“She said it was a woman, sir. A white woman. I thought she must be lying, so I—”
Interupting him, Guleed asked, “Did she give you a description of this woman?”
“White was all she said, sir. With some kind of automatic weapon. And a pistol, too, I think.”
“You think?”
“Sir, there were cartridges from a Kalashnikov and some kind of 9 mm weapon scattered where she must have stood to kill the others. Most of our…your men were hit before they had a chance to fire. The two who got shots off had pistols of a different caliber.”
Guleed studied the young man’s face and asked him, “What’s your name again?”
“Koshen Yiriq Warsame, sir.”
“You notice details. That’s a good thing.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“And you are certain that the whore said nothing else about the woman? Not the color of her hair? How long it was? How she was dressed?”
“No, sir. She was hysterical, saying the white woman had nearly killed her, too.”
“And was she injured?”
“No, sir. She said one of our men tried to use her as a shield, but the white woman killed him just the same.”
“You see? Another detail from your memory.”
Warsame didn’t seem to know if he should smile or cringe. He opted for a poker face and quick bob of the head.
“That’s all, for now,” Guleed informed him. “Stay close by, in case I have more questions.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
Warsame might be one to watch, but at the moment Guleed needed someone who could help him solve the riddle. Nineteen dead, on top of eight gunned down in Hamarwein, disturbed him. Two reports of a white woman mixed up in the incidents disturbed him even more.
And if there was a white woman, if she’d been killing Guleed’s men upstairs while the lucky whore heard shooting below, then who else was involved in the raid?
He needed Hassan, but his lieutenant was obeying orders, checking sources at the Mogadishu airport in an effort to identify Waabberi’s white man…and, perhaps, the woman who had rescued them from the Bakaara Market. If Hassan could get their names—or, better still, their photographs—Guleed could focus his search more precisely.
Or, could he?
What if he was wrong about Waabberi working for the CIA? What if the switchboard operator was mistaken? Could the missing shopkeeper, Dalmar Labaan, be someone else’s go-between?
But whose?
He barely registered the jangling of a telephone in an adjacent room, until one of his men loomed in the doorway.
“Sir,” the man said, “a call for you.”
“Is it Jama?” Guleed asked hopefully.
“No, sir. The man won’t give his name. He claims to speak for Jiddu Basra.”
BOLAN KNEW IT WAS only fifty-fifty that Guleed would speak to him. Using the hated adversary’s name might either help or hurt his odds. If nothing else, mention of Basra by itself would plant suspicion in the warlord’s mind, force him to think about the timing of the call and slaughter of his men at The Jackal.
Bolan was ready, waiting, when a deep voice asked him, “Who is this?”
“What’s in a name?” Bolan replied.
“Shakespeare. I learned it at the mission school. You want to speak with me, identify yourself.”
“You wouldn’t recognize my name,” Bolan said. “What’s important, here, is who I represent.”
“All right, No-Name. I’m listening for thirty seconds.”
“Jiddu Abtidoon Basra,” Bolan said.
“That’s a name I recognize,” Guleed replied. “What of it?”
“He’s my new employer.”
“And I care about this fact because…?”
“He hired me to get rid of you.”
Guleed’s laugh rang in Bolan’s ear. “Is that so? And you call to warn me, why?”
“Because it’s easier for me—for all concerned—if you get out of Mogadishu while you can. Pack up and cut your losses.”
“Stop it, this instant,” Guleed replied. “You’ll frighten me.”
“I hope so,” Bolan told him. “That would prove you’re smart.”
“You want to know how smart I am? I know a white voice when I hear it, Mr. No-Name. Jiddu must be worse off than I thought, if he’s importing scary whites to threaten me.”
“You call what happened at The Jackal a threat?” Bolan asked.
He visualized Guleed taking it in, deciding whether he should buy it or hang up. At last, the warlord said, “So, that was you?”
“It was,” Bolan replied.
“Maybe you had a little bitch with you, eh? A friend?”
“I had some help,” Bolan admitted, wondering how much the working girls upstairs had seen and what they would reveal when questioned by Guleed’s soldiers.
His first, best guess was everything.
“What kind of soldier takes a woman into battle with him?” Guleed asked.
“Depends upon the woman,” Bolan said.
“You have a point there, No-Name. I have known some bitches who would cut your throat for fun.”
“Nice crowd you’re hanging with,” Bolan said. “But it’s getting whittled down.”
“Jiddu, when I knew him, would never trust a white man.”
“Maybe he’s grown up enough to know when he needs help.”
“And yet, he is afraid to call and speak with me himself,” Guleed replied.
“He’s busy making plans for how to spend your money when you’re dead. The smart move is to take it with you and move on.”
“If that bastard thinks I’ll run away, he has forgotten everything I tried to teach him.”
“Time for you to get a lesson, then. I’ve done my best to help you out.”
“Don’t do me any favors.”
“You can count on that,” Bolan replied. “It’s all downhill from here.”
He cut the link before Guleed could answer, turned to find Waabberi and Mironov watching him.
“You think he fell for it?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter,” Bolan answered. “All we need is reasonable doubt.”
“He hates Basra,” Waabberi said. “It’s mutual. I think whenever something bad happens to one, the other is automatically suspected.”
“One thing,” Bolan told Mironov. “He knows about you.”
“From the woman that I left alive upstairs,” she said. “I should have shot the little whore.”
“She didn’t do us any harm. Guleed’s confused now, but he still might make a move on Basra. Just in case he doesn’t, though…”
“We will,” Mironov finished for him, smiling.
“That’s the plan.”
“You could have been a Russian, Matt. What a mind you have.”
JAMA HASSAN WAS PLEASED with the result of his excursion to the airport. As he’d expected, he had found a customs officer who valued money over the nit-picking regulations of his job. The Transitional Federal Government’s pay scale for public officials was scandalous.
Hassan now carried in his pocket a short list of the white visitors who’d landed at the airport in the past ten days. There had been five in all. One of the five was an American, two others had come from England, and a fourth from Portugal. The only woman on the list, according to her passport, was Ukrainian.
Her name was listed as Oksana Tymoshenko.
Hassan assumed the name was false. Indeed, there was a chance that all five names were pseudonyms. The whites who traveled in Somalia these days were mostly spies, gangsters or scouts for companies that craved the country’s natural resources at a bargain rate. The first two groups concealed their true identities from force of habit, while the last might fear retaliation if their bargaining went badly.
So, five names to be considered, traced, eliminated or confirmed as suspects in the Hamarwein firefight. Unfortunately, customs did not photocopy tourist passports, and the terminal
’s closed-circuit cameras were not in working order. He could not match faces to the names. Customs did ask all foreign visitors to list a contact address in Somalia. The two Brits and the Portuguese had listed the names of two local hotels, which were easy to check. The American, one Matthew Cooper, had been vague and written “traveling.”
The woman’s address line was blank.
Hassan had asked the customs officer how that was possible. The man had coughed, shuffled his feet and grimaced, finally admitting that he had to have been distracted when she handed him the card. Hassan assumed the little rodent had been ogling her and forgot to check the form before he passed her through.
Still, the fool remembered her, after a fashion. She had dark hair, shoulder-length and straight, with pale skin even for a white woman. Green eyes, he thought, with just a fleck of gold.
The moron was in love with someone he would never see again. At least, not if Hassan could find her.
As he left the terminal, moved toward his waiting car, Hassan spotted his driver pacing up and down the sidewalk, clearly agitated.
“What?” he asked the younger man, as he approached.
“I didn’t want to interrupt your business,” the driver said.
“That was wise.”
“But there has been another shooting.”
“What?”
The driver brandished his cell phone as proof.
“Headquarters called. It’s The Jackal. Someone went in and killed them all.”
Hassan had trouble grasping it. “All who?”
“Our men. Nineteen, at least.”
“What are you saying?”
“It’s the truth, I swear!”
“When did this happen?” he demanded.
“Well, just a little while ago. Within the hour, I think.”
Cursing, Hassan brushed past him, reached the car and threw himself into the shotgun seat. The driver hesitated for a moment, frozen on the pavement, until Hassan shouted at him through the open window.
“Hurry up! I don’t have all night to wait!”
Guleed would need him now, immediately. He would have a thousand questions.
Hassan only hoped that his answers would be good enough.
“AND NEXT, BASRA?” Mironov asked, as they cruised through the streets of Mogadishu’s west side, past the former American embassy compound.
Bolan was silent for a moment, studying at the concrete wall surrounding the abandoned site. Its drab surface was pocked by slugs and shrapnel, decorated almost gaily by graffiti that he couldn’t read—he supposed that it was just as well.
“Basra, that’s right,” he told Mironov. “We still need to pick a target, though.”
Waabberi took his cue and chimed in from the backseat of Mironov’s car. “Basra’s headquarters are across town, on the road to Buurhakaba. It is well defended, never less than fifty men, but—”
“I don’t want Basra tonight,” Bolan reminded him. “Let’s go with something like The Jackal. Maybe hit him in the wallet, while we’re thinning out his ranks.”
Waabberi thought about it for a moment, then replied, “There are three possibilities. At each place, Basra’s men stand guard while others work or gather to amuse themselves.”
“So, run it down,” Bolan said.
“First, there is a warehouse on the east side, where they store and process khat before they sell it. There is normally a large supply on hand.”
“Worth what, to Basra?” Bolan asked.
“In your dollars, forty thousand for a ton, wholesale. On the street, between three and four hundred per kilo. The product moves quickly, because addicts crave the fresh leaves.”
“So, a major loss would cost Basra roughly three hundred and sixty thousand per ton, at street prices.”
“That sounds about right.”
“Okay, what else?”
“There is a club where Basra’s men congregate, on Via Mocca, near old town. It is not as large as The Jackal, but similar activities are conducted there.”
“And number three?” Bolan asked.
“This I know of by rumor only,” Waabberi said, “but I trust the source, within reason. Past the airport, eastward, on the highway to Gesira, it is said that Basra has a small house with a large basement where he stores arms and ammunition.”
“Three hot properties,” Bolan replied. “I’m leaning toward the khat stash as the primary objective, for the bite its loss will put on Basra.”
“I don’t mind which direction we take,” Mironov said, “as long as we are moving toward recovery of the Vasylna’s cargo.”
“That’s the goal,” Bolan said. “One step at a time.”
“But not too many steps, I hope.”
“I never drag it out longer than necessary,” Bolan told her.
With a sidelong glance, she answered, “That’s a good rule for a battle. Not so good for other things.”
He let that pass and half turned toward Waabberi. “Any idea how many men Basra has guarding the plant?”
“Not precisely. I would imagine a dozen or so.”
“And the workers?”
“Some to bundle the fresh leaves,” Waabberi said. “Others to grind the dry leaves into paste for chewing, smoking, or for tea. The numbers, sorry, I don’t know.”
“All Basra’s men, or does he use civilians?”
“I think he trusts no one outside his control, but I can make no guarantee.”
It shouldn’t be a problem, Bolan thought. Once he was into it, he should be able to assess the hired help by their actions. Anyone who had a weapon and defended Basra’s drug stash was an enemy. The ones who cut and ran without a fight were free to go.
At least, as far as Bolan was concerned.
Granted, there’d be some risk of Basra’s people taking down civilians in a cross fire, but he’d dealt with that before, on other missions that involved narcotics. With the khat, there’d be no danger of inhaling lethal or addictive dust inside the warehouse, as there was with coke and heroin.
The only threat would come from Basra’s men, intent on killing Bolan and his two companions.
But if they could pull it off…
“Okay,” he said. “If anybody wants to sit out this round, now’s the time to say so.”
“You’re a gentleman,” Mironov said. “But I am not, how do you say it in America, a shrinking violin?”
“That’s violet,” Bolan replied. “And no, you’re not.”
“Besides,” she said, “if I don’t go, you’d have to walk.”
Bolan addressed Waabberi once again. “Your call,” he said. “If you don’t want a piece of this, just give us the directions and we’ll drop you off somewhere. Come back and meet you when it’s done.”
Or not, he thought, but kept that to himself.
“I’ve come too far,” Waabberi said, without any apparent sadness or self-pity in his voice. “I’ll go with you.”
“All right, then,” Bolan said. “Let’s get it done.”
MUSSE GULEED WAS SCOWLING at a map of Mogadishu, spread out on his desk, when Jama Hassan stepped into the open doorway of his office, his expression appropriately grim.
“How did it happen?” Hassan asked.
“The way it always happens,” Guleed said. “People with guns walked in and started shooting. They were better than our men, this time.”
“They left no trace behind?”
“Only our dead,” Guleed replied. “But one of them was kind enough to telephone.”
Hassan blinked at him. “What?”
“Oh, yes. A white man, Jama.”
“Not the same one from the market?”
Guleed shrugged. “Who knows? I doubt there can be many here with motivation to attack us.”
“How did he explain himself?” Hassan inquired.
“Quite simply. If we can believe him, he is working for our old friend Jiddu, sent to destroy us. He suggested I could spare myself from injury by leaving Mogadishu.”
<
br /> “Leaving? It’s ridiculous!”
“Of course. But then, I have to ask myself, why would a mercenary working for Jiddu be so considerate?”
Hassan shrugged. “If he hopes to frighten us away, he could collect his fee without a fight, at less risk to himself.”
“There’s always that,” Guleed agreed. “And yet…”
“You think he’s lying?”
“I’m considering all possibilities. If we but knew his name—”
“We may,” Hassan replied, taking a folded piece of paper from his shirt’s breast pocket. Opening the sheet, he passed it to Guleed.
“What’s this, Jama?”
“Five names from customs at the airport. All whites, landing within the past ten days. You see the two most recent.”
“‘Matthew Cooper, from America,’” Guleed read from the list. “And this Oksana Tymoshenko. Is that not a woman’s name?”
“It is, Musse.” Though he wore a somber face, Hassan sounded almost triumphant.
“This says she’s Ukrainian.”
“Perhaps. Passports are often forged.”
“No photographs, I take it?”
“They don’t copy the passports. I suggested that it might be worth their while, in future.”
“It’s a pity.”
“I have a description,” Hassan said, repeating the details.
“It’s something at least. She could be the woman seen at The Jackal.”
“An American and a Ukrainian, working for Jiddu? It’s a strange idea to say the least,” Hassan said.
“We’ve seen stranger things,” Guleed reminded him. “I’m not convinced yet, but it’s something that we must investigate.”
“Jiddu should be exterminated, even if it’s not his doing,” Hassan said. “He’s been a pebble in your shoe for far too long.”
“If it was easy to eliminate him, he’d be dead by now,” Guleed replied. “You know that, Jama, after all the times you’ve tried.”
“I’ll get him this time,” Hassan promised.
“First things first. If we can find this Matthew Cooper or the woman, preferably both together, they can tell us more about Jiddu’s involvement. If he is involved.”
“They won’t be hard to find in Mogadishu,” Hassan said. “White faces in a black landscape.”
“I hope you’re right. Make it your first priority.”
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