Frederick Forsyth - The Kill List

The man was the Troll, but Opal could not know that. He just had his handler’s orders: If anything leaves, except produce trucks, follow it. He left his rented room, unchained his trail bike and followed.

It was a long, brutal drive, through the night and into the dawn. The first part he knew already. The coast road led northeast, along the shoreline, past the dry wadi and the clump of casuarinas where he had met Benny and on toward Mogadishu. It was midmorning, and even his spare tank was almost empty when the pickup turned into the shoreside town of Marka.

Like Kismayo, Marka had been a rock-solid al-Shabaab stronghold until 2012, when federal forces, with huge backup from African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) troops, had retaken it from the Jihadists. But 2013 had seen a reversal. The fanatics had come storming back and in bloody fighting clawed back both towns and the land between.

Dizzy with fatigue, Opal followed the pickup until it stopped. There was a gate guarding some kind of a courtyard. The driver of the pickup hooted. A small trap opened in the timber gate and half a face looked out. Then the gate began to swing open.

Opal dismounted, crouching behind his machine, pretending to attend to the front tire, peering through the spokes. The driver seemed to be known, for there were greetings, and he rolled inside. The gate began to close. Before it sealed off Opal’s view, he saw a compound, with a central yard and three low-built off-white houses with shuttered windows.

It looked like one of a thousand compounds that make up Marka, a sprawling complex of low white cubes between the ocher hills and the sandy shore, with the glittering blue ocean beyond. Only the minarets of the mosques reached higher than the houses.

Opal went a few littered alleys farther on, found a pool of shade against the rising heat, pulled his shamagh over his head and slept. When he woke, he patrolled the town until he found a man with a barrel of petroleum and a hand pump. This time, there were no dollars; too dangerous. He could have been denounced to the mutawa , the religious police, with their hate-filled eyes and canes. He paid in a sheaf of shillings.

He motored again through the cool of the night. He arrived in time for his shift at the fish market. Only in the afternoon could he compose a short verbal message, dig up his canvas-wrapped transceiver, hook it to the newly charged battery and hit the send button. The message was received at the Office north of Tel Aviv and, by agreement, passed on to TOSA in Virginia.

Within a day, a Global Hawk out of the American launch site in Yemen had found the compound. It took a while, but the message from Mossad mentioned a fruit market, with stalls and produce spread across the ground, just a hundred yards from the compound. And the minaret two blocks away. And the multi-exit roundabout built by the Italians, six hundred yards in a straight line due north, where the Mogadishu highway skirted the town. There could only be one like that.

Tracker had had a link from the J-SOC drone-operating center outside Tampa patched through to the U.S. embassy. He sat there and stared at the three houses enclosing the compound. Which one? None of them? Even if the Preacher were there, he was safe from drone strike. A Hellfire or a Brimstone would flatten up to a dozen of the close-packed houses. Women, children. His war was not with them, and he had no proof.

He wanted that proof, he needed that proof, and when the cryptographers were finished, he figured the Karachi-based chutney maker would provide it.

In his Kismayo cabin, Opal was sleeping when the MV Malmö joined the queue of merchant ships waiting to enter the Suez Canal. For them, motionless under the Egyptian sun, the heat was stupefying. Two of the Filipinos had lines out, hoping for a catch of fresh fish for supper. Others sat under awnings rigged in the lee of the steel sea containers, themselves like radiators, that contained the cars. But the Europeans stayed inside where the air-conditioning run off the auxiliary engine made life bearable. The Ukrainians played cards, the Pole was in his engine room. Capt. Eklund tapped out an e-mail to his wife, and the cadet Ove Carlsson studied his navigation lessons.

Far to the south, a Jihadist fanatic, filled with hatred for the West and all its doings, scanned the printouts of messages brought to him from Kismayo.

And in a mud-brick fort in the hills behind the bay of Garacad, a sadistic clan chief known as al-Afrit, the Devil, planned to send a dozen of his young men back to sea, despite the risks, to hunt for prey.

There was indeed a code in the messages from Dardari in London and the Troll in Kismayo and it was broken. The two men communicated apparently in clear because both GCHQ in England and Fort Meade in Maryland are suspicious of transmissions that are clearly in code.

So vast is the commercial and industrial traffic flying through cyberspace that not everything can be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. So both centers of interception tend to prioritize the evidently suspicious. Somalia being a highly suspect place, only the harmless-looking would be studied but not subjected to the top-of-the-list decryption tests. So far the London/Kismayo traffic had got away with it. That ended.

The traffic purported to be between the head of a large foodstuffs manufacturer based in London and his manager in a location producing raw materials. The traffic out of London appeared to be queries concerning local availability of fruits, vegetables and spices, all locally grown, and their prices. The traffic out of Kismayo seemed to be the manager’s replies.

The code’s key was in the lists of prices. Cheltenham and Ariel got it about the same time. There were discrepancies. Sometimes the prices were too high, sometimes too low. They did not match the real prices on the world markets for those products at that time of year. Some of the figures were genuine, others unrealistic. In the latter category, the figures were letters, the letters made words and the words made messages.

The months of exchanges between a fashionable town house in London’s West End and a warehouse in Kismayo proved that Mustafa Dardari was the Preacher’s outside man. He was both financier and informer. He advised and warned.

He subscribed to technical publications dealing intensively with the West’s counterterrorism thinking. He studied the work of think tanks on the subject, taking technical papers from the Royal United Services Institute and the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and their U.S. equivalents.

His e-mails to his friend revealed he frequented, at a social level, the tables of those who might have a senior civil servant, military or security figure as their guest. In short, he was a spy. He was also, behind the urbane, westernized façade a Salafist and Jihadist extremist like his boyhood friend in Somalia.

Ariel spotted something else. There were single-letter typing errors in the texts, but they were not random. Very few nonprofessionals can type long passages without occasionally hitting the wrong key and creating a one-letter typo. In journalism and publishing, the correction of these is what copy editors are for. But so long as the meaning is clear, many amateurs do not bother.

The Troll bothered, but Dardari did not. Because his typos were deliberate. They occurred only once or twice per send, but their appearance was rhythmic, not always in the same place but always in sequence with the ones in the previous message. Ariel deduced they were “tells”—small signs which, if they were not there, would warn the reader the sender was under duress or the computer was being operated by an enemy.