The Janson Option

by Paul Garrison

  He jogged down the steps.

  The taxi was halfway to the presidential palace, Villa Somalia, when the Embraer thundered over the city and swooped to the north.

  * * *

  “CAN YOU TELL ME what’s going on?” asked Ahmed. The taxi was jouncing slowly along a street crowded with SUVs, pickup trucks, civilians on foot, and troops in armored vehicles.

  “You know what a belly bomb is?” asked Janson.

  “I don’t think I want to guess.”

  “One way to get a suicide bomber around security is to get him to swallow explosives. When he’s frisked or wanded, there’s no weapon.”

  “’Cause he swallowed it like a drug mule.”

  “Same idea.”

  “And you think Isse did that?”

  “I hope I’m wrong. Three or four hundred grams of pentaerythritol tetranitrate tears through a crowd worse than dynamite. But all the elements are there. You saw him holding his stomach. Like he hurts or he’s obsessed with what’s in it. How would you feel with a condom full of high explosive in your stomach?”

  “There’s plenty of ‘Somali Belly’ going around.”

  “Sure. Except a kid who doesn’t do drugs is suddenly stoned on opiates. Which is exactly what they would give him to keep him from eliminating the explosives before they were ready to blow him up.”

  “How do they set it off? Cell phone?”

  “Hard to swallow a cell phone. They could separate out the receiver, I suppose, but a cell can get tricky in a place like Mogadishu, where you don’t have reliable mobile phone service. A remote garage-door opener will do the trick.”

  “Wouldn’t security notice that?”

  “They’ll have his controller carry the opener. Set him off from just outside the blast field.”

  “You seem pretty sure how they would do it.”

  Janson gave the kid a thin smile. “It’s how I would do it.”

  * * *

  It looked to Ahmed like half of Mogadishu was headed to the homecoming. Ahead, they could see a huge blue banner with white letters slung across the road:

  WELCOME HOME, SOMALIA

  Ahmed asked, “How do you think Isse hooked up with the Italian?”

  Janson said, “More likely, the Italian hooked up with Isse.”

  “Spotted Isse for suicide-bomber bait when he was looking for Mullah Amriki? Ohmigod. Poor Isse.”

  Janson opened the canvas bag. “Back in Minneapolis, did you ever act in your high school plays?”

  “What? Yeah. I was a gangster in Kiss Me Kate. We sang a song called ‘Brush Up Your Shakespeare.’”

  “Here’s your costume. Put it on.”

  Ahmed shook open the fabric. ”What is this? A burqa?”

  “Pretend you’re in a play. And do exactly what I tell you.”

  FORTY

  2°2' N, 45°20' E

  Villa Somalia, Mogadishu

  Villa Somalia, the presidential palace, occupied a rise three miles from the airport and half a mile from the harbor. The gates were decorated with the white stars of Somalia set on blue fields. A light sea breeze stirred a hundred flags.

  Coffee-colored AMISOM armored personnel carriers with machine guns on the roof maneuvered in the streets outside the walls. Stanchions were set in the street to keep bomb cars from parking next to the wall. Somali National Army soldiers in camouflage fatigues sporting white stars on blue shoulder patches were positioned behind sandbags. A thousand people were lined up to show papers at the gates.

  “How would Isse even get in there?” asked Ahmed.

  “He has an American passport. Just like you and me.”

  Janson looked around for a way in without getting searched for weapons. He saw no sign of centralized digital security. No one was scanning passes. But soldiers were patting people down at the gates, which were split into separate checkpoints. Janson saw long lines of ordinary Somali men and women, shorter lines of recent returnees in Western dress, and an even shorter line for VIPs. Suddenly he saw the sun flash on Kingsman Helms’s blond hair. The tall oilman was approaching the VIP gate. Janson ran to catch up. Helms could walk him through. The crowd was thick. He called out, “Helms. Helms!”

  Helms did not hear, and before Janson could reach him security waved him inside, where he was greeted by a young man whom Janson recognized from photos as President Adam’s chief of staff. Janson called again, but they disappeared into the crowds milling about the plaza that surrounded the palace.

  A soldier took notice and appeared to guess based on Janson’s skin color. “Media there,” he shouted, pointing toward a separate press entrance where soldiers were searching reporters and inspecting their cameras.

  Janson backed away, scanning the crowds, looking for a break.

  “Hey, there’s Salah Hassan!” said Ahmed.

  The new member of Parliament was already inside, shaking hands with people who had cleared security. Janson pulled out a phone and dialed Hassan’s cell. “I’m right outside with a young lady who an old friend from London asked me to escort. It’s her first time back since she was a child. Can you walk us through the VIP gate?”

  He waved over the heads of the crowd and they made eye contact.

  The realtor turned politician stepped over to the gate and spoke with the guards. Janson held out a passport, but the guards gestured to spread his arms so they could frisk him and search his canvas bag.

  Getting Ahmed in the burqa past them was worth giving up his weapons. He said to Salah Hassan, “Tell them I have my pistol and two spare magazines in this bag. Could I leave it with them?”

  Salah translated. The guard took the bag, and the hundred-​dollar bill Janson palmed into his hand, and ushered them in without searching Ahmed. Which meant, Janson feared, that the Italian would find some similar method of joining the festive gathering.

  Once they were on the plaza inside the walls, Salah said, “Welcome home” to the burqa-covered Ahmed.

  “We’re looking for Isse,” said Janson. “Have you seen him?”

  “He’s here. He came early with a friend.”

  “What friend?”

  “An Arab businessman. He’s in Mogadishu to build a hotel.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Wandering the grounds. His friend is hoping for a word with Gutaale.” Salah winked. “Home Boy will make an excellent partner in a hotel venture.”

  “Describe the friend.”

  Salah looked puzzled by Janson’s abrupt manner. “Thin man. Short. A head shorter than Isse and wearing a Savile Row suit.”

  “Necktie?”

  “Sky blue. Somalia blue. Like mine.”

  Janson had spotted dozens of men dressed like him. Business cards were flying and backs were being slapped, for despite the heat, Welcome Home, Somalia celebrators were in their Sunday best, showing they had prospered in the dollar countries and were hot to make deals. Only the very young like Ahmed eschewed suits for shirtsleeves, and no one but beggars outside the gates wore T-shirts.

  “Glasses? Hair? Hat?”

  “Sunglasses, no hat, short black hair. Curly. I was pleased to see Isse with a businessman. It could be the beginning of something—there they are now!”

  “Where?”

  “Home Boy and the president.”

  The red-bearded Home Boy Gutaale and the youthful-looking president Mohamed Adam with his oddly white goatee were surrounded by high-ranking Army officers in glittering uniforms and tall plainclothes bodyguards in sports jackets and porkpie hats. Arm in arm, they started across the plaza, a convincing show of solidarity. Aides and guards steered them toward a raised wooden stage so newly erected that soldiers were shouting at the last carpenter, a stubborn old man who ignored them, to hammer a final nail.

  “Give me the burqa.”

  All were watching the president’s progress. Few noticed Janson whip the cloth off Ahmed. But Salah’s mouth dropped open as he recognized the parolee from Minneapolis.

  Janson draped the
cloth over his arm, grabbed the startled Salah, and dragged him along. “Look for Isse’s friend.”

  “What—”

  “Isse has a bomb. Do you understand me?” Janson shook him hard.

  “Yes. A bomb. I understand.”

  “The ‘friend’ you saw will detonate it. The man in the blue suit. Look for him. I’ll watch for Isse. You too, Ahmed. He’ll try to get near the president.”

  Shouldering through the crowds, dragging Salah with him, Janson worked closer to Home Boy and President Adam, trying to catch up on an intersecting course. A mob of blue-suited businessmen, Kingsman Helms pushing among them, called for their attention, and the president and the warlord paused repeatedly to shake hands and embrace friends. They were almost at the stage steps when Janson let go of Salah and forged ahead, slamming through the crowd and knocking people out of his way.

  There was Isse in a clean white shirt and sky-blue necktie, emerging from under the wooden stage and pushing toward the president and Gutaale. He looked frail, a vacant smile on his face, his hands outstretched and empty in gentle greeting.

  Isse got ten feet from the president, well within the kill zone of the explosives in his stomach, before a heavyset plainclothes bodyguard blocked him with a gesture to clear the way. Janson shoved closer. Isse saw him. He turned his head as if to warn his controller. Slamming a bodyguard out of his way, Janson tracked the boy’s gaze toward a slight, dark-haired Arab in a blue suit and sunglasses.

  Janson thought he recognized the man. He racked his brain for a connection. He was positive he knew him. But this was the controller, sliding what looked like a phone from his jacket and pointing it at Isse.

  Two bodyguards, tall and broad, grabbed Janson. He doubled one up, smashing a knee to his groin, and broke the other’s hand and flung the burqa like a fishing net.

  The folds of cloth spun through the air, spreading widely, hovered above Isse, and enveloped him. Janson threw his arms around the boy and held the cloth in place. The controller pushed on his phone, keying it over and over. So far the graphene nanoplatelet cloth was doing the job it had been invented to do—blocking electromagnetic interference. But the strength of the burqa shield was not infinite. Close enough, the signal would penetrate the fabric and detonate Isse’s bomb.

  Face contorted, teeth and jaw clenched in thwarted rage, the controller pushed nearer. By this point the scrum of people trying to greet the president and Home Boy Gutaale were aware that something was wrong. The controller thrust the phone ahead of him like a gun. Janson shouted a warning, and the crowd stampeded from the stage. The controller was swept up and nearly knocked off his feet. His sunglasses went flying.

  “Yousef!” Paul Janson recognized him instantly.

  It was clear in a hopeless blink of an eye that the exfiltration job Janson had accepted a year before in hopes of ending civil war had produced the grimmest of all possible consequences. The dictator’s son he had rescued and delivered to Italy had seized a new opportunity, and had flourished in the chaos of yet another civil war. For who could be better equipped to prevail in lawless Somalia than a dictator’s minister of secret police?

  Janson let go of Isse and attacked, smashing Yousef’s arm and wrenching the phone from his convulsing hand. He had it in his own hand when he was tackled from behind by the president’s bodyguards and driven to the ground.

  Fighting to shield the phone to keep its buttons from being pushed, he struggled to his feet, only to be grabbed from the front by another guard.

  He saw Isse throw off the burqa and run toward the plaza wall. Screaming people scattered from his path, which took him past the stage. Gunfire erupted in the street outside. A dervish in a black-and-white checked head scarf dragged himself onto the high outer wall through razor wire and broken glass and pointed a garage-door remote control at Isse.

  The Somali-American vanished in a ball of fire. A thunderous shock wave blew the dervish off the wall and scattered the makeshift stage in a lethal hail of planks and timbers. Paul Janson felt a sharp stab of pain in his chest. The bodyguard who was bear-hugging him let go and fumbled at his own chest. The man had been impaled by a long wooden splinter that lanced through his body and pricked Janson’s skin. Janson lowered him to the ground.

  Yousef, whose face was burned and blackened, crouched over a dead bodyguard and snatched his pistol from its holster. Janson stepped on his hand, kicked the gun away, dragged him to his feet, and thrust him at an Army officer who ran up, gun in hand. “This is the Italian AMISOM wants. Take him to General Ddembe.”

  “Yes, yes, do as you’re told,” said a voice behind, and Janson turned to find himself face-to-face with President Adam.

  “Are you all right, sir?”

  “I believe I am. Inshallah. And thanks to them.” He peered through the smoke drifting over his fallen bodyguards, who had taken the brunt of the explosion. “Where is Home Boy?”

  The red-bearded warlord rose from the victim he had been kneeling over and staggered toward them. He was rapping his palm against the side of his head, as if his ears were ringing. Otherwise, he appeared unhurt. “Ah,” he said to the president. “You survived.”

  “Try to conceal your disappointment when we address the media, Vice President.”

  “Now?” asked Gutaale.

  “Immediately! We must show Somalia we are intact.”

  * * *

  PAUL JANSON WALKED over to the body Home Boy Gutaale had been kneeling by.

  Kingsman Helms had not a hair out of place. His sky-blue necktie was straight, his suit neither wrinkled nor dirtied by the dust and smoke swirling around the plaza, and he appeared unscathed except for the four-inch framing nail that had pierced his temple and emerged from his left eye.

  What had made Helms come in person to such a potentially lethal event? War stalked the oil globals like an ever-roaming shark. Surely he knew how often his ASC deals set off battles like this one?

  “He was a damned fool,” said a voice behind him.

  Paul Janson turned to face Doug Case. The president of American Synergy Corporation’s Global Security Division was seated in his wheelchair, guarded by contract Special Ops shooters in sunglasses and bush hats.

  “He was a dangerous fool,” said Janson. “If he was a fool.”

  Case shrugged. “So now what?”

  “You just moved up in the world,” said Janson. “Temporarily.”

  “Temporarily?” asked Case. “What does that mean?”

  “It depends on what AMISOM wrings out of Yousef, don’t you think?”

  Case shrugged. “A man in trouble will say anything.”

  Janson said, “My gut tells me that nothing Yousef says will help you.”

  A shot rang out, followed by bursts of gunfire.

  People screamed and ran. AMISOM troops formed a circle.

  A broad-shouldered American in a flak vest and bush hat rejoined the shooters protecting Doug Case.

  “What’s the shooting?” asked Case.

  The American said, “The Italian pulled a pistol the idiots missed in their frisk. The AMISOM troopers shot first.”

  “Is the Italian dead?”

  “Totally.”

  Paul Janson said, “There was a shot fired before the troopers opened up.”

  Doug Case’s man looked at Case. Case nodded. His man said, “I thought I better shoot before someone got hurt.”

  Doug Case smiled. “Hey, where you going, Paul?”

  Paul Janson turned on his heel and went looking for a ride to the Puntland Coast.

  FORTY-ONE

  12°30' N, 54°0' E

  Socotra Airport

  Socotra Island, Yemen

  From the air, Socotra Island looked like a bombed battleship smoldering on a flat and windless sea. Fog clung to mountain peaks in the middle. Sand-dune shores sprawled into the sea. Ten miles off, as if lurking to deliver coup-de-grace torpedoes, stood the megayacht Irina, a strange-looking ship with a conning tower-like superstructure an
d a backswept ram bow that reminded Jessica Kincaid of a double-edged clip-point saber. Its swimming pools glowed aqua-green.

  Catspaw’s heavily laden Embraer 650 lined up against the weak southwest monsoon, landed hard, and used most of the ten-thousand-foot runway to shed speed. Yemeni Customs stamped the temporary visas that allowed Titus, Saakin, and his crew to board rigid inflatable tenders beached near the runway. Driven by powerful twin outboards and guarded by Socotran tribesmen armed with AK-47s, the boats roared onto the sea, disappeared in the fog, and homed in thirty minutes later on Irina.

  The Russian crew was standing by with their bags at an embarkation port. Catspaw’s crew boarded. The Russians got into the boats. Kincaid and Billy Titus went to the bridge. Titus conferred with the Russian captain and inspected his log. They shook hands. The Russian joined his crew and the boats headed back to Socotra. As arranged, Irina’s chief engineer and handpicked assistants remained in the engine room at quadruple their normal salaries.

  Billy Titus called for thirty knots and set a course for Eyl, five hundred miles down the Puntland Coast. Jessica Kincaid went below, where the chief engineer was waiting deep in the hold to show her Garik Tannenbaum’s submarine.

  * * *

  PAUL JANSON STOOD in the open door of General Ddembe’s personal Mil Mi-19 Russian-built helicopter five thousand feet above the dull yellow lights of Eyl. He was wearing a parachute, battle pack, rifle, and Panoramic night-vision goggles.

  “Thanks for the ride!” he shouted over the roar of the turbines.

  “Thanks for the Italian,” the general shouted back. “How will you get out to the yacht?”

  “Borrow a boat.” He stepped into the night and free-fell 4,700 feet. As he tore through the air, he steered for the darkest stretch of the beach. When his altimeter read 300 feet, he pulled his ripcord.

  FORTY-TWO

  Allegra was awakened by Maxammed’s mobile ringtone blaring the Somali music that reminded her of an accordion playing reggae. He and his caller shouted back and forth.