The Janson Option (15 page)

C
-four the Bell Ranger,” Janson ordered.

They had fewer than four hours to try again. Come dawn, the sight of their hydrofoil scooter standing off the ship would be a dead giveaway. A diversion would draw the fighters from the bridge.

They retraced their steps, moving like shadows, down from the bridge wings to the helo deck, down to the main deck, and started forward to blow up the smaller helicopter on the foredeck. Its helipad would be hardened and fireproofed. A spectacular-looking blaze set off by a mini-block of C-4 would not threaten the ship itself, or the lives of the hostages left behind. There was no question of saving all of them this time. Their only way off now was the scooter, and it had barely enough room for Allegra.

Halfway to the Bell Ranger, they heard the buzzing of outboard engines. The sound was coming from the beach. The engines were straining, the boats low in the water, heavily burdened. The pirates had found more boats.

“Fuck!” said Kincaid.

Lights skipped across the water, powerful handheld halogen flashlights. In their back-glow, Janson counted three skiffs plowing through the low seas, filled with armed men.

He signaled retreat. They would be immensely outnumbered and outgunned, and would end up putting all their effort into not getting caught, none into saving Allegra. They raced aft the length of the ship and down the rope ladders. Kincaid keyed the remote and the electric scooter slid under them like a faithful dog.

They dropped into their seats. Kincaid engaged the silent motor. The impellers bit and they started away from the yacht.

“Tsk!”
Janson warned her.

An enormous shark swept alongside—tall fin and part of its back rising darker than the dark water—and circled in front of them. Kincaid turned behind it, toward the oncoming boats, bumped over its tail, which felt solid as a waterlogged floating tree trunk, and gunned the motor. The scooter leaped up on its foils. Kincaid steered a weaving path, dodging light beams.

It was neatly done, Janson thought. The guards they had shot would be chalked up to the firefight, and Mad Max would have no inkling that they had come and gone. But neither would Allegra Helms, and a masterful retreat could not change the fact that their mission had collapsed in total failure.

“P
RETTY
L
ADY,
why did you scream when I took the mask off this commando?”

Maxammed loomed menacingly. Allegra said nothing, biting her lip, staring at the body. By a miracle none of the countless bullets had marked his face.

Suddenly the helicopter started its motors, a high-pitched whine that grew louder and louder as it warmed up. The noise made Maxammed even angrier.

“Pretty Lady, I will hurt you a lot if you don't tell me why you screamed when I took the mask off this commando.”

He leaned closer. She was afraid and said, “He's my cousin.”

Maxammed slapped her so hard her head snapped back and she was knocked off her feet. Her whole face was burning. It hurt so much she wept. Only the beginning of pain. There would be so much more. Weeping in terror, she murmured, “My folk have wedded me. Across heaven's span, Into a far country.”

“Cousin?” he shouted.

“My folk—”

He jerked her upright by her arm. “Cousin?”

She tried to cover her face. “Adolfo was trying to save me.”

Maxammed slapped her again. It felt like an explosion in her brain. As if his voice were muffled by a wall between them, she heard, “Aristocrats don't carry bullpup rifles.”

She turned her face, only to recoil from the sight of Susan and Hank's lifeless bodies. She hadn't realized they were shot, riddled by the cross fire. They were heaped under the table, their hands for once not touching. Near the dead couple, the old man was curled in a fetal position, untouched by the bullets, staring at them.
Close your eyes,
she wanted to say.
No one should see that.
But Maxammed was screaming at her.

“Adolfo was not an aristocrat!” she shouted back. “A different side of the family. From Naples.”

“The city in the south?”

“Through my mother. When someone first told me, I didn't believe them.”

He jerked her arm. “Told you what?”

“They are Camorra.”

“What is Camorra?”

“Il Sistema. The system. Criminals.”

“Like mafia?”

“Worse,” said Allegra.

“Mafia in your clan?” The tall pirate smiled and with one long finger brushed the tears from her face. “You're like me.”

But his mind was racing. How had the two men gotten all the way here? Who helped them? They're Italian. This woman is Italian. Were they somehow related to the “Italian” everyone in Mogadishu feared and no one knew? Not a figment but as real as this beautiful woman and her dead cousin. She would not know. But these commandos could have.

He stared at the fire on the beach, wondering. Had the attack on his boats been a feint arranged by this woman's family with powerful European Union connections? Was it possible she would fetch an even bigger ransom than the hostage Farole had shot?

Maxammed shifted his gaze from the fires to the woman. She was weeping. But no longer in fear, he thought, nor in pain, but solely in grief, mourning her Adolfo. She brushed past him as if he did not exist and knelt by the body and laid her breast on his mangled torso and closed her arms around him, stroking him gently, probing as if to find some breath of life.

She made a sight only God should see, and Maxammed turned away and stared out the shattered windows at his burning boats. He turned back when he heard her open a zipper.

“Help me get his vest off.”

“Why?”

“I want to wear it.”

Maxammed knelt beside her. Allegra unzipped the rubbery fabric. He lifted the body and they tugged his arms out of the vest and she put the bloody garment on.

“If you are from gangsters,” he asked softly, “why did your family allow you to marry outside your clan?”

She looked up from her cousin's body and met the pirate's eyes with an expression of disbelief as if to say, How could you not know? How could anyone not know?

“Answer me! Why did they allow it?”

“I gave them no choice.”

“But why?”

“To escape. Why do you think?”

“H
ELICOPTER'S BACK
,” Kincaid warned.

Janson heard it too, coming after them fast.

“What kind of radar on the AH-6?”

“Probably nothing special,” said Janson. The scooter signature was negligible, although sophisticated radar looking straight down might pick up the battery and the motor. “Except it doesn't sound like an AH-6. It's bigger.”

“Sea Hawk?”

“Let us hope not.” The Sea Hawk had surface search radar monitored by a dedicated sensor operator. If the helicopter was specially equipped for pirate patrol, a forward-looking thermal-imaging camera would detect their body heat.

“In the water,” said Janson.

“There's a goddamned shark in the water.”

“Bullpups work underwater.”

“We have to see him to shoot him.”

“I'd rather shoot him than get shot by the Navy. Ready?”

Kincaid throttled back and the scooter wallowed to a stop. “Ready.”

They stood up and were about to step into the dark water when Janson said, “Wait! Listen. That's not a Sea Hawk.”

Kincaid pulled the hood off her head. “Sounds sort of like one.”

“The rotors are turning slower. And a lighter blade beat. It's that S76D from the yacht. No way they've got serious infrared.”

“Where'd they get pilots?”

“Who knows. But it's not hunting. It's turning away.”

“Good. That son of a bitch is right alongside again.”

“Go!”

The scooter leaped onto its foils.

T
HEIR LUCK HELD
—
their
luck, not Allegra's, Kincaid thought bitterly—and the GPS brought them to the rendezvous with the Otter floating in a patch of empty sea twenty miles offshore just as the hydrofoil's low-battery warning light began pulsing. They retracted its foils, winched it up the ramp, and buttoned up the cargo hatch.

“Go.”

“Where's your hostage?” asked Kirpal Singh.

“We blew it,” said Kincaid.

“Go!” Janson repeated. This close to the coast they could run into anything from Combined Forces patrols to more pirates. “Get off the water. Set your course for Mogadishu.”

“I'm afraid that's not on,” said Kirpal Singh. The pilot slouched behind the right-hand yoke.

“We don't have enough fuel for Mogadishu,” said the South African copilot, who had taken the left-hand seat.

“Why not? Your tanks are topped up and you can refuel in the harbor.” As one of Janson's contingencies, Catspaw had fuel and Customs paperwork waiting at a Mog boatyard, and bribes paid.

“Sadly,” said Singh, “we are not entirely topped up. In fact, we're piss-all half-full.”

“What happened?”

“A patrol ship interrupted us in the midst of fueling,” Choh explained. “We dropped the hose and got away before they saw us. But we have barely enough fuel to make it back to the tanker.”

“Pray the patrols have moved on,” Singh added.

Janson took a closer look at the senior pilot. His eyes were dull, his bearded face mournful.

“Are you all right, Captain Singh?”

“I am down in the depths on the ninetieth floor.”

“What?” said Kincaid. “What are you talking about?”

“Cole Porter,” he said to Janson. “
You
might know the song. She's too young.”

“I dance to it,” Kincaid said.

“A beguine,” Singh muttered.

“What is wrong with him?” Kincaid asked the South African.

“He crashed.”

“Grimly,” said Singh, “I'm reminded that the far side of manic is depressive. But not to worry. First Officer Choh has placed me in the right-hand seat. With instructions not to touch a thing.”

“How close can you get us to Mogadishu?” Janson asked Choh.

“What do you mean? Drop you partway?”

“How close?”

“You'll be in the middle of nowhere.”

“We already are. How close to Mogadishu?”

“Let me see what I can do.”

While the floatplane bobbed on the gentle swells, which were growing visible as the sky lightened in the east, and Janson and Kincaid watched anxiously for roving patrols, Clarence Choh worked with chart, calipers, the calculator app in his cell phone, and the cell phone itself. The farther he flew down the coast, the closer to Mogadishu, the longer the triangle leg of his route offshore to the freight dhow that served as his tanker, the more fuel the Otter would burn. But stretching navigational limits was only half the challenge.

Competing forces roamed the land—clan warlords, freelance militia, AMISOM troops—Ugandans, Burundians, Kenyans—Somali government soldiers, al-Shabaab terrorists no less deadly in retreat, and even American Special Forces hunting al-Qaeda. None of whom Janson wanted to tangle with while getting to the capital as fast as he could to regroup for another rescue.

The copilot switched his cell phone on and off for the briefest of calls to query contacts ashore for the latest intelligence on who controlled what turf between Puntland and the capital city. This was why Janson trusted gunrunners. Those who survived knew their territory. He listened intently to the copilot's exchanges with the local clan elders and private militia leaders they supplied.

Choh put down his phone at last. “I can land near Harardhere.”

Janson and Kincaid put their heads over the map. Three hundred miles to Mogadishu. Little more than halfway. But a lot closer than Eyl.

“The surf is pretty rugged.”

“Reefs?” asked Kincaid.

“Sandbars. We went in all right, once, on a Zodiac. I wouldn't want to attempt it on your water bug.”

“We'll swim,” said Janson.

The last thing that he wanted spotted on the beach was an exotic landing craft painted flat black. Whoever ruled the sector would send troops after them with all four feet.

“What's the al-Shabaab presence?”

“Diminished,” the South African answered carefully. “They were thick with the pirates, but they're retreating, I'm told, and living off carjackings and robbery.”

“Let's do it.”

Choh started the engine. Captain Singh broke his morose silence.

“Why not crank a bit of right aileron and pick the left float out of the water?”

“No need, Captain. But thank you for the thought.”

“Cut some drag, what? We'll hop off on the right float before you can say Jack Robinson.”

“Jack Robinson,” said the South African, shoving his throttle wide open.

3°58' N, 47°26' E
Somali Coast

Y
ou know you're in a war zone,” Paul Janson told Jessica Kincaid, “when there's never a beautiful place to sit.”

The Catspaw operators were sitting on the concrete floor of an abandoned fish-drying plant, six hours and twenty miles after they swam ashore and the Otter disappeared to the northeast. Positioned left shoulder to left shoulder, as if on a tête-a-tête love seat, each watched ahead and to the right, boxing the compass with their MTARs.

The plant had been built, judging by the shoddy masonry and severe architecture, by Soviets propping up Somalia's long-since overthrown socialist dictatorship. It had recently housed an al-Shabaab training camp.

The terrorists had fled with little warning, leaving rice, detonators, batteries, and wiring for improvised road mines, along with partially assembled suicide vests. The graffiti on the walls were stark reminders that the name al-Shabaab meant “the youth.” No one had written jihadist slogans in Arabic calligraphy or Roman script. Instead, scratched on the walls were boys' drawings of pistols and assault rifles.

Outside, crushed Toyota Carib technicals were scattered in front of the factory—improvised roadblocks that had been flattened under AMISOM tank treads. Shade trees planted around the factory gate had been dead so long the bark had peeled off and the sun had bleached the trunks white. The mud-colored walls had been smashed here and there, a consequence of the 2002 tsunami, judging by the sun-and-wind-weathered rubble. The only other structure in sight was across the road—a blue poly tarp shading a rough-and-ready truck stop.

The road was the widest Janson and Kincaid had seen since they landed, a full two-lane detour that the Russians had laid from the decrepit dirt-and-rock single-track highway to the plant. It had weathered the tsunami better than the original. The sparse traffic—mostly trucks escorted by SUVs crammed with armed guards—shunted onto it and stopped by the front gate, where the men relieved themselves against the trees, then crossed the road and sat to eat rice and drink bottled water under the blue tarp.

Janson was not surprised when he inspected their cargo through his monocular lens that the trucks were carrying bundles of khat leaves. Their expensive escorts suggested big-money narcotics shipments to the
suqs
of Mogadishu. Come night, he and Kincaid would either hide in the back of a truck or hijack an SUV.

While they waited, they used the time to run a preliminary “mea culpa”—their post-mission assessment—dissecting what they had done during the
Tarantula
raid and what they could have done better. Failure was failure, but you only got better when you examined failure with an honest eye. Janson conceded that he might have been overly cautious. He worried that Kincaid would take his admission as license to risk rash action next time, and he said so aloud.

“If I was too cautious, it's not your job to make up for it by being reckless.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ordinarily, she would have admitted to risking the hostages' lives—and their own lives—by not obeying instantly the order to fall back. But she did not mention it. Not even a sarcastic “Sorry about that, Colonel.” Janson knew that he had to remind her forcefully that discipline kept operators alive, but she was taking the loss of Allegra very hard, and he decided to let it go until later.

Bats began darting through the shadows, dodging the debris hanging from the ceiling. But before the dark settled in thickly enough to provide cover to make their move, 100mm tank guns begin echoing off the inland hills. Ugandan T-55s chasing al-Shabaab, as the gunrunners' sources had reported, Janson guessed.

The cannon fire had the effect of taps saluting an early end to the day. Drivers and guards hurried to their vehicles and resumed their southward run to Mogadishu. The cooks rolled up their tarp, stacked pots and plastic chairs in a Toyota pickup, and took off on spinning wheels north toward Harardhere.

Janson and Kincaid watched and listened for convoys that might not stop until the cooks returned in the morning.

Suddenly Kincaid whispered, “You know that picture of the long-haired, pale-eyed gal you showed me in Florence?”

“Flora in Botticelli's
Primavera
. The flower goddess.”

“That's who she looked like.”

It was not their way to distract themselves when standing watch, but Kincaid was hurting, and Janson tried to keep her talking.

“Allegra?”

“Spitting image.”

“Her ancestress could have posed for Botticelli.”

“I don't mean that way. She looks like she knows hard times.”

“She's kidnapped.”

“I mean hard times before. Back in her life, sometime.”

“You saw a lot through your Panoramics. I couldn't even tell if the hostages were dead or alive.”

“It's the angle she holds her head,” Kincaid whispered. “It tells me all I have to know about her.”

Janson studied her face in the fading light. To his eye, the Botticelli image that captured Kincaid was
Pallas and the Centaur
—the cool-eyed guard arresting an intruder, the centaur, who looked stunned and amazed that she had clamped onto a fistful of his hair before he even saw her coming. Pure Kincaid.

“What do you know about her?” he asked.

“She's an escaper.”

“Like you.”

“Like me. Paul, we have got to—”

“We will.”

“Forget Helms, we're going to rescue that woman.”

Janson would not forget Kingsman Helms, but he replied, simply, “We will rescue that woman.”

“How?”

Janson had been thinking on it since he had ordered the retreat from
Tarantula
. Instead of answering Kincaid, he pulled a sat phone from his waterproof pack and was pleasantly surprised that the phone was not wet.

“Who you calling?”

“Quintisha, first. Then the guys in Mogadishu… Good morning, Quintisha. Things did not go as planned. Would you please lean harder on our New Jersey computer hacker? We need that oligarch's yacht and we need it now. No one has come through. I think he's our best option, or last hope… Right, through Lynds Shipworks… No, Jess is all right. But we're running out of time.”

He ended the call, switched to a throwaway cell phone, and dialed Salah Hassan, the Minneapolis real estate mogul he had sent to Mogadishu. Waiting for Somalia's ramshackle cell towers to make it ring, he whispered to Kincaid, “Remember the picture of the yacht? What color was the helicopter?”

“Both gold.”

He got the mogul's machine. His cheery Hassan Real Estate greeting ended, “Have a greaaaaaat day.”

Janson left a message with no names: “Neither young gentleman is answering his shanzhai.”

Seconds later, the throwaway vibrated. It was Hassan, who spoke as circumspectly. “Our student has disappeared, according to our entrepreneurial parolee. It's possible he's looking for a certain cleric.”

“That's exactly what I told him not to do.”

“Apparently he did not listen.”

“Has our entrepreneurial parolee made contact with anyone useful?” Janson asked, meaning Ahmed's former-pirate relatives or a negotiator hungry enough to risk prosecution.

“I'm afraid not. He started a business the day we arrived.”

“Like the business he got paroled from?” Janson asked. East Africa was a transit point for smuggling Asian cannabis and opiates to Europe. Lawless Somalia was a trafficker's haven. And drug transit points always suffered a spillover effect; the volume of the stuff moving through the territory created lucrative markets of domestic users.

“All I know is he's riding around Mogadishu in a big SUV.”

Janson rolled his eyes at the sagging roof. How much collateral damage were Catspaw's eyes and ears wreaking on poor Somalia? Ahmed had sure as hell gone native at the speed of light. But Ahmed's SUV was small potatoes compared to Hassan's own adventures. The realtor's Mogadishu ride, Janson had learned while working his phone in the Seychelles, was an armored-up Mercedes, which befitted his new station.

“I hear you purchased a seat in parliament.”

Salah Hassan offered no apology. “Better an honorable man than thieves and warlords. We need a new parliament, not a repeat of the old. I'm no thief and I'm not a fighter. I only want to get things done.”

“You got them done quickly.”

“Elders of my clan were on the selection committee. What can I do for you, Paul?”

Janson heard less an offer than a busy man ending a conversation.

“Do you have friends at the airport?”

Hassan said, “Since my purchase, as you so delicately put it, I have friends everywhere.”

“I want someone at the airport to keep an eye out for a gold Si­kor­sky executive helicopter.”

“I can do that,” Hassan said briskly, then tried to close the conversation with a cool “Anything else?”

Janson said, “Success in my business means getting in and out without being noticed. In your business—your new public-service business—public credit for rescuing Mrs. Helms could burnish, even elevate, a member of parliament's reputation both here and abroad. It might even legitimize his election in eyes beyond the cozy clan world.”

Hassan asked, “How much credit would you share?”

“In your new post, you are in a position to earn all the credit. Can I count on you?”

“Company!”
Kincaid whispered.

Janson and Kincaid slithered apart and covered the doors with their MTARs. He had heard it too. Not khat trucks rumbling on the road. Nor the AMISOM tanks in the hills, but men running—the al-Shabaab fighters who had escaped the tanks—running headlong for cover in the desperate hope of holing up for the night back where they started.