by Peter Nealen
But, first things first. We were invited to share a meal with Al-Jabarti, and while none of us were particularly thrilled at that idea, Danny pointed out that we had to. It really was a throwback to the SOF days in Libya, cozying up to bastard warlords to get the help to try to bring down the military-Islamist regime in Tripoli, which had killed Qaddafi only to turn out to be as bad or worse. They’d been assholes, too, but we’d had to work with them, even though they turned out just making things worse in the long run.
Still, we swallowed our rancor and sat around the short table with the bearded, jolly pirate, ate his spicy food, and pretended to be friendly. They had brought the rest of the team ashore for the night, along with all the gear, so we were well prepared if they tried anything, but no treachery was forthcoming. We ate and made small talk, if rather stiff, uncomfortable small talk. Al-Jabarti apparently was fascinated by several Hollywood stars, a couple of whom I’d never even heard of, and a couple more I was surprised he’d even heard about, as I was under the impression they weren’t working anymore. I was frankly bored to tears, aside from the tense professional paranoia that kept me watching both the pirate kingpin and his lackeys for any false moves.
After a couple of hours spent talking about the apparently scandalous life of some brunette actress whose name I can’t remember, we finally called it a night, and thanked Al-Jabarti for his hospitality. He smiled expansively and shook all our hands before we retired to what had turned into a suite of rooms on the bottom floor, where we set security and settled down to grab a few hours’ sleep before setting out again the next morning.
The next morning dawned cool and clear, with a slight breeze coming off the ocean. Most of us were up long before the locals, packing up what little gear we had broken out during the two days we’d been on Socotra. Of course, we had to wait three more hours for the pirates to rouse themselves to even start getting breakfast, before getting on the boats and heading out to the dhow that would take us to Hobyo.
The sun was high in the sky, the clouds were starting to gather over the inland mountains, and we’d been sitting on the beach with our backs against our gear and rifles across our knees for a while when two Toyotas finally started toward us from the hotel. Jim grumbled something about “lazy-ass gomers won’t even walk that far,” as we started to get up. I shoved my ball cap back on my head, as I’d had it pulled down to shield my face from the burning sun for a while.
The two SUVs came to a stop about fifty yards from the shore, and pirates started piling out, most carrying AK’s, but few carrying any extra ammunition for them. Most of them ignored us and started piling onto the boats that were pulled up on the sand. We started hefting our gear to load it back up.
To my mild surprise, Ibrahim got out of the passenger seat of the white Toyota Land Cruiser that had led the way from the hotel, and walked over to us, with a small satchel over one shoulder and a wide, if phony, smile on his face. “A salaamu aleikum, my friends,” he said cheerfully. “Are we ready to go?”
“Been ready for a couple of hours,” Larry said bluntly, and Ibrahim‘s smile slipped just a little. Not the way in that part of the world, but we were increasingly uninterested in making friends with this pack of thugs, no matter how much the CIA might want us to. Danny gave Larry a sharp glance, then looked at Alek, who made a point of not noticing the faux pas. Fuck their niceties, was the message, and though nobody said as much, it was equally obvious that the message had been received, loud and clear. We loaded our gear onto the skiffs and helped push them off the beach, jumping in with the lower legs of our trousers
soaked with salt water.
It was a quiet trip out to the dhow. The pirates chattered amongst themselves in a weird patois of Arabic and Somali, and we kept to ourselves. Ibrahim tried to be friendly, and make small talk, especially showing interest in our kit and our guns. We weren’t very forthcoming, and Danny’s features were getting clouded with a combination of worry and irritation at our intransigence. I had no doubt we were going to be treated to a lecture on hearts and minds as soon as he could get us out of earshot of the pirates, but none of us cared. We’d all been there before.
As it turned out, he wouldn’t get much of an opportunity to admonish us in private. Ibrahim didn’t leave us alone much, in spite of the “fuck off” signals we were all putting off pretty strongly. As the dhow chugged along the north coast of Socotra and toward the open ocean between the island and the Horn, he was always there, leaning against the rail, chattering away. Couldn’t tell you most of what he talked about; it seemed like the guy knew far more about American pop culture than any of us were even remotely interested in. After an hour I wanted to dump him over the side just to get him to shut up.
It was a long trip, and this time the pirates seemed to be on a little bit tighter schedule. There wasn’t any stopping on the coast every night; we just kept sailing. This was, of course, absolute misery for Rodrigo, as he didn’t even get any relief for his seasickness when the sun went down. I spoke quietly to Alek about it. We needed to make sure Rodrigo was out of the way for a little while when we did make landfall, as he’d need to recover some strength and nutrients in his body before he was much use in a fight. Right now he was just a liability.
We rounded the western tip of Socotra in the midafternoon, and were passing the rocky shores of Abdul Kori Island by the time the sun started to sink toward the western horizon. Seabirds shrieked overhead as we passed a few hundred yards from the sheer cliffs at the eastern tip of the island.
Night descended like a leaden blanket on the ocean, and before long the only light was from the lamps in the dhow’s cabin and the stars overhead. The pirates had quieted, their conversations little more than murmurs as most of them bedded down below decks, and the only other sounds were the chugging of the engines, and the slap of waves against the hull. We stayed in the bow, leaning back against our gear, our kit on and weapons close at hand, at least two guys up at all times. If Ibrahim noticed our paranoia, he gave no sign, but curled up against the starboard gunwale and went to sleep.
I stood second watch, until Larry relieved me, then I lay back against my ruck and closed my eyes. It was surprisingly peaceful, even out here, surrounded by pirates, on one of the most dangerous stretches of ocean in the world. The gentle rocking of the swells and sound of the waves lulled me off to dark, dreamless sleep.
I woke to considerably less gentle swells, and a leaden, threatening sky. The wind was whipping in from the east and battering the dhow, as it rode the increasingly unruly waves. I felt the first stinging drops of rain, and reached for the weather cover stuffed in the top flap of my ruck. I’d been in a couple of storms at sea before, and wasn’t looking forward to one on a rickety dhow. I glanced around, and saw that even Ibrahim had retired to the cabin, or below decks, while Jim, Nick, and Bob labored to strap down several weatherproof tarps over our perch in the bow. I levered myself to my feet, swaying a little to get my balance against the swells, and went to help.
The wind was picking up, hard, and snapping the corners of the tarps, threatening to yank them out of our grasp. With a fair amount of struggling, stumbling, and swearing, though, and increasingly soaked to the bone by stinging, wind-driven rain, we got them tied down over our gear at least. Most of us couldn’t fit underneath, at least not with enough room to breathe, but we took what shelter we could in the lee of the cabin and hunkered down. Rodrigo looked positively corpse-pale, which was a good trick for a brown guy.
We huddled against the stinging rain and wind, braced against the increasingly violent swells, for a good four hours. At least that was what my watch said. It felt like a whole hell of a lot longer than that. Through the soaked, freezing misery of it all, I couldn’t help but still think that we were behind schedule, and likely failing the poor bastards in enemy hands, the longer we stayed out at sea.
Of course, once we got ashore, that was only the beginning, but I had no idea at the time just how pear-shaped things could get.
We were so soaked to the skin that most of us had pretty much given up on ever being dry again. After the first squall passed, we’d pretty much taken to just leaving our rifles and M60s in waterproof weapons bags, and our pistols were so slathered with silicone to keep the water off that if it weren’t for the downright aggressive checkering set into the grips, we’d never have been able to keep hold of them.
The skies had pretty much cleared as we hove into sight of Hobyo, which slowly rose above the dusty horizon to the southwest, a low-lying collection of concrete buildings, swathed in low trees, crowned by a square, white tower. There were still clouds scudding across the sky from the east, and as I craned my neck to look past the cabin, I could see what looked like another squall line starting to form out to sea.
Rodrigo was in bad shape. He’d been so seasick that he could barely take any food or water, and he was weak, dehydrated, and borderline hyponatremic. He was dry heaving more than puking at that point, for lack of anything to bring up, and when he did bring something up, it was more often than not dark green bile. We’d have to carry him ashore, and he wouldn’t be good for much until we could get some food and fluids in him. Figure a couple of days, at least. Which was bad, as those days were going to be spent in bad-guy country.
Nobody said much as the skiffs started to come out to us from the white sand beach, rocking as they crested the gentle breakers and motored out toward the dhow. Ibrahim was back with us, smiling and trying to make small talk, but he was generally rebuffed with monosyllables or inanities like, “Yeah, sure, great.” His smile slipped again, and he looked put out, saying something about bad manners. I couldn’t make it out, as I was trying to help Rodrigo up, along with Nick, who was on his other side.
None of us had time for Ibrahim, especially as we were levering our gear over the side and into the skiffs below, hopefully without dropping them in the drink. Imad and Bob were down in the skiff, catching kitbags and rucks with their rifles slung across their backs. Jim and Larry had already crossed over to the second, and were helping spread-load the gear.
It took a relatively short time to get down into the skiffs, even with having to essentially lower Rodrigo down. He tried, hard, to get down by himself, but he was so weak from being that sick for five days that he was unsteady, and his grip on the rope ladder wasn’t strong enough to trust. Over his protests, I tied a sling rope around his chest and helped lower him to the skiff.
Danny and I were the last ones off the dhow. The crew was gathered near the rail, watching us, but not saying much. I didn’t like the looks we were getting. They made my back itch. Or maybe that was just the five days of being wet.
I clambered down the salt-encrusted rope ladder, my rifle swinging slightly across my back, and squeezed into a spot on the crowded, low-in-the-water skiff, between Bob, Imad, and a pile of rucksacks. The Somali at the tiller wasn’t talking, and wasn’t even looking at us much. Imad leaned over to me, and over the noise of the outboard and the swish of the water against the hull, he stage-whispered, “I’ve got a bad feeling about this, man.”
“Me, too,” I replied, glancing at the coxswain. “Danny can repeat what the Agency says all he wants. I don’t think it was a very good idea to trust these assholes. Especially now that they’ve got our money.”
Imad nodded. “Head on a swivel?”
“Hand on a gun,” I replied, and tried to lean back against one of the rucks.
It was a short run to shore. The coxswains took the skiffs all the way in, beaching them in water ankle deep. There were a ragged assortment of Bongo trucks, Toyota Land Cruisers, and HiLuxes arrayed on the beach, along with what looked like entirely too many young men wearing loose clothing and shemaughs and carrying weapons. AK-47s, FALs, PKMs, RPGs, and even a couple of FN MAGs could be seen. There was a lot of firepower on that beach. I flexed my hand around the pistol grip of my rifle, and saw the rest of the team start doing similar things, checking mags were seated, quick, surreptitious brass checks. This didn’t look like a welcoming committee so much as it did an ambush.
Granted, I am a bit paranoid. I came by that paranoia honestly, though, and so did the rest of us. We got off the skiffs and started pulling our gear out, as the pack of Somalis started down the beach toward us.
I glanced around at my compatriots. Everyone was calm. Nobody was obviously ready for a fight. At first glance, the untrained eye would only have seen eleven men unloading piles of gear from two boats and carrying it onshore. Innocuous, unremarkable, and non-threatening.
But there was a tension, a coiled-spring alertness, to everyone’s movements. No one picked up more gear than they could drop easily to get at a gun. Eyes, while never settling for long, never really left the Somalis.
Ibrahim walked up to meet the heavily armed group of Somalis, and started jabbering quickly to the man in the lead, a tall, rangy type with a round face and aviator glasses on. The man handed him an FN HiPower.
One thing this particular band of skinnies wasn’t very good at was concealing their intentions. They started telegraphing their envelopment before they’d even started moving, and that was a bad idea.
A split second after the first gun had started to come up, we were all up, facing outboard, guns up and covering them. The look of shock that they all, to a man, had on their faces was fucking priceless.
Imad barked at them in Somali. At first they balked, though none of them was stupid enough to try to bring his gun up while being covered by eleven battle rifles. I was keeping my muzzle pointed at one of the MAG gunners. Those machine guns could do a lot of damage if they didn’t go down first, and there really wasn’t any cover here. If any of them so much as twitched, I was drilling them first. I could see by the look in the guy’s eyes that he understood that, and didn’t want to die.
The tall guy in the lead was pissed. He snapped something at Imad, who replied shortly. I kept watching my chosen machinegunner, who was getting more scared by the second. I was suddenly tempted to grin at him, just to see what his reaction would be. Funny, the thoughts that go through your head in such situations. One wrong twitch and this beach could turn into a bloodbath, and I was getting tempted to mess with one of the bad guys’ heads.
Imad took a step forward, menacingly raising his weapon for emphasis. It looked kind of like skinny posturing, but I knew Imad well enough to know that he had just shifted his point of aim from the tall guy’s chest to his head. A glance at the tall guy confirmed that, mirrored shades or no, he had seen that as well. He spat something angrily in Somali, and, holding out his hands, bent to put his AKS-74U in the sand.
One by one, the others followed suit. Alek stepped up beside Imad. “On the ground,” he snarled. Imad translated, jerking his weapon for emphasis. Slowly, glowering at us, the tall guy waved at his compatriots, and took a step back, away from his weapon. The rest did the same, with varying levels of alacrity. Then, one or two at a time, they got down on their stomachs in the sand. Ibrahim and the tall guy were the last to comply.
Alek jerked his head, and Tim, Larry, and Hank moved forward, digging in their gear to come out with zip ties to use as hasty handcuffs. They weren’t gentle. Hands were jerked behind the pirates’ backs and hastily though thoroughly cuffed with single zip ties. Some of them winced, and a couple of them actually cried out as Hank yanked the ties tight, but the tall guy stayed impassive, staring at Imad with what I expected was supposed to be a wordless promise of bloody retribution to come.
Bob, Nick, and Jim hurried to the trucks behind our captives, and bega
n checking them out, while Alek and I covered the pirates and Rodrigo and Danny started collecting the weapons that were now strewn on the beach.
There was a scuffle by the trucks, and I glanced up to see Nick choke-slam a pirate against the hood of a HiLux. The kid’s weapon clattered to the ground, and Nick tossed him in the sand on the other side of the truck, then stepped over to put a boot in his back. Another quick zip-tie, and the last pirate was trussed and out of trouble. For the moment, at least.
Danny and Rodrigo were now festooned with slung weapons, and were trudging over to the trucks to deposit them in the backs, assisted by Tim, Larry, and Hank, who were now free to help. Imad, Alek and I advanced on the bound pirates, and Alek dug his boot toe under Ibrahim’s chin.
“Don’t think we’ll forget this,” he said, glowering down at Ibrahim, who was squinting up at him, his neck bent at what had to be a painful angle. “If I had more time, I’d make you and your boss pay now. But I haven’t got the time, and I’m not in the habit of shooting people with their hands tied behind their backs. So just make sure it sinks into that thick skull of yours, and tell all your buddies, too--” He crouched down to get closer to the pirate, and grabbed him by the beard, twisting his head up further to make solid eye contact. “--We’ll see that this kind of backstab doesn’t go unpunished. Rest assured. But before that, make sure nobody follows us, because if we see dust behind us, we’re likely to make life very short for anybody making it. I don’t give a fuck if they’re just watching. We’ll kill them anyway. And when we’re done with our business down south, we will come back here and kill every single living thing in this town. Clear?” Using the man’s beard as a lever, he forced Ibrahim to nod his understanding, then dropped his head in the sand and stepped over him.
Keeping an eye on the pirates, we moved to the vehicles. Nick had grabbed a HiLux with a PKM mounted in the bed, while Bob and Jim had each snagged a Land Cruiser. The Bongo wouldn’t have done all that well cross-country, so I was glad nobody had decided to try to take one of those. Alek waved everyone in next to Nick’s HiLux.