Frederick Forsyth - The Kill List

There was a tap on the door.

There was a new vehicle at the compound site, a small sedan this time. At 50,000 feet, the Hawk wheeled and turned, watching and listening. The same white-clad figure crossed the sand and conferred with the car’s driver. In Tampa and London, Americans watched.

The car did not enter the yard. A large attaché case was handed over and signed for. The figure in white headed for the main building.

“Follow the car,” said the Tracker. The outlines of the compound slid out of screen as the camera suite high in the stratosphere followed the car. It did not go far; under a mile. Then it stopped outside a small office block.

“Close up. Let me have a look at that building.”

The office block came closer and closer. The sun in Marka was overhead, so there were no shadows. These would come, long and black, as the sun set over the western desert. Pale green and dark green; a logo, and a word beginning with D in roman script: “Dahabshiil.” The money had arrived and been delivered. The overhead scrutiny returned to the Preacher’s compound.

Block after block of hundred-dollar bills were removed from the case and placed on the long polished table. The Preacher might be many miles from his origins in Rawalpindi, but he liked his furnishings traditional.

Duale had already announced he had to count the ransom. Jamma continued to interpret from Arabic to Swahili, Duale’s only language. Opal, who had brought the attaché case, stayed in case he was needed, the junior of two private secretaries. Seeing Duale fumbling with the bundles, Opal asked him in Somali: “Can I help you?”

“Ethiopian dog,” snarled the Sacad, “I will finish the task.”

It took him two hours. Then he grunted.

“I have to make a call,” he said. Jamma translated. The Preacher nodded. Duale produced a cell phone from his robes and tried to make a call. Inside the thick-walled building, he could get no tone. He was escorted outside to the open yard.

“There’s a guy in the yard on a cell phone,” said M.Sgt. Orde in Tampa.

“Grab it, I need to know,” snapped the Tracker.

The call trilled in a mud-brick fort in Garacad and was answered. The conversation was extremely brief. Four words from Marka and a reply of two. Then the connection was severed.

“Well?” asked the Tracker.

“It was in Somali.”

“Ask NSA.”

Nearly a thousand miles north in Maryland, an American Somali lifted the headphones off his ears.

“One man said, ‘The dollars have arrived.’ The other replied, ‘Tomorrow night,’” he said.

Tampa called the Tracker in London.

“We got the two messages, all right,” the communications intercept people told him. “But they were using a local cell phone network called Hormud. We know where the first speaker was — in Marka. We don’t know who replied or from where.”

Don’t worry, thought the Tracker. I do.

Colonel, sir, they’re moving.”

The Tracker had been dozing at his desk in front of the screen in the London embassy that showed him what the drone over Marka could see. The voice was from the speakerphone linked to the control bunker outside Tampa. The voice belonged to M.Sgt. Orde, back on shift.

He jerked awake and checked his watch. Three a.m. London time, six in Marka, the darkness before dawn.

The Global Hawk had been replaced by one with full tanks and hours of loiter time before it, too, would run dry. On the Somali coast, there was the tiniest pink blush across the eastern horizon. The Indian Ocean was still black, as was the end of the night over the alleys of Marka.

But lights had come on in the Preacher’s compound, and small red blobs were moving about — the heat sources caught by the drone’s body sensors. Its cameras were still on infrared mode, enabling it to see in the dark what was going on ten miles beneath it.

As the Tracker watched, the level of daylight rose with the sun; the red blobs became dark shapes moving across the courtyard far below. Thirty minutes later, a garage door was opened and a vehicle rolled out.

It was not a dusty, dented pickup truck, the all-purpose personnel-and-load carrier of Somalia. This was a smart Toyota Land Cruiser with black windows, the vehicle of choice of al-Qaeda right back to bin Laden’s first appearance in Afghanistan. The Tracker knew it could hold ten people.

The watchers, four thousand miles apart in London and Florida, watched just eight dark shapes board the SUV. They were not close enough to see that in the front were two of the Pakistani bodyguards, one to drive, the other heavily armed in the passenger seat.

Behind them sat the Preacher, shapeless in Somali robes with head covered, and Jamma, his Somali secretary. The third seat went to Opal and the other two Pakistani guards, making up the only four the Preacher could really trust. He had brought them all from his days in the Khorosan killer group.

The last was squatting in the baggage area behind the rows of seats. He was the Sacad Duale.

At seven Marka time, other servants hauled the gate open and the Land Cruiser rolled. The Tracker faced a quandary: Was this a red herring? Was the target still in the house, preparing to slip away, while the drone he must now know was above him went elsewhere?

“Sir?”

The man with the control column in the Tampa bunker needed to know.

“Follow the truck,” said the Tracker.

It led through the labyrinth of streets and alleys to the outskirts of town, then turned off and drove under the cover of a large, asbestos-roofed warehouse. Once in there, it was out of sight.

Fighting to control the panic, the Tracker ordered the drone to return to the residence, but the compound and its yard were wreathed in shadows and quiet. Nothing moved. The drone returned to the warehouse. Twenty minutes later, the large black SUV emerged. It drove slowly back to the compound.

Somewhere down there, it must have sounded its horn, for a single servant emerged from the house and opened the gate. The Toyota rolled inside and stopped. No one got out. Why? wondered the Tracker. Then he caught it. No one got out because no one was in it except the driver.

“Get back to the warehouse fast,” he ordered M.Sgt. Orde. In reply, the controller in Florida simply widened the camera lens from close-up to wide-angle, capturing the whole town but in lesser detail. They were just in time.

From the warehouse, not one but four half-body pickups, the so-called technicals, were rolling out one after the other. The Tracker had almost fallen for the basic switch.

“Follow the convoy,” he told Tampa. “Wherever it goes. I may have to leave, but I’ll stay on my cell.”

In Garacad, Mr. Ali Abdi was woken by the growling of engines below his window. He checked his watch. Seven a.m. Four hours until his regular morning conference with London. He peered through the shutters and watched two technicals leave the courtyard of the fort.

It was of no matter. He was a very contented man. The previous evening, he had secured the final concurrence of al-Afrit to his mediations. The pirate would settle with Chauncey Reynolds and the insurers for a ransom of five million U.S. dollars for the Malmö , including cargo and crew.

Despite the one minor fly in the ointment, Abdi was sure Mr. Gareth would also be happy when he learned that two hours after the pirate’s Dubai bank confirmed lodging of the dollars the Malmö would be allowed to sail. By then, a Western destroyer would surely be offshore to escort her to safety. Several rival clans had already sent skiffs to prowl around the Swedish merchantman in case she was ill guarded and could be snatched again.