[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel

by Richard Marcinko

  “I’m not paying for anything until it arrives.”

  Fat Tony went back to speaking Somali with Abdi, this time because he was more comfortable with his native language when it came to numbers. A three-way conversation ensued on how much we would pay, when, and where. It was amicable—used car negotiations should be so smooth—and with minimal haggling he agreed to accept a down payment in Djibouti of only ten thousand dollars “earnest money,” with additional money to be wired into two different accounts when the ship reached port and a final payment upon delivery.

  I probably could have gotten a better price, but since I was dealing with Magoo’s expense account, I didn’t push all that hard. Making multiple payments was actually in our favor—it would give the agency more leads to follow as they tried tracing the money route.

  And that was the deal. Fat Tony handed down a pair of clamshell mobile phones. A thick wad of masking tape encircled each; the number “1” was written on the tape of one, “2” on the other.

  “The first cell phone will tell you where to go with the money in Djibouti,” said Fat Tony. “Number One. It will only work there. You will need to be there very soon. Throw it away when you are done. Do not use it for another call. You will receive instructions on what to do with phone Number Two.”

  “Very good.”

  “We will do other business if this goes well,” he said, pulling the reins of his camel. “Allah be with you.”

  2

  (I)

  If that all seems anticlimactic and blasé, you’re right. In the space of five minutes, I’d just made a significant break in a case the CIA had been working on for a year—and didn’t even know the full dimensions of. A quick walk through the desert, and I’d secured a million-dollar drug deal. All I had to do now was hand off the information to Magoo and let him take it from there.

  Heh.

  We recovered the UAV and headed back to the boat. By the time we got there, Shunt had managed to verify that Shire Jama’s image and name matched that of a man identified by Interpol as a drug smuggler possibly associated with Allah’s Rule and al Qaeda. I called Magoo, who was his usually cuddly self:

  “I want those phones,” he said, curtly. “Meet me in Djibouti.”

  * * *

  Quick geography lesson for those of you who didn’t have Sister Mary Elephant for your fifth-grade geography teacher:

  Somalia is the weirdly bent seven on the eastern African coast directly below Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Djibouti is a set of false teeth that sits on the edge of the seven, to the east of Somalia, where the Gulf of Aden pinches into the Red Sea. Keep going north on the water and eventually you get to the Suez Canal.

  And don’t let Sister catch you drawing in your notebook rather than reading. The metal side of her ruler packs more wallop than brass knuckles. The sister has a bonfire of a track record when it comes to dealing with wayward scholars and other riffraff. She and my family go way back: she taught my father, George Leonard, and blessed my knuckles on countless occasions.

  * * *

  Our boat didn’t carry enough fuel to make it to Djibouti, and Somalia being Somalia, finding a hospitable marina along the way was about as likely as finding a Buddhist in the Vatican. It was also a rental. I’d borrowed it from a company that did business with the African National Congress, and probably ran guns on the side; while I’m sure we could have kept it for a while, they were charging an outrageous day rate, and taking it to Djibouti would have dented Red Cell International’s yearly dividend. So we motored back toward Mogadishu.

  No sojourn in the waters off eastern Somalia is complete without a tête-à-tête with pirates, and so I wasn’t surprised when Mongoose spotted a long fishing boat on a course toward our bow. It wasn’t out for a leisurely sail, either—the prow was up, and there was a good wake behind it.

  A prudent captain would have rung for full power and told the helm to steer us away. Then again, a prudent captain wouldn’t have been in these waters to begin with.

  “I see eight guys, all with AKs,” said Mongoose, looking through his binoculars. “Looks like they’re hungry.”

  “And we’re the main course,” said Shotgun, never one to miss a metaphor involving food. “Yum, yum.”

  “Well, let’s give them something to chew on,” I said. “Keep your weapons down until they’re in range.”

  Trace eased off on our speed. As the boat grew closer, everyone was alone with their thoughts, contemplating the looming engagement.

  I think I know my people well enough to summarize their thoughts:

  MONGOOSE: Should I use the SAW or the grenade launcher for my first shot?

  TRACE: I hope I get a little hand-to-hand action in. I haven’t choked someone in weeks.

  SHOTGUN: What is the proper pre-pirate snack, Yodels or licorice?

  Abdi, sitting between Shotgun and Mongoose, looked anxious and a little seasick.

  “You all right?” I asked.

  “I could use a weapon, Mr. Dick.”

  “Just stay down,” I told him. “We’ll take care of it.”

  He frowned. I suppose you could argue that he had earned my trust in the hallways at Fat Tony’s, but I wasn’t convinced yet. And the last thing I was going to do was give him a gun so he could feel better. The United States tried that sort of thing in Iraq and Afghanistan; I think you’re familiar with the results.

  As they closed to two hundred yards, one of the pirates raised his rifle and fired a burst in our general direction. It could have been meant as a greeting to fellow sailors, the way different navies sometimes welcome visitors with a cannon salute. Or it could have been intended as a warning salvo.

  We pretty much took it as an open invitation to fill the wooden vessel and its occupants with as much lead and high explosive as possible.

  I kicked things off with a burst from my MP5, taking out the gunman. A half second later, Mongoose fired the RPG into the boat, sending a spray of splinters and steam skyward. Shotgun emptied the magazine under his SAW on the forward section of the boat. He worked quickly, since his target was rapidly disintegrating. Mongoose fired another grenade—“overkill” is not a word in his vocabulary—and a second, larger cloud of steam appeared over the first one. I reloaded, but there was nothing left to shoot at but debris.

  One or two men flailed in the water. We immediately commenced rescue operations …

  * * *

  Be serious. They were lucky we didn’t run them over. Here’s hoping they were strong swimmers. I’d simply hate to think they turned into shark shit on the bottom of the ocean.

  * * *

  Besides being an eating machine, Shotgun can strike up a conversation with just about anyone on the planet. Maybe because he’s the size of a gorilla—you look at him and you know you need to keep him happy.

  He started talking to Abdi about what sort of snack foods Somalia has. The concept of “snack food” is pretty much nonexistent in Somalia, though since he had been to America Abdi did understand the concept.

  “Cheez Doodles!” yelled Shotgun. “Your restaurant should feature Cheez Doodles. You could build your whole menu around it.”

  “You eat so much,” said Abdi. “How come you have no fat belly?”

  “Intake matches expenditure.”

  Mongoose snorted.

  “He’s part of a deviant race,” said Trace. “His parents were from Alpha Centauri.”

  “When I open my restaurant in Brooklyn, I will have these snacks,” said Abdi. “Then you will come and be a customer.”

  Shotgun beamed. “I got plenty of ideas for a restaurant. You should have a snack-off, for one.”

  “What is that, a snack-off?”

  “It’s what Shotgun does in his room when the door is closed,” snapped Mongoose.

  “Don’t pay any attention to him,” said Shotgun. “He doesn’t understand anything he can’t blow up.”

  Shotgun filled Abdi with advice on what his restaurant should offer for the next thirty o
r forty minutes, until Mogadishu came into sight. By then, even Abdi had had his fill of Shotgun’s “advice”—which, if followed, would have made his restaurant the only Somali restaurant in Brooklyn exclusively devoted to selling bagged junk food. We sailed in blissful silence the rest of the way south. If there was a harbor patrol or coast guard craft anywhere, we missed it. The U.S. Navy had two ships off the coast near the port, but we were so close to the shoreline they took no notice of us.

  Finding a place to dock in Mogadishu was not a problem. Finding a place to put your boat without having to worry about it getting stolen was something else again. Even in the government-controlled area there were few docks where you could safely tie up your vessel, and those were not only crowded but expensive by Somali standards.

  Fortunately, Somali standards are somewhat lower than those of the rest of the world. Still, we had to pay one hundred bucks in cash to have the boat watched, and that wasn’t counting the ten dollars I slipped the two with the machine guns patrolling the dock.

  “Remember my face,” I told them in English. “I’ll be back for the boat in an hour. If anything’s touched, you’ll be swimming with your ancestors.”

  I had Abdi repeat it in Somali.

  “There’s no chance they’ll forget,” he told me. “You’ve tipped them more than they’ll make in a month, even here.”

  My arrangement with Taban was the customary small percentage of the overall deal, which I now owed a small down payment on. I was going to throw in a per diem for Abdi, bringing his fee to several thousand dollars: a fortune in Somalia, though hardly enough to get him to New York, let alone open a restaurant there.

  “I need you to open a bank account,” I told Abdi as we walked from the dock. “Once that’s set up, I’ll have your per diem wired in. Then when the deal with Shire Jama is concluded, you’ll get the rest.”

  Abdi was disappointed—he thought I was going to give him cash. That would have made him a target for everyone in the city, as I tried to explain.

  “You set up the account with a business name, to lessen the possibility of gossip,” I told him. “You might even use your uncle’s name. We wire it in, it stays in the bank. No one can touch it.”

  I had to make the point several times. “You have a lot of people around you who are very poor,” I told him. “If they know you have a lot of cash, they might try and steal it.”

  “My relatives would not steal from me. They didn’t steal from my uncle.”

  “You’re not your uncle. They’ll look at you as if you’re a boy, and try and take it.”

  Abdi was too dark-skinned to show much color in his face, but I could tell the blood was rushing there and he was displeased.

  “I’m not insulting you,” I told him. “I’m just telling you the way it is. People are scumbags.”

  “No. You do not know the Somali people. I could walk the street anywhere with the money in my pocket. I would be safe.”

  “If Somalia is such a wonderful place, then why are you leaving?” I asked. I reached into my pocket.

  “Here,” I said, handing over a hundred-euro note. “Take it as an advance.”

  He stared at it as if it were the Hope Diamond. Meanwhile, I took a business card from my wallet. “Call this number when you’ve set up the account. We’ll forward the rest of the per diem right away.”

  “I want to come with you,” said Abdi.

  “The hotel’s not far. We’ll be OK.”

  “No. To Djibouti. I can be very useful. There are many Somalis in the city—you will need a translator.”

  “They speak French there, merci beaucoup.”

  “Only government, not people. It would help to have a black man with you,” added Abdi. “It means more places you can go.”

  “I’m not planning on going any place where that would be a problem,” I told him. “I’m going for a meeting, and then very likely going home. Same with the rest of my team.”

  “But you said—plan for all contingencies.”

  “I was talking about wearing shoes on the boat.”

  “It is a general rule. I know this.”

  “Are you looking for extra pay?”

  “Pay me if you use me. Nothing if you don’t. You said yourself, be prepared. It is the SEAL way.”

  I hate it when people use my words against me.

  “Look, I’m not coming back to Mogadishu,” I told him. “I can’t take you to the U.S., if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “No, I don’t think of that. I know I am on my own-some.”

  Own-some? Tell me he didn’t pick up that English gem from Shotgun.

  “You have a passport?” I asked.

  “I do. What time should I be at hotel?”

  “We’ll pick you up at the restaurant,” I said. “Be ready to leave a half hour before dawn.”

  “I will not sleep until then.”

  * * *

  The next few hours were filled with phone calls and computer sessions, trying to gather more information on Shire Jama and Allah’s Rule on Earth. What we came up with can be summarized with one word: bupkis. This is a Yiddish expression meaning .14

  Shunt had temporarily run out of places to look for new information, and his various methods of drumming analysis—from standard data mining to something he calls context analysis—weren’t feeding him any new ideas. The bank’s new security measures had so far kept him out.

  We were now pretty sure that the bank had hosted accounts for Allah’s Rule. But without proof that they knew the accounts were connected to terrorists, there was no crime involved. On the contrary, the bank could point out that they had hired me to investigate the matter, and therefore done their civic and lawful duty.

  As for the connection to Veep—the more I thought about it, the more tenuous it seemed. I relish biting the hand that feeds me, but I needed more to go on.

  All of this meant that I put off updating Veep in New York. Telling him about the accounts we had found would shut them down; once that happened, we’d have an even harder time investigating.

  Was Veep stealing money from the bank, or involved with the terrorists? Both? Or neither?

  Both was best for me—it meant a much higher fee. I tried not to let that prejudice my thinking.

  Even talking to Karen was frustrating.

  “Your meeting in Mumbai has been pushed up. They need you there the day after tomorrow,” she said. “And there’s a reception tomorrow evening being held in your honor. They want to thank you for saving the Commonwealth Games.”15

  “That’s an exaggeration.”

  “I told them that.”

  I can always count on Karen to keep my ego in check.

  “Junior volunteered to go in your place,” she added. “To the meeting, not the reception.”

  “I’d rather he went to the reception.”

  “He’ll do fine at the meeting, Dick.”

  I trust Junior, but I wasn’t ready to let him represent me at a business meeting, especially in India. And despite the reception, not everyone there was appreciative of how I had handled the terrorist plots at the Games.

  “Can you get a plane from Djibouti?” I asked Karen.

  “It will cost you.”

  “I’ll pay your fee any time.”

  “I meant that the airline connections are outrageously expensive. I’ll figure it out. Junior will pick you up at the airport in Mumbai.”

  We spent the next ten minutes saying how much we missed each other. Since I’m not writing Fifty Shades of Rogue Grey, I’ll spare you the gory details. Suffice to say I needed a cold shower when I hung up.

  * * *

  The team was suitably grumpy when we assembled at four the next morning and piled into the hired car. We drove over to Taban’s restaurant, where, true to his word, Abdi was waiting when we arrived.

  So was a crowd that looked like half of Mogadishu.

  “Not good,” said the driver, stopping halfway down the block.

  �
��Put it in reverse. Fast,” said Trace.

  “Whoa, whoa,” I said, grabbing the driver’s hand as he reached for the shifter. “Let me see what’s going on.”

  There was a general murmur of disapproval as I got out of the car. Then the others jumped out to cover my butt.

  One or two people in the crowd had what looked like early-model M16s. The rest had AK47s. “Abdi, what’s going on?” I said, walking past the outer ring.

  “Sorry, Mr. Dick,” he said. He had a small cloth bag with him. Three or four women trailed close behind. I recognized one as his uncle’s wife.

  “What’s with all the people?”

  “Family matter.”

  I gave him the hairy eyeball.

  Abdi sighed, then pointed to a girl over by the doorway. “It is about Rose.16 She is to get married, but she doesn’t wish it.”

  I glanced over. A long, flowing scarf partly hid the young woman’s face. Even in the bulky dress she was wearing, Rose looked like a scarecrow of a thing, little more than a stick figure, except for a suspiciously round belly.

  “How old is she?” I would have guessed twelve.

  “Fourteen,” said Abdi. “In a few days.”

  “She’s getting married?”

  “It is the families’ wish. Because … of circumstances…”

  “Which are what?”

  Rose had been raped by a cousin some months before. She’d kept it a secret from her family because of her shame—as in much of the Muslim world, such events are considered the woman’s fault. Worse, if it becomes known that the girl has been raped, it’s impossible for her to marry. In Somalia, that’s a death sentence, since a woman without a family is a) an easy target and b) unlikely to find a way to support herself.

  Rape is not particularly rare here, and by common agreement such matters are handled by looking the other way—something that perversely is in the woman’s interests. But the girl had become pregnant, and as I had seen, there was no way to hide it.

  There was quite a bit of consternation, especially since the rapist was in the extended family. Eventually, the matter was brought to the local imam and a tribal council suggested that the matter be handled by marriage, proscriptions against cousins marrying notwithstanding.