The Socotra Incident (11 page)

Shannon despised the place the moment she stepped inside. The music sounded like someone was torturing a dial-up modem, and two men approached her and asked how much her company cost before she’d made it past the bar. This was just the kind of sleazy place Ari loved.

Getting past the bouncer at the velvet rope leading to the upper level cost a hundred euro note and a pouty lip. Semicircular booths extended across the floor, and all were canted toward the dance floor below. You came up here to be seen.

Shannon found Ari four booths down, a champagne bottle on ice in front of him and a bronze-skinned and scantily clad woman on either side of him, snuggling against the arms dealer and giggling sweet nothings into his ears. One had her hand in Ari’s crotch, a table thankfully blocking the full view.

“Shannon? I didn’t think this was your kind of place,” Ari said. His eyes lingered over Shannon without shame.

“Oh, I like her. Can she join us?” one of the girls asked.

“Bitches leave,” Shannon said.

Ari shoved the girls off him and tossed bills onto the table.

“Go get a drink. Daddy has some business to do,” Ari said. The girls snatched the money from the table and scurried away.

Shannon slid into the booth and gave Ari a smile that was anything but genuine.

Ari dug through his jacket and pulled out the table the vampire clamp Natalie had used. He flicked it at Shannon and it clattered over the table top. Shannon let it tumble to a stop in front of her but didn’t touch it.

“Thought you might want that back,” Ari said.

“We need to talk business,” Shannon said.

“Why, you want to resell it? You know my top price, and you aren’t the type to lose money on a deal so quickly.”

“I need your government to acquire a package. In return, I’ll cover your expenses and give you the Club K,” Shannon said.

Ari licked his lips.

“Your government can’t do this?” Ari asked. He was testing her with his question, trying to elicit just a little more from her.

“I don’t work for a government, Ari. You know that,” Shannon gave him another empty smile.

“What is the package? And what makes you think we can do this for you?”

“Nothing that Israel needs or wants and nothing that will cause any blowback so long as I get it. You have a hostage-rescue team in Nairobi posing as an import/export business that can do this. Do you want their names and phone numbers?”

Ari sneered at Shannon and shifted in his seat.

“Come on, Ari. Aren’t your handlers just a bit pissed you bungled getting the Club K? This is a bargain, and you know it.”

“You cheated.” Ari pointed to the clamp.

“Aww.” Shannon frowned. “Poor baby.”

Ari crossed his arms and snorted. “I need to make a call.”

“I’ll wait.”

Ritter and Mike sat in the humid Nairobi afternoon, sweating through their khakis, in front of a run-down café. A waitress brought them a plate of
mahamri
, lumps of fried dough that smelled of coconut and cardamom, and two cups of hot water with plastic envelopes on the saucers.

Ritter picked up the envelope and tossed it back on the table in disgust.

“We’re fifty miles from the farms growing AA-grade coffee beans, and they have the nerve to serve instant,” Ritter said.

“War is hell,” Mike murmured as he munched on a
mahamri
.

Ritter checked his watch and scanned the passing traffic. Battered trucks and vans puttered by, adding the smell of exhaust to the funk of sweaty bodies and third world sewage systems. Their contact was late, and as the only two white faces on this street, they could practically be spotted from orbit.

“You have any guesses on who the original buyer of the…item is? Can’t be the Iranians—the delivery boat went right past it. Thing like this should be damn expensive, more than the people we normally deal with could afford,” Ritter said. Terrorists normally bought their weapons in small batches, spending their money as soon as it came in from donors. To save up anything more than a few million dollars for a purchase was out of character for al-Qaeda and their ilk.

“Maybe a country? Iran slipped enough to Hamas or Hezbollah for the purchase?”

Mike shrugged.

“Good talking to you, Mike.”

A van with a door bereft of paint pulled up next to the café, and the driver rolled down his window. An African with a wide smile and gleaming ivory teeth smiled at Ritter.

“Hey, boss, you going on safari in Amboseli?” he asked, his accent thick and local.

“No, Tsavo,” Ritter answered. The van’s side door slid open, and a Semitic-looking man with gold-rimmed aviator glasses waved Ritter and Mike inside.

“Didn’t our mothers warn us about getting into cars with strangers?” Ritter said to Mike as he left a generous tip and picked up his backpack. Mike took the rest of the
mahamri
with him, plate and all.

The seats of the van felt like they were made of a sliver of torn leather and springs. The open windows and fine coating of road dust promised a long trip without air-conditioning.

“Sorry we’re late. Traffic,” said their driver, who now spoke like an Englishman.

“When was your last operational update?” asked the man in the sunglasses. All business. That was a trait Ritter could appreciate.

“Nothing since we got off the plane in Nairobi and got the pickup location,” Ritter said.

“We have the target location. We’ll lift off soon as we get to the airfield,” Sunglasses said.

The van smacked a pothole and sent
mahamri
flying. One piece remained on Mike’s plate. He offered it to the man in the sunglasses, who shrugged and took it.

“How long of a drive?” Ritter asked. The road ahead was unpaved. Shoeless children darted across the road. Men in carts powered by wide-horned buffalo drove the beasts onward with switches.

“Not long. Maybe three hours,” said the driver.

Calling it an “airfield” was being polite. A decrepit hangar that looked like it had been smuggled from the Soviet Union and reassembled by a construction crew without the original designs squatted next to a strip of packed dirt surrounded by scrubland. The airfield was half an hour from the last sign of civilization.

Ritter and Mike walked around the hangar toward the sound of voices, their minder, the man in the sunglasses, a few steps behind them.

A red and black Russian Mi-8 helicopter sat in the hangar, blades drooping over a dozen men in dark-green fatigues, who clustered around a table. The compartment on the upper turbo shaft engines was open, exposing a mess of gears and nozzles that looked rusted and neglected. Each man had a Tavor battle rifle slung over his shoulder.

“Not again,” Ritter said. The Mi-8 had been in service since the 1960s, and this one looked old enough to have flown for the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Maybe he had a ride on a German U-boat from the First World War to round out his travels on dangerous machines.

One of the men broke away from the table, a hawk-faced soldier in his early forties. He didn’t walk so much as he swaggered right up to Mike and squared off against Ritter’s partner.

“You son of a bitch,” Hawk Face said.

“Moshe. You still mad about Beirut?” Mike said.

Moshe’s stern face broke into a smile, and he reached for Mike. Ritter tensed; their day was about to get a lot worse if Mike broke every bone in Moshe’s body.

Ritter’s jaw went slack as Mike and Moshe hugged like old friends. Mike was never one to display affection for anyone or anything beyond killing terrorists.

Moshe shouted to the other soldiers in rapid-fire Hebrew and got a few laughs.

“I never thought you’d go freelance,” Moshe said to Mike.

Mike shrugged. “Same work, better pay.”

Moshe led them toward the table. Piles of sand and cardboard boxes modeled a village and surrounding terrain next to a different airstrip. A plastic toy airplane sat on the “runway” outlined by the scratch of a knife.

“Sorry if we don’t have 3-D models and PowerPoint slides you Americans might be used to. This is on the quick and on the cheap. We’ve got the time and location for this package of yours.” Moshe picked up a combat knife, which had sunk into the sand table. He leveled the blade at Ritter.

“Mike, I know what you can do. How’s this guy?” Moshe asked.

“He’s not bad but not up to your standards,” Mike said.

“Really, Mike? That stings.” Ritter had been trained, by Mike no less, to be deadly with everything from his bare hands to a .50-caliber sniper rifle. He was a veteran of two combat deployments with the army and countless lethal operations with the Caliban Program.

“Don’t take it personal. Not everyone can be Mossad,” Moshe said. “I’ll have you on over watch with Shlomo. Shlomo!” Moshe called over the driver from earlier, who’d changed into the same dark-green fatigues as the rest of the team and carried an M24 sniper rifle in his hands.

“Shlomo, this is your new best friend. Let’s go over the rest of the plan before we load up.”

The Mi-8 dropped them off 150 miles into Somalia, not far from the city of Bardera, a stronghold for the al-Shabaab terrorist group that ruled most of the countryside beyond the capital of Mogadishu.

The team marched the last five miles through a moonless night to a hillside overlooking a strip of packed earth. Shlomo killed two sleeping dogs with his silenced M24 sniper rifle before the rest of the team, minus Ritter, crept to the airfield.

Ritter and Shlomo had two hours to wait until the sun rose and the delivery would arrive. Shlomo’s job was to surveil the airfield and provide pinpoint fires, when needed. Ritter’s job was to protect Shlomo.

“I’m telling you, the hummus in Tel Aviv is the best in the world,” Shlomo said in a loud whisper, his gaze never wavering from the scope.

“I’ve had your hummus. There’s too much tahini, and it dilutes the taste. You go to Beirut, and it’s got more chickpea and more garlic for a smoother texture,” Ritter answered. They’d gotten to know each other as the sun rose, and the friendly discussion had drifted to food. The conversation wouldn’t stay friendly if they kept talking about hummus. The beige spread had become a nationalistic flash point between Arabs and Israelis in the past few years, as if they needed something else to fight about.

“Texture? If my
bubbeh
heard you say that, she’d—I see something,” Shlomo pulled the sniper rifle closer to his body and exhaled slowly.

Ritter looked at the airfield through a pair of binoculars and saw a shirtless Somali man stretching in the doorway of one of the three packed mud-and-thatch-roof buildings sitting kitty-corner to the airfield.

Ritter keyed his mike. “One military-aged male in the entrance of building two looks like he just woke up,” he said. Two clicks on the net signaled that the message had been received. The team lying in the brush near the airfield wouldn’t risk detection by speaking.

The Somali scratched his belly and trundled toward a patch of brush a dozen yards from the house.

“Levi, Ehud, he’s coming right for you,” Shlomo said into the mike. The two Mossad operatives were in the grass around a bush, which was the height of a man. Ritter waited, unsure whether they’d take the Somali out before he could spot them.

The Somali stopped a foot away from the bush, unzipped his pants, and emptied his bladder into the grass. He finished and wandered back to his hovel.

“Repositioning,” Levi said over the radio. Ritter watched him crawl inch by inch away from the puddle.

A smear of dust rose over the hills beyond the airstrip, and two dirt-caked trucks drove into view. The leading and trailing trucks each had a heavy machine gun mounted on a jerry-rigged mount; both were packed with armed Somalis. The truck in the middle had an enclosed bed.

“Convoy approaching, three technicals,” Shlomo said, giving the radio shorthand for civilian vehicles converted into military vehicles.

Ritter focused on the rear truck, which rode high on its axle. The nuke case was close to five hundred pounds, which should have weighed the truck down.

The convoy stopped at the trio of houses, and the fighters jumped from the trucks. Most lit cigarettes. One Somali stood behind the NSV depressed almost straight to the sky. The other gunner stuffed his cheek full of khat and sat on top of his truck’s cab. The shirtless man from earlier reappeared and shook hands with a Somali wearing a beret, who had been riding inside one of the trucks. There was the headman.

A Somali woman wrapped in a red-and-yellow
jilbab
, her head covered by a scarf, chased two children out of a mud house. The kids ran among the armed men, skipping and trading high fives. They were a complication.

The drone of an airplane filled the air. A prop plane descended through the morning haze on approach to the airstrip.

“Here we go,” Shlomo said.

Mike’s hand gripped his Tavor machine gun, waiting for the signal to end the lives of every armed Somali he could see. He focused on the enclosed truck and wondered whether the 9mm rounds in his weapon and in the rest of the Mossad team’s weapons would puncture the lead case around the nuke.

Nuclear weapons were notoriously delicate devices and required nearly perfect activation to begin the cascade of neutrons that would cause a nuclear explosion, but hitting one with a stray round was a risk he didn’t want to take.

The Cessna Caravan propeller plane bounced against the end of the runway before finding purchase on the ground; then it shimmied to a stop in a cloud of dust. The Somalis milled around their trucks as the man in the beret approached the plane.

The side door on the Cessna’s fuselage popped open and slid aside. A white man, with greasy, blond hair that hung loosely down to the base of his neck, waved to the headman from the opening.

Mike waited as the two men spoke to each other; then the headman grabbed the blond by his shirt and hauled him from the plane. He kicked at the blond until the pilot held up his hands in surrender, the sound of the still-spinning engine diluting his frantic words.

The headman yanked the pilot back to his feet and shoved him toward the mud houses.

Two Somalis dropped their rifles in the beds of the gun trucks and ran to the plane. They pulled a black case from the plane and struggled to carry it in the headman’s wake. The man in the beret extended the antenna of a satellite phone and made a call.

“That your package?” Moshe asked into the radio.

“Unsure. We need the pilot alive to verify,” Ritter answered over the radio. The nuke shouldn’t have been in the plane; Ritter was keeping their options open. “Wait until the guy in the beret finishes his call. Let him report that the payment is received.”

Moshe nudged Mike. “You remember how to count?” he said.

Moshe spoke Hebrew over the radio, and Mike aimed his Tavor at a Somali taking a deep drag on a cigarette.

“
Schloshah…shnayim…echad
.”

Mike squeezed the trigger and fired. His shot joined the rest of the synchronized volley from the rest of the Mossad team. His target collapsed, then rolled onto his back. The Somali looked down at the hole in his chest in disbelief. Mike put the next round in the man’s forehead.

A Somali man ran around one of the trucks, Mossad bullets smacking into the steel sides. An arm snaked over the bed and pulled a rifle from under the dead gunner, a victim of the first volley.

Mike aimed for the gunman’s exposed shins beneath the bottom of the truck and fired off a burst. Blood and muscle splattered from the impacts, and Mike heard the man’s howls as he collapsed to the ground. Another burst silenced him.

Mike pushed himself to his feet and followed Moshe as he charged across the ground toward the nearest mud hut. Dead Somalis littered the area, while the Somali woman screamed, one child held against her legs, the other boy sobbing next to the wheel of the enclosed truck.