Stephen Coonts - Pirate Alley

Grafton dropped the controller and climbed back into the truck. The sergeant started it moving. Everyone in the bed was looking at the still-growing cloud. The blast knocked down most of the shacks in Eyl. Little bits and pieces began raining from the sky. I covered my head with my hands.

As the truck topped the crest I got my last look. The breeze had moved some of the cloud to seaward. Ragnar’s lair was no longer there.

* * *

Mike Rosen was in Sultan ’s e-com center typing, as usual, trying to get the events of the evening into e-mails. He had stopped and was sitting looking at the town of Eyl in the early-morning sun when Ragnar’s building went up in a cloud of smoke and fire. He watched it for a moment, typed out what he had just seen and hit SEND. Then he turned off his computer.

He went up on deck and watched the giant mushroom cloud drift toward the Sultan . Looked at the destroyer and the boats and saw that one of them was towing a hawser toward Sultan.

An hour later the ship was free of her anchor and moving. Sailors were aboard on the bridge, using handheld radios to talk back and forth to each other and the destroyer, Richard Ward.

Sultan was turned toward the east and the destroyer towed her toward the open sea. Mike Rosen stood on the upper deck watching Africa slowly recede. An hour and a half later, all he could see in every direction was water, and some navy ships. High Noon joined him. Amazingly, his coat pockets were empty and he was drinking coffee from a ceramic cup.

“There’s coffee in the galley,” he said and leaned on the rail.

“Where’s your gin?”

“Oh, that. I poured gin on myself from time to time, but the bottles held mostly water.”

“Who do you work for? MI-6?”

Noon grinned. “Been in Africa over twenty years,” he mused. “Time to go home. Fact is, I think I’ve worn out my welcome.”

“What am I supposed to say when people ask me about that e-mail I sent Wednesday evening? How the Shabab was going to kill the pirates, steal the ransom and kill everyone in the fort.”

“Oh. Amazingly accurate prediction, that. True, even.”

“Yeah.”

“Why don’t you just say you overheard some people talking, and let it go at that?”

“The e-mails from the States had a lot to say about this Grafton fellow. That he was in charge of the rescue. You know him?”

Noon laughed.

“I was going to write a book about the Sultan ’s capture, but I am rethinking that.”

Noon emptied the last of his coffee into the sea. The wind whipped the liquid away.

“The truth is, I don’t know very much.”

“Life’s like that. I could use some more coffee. Want some?”

They headed toward the galley.

“Fact is,” Rosen said, “I’ve been offered an hour show on a cable television news channel, five days a week. Big pay increase. I’m going to take it.”

“Congratulations. Something good came out of this mess, after all.” Noon took a deep breath of the sea air. “I always wanted to take a cruise.”

“Enjoy.”

“I intend to.”

I went back to the States via Rome. Got a room in a modest hotel and looked up Sophia Donatelli. She had a few days off, so we spent them seeing Rome. She knew it backwards and forwards. I liked her a lot. She liked me a lot, too. Say what you will about Italian politics, but the women there are the most beautiful in the world, and the food!

From there I went to Paris and visited a friend I happened to know. She was gorgeous too, and the food!

My leg was well by the time I got to Washington in the last week of November, Thanksgiving week. The weather was mild. I didn’t bother taking my coat to work-my sport coat was enough.

Ricardo had broken the story about the Shabab warriors being murdered in an explosion after the Eyl battle. It had been all over the news in Europe, America and I suppose everywhere else. Al Qaeda had sworn revenge.

Ricardo had waited until the media hubbub over the returning hostages had died down somewhat. Everyone had had their fifteen minutes, or less, and life was returning to normal when Ricardo hosted a one-hour news show. He had lots of video, but none of the explosion. The camera had stayed on him as he related the tale of murder of defenseless men.

The press loved it and kept it alive. Congressional investigations had been threatened and scheduled. Subpoenas had been delivered.

An FBI agent and two congressional investigators were waiting for me at Langley that November morning when I unlocked the door to my tiny office. They escorted me to the conference room outside Grafton’s office, got the tape recorder and camera rolling and started questioning me. Having a legal education and some less-than-upright incidents in my shady past that I didn’t wish to discuss, I immediately refused to talk.

That upset them. They made unhappy noises while I worked on the coffee I had bought at the Starbucks stand in the lobby of the building. I smiled.

“Refusing to talk to us could cost you your job,” said the lead dog, a heavyset female with a rather large jaw.

“Really?” I replied and made a slurping noise with the coffee. “Fact is, I haven’t yet written my operations report. When I get it done, of course it goes to my boss. It’ll be classified. If you want to know anything about what my orders were, what I did, saw, said, witnessed, whatever, ask my boss for a copy of the report.”

“There is a report that one passenger from the Sultan was removed by Israeli intelligence agents, a Mohammed Atom. Do you know anything about that?”

“You have got to be kidding.”

“Did you know that there were two Mossad agents on the ground in Eyl?”

“For all I know, there could have been a hundred. Lots of shady characters running around there. Pirates, holy warriors, spies, SEALs, marines, British matrons and innocent babes like me. Take that Ricardo guy from Fox News-I thought he might be Russian intelligence, but damn if I know. I certainly didn’t ask him. Ask the boss for a copy of my report when I get it written.”

Some hot tongue work for a couple of minutes got them no place, so they turned off the gear, packed up and left.

I went in to see Jake Grafton. He was in his office with Sal Molina.

“Tommy Carmellini, Sal Molina.”

He asked how I did and we shook hands.

“Sal wants to ask you some questions,” Grafton said. He leaned back in his chair and ran a pencil back and forth through his fingers.

I mentioned the FBI and congressional investigators and my refusal to talk. “Fact of the matter is,” I told the president’s man, “my report will be everything I have to say about Somalia. If anyone asks about anything not in the report, I intend to take the Fifth Amendment. Everyone should do it at least once, so I thought, why not now?”

Molina stared at me stonily. “Have you been reading the papers?”

“I just flew in from Paris yesterday,” I said. “Read newspapers on the way. Some of the op-ed pieces read like the author belonged to al Qaeda. I’ve heard they can join that in college now, like they can the Communist Party.”

“The administration is under severe political pressure to explain the events that happened in Eyl.”

“Alleged events,” I said brightly, using my legal training.

“Tommy,” Grafton said, “I think we owe Mr. Molina an off-the-record oral statement. He can do with it what he will. Tell him what you personally witnessed in Eyl.”

I thought about it, took a moment to arrange my head and started with my team’s arrival near the airport after the Sultan was captured by pirates. My exposition took twenty minutes. I confess, I sanitized it somewhat. I never mentioned Nora Neidlinger, and I didn’t mention the RC control units. I did tell him about the woman who gunned the Shabab guy while he was in custody. I didn’t think the marines were at fault-who knew what she might do? — and said so.