The Janson Option (13 page)

Ahmed looked at him like he had lost his mind. “Whatever turns you on, Isse.”

Isse turned around and melted into the crowd.

Ahmed watched him go, wondering how fucked up Isse really was. He knew the Amriki rap. The religionist dickhead's next line went, “Sell this life for endless happiness down the road.”

Which was lame code for martyr suicide. But even Isse couldn't be that stupid.

W
hen night closed on the ocean, Janson and Kincaid blacked out head-to-toe in warm-water wet suits and marched down the beach. There was no moon, but the gentle surf gleamed under a sky white with stars. They walked the hard sand at the edge of the rising tide. The water erased the distinctive fish-spine prints of their assault boots.

Janson flipped down his JF-Gen4 PSFE Panoramic night-vision goggles when he reckoned they had gone a mile. The built-in GPS nailed their position. He led Kincaid up the sloping beach into the palm forest.

Kincaid said, “What's that smell? Paint?”

“I had to spray it flat black. The damned thing came red and white. You could see it at a thousand meters.”

Flat black, the hydrofoil was nearly invisible on a boat trailer with balloon tires. They pulled it into the surf, floated it beyond the low breakers, stashed the trailer back in the trees, and returned to the water, erasing footprints and wheel tracks with a palm frond Janson had cut earlier.

With its foils retracted, the wedge-shaped scooter—high in back, lower in front, ten feet long—floated in half a foot of water. They waded it out until they were knee deep and climbed into the seats, Kincaid in front. She engaged the electric motor, which was as silent as advertised, and drove it toward the open sea.

From the west, over the sea, they heard the hollow whisper of a turbine aircraft engine. The sound intensified to a growl. A bulbous form drifted down from the stars and headed straight at them. Its silhouette appeared ungainly—like a flying guppy, said Kincaid—but just as it was about to touch the water, two hundred meters ahead of them, the lower half of its fuselage split in two, lowering a pair of wide-spread floats.

The engine throttled back to a murmur. Spray glittered, and a sleek and sturdy ten-passenger high-wing single-engine de Havilland floatplane surfed to a quiet stop twelve seconds after it touched water. Kincaid approached from the rear, avoiding the propeller. Janson leaned out of the scooter and flipped a line over a cleat on the back of the nearest float. Kincaid throttled ahead and turned the airplane around to face the sea.

A section of the fuselage that encompassed the two rearmost windows hinged downward, forming a ramp to a five-foot-wide cargo hatch. Janson and Kincaid scrambled onto the right-hand float and threw their waterproof combat packs through the hatch. From the dark within, the copilot passed down a line. They hooked it to the scooter, which they guided up the ramp as the electric winch took the weight, and hauled it into the plane. They climbed in after it. All but the forward two passenger seats had been removed, creating a capacious hold with more than enough room for the scooter.

“Go,” said Janson to the shadow of the pilot.

But instead of gunning the engine to takeoff, the pilot taxied slowly, making just enough headway to hold the aircraft into the onshore breeze. When he turned around in his seat, Janson's Panoramics registered an aristocratic-looking Indian Sikh with a luxurious beard and mustache and a lightweight Sennheiser ANR headset wedged under his turban. He nodded politely to Kincaid, and addressed Janson in a cheerful upper-crust English public-school accent.

“We have a sticky wicket with the weather, sir. The captain of the first tanker dhow reports that his barometer is dropping. As I'm sure you know, low-pressure systems churn wind and waves.”

“I've been tracking the low since morning,” Janson replied. “It's moving north-northeast. The winds behind it are dropping to less than four knots.”

“Jolly good. Nonetheless, the dhow captain reports three-foot seas.”

“What's your limit?”

“Unfortunately, this is not a flying boat that lands on a stable hull,” the captain said, explaining that the Otter, being perched high on twin floats, needed calmer water to land safely. Sea heights of three feet would push her limits.

Janson flipped his Panoramics so they could talk face-to-face by the glow of the instruments. “Why don't we take off now?” he said. “Fly just short of our point of no return, where we can query the captain again while we still have enough fuel to return to the Seychelles if the seas are too high.”

“Excellent, sir,” answered the pilot. “I was hoping you would say that. Why don't you and the lady buckle your seat belts?”

The P&W6-27 turbine wound up to a high-pitched buzz. The plane—less burdened with Janson, Kincaid, and their scooter than it would be with its civilian capacity of ten passengers and luggage—surged across the flat water for a very short distance and lifted immediately into the air. Seven minutes after she had touched down to the sea, her floats folded under the fuselage again, reducing drag.

The pilot leveled off at only a hundred feet and there the Otter flew for twenty minutes under Seychelles radar. They clocked thirty-five miles and, finally out of range, ascended to ten thousand feet and continued west at a fuel-saving 130 knots. Janson and Kincaid field-stripped the MTAR assault rifles that were waiting, brand-new, in boxes, and let off a few test rounds out a back window.

Then Paul Janson closed his eyes and went to sleep and Jessica Kincaid sprang forward to kneel behind the pilots, hoping to swap plane talk. The copilot was a South African named Clarence Choh, and she learned he was an ex-mercenary who had gotten bored ferrying rich fishermen to remote “islands in paradise.”

The senior man was Kirpal Singh. He was a former Air India captain who had retired young, he told her, “in order to enjoy life more.” Kirpal Singh, Kincaid quickly concluded, was a lot more talkative than most pilots, rattling on nonstop about the meaning of life and then shifting into high gear about “my personal paradox—”

“How fast did you take off?”

“Sixty knots.”

“I noticed you held her nose down.”

“Better believe it,” the South African said with a laugh. “You've got to apply a ton of forward control column to keep her from pitching up. Nose high, she'll stall in a flash—particularly if you load your center of gravity too far aft.”

“She's a lady in every other aspect,” said Kirpal Singh, “but absolutely unforgiving about her nose. A tiny bump cocks her up, and if you fail to act quickly, her nose continues to pitch. Next thing you know it's too late for the aerodynamic capability of the elevators, in which event recovery will not be possible.”

“That's Indian aviator speak for ‘you crash,'” said Clarence Choh.

“What's your max crosswind landing?” asked Kincaid.

“Ten knots, at ninety degrees,” said Choh.

“But if you hold the weather wing down to stop it lifting,” said the Indian, “you can get away with fifteen.”

The South African laughed again. “Better have a long run out. Full flaps and crosswinds are a definite no-no.”

Janson woke up in an hour. Kincaid slept. Three hours out, they radioed the tanker dhow. The seas were still three feet. And the wind had not dropped.

“They're no worse,” said Janson. “Let's do it.”

The copilot looked dubious. Kincaid noticed that Kirpal Singh seemed more open to taking a chance. She said, “You were telling me about crosswinds. If the waves are spaced far enough apart, couldn't you land in the smoother water between the rows—across the wind?”

“That should be fun,” said the South African. “A straight-and-narrow landing in a crosswind.”

“But you're good to fifteen knots,” said Kincaid.

“The lady has a point,” said the Indian. “It's worth a try.”

The copilot looked incredulous. “Kirpal! What if the troughs are too narrow to land? By then we're out of fuel. Then what?”

“Obviously we'll have no choice but to land, regardless,” said Singh, and it finally dawned on Jessica Kincaid that there was something a little odd about the unusually talkative pilot.

The copilot said, “And get pitched ass-over-teakettle if we catch a wing.”

The Indian shrugged. “The dhow is right there to pick us up.”

“Right,” said the South African. “Provided we manage to climb out of the wreck before it sinks.”

“The empty fuel tanks will keep us afloat until we climb out.”

“Wait a minute!” said Choh. He planted a sure hand on Singh's shoulder and turned him firmly toward him. “Let me see your eyes… Are you off your chems?”

The pilot smiled. “I have felt for the past several days that I don't need medicine anymore. In fact, I feel wonderful. Almost euphoric.”

“
Almost?
Jesus Christ.” Clarence Choh turned to Kincaid and spoke as if the pilot were not sitting beside him. “He's bipolar. Stops the pills and gets high as a kite.”

“I am a very fine pilot,” said the Sikh.

“That you are, mate. You are the hottest pilot I've ever flown with.” Again Choh spoke to Kincaid as if they were alone. “The goddamnedest thing is, he's even better when he's nuts. But he is nuts.”

“I am wonderfully nuts,” said Kirpal Singh. “It is settled. We will rendezvous with the dhow as planned, refill our tanks, and loft this lovely lady and her gentleman friend on to Puntland, and while they go about their business we will refuel again at sea and lurk offshore until they radio us to pick up them and their friends and loft them home to the Seychelles for a honeymoon—if they've enjoyed such a good time ashore that a honeymoon seems like a delicious idea.”

“What if we end up in the drink?” asked Choh. “Who tells the ‘merchant of death' his aircraft's at the bottom of the ocean? Mr. Moscow is not a gentle soul.”

Paul Janson said, “My clients will cover the cost of the plane. They will make it right with Mr. Moscow.”

“Righto!” said the Sikh. “Onward, into the unknown.”

Janson and Kincaid continued to alternate hours of sleep until, in the middle of the seventh hour, with the barometer in the fueling sector still dropping, and the Otter's gauges nudging Empty, the pilot ordered them to put on lifejackets.

They descended in the dark.

At two hundred feet, Singh switched on landing lights.

“Seat belts, please, lady and gentleman.”

The Catspaw operators belted in quickly, motivated as much by a tightening of the pilot's jaw as the sight of the Indian Ocean scored with whitecaps.

“This sucks,” said the South African. “Six-foot seas.”

“Four feet,” said the Indian.

“Five if they're an inch.”

“Radio the dhow to switch on his lights.”

“How are you going to land in that?”

“I am not landing before the dhow shows me precisely where he is. Radio, First Officer Choh!”

Clarence Choh did as Kirpal Singh ordered. A half mile ahead, a two-masted, oceangoing wooden dhow—wheelhouse high in the stern—materialized in a circle of electric light. It was moving under power, its yards and sails struck down and suspended between the masts and the wheelhouse.

The Otter descended with its nose steeply pitched.

“One hundred feet,” called the copilot, and Janson saw Arab sailors in T-shirts wrestling a hose up from the hold. A sudden violent roll when the sea dropped under the dhow's starboard side sent one of them flying across the deck, gripping a railing for his life.

“I don't love this,” said the South African.

“Piece of cake,” said the Indian. He banked and turned the high-wing floatplane, lining onto a course parallel with the rolling seas. Janson estimated the corridor between the rollers to be narrower than the Otter's wingspan.

A gust of wind shoved under the right wing. A skillful touch on the right aileron leveled it. Then Singh raised the nose and called over his shoulder, “And now we'll attempt to put into practice the lady's interesting idea. Do not worry, madam. You didn't invent the maneuver. It has been tried many times before.”

Singh brought the floatplane down, flying ten knots faster than he would have were he landing directly into the wind. The plane was going too fast. It was refusing to descend the last few feet. But the crosswind smacking the starboard side and threatening to shove under the wing and flip her over made attempting to “airbrake” by fully lowering flaps suicidal. Singh throttled back. There was a moment of near silence.

The floats hit hard. Lacking the cushioning effect of the shock absorbers on wheeled landing gear, the plane shook from an impact that felt like it would break it into pieces. The tail snapped up, the nose dropped, and the front of the floats buried into the water.

Singh coolly raised the back elevators and revved the propeller and the plane straightened up and raised the floats out of the water. But just as it appeared that the phenomenally skilled pilot had pulled it off, an errant sea slipped out from under the left float. The plane fell to the left. A corresponding wave rose under the right float, lifting it and tipping the plane farther to the left. The left wing caught its tip in a wave. The wave curled over it and dragged it under. Still hurtling down the narrow corridor between the waves at forty miles an hour, the Otter began to tumble.

P
aul Janson banged open his seat belt, pushed out the passenger door, and jumped.

Forty knots of prop wash flung salt spray like a water cannon. He landed one boot on the float, leaned into the speeding plane's slipstream, kicked off the float, and clamped both hands on the wing strut. He pumped his legs to swing his weight farther outboard to counterbalance the wing that the sea was pulling under. The wing fought like a maddened animal. The pounding water, the roar of the engine, the propeller wind—all were chaos in the dark until he sensed a purposeful rush behind him.

He reached back for Kincaid.

Their hands locked.

Janson used his strength and her momentum to catapult her past him. Kincaid grabbed the wing with both hands and slung her 130 pounds farther outboard to add to his weight, levering it down. The Otter hung in suspension, port wingtip angling toward the sea bottom, starboard wing thrusting at the stars. Then it tugged its wing out of the water, slowly righted on both floats, and glided to a stop in the lee of the dhow.

Kirpal Singh cut the engine, and the propeller stopped thrashing. Sailors threw lines. Janson and Kincaid caught them and passed the hose to Clarence Choh, who rammed the hooded nozzle into the Otter's fuel port.

“T
HESE ARE NOT ROADS
,” Home Boy Gutaale complained to his driver and his bodyguards. “These are not even goat paths.”

The red-bearded warlord had been two and a half days leading a convoy of armored-up SUVs from Mogadishu to the Puntland town of Eyl. To call the roads horrible was to utter a statement without meaning. His driver, Mohammed, the cheeky one who had been through the wars with him, said, “Goat paths do not befit the future George Washington of Soomaaliweyn.”

Everyone laughed and Gutaale swore an oath that had his fighters smiling one second and cheering the next: “When we have
won
. When Soomaaliweyn is
one
. We will kill every tax collector who collected money for roads. But before we kill them, we will cut their feet off so their stumps can feel what it was like to walk their roads to Eyl.”

The goat road meandered across a land of rock and sand and hellhole heat wherever the hills blocked the wind. For miles at a time it was so empty it looked like no human had ever lived there, and so hot that no one would ever want to. Then, around a bend, boys would materialize from nowhere, leading a donkey or chasing a camel. Then more empty miles, hotter and hotter even as the sun fell low in the sky.

The hills were casting long shadows and the light was fading when suddenly his cell phone rang.

“Speak to me!” said Home Boy Gutaale. Thanks to cell towers sprinkled forty miles apart, his mind was connected to a world his body could not at this moment imagine. A cherished lieutenant was calling a heads-up from the far side of the moon in Mogadishu.

“Stay off the beach. There will be a raid tonight.”

Gutaale did not ask how his man had learned that the beach would be dangerous. Fresh intelligence was a payoff for success. When a warlord looked like he could keep the promise of a better tomorrow, information flowed his way from hackers eavesdropping on Combined Force frequencies, loyal comrades observing from supply docks, European intel operators tossing morsels to be remembered as friendship, global corporations extending a helping hand for future favors, and rich expatriates paving the road home.

He telephoned a fishing captain in Eyl, a clansman who owned a bigger boat than the fish it caught could pay for, thanks to the generosity of the future George Washington of Soomaaliweyn. Gutaale imagined the scene as the son who answered ran to his father mouthing,
“It is he,”
and the father snatching the phone from his hand, spitting chewed leaves from his mouth, and putting the wad on a blanket beside him.

“Yes, my brother. May God be with you.”

“Cook food for twelve fighters and ready your boat.”

A
T DUSK,
P
AUL
J
ANSON
ordered Kirpal Singh and Clarence Choh to land on an open patch of ocean fifteen miles off the Puntland shore. They had flown at wave tops, earlier, under the radar of a naval patrol. Now they were alone, the sea as empty as it had been all day. It was the evening after they left the Seychelles. After refueling, they had waited for hours bouncing under tow behind the slow-moving dhow in order to time a night raid on
Tarantula
. The pilots had slept on the dhow and returned complaining of cockroaches. Janson and Kincaid had slept on the plane. Catspaw contacts confirmed that the yacht was still cruising back and forth off Eyl.

The water was much calmer four hundred miles from the low-pressure system, typical western Indian Ocean conditions for July, Singh said. He surfed the Otter to an easy stop on six-inch wavelets. Janson and Kincaid lowered the cargo door and eased the dark scooter down the ramp. A swell undulated beneath the surface, gathering steam as it headed for the coast.

They got their rifles, packs, radios, sat and cell phones, and GPSs, climbed onto the Quadrofoil, and did a radio check with Singh and Choh. Kincaid deployed the hydrofoils—four curved appendages, two in front, two in back that extended three feet into the water. She tongued a tsk on her wireless lip microphone. Janson tsked back that he heard her in his earphone.

Then he tsked twice. Go.

Kincaid switched on the electric motor. The Quadrofoil gathered way. She increased the power. It picked up speed, and she kept increasing it until she felt a lifting sensation, as if something pacing them underwater was surfacing with them on its back.

She turned her head and spoke aloud. “Hang on, Janson. We're outta here.” She switched wide open and the scooter jumped up on the tips of its hydrofoils. Water resistance faded as the craft reduced the wetted surface of its hull from fifty square feet to a few square inches. They raced west for the coast, skimming the water at thirty miles an hour.

A
LLEGRA
H
ELMS
thought she heard the drones again.

Tarantula
was cruising slowly in the dark, endlessly back and forth, a mile off the beach. The pirates heard them too and freaked out. They herded her, Hank and Susan, and the grieving diplomat into the middle of the darkened bridge, away from the windows. The pirate steering the ship crouched behind the helm.

The EU Combined Force was patrolling the night sky, and the Somali pirates were taking no chances on radar, infrared, and night-vision sniper scopes. They were so scared they spoke in whispers. Who knew? If unmanned surveillance planes could see a man in the dark and shoot him in the dark, why couldn't they hear him in the dark?

And there they huddled, seated on the deck, hostages and pirates watching one another's frightened faces by the dim red glow of the instrument panels the pirates left on so they could see to guard them. They had decided that red light, which protected night vision, could not be seen by the drones. Allegra had no idea if that was true, but the belief comforted them, comforted her, too.

The previous night the drones had buzzed overhead. But this time they sounded different. Closer? She wondered. Lower? Or more of them? The noise was a different pitch, and it occurred to her in dueling flashes of hope and dread that there were more aircraft overhead tonight, not only drones, but airplanes and helicopters.

Hope that soldiers had come to rescue her.

Dread of the shooting. The skiffs that motored out from the beach with the daily bundles of green khat had brought more weapons on every run—more and more until the yacht resembled a war zone. Now the pirates guarding them and looting the cabins carried multiple pistols, automatic rifles and rocket launchers slung over their shoulders, and grenades dangling from their belts. The guns in some way were less frightening than the knives most had carried when they first boarded. Until she imagined them running around in a panic when the shooting started. With all those weapons going off at once, how long before a stray shot cut her down? How long before bullets knocked her on the deck like Allen Adler, gushing blood?

She felt the dread overwhelm her. Was she lost? She remembered a phrase from a poem she had spoken in a play at the Nightingale-Bamford School when she first learned English, and now it made her tremble.

Except, that was not entirely true. She had wedded herself, against their will, to escape her folk. And to the far countries where she had landed, she had ventured on her own. Until now.

A new sound intruded, a propeller plane coming in low.

With a hollow
pop,
a phosphorus flare lighted the sky. It drifted to Earth, a brilliant white fire blazing above the fiberglass skiffs the pirates had lined up on the beach like a row of teeth. Now she heard the thudding of helicopter blades. It was flying without lights, but she traced the noise from the sea, passing close to the yacht, then on toward the beach, where it began firing down on the boats. In seconds they were burning.

The pirates ran outside on the bridge wings, raging at their helplessness, shouting and shooting their weapons into the air. When Maxammed finally got them under control by battering several heads with the long, pistol-like rifle that was always strapped to his wrist, the flames on the beach were leaping in the dark, the helicopter had disappeared, and she heard the drones no more, only a ringing in her ears from the guns, and the sound of an old man, the retired diplomat whose wife had been killed, weeping with despair.

Allegra Helms stroked his shoulder. He cried harder and she felt as useless as she had when she couldn't stop Adler's bleeding. “Don't be afraid,” she whispered.

“They're going to kill us all,” he sobbed. “The lucky ones died first.”

She had no answer, only a silly memory. She knew those words—The lucky ones died first—from
Treasure Island
. Or did Captain Hook say it to Peter Pan?
Speak up!
she thought.
Be useful.

“Let me ask you something,” she whispered.

“What?”

“‘The lucky ones died first.' Is that from
Treasure Island
or
Peter Pan
?”

“Neither. It's ‘Them that die'll be the lucky ones.' Long John Silver says it in
Treasure Island
. There's nothing about being first.”

“I was sure it included ‘first,'” she said, and the frightened old man rewarded her effort by drying his eyes on his sleeve and replying with a sound in his throat that sounded slightly more like a chuckle than another sob.

“It should have been ‘first.' We know Long John wants to kill them all in the end. He's only warning them that if they fight back, he will make them suffer first. If they don't fight back, they get to die an easy death.”

And suddenly it was Allegra Helms, tumbling back into despair, who needed comforting. “There is no such thing as easy death.”

“When you're young, that's true,” said the old man. “But don't forget,
Treasure Island
is a children's story.”