Stephen Coonts - Pirate Alley

Carlo Luria captured it all on his camera, and his transmitter outside in the square fired it up to the satellite.

* * *

Ricardo and his cameraman rode in a technical to the fort and were reintroduced to Mustafa al-Said. “It is I who captured Sultan, ” the pirate bragged, so Ricardo gave him a few more minutes of fame. After he got a quickie version of the action, Ricardo asked to see Captain Arch Penney. Last night he had not been permitted to see Penney, nor to enter the fortress. Al-Said led the way into the fortress.

They found Penney in the cooking area. The cameraman arranged and turned on his portable spotlight.

Penney’s clothes were rumpled and filthy. He was unshaven. Words were unnecessary. His haunted visage told the story. Still, he spoke slowly and softly into the microphone Mustache held near his lips. “Two passengers died last night of dysentery. Dehydration. We have almost no way to keep clean, the toilet facilities are holes in the floor, the people have nothing. All of us will eventually sicken and die unless we are released.”

Al-Said stood watching. He was happy. The suffering of the infidels would soon bring money. Much money. The more suffering the camera revealed, the sooner the money would arrive. In truth, he was used to suffering. He had watched children die of starvation all his life, had watched people waste away from terrible, untreated diseases, had lived with the rats, lived like a rat. He was a survivor who cared about no one but himself.

Ricardo interviewed some other people, who to their credit didn’t complain. One man, from the Midlands, praised Captain Penney and his crew. “They have done all they can do.”

“Should the owner of the ship pay the ransom?” Mustache asked callously, and the Brit turned his back and walked away.

He buttonholed a man standing nearby and asked him if his family would pay ransom to win his freedom. Two women shed tears in front of the camera, which Mustache encouraged with leading questions that would have wrung tears from a stone. “Do you miss your children? What will they tell your grandchildren if you are murdered by pirates, or die of some preventable disease? Do you have any last message for your loved ones?” Subtlety was not his shtick.

He would have probably interviewed everyone in the fort if his cameraman hadn’t told him the batteries in the camera needed recharging. The spotlight was also draining juice quickly.

Mustache decided to move his operation outside, and spoke to al-Said about it. To his amazement, he was told no.

“No. You no leave. Ragnar’s orders.”

“Wait! You don’t understand. We are members of the press. We are not passengers or crew of this ship you captured. We report your story to the world. We tell the world what is happening.”

“Tell it here,” al-Said said firmly. “You stay.”

And he walked out. Ricardo trailed behind him, protesting vigorously, but the guards at the entrance stopped him and the cameraman. They stood watching as al-Said climbed into the pickup that had brought them here and drove away.

When he had composed himself, Mustache assumed the position with his microphone in front of his mouth. The cameraman used the last of his battery juice to broadcast the sad truth: He and Ricardo were now prisoners of the pirates and wouldn’t be broadcasting anymore unless and until they found a way to charge the batteries in their equipment.

Then Mustache had one of those moments that earned him the big bucks from Fox News. He said, “So we too join the prisoners from the Sultan. We too will die here in this filthy, rat-infested fortress unless the ransom Ragnar demands is paid. Like all these people trapped by an evil they can not control or even comprehend, we hope that statement is not our epitaph.” He managed to say it matter-of-factly, with the emotion just under the surface, summoning his courage and steeling himself for the ordeal. He was commenting in the shadow of the gallows.

As he predicted, it was terrific television.

* * *

Rear Admiral Toad Tarkington watched the Fox News and Italian transmissions to the satellite in the Flag Ops spaces aboard Chosin Reservoir . Unfortunately he was not a connoisseur of cable news, so he almost gagged at Ricardo’s histrionics.

He had the technicians play Sophia Donatelli’s interview with Ragnar twice while he studied the man’s face, his expressions. He learned nothing that he didn’t already know. The pirates were vicious men playing hardball. So be it. The U.S military played hardball, too.

Soon the admiral was watching technicians in an intelligence space put together a model of Eyl on a large table that was usually used for map study. The model was being constructed with sand, plaster of Paris and wood bits that were used for buildings and shacks. The info to construct the model came from satellite and drone imagery, and was checked and verified against the images from Carlo Luria’s television camera. Distances had to be correctly measured, the topography of the terrain accurately reproduced, buildings correctly placed, at the right height and aspect.

The admiral was most interested in the area below the fort, near the road that led to the entrance. The wire from the fertilizer bombs ran down this road, and Carmellini said it terminated in a small shack with an old-fashioned DC generator. No one knew where the detonators were located in the explosive mixture. Carmellini had also reported antennas. If there were some kind of radio controls, there must be batteries and a capacitor. How many radio controls there were, their location and who had access were all unknown. With a push of a button or flip of a switch, the bomb could be detonated at any time.

Finally, the admiral and his experts didn’t know where the Shabab soldiers were located. There seemed to be a large number of armed men and pickups in a district, actually a separate small town, about a mile upriver of Eyl. Were these men Shabab, or pirates under Ragnar’s control? They had to be one or the other. In Eyl there were very few neutral persons.

Tarkington’s staff fired off a Top Secret message to Washington asking for any information the CIA had about the Shabab in Eyl. Hours later, the For Your Eyes Only, Top Secret reply was placed in Tarkington’s hands. The lead paragraph stated that Tarkington was to reveal the message’s contents only to those officers who needed the information for operational purposes.

Tarkington quickly realized why. He was reading a carefully written, detailed intelligence summary. The message named every Shabab soldier in the Eyl area, where he lived, who he lived with, the weapons and other military equipment the Shabab possessed and their communications setup. It included descriptions and summaries of the abilities and prejudices and weaknesses of Shabab commanders, from the top down.

It was brutally obvious that the information could have only come from a spy on the ground in Eyl, someone who knew every man in town. No doubt that was why the information was not to be shared.

The admiral went into the space where the mock-up of Eyl was taking shape and compared buildings to the locations set forth in the message. Yes, the Shabab warriors were concentrated in the village neighborhood in the old wash west of the downtown area. Aerial reconnaissance imagery clearly showed the armed pickups parked willy-nilly, and fuel tanks here and there. When Colonel Zakhem came into the space a few minutes later, Tarkington handed him the message.

“It’s gold or bullshit,” Zakhem said after he had carefully read the message twice and handed it back.

“We’re going to find out, Colonel,” Toad Tarkington said with a smile. “Want to make a small wager on which substance it is? Like a steak dinner next time we hit port?”