by Gary Haynes
It had been a mixture of truth and lies, but it had got them in and, hopefully, would get them out, without the added stress of them having to duck under the local security services’ radar. It also meant that they didn’t have to worry about having the weapons and surveillance equipment they had in leather holdalls being confiscated by customs.
Crane had said that it was up to them to deceive NISA as to the real reason why they were there, but had reiterated that if the Somalis knew that a drone strike was going to happen without government approval, they’d be arrested on the spot. Like many countries, including Afghanistan, they’d accepted more or less anything when they were on the back foot, fighting terrorism. But as soon as they got a sniff of power, they became all territorial, and, Crane had added, the Somalis weren’t any different.
Tom and Lester mounted up in the rear of the jeep, with their holdalls in the footwell, and were driven out of a side checkpoint as the barrier had lifted. The colonel returned a salute to the soldiers there, standing beside an APC, dressed in battle fatigues, with desert-tan flak jackets and shoulder flashes of the Somali flag, a white star against a light blue background.
They were being driven to the HQ of the NISA, the agency having been established in January 2013 by the new Somali Federal Government, as planned. Many of their operatives had been trained by the CIA, under Crane’s overall direction, so pulling strings of this sort hadn’t been a hassle. NISA’s primary aim was to thwart Al-Shabaab activity in the capital, and to date they had had mixed success.
The airport was fourteen miles from the capital proper, along a newly constructed highway built with the aid of Turkish engineers, the outline of Mogadishu’s white minarets visible on the distant hilltops. They travelled in silence, the jeep keeping to a steady speed.
As the jeep turned off onto a dusty, tree-lined road, straight as a skyscraper, Tom saw the edge of the cityscape, comprising an extensive grid network, glowing beneath the solar-powered streetlights. The jeep eased to a stop at an intersection, the centre marked by a circle of palm trees surrounding a bronze statue of a man on a column above a marble plinth.
The colonel turned around, grinned, and said, “One day we will be rich like America. My children will be free and say what they want. No terrorists. No worries. Like in America.”
Lester gave him a high five and Tom shook his head. The guy was polite and friendly, but he didn’t have a clue.
Chapter 105
The first twenty minutes of the meeting with three NISA men had been affable enough. It had taken place at an army base on the outskirts of the city, rather than the HQ as planned, although Tom wasn’t informed of the reason for the change in venue. The Somalis had conversed in good English and had only once spoken together in their native tongue, known as Somaii.
They’d said that in five years’ time, Al-Shabaab would be history and, if the US Secretary of State came, they could guarantee her safety. Tom hadn’t thought that either statement stood up, but he’d said that he would send them a draft report of his security assessment before he passed it onto the CIA and the State Department. They’d seemed to appreciate that, even though there wouldn’t be one, of course.
He’d added that given the NISA had been so diligent about the routing out of terrorists in the cities and major towns, he and Lester would like to travel north, with the SDF, of course, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to assess the current position objectively. They’d said that this wouldn’t be a good idea, but they had relented after Tom had said that it was either that or they’d be going home to the States when they left the room.
Tom hadn’t mentioned that a terrorist called Ibrahim was hiding out in one of the relatively lawless northern districts, because he still felt that Crane’s reasoning about unleashing the Hellcat missile was sound. That and a clear and visceral determination to see his father’s killer and the most dangerous terrorist on earth dispatched within eyeshot.
As part of authenticating the misinformation he’d given to the NISA, he and Lester had travelled in a taxi to the outskirts of Sayidka Camp in Hawlwadag district of the city, knowing they were being shadowed by several local operatives. The camp housed many thousands of internally displaced Somali families, and was one of the poorest areas of the capital, its impoverished population existing on handouts in tents plagued by sand flies.
The regime was doing what it could, but, as in a lot of countries in Africa, Tom thought, if they concentrated as much on the suffering on their own people as they did on their palatial government offices and the size of their own bank accounts, things would be better.
After they travelled back to their relatively upscale hotel to meet with the hastily convened SDF guard patrol, who’d guide them to the north-western Harardhere District, where the cellphone call had been located, Tom felt that, given the extreme threat that they were facing, it was only right to inform Lester of the consequences, even though he knew Crane had not told anyone else in Department B, and he would go into a fit of rage if he ever found out.
“I know we are unlikely to even see him, but If Ibrahim so much as attempts to touch your face with a licked finger, take him out,” Tom said.
“Why the hell would he want to do that?”
“He’s a carrier of lethal disease,” Tom said.
“Say what?”
“All I’m saying is even if he brushes against you with a sweaty arm, it’s it.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“I’m sorry, man.”
“Fuck it, bro, you with me or against me?”
“You don’t have to ask that.”
Lester shook his head and Tom placed his hand on his forearm, and Lester didn’t shrug it off.
Chapter 106
The convoy was four jeeps, all fixed with heavy machine guns. Tom and Lester were in the back seats of the third one, their holdalls in the footwell. They’d left Mogadishu at 22:10, passing a few outlying shacks and skinny dogs. The main route to the Harardhere District was a fifteen-hour drive along the Wadada Buulebarde highway via the city of Beledweyne, which was a huge loop. Going direct along the coast would halve the travel time.
Tom had told the SDF that he didn’t expect them to go deep into Al-Shabaab territory, but it would be necessary for them to skirt along the western coast as far as possible in order for him and Lester to check out a typical village in rebel-held territory, and ascertain what manner of sea craft there was on the ground.
Now the jeeps’ headlights cast a shimmer over the sand at the beams’ outer reaches, like an artificial mirage. To the left in the scrubland, the eyes of startled antelope and other grazers shone as bright as exploding phosphorus as they were woken by the sound of the engines and struggled to stand up. There were no recognizable roads here, just a camel track used by the nomadic tribes. Tom knew that the semi-desert plain that ran parallel to the coast was miles wide. Known as the Guban, it was crisscrossed by shallow watercourses that now, during the dry season, were narrow channels of blanched sand.
Four miles south of the target site, the jeeps came to a halt and Tom and Lester and the ten members of the SIDF disembarked. Tom stared up at the sky. In all his foreign assignments, he had never seen a more pristine sight, never seen so many stars, never seen them so bright. It was as if the sky and earth had collaborated to make it so; that for this one night they had lessened the distance between them and used that union to rid the atmosphere of even a fleck of cloud.
They trekked the remaining six miles in two hours, moving at as fast a pace as possible over the terrain of sand and grassy hillocks. No one spoke behind the lead man, who was a local tribesman and knew the region well, because he didn’t have a satellite-based navigational tool, and hadn’t requested one.
They stopped just below the crest of a sand dune after following the scratch between the western dunes, behind some dry, low-lying bushes. An onshore breeze brought with it the smell of salt and rotting fish, and Tom knew that the target site was on the white beac
h on the windward side of the dune. In the shallows, the rusted hull of the wrecked oil tanker lay like the darkened ribcage of some enormous prehistoric beast.
Tom didn’t hear the drone, knowing it would be a medium-altitude variety sent over the border from nearby Djibouti. Camp Lemonnier, to be precise, a former French Foreign Legion outpost, which occupied an area bordering the Djibouti-Ambouli International Airport. Lemonnier was utilized as a base for the Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa, the only US base on the African continent.
He’d heard drones over Afghanistan and Iraq in his time there, reminding him of the sound of the small remote-controlled aircraft that fathers used to fly with their sons in the local park when he was a kid. Something he had watched with a peculiar jealousy that had nothing to do with the elaborate toy. But if he could’ve heard one so could’ve Ibrahim, he knew, and the jihadist would know of its deadly significance immediately.
Lester had assembled and positioned his Marine sniper rifle, a bolt-action M40A5, with a scout sniper night-scope, next to him, and Tom had slung a Heckler & Koch MP5 over his shoulder. If Ibrahim ran from the wood and mud shack on the edge of the beach where it met the semi-arid bush, he and Lester would cut him down in a volley of fire. They’d call it self-defence and take their chances with the SDF, hoping that Crane would be able to work his CIA magic afterwards.
Tom took out his satphone and got the message that there were still two heat signatures in the hut, one stronger than the other, which, given the estimated size of the inhabitants, meant it was likely a man and a woman. Tom sucked in air, gave Lester the nod, who fixed his right eye to the night scope. Tom sent an encrypted message via the satphone.
There was no sign that a missile had been discharged except the faint flash, as if a Chinese lantern had broken apart thousands of feet above their heads. A twenty-eight foot long MQ-1C Gray Eagle drone that could travel for thirty hours and had a top speed of one hundred and seventy miles per hour had fired an AGM-114 Hellfire air-to-surface missile from one of its rotary wings. The missile, controlled by a laser guidance system, travelled at almost one thousand miles per hour and weighed over one hundred pounds, its warhead being a twenty pound anti-tank, anti-armour metal augmented charge.
The hut exploded in a massive sand cloud that rose twenty feet in the air, sending out thousands of tiny shards of wood and thimble-sized bits of mud. An opaque dust cloud peppered with grit rose in a great bowl-shape. The earth trembled, the shockwave from the enormous blast was like facing a wind tunnel, like the effect of g-force in an F-I8 fighter jet. It tore at the landscape, dislodging tufts of wiry grass, flattening the scrub in its path, and driving three feet of sand from the crest of the nearest dune.
Several of the Somalis had been shocked into a wide-eyed inertia; others began rubbing at the grains in their eyes. The debris had been flung for fifty yards or more in all directions and the crater it had created was twelve feet deep. Tom saw a piece of clothing, a wafer really, float down into the spindrift twenty yards or so off the shoreline of the great ocean.
A goat emerged onto the beach, its left leg hanging from a few strands of ligaments, making a noise so pitiable that Tom felt the urge to put it out of its misery, but resisted.
There were no signs of the occupants of the hut, who Tom knew to be Ibrahim and his hapless wife. He felt he should have persuaded Crane to allow him and Lester to take out Ibrahim with their weapons, to have saved her. But it was either the drone strike with him there or the drone strike without him there, and he knew that his own macabre desire to see Ibrahim die had brought him to this place, just as Crane had said.
Then a small crossbreed dog emerged from the scratch between the dunes and trotted onto the blackened beach and began sniffing around the wreckage. The smell of blood in its nostrils, Tom knew. He knew, too, that he had never felt as animalistic as he did this night.
But it was over.
Chapter 107
The villagers came from their huts behind the dunes, some dazed-looking, others carrying machetes and axes, bent on defending what little they had from whatever was coming next. When Tom saw a group of men coming from the rear with AK-47s and more sophisticated assault rifles and submachine guns, he knew it was time to move.
The SDF men were looking at him and Lester as if they’d been deceived, which they had, of course, and began waving their hands around histrionically and shouting obvious curses. Apart from the drone attack, Tom knew that he’d brought them to this place and put them in possible mortal danger. But he also knew that they had been charged with their safety, and the thought of being militarily discharged and plunged into a Mogadishu prison, with a bunch a cutthroats and enemies of the state, would ensure that they didn’t turn on him and Lester.
As he tried to reason with them, those who spoke pidgin English told them to go, and used their hands to motion towards the scrubland. Crane had said that if things turned bad, he and Lester should move east, take shelter and call-in a stealth Black Hawk from Camp Lemonnier to the north, which he’d arranged to have on standby for just that reason.
One of the SDF soldiers raised his assault rifle, and Tom looked at Lester, who nodded and they backed away. The SDF began shooting rounds over the heads of the approaching villagers then, and although they were a lawless bunch, they didn’t look as if they wanted their village targeted by a massive SDF force bent on revenge for murdering a squad of government men.
Tom had one thought: for both of them to get as much distance from the armed villagers in the shortest time possible.
A few minutes later, Tom was standing at the entrance to a sandy track that stretched for a hundred yards or more into the darkness, flanked by all manner of makeshift dwellings. Behind him, Lester was lying flat beside a small shack, with a tin and wood-beam roof, and Tom knew the crosshairs of his friend’s night-vision scope would be scanning the area in his own immediate vicinity. The village stretched for almost half a mile to the east and the explosion had likely woken everyone. The villagers had either made their way towards the shoreline to see what had happened, or had remained inside, troubled, no doubt, by the subsequent gunshots after the seemingly apocalyptic explosion.
With the odd kerosene lamp the only light visible, an emaciated cat edged past a stagnant pool of outboard fuel to Tom’s left, appearing to be too weak to do anything but scavenge. He began to move, too. If he got to the end of the track without interference, he’d cover Lester as he came up to join him. He didn’t have the time to filter what had happened on the beach. They just had to get the hell out.
As Tom walked he pushed a black earpiece into his left ear with his free hand, the forefinger of his right hand resting over the trigger guard of the HK, which was hanging by his side. The spiralling wire from the piece was connected to a two-way radio that was tucked into his desert-tan combat pants.
Tom got parallel to the far left-hand edge of the track and, as he turned around, radioed to Lester to move. With that an eruption of small-arms fire came from the beach, and people began shouting and screaming. Tom knew that the mutually beneficial little truce between the SDF and local Somalis had just broken down.
Chapter 108
As Lester was about to stand up, he saw the muzzle of an assault rifle sticking out about three inches from behind a ramshackle building that looked like a small grain store. He knew he had two choices: either lift his radio and warn Tom, or fire in the hope that he took out the threat. He squeezed the trigger a split second later, aiming for a spot eighteen inches back. The high-velocity round hit the stone and mud with a dull thud, but the sound of the discharge reverberated around the alley like an echo in a canyon.
Keeping his eye fixed to the scope, he watched Tom sink, spin and aim at the building. His friend’s actions, Lester knew, were the result of a controlled adrenalin dump and years of repetitive drills, which had trained his brain to react rather than go into panic mode.
He checked the roofs, the entrances to the side alley, rolled, sna
ked around and checked behind him. Satisfied he sprang up and sprinted towards Tom.
When he got to the far edge of the building he saw Tom crouching in the earth, the fingers of his right hand checking the neck pulse of the gunman, who looked like a young man, with a short beard and bloodshot eyes. He was wearing a white dishdasha, his head bare. The weapon was a couple of feet away. His legs were trembling like the haunches of a dog in winter. The round had hit the Somali in the left-hand ribcage and would have punctured his lungs.
He gurgled blood and died.
Lester watched Tom ease himself up.
“Thanks, man,” he said.
“He’s dead,” Lester said. “We gotta run for it.”
They stepped back to the track, seeing a small crowd of men moving down it at a fast walking pace, with an array of weapons in their hands from sticks to MI6s. Lester raised his rifle, but he felt Tom’s hand on the barrel, lowering it.
A shot rang out and pinged through the night air to their right before impacting a wooden barrel and causing a flurry of splinters as it passed through it.
Lester yanked Tom by the arm and dragged him behind the building where the dead Somali lay.
“What’s wrong with you, Tom? I gotta slap ya again?”
Tom gritted his teeth. “No more killing. We get beyond the village, we can call in the Black Hawk. And if you slap me again, I’ll break your nose.”
Damn right, Lester thought.
They were crouched now shoulder to shoulder beneath the hull of the beached oil tanker. Tom had said that the Somalis could track them in the semi-desert and that they could outrun them, too. But he’d added that the locals were built for endurance rather than sprints so he and Lester had raced to the edge of the village and on for another five hundred yards.