Black Flag

by David Ricciardi

  “I didn’t realize you were so desperate for a few rifles and RPGs,” said Jake.

  “Desperate? No,” said Yaxaas, “but what I found on that ship is going to change Somalia forever.”

  It was the confirmation Jake had been after. The warlord wasn’t talking about rifles and RPGs. He’d found the bioweapon from Iran.

  “Go home, American, and don’t worry about Somalia. It’s none of your business.”

  “We’ll be in touch,” Jake said.

  It was the code phrase for the Ground Branch team to move in.

  Just as Clap and the others emerged from the shadows, the pregnant woman wailed and fell to the ground, clutching her stomach. Clap was a warrior, but he was also a husband, a son, and a father. His inherent compassion caused him to reach for her.

  But the instant she looked up and met his eyes, he knew he’d made a terrible mistake.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  THE WOMAN TREMBLED as she raised her hijab.

  She wasn’t pregnant.

  The only thing she was carrying was an explosive belt, and detonating it in the crowded market would kill half the Ground Branch team and at least twenty civilians.

  “Abort, abort,” Clap said into the radio. “Suicide bomber, contact range.”

  The frightened woman looked as if she had been forced to be an unwilling accomplice, but the presence of the bomb had neutralized the Ground Branch team and dashed any hope they’d had of capturing Yaxaas.

  Clap and his men would be lucky to escape with their lives.

  “I’ve got a visual on the actuator,” Jake said over the comms net.

  Yaxaas was holding a cheap mobile phone. He smiled as his thumb hovered over the send button.

  “It’s cellular,” Jake added.

  “Confirm cellular,” said Clap. “Can you get clear?”

  One the warlord’s goons jammed the muzzle of a rifle under Jake’s chin and took his pistol.

  “Yes,” Jake said stiffly.

  “Banger coming your way on three,” said Clap. “One, two . . .”

  Jake saw the flash-bang flying through the air and closed his eyes.

  “Three!”

  It was a perfect throw. The bright flash and concussive blast hit just as it flew past Yaxaas’s head.

  Jake pushed the rifle to the left and stepped to the right. The gunman pulled the trigger and emptied his entire magazine into the sky as the two men wrestled for control of the weapon. Jake planted his right leg behind the man and threw him to the ground.

  The flash-bang had temporarily blinded and stunned Yaxaas, but he still had the wherewithal to press the phone’s keypad.

  Nothing happened.

  One of the Ground Branch team had activated the same multifrequency jammer they’d used before to block the signal to the explosive belt.

  The flash-bang and the gunfire had triggered chaos inside the market. People were screaming and rushing from what they assumed was another terrorist attack. Jake lost sight of the Ground Branch team as people ran in every direction.

  Two of Yaxaas’s thugs rushed him and sent him tumbling backward into a stack of woven baskets. Jake scrambled to his feet and took off through the crowded market, shoving some people out of his way, jumping over others, and sprinting to one of the team’s prearranged rendezvous points.

  “Heading for alternate exfil alpha,” he shouted into his radio.

  But he turned a corner and found more gunmen blocking the exit. Jake didn’t know if they were Yaxaas’s thugs, but he had two men following him from behind and was about to be trapped in the middle. He ducked into an abandoned shop and pressed himself against a wall.

  Outside, the men who’d been following him began shouting, and Jake heard someone in the crowd respond. The entire exchange had been in Somali, but Jake didn’t need to understand the language to know that he’d been given up.

  Yaxaas’s soldiers entered the shop, AK-47s against their hips, fingers on the triggers. The first man was the one who’d taken Jake’s pistol. He relaxed when he saw that the American was still unarmed. The gunman slung his weapon and took out a length of coarse rope to tie Jake’s hands.

  Jake doubled over and looked as if he might throw up.

  The two men were nearly on him when he straightened up.

  Neither man saw it until it was too late. Jake pulled the karambit from the sheath under his shirt and raked the knife up the first man’s leg, diagonally slicing at least six inches of his femoral artery. At the top of the arc, Jake rotated the curved blade and brought the knife down hard along the second man’s neck, slashing his carotid artery. The man dropped the gun before he could get off a shot.

  The entire attack had taken less than two seconds.

  Both men would bleed out in less than two minutes.

  But Jake didn’t have that long to watch them die. It was pandemonium outside as more of Yaxaas’s men closed in.

  Jake burst through the shop’s rear door and into an alley. It was a part of the market he’d never seen before, but it opened onto a busy street, and for the first time since he’d come to Somalia, the streets of Mogadishu looked like the safest place around.

  Jake sheathed the knife and ran.

  There were a few cars and trucks, several Bajaj taxis, and a man on a dirt bike stuck in traffic. Jake tackled the man on the motorcycle and took the bike.

  “On a moto, heading west,” Jake said into the radio. He’d figure out where he was and where to go later. Right now he just needed to get clear of the market and open up some distance between him and his pursuers.

  He put the bike in gear, gunned the engine, and aimed the bike toward a gap between two cars heading in the opposite direction.

  He was nearly home free when a black SUV rammed him head-on.

  The impact smashed the motorcycle’s front fork and sent Jake flying backward through the air. He crashed to the ground ten feet away with the wind knocked out of him and his radio mic and earpiece missing. By the time he raised himself up to his hands and knees, three men with Kalashnikovs were standing over him. A fourth man emerged from the SUV’s passenger seat.

  Nacay.

  The warlord’s son walked to Jake and stomped him in the back, sending him sprawling on the ground once again. Nacay kicked him a second time, then a third, each time driving the toe of his heavy boots into Jake’s ribs.

  Two of the gunmen hauled Jake to his feet. He was bloodied and wheezing and no longer a threat to anyone, but Nacay wound up and threw a haymaker punch at his face, drawing more blood and sending Jake to the dirt a third time.

  The goons stripped Jake of his knife, bound his hands, and threw him in the back seat of the SUV. The rest of the team mounted up and the man sitting on Jake’s right fired a dozen rounds into the air through the truck’s open window.

  The SUV sped from the scene and disappeared down a side street.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  THE LINE OUTSIDE the clinic was moving slowly, and the infant children in their mothers’ arms were restless, but the women did not leave, for it was the only clinic in Mogadishu that was open to the Hawiye, and the doctor came but once a week.

  And for once, the mothers did not have to stand in the glare of the sun. The cottony clouds that had been building over Mogadishu during the past week had turned thick and dark, ushered in by a strong, gusty breeze, and they cast wide shadows across the street. Though their hopes had been dashed countless times before, enthusiasm was building across the country about the possibility of rain.

  It was late afternoon when a Toyota Land Cruiser pulled up outside. Badeed’s bodyguards paid no mind to the man who exited the white SUV. His name was Robleh, and eight years earlier, he had acquired the rights to distribute the popular Caafi brand of bottled water throughout the Hawiye clan territories in northeastern Somalia. It was a massive franchise i
n a country plagued by polluted groundwater, and it had made him a rich man.

  He passed the guards and found Badeed inside the clinic, holding an emaciated boy whose eyes and ribs bulged from a body that should have been twice as heavy. Badeed held the boy on his lap, patiently feeding him sips of sugar water, trying any way he could to get calories into his dangerously malnourished system. The warlord spotted Robleh and nodded, but continued to feed the boy until he’d finished the eyedropper full of sugar water.

  Badeed picked up his cane and gestured for his friend to follow him to an empty room. Both men were Hawiye clan elders and had known each other since childhood. Robleh was also Badeed’s cousin, although this was of lesser importance, as everyone in the clan was, by definition, related to everyone else.

  The two men skipped pleasantries and quickly got to the reason for Robleh’s visit. Badeed considered the clinic his refuge, and visiting him there to talk business was not recommended for anyone but his closest friends and advisers.

  “I received a phone call yesterday,” said Robleh, “from a government official in Afgooye. You know of the displacement camp there?”

  Badeed nodded solemnly. “Last I heard, it was ten thousand people . . .”

  “Sixteen thousand now,” said Robleh, “and someone fouled one of their wells.”

  Badeed shook his head. He thought of himself as ruthless, but just. Depriving a refugee camp of drinking water made him ponder the existence of humanity.

  “And they asked you for bottled water?”

  Robleh nodded.

  “I will help with the cost,” Badeed said.

  “Thank you, but that is not why I am here. I will provide the water until the well is cleaned, but I do not have the resources to do what needs to be done next.”

  Badeed realized at last why Robleh had come. It was a security matter.

  “Who did it?” he said.

  “I assumed it was al-Shabaab, but then I went to the camp this morning and started asking around.”

  Robleh explained the history of the couple who’d married outside their clans and the actions of the bride’s brother.

  “Spilling blood in the well was excessive,” said Badeed, “but they deserved to be punished. I am not certain that this concerns us.”

  “It was Masaska,” said Robleh.

  It was the same man who’d stolen the medicines bound for the very clinic they were standing in.

  Badeed looked at his friend.

  “Then I’m afraid the time for diya has passed.”

  FIFTY-NINE

  IT WAS LATE afternoon in the Yaaqshiid district of eastern Mogadishu and maybe a dozen people were on the street—a few men chewing qat and a handful of homeless children looking for scraps of food among the dust and litter that blew across the road.

  The auto shop in the middle of the block was little more than a rollup garage door and a single repair bay. Inside was a pickup truck that had started making noise after striking something the prior day.

  It was a Darood neighborhood, and the garage’s owner, mechanic, and sole employee was Darood, but he wasn’t the reason the truck filled with Hawiye gunmen had stopped at the end of the block.

  They were there for the other man, the driver of the pickup. They’d been searching for him since Badeed had put the word on the street that the attack on the Hawiye refugee camp in Afgooye would be avenged. A few hours later an enterprising Bajaj driver had spotted the olive drab pickup with the dented front fender and reported its location to his cousin, a fighter in the Hawiye militia. The cousin had told his commander and the commander had called Badeed.

  The gunmen jumped down from their truck. They asked no questions. They entertained no pleas.

  They opened fire.

  The Hawiye raked the garage with bullets, killing its owner and the owner of the pickup truck. The gunmen kept firing with their automatic weapons until the fuel leaking from the pickup’s tank ignited.

  Filled with greasy rags, a barrel of motor oil, and several cans of gasoline and diesel fuel, the garage erupted in flames. Fire leapt from the open door, rising into the air above the building. The flames ignited a rats’ nest of power lines that were strung overhead and sparks flew and lines crackled as they fell to the street. Thick black smoke filled the air.

  Their mission complete, the Hawiye were returning to their vehicles when four teenage boys ran onto the street. They were part of the neighborhood Darood militia, paid by Yaxaas in drugs and food but mostly threats. They were outnumbered and outmatched, but they had their orders, and those orders were to repel the Hawiye.

  Bullets flew in both directions, sprayed aimlessly down the street. Neither side cared that the locals who were caught outside took more fire than the enemy. Innocent men, women, and children fell where they stood.

  Bodies lay strewn about the block. The neighborhood children, numb from years of war and hungry from years of famine, quickly stripped the dead of anything of value: sandals, weapons, and whatever else they could scrounge. By the time the fighting was over, the road was lined with shattered windows, pockmarked walls, and puddles of blood.

  More bystanders were killed than enemy combatants and, in a place where human life had no value, both sides considered it a victory.

  SIXTY

  HOT AIR BLEW through the SUV’s interior as the passengers rode with their gun barrels sticking out the open windows. Nacay was in the front passenger seat and regularly checking his side-view mirror while the driver hurtled down side streets and up alleyways. One of the gunmen riding in back had put a hood over Jake’s head and the SUV made dozens of turns until the men inside were sure they weren’t being followed.

  Two men slid open the fifteen-foot-high doors to a warehouse as the black SUV approached. It sped inside and stopped in the back. Nacay took Jake and three henchmen and climbed into a white sedan with heavily tinted windows. Less than a minute later, the white sedan and two decoys drove out of the warehouse and fanned out in different directions to confuse any aerial surveillance the Americans might have deployed.

  Jake was sandwiched in the back between two Darood gunmen while Nacay rode shotgun. The sedan’s driver had undergone a remarkable transformation—waiting patiently while a Bajaj in front of him blocked traffic to discharge a passenger, then slowly pulling around and driving down a side street. In stark contrast to his time behind the wheel of the black SUV, the driver was doing everything possible to avoid drawing attention to the sedan.

  Probably 80 percent of the cars in Somalia were white sedans or hatchbacks, and as they headed northwest through the city, the vehicle with Jake inside had effectively disappeared. They were making no more than thirty miles per hour, simply going with the flow of the traffic around them—when the Toyota minivan in front of them slammed on its brakes.

  Clap and two of his men stepped out of the van and raised their weapons. A second later, a gray SUV holding the rest of the Ground Branch team skidded to a halt behind the sedan and pressed hard against its rear bumper.

  Though Jake had lost his earpiece, he still had the radio transceiver unit strapped to his waist. Clap and the Ground Branch team had been tracking him using a system known as ATAK, which, among other things, overlaid his position onto a moving map on their mobile phones.

  Nacay’s driver revved his engine and shifted into reverse.

  The Ground Branch team opened fire.

  Clap fired half a dozen rounds into the Nissan’s engine compartment. The CIA contractor on his right shot out the sedan’s two left tires while the man on his left fired three rounds at the driver’s chest. The rest of the team targeted the right-side tires and rushed the back seat doors, where Jake was being held.

  But the Nissan’s driver mashed the gas pedal to the floor. The white sedan shot backward, pushing the SUV back a few feet and sending the Ground Branch men scrambling for cover. Clap fired
off another five rounds, but the unobtrusive sedan was armored all around, from the engine compartment to the windows, including run-flat tires. Nothing seemed to affect it. The driver shifted back into first gear and clipped the minivan as he sped away.

  Clap ordered the CIA men back to their vehicles. The minivan was heavy and slow, so the gray SUV took the lead spot in the pursuit, ramming the sedan twice and trying to spin it out of control.

  But Nacay’s wheelman knew his car and he knew the roads. He quickly opened up the distance with his pursuers and floored it down a bumpy alleyway before disappearing down another side street. The Agency vehicles followed.

  The road was a single lane wide, with two-story buildings on each side and strings of power lines up above. The Agency SUV had closed to within a few car lengths of the white sedan when it made a sharp right turn and stopped.

  Blocking the intersection ahead was a technical, a pickup truck with a light machine gun mounted in its bed. The improvised guntruck had become a staple of the Somali civil war, and the site of the ambush had been chosen well. The tight quarters made it nearly impossible for the Americans to reverse to safety.

  The gunner opened fire with long bursts from the machine gun. Its heavy 7.62mm rounds tore through the Americans’ passenger compartments.

  Clap took a round to the shoulder, and the man next to him was hit twice in the chest. The Agency SUV was peppered with bullet holes and shattered glass. The Ground Branch contractor in the front seat was killed instantly when a round tore out his throat.

  Another operative leaned out his window and smoked the technical’s gunner with three quick rounds to the face.

  It bought the two CIA vehicles enough time to back out of the alley, but Jake was gone.

  SIXTY-ONE

  THE WHITE SEDAN swerved around a corner and accelerated. Pocked with bullet holes, it made close to seventy miles per hour through the narrow streets as it sped across two intersections and turned into a junkyard. Workers unloading bags of trash from a garbage truck pretended not to notice Nacay and the two gunmen who stepped out of the back seat.