Death Wave (30 page)

“Moscow denies that there are any missing tactical nukes,” Rubens said. “They have their heads planted firmly up their asses and aren’t going to extract them now.”

Douglas grunted. “The
Constellation
CBG is the closest naval force to the area right now, he said. They’re in the best position to board and search the
Yakutsk
.”

“Yes, sir.
If
we can get the approval to go in.”

“Damn it, get me something harder to go on with this tidal wave thing. I can’t go to the President with a wild tale from a mass-market paperback.”

“I’ve already arranged for the Deep Black team on La Palma to do some checking, sir,” Rubens told him. “I’ve also initiated a requisition with the NRO for detailed satellite reconnaissance of La Palma.” He spread his hands. “It’s all we have going for us at the moment.”

“Then it’s going to have to do. You and your people have my authorization to do what you need to do …
but get me that proof
.”

15

HOTEL SOL
PUERTO NAOS
LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS
FRIDAY, 1715 HOURS LOCAL TIME

That woman isn’t really your wife, is she?” Lia asked.

“Um, no,” Carlylse admitted. He looked embarrassed. “She’s a waitress at a restaurant in Puerto Naos. I met her a couple of days ago, and we kind of hit it off.”

“You need to get rid of her.”

“Damn, she’s been up there in my room for over an hour. She’s going to be wondering where the hell I am.”

“We think that a hooker gave Jack Pender’s room key to some JeM assassins,” she told him. “If this is the same sort of setup, someone else could be waiting for you in your room.”

“Gem? What’s gem?”

“Jaish-e-Mohammad,” she told him. “The Army of Mohammad. Thoroughly nasty characters who blow up buses filled with civilians, among other unpleasant things.”

“Shit.” He shook his head. “But Carmen is
such
a nice girl …”

“Sure she is. Let’s go up to your room together, and you’ll explain to her that the date is off for tonight.”

“Uh … I gave her my key.”

“I’d rather not knock. Get another key from the front desk.”

“Yeah, sure.” Carlylse seemed distracted, even a bit dazed. He wasn’t thinking straight.

On the way up to the room, Lia pulled her P226 from her pocketbook and snapped a loaded magazine into the butt. The muzzle was threaded to receive a sound suppressor, which she screwed on tightly. If this was a setup, it was possible that a couple of JeM assassins were waiting in the room for Carlylse’s return, and Lia was taking no chances. At the door to room 312, she stood with her back to the wall, the pistol in both hands, muzzle pointed at the ceiling. “Open it,” she whispered, “and then get the hell out of the way.”

Carlylse nodded and slid the keycard through the reader. The door clicked open, Carlylse stepped back, and Lia rolled around the corner and into the room.

The woman was in the king-sized bed, naked and half asleep. As Lia spun into the room, her pistol aimed two-handed at the woman, the waitress sat up and shrieked.

Lia pivoted, checking each corner of the room, but the woman had been alone. Now she was out of bed, snatching up stray items of clothing from the floor and bolting for the door, still screaming.

“Damn it, you scared the poor girl half to death!” Carlylse thought about it a moment. “You scared
me
half to death!”

“Grab your things.”

“Huh? What do you—”

“If this was a setup, she’ll be talking to the assassins as soon as she gets her clothes back on. If it wasn’t, she’ll be talking to the desk manager, and he’ll have security up here in a few minutes. Do you really want to wait here and answer their questions?”

“Um, no.” He gave her a hard look. “Look, who are you, anyway?”

“I showed you my ID.”

“I saw an ID for someone named Cathy Chung. I
think
the ID was for the U.S. State Department, but I’ve never seen one of those, so I have no way of knowing if it was real. If
you’re
real.”

“While you try to figure that out,” Lia told him, “grab your suitcase and let’s get out of here.”

“Look … did my ex send you?”

“What?”

“Did my ex-wife send you to screw up my sex life?”

“Art Room,” Lia said.

“What?” Carlylse asked, looking puzzled at the non sequitur.

“Here, Lia,” Jeff Rockman said in her ear.

“Give me some bio on this guy. Stat.”

“Coming right up, Lia.”

“Who are you talking to?” Carlylse asked, suspicious.

“My electronic backup,” she told him. “Never leave home without them.” Rockman began reading a file into her ear. Lia listened a moment, then began repeating select lines. “Okay … you’re Matthew Vincent Carlylse but you’ve gone as Vince since high school. You were born in Peoria, Illinois, on May 2, 1972. U.S. Army from 1991 to 1995. Married June Hanson in 1994, but she divorced you twelve years later after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. The voices told her you were sleeping with other women. You started writing after your discharge, and your first book was published in 1998. The book was called
Gray Terror: The UFO Abductors
, and was a minor commercial success—”

“Hey!”

“You met John Pender at a book convention in Atlanta the following year, and—”

“All right Hold it!
Hold
it! What’s the point of this?”

“To prove to you that I am a U.S. federal agent with access to a great deal of background information on you. Information that foreign terrorists wouldn’t have.”

“I don’t know. My wife was a foreign terrorist after she was hospitalized the first time.
She
would know all of that stuff.”

“And she wouldn’t have told me that she was schizophrenic. Her medical records, however, are another matter. Mr. Carlylse, can we
please
continue this discussion in my room? Unless you really want to discuss me with hotel security or a couple of assassins from the Army of Mohammad.”

Reluctantly, he began gathering his things.

HAFUN
NORTHEASTERN SOMALIA
FRIDAY, 1940 HOURS LOCAL TIME

The place still hasn’t recovered
, Ahmed Babkir Taha thought as he walked along the sand through the darkness.
Not completely. I wonder if it ever will?

Even now, well past sunset, the pounding of hammers could be heard farther up the hill from the beach, as small handfuls of people continued to rebuild. A few lights shone here and there. It was late enough in the year that the wind coming in off the ocean was quite chilly. Unfortunately, it was also dry, with the promise of yet more crippling drought.

God the most merciful had not been merciful to the town of Hafun—Xaafuun, in Somali. Drought, crushing poverty … and on December 26, 2004, an earthquake fifty-four hundred kilometers away, off the distant coast of Sumatra, had generated a tidal wave that had swept across the Indian Ocean, wreaking untold damage and killing 230,000 people in eleven countries.

Hafun, a fishing village located on a sand spit just above sea level here at the very tip of the Horn of Africa, had been the population center hardest hit on the entire African continent. Some 280 people had been killed or missing, though only nineteen bodies in all had been recovered. Eight hundred homes had been washed away, the wells poisoned by saltwater, the fishing boats destroyed. The land here was parsimonious, barren, and unforgiving; some families had maintained small plots where they’d grown peas or lentils, but fishing had been the principal local industry. The tsunami had left the local people with nothing.

Picking his way through the darkness, Taha made his way out of the town, following a worn track across the sand toward the ocean, guiding on a small cluster of flickering lights on the beach. The
pound-pound-pound
of hammers, he thought, was a beautiful sound. The sound of rebuilding.

The sound of life.

Since the beginning of 2005, the town had started to rebuild, though this time the structures were rising higher up along the ridge of sand, some five hundred yards from the sea. The people were terrified that the waters would come again. Foreign aid had come to the impoverished area, and UNICEF had been attempting to establish a school for the local children, a school for girls as well as for boys, of all things. While anything resembling a real government in Somalia had collapsed in 1991, this northeastern corner of the country, the Horn of Africa, had stabilized somewhat over the past few years, with an uneasy balance between the Transitional Federal Government, operating out of Ethiopia, and the opposition party, the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia.

It hadn’t been perfect. ARLS antiaircraft guns had repeatedly fired at aircraft bringing emergency food and medical supplies to the region, and the rivalry between the TFG and the ARLS continually threatened to slip back into civil war. Still, it had been a start, a small one, back to sanity and self-sufficiency. The Bars region around Hafun had long traditionally belonged to the Majeerteen sub-clan of the Osman Mahmoud. They were the
true
power here, the true government. Or they had been.

Then the outsiders had come.

With the TFG ruling from next-door Ethiopia, most of south and central Somalia was still held in the grip of various rival Islamist gangs—the most powerful being the Hizbul Islam and the rival al-Shabaab. United African forces—Kenyan and Ethiopian troops, mainly—had been alternately battling and attempting to appease the Islamist militants.

Neither military intervention nor negotiation had made much headway.

He was approaching the camp on the beach now. One of the guards stepped out of the shadows, blocking his way. “In the name of Allah and His Prophet,” the man said, “you will halt!”

Man? It was a boy, a child no more than fifteen years old. The AK-47 rifle he held with wavering hands looked nearly as large as he did.

Taha raised his hands chest high, palms out, to show he carried no weapons. “God willing, I am here to see General Abdallah,” he said. “He knows me. I’ve been here before.”

The boy seemed uncertain, and Taha felt sick fear prickling at his spine. These people were perfectly capable of shooting a man dead in the street for no reason at all save that they mistrusted him, that they didn’t like his looks or his demeanor, that they thought he’d failed to show proper respect.

“I’ll take him, Oamar,” another voice said. Abdiwahid Eelabe Adow stepped out of the night. “It’s all right.”

Oamar gave Taha a surly look, then nodded, lowering his rifle, and Taha relaxed slightly. He knew Adow, one of Abadallah’s chief strongmen and the cleric of the group. At least Adow wouldn’t shoot him on sight.

Adow gestured toward a fire burning in a drum on the beach a dozen meters away. “And what brings you to our humble camp this time, Taha?” Adow asked pleasantly.

“News from Addis Ababa,” Taha replied. “A possible target with a fabulously rich payoff.”

Adow snorted. “Better than the last few targets, I hope. The Westerners have been guarding their ships more and more closely. Business has become … very difficult, of late.”

“This one,” Taha replied, “is unprotected. God willing, it carries a cargo of great value.”

“We’ll see. There’s the general.”

Taha despised the group known as
al-Shabaab
, Arabic for “the Youth.” Principally active in southern Somalia and in the capital of Mogadishu, they’d been fighting a bitter war there against the TFG. In recent months, they’d moved into the Hafun area as well, a region long under TFG control and protection. Ostensibly, they’d come with their boats, offering help. In fact, they were pirates, heavily armed raiders who set to sea every few days in hopes of catching one of the fabulously wealthy cargo ships passing through Somali waters. They would board a likely-looking vessel, hold the ship and crew hostage, and demand a ransom from the company or even the country owning the ship.

It was more dangerous than fishing, but
much
easier, and the potential rewards meant inestimable wealth and power for those who succeeded.

General Abdallah, Taha knew, was not a real general. He’d been part of the crew that had seized the Ukrainian merchant ship MV
Faina
in 2008. That vessel had been carrying thirty Russian tanks and tons of ammunition and weapons to Kenya when it was seized. The owners had paid 3.2 million American dollars for the
Faina
’s release—and Taha knew that many of the machine guns and RPG launchers on Abdallah’s boat had come from the
Faina
’s hold. His share of the ransom had made him obscenely wealthy by Somalian standards, and he’d used that wealth to buy and outfit a larger boat with which to score even greater successes. It was no secret that Abdallah planned to consolidate his political and military power, carving out his own personal warlord’s empire from the northeastern Somali coast.