Stephen Coonts - Pirate Alley

I knew Grafton was slick, but he had a talent as a liar that would have done credit to Bernard Madoff. He should have been a politician.

They had questions, and he deflected most of them. They would have to wait.

Then he was done and walked away. I went with him. The press got busy packing up and moving up the hill to photograph the choppers arriving and departing.

The evening was upon us. The ocean to the east was shrouded in darkness.

I was tired, and I realized I wasn’t going to get any sleep. Grafton sat on a piece of a box that had washed up on the beach and talked awhile on his handheld radio. It didn’t have much range, but he was chatting with Toad Tarkington aboard Chosin Reservoir ; I doubted if the ship was over ten miles away. Just in case, I suspected the E-2 Hawkeye from the aircraft carrier farther north was overhead to relay the signal, and of course Tarkington probably had an Osprey or two aloft. Plus drones. I wondered if Ragnar realized how tight the net already was.

* * *

Ragnar, his two sons, and Mustafa al-Said huddled around a radio set up in a room on the third floor of his building. The radio had come out of a captured ship and could run through the UHF and VHF frequencies that the allied task forces used to communicate. The technician spoke some English, enough to get the drift of remarks, but tonight he was having his problems.

All the tactical transmissions among the ships and SEALs and planes were encrypted. About the only plain-language transmissions he could intercept were aircraft control freqs in use around the ship, and were quite useless to him, most of the time. Other than the fact that certain aircraft were airborne, and how many, a nonexpert listening to this stuff heard most of it as useless tidbits, and numbers could easily be over- or understated to confuse eavesdropping baddies.

However, tonight the technician had found and was listening to Jake Grafton’s plain-language discussion with Toad Tarkington. Grafton told the admiral afloat that he wanted two helos, all the clean water they could carry, soap, medicine for intestinal problems and a doctor. He wanted the choppers to land on the roof of the fortress, off-load their supplies and evacuate sick people. The technician translated as much of that as he could for Ragnar and his men.

Then Grafton got into the amount of money Ragnar wanted. Toad read Grafton snippets of messages that, he said, were pouring out of Washington. After fifteen minutes, Ragnar learned that Grafton had the authority to agree to pay two hundred million in cash to Ragnar, but the money wouldn’t arrive aboard ship until the following day. Toad recommended a delivery Friday morning, after Grafton had agreed on the amount and the method of transport of the prisoners after they were released.

What Ragnar didn’t know, of course, was that all this was merely good theater. Still, he and his men discussed the conversation they had overheard, and were pleased. They had won. The allies were going to cave. They were going to be filthy rich.

Two miles inland, at the headquarters of the Shabab in the village beside the river, Yousef el-Din was also listening.

He and his lieutenants made their plans. If Ragnar and his pirates were dead when the two hundred million arrived, they could collect it in their place and use it to fund jihad. The irony of using infidel money to buy weapons from infidels to kill infidels was delicious to contemplate.

Of course, the Shabab would kill all the prisoners. “God’s curse be upon the infidels,” says the holy Koran. “Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Deal firmly with them. Know that God is with the righteous.”

This triumph would be the ultimate terror strike against the Great Satan. The power of the Shabab would be on display for all the world to see. America and her allies would react violently, of course, and that bloodletting would unite the faithful worldwide in the ultimate jihad, the final cataclysmic battle between good and evil.

Since they fought God’s battles, the warriors of the true faith would win, once and for all. Their reward in Paradise would be great indeed. The Koran promised endless virgins to deflower and boys to bugger, prospects that appealed mightily to Yousef el-Din, who did his best to anticipate his reward right here on earth.

Yousef el-Din and his lieutenants could scarcely contain themselves.

Allah akbar !

* * *

After a while Jake Grafton and High Noon strolled into Ragnar’s building to see the man. No doubt they were going to negotiate some more on how much ransom the good guys were going to pay. I was sure Grafton would be a super-hard sell yet eventually capitulate, filling Ragnar’s hard little heart with greedy hope … but, of course, I now knew that Grafton intended to pay nothing, nada, zip point zilch more than the million he had already laid on Ragnar.

Knowing Grafton, I suspected he would also figure out a way to get most of that million back. No doubt he planned a tiny role for me in that repossession.

I sat on a handy rock and surveyed Ragnar’s building. The Italians built it, I knew, back when this was Italian Somalia. Balconies faced the sea, but the other three sides had only windows. The walls had the usual decorations, little ledges and cornices. I estimated the distance between them. Yes, the building could be free-climbed.

The windows were bright with electric lights. Obviously the building had a generator. As far as I could see, it was the only one in town. Everyone else had candles and lanterns to keep the night away, so the town was much darker than one would see in Europe or the Americas.

I sat watching the crowd as the evening deepened. One of the television reporters was busy chattering into the cameras as the portable lights illuminated the scene. The other two reporters were already up at the fortress. Hordes of local kids stood behind the reporter, mugging for the cameras. The technician running the diesel generators was passing out candy bars to the kids. He tried to make the goodies last, but soon he was out and the kids abandoned him to his noisy machine.

A few entrepreneurs had set up grills and were selling food. I wasn’t tempted. The locals ate the stuff with their fingers. I didn’t see a single Somali woman in the crowd. Lots of kids, men with AKs and unarmed men just wandering around, but no women. Every now and then one of the kids or men would relieve themselves in the sand. Or on the plaza.

A bonfire burned in the plaza. The flickering light made the scene look like something out of Dante.

The hot wind blew gently off the desert, and waves flopped on the beach. By all appearances, it was just another night in Somalia.

Up on the point I could see some light leaking out the gun ports of the old fortress. Eight hundred fifty people hunkered in there …

I stood up, dusted off my fanny and hoisted my backpack, and walked across the plaza toward the road that would take me up the hill. I wanted to be there when the helos arrived.

Susan B. Grant was the name of the freighter lying in the mud below the fort on the north side of the harbor. The slope of the hill came down to the beach at perhaps a thirty-degree angle, and the beach was perhaps fifty yards wide. The six-thousand-ton bulk carrier lay two hundred yards from the beach. She had been anchored there in June. Her bulk had caused the discharge from the small river to slow there, and silt to accumulate. In addition, the natural movement of sand southward along the beach was disrupted, so sand mixed with the silt. Susan B. Grant now rested solidly on the silt-sand mixture, which was building up around her hull. At most, only ten feet of water circulated around her rusty sides.