[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel (15 page)

I’ll leave it to the experts to describe how the stuff is made by squeezing the hell out of the plants. Afghanistan—big surprise, right?—is a key source of the black variety of hashish, and since it’s also the place of origin for a lot of heroin, it was reasonable to hypothesize that I was now being admitted to the terror pipeline the CIA was trying to plug. The skinny man was either a member of Allah’s Rule, or, like Fat Tony, another cutout.

Then again, he could have been associated with another organization entirely. The information that linked Fat Tony with the Allah’s Rule people could have been completely wrong—remember, some of it came from the CIA, and their track record is about as pure as yellow cake uranium.

But I did say “hypothesize” rather than “assume.” I wasn’t assuming anything, and Fat Tony wasn’t giving out more information than he deemed absolutely necessary to close the deal. One hundred and twenty pounds (or so) of heroin is a good amount of high, but in the world of contemporary drug smuggling, it’s not a major haul. The numbers Magoo had thrown around earlier for a single shipment were ten to twenty times that high.

I mentioned that I could handle more and would be very interested in doing so, but Fat Tony demurred.

“This is where we start,” he said. “If you are not interested, then never mind.”

“No, no. We are interested.”

“We can add some other things, perhaps,” he said, glancing at the other man. He mumbled something I couldn’t hear; the man nodded. “Vicodin and Viagra, to start. Later something else.”

“How many?”

“Two cases of each.”

“They’re good?”

“The best. I sell some myself.”

“We will need an earnest payment in Djibouti by the end of the week.”

“I’m not paying for anything until it arrives.”

Fat Tony went back to speaking Somali with Abdi, this time because he was more comfortable with his native language when it came to numbers. A three-way conversation ensued on how much we would pay, when, and where. It was amicable—used car negotiations should be so smooth—and with minimal haggling he agreed to accept a down payment in Djibouti of only ten thousand dollars “earnest money,” with additional money to be wired into two different accounts when the ship reached port and a final payment upon delivery.

I probably could have gotten a better price, but since I was dealing with Magoo’s expense account, I didn’t push all that hard. Making multiple payments was actually in our favor—it would give the agency more leads to follow as they tried tracing the money route.

And that was the deal. Fat Tony handed down a pair of clamshell mobile phones. A thick wad of masking tape encircled each; the number “1” was written on the tape of one, “2” on the other.

“The first cell phone will tell you where to go with the money in Djibouti,” said Fat Tony. “Number One. It will only work there. You will need to be there very soon. Throw it away when you are done. Do not use it for another call. You will receive instructions on what to do with phone Number Two.”

“Very good.”

“We will do other business if this goes well,” he said, pulling the reins of his camel. “Allah be with you.”

2

(I)

If that all seems anticlimactic and blasé, you’re right. In the space of five minutes, I’d just made a significant break in a case the CIA had been working on for a year—and didn’t even know the full dimensions of. A quick walk through the desert, and I’d secured a million-dollar drug deal. All I had to do now was hand off the information to Magoo and let him take it from there.

Heh.

We recovered the UAV and headed back to the boat. By the time we got there, Shunt had managed to verify that Shire Jama’s image and name matched that of a man identified by Interpol as a drug smuggler possibly associated with Allah’s Rule and al Qaeda. I called Magoo, who was his usually cuddly self:

“I want those phones,” he said, curtly. “Meet me in Djibouti.”

*   *   *

Quick geography lesson for those of you who didn’t have Sister Mary Elephant for your fifth-grade geography teacher:

Somalia is the weirdly bent seven on the eastern African coast directly below Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Djibouti is a set of false teeth that sits on the edge of the seven, to the east of Somalia, where the Gulf of Aden pinches into the Red Sea. Keep going north on the water and eventually you get to the Suez Canal.

And don’t let Sister catch you drawing in your notebook rather than reading. The metal side of her ruler packs more wallop than brass knuckles. The sister has a bonfire of a track record when it comes to dealing with wayward scholars and other riffraff. She and my family go way back: she taught my father, George Leonard, and blessed my knuckles on countless occasions.

*   *   *

Our boat didn’t carry enough fuel to make it to Djibouti, and Somalia being Somalia, finding a hospitable marina along the way was about as likely as finding a Buddhist in the Vatican. It was also a rental. I’d borrowed it from a company that did business with the African National Congress, and probably ran guns on the side; while I’m sure we could have kept it for a while, they were charging an outrageous day rate, and taking it to Djibouti would have dented Red Cell International’s yearly dividend. So we motored back toward Mogadishu.

No sojourn in the waters off eastern Somalia is complete without a tête-à-tête with pirates, and so I wasn’t surprised when Mongoose spotted a long fishing boat on a course toward our bow. It wasn’t out for a leisurely sail, either—the prow was up, and there was a good wake behind it.

A prudent captain would have rung for full power and told the helm to steer us away. Then again, a prudent captain wouldn’t have been in these waters to begin with.

“I see eight guys, all with AKs,” said Mongoose, looking through his binoculars. “Looks like they’re hungry.”

“And we’re the main course,” said Shotgun, never one to miss a metaphor involving food. “Yum, yum.”

“Well, let’s give them something to chew on,” I said. “Keep your weapons down until they’re in range.”

Trace eased off on our speed. As the boat grew closer, everyone was alone with their thoughts, contemplating the looming engagement.

I think I know my people well enough to summarize their thoughts:

MONGOOSE:
Should I use the SAW or the grenade launcher for my first shot?

TRACE:
I hope I get a little hand-to-hand action in. I haven’t choked someone in weeks.

SHOTGUN:
What is the proper pre-pirate snack, Yodels or licorice?

Abdi, sitting between Shotgun and Mongoose, looked anxious and a little seasick.

“You all right?” I asked.

“I could use a weapon, Mr. Dick.”

“Just stay down,” I told him. “We’ll take care of it.”

He frowned. I suppose you could argue that he had earned my trust in the hallways at Fat Tony’s, but I wasn’t convinced yet. And the last thing I was going to do was give him a gun so he could feel better. The United States tried that sort of thing in Iraq and Afghanistan; I think you’re familiar with the results.

As they closed to two hundred yards, one of the pirates raised his rifle and fired a burst in our general direction. It could have been meant as a greeting to fellow sailors, the way different navies sometimes welcome visitors with a cannon salute. Or it could have been intended as a warning salvo.

We pretty much took it as an open invitation to fill the wooden vessel and its occupants with as much lead and high explosive as possible.

I kicked things off with a burst from my MP5, taking out the gunman. A half second later, Mongoose fired the RPG into the boat, sending a spray of splinters and steam skyward. Shotgun emptied the magazine under his SAW on the forward section of the boat. He worked quickly, since his target was rapidly disintegrating. Mongoose fired another grenade—“overkill” is not a word in his vocabulary—and a second, larger cloud of steam appeared over the first one. I reloaded, but there was nothing left to shoot at but debris.

One or two men flailed in the water. We immediately commenced rescue operations …

*   *   *

Be serious. They were lucky we didn’t run them over. Here’s hoping they were strong swimmers. I’d simply
hate
to think they turned into shark shit on the bottom of the ocean.

*   *   *

Besides being an eating machine, Shotgun can strike up a conversation with just about anyone on the planet. Maybe because he’s the size of a gorilla—you look at him and you know you
need
to keep him happy.

He started talking to Abdi about what sort of snack foods Somalia has. The concept of “snack food” is pretty much nonexistent in Somalia, though since he had been to America Abdi did understand the concept.

“Cheez Doodles!” yelled Shotgun. “Your restaurant should feature Cheez Doodles. You could build your whole menu around it.”

“You eat so much,” said Abdi. “How come you have no fat belly?”

“Intake matches expenditure.”

Mongoose snorted.

“He’s part of a deviant race,” said Trace. “His parents were from Alpha Centauri.”

“When I open my restaurant in Brooklyn, I will have these snacks,” said Abdi. “Then you will come and be a customer.”

Shotgun beamed. “I got plenty of ideas for a restaurant. You should have a snack-off, for one.”

“What is that, a snack-off?”

“It’s what Shotgun does in his room when the door is closed,” snapped Mongoose.

“Don’t pay any attention to him,” said Shotgun. “He doesn’t understand anything he can’t blow up.”

Shotgun filled Abdi with advice on what his restaurant should offer for the next thirty or forty minutes, until Mogadishu came into sight. By then, even Abdi had had his fill of Shotgun’s “advice”—which, if followed, would have made his restaurant the only Somali restaurant in Brooklyn exclusively devoted to selling bagged junk food. We sailed in blissful silence the rest of the way south. If there was a harbor patrol or coast guard craft anywhere, we missed it. The U.S. Navy had two ships off the coast near the port, but we were so close to the shoreline they took no notice of us.

Finding a place to dock in Mogadishu was not a problem. Finding a place to put your boat without having to worry about it getting stolen was something else again. Even in the government-controlled area there were few docks where you could safely tie up your vessel, and those were not only crowded but expensive by Somali standards.

Fortunately, Somali standards are somewhat lower than those of the rest of the world. Still, we had to pay one hundred bucks in cash to have the boat watched, and that wasn’t counting the ten dollars I slipped the two with the machine guns patrolling the dock.

“Remember my face,” I told them in English. “I’ll be back for the boat in an hour. If anything’s touched, you’ll be swimming with your ancestors.”

I had Abdi repeat it in Somali.

“There’s no chance they’ll forget,” he told me. “You’ve tipped them more than they’ll make in a month, even here.”

My arrangement with Taban was the customary small percentage of the overall deal, which I now owed a small down payment on. I was going to throw in a per diem for Abdi, bringing his fee to several thousand dollars: a fortune in Somalia, though hardly enough to get him to New York, let alone open a restaurant there.

“I need you to open a bank account,” I told Abdi as we walked from the dock. “Once that’s set up, I’ll have your per diem wired in. Then when the deal with Shire Jama is concluded, you’ll get the rest.”

Abdi was disappointed—he thought I was going to give him cash. That would have made him a target for everyone in the city, as I tried to explain.

“You set up the account with a business name, to lessen the possibility of gossip,” I told him. “You might even use your uncle’s name. We wire it in, it stays in the bank. No one can touch it.”

I had to make the point several times. “You have a lot of people around you who are very poor,” I told him. “If they know you have a lot of cash, they might try and steal it.”

“My relatives would not steal from me. They didn’t steal from my uncle.”

“You’re not your uncle. They’ll look at you as if you’re a boy, and try and take it.”

Abdi was too dark-skinned to show much color in his face, but I could tell the blood was rushing there and he was displeased.

“I’m not insulting you,” I told him. “I’m just telling you the way it is. People are scumbags.”

“No. You do not know the Somali people. I could walk the street anywhere with the money in my pocket. I would be safe.”

“If Somalia is such a wonderful place, then why are you leaving?” I asked. I reached into my pocket.

“Here,” I said, handing over a hundred-euro note. “Take it as an advance.”

He stared at it as if it were the Hope Diamond. Meanwhile, I took a business card from my wallet. “Call this number when you’ve set up the account. We’ll forward the rest of the per diem right away.”

“I want to come with you,” said Abdi.

“The hotel’s not far. We’ll be OK.”

“No. To Djibouti. I can be very useful. There are many Somalis in the city—you will need a translator.”

“They speak French there,
merci beaucoup.
”

“Only government, not people. It would help to have a black man with you,” added Abdi. “It means more places you can go.”

“I’m not planning on going any place where that would be a problem,” I told him. “I’m going for a meeting, and then very likely going home. Same with the rest of my team.”

“But you said—plan for all contingencies.”

“I was talking about wearing shoes on the boat.”

“It is a general rule. I know this.”

“Are you looking for extra pay?”

“Pay me if you use me. Nothing if you don’t. You said yourself, be prepared. It is the SEAL way.”

I hate it when people use my words against me.

“Look, I’m not coming back to Mogadishu,” I told him. “I can’t take you to the U.S., if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“No, I don’t think of that. I know I am on my own-some.”

Own-some? Tell me he didn’t pick up that English gem from Shotgun.