Black Flag

by David Ricciardi

  But it had made a comeback.

  A new type of piracy had emerged in the last six months, and it was far more profitable and far more lethal than the old one. With each attack, twenty men disappeared and twenty million dollars’ worth of stolen cargo vanished—neither the crew nor the ships were ever seen again.

  And it was a lot of money—enough to exert enormous influence over the broken nation of Somalia. It backed private armies and bribed corrupt politicians. It supported terrorism and funded human trafficking. For the country’s citizens, it meant a lifetime of living in fear: extortion, rape, murder.

  The new wave of piracy was about to put the struggling country down for good.

  And Jake and Pickens had been ordered to stop it.

  “Who do you work for?” Jake asked.

  Dameer said something in Arabic to his accomplices.

  Jake didn’t know the Somali dialect well, but he understood enough of what Dameer had said to know what was coming next.

  And it wasn’t good.

  Pickens spoke Arabic and Somali, but he stuck to English around the locals. He learned a lot more when they thought he didn’t understand.

  Like now.

  It was going to be four-on-two. Dameer and the man with the machete, plus the two men with the Kalashnikovs, but they were so doped up that they probably couldn’t hit the air in front of them. The biggest risk from those idiots was a ricochet.

  But it was a real risk.

  The small room was made of concrete with a corrugated steel roof. Each bullet would have a couple of chances to find a target and if the gunmen went full Somali-style—rifle held at the waist and trigger held down until the gun was empty—there was a better-than-even chance that no one on either side would walk out alive.

  The two Americans made eye contact. Pickens nodded almost imperceptibly.

  Jake snapped his head back, shattering the nose of the man with the machete, then grabbed the hand with the knife and pushed the blade away.

  The man staggered backward with tears in his eyes and blood streaming down his face.

  Jake turned and punched him in the throat, then kneed him in the groin. The Somali crumpled to the ground, out of the fight.

  Dameer stepped out from behind the table and squared off against Pickens. The Somali was tall and lanky, with a sweat-stained shirt, crazy eyes, and a knife of his own. It was rusty and dull, except for the edge, which was shiny and sharp.

  Pickens brought his forearms up to protect his face and chest, like a boxer.

  Old school.

  The Somali waved the knife back and forth like he was trying to sell it. He took half a step forward.

  Pickens faked right, then rotated his two-hundred-forty-pound body and launched a left into Dameer’s face. The blow lifted the man off his feet and hurled him into the back wall.

  His sandals were still on the floor where he’d been standing.

  It was a hell of a punch.

  But the goons with the AK-47s had finally discovered that something was amiss. They were shouting and yelling and gesturing wildly—and pointing their rifles at Pickens.

  TWO

  THE TWO MEN with the Kalashnikovs were shaking.

  It might have been from the drugs, or maybe they were nervous, but Jake wasn’t looking to make a diagnosis.

  He was trying to keep his partner alive.

  “Drop the weapons!” he shouted.

  He had a 9mm pistol up and was shifting his aim between the two gunmen, making sure they each had a chance to look straight into the muzzle before he switched targets.

  They could shoot Pickens, but it would cost them their lives.

  It should have been an easy decision, even in a drug-induced haze, but the gunmen didn’t react.

  Jake yelled again, this time in Arabic, and the men literally dropped their rifles onto the concrete floor.

  Pickens scooped up the weapons and the two Americans backed through the door to a beige Daihatsu hatchback—a car so generic that it was like a third-world cloak of invisibility. With Pickens behind the wheel, they quickly disappeared into the low-rise streets of Mogadishu. Voted “the most dangerous city in the world” for twenty years running, it was a place where machine gun fire punctuated conversations and truck bombs ended them.

  Though the thugs who’d tried to ambush them probably couldn’t walk a straight line, much less tail them through city streets, the two CIA officers didn’t take any chances. Pickens drove a full surveillance detection route over the narrow roads. The routes were designed not only to spot a tail but to do so without making it obvious, because acting like a trained intelligence operative was the surest way to confirm that someone was a trained intelligence operative.

  Pickens spotted an accident blocking the road ahead and turned down a narrow side street to avoid a potential ambush. Lined on both sides with crumbling stucco buildings, it was impossible to tell where the blown sand ended and the cracked pavement began. He steered carefully around a man sleeping in the shade of a parked car and back onto a larger road where the two men could relax—somewhat.

  “I’ve never seen a man knocked out of his shoes before,” Jake said.

  Pickens grinned.

  “The key,” he said, “is to rotate your hips and follow through on the swing.”

  Jake checked the side-view mirror. “Too bad those idiots didn’t know anything.”

  It was the third meeting they’d had in the four days since Jake had arrived, and each one had nearly cost him his life.

  “We’ve got to start somewhere,” said Pickens.

  John Pickens had been with the Agency for twenty years and working the Mogadishu account for the last eight. It was a medium-sized CIA station, but most of his fellow officers in the Directorate of Operations were working with their counterparts in the Somali National Intelligence and Security Agency or deployed in Counterterrorism Center teams. The CTC pursuit teams were the sexier side of CIA and, for the past twenty years, counterterrorism had been the fast track to advancement.

  Pickens was in a career backwater.

  “Everyone knows you’re understaffed here, John, but this is a new threat and we need a new response. Seven tankers have disappeared without a single distress call or ransom demand.”

  Pickens snaked around the site of a recent IED attack. Two days prior, al-Shabaab terrorists had daisy-chained together half a dozen 122mm Russian artillery shells and detonated them in the back of a delivery truck. One hundred forty-six people had died. The air still smelled of diesel fuel and gunpowder, burnt plastic and seared flesh. An African Union soldier was in the blast pit, searching the twisted chassis for a vehicle identification number while children played nearby on piles of concrete rubble that had been their homes just forty-eight hours earlier.

  “I told Ted this should be a joint op with FBI,” Jake said, “and he told me to shut up and find out who’s in charge of the pirates.”

  “Is that what Black Flag is about?” Pickens looked over. “Is Graves looking to put people in the ground?”

  Ted Graves was chief of the Agency’s Special Activities Center. The paramilitary officers under his command operated in the field with little oversight and were known for using their considerable autonomy wisely and ethically.

  The same could not be said for their boss.

  “Phase one is to identify who’s behind it,” Jake said. “I’m guessing phase two is rolling him up, but Ted hasn’t shared his long-term strategy with me.”

  Pickens laughed and fist-bumped his new partner. “With you or with anyone, brother. I’m just trying to figure out why the Seventh Floor brass suddenly care. Piracy has been a way of life down here for twenty years.”

  “It’s about oil.”

  Pickens shrugged. “Always is.”

  “But not the way it used to be,” Jake said.
“Now that the U.S. isn’t importing as much from the Middle East, we’re reducing the military presence we’ve had there for the past fifty years.”

  “The ‘Pivot to Asia’?”

  “Exactly. Our forces are moving east to deal with national and regional threats, but whoever is stealing these oil tankers is clearing close to twenty million dollars each time they sell the cargo on the black market. That kind of money can fund terror networks and weapons of mass destruction.”

  Pickens turned down a side street. “Then why aren’t the pirates ransoming the crews? That’s where they used to make their money.”

  “Anonymity,” Jake said. “Headquarters doesn’t have a clue who is behind this: not an email, not a text message, nothing. You start making ransom demands and you leave a trail. Whoever is behind the hijackings understands operational security. This isn’t six-skinnies-in-a-skiff anymore. We’re up against professionals with training and resources, probably ex-military.”

  Pickens scowled. “I don’t know, Jake. We take out this pirate and somebody will take his place before the body is cold. There’s no rule of law down here. People have gotten used to taking what they can today because they might not be alive tomorrow.”

  “Economic opportunity is the long-term solution, but that’s never going to happen unless we find the pirate leader and put him out of business.”

  The two men were stopped behind a line of cars and Pickens was tapping his hand against the steering wheel. Jake couldn’t tell if the anxiety was from the traffic, the narrow escape, or something else.

  “I’m on board with the mission,” said Pickens eventually, “because that’s my job, but Somalia is a lost cause.”

  THREE

  JAKE AND PICKENS drove past Villa Somalia. Built by Italian colonialists, the whitewashed Art Deco building was the official residence of the Somali president, but with the country embroiled in a civil war since 1991, the villa changed tenants like a hot-sheet motel. The current government had been in place for less than a year, and though it didn’t control much territory outside Mogadishu, the new president took his personal security very seriously. He’d paid a lot of bribes and made a great many promises to secure his election, and he wasn’t going to waste the opportunity to grow rich off it. Armored personnel carriers staked out the compound’s corners and drop-down Delta barriers blocked the entrance.

  Just a week earlier, the surrounding neighborhood had been evacuated and sealed when security forces were alerted to a smoking vehicle on a nearby street. A military demolition team had examined the stolen delivery truck and found it packed with thousands of pounds of homemade explosives—and a faulty detonator. Traffic in the neighborhood had been frozen for the better part of a day while the bomb was defused.

  Four blocks east of Villa Somalia was the safe house Pickens had been using for the past twenty-six months. It was close enough to the villa to benefit from the additional security but far enough away that it wouldn’t become bug-splat the next time someone tried to kill the president.

  Like many private homes in the area, the quarter-acre property was surrounded by a high concrete wall. The small house had a pale yellow exterior and a red roof. Aside from a few pockmarks from a decade-old mortar attack, it would have looked at home anywhere in the tropics.

  Pickens opened the sliding steel gate with a remote control. He kept a variety of cars, trucks, and motorbikes on the property. They were rotated often, swept regularly for tracking devices, and rented through shell corporations set up by the Agency—with the collision-damage waivers fully paid up.

  Jake and Pickens walked across the small courtyard under a cloudless blue sky that had dropped less than an inch of rain on the country in the last two years. The two men entered the house and spent an hour reviewing what had gone right, and what had gone wrong, during their meeting with Dameer. They’d had several similar encounters and were still no closer to identifying who was behind the resurgence of piracy.

  Jake had just suggested a change in strategy when the buzzer rang for the front gate. A live video feed popped up on Pickens’s cell phone of a lone man standing on the street. Lean, relaxed, with a medium-brown complexion and an untucked shirt, he looked like half the men in Somalia.

  Pickens buzzed him through the gate and led him through the front door.

  “I’m Steve,” he said as he shook hands with Jake.

  “Steve is a major in Army Special Forces,” said Pickens. “His team is here killing terrorists.”

  “Our mission,” Steve clarified, “is to improve border security, allow the rule of law to take hold, and give the democratically elected Somali National Government a chance to save the country.”

  “That’s a tall order,” Jake said. “How are you going about it?”

  “By killing terrorists,” Steve deadpanned. “Over the past six months we’ve started using their tactics against them: disruptive attacks, destroying their infrastructure, and killing high- and low-value targets to show them that no one is safe. It’s already hurting operations and recruitment.”

  The three men stood in the small kitchen as Steve opened a manila folder and spread half a dozen photos across the counter. The images were from various U.S. manned and unmanned intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets that routinely overflew much of the country. CIA may have been the nation’s lead intelligence gathering agency, but the U.S. military had exponentially more assets in the Horn of Africa.

  “Six days ago,” Steve said, “the Port of Kismaayo was hit with staggered, vehicle-borne IEDs, followed by mortars and heavy machine gun fire. The Air Force deployed a U-28 surveillance aircraft on an overhead collection mission after the attack and spotted this three-vehicle convoy just north of the city.” He pointed to an ultra-high-resolution image of an anchor and crossed rifles on the side of one of the trucks. “These are four-ton Leyland trucks, clearly marked as Kenya Defence Forces, but we talked to the KDF after the fact and they didn’t have any assets in the area.”

  “Where did the trucks go?” Pickens asked.

  “We don’t know,” Steve said. “The U-28 saw the KDF markings and moved on. We dialed up a couple Predators once we realized the trucks were fakes, but the aircraft didn’t find anything noteworthy except two facilities along the Jubba River: one outside the town of Jilib, and one in Dujuma.”

  He pointed to two images on the counter.

  “Either of those mean anything to you?” he asked Pickens.

  The CIA officer studied the photographs. He might have been stuck in a dead-end job, but his eight years in-country had made him a go-to resource for many of the U.S. agencies and military units that were operating in Somalia.

  “The place outside Jilib used to be a commercial farm,” Pickens said, “but the Jubba River is fed by rainfall from the Mendebo Mountains, and they haven’t seen so much as a drop in two years. The river dried up and that region turned to dust. I’m guessing the place near Dujuma was a livestock ranch, but those animals are long-since dead and the ranch is probably abandoned.”

  “Well, that’s fan-fucking-tastic,” said Steve. “We’ll keep looking, but keep your ear to the ground. We’ve picked up some chatter that one of the warlords is running a camp somewhere out there, but we haven’t been able to locate it.”

  “Do the warlords operate in the open?” Jake asked.

  “Like they own the place,” said Pickens. “They have motorcades and regular tables at the local restaurants. They provide security and dispense justice. The government here is so corrupt that the warlords have taken over the job.”

  “But you wouldn’t confuse them with civil servants,” Steve said as he walked to the door. “They’re the most ruthless men you’ll ever encounter. They fund terrorists, bribe politicians, and use private militias to extort and control the population. Fortunately, they’ve been keeping one another in check through a constant war of attrition.
The real disaster for the Somali people would be if one of the warlords was able to take out his competition—then the whole country would collapse into a dictatorship.”

  FOUR

  THE HORN OF Africa.

  For more than a millennium, its two thousand miles of coastline had attracted Roman, Chinese, and Indian merchants and turned it into a vibrant hub on the Silk Road trading route. Yet it wasn’t until a heavy Arab migration in the seventh century AD that Somalia would acquire the culture that would define it for the next 1,400 years. The country had taken its name from Samaale, an émigré from the Arabian Peninsula, and 95 percent of its population belonged to one of the six clans descended from him and his brother.

  The nation became a successful blend of traditional clan and moderate Islamic values, but like Yemen to its north, Somalia’s strategic location and vibrant food and livestock production attracted unwanted outside attention. European and African nations competed for control of the area for hundreds of years, using military force to impose their will on the Somali people—until the middle of the twentieth century, when the foreigners abandoned their empire-building and left the Horn.

  What should have been a golden opportunity swiftly turned into a disaster. The Somali people were finally free, but with an ineffective government and an economy in shambles, their nation was in a state of crisis. The former colonial powers continued to harvest the rich fishing grounds off the nation’s coast with commercial fishing boats while the Somalis could barely put to sea a fleet of small skiffs with handmade nets. The balance of the country’s citizens were agro-pastoralists—raising crops and livestock—and barely eking out a sustenance living because of years of dry weather.

  In this land of strong clans and weak government, the tattered economy created a power vacuum that attracted those with the might to impose their will. It was a pattern that would repeat itself many times over in the nation’s tragic history—most notably in 1969, when General Siad Barre declared himself president in a coup. He ruled with brute force, marginalizing the clans until he too was eventually overthrown in 1991.