Pirate Alley: A Novel (34 page)

*   *   *

“Captain, we have all three pirate skiffs on radar.”

“Range?”

“Eight miles.”

USS
Richard Ward,
an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer, approached Eyl from a course slightly north of west. The commanding officer, Commander Millicent C. Fjestad, had her ship inbound at ten knots. Her crew referred to her as The Old Woman, just as male commanding officers were traditionally called The Old Man. Less reverently, she was called Big Mama behind her back. Still, every man and woman aboard
Richard Ward
respected the captain. She was a highly competent naval officer who cared about her crew.

Her mission tonight was to sink all pirate skiffs at sea off the port of Eyl so that SEALs could egress without opposition. “Sanitize the area and keep it sanitized,” flag ops said.

Like all American destroyers now in commission,
Richard Ward
had but one gun. It was a dilly, a Mark 45 Mod 4, in caliber 5"/62. This weapon fired a shell five inches in diameter weighing 70 pounds at a muzzle velocity of 2,650 feet per second. Its effective range was over 20 miles. Aimed by radar and computer, it was accurate and deadly.

The pirate skiffs, however, were not conventional enemy warships, with decent freeboards and a superstructure. They were boats, and their gunwales extended about a foot above the water. They were small, difficult targets. Big Mama Fjestad didn’t intend to miss. She wanted them closer, not hull down on the horizon.

She worried about the depth of the water as she approached the Somali coast. There was a submerged sandbar about three miles offshore, and the channel across it was farther north. Of course the skiffs were inside the bar, cruising up and down, looking for God knows what. The sonar was giving the bridge crew a constant real-time reading on the depth of water.

Not a light shown from
Richard Ward
as she glided toward the coast. On the deck forward the gun barrel was alive, tracking the northern-most target as the destroyer closed the range.

At three miles from the skiffs, five miles offshore, the water shallowed to less than a hundred feet. Commander Fjestad turned her ship northward to parallel the coast.

Meanwhile, aboard the skiffs, the fireworks and muzzle flashes from Eyl were plainly visible. The crews were not searching the dark sea for enemy ships, but staring toward Eyl as their captains tried to raise someone on their hand-held radios.

Ten seconds after
Ward
was steady on her new course, the tactical action officer (TAO) called on the squawk box. “We are stabilized on all three targets, Captain. Request permission to shoot.”

“Send them to hell,” Big Mama said, then stuffed her fingers in her ears.

Two seconds later the Mark 45 rapped out three shots, about a second apart. The propellant gases still burning as the shells left the gun muzzle strobed the darkness. Now the gun barrel traversed at 30 degrees a second to the second target and stabilized. Boom, boom, boom, three more ear-splitting reports assaulted the bridge team, most of whom had fingers in their ears or were wearing ear protectors. Traverse to the next target, three more muzzle flashes and trip-hammer reports.

It was all over in twelve seconds.

Five seconds later the bridge squawk box came to life. “Captain, the targets have disappeared.”

“Good shooting, people! Well done.”

*   *   *

The Hellfire missiles that took out the machine guns on the roof of the lair cratered it. Chunks of brick, mortar, concrete and wooden beams were blasted down into the penthouse. Sheikh Ragnar was hit by a large piece, which knocked him unconscious. His two sons were there, and they too went down under the onslaught.

Nora Neidlinger was in the bedroom, under the bed, when the roof caved in. She wasn’t hurt. For a long moment the air was opaque with dirt and dust and explosive residue, but gradually the sea breeze carried it out. From the outside it looked like smoke.

She crawled out and looked around. The lights were still on. She made her way through the rubble and found the three pirates on the floor of the main room. U.S. currency notes were scattered everywhere, like confetti. One of the sons was obviously dead, with a large splinter of wood through his neck. He had bled some, but not much. She couldn’t see his face, which was covered with dirt and small debris.

The other son was still alive. The butt of his rifle was under him. She grabbed it and tugged. It came slowly, then quickly when out from under his dead weight.

She examined it, then pointed it at the man’s head and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.

She fiddled with a lever on the side. Tried it again. This time it hammered. The recoil was unexpected and the rifle leaped from her hands. Fell into the blood-and-grime mess that had been his head.

Nora went over to Ragnar and scrutinized him. He was lying faceup, with a bloody spot on his skull, in a bed of currency. His eyes were open and blinking. He was trying to swallow.

Not too much stuff on him. She found his pistol on his belt and jerked it out. Threw it across the room.

Turned and wandered away. There was a rope in the corner, coiled up. Not too thick. Clothesline thickness. But long.

She went into the kitchen area, also a shambles, and rooted through the debris until she found a knife. Went back to the rope and began cutting six-foot lengths. It was difficult. The knife was not very sharp, so she had to work at it.

CHAPTER
TWENTY

Jake Grafton, Arch Penney and four of the
Sultan
’s officers and supervisors were standing by the portal to the fort when a technical roared out of the brush and screeched to a halt in a shower of gravel. It had come cross-country, avoiding the road. A man swung the machine gun in the bed back and forth, looking for targets, as another man jumped out of the driver’s seat and ran for the entrance. Penney and his officers ran for cover.

Jake propped the AK against the stone that formed the side of the entrance, took careful aim and fired a single shot. The man on the machine gun toppled. The other man slowed. Grafton put a bullet into the dirt at his feet. He stopped dead, his weapon in his hand.

“Drop it!”

He knew enough English to understand that command. The assault rifle fell to the ground.

Penney came over to Grafton’s side. “That’s Mustafa al-Said,” he said. “He led the pirates that captured my ship. He killed my officers. Murdered my passengers.”

Grafton handed Penney the AK. “You do the honors. Get him in here. Don’t kill him. We may need him later.”

Penney walked out with the rifle at his shoulder, aimed. He took a pistol from al-Said, then marched him toward the portal.

Once they were there, Penney handed the pistol to Jake Grafton. Al-Said stood with his hands up. Grafton said to Penney, “Get something to tie him up with.”

“We don’t have anything. Someone will have to watch him every minute.”

Jake Grafton bent over, checked the pistol in the dim light. Then he pointed it at al-Said’s leg and pulled the trigger. The bullet tore into the pirate’s knee; he toppled, screaming.

Grafton walked over to him. At point-blank range he shot him in the other knee.

“He’ll stay put now,” Grafton told Penney. “Get the keys to that truck. We may need it later.” The
Sultan
’s officers were gawking at him, with their mouths open.

The admiral handed Penney the pistol, then climbed the stairs leading to the roof. He wanted to see the rest of the battle, what there was of it, and radio reception was better up there.

*   *   *

The problem with going down stairs is that your feet arrive before you do. The sound of the shot in that basement was like a cannon going off, but I didn’t notice. The bullet burned my left leg and it folded, which was just as well. By then I was in the process of diving toward the bottom headfirst.

Saw the guy to my left with a pistol trying to get a clean shot at me. I didn’t wait. I got one into him by the time I hit the floor like a sack of potatoes. I rolled right, pistol out, and got him framed in the sights. He was sagging against the wall, staring down at the red spot on his dirty shirt. I wasn’t in the mood for a long-drawn-out dying scene, so I shot him again, then scanned the rest of the room. No people in sight.

The room was big and half-filled with crates stacked floor to ceiling. I scrambled up, cussing at the pain in my leg, and went exploring. There was another room behind this one, just as big, but completely filled with crates and weapons piled here and there. I gave it a cursory glance, then went back to the generator, which was throbbing along. For the first time I realized the room was filthy, with trash that had been piled in there since the Italians left. Rat shit all over the floor. I had been rolling in it. No doubt dozens, maybe hundreds, of generations of rodents had lived out their life cycles here.

My leg wasn’t bleeding too badly, and I could flex it, but it burned like hell. I rubbed the rat shit off my face and hair and spit on the floor, just in case.

Ben and Zahra came down the stairs. They glanced at the dead pirate, then ignored him. They went into the other room with their pistols out and ready. I kicked some of the trash around, looked for odd wires. Some rats scurried out of one pile and ran into another.

The generator had a fuel line gravity-feeding from a huge tank sitting beside it, against an exterior wall, mounted up on some kind of wooden supports. There was a valve on the line. I was looking it over when Zahra came back for me. “Carmellini!”

I went. In addition to the crates in the second room, in one corner were stacks of AKs, hundreds of them. I examined some of the crates while the Mossad agents scanned the others. The writing on the crates was in Cyrillic. A few of the wooden crates were open, so I looked in. The first box I looked at contained belts of machine-gun ammo. So did the second. The third one contained boxes of AK stuff, 7.62 x 39 mm. Hundreds of RPG-7 launchers were stacked like cordwood along one wall, with piles of warheads, and there was box after box of MON-50 mines, Russian claymores. They weighed maybe five pounds each, were packed with hundreds of steel bearings that the explosive propelled out like a shotgun blast. They were deadly as hell within fifty yards, and hit-and-miss out to maybe three hundred. I estimated that at least a hundred of them were piled here.

“Look at this.”

Ben pried the lid off one of the large boxes.

“PVV-5A,” he said. “Several tons of it, I think.”

“Detonators?”

“In this lot somewhere.” He stood looking around. “Over here are a couple of machine guns.”

I went back to the generator. Started cranking the fuel valve. The engine sputtered. The lights in the basement flickered, and died when the generator did.

The two Israelis already had their flashlights out and on. I hadn’t been smart enough to bring mine. I followed them back up the stairs.

They were pros. They held the flashlights out in their left hands while they scanned them around the lobby of that dump. It was still empty. I talked a bit on my headset with the SEAL team leader, Red One, or as he called himself, Red Leader.

“Check out the north room on the second floor,” he said. I clicked my mike and motioned to Ben. We headed up the staircase, Ben leading with his flashlight.

The second-floor north room was the com center. A modern shortwave set sat on a table. Ben didn’t waste much time—he used his pistol to put three rounds through the main radio. There were radio controls for model airplane rigs and garage door openers, all right, and batteries. Also two dead men. The Israelis looked them over, but they didn’t recognize either of them. They settled in to examine the radio controls, one holding the flashlight while the other scrutinized them.

I checked in with Grafton on the net.

“Grafton, Tommy. Found the radio room. A shortwave set and batteries and RC control units.”

“In the com center?”

“Yes.”

“Ragnar will have the hot one in his pocket. Get it and bring it to me.”

“I’m trying to figure out why they didn’t push the button to blow the fortress when the shooting started.”

“Thought we were Shabab, maybe,” Grafton said. That Grafton! He didn’t sound too interested. Fucking guy had ice cubes for balls. Everyone was still alive, so …

“Red Leader, I’m coming on up,” I said.

Heard some more gunfire above me. “Come on,” he said.

*   *   *

It was a nice early November evening in Washington, not too cold, with almost no wind. The president and his leadership team huddled around a television in the Ops Center in the basement. They sat silently listening to Ricardo—he was using his microphone now, he said—and watching war on television. Real war. In a shitty little place. Mostly the show consisted of random flashes and a cacophony of small-arms fire, overlaid by Ricardo’s fevered descriptions.

In London it was past midnight, and the prime minister and his lieutenants were similarly engaged at 10 Downing Street watching the local Fox network. On another television tuned to the BBC, they had only audio from the satellite telephone of the BBC’s man in Eyl, Rab Bishop. A scrolling legend on the bottom of the screen pleaded technical problems and promised video momentarily.

“All that money for the BBC,” someone remarked, “and this is what we get.”

Both the prime minister and the president had satellite telephone connections with Admiral Tarkington aboard
Chosin Reservoir
. The admiral had apprised them several hours ago that the action would soon begin, but they had expected that when they read Mike Rosen’s first e-mail.

“Wouldn’t it have been better to wait until the marines were ashore tomorrow before launching this party?” the foreign minister asked the PM.

The prime minister knew little of military affairs, a fact he was willing to admit publicly, and he had learned not to trust generals and admirals, who were, in his opinion, far too quick with victory predictions and clueless about political realities. Today his misgivings over the handling of this crisis grew with every machine-gun blast and Hellfire impact on the screen in front of him. Still, he wasn’t going to call the admiral for reassurance. If he had any to give. Or those ninnies at the White House. The bald fact was the horse had left the gate and was running the race.