[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel (29 page)

Container number two was just being hitched.

“I thought you said they’d stay on the docks for at least a day,” said Trace. Her tone could be best described as sarcastic.

“Take us back to the other car,” I told Mongoose. “We’ll split up. Abdi will come with me.”

The other car was a Ssangyong Kyron, an
almost
SUV made by the Korean company Ssangyong. Mechanically, the car was typical of effective but not flashy Korean workmanship. But it was so small Abdi and I rubbed shoulders in the front seat.

The trucks drove west. After dropping us off, Mongoose and Trace raced ahead on the highway, and found that there were four other trailers besides the ones we’d tagged, all traveling relatively close together. Wary of being spotted, Trace got about a half mile ahead of the lead vehicle, and kept pace with the help of the tracking program.

We caught up near Ta’izz (or Taiz as some in the West spell it). This is an incredibly densely packed city in southwestern Yemen, built in and around mountains. The city itself is some 1,400 meters above sea level, high enough that my ears popped on the climb.

The streets were quiet and dusty. Yemen roads in general are about on par with the rest of those in the Middle East, which is to say they suck. But outside the city, the highways were decently paved, occasionally featuring three lanes (mostly empty) in each direction. There were no military patrols or checkpoints, and the hardest part of the drive was staying awake.

Abdi and I swapped places about a mile outside of Ta’izz. I needed to make some calls and arrange for weapons—the trucks’ sudden departure meant we had no gear. I got on the phone with Danny back home, to see if he could arrange to have one of our “friends” find us some weapons and meet us along the way.

We have friends everywhere. Some are more friendly than others.

“Where do you think they’re headed?” asked Danny, trying to figure out where we might set up the rendezvous.

“Saudi border,” I said. “Drive up the side of the Red Sea, maybe go through all the way to Turkey and then into Europe from there.”

“I think you’re looking at local stops. Otherwise why land in Yemen? Why not just offload in Turkey.”

“They want to avoid any customs inspectors.”

“Easy to bribe them. Cheaper, too.”

“Maybe the answer has to do with what’s in the other containers,” I told him. “Prescription drugs are one thing. Guns and ammo another. Al Qaeda’s pretty active in Yemen.”

“Could be. I’ll get back to you once I have things set up.”

*   *   *

The next two hours passed slowly. We stopped for gas, paying 175 Yemen rials per liter, a price set by the government. That’s a little less than a dollar, or roughly three bucks a gallon. I may fill up there all the time.

Danny called me back north of Al Hudaydah. He’d arranged for a rendezvous a few miles over the Saudi border.

“If you end up staying inside Yemen for the night,” he added, “then Ahmed
31
can get south and hook you up. But it’s probably better to wait until past the border. You can get through right on the highway, without worrying about being searched.”

The crossing to the north near Al Tuwal was well guarded and extremely bureaucratic. Most likely we could get guns through, but Danny was right; there’d be no sense taking the chance. Especially since the trucks were driving along as free and easy as if they were going through Indiana.

As we skirted around Az Zaydiya and continued north, Trace got on the radio and asked what I thought we should do about getting food.

“We can wait for them to stop,” I told her.

“They should have stopped by now, if they were stopping,” she told me. “Mongoose is getting hungry.”

“Be grateful Shotgun’s not with you.”

“He’d at least have something to munch on.”

“Go on ahead a little and see if you can find some place to stop,” I told her.

“Where? It’s not like they have McD’s at every exit.”

I checked the map. There was a small city about ten miles ahead of her. “Stop there. Just don’t take too long. We’ll close the gap in the meantime.”

Trace and Mongoose pulled off the highway at a small hut selling local food. They uploaded fresh videos of the trucks as they passed, hoping Shunt might get some more information. They were still getting the food when we passed.

There was generally a good queue at the border customs station, and it might be possible to pose as customs men and make a personal inspection there. To do that, we’d need some information about Saudi routines, and specifics on the station. I was just about to call Danny to see what he could get when I looked at the iPad and noticed the tracking map showed our two vehicles suddenly going in different directions.

That was inconvenient.

“Are you seeing this?” asked Trace a few seconds later.

“Yeah. They just split up below al Ma’ras.” I looked at the map. The lead truck was heading east, back into the hills in the direction of a city named Hajjah. The other was still going up the coast.

“You stay with the vehicle going up the coast,” I told Trace. “We’ll go east.”

*   *   *

I had Abdi speed up to close the distance between our little SUV and the truck, unsure whether there were more vehicles with it. The road was well paved, but it curved violently with the sides of the hill. North of Hajjah it became particularly treacherous, angling sharply. The sides of the road were filled with rocks from landslides.

After about five miles, the truck turned off the highway and the road narrowed further. The mountains around us were sprinkled with little green specks—large bushes and small trees—that stood out against the dreary brown and dark yellow of the sandy hillsides. The valleys were lined with small fields. Crooked hamlets backed up into the hills. They were small and old. Occasionally there would be a new brick building near the street. Korean compacts, haphazardly parked, jutted half into the road in front of high stone walls. The macadam gradually disappeared into hard-packed dirt.

If we were going to Saudi Arabia, we were sure taking the long way there. Abdi closed the distance between us until I could see the dust cloud in front.

I was beginning to think I’d chosen the wrong truck to follow when the phone rang. I went to answer it, then realized it wasn’t my sat phone.

It was the phone Shire Jama had given us. The one that wasn’t supposed to be used until the shipment arrived in Europe.

“Yes?” I said.

“We are under—attack. New arrangements—”

There was a loud explosion in the background, then a softer pop. The phone went dead.

The car suddenly stopped. I looked at Abdi. He was pointing ahead.

“Truck, Dick. They’ve stopped.”

In the middle of the road.

“What is going on?” asked Abdi.

The answer was supplied by a man with an AK47 near the front of the truck. I thought he was the driver or a helper, but then realized he was approaching the cab from a pickup truck blocking the roadway ten or twenty yards up. He fired a few rounds into the air, then pointed at the windshield. Apparently he didn’t like the response he got, for he lowered his aim and fired directly into the passenger compartment.

“Throw us into reverse,” I told Abdi, planning one of those evasive J maneuvers security drivers and James Garner are so fond of. But as I swung around to check the rear, I discovered our exit was cut off by not one but two pickups, which together had blocked the narrow mountain road.

There was a .50 cal machine gun in the back of one of them. A man with a grenade launcher stood in the other.

“This would be SNAFU, yes?” said Abdi.

“You could call it that,” I answered, throwing my hands up as a gunman started to approach.

5

(I)

Abdi gave the man at the window our cover story, claiming that we had been separated from our boss, who was driving to the border to check on Filipino contract workers.

The man was confused, but it was clear that they had set up here for the truck and his orders didn’t include killing bystanders. We were ordered out of the car, quickly frisked, then told to stand on the side of the road.

“We’ll need to know the area so we can find our way back,” I told Abdi. I wanted to give him something to focus his mind on rather than the danger we were in. “Stick to our story.”

He nodded grimly.

There were a dozen gunmen, not counting the drivers. They were dressed in typical Arab peasant clothes, long dirty white shirts and loose-fitting trousers. They wore head scarves wrapped to obscure their faces. A few had knives tucked into their belts; two or three had hand grenades and bandoliers as well. They pulled the bodies from the truck and one man got in the cab. Another man took our car, and slowly the two vehicles set out behind one of the pickups. The man who had come to our window prodded us to follow on foot, in front of the rest of the troop.

I kept looking to the sides of the road, sizing up possible escape routes. Running for it didn’t make sense, at least not at the moment. There was still at least an hour to go until sunset, and the starkness of the hills nearby meant the gunmen would have an easy shot.

Trace and Mongoose would know soon enough that something had happened, as would Shunt, who would track my phone. The first order of business was to stay alive, and until I saw at least even odds, running for it made no sense.

After we’d gone a few hundred yards, the truck turned down a narrow dirt lane on the left. We followed. A terraced field stepped down the hill to the right, and for a moment I thought of making a break for it. But Abdi was walking a little ahead of me, and I didn’t want to leave him behind—he’d be an easy target.

A thick wall rose at a curve in the road a short distance ahead. Two men in Arab garb with AKs stood on the road. Someone in the lead pickup shouted a greeting. A wrought-iron gate was pulled back, and our little convoy turned into a small compound etched into the side of the hill.

There were five buildings spread over a space of about four acres. Besides the guards I’d seen at the road, there were two guard posts at the corners of the road looking down the valley. They had an impressive view across the valley to a stretch of dark desert many miles away.

Two vans were waiting in the center of the compound. I didn’t see what was going on—the man who’d radioed for instructions barked and the gunmen who’d been behind us prodded us toward a one-story building built into the south side of the wall about ten yards from the road. It appeared to be used as a stable; bits of straw clung to the floor, and it smelled like Shotgun after a long workout.

“What will happen to us, Mr. Dick?” asked Abdi.

“We’ll get out.”

“How?”

“Haven’t figured it out yet.”

“You will find a way?”

I nodded.

“I wish I could be like you. My uncle was that way, too. He always knew.”

I inspected our new digs. While the sun hadn’t set yet, there was only a small window in the building, and it was fairly dark. There were no lights to turn on that I could see.

The window looked to be our obvious exit. Two rows of bricks broke the open space into three almost equal parts. Take those away, and we could get through easily—and since the hut was built into the perimeter wall, once through we’d be free.

The problem was getting through the bricks. They were old but they were thick. I didn’t have a knife or any other tools—our captors had seen to that—and trying to scratch the base away with my fingernails would take a long, long time.

“How do you know?” asked Abdi as I stared at the bricks.

“How do I know what?”

“To do—how do you know what to do?”

“Sometimes I don’t,” I confessed. “But you always try.”

“Yes. My uncle said that.”

“He was a wise man.”

I looked down at the floor. It was made of boards nailed into crossbeams. The nails were old-style wedges: miniature chisels. All I had to do was pry one out.

“Find a loose board,” I told Abdi.

I explained a little of what I wanted to do. He dropped to his knees and began searching with me.

“Why a restaurant in Mogadishu?” said Abdi out of the blue.

“What do you mean?”

“Why did my uncle open the restaurant there? Why not America? Or at least Cairo. Alexandria. He could have gone to Egypt.”

Egypt as the Promised Land is a difficult concept to get your mind around, even in 1012 BC, but I knew what he meant.

“Your uncle wanted to stay and help your family,” I told Abdi. “He believed in the country where he’d been born. That’s why he was still in Mogadishu.”

“I should stay there. To help the family now.” He reached to the board in front of him. “This nail is loose.”

I took the nail and went back to the window. The nail was small and a bit dull, but it made decent progress against the old mud of the brick. I had a good slice across the base a half inch deep when we heard voices outside the door. I stuck the nail in the crevice and stepped away just as the door opened.

Two men came into the house. One was the man who had been in charge of the team that took us prisoner. The other was younger, skinnier, with only a bare beard; he was dressed in Western trousers and a T-shirt.

“You are an American,” said the younger man in English. He was so thin that his arms could have been made of wire.

“I have an Egyptian passport,” I told him. I could tell from his expression that wasn’t going to work, so I continued. “But I am Italian by birth. My mother was Egyptian, my father a soldier.” I repeated it in Italian, mostly to establish that Skinnyboy didn’t speak the language.

“You are American,” he insisted.

“You have my passport.” They had taken it earlier.

“Passports are not worth the paper they are printed with.”

I shrugged. He was right, given the outrageous price of paper these days.

The other man grinned. “You will fetch good money, American.”

“Come,” said Skinnyboy. “The leader wishes to meet you.”

The other man barred Abdi as he started to follow.

“He’s with me,” I said.