Stephen Coonts - Pirate Alley

“With this I can set off Ragnar’s bomb around the fortress, and collapse it. The explosion and falling stone will kill everyone inside. My men will kill everyone outside. If the British or Americans attempt to betray us, or fail to pay the money, I will kill all these people, including you. Allah akbar .”

Grafton donned his headset, which had been arranged around his neck. He keyed the mike with his belt switch. “Toad, this is Jake.”

“Roger.”

Grafton repeated el-Din’s threat. As they discussed it Grafton heard a shout. He looked up in time to see a body falling from the penthouse balcony. It hit with a dull splat. Then another, and another.

Several of el-Din’s entourage ran over for a look. They came back with the news. Jake didn’t need a translation. Ragnar and his sons were dead. Yousef el-Din’s eyes crinkled, and inside his beard his lips twisted. This was his smile.

He spouted more words, either Arabic or Somali, Jake didn’t know. The translator said, “You come with us. You will talk for us. Any tricks, and you die.”

Jake repeated that to Toad Tarkington, then added, “I’m turning this headset off to save the battery. I’ll call you tomorrow to find out when you are ready to deliver the money.”

“Fine.”

* * *

As the pickups came up the hill toward the fortress, I put my weapons in my backpack and set it inside where it was hard to see. Thank heavens someone had dragged off the bodies of the sentries I’d killed. No doubt there were small bloodstains, but who would know? Or care?

Here they came, a couple dozen of Allah’s finest. Ahmad the Awful spouted gibberish at Captain Penney as I listened on my headset to Grafton talking to Admiral Tarkington.

I heard Grafton say el-Din was making him a prisoner. So they were kidnapping the negotiator!

One of the pickups was backing toward the entryway. It stopped twenty feet or so away, and the man at the machine gun pointed it at us, scowled fiercely and wiggled the barrel. If the trench bomb went off while he was sitting there he was going to join the ranks of the recently departed. Maybe he didn’t know that.

The three network reporters were trying to get an interview, but the head dog wasn’t having any of it. Maybe he didn’t speak English. He smacked a light with his rifle barrel, breaking it, and pointed toward the fort. The message was unmistakable. Get inside!

The media people obeyed with a lot of wasted motion. Generators died and lights were extinguished.

I keyed my headset. “Red Control, this is Tommy. Can you track Grafton with the drones?”

“We should be able to do that.”

“Wilbur, Orville?”

“We’ll try, Tommy.”

“Everybody, I’m going to turn off the headset to save the batteries. I’ll call before dawn for a report.”

“Roger.”

I switched the thing off, passed behind Captain Penney as I retrieved my backpack and headed for the stairs to the roof. I needed a few hours’ sleep. I wondered if I would get any.

* * *

Julie Penney escorted Nora Neidlinger to where Suzanne and Irene were trying to sleep, after the battle sounds died away. Marjorie was there, too. The women made a fuss over Nora, whose clothes were still damp.

“We must find her something dry to wear.”

As they did that, Suzanne got right to it. “How are you, Nora? Are you okay?”

In the gloom, it was impossible to read her face. “Fine,” she said. “Fine.”

When her daughter was led in a few minutes later, Nora grabbed her and held on tightly.

Someone asked, “Have you had anything to eat?”

“I’m not hungry. Honestly.”

“Pirate adventures are a good way to lose weight,” Irene remarked.

“Two more days,” Julie told the women. “Arch talked to the negotiator, a Mr. Grafton. The money is coming. Just two more days and we’ll be free.”

When Nora finally lay down and closed her eyes, she tried to get some perspective on her life and her recent adventures. She often did that in the moments before sleep overcame her, but tonight the emotions threatened to overwhelm her. She needed to surpress them, try to wall them off. She certainly didn’t want to think about the details of the torture of Ragnar, which had been a catharsis, a break.

I’ve broken with my past life, she thought. From here until the end it’s a new adventure.

That thought allowed her to relax, and she slept as the dawn turned into day and the first rays of the sun sneaked through the gun ports into the fortress.

* * *

Jake Grafton was also lying down, trying to relax enough to sleep. He was in some ramshackle dirt-floored building a couple of miles up the river from the beach town, Eyl proper. East Eyl. Eyl Beach. Eyl by the Sea, the jewel of Somalia.

Around him he could hear men farting and snoring and coughing, and the groaning strain of the cots on which they lay.

He was acutely aware of the Walther in the ankle holster. They didn’t search him, merely took his com unit and headset. Told him where to lie down. He had obeyed.

Of course, the act of pulling that pistol from its holster would get him shot immediately. He had no intention of doing so. Not anytime soon, anyway.

He lay there listening to the night sounds and wondered if Yousef el-Din’s pocket radio controller would indeed trigger the trench bomb. He and the Israelis thought they had disabled all the detonators and antennas … But! Maybe they missed one. Or two. Maybe it wouldn’t be a really big bang, but a little one. Maybe there would be no bang at all. If Yousef pressed the button and nothing happened, he was going to be very surprised. Also very unhappy. Disappointed, too.

Maybe …

Jake Grafton was still going over the maybes when he drifted off.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Encrypted Top Secret Flash messages were launched into the ether at the speed of light from desks in Washington, Langley and the Indian Ocean, and at most of the military commands in between, and other encrypted Flash messages came zipping back, again at the speed of light.

Toad Tarkington received an avalanche of demands to be told in exquisite detail all that had happened in Eyl to date and what was going to happen in the future. Was or was not the trench bomb safe? Tarkington was given orders to report on the state of health of the Sultan prisoners, the status of the television news teams and the status and circumstances of any civilian casualties caused by the U.S. military or anyone else.

For his part, Toad informed the bureaucrats that Jake Grafton, the American envoy, was the prisoner of Yousef el-Din, the local Shabab banana, and that Ragnar was dead.

Toad and Grafton had a plan, of course, that they had made and massaged since the president appointed Grafton, and Toad undertook to state to the powers that be that the plan didn’t require any participation from Grafton.

Then he turned the whole message mess over to his chief of staff, who could draft answers and kiss ass at the speed of light whenever required.

* * *

In Washington the president took another smoke break with Sal Molina. “Whaddaya think?” the elected one asked after that first blessed drag of cigarette smoke.

“You know Grafton,” Molina said. He stretched out his feet as far as they would go and jammed his hands in his trouser pockets. “Ragnar got his lesson, and now it’s the Shabab’s turn. The thing about Grafton: Anything can go wrong, and if it does, he has probably prepared for that eventuality.”

The president spun his chair so he could look out the window at the floodlit Washington Monument rising like a giant phallic symbol against the black night sky.

“This military adventure won’t go over very well in Europe. They call us unprincipled cowboys now; if there are any significant casualties, they’ll call us worse.”