Compromised

by Tom Saric

  Compromised

  Tom Saric

  Copyright © 2019 by Tom Saric.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Published by Severn River Publishing.

  Contents

  Also By Tom Saric

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Also By Tom Saric

  Thanks for Reading

  Indicted

  INDICTED: Chapter 1

  INDICTED: Chapter 2

  INDICTED: Chapter 3

  Read INDICTED

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also By Tom Saric

  Indicted

  Compromised

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  For my wife.

  1

  32 Miles Off the Coast of the Puntland, Somalia, 2010

  Samatar ‘Sami’ Al Jelle couldn’t help but think this was the way his life was supposed to be. He sat on a bench at the stern of his fishing boat, holding a fishing rod in one hand and a half-smoked cigarette in the other. The turquoise water surrounding the boat looked like glass, broken only by the bobbing of his flaccid fishing line. Yes, this was how he was meant to live: fishing, smoking, and sunbathing.

  Sami owned one of the largest fishing boats in the Puntland. Most fishermen managed with fifteen-foot, wooden, peeling-paint boats fitted with small outboard motors. Sami’s vessel, a twenty-five-footer with a rusting metal hull was gigantic by comparison. He had a seven-man crew with him, so while most other fishermen relied on their family members to help drag in the nets, Sami had over a half-dozen young, strong, skilled workers.

  The boat was passed on to him by his father, and it had been in the family long enough that Sami considered it an heirloom. He had worked on the boat since his father and grandfather had taken him out on the sea for the first time when he was nine years old. He remembered what seemed like an endless supply of tuna spilling out from their nets. They landed on the deck and he playfully clubbed them with a broom. It all happened on this deck, on this boat.

  But that was then, and it had been a long time since the nets were full.

  When Sami’s father, Abdi Al Jelle, was on his deathbed, being suffocated by tuberculosis, he made his final wishes clear in a rare lucid moment for a man who spent months in a feverish delirium. Minutes before his death, with his entire family surrounding the sweat- drenched mattress he laid upon, Abdi announced that the fishing boat would go to his youngest son, Sami. His father’s dark eyes filled with intensity and squared on Sami’s. He said, “the boat has kept this family from hunger for fifty years; you must ensure that it continues to do so.” And then his eyes became glassy again, his breathing shallow and groaning. Then it stopped. This image was so deeply engraved in Sami’s mind that he saw them each time he stepped onto the boat. The old man had made his point.

  For several years, Sami fished daily, the only exception being during Karan, the heavy rains in the springtime. Year by year, the amount of tuna he caught diminished. At first, he was unable to turn a profit at the local market in Bosaso. The problem then worsened; he could no longer make enough money to fill the massive engine with diesel. As a result, his boat was beached. He purchased several goats and sheep to feed his wife and four young daughters. His father’s final words, once comforting, began to haunt him. You must ensure it continues to do so. But he couldn’t and his family grew hungry.

  Explanations for the declining fish population off the coast of Somalia ranged from pollution to disease to algae blooms. But Sami always suspected, and he was not alone in his suspicions, that the area had been over-fished. Not by Somalis, of course, but by huge commercial boats coming from the Arabian Peninsula, Europe, and India. Somalia was too busy in civil war to have a coast guard to protect its waters. Fishing off its coast was a free-for-all.

  But that didn’t change his situation.

  The boat has kept this family from hunger for fifty years; you must ensure that it continues to do so.

  Sami took a hard drag on his cigarette and tossed it into the water. He turned and looked at his crew pulling in empty nets from the calm blue waters. The rusty pulleys creaked as they collected the nets into neat piles on the deck. He imagined for a moment that the nets were full of fish, flopping around on the deck, and a smile broke his stern expression.

  Yes, this is how it was supposed to be: simple and uncomplicated.

  The cell phone in his pocket vibrated, breaking him from his trance. He opened the phone and read the text message.

  SHIFT CHANGE - 10 MINUTES.

  Sami walked along the deck and entered the open wheelhouse, a claustrophobic six-by- six-foot room consisting of the boat’s steering wheel, a small folding table, a tiny, humming fan, and a GPS device. Sami spread a nautical map on the table, looked at the set of coordinates scribbled on a piece of paper from his pocket and he traced a line using a parallel ruler. He glanced at the screen on his GPS and compared his current coordinates—11.17, 52.51—to those on the map. Their position was perfect. The cargo ship was going to pass right by them, almost running them over.

  Sami stepped out of the wheelhouse, scanned the horizon and barely made out the shape. The hull was a sliver against the orange sky. She seemed small to him now, but Sami knew the true enormity of the Stebelsky. More importantly, he knew how quickly she would arrive. He bounced back into the wheelhouse, turned off the boat’s engine and prepared to drop anchor. They didn’t need to go any farther.

  Sami ran out to the deck as quickly as he could without tripping on a loose deck board. His men sat along the bow’s outer ledge, talking and laughing loudly.

  “Is this what I pay you to do?”

  “What do you want us to do… fish?” one of his men said, to laughter from the group.

  “At least pretend to.” Sami dragged a small a crate along the deck and sat in front of his men. They efficiently formed a semi-circle around him. He leaned in, “I want to tell you all a story—an English story—called Moby Dick .”

  His men sat with furrowed brows. Ali, the youngest man in the group, and Sami’s nephew, spoke up, “I’ve heard this story.”

  “What is it about then, professor?” one of the men who wore fluorescent board shorts asked, waving his hand dismissively.

  “A whale.”

  “Not quite.” Sami rose from his seat and walked with deliberate steps to the edge of the deck. “It is actually about the biggest catch in the sea.” Sami kept his expression serious as he raised his hand wit
h a flourish and pointed out towards the horizon. “I call her Stebelsky.”

  The men followed Sami’s finger and saw the rapidly approaching cargo ship. The hull smashed through the calm waters, leaving a foamy wake on either side. Along the deck, stacked boxcars towered above the waterline. She moved quickly; moments earlier she had been a sliver against the sky, now she was dominating it. Soon she would be on their doorstep. They had to move quickly.

  The men jumped up and smoothly descended below deck through a small square opening on the deck’s surface. All the men had fought alongside Sami during the clan wars in the 1990s. Two of them had fought the Americans in Mogadishu in 1993 and worked that into any conversation they could. But for the last two years, the only military operations of any sort these seven men had participated in started on this boat.

  Three weeks ago, a man contacted Sami, claiming that he had information on a ship coming through the Gulf of Aden. He refused to meet in person, but delivered on his promise. The detailed manifest and shipping route coordinates of a Ukrainian cargo ship were placed inside the pages of a Somali-translated copy of Moby Dick in the library in Bosaso just as they had discussed. A man would be on the inside, working as a watchman, alerting Sami to the change in shift when they could approach the ship undetected.

  Sami stayed on deck and took in the enormity of the cargo ship. Ali approached Sami from behind and wrapped his powerful arm around Sami’s shoulder. “Uncle, we have made it.” His smile beamed.

  “This is the beginning of the mission, Ali.” Sami didn’t break his gaze with the Stebelsky. “We still have to complete it.”

  “I know.” Ali nodded. The ends of the bandana on his head began fluttering in the developing evening wind. “But I know we’ll succeed.”

  Ali was young—nineteen years old. Ali’s parents, Sami’s brother and sister-in-law, were killed in a roadside bomb when Ali was eight, and Sami had raised him. Although Sami did not have a son, he felt that if he ever had, he would have wanted him to be like Ali.

  Sami went below deck, where the crewmen were assembling weapons. Assault rifles leaned against one wall in neat rows. Against the other stacked boxes containing hand-held pistols, plasticuffs, and nylon rope. He opened a bag sitting in the middle of the floor, removed a set of black military fatigues and boots and slipped them on. He lifted a pistol out of one of the boxes, snapped on the magazine, loaded the barrel, and slotted the gun into his hip holster.

  The crewmen who had been in fluorescent shorts, but had since changed into dark fatigues, brought Sami his rifle, his M-16. It was the only one on board; the other men had to settle for AK-47s. He had been using the M-16 since his second hijacking and he knew it well. Sami knew that it shot three degrees to the left and he could feel the millisecond delay from the time he pulled the trigger to when the bullet left the barrel.

  “I was going to use it today.” the crewman smiled. He held on to it, clutching it to his chest.

  “Don’t take Sami’s gun, he’ll kill you,” another chimed in while slipping on boots.

  “Sami, why don’t you use an AK?” Fluorescent Shorts asked.

  “This has been my gun for two years.”

  “A good soldier can use any gun,” he laughed.

  “In two years, I’ve been on eight missions. Every one was a success. And you know how many men have been hurt?” Sami curled his index finger and thumb together. “Zero.”

  He grabbed the gun out of the crewman’s hand and pointed it at the group, slowly moving it along. “Do any of you want to be the first? Because I can take care of that right now.”

  The men looked at the ground.

  “Okay, you keep it.” The crewman raised his hands.

  Sami lowered the gun and boomed a laugh, slapping the man on the shoulder. Sami started up the ladder to the deck.

  “You superstitious bastard,” he called up after Sami, smiling.

  The Stebelsky was more visible now despite nighttime descending, and Sami could make out her name painted against the side of the hull. From what Sami could gather, her trajectory would miss them by about 500 meters in fifteen minutes. The wind had picked up and the water had become choppy. Waves slapped against the side of Sami’s boat.

  “Prepare the skiffs,” Sami ordered.

  2

  Sami and his men had divided themselves into the two high-speed fiberglass skiffs tied against the sides of his fishing boat. AK-47s (and Sami’s M-16), handheld pistols, rope, machetes, and more plastic handcuffs than they could possibly need buried in the wells of each skiff. They matched and surpassed the Stebelsky’s twenty knots and were on her heels within a few minutes. The pirates crouched, holding onto the sides, as the skiffs skipped through the ship’s massive wake. If all went as planned, they would be on the bridge of the ship before anyone knew they were there. Everything—from the moonless sky, the approach from the stern, the dark fatigues, even their dark skin—made them almost undetectable. The pirates kept silent, even though the cargo ship’s roaring propellers chopping through the dark water were deafening. From this point on, all communication was strictly for tactical purposes.

  While one of the skiffs went to the starboard side of the ship, Sami’s skiff kept close to the ship’s stern. Sami stood, but quickly lost his balance as the skiff rocked violently in the large wake. The momentum nearly threw him overboard, but as his feet hit the water, he grasped the skiff’s edge, held on, and managed to stop himself from being swallowed by the wake. Sami crawled back over into the skiff, dug into one of the backpacks, and removed a grappling hook. He stood on one knee and looked up at the back of the Stebelsky. The ship was huge this close up; the hull rose like an iceberg out of the sea. He launched the hook over the poop deck on the back of the ship. It sailed and gripped firmly to the safety rails. He tied the ladder to the rope attached and fed the line through so the ladder now hung off the back of the ship.

  “Go, go, go!” he could barely hear his own voice over the sound of the roaring propeller.

  His men skillfully climbed the swinging ladder towards the deck. Their dark fatigues made them look like moving shadows against the hull of the Stebelsky. Only the occasional glint of the AK-47s or the machetes gave them away.

  Sami saw movement on the deck of the ship. The crew had come out. He could barely make out the sound of the ship’s alarm siren over the crashing waves but someone had definitely sounded it. The crew was likely there just to see what was happening, to see a hijacking up close. They couldn’t risk a crewmember putting up resistance and trying to save the ship.

  Sami motioned for his men who were hanging on the rope ladder on the back of the ship, to hold their positions. He reached for his machine gun. He searched the bottom of the skiff but all he found was a lone AK-47. Someone had taken his M-16. Bastards. He grabbed the machine gun and peppered a series of bullets towards the crew, aiming high enough to miss them, but close enough to show them he was serious. The figures disappeared, ducking for cover.

  Sami checked his watch. By this point, the men from the other skiff had boarded the ship on the starboard side. The men from his skiff had reached the deck and waved all-clear, so Sami threw the AK-47 around his shoulder. Fluorescent Shorts steered the skiff in close to the Stebelsky so Sami could reach the rope ladder. As Sami reached the top, Ali offered him an arm over the rail and greeted him with a grin. Sami didn’t take Ali’s arm, nor did he reciprocate his smile. They still had work to do. Sami couldn’t relax until the bridge was secure and all of the Stebelsky’s crewmembers were in handcuffs. He learned his lesson two years earlier aboard a German yacht.

  The ship’s tower rose three stories above the ship’s deck. A series of emergency steel staircases connected to platforms on each story ran along the outside of the tower. This led up to the bridge, the ship’s navigation center. Lights were on inside the bridge, which looked like a beacon against the dark sky. Sami hoped his contact was inside, as agreed upon, waiting for him to take control of the ship.

 
; Sami’s men had already divided into three teams and were securing the crewmen. At this hour, most of the ship’s men were below deck, so he sent two teams downstairs. Sami and Ali were the third team and their objective was to secure the bridge.

  They moved along the deck between the rows of stacked metal boxcars. At each corner, Ali crouched, while Sami stepped in a wide arc watching for an ambush at a corner. It was precautionary; cargo crews were trained to surrender, but every once in awhile, someone would try to be a hero.

  They arrived at the foot of the tower, directly below the bridge of the Stebelsky. As they approached the tower, the blaring alarm became louder. Ali walked up the steps leading to the first platform. Sami took a position covering his blind side as Ali moved upwards, the sound of his footsteps drowned out by the ship’s siren. Ali scanned the area on the platform just below the bridge and raised his fist, signaling ‘clear’ for Sami. Sami moved up the steps, continuing the procedure, knowing that they had at least one man on the inside that wouldn’t be hostile.

  The final stairway that led up to the bridge was a vertical ladder, and it led through an opening the size of a manhole. Sami looked up through the opening, his gun pointed, his finger on the trigger. He waited a long moment, at least five seconds, to satisfy himself that it was clear of any hostiles. He edged up the stairs, one hand on the rails, the other on the machine gun.