[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel

by Richard Marcinko

  Walking past the thin iron gates that marked the boundary of the cemetery, I realized my driver and his car were nowhere to be found. Rooster, trailing behind me, came up and asked where I was going.

  “Back to the hotel,” I told him. “If I can find my car.”

  “We can ride you,” said Rooster. “To hotel, yes?”

  “Yeah.”

  Rooster led the way to a small Toyota parked down the hill, two blocks away. The car looked about twenty years old. Once white, the paint had faded to a dusty gray, pockmarked with reddish brown splotches of rust. The quarter panels were fringed gray with epoxy filler, apparently in a forlorn effort to keep the corrosion from creeping completely up the sides.

  Goat and one of the other men had followed us. I got in the front seat on the passenger side, tucking the rifle muzzle down between my legs. The seat was close to the dash; I tried adjusting it, but the rails were either rusted or jammed and it wouldn’t budge.

  A large wedge of wire had been stuffed into the ignition; this served as the key.

  “Tricky,” said Rooster. He pumped the gas, then played with the wire. It took him four or five tries before the engine turned over, then several more before it coughed to life.

  “Coughed” being the technical term for stuttering and backfiring. Mourners had flooded the street, and Rooster made his way gingerly around them, riding the brakes. The street had once been paved with bricks, but there was only scattered evidence; mostly it was a collection of ruts and potholes. At the intersection we turned right, driving into a district of tightly but irregularly placed houses, none larger than a good-sized garden shed back home. The road was dirt, and an orangish haze rose from the wheels and crept in through the windows as we picked up speed. Rooster drove through a maze of shanties, heading us southward and down the hill until we came to a road flanked by high walls. This was a high-rent district, or what passed for it here, a kind of suburbia on the south end of the city.

  I knew the hotel was to our right somewhere, but with the crazy patch roads I had no idea how to get there. Finally we came to an intersection. I saw a highway in the distance. Rooster turned toward it.

  “I want my hotel, not the airport,” I told him.

  “I make the wrong turn, Mr. Dick,” confessed Rooster.

  “Just get us there,” I growled.

  “We are not going to hotel,” said Goat behind me. He shoved a pistol into the side of my neck.

  Rooster said something in Somali to Goat. I don’t think it was “be gentle with Dick”—he jammed the snub-nose barrel forward and hard into my chin.

  “Keep your hand away from rifle,” said Rooster. “Better not to make a mess in the car.”

  (IV)

  There is something about the feel of a snub-nosed revolver against your anatomy that gets your pulse racing. And when that happens, there’s no sense lollygagging around.

  “I think we’re going a little slow for the highway,” I said in a calm voice, extending my left foot under the dash to mash Rooster’s on the gas pedal. The Toyota lurched, hesitated, bucked, then burst forward. Goat flew backward—but not before I managed to slap the gun out of his hand.

  Unfortunately, the snub nose of the gun and bucking of the car threw my aim off, and I couldn’t grab the pistol as it bounced into the back, beyond my reach.

  Rooster had taken his left hand off the wheel to try and punch me. Rather than hitting back, I opted to help him steer—I jerked the wheel to the right, then hard to the left. He flew back against the seat, flailing at me. Unable to get his right foot off the accelerator, he tried stabbing the brake with his left. An elbow to his throat took his hands off the wheel. Before I could grab it, the car twisted around in a 360. Rooster’s foot flew off the brake. The Toyota engine had finally found its sweet spot, revving steadily now as we spun. I grabbed the wheel and managed to get us moving straight—straight at a stone wall.

  We rammed into the wall at about forty miles an hour. The airbags exploded, burning my face and pushing Rooster back in his seat.

  Goat jackknifed over the back into the window, sliding between and over the two airbags. They may have slowed his momentum, since he didn’t hit quite hard enough to do more than spiderweb the glass.

  I grabbed at the door, got it open, then realized I still had my seat belt on. I unbuckled it and tumbled out of the car, pulling my AK with me.

  Rooster looked at me over the prone body of his comrade. He had a dazed look on his face.

  “Always wear your seat belt, Rooster,” I told him.

  Then I shot the son of a bitch through the head, and put a few holes into Goat’s ribs. I’ve always admired a car with a bright red interior.

  I fished the revolver from the back. It was a Colt, worn from decades of hard living but still serviceable. I was just pushing the cylinder back in place when a horn sounded. I looked up and saw a Land Rover rushing toward me.

  I tucked the revolver in my pocket and lifted the AK. The Rover stopped and Abdi jumped from the passenger side, waving his arms. He was unarmed.

  “Come! Come!” he yelled. “We must get away from here.”

  “Your two henchmen just tried to kidnap me.”

  “They don’t work for me. They—” He looked at the Toyota. “You killed them? You have to get away from here quickly.”

  “They were working for you yesterday.”

  “No,” he insisted. “They were just in the crew my uncle hired. They are not our people—my uncle didn’t know them.”

  By now, people had come out of the nearby buildings. It was definitely time to leave, and not on foot. But it would be an understatement to say that I didn’t trust Abdi.

  “Up against the car,” I told him.

  “What?”

  “Against the Rover, asshole.” I helped him assume the position.

  “Mr. Dick—”

  He was unarmed—foolish in Mogadishu.

  “You don’t trust me,” said Abdi.

  “Damn straight.”

  Taban’s MP5 was in a special holster in the front of the Land Rover. Still holding my gun on Abdi, I reached in and grabbed it. Then I told him to get in and drive.

  “We go to the airport now,” I said. “Straight to the airport.”

  I trotted around to the other side. He could have hit the gas and left me there—he wouldn’t have gotten very far, but he could have tried. Still, I wasn’t about to be lulled into trusting anyone in Somalia. From what I saw, I was just a target here—very possibly Magoo had set me up, knowing what would happen. The bust of the European side of the drug ring must’ve been planned for some time, and very likely Magoo was in on it. He’d “enlisted” me just to get rid of me.

  Maybe that was too harsh, but it was what I was thinking. Time for a strategic retreat to rethink the situation.

  “I want to make money,” said Abdi as he wended his way toward the airport.

  “We all want to make money, Abdi,” I told him. “But that doesn’t give us the right to kidnap people.”

  “I am not a pirate,” he said. “I want to open a restaurant, like my uncle.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “I want to open it in Brooklyn.”

  “Brooklyn is in New York.”

  “I have visited it. I went to school for two years in Pennsylvania. I want to get out of Mogadishu. America is a free country—that is where I want to go.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I will help you with Fat Tony. You will pay me, then with money I will leave. I know you are doing bad things,” he added. “I will not judge.”

  “What bad things am I doing?”

  “My uncle said—” Abdi suddenly lost his tongue.

  “Go ahead.”

  “He said you helped people arrange ransoms. But when we went north, I knew something else was happening. You were talking about buying things. You would be open for this. Then, when Fat Tony sent his man, it was about purchases. Purchases are not ransom. So—it is smuggling.”
<
br />   “What if it is?”

  Abdi shook his head. “It is none of my business.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I will still help. For the money.”

  “If you’re so hot on money, what’s stopping you from holding me for ransom?”

  Abdi’s head pivoted. He seemed shocked; he might have been faking.

  “That would be an offense against my uncle,” he said, turning his eyes back to the road. Then he chuckled softly. “Don’t want to end up like Rooster and Goat.”

  “Damn straight.”

  We had the airport in sight when my sat phone rang. It was Shunt.

  Perfect timing. I needed him to hack his way into an airline ticketing computer and secure a seat out of this hellhole.

  “You wouldn’t believe what Veep’s password is,” he said as I clicked the phone on. Some people don’t believe in long good-byes. Shunt doesn’t believe in long hellos. Or any hellos. “Password1. P-a-s-s-w-o-r-d-1! The easiest password to guess. It was so simple I didn’t even try it.”

  “I need you to arrange a plane ticket.”

  “He has an account in Djibouti. There are transfers between it and a bank in Pakistan. I tracked an e-mail down—he’s using phony names, offshore accounts—there’s a lot there. There’s definitely a connection between those accounts and Allah’s Rule. One of the accounts that received money from al Qaeda also had two transactions with an account that got money from Veep. It’s going to take me time to flesh this all out, but there’s definitely a connection between Veep and the terrorists.”

  “Is he laundering money?”

  “I can’t tell yet. It’s going to take me a few days to track through all the accounts and break the encryptions. But this is bigger than embezzlement.”

  Or simply hosting terror accounts, I thought.

  “Another thing—he spent a lot of time on Google News this morning, running searches on drug busts,” added Shunt. “Think there’s a connection there?”

  “Good work.”

  “So what’s this about a plane ticket?”

  “Never mind,” I told him. “I’m sticking around for a while longer.”

  “Really? What’s Somalia like these days?”

  “Beautiful place. Everyone should spend their vacation here.”

  (V)

  Roughly thirty-six hours later, I stood in the prow of a speedboat, zipping in toward the “port” of Eyl. Trace was at the wheel. Shotgun and Mongoose were sitting at the stern, Mongoose frowning at the smudge of light brown growing in front of us, and Shotgun munching on some sort of African snack he had brought with him from Kenya. Abdi was with us, unarmed, and looking more than a little seasick. The sun had set four hours before; there was only the barest sliver of a moon. Fat Tony was expecting us—the next afternoon.

  I like being early for certain appointments.

  To catch you up while we’re in-bound for the beach:

  • Magoo had called back. He claimed he’d had no advance warning of the raid on the European side of the drug deal. I didn’t believe him.

  • Magoo: “But that should help your op.” You can figure out my response yourself.

  • Veep had changed his passwords, and upped security on the bank system. Clearly, something we’d done had tipped him off. Shunt didn’t think he could track the penetration back to us, but there was no way of knowing for certain.

  • We were currently shut out of both Veep’s computers and the bank accounts. Shunt was working on a solution that didn’t require us to go on-premises.

  • Before that had happened, Shunt had been able to get a nice read of all the bank’s accounts, which was how he had found the connections he’d told me about. He’d also found something else interesting: the accounts that had started the entire investigation and gotten me involved did not exist on the backup set, which was now the bank’s sole record of accounts.

  • As suspected, the Allah’s Rule network now needed new buyers. Fat Tony had thought of me. I sent his messenger back to Eyl with the promise of a meeting, then spent the following day and a half getting asses and assets in place.

  * * *

  Trace cut the engines. Snugging my waterproof ruck, I hopped out with the boys into knee-deep water. Trace would stay with the boat, its engines running—I wanted to be able to get the hell out if things didn’t go quite the way we planned.

  The water was cold. Abdi handed off his waterproof ruck, then hopped out, his teeth chattering.

  “If I don’t hear from you in an hour, I toast the town,” said Trace, by way of saying good luck.

  She was speaking literally—we had a mortar and several napalm and tungsten charges ready to go.

  Shotgun and Mongoose were armed with FN Minimis with large plastic boxes of bullets under their bellies. I had my MP5 and the AK I’d gotten from Taban; when I hit the beach I took my PK from my ruck and holstered it on my leg. I secured the snub-nosed Colt I had retrieved from Goat to my other leg, and made sure my knives—plural—were in easy reach. I was carrying enough spare ammo to open a gun shop in Arizona.

  I would have brought a cannon with me if I could.

  I took point, with Abdi more or less at my side and Shotgun and Mongoose spread out behind me. The village was quiet, except for the hum of diesel-powered generators supplying electricity to the better-off houses and larger buildings at the center. A few lights flickered here and there, but the place was mostly dark.

  The street in front of Fat Tony’s building was deserted. I went to the door and tried it—it wasn’t locked.

  Honor among thieves? Or an open invitation to walk into a trap?

  I slipped inside the door and attached a small video camera and a sending unit to the jamb. The camera itself was about the size of the one in your cell phone. The sending unit, which transmitted the video back to a receiving unit on the boat, was bigger, about the size of two decks of cards. Red Cell International has a variety of bugs, video and audio, purchased from various vendors. This one came from a Nevada company where I serve on the board of trustees.

  I checked the volume on the team radio, then hailed Trace.

  (On the radios: Think AN/PRC-148 Joint Tactical Radio System, then go about two sizes smaller. Most of the internal logic is supposedly the same, only it’s been made on a smaller chipset. We don’t have quite the range of options the military units made by Thales do—no provision for “future wideband waveforms” as the brochure for the military unit brags—but the range is at least as good, and according to Shunt, the encryption beats the NSA standards the military uses.)

  “Trace, you seeing this?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it’s a regular rerun of Father Knows Best.”

  “The Pad working OK?”

  “IPad, Dick.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Yeah, it’s working. It better, for the money.”

  Always keeping up with the times, our technical section—Shunt and Junior—had recently procured some “upgraded” iPads to use in place of the laptops we’d used to receive video and do other tasks. There were a variety of special “apps” on them, small programs that could automatically monitor video feeds and do a couple of other things. Personally, I think Junior wanted them just so he could watch Netflix when he was out on a mission.

  “How is it out on the boat?” I asked Trace.

  “Quiet here. Tell Shotgun he got crumbs all over the deck.”

  “I’ll make him lick them up when he gets back.”

  “I’ll lick anything you want,” said Shotgun, listening in on the shared team circuit.

  “The only thing your lips are going to taste are my shoe heels,” snapped Trace.

  It warms my heart to hear the kids show genuine affection for each other. Living proof that we are a family.

  We set up video bugs on the other possible exits and the general area at the front of the building, then moved to the back where Fat Tony’s living quarters were. We didn’t have to be too quiet—the alley th
umped to a mix of American heavy metal rock ’n’ roll and lame African rap and hip-hop.

  Mongoose’s assessment, not mine. My knowledge of rap music is limited. Though Run DMC always gets my trigger finger bouncing.

  A single outside door led directly to Fat Tony’s apartment at the back of his building. He had a video camera positioned on the corner, which covered the approach; we suspected there would be a guard outside as well.

  The video camera was not fancy. A floodlight was mounted above it, which limited its view to just under twenty feet from the corner; anything beyond that small circle of light would be in shadow.

  Shotgun and I climbed atop the generator shed about six feet from the front of the building, and from there got to the roof. Most of the roofs in the village were covered with steel panels or rolled asphalt paper, the sort of cheap though waterproof covering you see on sheds and some houses in the States. This one, however, was covered with gravel that had been laid over pitch. Gravel and bits of tar stuck to my shoes and my hands as I pulled myself up over the side. Bob Vila would never have approved.

  A satellite dish stood on a pedestal at the center of the roof, one set of cables running directly from the power generator, the other running downstairs with the signals. A large dish grabbed television signals—DirecTV without the subscription hassle. Next to it was a smaller dish, used for secure communications. We attached bugging collars to the cable—the collar looks like a fat hose that clamps over the wire—to pick up signals, then connected them to a sending unit. The devices are a little picky, even with the old-style cables Fat Tony used, and it took me a few minutes to get them set before the green LED on the box lit to tell me it was live. Meanwhile, Mongoose was getting restless down in the alley; music makes him antsy.

  “You having trouble up there, boss?” he asked.

  “We’re just about ready,” I said over the radio. “Be down in a second.”

  While I’d been fussing with the cables, Shotgun was posting another one of our video bugs to cover the back lot of the building. Then he took a rope from his backpack, tied off against the frame of the satellite base, and lowered himself down to have a peek.