The Janson Option (21 page)

Helms answered very carefully. He'd had similar conversations with various African politicians. “In our experience, exclusive rights to develop oil and gas reserves increase the profits for all concerned.” The president could read “increase the profits” as efficiency stemming from exclusive development rights, or he could read it as an offer of a bribe. It was up to him.

“Did Home Boy offer you exclusivity?” Adam asked.

“Yes.”

“That was generous of him, considering he was in no position to make such an offer.”

“When we started negotiating, the political situation was more volatile,” said Helms. “The Transitional Federal Government was barely holding on to a few neighborhoods of Mogadishu. The rest of the city, and all of the countryside, was up for grabs. There was reason to believe he might be the man to deliver what we agreed upon.”

“The
former
Transitional Federal Government.”

“Replaced by elections to Parliament,” said Helms. “And your subsequent appointment.”

“Did you and Home Boy agree on refineries?”

“How do you mean?”

“You know exactly what I mean. Did ASC promise to build a refinery so that Somalia could reap more economic benefit—jobs and profits—from our oil than we would if we merely shipped the unprocessed crude oil abroad?”

Helms hesitated. This argument about demanding local refining had stopped development dead in Uganda. There was no good answer, because to agree to refining Somalia's crude in Somalia meant losing control of the market. All ASC wanted were pipelines to offshore loading facilities so tankers could then ship the oil to wherever the market was strongest.

President Adam said, “Are you quite sure you want stability?”

“Doesn't everyone?”

“Even if stability puts you in a less than exclusive bargaining position?”

Helms said, “Surely you would agree, Mr. President, that for ASC to gain an exclusive bargaining position in a failed nation that cannot secure its own oil fields would be a hollow victory.”

H
OME
B
OY
G
UTAALE
showed up at the presidential palace shortly after the ASC executive had left. President Adam greeted him warmly. “I am facing a conundrum, my brother. You must help me decide.”

“
Inshallah,
I will do my best.”

“Do we call the event ‘The Homecoming'? Or do we call it ‘Welcome Home Youth'?”

Gutaale stroked his red whiskers. “How about ‘Welcome Home, Boys'?”

Thinking that sounded too much like “Welcome Home Boy,” President Adam asked, “But what of the women?”

“Good point. How about ‘Welcome Home, Boys and Ladies'?”

President Adam shook his head. “What we are trying to say is ‘
All
of you—boys, girls, men, women, old, young—
all
who prospered in the dollar countries should come home and build a new Somalia.'”

“Why not ‘Welcome Home, Somalia'?”

President Adam took off his glasses and stared at the warlord with new respect. “I think you've got it.”

Home Boy Gutaale grinned proudly. “See? I told you we would make a fine team. I hope this means that you and I can appear together at the homecoming.”

“Someone who will remain nameless suggested to me that having a warlord for a vice president could be unhealthy.”

“Did that accusation come from a nameless oilman with an ax to grind?”

“Whatever his motive, he raises an interesting point.”

“Which surely you had already thought of on your own.”

“Yes, I had,” President Adam said bluntly. “And it is very troubling.”

“Of course it is troubling to be frightened.”

“I am not frightened. But I am concerned by what could be lost.”

“That's what I mean. Your life—”

“No, Home Boy. Not my life. This opportunity.”

“What opportunity?”

“I see that militias want to carve the city into fiefdoms. In the countryside, yesterday alone, thirty clansmen were killed fighting for water and grass. In the government nothing gets done without someone asking, ‘What's in it for me?'”

“This is opportunity?”

“If you were vice president and did not murder me, we would hold this country together.”

“I agree. These groups need an iron fist. Strong, professional police forces in the cities and an army in the field.”

President Adam nodded vigorously. “Together, between us we can stop the clans from fighting long enough to establish a real army and real police and real courts.”

“We can do all that,” said Gutaale.

“We can,” said President Adam, eyeing Gutaale shrewdly, “but will we?”

“Together,” said Gutaale.

“Why don't we start by securing the city,” said Adam. “I am issuing an order to the Army to remove all illegal checkpoints from Mogadishu. Do you think they will meet strong resistance?”

Gutaale, whose clansmen's militias exacted tolls at many of those illegal barriers, said, “Excellent idea. The time has come.”

“An excellent start,” said Adam.

“No one can stop us.
Inshallah
.”

P
aul Janson joined Jessica Kincaid aboard the Embraer the instant she landed in Mogadishu. “How'd it go?”

“No luck with Hassan's friends. Just legit businessmen. But I got a couple of neat pieces of intel—”

“I meant your CT scan.”

“I'm healing. No tendon damage. Muscle's OK.”

Janson looked hard at her. “Kincaid—”

“Truth. The doc said I was really lucky. Nothing permanently hurt—I got the CT scan on a disc. You want to see it?”

“I'll trust you. What neat intel?”

“I was talking to a Special Ops guy in the airport and he told me something really weird. One of our outfits traced calls between Mad Max and the Italian.”

“All we need is the Italian hooking up with Mad Max—Is Special Ops going for Allegra?”

“I don't think so.”

“Part of me wishes they would,” said Janson.

“Affirmative. But it didn't sound like it would happen.”

“You sure you read the guy right?”

Kincaid did not hesitate. “It's still on us.”

“You said two pieces of intel.”

“I saw one of ASC's Global Expresses at Nairobi.”

“Helms is here. I saw him today.”

“No. Sarah batted her baby blues at the pilot. It wasn't Helms's plane.”

“Doug Case?”

“The pilot wouldn't spill, but she did find out it was not Helms's.”

Janson took out a smart phone and keyed an app. “Let's just have a look.”

“What?”

“See if Case is around… You called it, Jess. He's right here in Mogadishu. Down by the beach. Probably the Red Hotel.”

Kincaid pressed close to look over Janson's shoulder. On the screen was a map of Mogadishu and a pulsing green dot. “What is that?”

“I told you I'd keep an eye on Case.”

“Paul, what the hell is that?”

“Doug has horrific pain from breaking his back. Right?”

“And?”

“Spinal-cord-stimulation implants have helped. He got a new, improved one recently. A tiny titanium-metal can no bigger than a dime holds the stimulator electrodes and the coil and the battery. And a GPS transmitter.”

“GPS? So his doctor knows where he is?”

“So
I
know where he is,” said Janson.

“What?”

“I don't know what Doug did to us on Isle de Foree. I don't know that he did anything to us. But you made a very good case for not trusting him. So this little thing is a kind of insurance policy.”

“How did you get it in him?”

“It's apparently never occurred to Doug that the Phoenix Foundation originally got him his doctors. They're the best in the business, so Doug stayed with them all these years.”

“How did you get the docs to go along?”

“They owed me.”

“For what?”

“This and that.”

“Janson, you are one shifty, twisty sumbitch.”

“That's what they pay me for. This thing isn't perfect. I can't track him minute by minute without screwing up the battery and running down his charge enough so he'd notice. But I can light him up now and then.”

“So he's here. What do you suppose he's up to?”

“My best guess is he's screwing Kingsman Helms.”

“Will he get in our way?”

“I would hate to believe that Doug would put Allegra's life at risk just to screw Helms. So I think the worst threat is the Italian.”

“What do you suppose the Italian wants from Maxammed?”

“Horning in for a cut of the ransom, I'd guess. All the more reason to get her out of there as soon as we can.”

T
EARS FILLED
I
SSE'S EYES
. He gagged. Then he vomited for the third time. The latex condom packed with PETN powder flew from his mouth and fell in the sand. The Arab who had assembled the bomb flinched. The detonator was TATP, which was aptly nicknamed “Mother of Satan,” and it didn't take much of a shock to trigger it.

Mullah Abdullah al-Amriki picked up the condom and rinsed it off with a water bottle. He shook his head. Isse hung his. He had disappointed the cleric.

“We know it is possible,
Inshallah
. Drug mules do it with cocaine. Try again!”

“I just gotta catch my breath.”

Abdullah al-Amriki thumped his chest with his fist, the gesture made famous by his YouTube sermons. “Of course it's hard. It would be easier with balloons. Your throat is rejecting the filth associated with the condom. Were Somalia not so poor we could use balloons, but there is no money for children's toys. So we must rely on
haram
condom. This time I believe you will succeed with Allah's will,” he said, rapping his chest again. “Go on, now. Try it again.”

Amriki's al-Shabaab fighters who were watching crowded closer around the poly-tarp shelter. They were a grab bag of Arabs, Somalis, Europeans, and even a couple of Somali-American dudes from Maine. Isse heard one snicker. If the cleric heard, he did not take notice, saying again, “Try harder, my brother. There is much at stake.”

Isse stared at the bulging condom and tried to collect his spirits. Sealed with a knot, it looked like a white hot dog. Except for the bulge of the AAA battery, miniaturized radio receiver, and blasting cap that formed the detonator.

“Deep-throat it, man,” said the snickering dude.

Isse stared at him. PETN is not a drug, is it, dude? PETN is pentaerythritol tetranitrate. One condom load, if he could get the thing down his throat, was four hundred grams. The Underwear Bomber had less than eighty in his crotch. Four hundred grams of pentaerythritol tetranitrate, dude, will blow a 747 out of the sky and drop a million pounds of wreckage on a city.

The snickering dude looked away.

Like he knew he didn't have the balls to make a belly bomb.

Behind the al-Shabaab spectators stood ten silent fighters led by the cleric's new ally, the one they called the Italian—the awesome ghost every Somali talked about, even back in Minneapolis—who Salah Hassan joked was an equal-opportunity assassin.

The Italian was a small man with eyes black as oil, much shorter than his guard. He and his fighters, whom he called dervishes, all wore flak vests and hid their faces under black-and-white kaffiyehs. Even here in Amriki's camp, all you saw were their eyes. And they never spoke, which was really cool. In a weird way, the Italian's dervishes gave Isse courage, more than the cleric. Named in honor of the Muslim fighters who had defended Somalia against Italian and English invaders, these guys were serious. Dervishes oozed belief. Like they knew it took blood to change the world. Starting with your own.

“Water,” Isse said.

The bearded mullah handed him the bottle. Isse wet his throat. Then he threw back his head and pretended that the condom was a long slug of a Piña Colada Slurpee. For a terrible ten seconds he could not breathe. Then, slowly, finally, it was inside him.

“Down the hatch,” called the dude from Maine, raising a fist in heartfelt congratulations. The others cheered.
Allah Akbar
. God is good. God is great.

“Well done, my brother,” said Amriki.

Isse glanced at the shrouded Italian and his silent guard. They were nodding with respect. This, thought Isse, is belief. This is what I came home for. This is righteous.

“Drone!”
cried the lookout, who was wearing a headset to amplify sounds from the sky.

A hundred fighters scattered into the trees that lined the riverbed.

Mullah Abdullah al-Amriki took Isse's arm and hurried him toward the underground command shelter. “This way, my brother,” he said with a smile. “You are too valuable to be Hellfired.”

“So are you, Mullah Abdullah al-Amriki,” shouted the Italian, running alongside and gesturing for one of his dervishes to take off his flak vest. The fighter complied instantly and helped the cleric into it.

The drones circled. In the deep shelter, Isse slapped at flies and cringed from the spiders and inch-long ants crawling out of the timber ceiling. A fighter screamed in pain and the men around him stomped the floor to kill the scorpion. They huddled for an hour until the drones disappeared. Finally it was safe to venture out.

“Keep the vest,” the Italian told Amriki. “In case, God forbid, they return.”

An imam called for prayer. Everyone knelt. After prayer, the fighters circled around Mullah Amriki and begged him to preach.

“A word with you, Isse,” said the Italian. “If you would.”

“Sure.” Even the righteous Italian spoke to him with respect.

Isse followed him away from the crowd. The dervish bodyguards trailed them. The Italian spoke perfect English with a funny bit of accent that Isse's ear caught as Arab of some sort, not Somali. He could have been raised in an Arab city, but he was very small for a Somali. And certainly the skin around his eyes looked lighter than that of most Somalis.

“You are a brave young man.”

“God is great,” said Isse. “If I have any bravery, God has given it to me.”

“All the more reason to spend it frugally.”

“What do you mean?”

“God gave you courage to be an intelligent, mobile bomb. You should not waste the gift that you are.”

Isse felt a little confused. He fell back on slogans. “An infidel airline jet packed with infidel passengers would not be a waste. Would it?”

Even as he spoke, the educated side of him, his high school and college courses—even the suburban American side and TV and movies—all argued in his ear that slogans were the last refuge of idiots. But he spoke them anyway. He had a right to. He was giving up his whole life to be an intelligent, mobile bomb.

The Italian did not agree. “It would be a terrible waste. You could serve God better with a more significant target.”

“Like what?”

The Italian lifted a light-skinned hand from his robe and raised it for silence. “Wait. Let us listen. Mullah Abdullah al-Amriki preaches.”

Isse had first heard Amriki on YouTube. He was a fiery speaker and a righteous rapper, and this morning in the heat of the dry riverbank he was at his best, calling believers, damning infidels, promising that heaven held endless rewards for young men who died exalting God's poor, condemning the rich, and fighting the disbelievers.

“The beloved brothers of al-Shabaab will free our Muslim Somalia of the enemies of Allah by severing the ever-present hand of the unbelieving
kuffar
.”

Isse was as mesmerized as he had been that first time. When his
kuffar
Christian girlfriend said, “This guy's rapping the same shit as Jesus, except Jesus wasn't into killing,” he had walked away from her and never looked back.

They had miked Amriki on YouTube so when he thumped his chest it thundered in the speakers. Here in the hot riverbed he was acoustic, which didn't stop him one bit. He just thumped harder. “Allah!” He thumped. “Akbar.” Thump. “God!” Thump.

A blinding flash, brighter than the merciless sun, exploded from Mullah Abdullah al-Amriki's chest. A thunderous explosion threw the men nearest to him to the sand and tore Amriki's body into chunks of bone and flesh that went flying through the air.

“Drone!”

“Hellfire!”

Everyone ran for the trees. Except the Italian. He took Isse's arm firmly in his hand, and his dervishes closed ranks around him.

“It's a drone,” Isse shouted in terror. “Take cover.”

“It's over,” said the Italian. “Come with me.”