by Matt Rogers
He found out a few seconds later.
The translator stepped away from the jeep and disappeared into the darkness, stepping out of King’s field of view. He was blinded by the headlights of the vehicle stalling idly ahead, and he quickly realised he was at the mercy of these men. They could send a round through his skull under cover of darkness, and he would never know what had hit him until it was too late.
But the man returned to the driver’s side a moment later, clutching a fat wad of notes between his fingers. He passed the stash across and King tried not to boggle his eyes at the amount of money he’d been handed. It had to be at least twenty thousand dollars, all Benjamin Franklins.
He didn’t react outwardly, instead taking the bundle with a nod of satisfaction and dropping it carelessly onto the passenger seat as if it meant nothing at all. The cash pooled around the barrel of the HK416.
King motioned to the pair of vehicles parked across the trail itself, blocking his way.
‘My brother will be angry if I wait around any longer,’ he said.
The translator nodded and gestured to his friends. The other officers slunk away, and the next thing King heard was a pair of engines coughing and spluttering into life. For a moment he thought it was too good to be true, and that the next thing he saw would be a gun barrel rising toward his face. But the headlights died out and the vehicles backtracked simultaneously.
The next thing he knew, he had leant pressure on the accelerator and moved off with a slight nod to the translator. The man watched him go, confused and apprehensive but unwilling to protest the demands in any significant fashion.
King slotted straight through the newly-formed gap in the convoy, missing the Somali Police Force sedans on either side of the jeep with inches to spare. As soon as he was through, he crushed the accelerator to the floor and roared away from the procession, eager to cover as much ground as he could.
His heart beat like thunder against his chest wall.
He couldn’t believe he’d made it out unscathed.
He took a solitary glance at the sea of cash covering the passenger seat, the bundle separated into a thin sheet of notes by the force of the jeep’s acceleration.
Twenty thousand dollars.
A fifth of what Reed had paid the officers.
It boggled his mind, making him reconsider everything he’d discovered up to the present moment. He had automatically assumed that Reed’s claims of a smuggling ring running drugs and guns out of arriving container ships was a false diversion of a tale, but he couldn’t imagine anything else dealing with that kind of money. A hundred thousand USD was a mere afterthought to the man, used to ensure himself safe passage through to Afgooye. No wonder the officers had been so co-operative.
If King didn’t stop Reed in his tracks, the man would flee with millions of dollars in stolen funds. It was the only ultimatum that made any sense. He knew the average Force Recon Marine’s salary was fifty-eight thousand a year, and Reed had thrown that at a cluster of officers twice over.
The gravity of the situation began to sink in.
King clutched the wheel with a determined, vice-like grip and surged through the overbearing darkness toward a remote town in the heart of the Somali countryside.
27
Afgooye snuck up on him in the darkness.
One minute, King’s guard started to fade as the trail ahead blurred into a constant stream of nothingness, pitch dark and surrounded by open fields of dead vegetation and sand. The next, soft light emanated from the surrounding land, barely perceptible amidst the darkness.
His eyes drooped momentarily, a response to his adrenalin levels crashing down in the aftermath of the police stop. He’d been ready to go down in a blaze of gunfire, and his veins had thundered with cortisol accordingly. Now that the threat had dissipated and he was left to ponder what had occurred at the checkpoint, his energy levels plummeted.
He had almost fallen asleep at the wheel when he noticed broad shapes on either side of the trail.
It startled him into action.
Only managing to glimpse the objects in his peripheral vision, he wrenched the M45 out of the storage compartment in the driver’s door and trained the barrel into the darkness.
Energy came flooding back in a wave.
He hadn’t a clue what he was witnessing, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark and the surroundings began to make sense, he let the fight-or-flight mechanism tone itself down once again.
There was no threat here.
He gazed out upon rows and rows of tattered canvas tents, arranged in two staggering grids on either side of the trail. It boggled his mind as he considered the scale of the encampments, plunging into the distance where they faded entirely from view. There had to be thousands and thousands of the tents, with barely any artificial lighting to pave the way for civilians. The soft glow came from the odd halogen bulb dotted randomly throughout the twin sites. In the midst of the temporary shelters, King saw silhouettes moving slowly through the aisles, milling around in certain areas, congesting in hotspots. He could see the lie of the land due to the plains sloping away from the trail on either side, allowing the ability to look out at the sea of tents.
Rattled by the sudden appearance of thousands of people, he tore his gaze away from the camps and stared straight ahead, focusing on slicing the jeep through the midst of the tents without attracting too much attention.
He needn’t have bothered.
No-one even glanced in his direction, and he realised they were preoccupied with their own problems. If this trail acted as a major link in a nation-wide trade route, then one more jeep passing by would mean nothing to them.
King could almost taste the raw fear in the air.
He concluded that the camps must be providing shelter to the men, women and children displaced from their homes in the war-torn hotspots of Somalia. He pondered the gravity of the situation for a moment — just as he had considered the scale of the drug trade in Tijuana. Diving into the thick of the action made him realise how insignificant he was in the grand scheme of things.
His actions didn’t matter in the big picture.
But they mattered to him.
If he could prevent a maniacal soldier from escaping scot-free, he would consider it a job well done.
The perimeter of the two camps fell away after another minute of travel. As he pushed through to the town of Afgooye itself, he glimpsed more signs of civilisation — rundown general stores scattered at random across the sides of the trail, litter and waste strewn across the road itself, the distant stirring of commotion. Everything had closed down for the night, but still the aura of human contact covered everything, vastly different from the wasteland he’d driven through once he left Mogadishu behind.
Still, something caught his attention.
He knew Reed had business in this town, and good businesses operated at all hours of the night — something King imagined would be accurate in this situation given the scale of the money involved. He stopped in the middle of the road and switched the headlights off momentarily, plunging everything around him into total darkness. For good measure, he killed the jeep’s engine, silencing the throaty chugging and replacing it with the omnipresent murmur of thousands of refugees in the distance.
He could hear the commotion floating through the town, even at this hour. It took some of the tension away from the fact that he had come to a halt out in the open, entirely vulnerable to an attack.
Despite his mind conjuring up images of Reed ghosting out of the shadows and plunging a blade into his throat, King focused on holding his breath and listening intently for any sign of suspicion.
There.
Somewhere ahead, he heard it. It came from the land beyond Afgooye’s centre, a section of the countryside past the bulk of civilisation. There was commotion in the air, but a different kind.
Industrial. Purposeful.
It didn’t sound like thousands more refugees floating amongst their cit
y of tents — instead, it carried the urgency and pace of men and women on the job, hustling for a paycheque. He heard the faint beeping of a reversing truck, and right then he knew he had found Reed’s destination.
Hoping he wasn’t too late, he fired the jeep back into life, switched the headlights on, and accelerated hard for the other end of Afgooye.
28
King hadn’t been prepared for the size of the industrial complex.
It rivalled the Port of Mogadishu in scale, but out here it seemed a thousand times larger — a small city of warehouses built in the middle of nowhere. He looked in either direction down the perimeter wall of the complex, and found nothing but vast empty space for as far as the eye could see.
Afgooye had turned out larger than he anticipated. It had taken him ten minutes of coasting aimlessly through dusty suburbs to reach the industrial sector. Throughout the journey, he’d been surrounded on either side by residential one-storey clay houses. Half the buildings he passed were painted in outrageous fashion, sporting bright turquoise walls or maroon roofs or any number of other strange amalgamations. When the congestion of the town’s populated buildings began to fade and the vast fields of weeds and sand returned, King’s morale had crumpled as he realised that he might not ever find Reed amidst this wasteland.
Then he hit the concrete wall after two more minutes of steady coasting, and his objective suddenly seemed achievable after all.
The perimeter of the compound must have cost a staggering amount alone — barbed wire topped the wall in an unceasing contorted mess. At random intervals, portholes had been carved out of the rock to make way for fearsome-looking turrets. He recognised them instantly — they were Browning M2HB heavy machine guns, used by the U.S. military for decades.
He wondered how this place had managed to get hold of them, and more importantly, how they had managed to keep hold of them.
Then he remembered the hundred-thousand dollar payment to the Somali Police Force, and it clicked that there was more money involved in this operation than he could possibly fathom.
He didn’t hesitate when the compound materialised ahead — any kind of weakness would be seen as suspicious. Instead, he tuned his hearing to the sound of hundreds of people and vehicles milling about on the other side of the wall and made up his mind to press straight through.
Whatever it took.
He spotted the front entrance to the complex, wide enough to fit the largest of transport vehicles through without any problems. It was the only way to catch a glimpse of what lay within the walls — he saw vast warehouses made of corrugated steel and enormous semi-trailers splayed at random across the main aisle, a vast stretch of concrete as wide as a football field.
The scale sent a shiver down his spine. In comparison to the scene he had stumbled across, he was puny, insignificant in comparison. What could he possibly hope to achieve in this madness?
He could kill one man.
That was all that mattered.
The front gate had been heavily fortified in similar fashion to the rest of the compound — its gate had been constructed of solid steel, made of thick bars that ran vertically across the face. A guard booth with bulletproof windows and another Browning turret lay attached to the exterior wall, directly near the gate. King made out the silhouettes of three men within the small fortification.
It was a similar style of set-up to the peacekeepers’ compound back in Mogadishu, the only difference resting in the amount of zeroes thrown on the end of the budget.
But the added security didn’t change the basic fundamentals of human nature.
Act like you belong.
King screeched to a halt in front of the guard booth in the kind of rush that signalled he had places to be. It couldn’t have worked better.
One of the Somali guards stepped out of the booth, clutching a Kalashnikov AK-47, but the way he let the barrel drift to the road between his feet told King that he had no intention of using it. King raised his eyebrows as the man strolled toward the vehicle, indicating that he was in a rush.
The guard stopped by the driver’s door and merely grunted.
No English.
It didn’t matter. Most intentions in the criminal industry could be communicated with simple gestures that transcended all language barriers.
King reached over to the passenger seat, scooped up the majority of the hundred-dollar bills the police had given him, and handed them straight to the guard without a moment’s hesitation. Then he tapped his bare wrist twice, evidently pressed for time. He settled back into his seat, letting all the tension go from his limbs, and stared straight ahead through the steel bars of the front gate.
Clock’s ticking.
I’ve got places to be.
The guard put two and two together. Nothing about the jeep signalled that it belonged to U.S. military — the faded olive paint could have belonged to any faction, and there was no insignia to argue otherwise. Apart from that, King displayed zero warning signs.
The guard must have figured that a white man with boatloads of cash driving right up to the gate without a worry in the world obviously had something to do with the man who had entered the compound earlier.
If Reed had come straight here, things would unfold without a hitch.
For a brief moment, King stiffened as he realised the silence had elongated to an uncomfortable length. The M45 underneath his right leg made itself known, digging into his hamstring, as if silently instructing him that it might be needed.
He sure hoped not.
Then the guard turned on his heel, pocketing the bulk of the money in one smooth motion, and disappeared into the guard hut. A few seconds later, the gate crawled open with an electronic whine. King let out a sigh of relief — masking it from view of the ragtag guard team — and took his foot off the brake.
When there was enough space to fit through, he let the jeep roll slowly into the compound, refusing to accelerate in case it drew unwanted attention to his arrival.
He plunged into the industrial complex, took one sweeping look around the place — and suddenly, everything made sense.
He knew exactly what Reed had got himself involved in.
He scolded himself for not understanding sooner.
29
At surface level, nothing caught the eye.
King realised he had entered the compound with a predetermined idea of what he might find. His mind had conjured up the image of thousands of illegal weapons and piles of smuggled narcotics, hidden from sight by the enormous wall surrounding the complex.
The truth was banal in comparison.
But that was the beauty of it.
He slowed the jeep to a crawl as he passed through the small army of hired workers swarming the compound, many of them directing semi-trailers into cargo bays or navigating forklifts around hundreds and hundreds of wooden pallets. The pallets were stacked high with every commodity King could think of — he gazed out across a sea of food and bottled water and entire containers packed with cigarettes and standard commodities like clothes, building supplies, raw materials, electronics…
Reality set in.
This was a small city teeming with supplies of every shape and form, all transported to the distribution hub in Afgooye along a back route through Mogadishu. Staring out at the operation, it took King some time to realise exactly why such a staggering amount of goods were brought through unchecked channels.
Then it all clicked.
This was the world of extra-legal services. The rumours of guns and drugs were powerful tools to distract people from the reality that most of the goods that avoided regulations were the usual commodities you wouldn’t look twice at. King certainly hadn’t. When he’d first rolled the jeep into the compound he’d barely noticed the thousands of pallets, dismissing them as a front to hide the true nature of the business.
This is the business, he thought, realising the kind of profits that could result from this kind of scale.
King h
ad bristled at the notion of an illegal smuggling ring running all kinds of horrors out of the port — assault rifles, sub-machine guns, semi-automatics, cocaine, heroin, meth. In truth, the smuggling ring existed, and it obviously turned over unfathomable amounts of cash, but it didn’t deal with the product King had expected.
The tens of thousands of refugees crammed into the temporary camps around Afgooye needed to be fed, clothed, supplied with the necessities.
Realisations hit home. No taxes, no customs, no tariffs, no accounting services, no auditing. There was room for millions — no, billions — of dollars of potential profit, just by providing the kind of banal services that the entire country needed to function.
All that money had to end up somewhere.
That’s what Reed was doing.
King suddenly realised that Reed had sold him on the tantalising illegalities too.
Hook, line, and sinker.
Reed had spoken of a notorious smuggling ring dealing in the kinds of illegal goods that would have snatched the attention of a guy like King — and it had worked flawlessly. In truth, there were no guns or drugs — or if there was, they made up such a small percentage of the extra-legal goods to be a non-factor.
The truth lay in plain sight.
King continued through to the next section of the complex. The land near the front gate lay under large floodlights that left no room for secrecy. Everything lay out in the open, under the watchful eye of the handful of guard towers stationed along the perimeter.
The grid of warehouses was an untapped goldmine, and he imagined how easy it would be to track down a stockpile of extra-legal profits and slot them into an offshore account without anyone in the chain of command finding out. Because this world operated outside of the law, they would have to trade exclusively in cash or physical goods like diamonds. It would be laying around here somewhere…