The Delta Solution

by Patrick Robinson

  There was a sharp crack from the screaming missile, and then a brightblue, flaring light burst into the sky, lighting up the area below like Yankee Stadium. Sheikh Sharif’s running troops were suddenly out in the open. For thirty-five seconds, 300,000 candela (the military’s basic unit of luminous intensity) floodlit the barren plain, with the main force of Sharif’s men now only three to five hundred yards out, smack in the range of defending machine guns.

  Night had briefly turned to day.

  Elmi Ahmed, assuming a loose command on the ramparts, ordered: “FIRE AT WILL!”

  The two high Russian machine guns opened up a withering field of fire, the barrels swivelling to and fro, across the vanguard of the enemy attack. In the first thirty seconds they poured more than six hundred rounds into the al-Qaeda force. The four other guards, selecting their targets with care, fired nonstop, cutting down the Arabs who would steal the pirate gold.

  The attackers went down two and three at a time. As they fell, the flares above them died, and only the cries of the wounded could be heard. Ahmed’s gunners kept going. With their ample supplies of ammunition, they fired steadily into the dark until the veteran pirate called it off. Sheikh Sharif himself had taken four bullets full in the chest and was dead before he hit the ground.

  In less than a minute, every one of the thirty al-Qaeda attackers was dead or dying, although the full horror of the carnage would not be seen until first light. By then there would be no survivors, because each of these men had, without exception, taken an average of five or six machine-gun bullets.

  Meanwhile, the second wave of Sharif’s assault was swarming around to the east and was regrouping five hundred yards short of the wall. Their knowledge was limited. They knew their comrades had successfully bombed the courtyard, and they had seen the giant flare in the sky. But they were too far distant and running too fast to look back. The volleys from the machine guns had confused them and they had not known who was shooting whom. They were receiving no instructions because their CO’s cell phone was dead, like its owner.

  Unknown to any of them, Salat had summoned Colonel Patrick Zeppi at the very outset of the one-sided battle, and with supreme organization, he and fifteen of his warriors came charging around the corner of the west wall, from which Admiral Ismael Wolde and his men were already firing at the incoming al-Qaeda second army.

  Colonel Zeppi’s troops, many of them veterans of other Somali wars, stood back, close to the garrison, and let fly with their Kalashnikovs, coming at the raiders from their left flank.

  The instant slaughter was, if anything, worse than that which Elmi and his men had inflicted. Some of the al-Qaeda men had gone down in the opening volleys; others had turned to run back to the east toward the coast. Others had kept going straight, racing for the town, trying to find cover from the merciless barrage being aimed at them with massively superior weaponry and huge volumes of ammunition.

  No one made it. Mohammed Salat had been preparing for this day for many months. Sporadic raids by al-Qaeda forces and heavy-handed demands for a share of the pirates’ prize money were commonplace in the north on the shores of the Gulf of Aden. But al-Qaeda was getting desperate, and Salat’s view had long been: They might be successful somewhere else, but they’ll never break down Haradheere.

  The two wounded guardsmen were removed to the well-equipped Haradheere hospital, and at first light the village elders called in their two municipal bulldozers and JCB mechanical diggers to clear away the rubble outside the gates.

  The workers were also tasked with digging a mass grave in the scrubland in order to bury the dead assault troops. This was not an act of respect toward Islam; it was standard cleansing and health procedure. To prevent the dead bodies from rotting in the burning sun, they would be immediately loaded into the pits with heavy quantities of lime.

  Haradheere had its own health and sanitation officer, paid for by the pirate revenue. The entire cost of rebuilding and minor repairs would be taken care of by the office of Mohammed Salat. And that evening there would be a formal dinner at the house, whose blasted windows were already being repaired.

  Salat’s guard commanders would be there, along with the pirate leaders who had fought on the ramparts that night. Wives would not be invited. This was a military debriefing, a time to assess future dangers, a time to strengthen and improve.

  And above all, from Mohammed’s point of view, it was a time to congratulate his troops. Perhaps to promote the warlord Zeppi from colonel to brigadier. Yes, he would bestow that honor. The colonel would like that. Almost as much as Salat would enjoy his continuing role as god of all he surveyed.

  AL-QAEDA’S WORLD HEADQUARTERS tends to shift with the winds of war. There was of course a time when it was fixed in the high Hindu Bush on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, bin Laden country. For a while it bloomed in Iraq, and then it returned to the Afghan lowlands, and then back to its beginnings in the Swat Valley north of Peshawar.

  However, the carpet bombing of Tora-Bora by the US, the crushing defeats everywhere close to Baghdad, and the suddenly aggressive stance of the Pakistani government had effectively caused al-Qaeda to move on yet again. The professionals in the CIA, FBI, NSA, and MI6 were all inclined to believe its new headquarters was on its way to Africa.

  But before that could be completed, al-Qaeda’s senior commanders put down roots in Yemen, the Islamic stronghold that sits in a wilderness of sand dunes at the foot of the Arabian Peninsula on the Gulf of Aden. It’s hot, swept twice-yearly by powerful monsoons, and the most heavily populated of all the countries on the peninsula. It’s an arms-dealing mecca in the Middle East, and Mohammed Salat is one of its principal customers.

  Communications have been excellent for many years in Yemen’s inland capital city, Sana, which traces its roots back almost 2,000 years to a time when the country was already over 1,000 years old. The one exception to these smooth lines of contact was satellite calls into the Somali hinterlands, where everything was slow, difficult, and inefficient. It was a place battered almost to death by war.

  For al-Qaeda commanders operating in remote areas of Somalia, trying to organize their own attacks on the West, it proved nearly impossible to report, brief, and debrief the high command in Sana’s Old City. It took a day and a half to report the inside story of the magnificent blast in Addis Ababa, by which time it was already on the network news of Al Jazeera television.

  The shocking report of the massacre outside Haradheere stood unreleased, behind a curtain of silence, made inevitable by the absence of survivors to call in with details of the ghastly defeat. In turn, Mohammed Salat had issued orders for a complete news blackout since he had no wish to inflame al-Qaeda into yet another unprovoked attack, with new and perhaps greater numbers of troops.

  Which meant no one in Yemen had the slightest idea that anything had happened in the Haradheere area. It took more than a week for anything to leak out, and that came from a Mogadishu arms dealer, Kwesi Garoweh, who had a regular weekly conference with Sheikh Sharif and was mystified when the al-Qaeda commander failed to answer either call or text.

  The man knew something was wrong. He had two other numbers to try, and there was no response from either. So he sent two of his men to the old camp, two hundred miles up the Shebele River, and, when they called in, there was nothing to report. The sheikh had vanished and taken his entire army with him. Local herders had no idea where they had gone. However the arms dealers had come this far, and they saw no point in going home to Mogadishu without finding something.

  So they pressed on to the town of Beledweyne, which was big enough to have its own airstrip. And there they spent hours trying to plug into an al-Qaeda network. They were just about to give up when they met a young woman working as a waitress in a bar. She had a friend who was going out with one of Sheikh Sharif’s young warriors. Four hours later, just before midnight, they were told the “army” had decamped to Haradheere and was not expected back.

  Kwesi took over from ther
e. A strict businessman with no political or religious guidelines, he traded up and down the Somali coast and had a customer in Haradheere, the pirate ship captain Hassan Abdi, master of the Mombassa. And the ex–Puntland fisherman was delighted to recount the crushing defeat his men had inflicted on al-Qaeda.

  The precise route of the communication was not clear. But from that point, the news travelled fast. And a day later, the al-Qaeda high command in Yemen was told that one of their top Somali forces had been wiped out.

  This was greeted with enormous consternation, and warning was issued to al-Qaeda cells all over the continent that the Haradheere garrison of the Somali Marines was protected by probably the most heavily armed private military force on the Horn of Africa. According to Kwesi’s wellsourced report, Sheikh Sharif’s men had been cut down by superb weaponry and highly skilled modern tactics.

  All al-Qaeda forces in the coming months should avoid direct contact with any operations, land-based or offshore, which emanated from Haradheere. Apparently they had killed without mercy, and, when the battle was won, they just went right on killing, ignoring signals to surrender, dismissing the pleas of Sheikh Sharif who was asking for terms ten minutes after the conflict ended.

  By the time the al-Qaeda officers had finished, Mohammed Salat himself had started it and had torn into the heroes from the Arabian Peninsula while they were asleep.

  The commanders, aided by a mullah, swore by the prophet that Allah had vowed revenge upon them all and had personally blessed the peaceloving martyrs of the Beledweyne camp. God would give them justice. And there was no other god but Allah. And Allah was great. And he awaited his sons on the other side of the bridge, where the three trumpets had already sounded a welcome when the martyrs approached the gates of paradise.

  The recounting of the Islamic massacre at the hands of godless tribesmen in Somalia ripped through the Old City of Sana, gaining authenticity as it went. From the moment it reached the ears of the al-Qaeda C-in-C, it took one day, nine hours, and twenty-seven minutes to arrive in the office of Harrison Darrow, the CIA’s Yemen bureau chief.

  Harrison worked from three rooms behind an ancient basket shop for a rent that might be termed exorbitant but that bought him privacy and secrecy. It also had a secret passage out through the silversmith next door.

  A forty-two-year-old native of upstate New York, the CIA bureau chief had started life with a scholarship to Cornell, where he completed a master’s in criminology. His first job was in the police department in Washington, DC. His promotion was rapid, and he applied only twice to Langley before the CIA accepted him, with glowing references from the police.

  Harrison was an intellectual by nature, and he missed very little that was happening in Yemen. He understood consequences and ramifications, and within five minutes of receiving news of the battle in Haradheere from his contacts in the Old City, he had flashed an e-mail to Bob Birmingham in Langley, who lost no time informing Admiral Andy Carlow at SPECWARCOM.

  In these circles, in these troubled days, anything that involved Somalia or its pirate gangs counted as hot news. Because this quiet two weeks was an obvious calm before the bastards hit another oceangoing tanker corporation for another multimillion-dollar ransom.

  CHAPTER 7

  HARRISON DARROW MOVED OUT INTO THE CITY, MAKING CALLS, trying to discover precisely how the Somali pirates had crushed a recognizable al-Qaeda army. He did not know precise numbers, and for a while he thought Sheikh Sharif may have suffered perhaps one hundred casualties.

  It quickly became clear that there were fifty dead Islamists. And what Harrison wanted to know was the content of the pirates’ arsenal. If they could mow down a trained assault force, which had been hard-schooled in the al-Qaeda camps, they were a match for anyone. And right now that appeared to be any major oceangoing merchant vessel.

  “These guys must have some serious gear,” muttered Harrison, as he made his way to one of the biggest arms dealers in the city, Najib Saleh, a man he had befriended assiduously since arriving in Yemen eighteen months earlier.

  Saleh looked nothing like the slick, impeccably dressed prototype of an arms dealer, who typically sported a Savile Row suit and fez. He was a hefty native of Aden, he always wore Arab clothing, and no one had ever seen him work in any form whatsoever, except on his cell phone, talking to his bookmaker in London.

  His office appeared to be a coffee shop in the Old City, where he held court at an outside table, sipping special ginger-spiced qahwa coffee and tucking into a plate of bint as-sahn, egg-rich sweet pastry often dipped in a mixture of clarified butter and honey.

  He was said to be the richest man in the city. And he did a lot of laughing. No one would ever have guessed that Mr. Najib was a widely travelled world expert on warfare. Or that he had regularly sold fighter jets and warships to Third World countries, not to mention vast supplies of brand-new Russian missiles and ammunition to anyone who wanted to buy.

  He had never signed a contract or made a deal he did not honor. His financial terms were simple: half down, the rest on delivery. If there was a problem, he would absorb the loss. No one ever defaulted, and no one ever tried to defraud him. Except for one royally stupid African minister of defense, who was later found decapitated in the jungle.

  From the biggest shipment to the smallest cache, Mr. Najib always gave the matter his personal attention. Rumor had it that he had once sold a submarine to a landlocked nation in Central Africa and refunded their money when they realized they needed an ocean in which to park it. One of his many clients in the gulf bailed him out and took the underwater warship off his hands for a profit believed to be close to $10 million.

  Harrison Darrow knew with absolute certainty that if anyone in the country knew who had armed Haradheere, it was Najib Saleh. To his great relief, the great man was reading the newspaper in his usual outside chair, his trusty pot of qahwa well within reach.

  The two had become fast friends and frequently dined together, except when Darrow’s wife, Veronica, visited because she regarded the corpulent Arab as possibly the sleaziest man she had ever met and, owing to his chosen profession, a menace on the face of the earth.

  Harrison found him, unfailingly, a fascination. “Aha,” said the beaming Najib, “and how is my American friend today? Are you here to greet me and pass the time, or are you in search of information of such quality only I can provide it?”

  “The latter,” said Harrison. “And if you can help, I’ll buy you dinner at Taj Sheba tonight.”

  Najib sighed. “You Americans,” he said. “You think your money will buy you anything and everything. But here in the Middle East we have higher ideals. As you must by now have realized.”

  Harrison sat down. Najib poured him coffee and offered him one of the sweet breads and the honey dip. Harrison grinned and accepted both. “Pure indulgence,” he said. “Do we have a deal?”

  “Of course,” replied Najib. “We always have a deal. What’s on your mind?”

  “Just a little place on the coast of Somalia,” said Harrison. “It’s called Haradheere.”

  “So it is,” said the arms dealer. “I heard about it too. A very nasty little battle, I believe.”

  “When did you hear?”

  “Sometime yesterday afternoon,” he replied. “The al-Qaeda guys speak of nothing else. They are very shaken.”

  “Guess the tribesmen kicked some very major ass,” said Harrison. “I heard there were no survivors.”

  “I heard the same. What specifically do you want to know? I’ll tell you everything, but my knowledge is incomplete. Do I still get dinner if it’s not enough for you?”

  “Absolutely not,” said Harrison. “Can I have another one of those pastries, while you still appear useful to me?”

  “One only,” chuckled Najib. “That might be all I get today.”

  “I doubt that, old buddy. And I’ll try not to ask you direct and possibly incriminating questions.”

  “Thoughtful. I like that.”
r />   “Okay. I don’t want to know if you sold weapons to Haradheere. But tell me if you’d like and, more importantly, tell me what they have.”

  “As you know, my dear Harrison, that little town has all the money in the world. All stolen, all stashed away.”

  “So I understand. Were the al-Qaeda guys trying to steal it?”

  “Of course. There were fifty tribesmen armed with Kalashnikovs and mortars. They did some damage, but the Haradheere tribesmen were very superior, well led and well equipped.”

  “Any idea what they were firing?”

  “Of course. I have always been their main weapons dealer, although they get some ammunition from Mogadishu. Certainly I have shipped them probably fifty brand-new Russian PK machine guns, twenty pounds, heavy and very effective—650 rounds per minute.”

  “Jesus,” said Harrison. “They planning to start a war or something?”

  “Probably not,” said Najib. “But they seem to know precisely how to finish one. Those PKMs have enough of a bang to double as antiaircraft weapons, you know, fix-mounted on a Stepanov tripod, night-sights, anything your little heart desires.”

  “You mean they can knock a goddamned aircraft out of the sky?”

  “No trouble. The modernized PKM is the finest weapon around at the moment. It plainly made short work of the al-Qaeda rabble.”

  “What else does Haradheere have?”

  “Well, I have shipped them crates of Kalashnikov’s best,” said Najib. “All brand new. Current models: the RPK-74s, that’s a handheld, light machine gun, seventy-five-round drum magazines, selective fire. Plus the modern AK-47. I visit the factory a couple of times a year.”

  “You do? Where is it?”