The Kill List (16 page)

The five Europeans and ten Filipinos were gathered on deck. Capt. Eklund was told that if any more were hiding, one of the officers would be thrown into the sea.

“There are no more,” said the captain. “What do you want?”

Jimali gestured to his men.

“Food. No pig,” he said. Capt. Eklund told the Filipino cook to go to his galley and prepare food. One of the pirates went with him.

“You. Come.” Jimali beckoned the captain, and they went to the bridge. “You steer Garacad, you live.”

The captain consulted his maps, presumed the Somali coast and found the village a hundred miles south of Eyl, another pirate concentration. He worked out an approximate heading and turned the helm.

A French frigate from
L’indien
was the first to find them, just after dawn. It took up station several cables to port and reduced speed to stay in formation. The French captain did not intend to use his marines to board the
Malmö
, and Jimali knew it. He stared across the water from the bridge wing, almost challenging the infidels to have a go.

Far away from the seemingly harmless maritime spectacle of a French frigate escorting a Swedish freighter with a Taiwanese trawler far behind, a whirlwind of electronic communication was taking place.

The
Malmö
’s automatic identification system had been picked up instantly. It was monitored by the British Maritime Trade Operations out of Dubai and the American MARLO, the maritime liaison out of Bahrain. A score of NATO and EU warships were alerted to her problem, but, as Jimali knew, none would attack.

The Andersson Line maintained a night-and-day operations room in Stockholm, which was immediately advised. The shipping HQ called the
Malmö
. Jimali indicated that Capt. Eklund could take the call but put it on the bridge speaker and converse only in English. Even before he spoke, Stockholm knew he was in the presence of armed Somalis and every word should be guarded.

Captain Eklund confirmed that the
Malmö
had been taken in the night. His men were all safe and were being well treated. There were no injuries. They were steaming under orders for the coast of Somalia.

The shipowner, Harry Andersson, was roused over breakfast in his palatial home in a walled park in Östermalm, Stockholm. He finished dressing while his car was brought to the door, then drove straight to his operations room. The fleet controller of the night shift had stayed on. He explained everything that the emergency services and Capt. Eklund had been able to tell him.

Mr. Andersson had become a very successful, and thus rich, man because he had two very useful talents, among others. One was to assimilate a situation with extreme speed and, having done so, create a plan of action based on realities, not fantasies, and then go for it.

He stood, plunged in thought, in the middle of his operations room. No one dared disturb him. His ship had been taken by pirates, his first ever. Armed assault at sea would trigger a massacre and was simply not going to be attempted. The
Malmö
would therefore make the Somali coast and be anchored there. His first duty was to his fifteen employees, then to recover ship and cargo if possible. And then there was the question of his son.

“Bring my car to the door,” he said. “Call Björn, wherever he is, and tell him to get the plane ready for immediate takeoff. Flight plan for Northolt, London. Book me a suite at the Connaught. Hannah, you have your passport with you? Then come with me.”

Minutes later, in the back of his Bentley, his PA Hannah beside him, speeding to Bromma airport, he used his mobile phone to plan the immediate future.

It was a matter for the insurers now. He insured through a specialist syndicate of underwriters at Lloyd’s. They would have the whip hand because the money at risk was theirs. That was what he paid them an annual fortune for.

Before he was airborne, he had learned his underwriters’ negotiator of choice—and they definitely had been down this road before—was a firm called Chauncey Reynolds, which had a track record of negotiated recoveries. He knew he would be in London long before his ship would reach the Somali shore. Before his Learjet reached the Swedish coast, he had an appointment with the lawyers at six p.m. Well, they would damn well have to work late.

While he was on the glide path of Northolt touchdown, Chauncey Reynolds was preparing. They were trying the Surrey home of their negotiator of choice, the half-retired ace of his strange profession. His wife fetched him from among the beehives in the garden.

He had learned his skills as a hostage-recovery negotiator for the Metropolitan Police. He was a deceptively slow-spoken Welshman named Gareth Evans.

• • •

T
he Troll was very dead when Opal arrived. Opal had been seen by the spotter down the road and recognized because the captain had seen him before, at the earlier beach meeting with Benny. Again the pulse went red in the captain’s hand and the roadblock came into being.

Opal suddenly saw the group of robed figures in his dim headlight, the swinging torch, the pointing assault rifles. Like all secret agents far behind enemy lines and facing a bad death in the event of unmasking, he had a small panic attack.

Were his papers in order? Would his story of job seeking in Marka stand up? What could the
mutawa
possibly want on that road in the middle of the night?

The man with the torch approached and stared at his face. The moon came out from behind a bank of clouds, harbinger of the coming monsoon. Two black faces, inches apart in the night, one dark by nature, the other smeared with commando’s night-fighting cream.

“
Shalom
, Opal. Come, off the road. There is a truck coming.”

The men vanished into the trees and couch grass, taking the trail bike with them. The truck passed. Then the captain showed Opal the crash site.

The Troll’s pickup had seemingly had a complete blowout of the front offside wheel. The nail was still protruding from the tread, where human hands had hammered it. Out of control, the pickup must have slewed to one side. By ill chance, this was in the center of the concrete bridge.

It had toppled at speed over the edge, slamming into the far steep bank of the wadi. The impact had hurled the driver into the windshield and the steering wheel into his chest with enough force to shatter both head and thorax. Someone had seemingly eased him out of the cab and laid him beside the vehicle. In death he stared unseeing up at the wispy tips of the casuarina trees between him and the moon.

“Now, let us talk,” said the captain. He briefed Opal exactly as Benny had told him on the secure line between the trawler and Tel Aviv. Word for word. Then he gave him a sheaf of papers and a red baseball cap.

“These are what the dying man gave you before he passed away. You did your best, but there was no hope. He was too far gone. Any questions?”

Opal shook his head. The story was feasible. He tucked the papers inside his windbreaker. The captain of the Sayeret Matkal held out a hand.

“We must go back to the sea. Good luck, my friend.
Mazel tov.
”

It took a few moments to brush the last footprints from the dust, all save those of Opal. Then they were gone, back across the dark ocean to the waiting fishing boat. Opal hauled his trail bike back to the road and continued to the north.

• • •

T
hose who gathered in the office of Chauncey Reynolds were all experienced at what, over a decade of piracy, had become a mutually agreed ritual. The pirates were all clan chiefs of Puntland, operating out of an eight-hundred-mile coast from Boosaaso in the north to Mareeg, just up the coast from Mogadishu.

They were in piracy for money and that was all. Their excuse was that, years ago, fishing fleets from South Korea and Taiwan had arrived and gutted their traditional fishing grounds, from which they had made a livelihood. Whatever the rights and wrongs, they had turned to piracy and since then made huge earnings, far more than those generated by a few tuna.

They had started by boarding and capturing merchant vessels steaming past their coast just offshore. With time and expertise, they had ranged farther and farther east and south. In the beginning, their captures were small, their negotiations clumsy, and suitcases of dollar bills were dropped by light aircraft, flying up from Kenya, at a preagreed drop zone at sea.

But no one trusts anybody on that coast. There is no honor among these thieves. Ships captured by one group were stolen by another clan while at anchor. Rival packs fought over floating suitcases of cash. Eventually, a kind of agreed-upon procedure prevailed.

The crew of a captured vessel was rarely, if ever, brought ashore. Lest an anchor drag in the pounding rollers, captured ships were anchored up to two miles offshore. The officers and crew lived onboard in barely reasonable conditions, but with a dozen guards, while negotiations between their principals—shipowner and clan chief—dragged on.

On the Western side, certain companies of insurers, lawyers and negotiators became expert with experience. On the Somali side, educated negotiators—not simply Somalis but from the right clan—took over the talking. This was now done with modern technology—computers and iPhones. Even the money was rarely dropped like bombs from on high; the Somalis had numbered bank accounts, in which the money would immediately appear.

With the passage of time, negotiators from the two sides came to know each other, each simply concerned about getting the job done. But the Somalis held the aces.

For the insurers, a cargo delayed was a cargo lost. For the shipowners, a vessel not earning was an operating loss. Add to that the distress of the crew and their desperate families, and a speedy conclusion was their pressing aim. The Somali pirates knew this, and they had all the time in the world. That was the basis of the blackmail: time. Some vessels had been moored off that coast for years.

Gareth Evans had negotiated ten releases of ships and cargoes of varying values. He had studied Puntland and its mazelike tribal structures as if for a doctorate. When he heard the
Malmö
was steaming for Garacad, he knew which tribe controlled that stretch of coast and how many clans comprised the tribe. Several of them used the same negotiator, a smooth, urbane Somali graduate of a Midwestern American university named Mr. Ali Abdi.

All this was explained to Harry Andersson as a summer dusk settled over London and, half a world away, the
Malmö
steamed west to Garacad. Takeaway dinners were nibbled at the polished table of the conference room, and Mrs. Bulstrode, the tea lady who had agreed to stay on, served relay after relay of coffee.

A room was set aside as operations control for Gareth Evans. If a new Somali negotiator was going to be appointed, Capt. Eklund would be told by Stockholm which London number to call to get the ball rolling.

Gareth Evans studied the details of the
Malmö
and her cargo of gleaming new cars and privately calculated that they ought to be able to settle for about five million dollars. He also knew that the first demand would be miles too high. More, he knew that to agree with alacrity would be disastrous. It would immediately double. To demand speed would also be self-defeating; that, too, would raise the price. As for the imprisoned crew, that was their bad luck. They would just have to wait in patience.

Tales from repatriated seamen related that as the weeks dragged by, the onboard Somalis, mostly ill-educated tribesmen from the hills, turned the once-spruce vessel into a stinking pesthole. Lavatories were ignored, urinations took place as and when Nature called. And where, inside or out. The heat did the rest. Oil to power the generators, and thus the air-conditioning, would run out. Unfrozen food would rot, putting the crew onto the Somali goat diet, slaughtered on deck. The only diversions were fishing, board games, cards and reading, but they held boredom at bay for only just so long.

The meeting broke at ten p.m. If set on maximum power, which she probably would be, the
Malmö
should enter the bay of Garacad around noon London time. Shortly thereafter, they should learn who had taken her and who the nominated negotiator was. Then Gareth Evans would introduce himself, if need be, and the intricate gavotte would begin.

• • •

O
pal arrived in Marka as the town slumbered in the blazing post-noon heat. He found the compound and hammered on the door. This compound was not sleeping. He could hear voices and running steps, as if someone was expected but was late.

The latch door in the heavy timber gate flicked open and a face peered out. It was an Arab face but not Somali. The eyes scanned the street but saw no pickup truck. Then they settled on Opal.

“Yes,” snapped a voice, angry that a mere nobody should seek admittance.

“I have papers for the Sheikh,” said Opal in Arabic.

“What papers?” The voice was plainly hostile but with curiosity.

“I don’t know,” said Opal. “That was what the man on the road told me to say.”

There was a buzz of conversation behind the timber. The first face was pulled aside and another took its place. Neither Somali nor Arab, but Arabic-speaking. Pakistani?

“Where are you from and what papers?”

Opal fumbled under his windbreaker and produced a sealed package.

“I come from Marka. I met a man on the road. He had crashed his pickup truck. He asked me to bring these and told me how to find this place. That is all I know.”

He tried to stuff the package through the aperture.

“No, wait,” shouted a voice, and the gate began to open. Four men stood there, fiercely bearded. He was grabbed and hauled inside. A teenage boy ran out, seized his trail bike, wheeling it inside. The gate closed. Two held him. The man who might be a Pakistani towered over him. He studied the package and sucked in a deep breath.

“Where did you get these, dog? What have you done with our friend?”

Opal played the terrified nobody, which was not hard.

“The man driving the truck, sir. I fear he is dead . . .”