[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel

by Richard Marcinko

  He unleashed a stream of curses so severe even Mongoose appeared embarrassed. He grabbed our glasses, got up, and went for some refills.

  Garrett was still spewing when Mongoose returned. I may have gotten out of my chair by that point, because Goose looked concerned. “Maybe you two should take it out to the street,” he suggested.

  The street was some eighty stories down. It was tempting.

  “Let’s go out to the terrace,” I suggested, pointing to the doors on the side of the room. I could always toss him down to the street if I changed my mind.

  Garrett hopped up with more energy than I’d thought he possessed. In the short walk across the room, he became rejuvenated, shedding the ill effects of the prison as if they were dandruff flakes on the shoulders of his jacket. Mongoose furled his brow—a frightening look that reminds me of a war pig—then trailed after him. I grabbed my gin and one of the beers.

  I was barely through the door when Garrett launched into a fresh tirade. I’d heard enough and snapped back.

  “I ruined your life? Is that what you’re saying?” I demanded indignantly. “Your life would have ended at the point of a sharp axe when they chopped off your head after declaring you guilty in a few months.”

  “You don’t know crap.” Garrett’s eyes flashed. I had a sudden flashback to my navy days with his dad, when he and I faced off against a dozen marines.

  I love the marines. Except when I’m fighting them in a bar. And especially when I’m outnumbered six to one.

  But Flushing Taylor’s temper was a legendary force multiplier. He lit into those marines like an A-10A Warthog ripping through a squad of tanks. None of them were standing when he got done.

  Now, the infamous family temper was about to explode on me. Mongoose took a step between us, ready to grab Garrett if he took a swing.

  “Who sent you?” Garrett demanded. “Who pulled the plug?”

  “What plug? No one sent me. I talked to your dad.”

  “My dad?”

  “Look, I don’t know what you’re doing with your life, and I don’t want to know. If you want to associate with the scum of the earth, that’s your business. Your father was a plank owner of mine, and that brings certain obligations. That’s why I’m here. If you have a beef, take it up with your father.”

  “My father.”

  “You’re on your own. If I were you, though, I wouldn’t go back to Saudi Arabia.”

  “You’re an idiot, you know that?” Garrett began to laugh. “You went through all this trouble because my father was worried about me?”

  “What’s so funny about that?”

  “How much did he pay you?”

  “Not a cent.”

  “This—all this—you did out of the kindness of your heart?”

  “I did it because your dad is an old friend,” I told him. I was also hoping to get information about Allah’s Rule on Earth from him, but under the circumstances I decided this wasn’t a good time to talk about it. And frankly, I had the feeling I wasn’t going to be getting much of anything in the way of cooperation.

  “This was none of my father’s business,” said Garrett, shaking his head. “I work for the agency, you idiot. The CIA. You just blew six months’ worth of work.”

  (II)

  Oh yeah, I felt foolish.

  Here I was, thinking I was living a Father’s Day greeting card, and it turned out I’d actually stumbled into a Christians in Action Playtime Adventure.

  * * *

  Contrary to popular belief and my occasional roguish jibes, the CIA is not entirely clueless when it comes to tracking terrorists and their use of drug smuggling to fund operations. In this case, they were ahead of me, just not far enough to avoid tripping me up.

  Concerned that Allah’s Rule was making inroads into Europe, the Christians in Action had tried for months to get information about its hierarchy and drug smuggling operations. At some point they decided that the best way to flesh out the hierarchy was to insert someone inside it.

  They’d placed an Arab inside the network, but the cell-like nature of the organization prevented them from finding anything out about the European side. So they set Garrett up as a possible mule, getting him arrested in Saudi Arabia, where they hoped he would come in contact with Allah’s Rule operatives.

  “How’d that work?” I asked him.

  “It was working,” he insisted, folding his arms.

  “So it wasn’t working at all. You’re lucky you’re not dead. What bright bulb at the agency thought of that? None of my friends, I hope.”

  It was purely a rhetorical question. Garrett turned red, and stomped back inside the hotel.

  “You think we screwed up an operation?” asked Mongoose.

  “No. We saved him from being killed,” I told Mongoose. “He was pretty beat up the first day I found him, and he got worse. By the time he would have found anyone to make the connection for him, he’d have been cut up into little anchovy pieces. If you’re not a Believer in that prison, you’re not coming out alive. It was a stupid idea. Probably not his.”

  “He’s probably not going to see it that way.”

  “I don’t blame him.”

  Garrett had left for his room. Mongoose and I shared a few more drinks, a couple of stories about his misadventures between deployments as a SEAL, then turned in.

  Four or five hours later, I was woken from the middle of a dream by the ring of my satellite phone. I reached for it groggily, and found myself talking to Karen Fairchild.

  “Honey, are you awake?” she asked. “Admiral Jones just called.”

  “Damn.” I figured he’d get around to calling at some point. Admiral Jones heads the CIA. We have what you might call a beneficial but bendable relationship: it benefits him, while I get bent, spindled, and generally masticated en route to a payday. “I hope you told him you didn’t know where I was.”

  “I couldn’t lie. Besides, he already knew where you were. He wants to talk to you.”

  “Tell him I’ll meet him for lunch.”

  “He’s on the other line. I can connect you.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t.”

  The phone clicked, and the gravel-laden voice that sunk a thousand careers came on the line.

  “What the hell are you doing out there, Dick? What the hell are you doing?”

  “Sleeping. Isn’t it past three there? Shouldn’t you be on a golf course? Or have you taken up bowling?”

  “One of my people is downstairs in the lobby of your hotel,” barked the admiral. “I expect you to talk to him, pronto. Or I’ll approve his request to send two men up to roust you.”

  “Aye, aye, Admiral.”

  “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 b
y 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 character7 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 Mo
hammad 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.