[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel (28 page)

“Gonna be one of those last three,” said Shotgun, when we snuck back to the row of containers. “Gotta be.”

“Which one do you think it is?” I asked.

Shotgun pointed.

I told him to try the one farthest from that.

Bingo.

What we’d planned as a thirty-minute operation had taken nearly five hours. Both of us were pretty damn tired, thirsty, and hungry. And we still had to get off the ship without being seen.

Mongoose had gone north, cutting his power to preserve fuel. He was more than five miles away when I called him.

“Radio us when you’re two miles off,” I told him. “We’ll slip over the side and swim to you.”

“That’s a long swim.”

“I can handle it.”

“I don’t know about Shotgun.”

“Don’t worry about me,” he boasted. “I can float.”

Mongoose cursed. “Radar is picking up something else out ahead of you.”

“Another NATO ship?”

“No, no, too small.”

“How small?”

“Size of a longboat, a little bigger. High prow.”

I crawled out to the gunwale and moved forward toward the bow. When I got there, I spotted a black blur moving along the edge of the water, just visible against the lightening blue of the sky.

Pirates. Speeding in our direction.

(IV)

If you’re thinking there are entirely too many pirates in these waters, I completely agree. The bastards ought to be keelhauled where they live.

On the other hand, you might argue that the pirates were none of our business, and that in some ways their arrival was beneficial—they would provide the perfect cover for leaving the ship. But consider: I had just spent half the night setting up a shipment so I could track it into Europe. If the ship was parked off the coast of Somalia for a few months, I was going to be twiddling my thumbs for an awful long time.

Someone on the bridge had obviously spotted the approaching boat as well, for the ship began to speed up. You’ve probably heard that small parties of armed guards are being put on some ships to fight off pirates; this wasn’t one of them. Nor did it appear that the crew was armed—two seamen came out on the starboard deck and set up a fire hose, preparing to soak their enemies.

The captain radioed the Italian destroyer, but it had sped to a call to the south. The Italians didn’t have a helo with them; they told the captain they would check their distress call and then return as quickly as they could, but not to expect them before an hour. The captain’s response was appropriately vulgar.

The pirate vessel was a high-prowed longboat originally designed for fishing; it was open and sturdy, though not particularly exceptional. What were exceptional were the two outboard motors on the stern—each looked big enough to propel a locomotive up Mount Everest. The crewmen aimed their fire hose as the boat swung in a circle to come alongside the ship on the starboard side. The burst of water pushed the prow sideways, and for a moment I thought the crew had successfully fended off the attack. But the pirates weren’t going to give up that easily. Two men rose and returned fire, shooting with lead rather than water.

Even so, the bullets didn’t seem to faze the sailors. The grenade launcher was a different story. They fled as the man at the bow rose with the RPG. The sailor barely managed to get into the superstructure before the projectile exploded against its side.

No longer being harassed, the pirates pulled in close; one threw a grappling hook around the rail.

“Stand by to repel boarders,” I told Shotgun, creeping forward.

A head popped up over the rail, turned in our direction—then disappeared, no doubt because of the bullet I put into its nose.

The pirates responded by moving off and firing their guns at the bridge. It was an impressive display of firepower, the spray of bullets taking out the large plates of glass with stupendous clatter.

It was also a handy diversion—the pirates were so concentrated on the bridge that they didn’t see Shotgun or me lean over the rail and take aim.

Strike that—one man did. But the last thing he saw was a bullet from my MP5 as it zeroed in on his skull.

I have no idea what the other eight saw. It would have been roughly as pretty. The boat’s hull had been pierced in more than a dozen places, and it began settling immediately.

“Stow your gun and let’s go,” I told Shotgun, straightening. “We’re going over the side.”

We swam, floated, and swam some more for nearly a half hour as the freighter disappeared behind us. Finally Mongoose appeared in the distance, the bow of the Zodiac a welcome smile on the waves.

Once we were aboard, I had him radio the captain on the channel the Italians had used. He claimed that a NATO anti-pirate force had just taken care of the pirates, and I wished him well.

Oddly, the radio failed as soon as the captain began asking questions.

Four hours later, our fuel gone, a helicopter appeared on the horizon. It was Trace, right on time. Within an hour we were fully refueled and heading toward Djibouti.

*   *   *

Trace met us when we landed later that evening with typically warm greetings.

“What the hell took you assholes so long?” she yelled as we waded up the mudflat that stood in place of a beach southeast of the airport.

“If we’d known you were waiting, we would have gone slower,” answered Shotgun.

Trace responded with a hearty round of tender endearments and suggestions for Shotgun’s physical improvement, most of which were anatomically impossible. We pulled the Zodiac into the back of the pickup she’d rented, then headed across the dunes to the highway, and from there to a warehouse near the port. We’d amassed a good amount of equipment and storing it was problematic.

Sometime later we assembled in a briefing room—aka, the hotel bar—and began debriefing properly, assessing the recuperative powers of cold German beer. Shotgun chatted up one of the waitresses—a comely lass who was from Ireland—while Mongoose went over to the pool table and began showing his skill at knocking defenseless balls silly.

Trace and I discussed Junior and a myriad of other topics, including how many people we would need in place when the ship docked in Europe. My plan now was to follow the trailers, identify the main players, flesh out the bank connection, and turn the information over to the bank’s board of directors.

“You think Veep’s involved?” asked Trace.

“Up to his sneering smile.”

“Why not give the information to Garrett?” asked Trace. “Make him look good.”

A certain tone in her voice made it clear she’d taken a shine to young Mr. Garrett. I said nothing: I learned long ago that interfering in
affaires de cœur
is a good way to piss off people. Or in the case of Trace Dahlgren, get your throat slit. Which is better than your balls, as you serious Rogue Warrior fans always remember.

“The agency’s goals are not our goals here,” I told her. “We have to keep him at arm’s distance.”

Was that a blush I saw on her cheek? The lighting was too dim to tell. Trace left a few minutes later to keep an appointment—the word “date” is expressly forbidden—with said Garrett. She was under strict orders not to tell him that we had taken his advice and visited
Indiamotion.
I’m sure she found plenty else to do.

I meditated further on the situation with the help of timely communiques and background material from Danny in the States.

I also had occasion to check on the progress of our containers: still aboard ship, which was making its way toward Aden.

Aden?

“Looks like it, Dick,” said Shunt, who was looking at it on his computer plot. “Check it on the iPad. That’s what we wrote the app for.”

I swiped and typed, getting my password into the overpriced tablet computer, then tapped the little picture to bring up the tracking app. A few seconds later, I saw that Shunt was right—the ship was on a beeline for Aden, a major port in southern Yemen.

“Is that a scheduled stop?” I asked Shunt.

“Negative. And there’s been no traffic about it either.”

“Can the company track it?”

“Their system isn’t particularly precise, but it will be obvious if they stay around for a while, say to unload something. Why wouldn’t this be listed?”

“Same reason seven-eighths of the containers aren’t,” I told him. “And even more.”

The fact that the ship was making a side trip to Aden didn’t meant that our cargo containers were getting off there. But if they were, tracking them was going to be much more difficult than following them through Europe. If they were bound for customers in the Middle East it would still be worthwhile tracking them, just more of a pain. I’d already had my share of fun and joy on the Arabian peninsula.

I was cogitating on what to do next when Trace returned from her rendezvous. I was frankly surprised to see her back in the bar, even though several hours had passed—I thought her assignation would have required considerably more time.

“Garrett’s on his way to France,” she announced. “They have information on where the ship is going. Marseilles.”

Trace pronounced the name of France’s most important Mediterranean port with an air of triumph, as if it wouldn’t have been the most obvious place for the ship to land.

“You’re sure?” I asked.

“He said they intercepted a message to the ship just before he and I had dinner. I drove him to the airport.”

Hmmm.

“They know the ship?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“What’s the name?”

“He didn’t say.”

“He didn’t? Did you ask?”

“He just wouldn’t say.”

“How much do you like him?” I asked.

Trace’s face colored. “Why?”

“Just wondering.”

“I’m fine, Dick. He didn’t say. Is it our ship?”

“If so, he’s lying.”

Trace’s eyes narrowed, but she remained quiet.

“Our ship is a few hours out of Aden,” I told her, showing her the iPad. “Unscheduled stop.”

“I’ll slit his balls off if he’s leading me on,” she said, starting to rise.

“Let’s just take this one step at a time.”

“I will cut his balls off,” she repeated. There was enough conviction in her voice that I pushed my own legs together, and didn’t move until she was across the room.

(V)

I didn’t need Murphy to tell me that the containers we’d marked would almost certainly be offloaded in the worst possible place for us to track, and so when Shunt reported that they were being moved at the dock in Aden, Trace, Mongoose, Abdi, and I were waiting to catch a plane at the Djibouti airport.

Aden had a colorful history as a British colonial city, but if Americans know it at all, it’s as the port where the attack on the USS
Cole
took place in 2000. That was an al Qaeda production,
29
one that got a lot of attention from everyone in the world … except the United States, which sent FBI agents to investigate, then let them be browbeaten away by rifle-waving Yemen soldiers when they landed at the airport. This at a time when the entire Yemen military could be defeated by a Boy Scout troop from New Jersey.

The attack on the
Cole
brought al Qaeda to the attention of many Americans, but this was far from their first attack in the area. In 1992, al Qaeda operatives detonated a bomb at the Gold Mohur Hotel in Aden. They were aiming for U.S. servicemen, supposedly; they killed an Austrian tourist and a Yemen citizen.

Why did they want to attack Americans? Because Americans were trying to bring food aid to Somalia.
30
Apparently trying to keep starving people from dying is a crime against Islam if you’re a member of al Qaeda.

I brought Abdi with us to help with our cover; we were international businessmen with vague plans to stay for a week. Americans are not particularly welcome in most parts of Yemen, and not knowing which parts we were going to, we adopted identities that had nothing to do with the good ol’ USA. Trace’s Indian background is adaptable to a variety of nationalities, and my beard has helped me pass as Arab before, especially with the aid of the proper clothes. With his swarthy Filipino face, Mongoose could probably have passed as an Arab—until he opened his mouth. To avoid that problem, we presented him as a Filipino labor broker, anxious to hook up with companies in the port area. That made him the boss—Trace was his Filipino secretary, while Abdi and I were flunkies with various abilities, mostly unspoken. It was worth the sneers from Mongoose just to see him in a suit and tie.

Shotgun, about as white as Wonder Bread, stayed in Djibouti.

Aden was packed with spies, domestic and otherwise. Two members of the national police tailed us from the airport, and another with a camera snapped our photo as we came into the hotel. Which was probably unnecessary, since I’m sure the hotel transmitted copies of our passports to the local police and intelligence apparatus within a few seconds of our signing the registry. At least two people in the lobby were using their cell phones to take clandestine pictures of everyone who came in, and I spotted a fellow in the corner pretending to read a newspaper two days old.

Our GPS system, accessed via the iPad, showed the two containers next to each other in a lot near the water. The mapping was accurate to about a foot, but it didn’t supply real-time imagery; it was possible that the sensors had been discovered and moved. So I needed to get there and examine the scene with my Mark 1 Eyeballs.

If there was time, I’d take a look at any other containers that were plucked off as well. Maybe they were just dried fruit and nuts, or maybe they were something fruits and nuts would find useful in a shooting war.

Squared away at the hotel—we also had a pair of secret reservations elsewhere as backup—we headed to the pier on the north side of Al-Ma’ala, the rocky tip of the arm of the bay protecting the interior. There was no security to speak of—though anyone approaching on foot would be taking his life in his hands, as the locals drove with the abandon of Frenchmen on holiday.

Warehouses larger than most of the ships and barges lined the far end of the pier. We’d rented a Mercedes E280—1,328 euros per week, plus gas, a complete ripoff. Mongoose drove, taking us into the holding lots around a stream of kamikaze truck drivers. He got us out to the staging area near the end of the pier just in time to see the first of our trailers exiting past us.