded up the message with one hand.

“Sir, lookouts report civilians are lining the rail of the cruise ship. Some pirates with weapons behind them.”

He could just ignore the order and proceed as if he never got it.

Even as he weighed it, he knew he wasn’t going to ignore a direct order from the National Command Authority. Wanted to … knew his plan would work …

God damn!

Haducek was standing beside him. “Tell the captain to veer off. Tell
Ward
to do the same. Tell them to take up station five miles on either flank of the cruise ship.”

“Jesus, Admiral. What—?”

Toad handed him the wadded-up message. “Just do it, Flip. Have the marines stand down.”

*   *   *

Mustafa heard the ringing of the engine room telephone as he watched the amphibious assault ship turn away and accelerate. Captain Penney heard it, too.

Penney wrenched himself from al-Said’s grasp and walked over to the phone. He grabbed it. “Captain.”

“Port aft pod has power. Use the bridge controls.”

“Thank you.”

Penney went to the power control station, advanced the power lever for the port aft engine, made sure the turn-rate controller was centered so he could see how much he would have to turn the engine to make the ship go straight. He felt the screw bite. Almost imperceptibly, but he felt it. Saw the RPM needle come off the peg.

*   *   *

“
Sultan
is under way, sir.”

Toad bit his lip. Even with the ship under way, his show of force would have worked.

He took off his baseball cap and crushed it with his left hand. The flag lieutenant was standing a little distance away. Toad glanced at him. “I believe I’ll have a cup of coffee, Mr. Snodgrass.”

“Yes, sir.”

Afterward Snodgrass told his fellow officers, “You should have seen the old man. Ice water in his veins.”

CHAPTER
EIGHT

E
THIOPIA,
N
OVEMBER
10

I settled myself into the earth and pulled the stock back into my shoulder, welding my cheek to the stock. The scope picture was right there, clear and crisp. I settled the crosshairs onto the target, a black circle inscribed on the side of a cardboard box with Magic Marker, and snicked off the safety.

The box was only two hundred yards out there. This rifle, a Sako TRG-42, was theoretically capable of putting a bullet into a one-inch circle at that range. No wind. If the shooter was capable of matching theory to practice.

The rifle was chambered in .338 Lapua Magnum, which fired a 250-grain very-low-drag bullet at a muzzle velocity of 3,000 feet per second. In the warm African air, the bullet remained supersonic for about 1,500 meters; in the hands of an expert, which I wasn’t, this rifle/bullet combination could take down a man-sized target about 80 percent of the time at that distance, penetrating five layers of ballistic material to do it. It had more capability than the 7.62 mm NATO bullet, and less than a .50 caliber Browning machine-gun round. Even though it weighed almost thirteen pounds with the scope, the gun kicked pretty good, so it was no rifle for anyone suffering from flinching.

To maintain expert proficiency with a sniper rifle, you should fire about two thousand rounds a year through your weapon, making every shot count. Needless to say, camping out with the CIA part of the year and doing the usual burglaries, safecracking and bug planting they expected of me the rest of it, when I wasn’t doing paperwork, I didn’t have that kind of time.

Nor had I ever had expert proficiency. At anything. In my whole life.

Still, I liked the rifle. If you were going to murder someone, this Sako was just the tool for the job. You could comfortably hunker down a goodly distance away, like a kilometer, set up with a tripod or bean bags, measure the range with a laser rangefinder, adjust your scope, and have a good chance to assassinate your man when and if he showed. Suck down water, shoot from a shady spot … all in all, this was the rifle for the gentleman sniper, which of course was the category I tried to fit into. No diapers, no camouflage, no lying motionless while insects chewed on your parts. Then, after you had done the dirty deed, you had an excellent chance of getting away clean since the unhappy people who had witnessed their friend’s death were a kilometer or more away. Snipers always worried about the getaway. Being a burglar, I did, too.

The Sako carried a 24-power telescopic sight that had turrets for changing the vertical and horizontal settings. Back when we were younger, my team members and I had shot this rifle and developed a table for the various ranges and possible wind conditions. The crosshairs were adjusted with the turret settings so that the shooter could put the crosshairs precisely where he wanted the bullet. The rest was breath and trigger control. Sounds simple, and at five hundred yards it was no great feat to hit a man-sized target. That’s military-ese for hitting a standing man holding stone stock-still just to make your task easier. Few of them do.

Beyond a thousand meters, which was about as far as a guy with my skill level should attempt a shot at our theoretical suicidal standing man, the rifle required a master’s touch. Sniper rifles defined the phrase “precision instrument.”

Today in Africa I concentrated on holding the crosshairs steady despite the heat mirage. I took a breath, exhaled, then ever so gently squeezed the trigger just the way those marine gunnery sergeants told me to in sniper school. The trigger on our rifle was adjusted for a feather-light two-pound let-off, so she went off while you were still thinking about it.

When I recovered from the recoil and steadied the scope on the target again, I could see the bullet hole. The round-spot target was roughly an inch in diameter, and the hole was about a half inch outside at the 10:30 position. Hmmm.

My second shot was just touching the circle at 3:00.

Good ol’ Number Three. Squeeze ever so gently … and it was maybe an inch below the spot. Like a two-and-a-half-inch group. Sigh.

“Your turn,” I told Travis Clay. He was the best shot we had, and he was no expert either. Still, he could routinely hit targets that I could only dream of whacking. Second best was a former Special Forces sergeant named Elvis Duchene. We called him Erectile Dysfunction, or E.D. He would answer to E.D., but not the other.

When we finished with the short-range stuff, just to verify the scope hadn’t been knocked out of zero, we took boxes to five hundred and a thousand meters and left them there. Then we got serious.

We had two rifles, both of which had been packed in aluminum cases along with ammo, logbooks and data sheets. We played with the range finders, ensured they were working properly and we knew how to use them, then settled down to some serious shooting at a dollar a shot.

I heard a buzzing sound, faint, while I was concentrating on a shot. I tried to ignore it. A good shooter gets in the zone, concentrates on the mechanics, sight picture, trigger squeeze, wind, target movement, all of it. A burglar never gets in the zone. Ever. A burglar must be constantly aware of everything in his universe, sights, sounds, smells, heat, light, searching for the most minute warnings of things not the way they should be. Unfortunately I was a burglar first, shooter second.

I looked up. Couldn’t find the buzzing. Then I saw it. Twelve feet above me. A maple seed, rotating … floating on the breeze … no. Not floating. Flying against the breeze. It dropped down, hovered just two feet in front of me. A drone, weighing less than an ounce. I knew the operators, Wilbur and Orville, were a hundred yards away, watching me on the drone’s sensor. I stuck my tongue out at the thing, then settled in again with the rifle.

I heard the buzzing growing fainter, until it was lost in the African day.

Two shots later I saw another drone. The guys were working with our big night flyer, a Dragonflyer X6. It had six counter-rotating props arranged in three pods, each pod sporting a top and bottom rotor. It measured thirty-six inches from rotor tip to rotor tip and weighed about two pounds. Carried a good digital video camera with a zoom lens and an IR sensor, plus a transmitter.

Wilbur and Orville were making sure their toys were in working order. Sand and dust were the enemies of precision machinery and electronics; in this desert we had plenty of both. The other guys were cleaning weapons and doing routine maintenance on our com gear. When they finished that, there were the usual camp chores.

We gunnies finally knocked off for beer. I had a sore shoulder and tried not to show it. I owed E.D. twelve dollars and Clay eighteen. We didn’t have any money here and would have to settle up later. I wasn’t flustered because I intended to welsh.

“So, E.D., you did this for a living back in the day,” I said. “How many kills did you get with a sniper rifle?”

E.D. was from New Jersey and still had the accent. “None. I wasn’t a sniper.”

“Any long-range shots at Taliban, bomb planters, suiciders…?”

“Nope.”

“Don’t even ask,” Travis Clay said. “I ain’t ever fired a bolt gun at anybody, near, far or in between.”

I contemplated my toes.

“Not even going to bother asking you, Carmellini. I can see it in your face.”

“Three fucking amateurs,” Erectile summed up succinctly.

“Hey,” I said, remembering that I was supposed to be the leader and in charge of morale and all that, “we’re the good guys. Truth, justice and the American way. That’s our edge.”

“Pot, chicks and porno flicks,” E.D. sneered and drained the rest of his beer. He crushed the empty can in his fist and threw it as far downwind as he could. It was still flying through the air when he got his first shot off with his Kimber 1911. Missed. Then the can hit the dirt and he used both hands and kept it skittering along until the slide locked open.