Marc tried to dismantle this new piece of information and figure out what it meant. The list of people who wanted Horvat crossed off was long and varied, but the timing of his death was too expedient. It felt like a loose end being tied up. Marc’s frown deepened and he filed away the information for later consideration. He had more immediate matters to concentrate on, and he slipped the phone into a Velcro-sealed pocket.
‘Hey.’ Lucy’s voice came through the radio bead built into his helmet, and he looked up. She stood before him, swaying slightly with the motion of the deck underfoot, dressed in the same gear as him. Only her eyes were visible, and they had her usual deceptively sleepy aspect to them. ‘Still dizzy?’
‘I’m good,’ he replied, the mike in his oxygen mask picking up his words. ‘This is all a bit new to me,’ Marc went on. He looked away, taking in the cabin around them. The unpressurised cargo bay of the big C-130 Hercules resembled the inside of a railway carriage, one that had been stripped to the bare metal and redecorated with sheets of thermal cloth and bright red netting. Two crewmen in the uniform of the Omani Royal Air Force shared the space with them, but they had been ordered to keep themselves to themselves. Since Marc and Lucy had buttoned up in their tactical gear somewhere over the Gulf of Aden, they hadn’t shared a word with either of them.
‘It’s a piece of cake,’ she told him. ‘All you gotta do is follow me and fall out a door.’ Lucy reached down and tapped the digital auto-altimeter on his wrist. ‘This’ll do the rest for you.’
Marc couldn’t help but throw a look toward the far end of the bay, where the Herc’s cargo ramp was sealed tight. ‘I jumped out of a plane a couple of times, in OpTeam training with the SIS. But that was during daylight. And not so high up as to give me frostbite.’
Lucy indicated the ice crystals gathered around the edges of the circular window near his head. ‘We’ve been climbing for a while now. When we get to thirty thousand feet, we’ll be in the zone. Can’t fly lower than angels two-six out here, on account of SAMs and the like . . .’
‘Right.’ Marc craned his neck around to look out into the ink-dark sky, hoping to catch sight of the sea far below him, but all he saw was the steady blink of the aircraft’s running lights and the blur of the blades on the turboprop engines. He met her gaze. ‘Is this you getting back at me for what happened with the Veyron?’ Cause that was not my fault.’
‘Hey, this was your idea.’
‘It bloody well wasn’t,’ he insisted. ‘You really like this whole “falling from great heights” thing, don’t you?’
Her eyes showed her smile. ‘This’ll be more fun than that wire-drop we did in New Jersey, trust me.’ Lucy straightened and became serious. ‘All right, you wanna run through it this one last time, or have you got it?’ She patted a window pocket on the forearm of her jumpsuit, where a map was stowed.
Marc shook his head and patted his own. ‘No, I’m good.’ He drew another deep breath of cool, metallic-tasting air through his mask. ‘Sooner we go, sooner we’re down, right?’
‘Glad you said that,’ she noted, as the crewman started moving toward them. ‘Last gear check.’
Marc got to his feet and did a slow pirouette, letting her tug on fasteners and tabs. The parachute on his back felt awkward, pulling him off balance from the smaller pack hanging from his chest that contained an oxygen bottle, reserve chute and mission gear. He did the same for her, making sure nothing was loose.
She put her hands on the straps over his shoulders. ‘These feel tight?’ The straps crossed over his chest and down around his crotch, hugging the contours of his body.
‘Very.’
‘Then that’s not tight enough.’ Lucy yanked on the tabs and Marc lost a breath as he was almost throttled by the embrace of the straps.
‘Thanks,’ he grunted.
The Omani jumpmaster paused to shout something to Lucy and she gave a nod in return. ‘Here we go!’
Marc felt the crewman’s gaze rake over him and wondered what the guy was thinking. According to the flight plan, the Hercules was on a scheduled cargo run from the RAFO’s base at Thumwait to a Kenyan military airstrip outside Mombasa, and the aircraft could not deviate from that course. But orders from high up in the Omani Air Force’s chain of command had swapped out the usual cargo in favour of a man and a woman in high-spec stealth gear, with no explanations as to why. From what Marc understood, Ekko Solomon regularly played golf with the RAFO’s chief of staff and getting them the use of the C-130 was the cashing-in of an old marker.
‘This won’t be like the jumps you’ve done before,’ said Lucy. ‘This is HAHO, high-altitude, high-opening. The chute will pop a few seconds after we hit sky, so be ready for it.’
The ready light flashed on the cabin wall and the cargo ramp dropped open. A wall of polar-cold air rumbled in through the gap and Marc felt it wash over him. As they marched toward the widening gap, out beneath the tail of the Hercules he could see only depthless midnight blue. ‘So you’ve done this a bunch of times when you were with Delta Force, right?’
‘Actually, this is my first.’
‘What? Really?’ The standby light changed to green and the jumpmaster gave a thumbs-up.
‘Nah,’ she said, and there was the smile again. ‘Later.’ Without hesitating, Lucy stepped up to the edge and fell out into the void.
Then Marc was where she had been standing and he looked down, seeing moonlight off the Indian Ocean far below. ‘Green for go,’ he said to himself.
Marc pitched forward and gravity took him.
*
The thunderous wind plucking at the sleeves of his jumpsuit and the drag on the pit of his stomach told Marc that he was falling, even if the deep night around him was strangely static. Out of the corner of an eye, he briefly caught sight of a black shadow on the sky, a blink of light as the Hercules vanished away on its course. Then the aircraft was lost to him and he turned, orienting himself toward the ground.
He barely had a moment to steady himself before a mule-kick impact slammed him in the chest and pulled at his shoulders. His head snapped back and there was a flash of pain as the parachute exploded out of his pack, unfolding perfectly into a wide arc of aerofoil. Lucy had warned him that some HAHO jumpers were hit so hard by the violent wind at altitude that they were knocked unconscious, hence the auto-deploy linked to his altimeter.
Marc’s hands snatched at the dangling control lines and a surge of relief shot through him as he grabbed hold. He gave the chute’s steering an experimental tug and it let him drift right, then left.
‘Good deployment,’ radioed Lucy. ‘I’m below you, your seven o’clock.’
‘Roger that.’ He looked and found a vague shape. Dull green glow strips on her gear vest and boots showed Marc where to find her. ‘I got you.’ As the more experienced jumper out of the two of them, Lucy was the lead and she was carrying slightly more gear than Marc, in order to even up their weight so they would descend together.
‘Stay on my six and follow me down. We got distance to cover, so stay sharp. Maintain radio silence until we’re on the dirt.’
‘Copy.’ He nodded, not that she would have been able to see him.
They described a slow corkscrew turn away from the ocean and the coastline of Somalia made itself apparent far below them. Marc flicked a look at the map and saw where the bright splash of light that was Mogadishu extended out to the south-west. From high above, the city resembled a spray of hot orange sparks frozen in time. Looking northward, the colour faded away as the urban sprawl petered out and became scrubland. He picked out other smaller townships up along the coast, reaching into the lawless regions that Ramaas and his pirate clan had made their heartland.
Their landing target was out beyond the eastern end of the Somalian capital, in an area that Welldone Amadayo and his wealthy friends had bought up over the last few years. Satellite photos showed naked plots of ground ready for the new rich to move in and start building, with Amadayo’s estate being on
e of the notably larger domains. Marc recalled seeing clusters of single-storey brick-and-clapboard houses grouped around one edge of the walled estate, like fungus growing on a rock. The dead man’s neighbours were the ordinary and the poor, and Marc wondered how they felt about living next to a rich man’s fortress.
Lucy continued her wide downward turn and Marc made sure he kept on her, trying not to tense up too much on the control lines. Now he was starting to pick out detail from the city below, and the tranquil nature of the first part of the descent faded. Being able to see buildings and streets turned the ground from something abstract to something real, and he was suddenly very aware of how fast they were falling. He ran through what he remembered from jump training with the SIS, repeating it to himself in preparation.
Marc checked the map again. They were still kilometres away from the drop zone, and now Lucy was vectoring into the wind up the coast as they silently drifted over Mogadishu’s wide dusty highways and the endless grids of its side streets. Identical clusters of houses went on for ever, broken here and there by bald patches of earth or clumps of greenery.
He wasn’t really sure what he’d been expecting to see from up here. Most Westerners only knew the country and its fractured capital from war movies and disaster-laden news footage, but the place was quiet – no running battles in the streets, no fires burning out of control. How much of that was real peace or a deceptive mirage he couldn’t tell, not until he was down in the dirt.
His radio crackled. ‘Here we go,’ said Lucy. ‘DZ in sight.’
‘Yeah, got it.’ Marc looked for and found the Amadayo estate, becoming clearer now as it rose out of a low hillside. He could see light spilling from the windows in the mansion house and what looked like a makeshift tent city out in front of the building.
They orbited over the walls of the estate toward waste ground beyond. Marc kept expecting the sudden report of gunfire from below, but no-one looked up as they flashed by above, under the silent black canopies.
Then the ground was zooming up to meet him and Marc braced. He hit hard and stumbled across the uneven earth, skidding to a halt and panting from exertion. The night’s ambient heat enveloped him and he was immediately slick with sweat inside the insulated jumpsuit. He gathered up the billowing chute and had the helmet and oxygen gear off as Lucy came jogging up to him. He stowed the jump kit with hers in the hollow of a dead tree, and then set to work stripping off all the cold-weather layers that had kept him from getting frostbitten on the way down.
Lucy handed him a pack that contained a Heckler & Koch MP7 submachine gun, extra ammo magazines and a stubby suppressor. Marc had been issued with a Glock pistol in a thigh holster as well, but the real weapons in his personal arsenal were an Amrel mil-spec tablet computer and a few gadgets he had purloined from an equipment locker on board the Themis.
‘You saw the tents?’ Lucy was checking her gun, and didn’t look up. ‘Looks like Ramaas decided to move in and redecorate.’
‘He’s not going to be in there,’ said Marc. ‘He’s too smart for that.’
‘True,’ she replied, ‘but I’ll bet someone here does know where he’s at. We find that guy . . .’ Lucy ratcheted the slide on the MP7 to underline her point. ‘And I’ll ask him real polite like.’
Marc put his own SMG on a sling and gestured forward. ‘Ladies first.’
‘So gallant.’ Extending the wire stock and fore grip, she pulled her weapon close to her shoulder and set off, fast and low toward the wall of the compound.
As they got closer, Marc smelled cooking meat wafting over from a makeshift barbeque set up in the remains of the ornamental garden. They halted in the shadows cast by the wall and he used a pocket monocular to scope out the front entrance down by the road. ‘Gates have been pulled off the hinges and left where they fell,’ he noted. ‘I can see a technical parked across the driveway, and a couple of lads with AKs.’ The vehicle was a battered Toyota pickup truck with a heavy .50 calibre machine gun in the bed, the blunt barrel aiming skyward at nothing. Marc felt his gut tighten at the thought of what might have happened if the weapon had been manned by someone alert during their descent.
‘Not the front door, then,’ said Lucy. They moved away until they found a section of wall out of sight of the guards.
From his pack, Marc removed a snake-like cable ending in a micro-camera and connected it to the tablet, before sliding it up and over the wall. The tablet’s screen gave them a fish-eye view of a scorched lawn, and clumps of bushes.
As he reeled the camera back in, Lucy scrambled up and over, and then Marc did the same, staying low and rolling longways across the top of the wall to minimise his silhouette.
They were barely into cover when two men walked past, following the path up to the big house. Something was clearly funny, because they were both braying with laughter as they passed by the two intruders. The men were wearing dirty green fatigues and they toted AKM assault rifles by the barrels, swinging them around carelessly as they joked. Each had a jet-black shemagh around his neck.
When they were out of earshot, Marc leaned close to Lucy. ‘Those guys don’t look like bandits.’
‘More like militia,’ she agreed. ‘We need to get a closer look.’
They crawled through flower beds now left untended and around fountains that had run dry. The green of Amadayo’s gardens was already dying where it had been left to rot. Snatches of conversation reached them, and as they got closer to the mansion house, Marc could hear loud music playing from within. The sound was echoing off the walls and around the interior spaces stripped bare after the politician’s murder.
Lucy took a guardian position close to a smashed window and Marc dug in the “bag of tricks” again, this time retrieving a toy-like device that resembled a large cotton reel made of black plastic. A titanium tube, it ended in two cast-urethane hemispheres that were ribbed like the wheels of a dune buggy. Little whip antennae protruded from one surface, and a small stabiliser hung down from the rear. Marc activated a remote-control program on the tablet and the wheels gave a spin as it came to life.
He held it up for Lucy to see, and her face appeared on the tablet, relayed through a wireless camera in the frame of the device. ‘You know why they call this a “throwbot”?’
‘Why?’ She was humouring him.
He smirked and threw the device overarm through the broken window. The wheeled drone landed on the carpeted floor inside and automatically flicked itself over into the correct position.
Marc was now looking through the throwbot’s eye, and with smooth motions over the tablet’s touch-sensitive surface, he guided it silently from room to room, deeper into the mansion’s interior.
‘What are you seeing?’ whispered Lucy.
‘We absolutely do not have an invite to this party,’ he replied. The wheeled drone kept to the shadows, but Marc’s view on the screen was clear enough to show dozens of men milling around in the largest hall of Amadayo’s house. They were sitting or crouching, gathered in front of a bedsheet hanging from one wall that was being used as a makeshift screen. A video projector and a portable DVD player were rigged up nearby, and the loud music Marc had heard before was the soundtrack over herky-jerky propaganda videos of firefights and bomb detonations. The men watching the screen were dressed like the guards outside – the same style of fatigues, with webbing rigs that looked like Chinese Communist issue and the ubiquitous shemaghs in black or red-and-white check. He worked the drone backwards, retreating from the room and into the corridor, but not before the throwbot’s camera caught sight of a familiar black flag covered in white Arabic script, pinned up over the entrance atrium. It was the al-rāya, the infamous jihadist banner.
‘Confirmation,’ he said quietly. ‘These aren’t Ramaas’s pirates. These blokes are Al Shabaab.’
‘What the hell are they doing here?’ hissed Lucy. ‘This isn’t their turf . . .’ She drifted off, and shot a look into the night sky.
‘It is now,’ Mar
c corrected. ‘We know Ramaas has dealt with them before . . . Maybe he turned this place over to them as a way to get them on side? Along with the bandit clans, they’re the largest armed force in the country after the army . . .’ He realised that Lucy wasn’t listening to him anymore. ‘Hey!’
‘You hear that?’ she said.
‘What?’ But as the word left his mouth, he caught a noise on the wind, over the steady thudding of the music from inside the mansion house. A deep, rattling drone that was growing louder with each passing second.
He turned in the direction of the sound in time to see an angular shape emerge out of the darkness and sweep low over the wall of the estate, the rumbling engine note changing as it pitched up and slowed suddenly. Marc saw a pair of large black rotor blades chopping at the air, suspended at the ends of wings that supported a muscular fuselage between them.
It was unmistakably a V-22 Osprey, the next-generation tiltrotor troop transport that was a hybrid of helicopter and turboprop aeroplane; but only the United States military flew the V-22, and the livery of the aircraft was all-black rather than the usual American battleship grey. This isn’t right, Marc told himself, instinct kicking him back up to his feet.
The Osprey’s wing-tip nacelles tilted to the vertical as the aircraft passed directly over their heads and a powerful downdraught blasted Marc and Lucy back against the stucco walls of the mansion house. Flashes of firelight from the guards at the gate reached toward the Osprey as they opened up with their assault rifles, but the aircraft was already pivoting into a pedal turn, a drop ramp at the rear falling open to deploy troops onto the roof of the building.
Lucy looked back at Marc and her mouth moved, but her words were swallowed up by the noise of the rotors. Sudden movement on the screen of the tablet dragged Marc’s attention back to the device and he looked to see the face of one of the Al Shabaab fighters filling the view from the throwbot’s camera. The man was agitated, shouting and waving his hands around.
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