[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel (8 page)

“Don’t ‘aye, aye’ me, Dick. I understand you screwed up something my people have been working on for over a year.”

“I saved one of your junior officers’ lives,” I said, sitting up in bed. “You ought to be a little less reckless with them.”

“I’m sure Clayton Magoo wasn’t reckless. Get down there and talk to him, or all those contracts that are keeping Red Cell International one step away from bankruptcy are going to vaporize in the morning.”

The name sounded vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t quite place it, and was sorely tempted to go back to sleep. But being a conscientious sort of person, I decided to get up and see what this Magoo fellow wanted.

For the record: Red Cell International is not now, and has not ever been, one step from bankruptcy. Two or three, maybe.

Two large goons fresh from the Farm (the CIA’s training facility) came out from the shadows as I pressed the elevator button in the hallway a few minutes later. They flashed agency IDs, but acted more like Mafiosi. Obviously they’d seen a few too many
Sopranos
reruns.

“Boss wants to see you,” said Tweedledumb. He looked all of nineteen. He tried to neutralize his baby face by frowning as much as possible.

“Downstairs,” added Tweedledumber. He actually did look mean, or at least ugly, but the effect was ruined by a squeaky voice that a rubber duck would envy.

Both kids were about six-three or six-four, and probably weighed around two hundred pounds.

Big, but not nearly big enough to intimidate Shotgun, who stepped out of the shadows behind them.

“Should I clock ’em, Dick?”

Dumb and Dumber would have jumped through the ceiling if Shotgun hadn’t clamped his hands on their shoulders. No mobster has a grip quite as pulverizing as his.

“Leave them be,” I told him. “They look kind of heavy, and I don’t feel like carrying them downstairs. I’ve done enough lifting for one day.”

Fresh off the elevator, I was met by a skinny man in a brown polyester suit, who squinted at me through a pair of the thickest glasses you have ever seen.

Magoo. The last name could easily have been a mocking nickname, though apparently it wasn’t. Then again, except for the glasses, he didn’t look much like the cartoon character
7
either—he stood about six feet tall, with a thick carpet of black hair cut almost razor tight to his scalp. The vague hint of a scar ran down from his hair to his right eyebrow, following the square corner of his head. He was probably in his mid-thirties, though he had the sort of face that seemed a good deal older.

“You’re in a shitload of trouble, Dick,” he said. He pushed his face forward when he talked to me, a little like a chicken poking at a fence in hopes an onlooker will give it some food.

Chickens, remember, are not exactly the smartest animals in the barnyard.

“I don’t believe we’ve met,” I told him.

He poked his head up and down. Career CIA men get a certain smell about them that you don’t find on a scratch-off page in a magazine. It’s called ARROGANCE. All capital letters.

“We’ll discuss this upstairs,” he said.

“The bar’s still open?”

“In my room.”

“Let’s go up to the bar and have a nightcap instead. It’ll put me in a better mood.”

“I heard you were a drinker,” he said smugly, waving his hand to signal agreement.

Well, at least he had done some homework.

Magoo and his two henchmen secured us a table toward the far end of what was now an empty room. Dumber pulled out a device that checked for bugs. Shotgun went over to the bar, hovering near the pretzel bowls and watching protectively from a distance as I got myself a beer.

“The admiral says hello,” I told Magoo, sitting down across from him at the table.

He blinked from behind his glasses. “This doesn’t concern him. I’m in charge of this operation.”

“Which operation?”

“Don’t get cute with me. I know Garrett told you everything.”

“What Garrett told me was enough to get you fired for gross incompetence,” I said.

“We all take risks.”

“The only risk he was taking was on the size of the coffin they were measuring for,” I said. “Putting a white guy in that jail was foolish.”

“You seem to have made it out OK.”

“Just barely.” I sipped my beer. “I’m sorry if I interfered with your operation. Next time you might try giving his dad a heads up.”

“The infamous SEAL network.” Magoo made it sound like a disease. “A brother SEAL is in trouble, and you rush to his aid?”

“I didn’t realize helping a friend was a bad thing.”

“Well, you owe me one now. A big one.”

“They only have eight-ounce glasses here,” I said. “You might want to wait until tomorrow when we can find a real bar.”

Needless to say, Magoo wasn’t talking about a drink. He wanted me to help him continue his “investigation”—his word—into the network smuggling the drugs. And I was to start by telling him everything I knew.

I suppose I could have laughed and gone back to bed. But there was still the matter of the bank, and I needed to find out what the connection or non-connection with the terror group was. Magoo didn’t realize it, but he was offering to help me figure it out.

“I don’t know all that much,” I said. “Just what Garrett told me. What do you know?”

“There’s a European connection, that I know.”

“Are they just bringing drugs in, or are they trying to blow things up?”

He shook his head. We danced around a little bit more, neither one of us revealing what we were really thinking, aside from the obvious contempt.

Then finally Magoo got to the reason he’d come by.

“You owe me a favor,” he said. “And I intend to collect.”

He took off his glasses to wipe them. They’d fogged up with perspiration—obviously he was thinking hard. I ordered a refill and asked him to explain what he had in mind.

Note for the file: never make important business decisions after midnight in Abu Dhabi.

(III)

Two days later, rested, restocked, and rejuvenated, I came face-to-face with an old friend.

A Heckler & Koch MP5, to be exact. The submachine gun has been my weapon of choice for many years. It’s light, deadly, and most important of all, dependable. If a dog is a man’s best friend, a decent submachine gun is not far behind.

Unfortunately, this one wasn’t mine. And it happened to be pointed at my nose.

“You are an enemy of the state,” said the man holding the gun.

“Probably,” I admitted.

“You are an infidel and a demon.”

“Absolutely.”

“You are worth more to me dead than alive.”

“There I’d have to disagree.”

“In Somalia, even here in Mogadishu, white men are worth their weight in gold,” countered the man with the gun. He wore a gray suit, which somehow seemed loose-fitting despite his considerable girth and broad shoulders. The perfectly pressed cuffs of his pants edged over the tops of his gleaming blue vinyl Nike athletic shoes. A small line of sweat glistened at the edge of his mahogany-colored scalp, a dotted line where his hair had once been.

Hopefully, the sweat was a result of the heat, not nervousness. Nervousness in Somalia is very bad for your health, especially if you’re on the wrong end of a gun barrel.

I held my arms out a little farther. The Somalis are world-renowned for their friendliness. In ancient times, it’s said they often held feasts for visitors, generally about a half hour after they were killed. These days, they party a little less, but the same welcoming spirit prevails.

“No one will pay my ransom. You’ll have to pay the cost of my burial.”

“Well, that wouldn’t do.” The man lowered the submachine gun and grinned. “How are you, Mr. Dick?”

“Good, Taban,” I managed before he extended his arms and pulled me into a bear hug that could have squeezed life out of a tree.

“So long since we have seen you.”

Taban released me and stepped back. Then he glanced to his left, where a thin young man of about twenty was standing, holding an AK47. The young man seemed confused, or maybe disappointed that he wasn’t going to get a chance to use the rifle.

“Let me introduce my nephew Abdi,” continued Taban. “Abdi—put the gun down. This is my friend, Mr. Dick. We have done much business together. The Good American. Mr. Dick—the Rogue Warrior. Very famous in America. He has come to eat in our restaurant, no?”

Taban turned back to me.

“Sure,” I told him. I had already eaten, but turning down an offer of hospitality in Mogadishu is more dangerous than stepping into a room filled with king cobras.

Abdi eyed me suspiciously. I couldn’t blame him, really—paranoia is a survival skill in Mogadishu.

“Come, and have something to eat,” said Taban, pulling me into the restaurant. “I have something very special for you—Mogadishu meatloaf. This is an old family recipe. Very good.”

“Your family had meatloaf?”

“No, no, not my family. A family in Minnesota. I found it on the Internet.”

*   *   *

I’d met Taban ali Mohammad nearly a decade before, when I did some “consulting” work for a shipping line, during the days when piracy was still a growth industry. My clients got their item back without having to make a payoff, which meant quite a big payday for me. Taban got a commission. We’ve had several opportunities to work together since then, though Somalia being Somalia, we haven’t seen each other all that much.

Taban had worked for several of the revolving-door governments, and had ties to two different clans along the coast. More important was his connection to a Somali entrepreneur whose unpronounceable local name translates as something like Fat Tony. Fat Tony started in the pirate business as a grunt, then climbed the ladder to commander and CEO. As competition increased, he did what many businessmen do: he sold out his shares and retired from day-to-day operations.

Not that he was really retired. He still invested in different pirate groups, bankrolling expeditions and seeing to a number of other concerns, including smuggling and gun running. Rumor had it that he owned several khat “farms,” a potentially lucrative arrangement given the popularity of the narcotic, which was not only the drug of choice for ministers of mayhem on the high seas, but more popular than coffee in much of northern Africa.

I knew of Fat Tony only by reputation, and needed Taban’s introduction to make the connection. The connection was necessary, for I’d come to Somalia to buy things unavailable in Europe.

Magoo’s plan had been extremely crude—he wanted me to make a connection in Somalia, where the drugs shipped en route to Europe, and he’d take it from there. I refined the plan once I realized Fat Tony was one of the connections used by the terrorist/smugglers.

I should say that, as far as I could tell, Fat Tony wasn’t a member of either Allah’s Rule or al Qaeda; he was Muslim in name only, if that. That was certainly not unusual—the terrorist hierarchy contained only true believers, and no true believer would have a direct connection to drugs. The network made use of many Fat Tonys in its day-to-day affairs.

I hadn’t told Magoo about the connection between Allah’s Rule and the bank. I’m sure there were things he didn’t tell me as well.

As for Magoo himself, he wasn’t too well-known among my network of CIA contacts. “A fast-mover,” one friend I’d known since my SEAL days told me. “Shooting up the ranks like a rocket.”

I’m not sure he meant it as a compliment.

*   *   *

“How long have you been in Mogadishu?” asked Taban, making small talk as dinner cooked.

“I just got here. They didn’t want to give me a tourist visa.”

“This is not surprising. Maybe they gave you a head exam first, no?”

“They probably thought about it.”

Actually, I had obtained a tourist visa before flying into Mogadishu, but I knew from experience that it would be useless for anything other than getting on the plane, which flew from Dubai to Kenya, stopping here mainly for fuel. Once we landed, I joined the short queue of Turks waiting for a tourist visa in the terminal, which looked like a cross between a bus garage and a 1960s strip mall. The line moved at a snail’s pace under the wary eye of soldiers from the African Union, who were there to provide the security that the government couldn’t. They looked at me and rolled their eyes, sure that my tanned but still white face would never be seen again.

The Turks were “contract workers” for the government—aka, mercenaries who would man “peacekeeping posts” and shoot the daylights out of anything smaller than a tank that crossed into the government-controlled area of the city without permission. For them, tourist visas were a convenient fiction. For me, it was an inconvenient one, as the customs official at first refused to believe my story that I was expected, and tried to send me back to the plane.

Fortunately, the aircraft was already taxiing down the runway, and I eventually got my visa, for twice the normal bribe. That was a bargain, though—I paid five times what the Turks did for the room at my hotel.

All told, I spent about what you’d spend at McDonald’s for a super-sized lunch. Isn’t the Third World wonderful?

“Mr. Dick, here you are,” said Taban, gesturing as Abdi came out of the kitchen with a covered plate. “Special meatloaf.”

It looked about as appetizing as my shoe, and proved nearly as tough. Slices of mystery meat were aligned on the plate beneath a thin sauce.

I picked up my fork and carefully tried a bite. “Goat?” I asked.

“Dog,” he said triumphantly. “With a touch of oxen and just a hair of rat.”

“Rat hair, or hair of rat?”

“Both.”

Calling it roadkill stew may be giving it a culinary upgrade; it seemed to have been baked au naturel by the sun. Compared to some of the things I’ve eaten in Africa, it wasn’t half bad.

Taban talked about Somalia while I ate. He was as optimistic as ever—killings in the city were down to a manageable level, and the government zone had actually expanded in the past few weeks. Business at his restaurant had improved: he could count on half a dozen customers each week.

“Soon, soon, as big as New York City,” he proclaimed.