Stephen Coonts: Pirate Alley

The floor came up and threatened to hit me in the face.

I turned and glanced at Travis, who was bent over Joe Bob working on him. He didn’t have to say anything to me. I could see Joe Bob’s pasty face and see his eyelids flutter as he tried to remain conscious. We were going to have to get him to a doctor quick or he was going to die.

The bad news was that the nearest doctor and surgical facility were at a French base in Tadjourah, Djibouti, which was at least eight hours away by chopper.

I looked at the unconscious computer guy and wondered if he was worth the life of Joe Bob Sweet, a twenty-nine-year-old Texan, a Special Forces sergeant on temporary duty with the CIA, an all-around good guy and father of two little towheaded kids.

* * *

The chopper flew us northwest toward our base. Joe Bob bled out during the flight. After a while the brown eyes in his chalk face focused on infinity, and Travis and I could get no reaction from him. No pulse. No respiration.

I took a seat by the door and watched Africa go by.

A V-22 Osprey delivered us to the desert two weeks ago, to a site the experts had picked for us. Actually it was in Ethiopia, not Somalia, but I am probably not supposed to say that. I don’t think anyone in the American government asked the Ethiopians if we could use their desert, but I am something of a cynic. It was about as lonely a place as one could find on the planet, and conditions were a bit Spartan. We hammered a tube into the ground to piss in and dug a hole to poop in. We erected four tents, built up dirt berms around them to stop shrapnel and bullets, and between them built a food and ammo dump below ground level. Two of the tents were for the other guys to sleep in, one housed the com gear, and one was mine. All mine. With my own cot and vermin and flashlight. I felt like an Eagle Scout.

We did some serious camping. The sand and dirt got into everything, including our food. We bitched a lot, but that didn’t help. Gave up shaving. And bathing. Worked out every day, cleaned our weapons and played cards. At one point I was $152,000 ahead, but I lost twenty grand and the deed to my ranch the next day when one of the guys filled an inside straight. I tried to keep my gambling wealth in proper perspective; the bastards would never pay off.

This afternoon when we arrived in a cloud of dirt, the other guys got busy refueling the chopper while I sent an encrypted message via satellite telephone to my current-and I hoped temporary-boss, Jake Grafton, head of Middle Eastern covert ops for the CIA, telling him we had Omar Ali and one KIA.

Walk into a room and collect a bullet in the gut from a kid.

Truth was, I suspected, that Joe Bob hesitated half a second when he saw it was just a kid … and the kid drilled him while he hesitated.

You can train and train and train until you are eligible for your pension, but in the real world, you are going to hesitate for just an instant.

So the boy shot Joe Bob, and he still had to kill him.

We put Joe Bob in a body bag and settled in with beer to wait for Ali to wake up. He slept the rest of the afternoon.

Our two interrogation experts checked him from time to time to ensure he wasn’t oversedated, and we got on with the evening meal, which consisted of MREs and Tabasco sauce. Man, you eat that stuff for weeks, you become a hot sauce junkie.

The interrogation guys, Joe and Skeeter, talked to me over a beer, ensuring they knew precisely the information we wanted from Ali. This certainly wasn’t the first guy this team had snatched and, if the world kept turning, wouldn’t be the last. In fact, snatching bad guys was our mission, why the Company sent us here in the first place. What with all the Islamic fundamentalist rebels, terror groups and jihadists, we were in no danger of running out of bad guys any time soon. Looked like a career to us.

What happened to them after we squeezed them dry kinda depended on how bad each dude was. Real bad actors went into a hole in the ground. Guys from mud-hut villages who were doing the bad-guy thing because they were bored, or it was the only game in town, could be sent to Gitmo, there to rot while American politicians wrung their hands and wept. Gofers and kids and hangers-on could be relocated in the middle of the night and turned loose with an admonition to go forth and sin no more. No one knew if they did or didn’t-sin anymore-but there is a place in this world for hope.

Omar Ali was a case in point. He was the computer geek for a pirate named Ragnar up the coast from Mogadishu. This past summer Ragnar’s boys captured a yacht with four adults on it, two men, two women, and Ali got busy on the Internet trying to find out what these four captives might be worth in the ransom market. Then the gig went sour, somehow, and the pirate captain on the yacht killed all four of them.

So our boy Omar Ali was up to his nuts in conspiracy, piracy and murder. He also knew all about the pirates, who, what, where, when and why, how they operated, and so on. Hence the snatch.

That night we sat in the African dirt, stuffed with food containing enough preservatives to mummify King Tut, which we had washed down with Tabasco sauce and beer, looking at the stars on a black African night while we waited for Omar Ali to wake completely up. We talked about everything on the planet except Joe Bob Sweet. Finally the encrypted satellite phone started buzzing.

It was Jake Grafton, my boss.

Now don’t get me wrong; I personally like Grafton and have worked for him several times through the years. It’s just that the stuff he handled these days was usually red hot, and in dump places, like the Middle East and the horn of Africa. I am on the Company payroll as a tech-support guy, which means I crack safes, plant and monitor bugs, tap telephone lines, diddle with other people’s computers, stuff like that, usually in fairly decent places, like Europe or China or Japan or Australia or Canada or California or Washington or … Oops, I’m probably not supposed to mention the stateside stuff. Anyway, Grafton borrowed me from time to time to handle chores for him. Like I said, I liked him well enough but wanted our professional association to be temporary, and the more temporary, the better.

Tonight, after exchanging pleasantries with me, he said, “The Osprey is coming for Ali. Put him and Sweet on it.”

“You want us to find out what he knows before we send him?”

“No. That wouldn’t play well in an American court.”

I couldn’t believe it. Just when you think there are no more surprises left in life. “They’re actually going to try this guy? Let him lawyer up and cry for the cameras?”

“Justice thinks they got enough on this dude to lock him up for life. They want to give it a whirl.”

“Yessir. But after the press release, don’t plan on us going back to Mogadishu to snatch anyone else. It’ll be impossible.”

“I’m sorry about Joe Bob, Tommy. I’ll write a letter to his wife, and we’ll send someone to see her, get the process started. Ain’t much, I know, but Joe Bob signed on for the king’s shilling and knew the risks.”

Sympathy was not one of Grafton’s major virtues. Maybe he had seen too many corpses.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Tell the guys to hang tough, Tommy.”

“We need more beer and gasoline for the generator.”

“You got it.”

Omar Ali went flying out of our lives an hour later. After we had off-loaded the fuel drums and some boxes of rations, we put Ali on the V-22 Osprey with his computer. We strapped him to a stretcher and gave him another shot, so he was sleeping like a baby. Joe Bob’s corpse went on, too. The tilt-rotor Osprey lifted off, raising the usual cloud of dirt, and flew away low with its lights off, across the desert toward the sea.