Black Flag

by David Ricciardi

  Jake spent twelve hours taking everything in through the magnified optics. He saw animals come and go by the river, guards patrolling the camp’s perimeter, and crews switching duty on the mounted machine gun up on the hilltop. He might have found Yaxaas’s camp, but Jake was wet and cold and he still had no idea where the biowarfare agent was being stored—if it was even there. There was no biohazard sign on a door, no extra security around one of the camp’s huts, and no sign of Yaxaas or a potential delivery mechanism.

  Doubt crept into his mind.

  Jake had based his entire plan on a few clues he’d overheard while being tortured by Yaxaas’s goons at the warehouse. He’d heard some of them speak fearfully about “the Devil’s Box,” and some of the men in camp seemed to detour around a specific building every time they passed it, but he had no hard evidence. And even if he was lucky and the weapon was there, he would have only a single chance to neutralize it before the element of surprise was lost and an overwhelming force descended on him to extinguish his life.

  Jake had brought several options for destroying the bioweapon, but access, the weather, and a half dozen other factors would determine what he’d be able to use. The only way to guarantee its destruction was to be right on top of it. Everything else was a fallback plan, with the odds of success dropping off like a cliff.

  Jake needed to get close.

  He needed to get inside the camp.

  SEVENTY-THREE

  JAKE LAY IN the thick grass and waited. Darkness came early that night, ushered into the valley by dense clouds and heavy rain. By ten p.m., the men in camp doused the work lights and retired for the night, leaving only those on guard duty outside. There were two men in the machine gun nest, four patrolling the outside walls, and four walking the interior.

  The generator was finally shut down a little after midnight.

  Jake assembled a small pack of gear and crawled down the muddy ridge through waist-high grass until he was a hundred feet from camp. The remaining distance to the wall was bare—conspicuously so—as if it had been clear-cut and burned out.

  Like a minefield.

  Jake was far from an expert on land mines. In fact, he knew a single salient fact about them—and it was that they could maim him horribly. It was enough. He lowered himself to the ground and waited. The guards came and went, patrolling the exterior fence line but never venturing into the clear-cut zone.

  It was nearly an hour later when a greater kudu wandered into view.

  The five-hundred-pound antelope was alert, walking with its head up and its ears twitching in the rain as it followed a rivulet of water past the camp and down to the riverbank. Jake marveled at its muscular body, long legs, and sharp horns that spiraled into the sky.

  It was a magnificent beast.

  But more importantly, it wasn’t a gooey mess, blown to pieces by a land mine.

  The kudu jumped down to the riverbed. The heavy rains had begun to refill it and what was a trickling stream just two days ago was now ten feet wide and flowing steadily. The kudu bounded across in a single leap.

  The jumping antelope provoked no reaction from the guards. Whether they’d grown to ignore such crossings or simply hadn’t seen it, Jake couldn’t know, but the strong winds and the first rain in two years were providing plenty of distractions in the valley. Depressions flooded, trees toppled over, and mudslides crashed through the hills. The hard, dusty ground simply couldn’t absorb all the moisture.

  Distant thunder rumbled in the valley as Jake switched on his night vision goggles. The four exterior guards were each pacing up and down one side of the rectangular camp, carrying rifles under their plastic ponchos. The interior sentries had been doing the same when Jake had last seen them from the hills. Carefully timing his moves to avoid them, he waded into the river and followed it to the camp’s long northern wall.

  The north-side guard was two hundred feet away and closing when Jake scrambled up the riverbed and began crawling through the mud with his rifle in his arms. As soon the guard made his turn at the corner, Jake went to the wall and threw a knotted rope into a crook atop the stockade fence. He pulled himself up the side of the fence, his muddy hands and feet slipping several times as they struggled for purchase.

  Jake reached the top and looked for the nearest guard. He was fifty yards away and closing quickly.

  Jake dropped into camp.

  He flicked the rope off the fence, stuffed it into the exterior webbing of his pack, and crouch-walked to the nearest darkened building. Its glassless windows were covered with canvas tarps, flapping in the wind and heavy rain.

  Covered in mud and sitting on the ground under a wooden eave, Jake was effectively invisible. He raised his rifle and tracked the nearest guard as the man passed and made his turn at the northwest corner. Thunder cracked nearby as the guard passed by a second time and began the long slog back across the northern side of camp. The western guard passed by a moment later.

  With his right hand holding the rifle firmly against his shoulder, Jake used his left hand to pull one of the tarps back a few inches and look inside the building. Through his night vision goggles he saw knives, hatchets, and Zulu and Masai spears along the walls, plus two bunks and a table and chairs—but no people and no sign of the bioweapon.

  Jake suspected it was being stored in a building fifty yards to the east. No one had entered or exited that single building since he’d arrived in Dujuma, and many of the men in camp seemed to give it a wide berth as they went about their duties.

  Jake checked the positions of the four interior guards, lowered himself to the ground, and started crawling again. The mud was thick and the puddles deep. By the time he was halfway to the next building, mud had made its way into his clothes, his hair, and his boots.

  A bolt of lightning struck somewhere in the southern part of the valley, illuminating the entire camp as if the sun had come out for a split second. Colors came to life, details became crisp, and the impenetrable curtain of the heavy rain was lifted. Jake saw the buildings along the north wall that he believed to be the barracks and the latrine. He saw the structure in front of him that he suspected of housing the weapon.

  And he saw the guards pacing along the north and south walls.

  Which meant that they could see him.

  Jake froze.

  He was flat on the ground, practically inhaling mud, but he still had a pack and a rifle—distinctive shapes that didn’t blend in with the land.

  A crack of thunder rolled through the valley several seconds later. Jake had been timing the lightning and the thunder and knew that the worst of the storm was still approaching. Another flash of lightning lit the camp. This time, the southern guard was closer and the northern guard was farther away. Jake couldn’t see the other two. The lightning was turning his mission into Russian roulette. It might not be the next flash, or the one after it, but eventually one of the guards would spot Jake and sound an alarm. He might be able to kill one of the guards, or maybe two, but he’d never reach the weapon.

  He would have to find another way.

  SEVENTY-FOUR

  JAKE SNUCK OUT of camp and climbed back to his observation post in the hills. He had a direct line of sight into camp and to the machine gun nest—but lines of sight worked both ways. With the lightning flashing and dawn not too far away, he needed to find some concealment, to find a place where his every move wouldn’t put his life at risk.

  But where to go? His entire body of knowledge on scout/sniper operations consisted of a documentary he’d watched and a few war stories from the ex–Delta Force operators he’d trained with upon joining Special Activities. It wasn’t much, but he knew that if he was going to observe the camp in daylight, he needed to camouflage himself and have routes of ingress and egress that wouldn’t leave him exposed.

  He crawled farther up the hill and tucked in behind a ridge, away from game trails and
thickets of thorn bushes, where he could still see most of the camp but was invisible to the men in the machine gun nest. He was using his knife to cut some nearby twigs and grasses—then stuffing them into his hat, on his clothing, and on his rifle to break up his outline—when another bolt of lightning struck nearby, temporarily blinding him. The thunder was instantaneous and so loud that he felt it in his chest and in his bones.

  Jake lay prone on the ground, pointed the rifle toward camp, and parted the thick grass with the tip of his suppressor.

  He took a few deep breaths and settled in for the day.

  It was Christmas Eve.

  * * *

  —

  JAKE LAY THERE for hours.

  Occasionally he turned on the night vision sight for a detailed scan of the camp, but for the most part, the routine was the same. The workers did their chores and the guards did their patrols—all of them slogging through the mud and looking miserable.

  The rain was incessant.

  The hills channeled most of it into the valley where it ran into the rapidly expanding Jubba, but in other places, the heavy, water-soaked earth could no longer support itself and came crashing down the side of the hills. Most of the mudslides were small, yet Jake had seen a few with enough force to bury him alive, but he was undeterred.

  Instead of celebrating the holiday in Greece with Athena, he was spending it alone in the hills of Africa, waiting to kill one man before he could kill a million.

  The first sign of unusual activity came just as the first hint of morning twilight glowed faintly through the clouds.

  Several men trudged past the goat pen and across the camp’s muddy courtyard, led by the man with the bandoliers. He wore no hat or poncho to protect him from the rain, just a few hundred rounds of machine gun ammunition to protect him from everything else.

  He pointed into the hills, not far from where Jake was holed up, and two armed patrols departed through the main gate. Fortunately for Jake, they mostly ignored their orders and instead followed the game trails on the valley floor, where the ground was level and the risk of mudslides was lower. Jake spotted them intermittently over the next few hours as they crisscrossed the countryside. Several times they walked to within a hundred yards of his position. Good siting and good luck kept him safely hidden in the tall grasses, but luck was a fickle thing, and Jake didn’t like relying on it when so much was at stake.

  Despite the weather, the animals came out again at sunset. Several antelope wandered toward the river and a small jungle cat prowled the fence outside camp, but there was still no sign of Yaxaas or the weapon. The only human activity was the constant patrols. Yet Jake took perverse comfort from the men combing the hillside, rationalizing that they would only guard something of value.

  The mission was taking much longer than he’d planned. He’d run out of food and his body was stiff and sore from lying nearly motionless twenty-four hours a day. The constant rain and lack of sunlight had soaked his clothes and robbed his body of heat. His senses were dull.

  But Jake waited into the night, with the rifle to his shoulder and his eye to the glass. He was watching the patrols’ flashlights move slowly across the far hillside when something rustled the grass to his right.

  It wasn’t the wind.

  As slowly as he could, Jake rotated his head a few degrees. There were two men, ten yards from his position, carrying Kalashnikov rifles.

  And one was pointing a flashlight at Jake.

  SEVENTY-FIVE

  THE TELEVISION DOCUMENTARY Jake had watched on sniper training had made it look sexy—small teams of elite soldiers who stalked enemy positions using expert camouflage and precision weapons. It was about using art and science to conduct reconnaissance and eliminate distant targets without ever being seen.

  Now, shivering from days of cold rain, out of food, short on drinking water, and worrying that something as trivial as the reflection of a flashlight against the whites of his eyes might betray his presence to an armed patrol, it didn’t seem quite as sexy.

  In fact, it sucked.

  Jake was tempted to kill the two men, to eliminate the threat. He could roll onto his side, swing his weapon around, and pump two rifle rounds into each of the men before they even realized what was happening.

  But instead of solving his problems, killing the guards would more likely set in motion a chain of events that would quickly spiral out of control. The guards’ absence would be noted and more of Yaxaas’s men would pour into the hillsides. Jake knew that this mission would likely kill him, that infiltrating the camp undetected, destroying the weapon at close range, and killing Yaxaas would probably cost Jake his life, and he was prepared for it, but he did not want to die before it was done.

  No less than the fate of the nation of Somalia hinged on the guards’ decision in the next few seconds. If they raised a weapon or walked in his direction, Jake would be forced to kill them and hope for the best.

  He lay motionless, hoping that his camouflage and the darkness would give him another option.

  After a few more seconds, the flashlight moved on and the armed patrol continued down the hill.

  Jake exhaled and glanced at his watch.

  It was just past midnight.

  Christmas Day.

  SEVENTY-SIX

  THE RAIN ENDED before daybreak. Mist rose from the grasslands as three days of downpours evaporated back into the sky from which they had fallen. The air was sweet with the fragrance of balsam and cedar trees and a dozen different spice plants. The runoff from the hillsides subsided and the muddy ground began to dry. Across the valley, monkeys screeched and birds chirped in anticipation of the food that would soon come.

  With sunrise came the insects. Swarming in clouds, they soon discovered Jake hidden among the tall grasses. They flew up his pant legs and down his shirt. They crawled inside his nose and burrowed into his ears.

  But insect repellent still didn’t make his Christmas list.

  He was cold and wet. He hadn’t eaten in thirty-six hours and the only water he’d drunk in the past twelve was what he’d been able to collect in his upside-down hat. Cramps had seized his legs and his head pounded. But more than food, more than water or a comfortable bed, what Jake wanted was confirmation—some sort of evidence that the weapon was in camp and he wasn’t wasting time in Dujuma while Yaxaas was preparing to use it somewhere else.

  Six hours later, Jake got his present.

  Four men slid open the camp’s main gate and the warlord’s armored Range Rover pulled in, followed by a refrigerated delivery truck. Both vehicles were caked with mud. From the windshields, where the wipers had cleared just enough area for the drivers to see, to the doors and fenders, which looked as if they’d been dunked in quicksand, there wasn’t a speck of paint or glass showing. Jake realized that, in a land that had gone years without more than an inch of rain, the downpours of the last few days had washed out the roads. The rural camp had been cut off from the rest of Somalia.

  Which was great news for the rest of Somalia.

  The man with the bandoliers walked across camp to greet the warlord. Yaxaas stepped out wearing a pair of crocodile-skin cowboy boots.

  Jake moved no faster than a caterpillar as he reached over the rifle and increased the scope’s magnification. Tucked into his shoulder and resting on a bipod, the rifle was as stable as a rock. The wind was calm and his holdover at this distance would be negligible. The .308 Winchester would do its job as long as he did his. He visualized the bullet leaving the rifle, its vapor trail arcing down toward Yaxaas, and the warlord collapsing on the ground with a terminal chest wound.

  But it wasn’t time.

  The bioweapon had to be destroyed first.

  The Range Rover’s rear doors opened and two men with AK-47s stepped out, followed by a third man who’d been pinned in the back seat. He moved slowly, with a bandage c
overing most of his head. One of the gunmen motioned toward the western edge of camp and the three of them began walking with the prisoner in the middle.

  The wounded man looked into the hills as he walked and Jake caught a glimpse of his face through the high-power rifle scope.

  It was Pickens.

  SEVENTY-SEVEN

  THE THREE MEN disappeared from sight, blocked from Jake’s view by the hills, but a wide grin crept across his face as he raised his head from the scope.

  Pickens was alive.

  It was the first good news he’d had in days.

  But it wrecked his plan.

  Ever since he’d left Mogadishu, Jake had been focused on eliminating the weapon and killing Yaxaas. He knew that assaulting a larger and better armed force would be dangerous, and if he didn’t destroy the bioweapon on his first attempt, he might become its first victim. But Jake was disillusioned with Graves and the Agency and had devised his plan just after losing Athena and Pickens. He was willing to sacrifice his own life to save the people of Somalia. Surviving the mission had never been part of the plan.

  But Pickens wasn’t dead.

  And it was time for a new plan.

  Jake valued nothing more than loyalty, and Athena’s death had unleashed in him a flood of emotions. The sense of loss and the void in his future were brutal, but what had nearly suffocated him was the self-loathing he’d felt about abandoning her and Giánnis so abruptly after causing her death. Leaving Pickens had been almost as hard. Jake had replayed the scene in his mind too many times to count—standing on the roadside, powerless to stop the shooting as his partner slumped forward in the seat, his blood splattered across the windshield—dead and abandoned on the streets of a foreign country.