The Child Taker & Slow Burn (2 page)

Chapter Two

Mogadishu

Thousands of miles away, on the African continent, Grace Farrington felt sweat running down her spine in rivulets. It was nearly one hundred degrees in the full glare of the Somali sun. Her black skin glistened with moisture as the heat of the sun intensified. Midday was approaching and the temperature continued to climb steadily as she walked through the bullet-ridden streets of Mogadishu. The buildings around her were built from stone, rendered with plaster made from crushed seashells and coral rock and whitewashed. She couldn’t help but wonder what the city would have been like before civil war brought it to its knees. Grace had seen many war-torn cities during her service but Mogadishu was in a league of its own. Mogadishu, now the capital city of Somalia, was one of the first Muslim settlements on the East African coast and its first secure harbour. Though it had been settled long before the arrival of Islam in the seventh century, the expansion of Islam made it an important commercial centre for the trade of cloth, ivory, hides, slaves, spices, cattle and porcelain with merchants from Arabia, the Persian Gulf, Indonesia and China. In the sixteenth century it fell under the control of the Portuguese and then fell under the suzerainty of the Sultan of Zanzibar in 1871. Twenty years later the Sultan leased it to the Italians who then bought the city in 1905 and made it the capital of their colonial Somaliland until World War Two. The indigenous tribes had been warring ever since. 

              Grace was accustomed to the sight and sounds of a war zone. The daughter of the first black man to achieve the rank of Sergeant Major in the British army, she had chosen to follow her illustrious father into the forces. She was a natural soldier, a sharpshooter and unarmed combat aficionado. Grace had risen through the junior ranks of the military quickly, impressing her superiors so much that they put her name forward for the Special Forces selection programme. She was successful and spent the next three years flitting from one elite unit to the next, wherever a female black operative was required at the time. Different missions required different personnel, especially in countries abroad where dark skin was indigenous. Soon Grace was chosen to take the selection programme for the combined Terrorist Task Force Unit, which she passed with flying colours and now she was the unit’s number one female agent. She had led operations all over the world, but this time Somalia was the theatre in which their unit would perform. The collapse of the Somali government seventeen years earlier had led to a brutal civil war which was still raging and the outskirts of the city had been reduced to nothing but derelict ruins. The square built buildings were pockmarked with bullet holes of every size and shape imaginable. The deserted houses were riddled with shell holes, and black smoke stains crept out of every window and smeared the bricks above them. Grace could hear a petrol engine approaching and the hairs on the back of her neck bristled.

“It’s them,” her Somali guide whispered nervously as he looked over his shoulder towards the speeding vehicle. He was a nineteen-year-old militiaman; as thin as a rake and dressed in a mishmash uniform which hung from his skeletal frame. Sweat was pouring from every pore on his skinny body and the smell that emanated from him was not a pleasant one. “Give me the money now before they get here.”

“You’ll get paid when I’ve met Said Adid,” Grace hissed. She stubbed her little toe on a stone and cursed under her breath. Rocks and stones protruded from the compacted sand that formed the narrow streets of the war-torn city. Her flimsy sandals offered her very little protection against them, and she stumbled frequently.

“I don’t trust you, English bitch!” Her guide snarled. He grabbed her elbow and helped her to her feet again. “Pay me my money.”

“There are half a dozen marksmen with their sights trained on the back of your head right now. If you don’t calm down and stick to your part of the bargain, I’ll signal them to blow your fucking brains all over this godforsaken road.” Grace held him with an icy glare, which left him with no doubt in his mind that she wasn’t lying. He tried to match her glare, but she was not a woman to mess with.

“Are you okay?” Tara asked concerned. Tara was a twenty-three-year-old white-skinned European. She was the newest member of the unit. She was also beautiful and today they were the bait in a honey trap operation.

“I’m fine. Get on with the job,” Grace replied curtly. Although Tara and Grace had worked in the elite counter-terrorist unit together for three months now, they didn’t get on at all. She turned back to their guide and hissed, “If you make one move out of line, you’re a dead man.” 

The guide nodded his head slowly and swallowed hard. His oversized Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. He was sweating profusely and he wiped his eyes with the front of his khaki shirt. A dark wet smear appeared on the material.

The vehicle’s engine roared as it screeched to a halt ten yards away from them. The driver fishtailed the back of the truck and a wave of grit and sand showered Grace and her guide. The guide rubbed sand from his face as he turned to the vehicle and smiled widely. Grace kept her face lowered as she analysed the situation in a microsecond. The vehicle was a battered red Toyota pick-up. There were three men in the crew cab, and three more standing on the flatbed at the rear. They were operating a Chinese-made heavy machinegun that was welded to a makeshift tripod. Mogadishu was swamped with improvised military vehicles like this one. They were known to Westerners as ‘technicals.’

“Let me see them.” The man in the passenger seat spoke. He was sporting a red beret and was wearing a grimy red vest to match. All the men in the pick-up had mirrored sunglasses on.

“She’s Jamaican, and she’s untouched, very clean,” the guide rambled. He put his hand beneath Grace’s chin and pushed her head upward so that the men in the vehicle could get a proper look at her. “And this one is Swedish. We took them from a boat.” He added, referring to the hundreds of ships that are attacked and held for ransom every year off the Somali coastline. He grabbed a fistful of Tara’s blond hair and twisted her head cruelly sideways. Tara grimaced and thought about putting a bullet through him for a moment, but the mission was an important one and she would have to play along with it for now.

The driver of the pick-up studied Tara and Grace and smiled as he punched a number into a mobile phone. He spoke a few words and then nodded his head as he ended the brief call. The driver grinned and then saluted the guide. The engine roared again and the wheels spun in the sand before finding purchase. The pick-up lurched forward. Grace stepped backward to avoid the avalanche of grit that it had created.

“What’s going on?” she said to her guide. “Which one of them was Said Adid?”

“None of them, he wasn’t there.” The guide looked wide-eyed and confused. He held his hands palm upward and shrugged his skinny shoulders. He was about to speak again when they heard a second engine approaching.

“They were the reconnaissance crew,” Tara said as she looked towards the oncoming vehicle. “If you pull my hair again I’ll cut your balls off, do you understand me?”

The guide was about to reply but the look in her eyes made him think again. He was paid more money than he could earn in ten years for guiding the women to this area of the city. The two women were soldiers, which was a concept that he couldn’t comprehend. Being told what to do by a female was alien to him. These women were very different from his kind and they were very dangerous. Today they were set in a honey trap to lure a Somali warlord out of his lair. Said Adid was the brains behind the recent spate of pirate activity off the coast of Somalia, which had cost Western governments billions of dollars in ransom payments. Despite the deployment of dozens of allied warships to the area, the pirates were still succeeding in capturing ships at will. Governments the world over were being forced to pay huge amounts of money to ensure the safe return of multi-million pound cargos. Despite several coordinated initiatives, the international community had failed to stop the pirates. A joint government committee decided to remove Adid from the equation, thus cutting the head from the serpent. The problem was that Adid was just as unpopular in Mogadishu as he was internationally and there was a huge bounty on his head. He was a ghost-like figure, always in hiding and always moving his hideouts to prevent his rivals assassinating him. Adid was a hunted man and as such, he was forced to be a very cautious man too.

“Shake hands with Adid first, do you understand?” Grace whispered to the guide. A rusty white van appeared from a side street two hundred yards away on the left. The van stopped next to the red pickup truck and words were exchanged between the two drivers. There was a heated discussion going on, and the men who were operating the mounted heavy machinegun on the back of the pickup were gesticulating wildly. Grace thought that their plan might have been scuppered, but suddenly the two sets of men joined in raucous laughter. Whatever the dispute had been about, they seemed to have resolved it.  

“I’m not sure about shaking hands with Adid first.” The guide was shaking nervously as he spoke.

“What do you mean?”

“I have never actually met him before,” the guide confessed.

“You have never met him before?” Grace repeated quietly.

“I’ve seen him from a distance and I know what he looks like a little bit.” The guide swallowed hard again, and his Adam’s apple climbed upward towards his chin before bobbing back to its original position. Rivers of sweat were running down his face, a combination of the burning sun and fear.  

“What the bloody hell do we do now?” Tara hissed. The white van pulled away from the pick-up and headed towards the strange trio.

“I know that he has a lazy eye, it looks a different way to the other one,” the guide said proudly. The van pulled up adjacent to them and the guide grinned widely at the van driver. The driver didn’t reciprocate his greeting and neither did his colleagues. The driver and the two men in the passenger seat stared expressionless at the two women. They all sported mirrored sunglasses. The atmosphere was electric. This was going to go one way or the other, and Grace knew that it could deteriorate into a melee in a matter of seconds.

“Hey, Boss. Look at the beautiful women that I have brought for you. This one is Jamaican, very clean, no diseases. This one is French.” The guide grinned nervously as he tried to sell his wares.

“French?” The man repeated.

“Yes, French.” The guide swallowed and his huge Adam’s apple bobbed up and down again.

“You told my friend that she was Swedish,” the man spoke with a deep throaty voice. There was no malice in his tone as he pointed out the guide’s mistake, but there was caution in his eyes as he removed his sunglasses.

“I was mistaken, Boss, she’s French.” The guide grabbed Tara’s hair again and twisted her face upward, as if he could demonstrate her nationality by doing so. “Tell him where you are from bitch.”

“Je suis Française,” Tara lied. The man in the middle nudged the passenger and he opened the door and climbed down to allow him to exit the vehicle. They eyed the women and there was an air of malevolence about them. Every nerve ending in Grace’s body was on high alert, just waiting for the right moment.  

“They are good quality, Boss. No one has used them yet.” The guide emphasised the point that neither of his prizes had been raped at any point since their capture. In Somalia that was verging on a miracle and it added to their value because the risk of catching AIDS was drastically reduced if another African man hadn’t touched them. “I’ll give you a good deal boss.”

“Shut your mouth,” the man said quietly as he approached the two women. The driver and his mate had also exited the vehicle and they approached the trio menacingly. “She is no more a French woman than I am.”

Grace edged backward an inch or so at a time. She needed to put some distance between herself and their target. If one of the men was Adid, then she had to try to give the snipers a clean shot at him.

“Stay where you are, bitch,” the man growled. Grace froze and looked down at her feet in mock fear. She was studying the man’s face to try to see his eyes behind the glasses. “Have you somewhere to go, bitch?” The approaching men began to laugh but there was no mirth in it, only menace.

“Look here, Boss, I’ll give you the best price I can, because I respect you.” The guide stepped backward away from the approaching man but he didn’t move far enough. The man reached behind his back and pulled a fat silver Bulldog revolver from his belt. As quick as a flash he pressed the thick barrel against the guide’s chest and pulled the trigger. The .44 bullet smashed through his sternum and shredded his heart muscle before punching a huge hole the size of an orange through his back as it exited. The guide was lifted from his feet by the force of the impact and he landed on his back with a thump. A deep red stain began to blossom across his khaki shirt. His eyes were wide open and he stared lifelessly at the blue Somali sky. He was just one of hundreds of young African men who would die that week at the hands of their own kind. The man turned the revolver towards Tara, and he aimed it at her midriff.

“So, bitch, tell me where you are from.” He grinned as he spoke to her. His gravelly voice was full of contempt. Tara glanced at Grace to see if she was going to give the signal for the snipers to open fire but Grace was still looking at the man’s face. He caught the look that had passed between them and turned to Grace. “What?” He snarled. He took his glasses off and put them into his shirt pocket.