The Kill List

There was indeed a code in the messages from Dardari in London and the Troll in Kismayo and it was broken. The two men communicated apparently in clear because both GCHQ in England and Fort Meade in Maryland are suspicious of transmissions that are clearly in code.

So vast is the commercial and industrial traffic flying through cyberspace that not everything can be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. So both centers of interception tend to prioritize the evidently suspicious. Somalia being a highly suspect place, only the harmless-looking would be studied but not subjected to the top-of-the-list decryption tests. So far the London/Kismayo traffic had got away with it. That ended.

The traffic purported to be between the head of a large foodstuffs manufacturer based in London and his manager in a location producing raw materials. The traffic out of London appeared to be queries concerning local availability of fruits, vegetables and spices, all locally grown, and their prices. The traffic out of Kismayo seemed to be the manager’s replies.

The code’s key was in the lists of prices. Cheltenham and Ariel got it about the same time. There were discrepancies. Sometimes the prices were too high, sometimes too low. They did not match the real prices on the world markets for those products at that time of year. Some of the figures were genuine, others unrealistic. In the latter category, the figures were letters, the letters made words and the words made messages.

The months of exchanges between a fashionable town house in London’s West End and a warehouse in Kismayo proved that Mustafa Dardari was the Preacher’s outside man. He was both financier and informer. He advised and warned.

He subscribed to technical publications dealing intensively with the West’s counterterrorism thinking. He studied the work of think tanks on the subject, taking technical papers from the Royal United Services Institute and the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and their U.S. equivalents.

His e-mails to his friend revealed he frequented, at a social level, the tables of those who might have a senior civil servant, military or security figure as their guest. In short, he was a spy. He was also, behind the urbane, westernized façade a Salafist and Jihadist extremist like his boyhood friend in Somalia.

Ariel spotted something else. There were single-letter typing errors in the texts, but they were not random. Very few nonprofessionals can type long passages without occasionally hitting the wrong key and creating a one-letter typo. In journalism and publishing, the correction of these is what copy editors are for. But so long as the meaning is clear, many amateurs do not bother.

The Troll bothered, but Dardari did not. Because his typos were deliberate. They occurred only once or twice per send, but their appearance was rhythmic, not always in the same place but always in sequence with the ones in the previous message. Ariel deduced they were “tells”—small signs which, if they were not there, would warn the reader the sender was under duress or the computer was being operated by an enemy.

What the traffic did not confirm was two things the Tracker needed. The messages referred to “my brother,” but that could be a greeting between fellow Muslims. They referred to “our friend,” but never Zulfiqar Ali Shah or Abu Azzam by name. And they never confirmed that our friend was resident not in Kismayo but in a compound in the heart of Marka.

The only way he would achieve these two proofs and the authority to go for a terminal strike would be positive identification by a reliable source or the Preacher being goaded to make a terrible mistake and go online from his home. The Global Hawk high above the Marka compound would hear it instantly and snatch it out of space.

To achieve the first, it would need someone in a distinctive and preassigned headdress or baseball cap to stand in the courtyard, look up at the sky and nod. Tampa would see that staring face, as Creech had seen Anwar al-Awlaki look fatally at the sky, his exposed face filling a whole TV screen in an underground bunker in Nevada.

As to the second, the Tracker still had an ace of his own to play.

• • •

The MV Malmö eased out of the canal at Port Suez and into the Red Sea. Capt. Eklund offered his thanks and farewells as the Egyptian pilot slipped over the side to his waiting launch. Within hours, he would be on another freighter heading north.

The Malmö, back under her own command, nosed south toward Bab al-Mandab and the eastward turn into the Gulf of Aden. Capt. Eklund was content. She had made good time so far.

• • •

Opal returned from his work at the fish dock, checked that he was completely alone and unobserved and retrieved his radio from beneath the floor. He knew these daily checks to see if there had been an incoming message were the danger points in his life as a spy inside the al-Shabaab fortress.

He took the set, linked it to the charged battery, put on his earphones, took out pen and notepad and prepared to transcribe. The message, once slowed down to reading speed, took only a few minutes, and his pen raced over the paper making Hebrew characters.

It was short and to the point. Warm congratulations on tracing the pickup from the warehouse to Marka. The next time that happens, do not follow immediately. Return to the set and alert us that it is heading north. Then hide the set and follow. Endit.

• • •

The Taiwanese trawler was well east of the Somali coast and had not been stopped. There was no reason why she should be. A low-flying patrol plane, spotting for one of the international naval forces now trying to protect international shipping from Somali pirates, had dipped to have a look but had flown on.

The vessel was clearly what she was—a deep-sea, long-distance fisherman out of Taipei. Her trawl was not down, but there was nothing odd about that if she was looking for fresh and better waters. She had been captured by al-Afrit weeks before, and that had been noted—but under her real name. That name had been changed. Her Chinese crew, under threat, had been forced to paint a new name on her bows and stern.

Two of the same crew, all that were needed, were now on the bridge. The ten Somali pirates were crouching out of sight. The patrol plane crew, scanning with binoculars, had seen the two Asian men at the wheel and suspected nothing. The two men had been warned that any attempt to gesture for help would result in death.

The trick was not new, but it remained extremely hard for the international force to detect. Somali skiffs, pretending to be innocent fishermen if seen and intercepted, did not take long to expose. They might protest they needed their AK-47 Kalashnikovs for self-protection, but that could hardly apply to rocket-propelled grenades. The clincher was always the light aluminum ladder. You do not need it to fish, but you do to scale the side of a merchantman.

Somali piracy had taken some devastating knocks. Most big and valuable ships had taken on a team of professional ex-soldiers, who carried rifles and knew how to use them. About eighty percent were so protected. The drones now flying out of Djibouti could scan up to 40,000 square miles of sea in a day. The warships of the four international flotillas were helped by helicopters as wide-ranging scouts. And, finally, the pirates, captured in greater numbers, were simply being tried, found guilty and detained in the Seychelles with international support. The heyday was over.

But one ruse still worked: the mother ship. The Shan-Lee 08, as she was now named, was one such. She could stay at sea far longer than an open skiff, and her range was immense. The attack skiffs with their fast outboard motors, were stored belowdecks. She looked innocent, but the attack skiffs could be on deck and in the water in a few minutes.

• • •

Out of the Red Sea and into the Gulf of Aden, Capt. Eklund was meticulous in following the internationally recommended transit established to give maximum protection to merchant shipping passing the dangerous Gulf of Aden.

The corridor runs parallel to the Adeni and Omani coast, from the 45th to the 53rd longitude east. These eight longitude zones bring the merchantman past the north coast of Puntland, the start of the pirate havens, and far out beyond the Horn. For ships wishing to round the southern tip of India, this brings them many miles too far north before they can turn south for the long haul across the Indian Ocean. But it is heavily patrolled by naval vessels and keeps them safe.

Captain Eklund followed the prescribed passage to the 53rd longitude, then, convinced he was safe, he turned southeast for India. The drones could indeed patrol 40,000 square miles of sea in a day, but the Indian Ocean is many millions of square miles, and in this vastness a ship can disappear. The naval vessels of NATO and the European EU NAVFOR could be thickly gathered in the corridor, but they were scattered far and wide out on the ocean. Only the French have a force dedicated to the Indian Ocean. They call it L’indien.

The Malmö’s master was convinced that he was now too far east for anything from the Somali coast to threaten him. The days, and even the nights, were sweltering hot.

Almost all ships traveling in these waters have used engineers at home to construct an inner fortress protected by steel doors locked from the inside and equipped with food, water, bunks and toiletries, enough for several days. Also included are systems to disconnect the engines from outside interference and run both them and the steering mechanism from inside. Finally, there is a fixed-message distress call that will broadcast from the mast top.

Protected inside the citadel, the crew, if they can seal themselves inside in time, can await rescue, pretty sure that it is on its way. The pirates, though they have the run of the ship, cannot control it or threaten the crew, though they will try to break in. The crew can only hope for the arrival of a frigate or destroyer.

But as the Malmö ran south past the Laccadive Islands, the crew slept in the greater comfort of their cabins. They did not see or hear the skiffs racing through the wake or hear the clatter of ladders against the stern as the Somali pirates boarded by moonlight. The helmsman raised the alarm, but too late. Dark, agile figures with guns were racing into the superstructure and up to the bridge. Within five minutes, the Malmö was captured.

• • •

Opal watched the gates of the warehouse compound open as the sun went down and the pickup emerged. It was the same one as before. It turned in the same direction as before. He straddled his trail bike and followed it to the northern outskirts of Kismayo until he was sure it was on the coast highway toward Marka. Then he went back to his cabin and lifted his transceiver from its hole beneath the floor. He had already composed his message and compressed it into a fraction-of-a-second burst transmission. When he had removed the battery from its photovoltaic recharger and connected it, he just hit send.

The message was taken by the permanent listening watch inside the Office. It was decrypted by the officer of the watch, who passed it to Benny, still at his desk in the same time zone as Kismayo. He composed a short instruction, which was encoded and beamed to a boat masquerading as a Salalah-based fisherman twenty miles off the Somali shore.

• • •

The rigid inflatable left the side of the fisherman a few minutes later and sped toward the shore. It contained seven commandos and a captain in command. Only when the sand dunes of the coast came into sight in the moonlight did the engine level decrease to a slow growl, in case of listening ears even on this desolate stretch of sand.

As the nose ground into the sand, the captain and six men leapt ashore and ran for the road. The spot, they already knew; it was where a dry wadi ran under a concrete bridge and a clump of casuarinas grew. One of the men jogged three hundred yards up the road toward Kismayo, found a spot in the sedge by the roadside, lay down and fixed his powerful night vision goggles on the road south. He had been told exactly what vehicle to look for and even its plate number. Behind him, the ambush party also lay in the cover roadside and waited.

The captain lay with the communicator in his hand, where he could not miss the pulsing red light when it came. Four vehicles went past, but not the one they wanted.

Then it came. In the green half-light of the night vision goggles, the commando down the road could not mistake it. Its dirty off-white original color was irrelevant in the all-green glow of the NVGs. But the battered grille was there, along with the twisted roll bar that had clearly not done its job. And the front number plate was the one he was looking for. He pressed the send button on his pulser.

Behind him the captain saw the red glow in his hand and hissed, “Kadima,” to his men. They came out of the ground, from both sides of the road, holding the broad red-and-white tape between them. In the darkness, it looked like a horizontal pole. The captain stood in front of it, shining a shaded torch at the ground, his other hand raised.

They were not dressed in camouflage but in long white robes and Somali headdresses. They all carried Kalashnikovs. No Somali would dare drive through a roadblock manned by the religious mutawa. The engine of the oncoming pickup truck coughed as the driver changed down a gear, then another.

• • •

The pirates had left two of their number to keep the Taiwanese skipper and his first-mate prisoner. The other eight had boarded the Malmö. One spoke a smattering of English. He came from the Garacad pirates’ nest, and this was his third capture. He knew the routine. Capt. Eklund did not, despite his briefing from a Swedish naval officer back in Gothenburg.

He knew he had had time to press the send button of the perpetual Mayday signal from his cabin. He knew it would be transmitting from his mast top, alerting a listening world that he was captured.

The pirate leader, who was twenty-four and called Jimali, knew it, too, and did not care. Let the infidel navies come; it was too late now. They would never attack and trigger a bloodbath. He knew of the kuffar obsession with human life and despised it. A good Somali feared neither pain nor death.

The five Europeans and ten Filipinos were gathered on deck. Capt. Eklund was told that if any more were hiding, one of the officers would be thrown into the sea.

“There are no more,” said the captain. “What do you want?”

Jimali gestured to his men.

“Food. No pig,” he said. Capt. Eklund told the Filipino cook to go to his galley and prepare food. One of the pirates went with him.

“You. Come.” Jimali beckoned the captain, and they went to the bridge. “You steer Garacad, you live.”

The captain consulted his maps, presumed the Somali coast and found the village a hundred miles south of Eyl, another pirate concentration. He worked out an approximate heading and turned the helm.

A French frigate from L’indien was the first to find them, just after dawn. It took up station several cables to port and reduced speed to stay in formation. The French captain did not intend to use his marines to board the Malmö, and Jimali knew it. He stared across the water from the bridge wing, almost challenging the infidels to have a go.

Far away from the seemingly harmless maritime spectacle of a French frigate escorting a Swedish freighter with a Taiwanese trawler far behind, a whirlwind of electronic communication was taking place.

The Malmö’s automatic identification system had been picked up instantly. It was monitored by the British Maritime Trade Operations out of Dubai and the American MARLO, the maritime liaison out of Bahrain. A score of NATO and EU warships were alerted to her problem, but, as Jimali knew, none would attack.

The Andersson Line maintained a night-and-day operations room in Stockholm, which was immediately advised. The shipping HQ called the Malmö. Jimali indicated that Capt. Eklund could take the call but put it on the bridge speaker and converse only in English. Even before he spoke, Stockholm knew he was in the presence of armed Somalis and every word should be guarded.

Captain Eklund confirmed that the Malmö had been taken in the night. His men were all safe and were being well treated. There were no injuries. They were steaming under orders for the coast of Somalia.

The shipowner, Harry Andersson, was roused over breakfast in his palatial home in a walled park in Östermalm, Stockholm. He finished dressing while his car was brought to the door, then drove straight to his operations room. The fleet controller of the night shift had stayed on. He explained everything that the emergency services and Capt. Eklund had been able to tell him.

Mr. Andersson had become a very successful, and thus rich, man because he had two very useful talents, among others. One was to assimilate a situation with extreme speed and, having done so, create a plan of action based on realities, not fantasies, and then go for it.

He stood, plunged in thought, in the middle of his operations room. No one dared disturb him. His ship had been taken by pirates, his first ever. Armed assault at sea would trigger a massacre and was simply not going to be attempted. The Malmö would therefore make the Somali coast and be anchored there. His first duty was to his fifteen employees, then to recover ship and cargo if possible. And then there was the question of his son.

“Bring my car to the door,” he said. “Call Björn, wherever he is, and tell him to get the plane ready for immediate takeoff. Flight plan for Northolt, London. Book me a suite at the Connaught. Hannah, you have your passport with you? Then come with me.”

Minutes later, in the back of his Bentley, his PA Hannah beside him, speeding to Bromma airport, he used his mobile phone to plan the immediate future.

It was a matter for the insurers now. He insured through a specialist syndicate of underwriters at Lloyd’s. They would have the whip hand because the money at risk was theirs. That was what he paid them an annual fortune for.

Before he was airborne, he had learned his underwriters’ negotiator of choice—and they definitely had been down this road before—was a firm called Chauncey Reynolds, which had a track record of negotiated recoveries. He knew he would be in London long before his ship would reach the Somali shore. Before his Learjet reached the Swedish coast, he had an appointment with the lawyers at six p.m. Well, they would damn well have to work late.

While he was on the glide path of Northolt touchdown, Chauncey Reynolds was preparing. They were trying the Surrey home of their negotiator of choice, the half-retired ace of his strange profession. His wife fetched him from among the beehives in the garden.

He had learned his skills as a hostage-recovery negotiator for the Metropolitan Police. He was a deceptively slow-spoken Welshman named Gareth Evans.

• • •

The Troll was very dead when Opal arrived. Opal had been seen by the spotter down the road and recognized because the captain had seen him before, at the earlier beach meeting with Benny. Again the pulse went red in the captain’s hand and the roadblock came into being.

Opal suddenly saw the group of robed figures in his dim headlight, the swinging torch, the pointing assault rifles. Like all secret agents far behind enemy lines and facing a bad death in the event of unmasking, he had a small panic attack.

Were his papers in order? Would his story of job seeking in Marka stand up? What could the mutawa possibly want on that road in the middle of the night?

The man with the torch approached and stared at his face. The moon came out from behind a bank of clouds, harbinger of the coming monsoon. Two black faces, inches apart in the night, one dark by nature, the other smeared with commando’s night-fighting cream.

“Shalom, Opal. Come, off the road. There is a truck coming.”

The men vanished into the trees and couch grass, taking the trail bike with them. The truck passed. Then the captain showed Opal the crash site.

The Troll’s pickup had seemingly had a complete blowout of the front offside wheel. The nail was still protruding from the tread, where human hands had hammered it. Out of control, the pickup must have slewed to one side. By ill chance, this was in the center of the concrete bridge.

It had toppled at speed over the edge, slamming into the far steep bank of the wadi. The impact had hurled the driver into the windshield and the steering wheel into his chest with enough force to shatter both head and thorax. Someone had seemingly eased him out of the cab and laid him beside the vehicle. In death he stared unseeing up at the wispy tips of the casuarina trees between him and the moon.

“Now, let us talk,” said the captain. He briefed Opal exactly as Benny had told him on the secure line between the trawler and Tel Aviv. Word for word. Then he gave him a sheaf of papers and a red baseball cap.

“These are what the dying man gave you before he passed away. You did your best, but there was no hope. He was too far gone. Any questions?”

Opal shook his head. The story was feasible. He tucked the papers inside his windbreaker. The captain of the Sayeret Matkal held out a hand.

“We must go back to the sea. Good luck, my friend. Mazel tov.”

It took a few moments to brush the last footprints from the dust, all save those of Opal. Then they were gone, back across the dark ocean to the waiting fishing boat. Opal hauled his trail bike back to the road and continued to the north.

• • •

Those who gathered in the office of Chauncey Reynolds were all experienced at what, over a decade of piracy, had become a mutually agreed ritual. The pirates were all clan chiefs of Puntland, operating out of an eight-hundred-mile coast from Boosaaso in the north to Mareeg, just up the coast from Mogadishu.

They were in piracy for money and that was all. Their excuse was that, years ago, fishing fleets from South Korea and Taiwan had arrived and gutted their traditional fishing grounds, from which they had made a livelihood. Whatever the rights and wrongs, they had turned to piracy and since then made huge earnings, far more than those generated by a few tuna.

They had started by boarding and capturing merchant vessels steaming past their coast just offshore. With time and expertise, they had ranged farther and farther east and south. In the beginning, their captures were small, their negotiations clumsy, and suitcases of dollar bills were dropped by light aircraft, flying up from Kenya, at a preagreed drop zone at sea.

But no one trusts anybody on that coast. There is no honor among these thieves. Ships captured by one group were stolen by another clan while at anchor. Rival packs fought over floating suitcases of cash. Eventually, a kind of agreed-upon procedure prevailed.

The crew of a captured vessel was rarely, if ever, brought ashore. Lest an anchor drag in the pounding rollers, captured ships were anchored up to two miles offshore. The officers and crew lived onboard in barely reasonable conditions, but with a dozen guards, while negotiations between their principals—shipowner and clan chief—dragged on.

On the Western side, certain companies of insurers, lawyers and negotiators became expert with experience. On the Somali side, educated negotiators—not simply Somalis but from the right clan—took over the talking. This was now done with modern technology—computers and iPhones. Even the money was rarely dropped like bombs from on high; the Somalis had numbered bank accounts, in which the money would immediately appear.

With the passage of time, negotiators from the two sides came to know each other, each simply concerned about getting the job done. But the Somalis held the aces.

For the insurers, a cargo delayed was a cargo lost. For the shipowners, a vessel not earning was an operating loss. Add to that the distress of the crew and their desperate families, and a speedy conclusion was their pressing aim. The Somali pirates knew this, and they had all the time in the world. That was the basis of the blackmail: time. Some vessels had been moored off that coast for years.

Gareth Evans had negotiated ten releases of ships and cargoes of varying values. He had studied Puntland and its mazelike tribal structures as if for a doctorate. When he heard the Malmö was steaming for Garacad, he knew which tribe controlled that stretch of coast and how many clans comprised the tribe. Several of them used the same negotiator, a smooth, urbane Somali graduate of a Midwestern American university named Mr. Ali Abdi.

All this was explained to Harry Andersson as a summer dusk settled over London and, half a world away, the Malmö steamed west to Garacad. Takeaway dinners were nibbled at the polished table of the conference room, and Mrs. Bulstrode, the tea lady who had agreed to stay on, served relay after relay of coffee.

A room was set aside as operations control for Gareth Evans. If a new Somali negotiator was going to be appointed, Capt. Eklund would be told by Stockholm which London number to call to get the ball rolling.

Gareth Evans studied the details of the Malmö and her cargo of gleaming new cars and privately calculated that they ought to be able to settle for about five million dollars. He also knew that the first demand would be miles too high. More, he knew that to agree with alacrity would be disastrous. It would immediately double. To demand speed would also be self-defeating; that, too, would raise the price. As for the imprisoned crew, that was their bad luck. They would just have to wait in patience.

Tales from repatriated seamen related that as the weeks dragged by, the onboard Somalis, mostly ill-educated tribesmen from the hills, turned the once-spruce vessel into a stinking pesthole. Lavatories were ignored, urinations took place as and when Nature called. And where, inside or out. The heat did the rest. Oil to power the generators, and thus the air-conditioning, would run out. Unfrozen food would rot, putting the crew onto the Somali goat diet, slaughtered on deck. The only diversions were fishing, board games, cards and reading, but they held boredom at bay for only just so long.

The meeting broke at ten p.m. If set on maximum power, which she probably would be, the Malmö should enter the bay of Garacad around noon London time. Shortly thereafter, they should learn who had taken her and who the nominated negotiator was. Then Gareth Evans would introduce himself, if need be, and the intricate gavotte would begin.

• • •

Opal arrived in Marka as the town slumbered in the blazing post-noon heat. He found the compound and hammered on the door. This compound was not sleeping. He could hear voices and running steps, as if someone was expected but was late.

The latch door in the heavy timber gate flicked open and a face peered out. It was an Arab face but not Somali. The eyes scanned the street but saw no pickup truck. Then they settled on Opal.

“Yes,” snapped a voice, angry that a mere nobody should seek admittance.

“I have papers for the Sheikh,” said Opal in Arabic.

“What papers?” The voice was plainly hostile but with curiosity.

“I don’t know,” said Opal. “That was what the man on the road told me to say.”

There was a buzz of conversation behind the timber. The first face was pulled aside and another took its place. Neither Somali nor Arab, but Arabic-speaking. Pakistani?

“Where are you from and what papers?”

Opal fumbled under his windbreaker and produced a sealed package.

“I come from Marka. I met a man on the road. He had crashed his pickup truck. He asked me to bring these and told me how to find this place. That is all I know.”

He tried to stuff the package through the aperture.

“No, wait,” shouted a voice, and the gate began to open. Four men stood there, fiercely bearded. He was grabbed and hauled inside. A teenage boy ran out, seized his trail bike, wheeling it inside. The gate closed. Two held him. The man who might be a Pakistani towered over him. He studied the package and sucked in a deep breath.

“Where did you get these, dog? What have you done with our friend?”

Opal played the terrified nobody, which was not hard.

“The man driving the truck, sir. I fear he is dead . . .”

That was as far as he got. A right-handed slap with full force laid him on the ground. There was confused shouting in a language he did not understand, though he spoke English, Somali and Arabic apart from his native Hebrew. Half a dozen hands picked him up and hustled him away. There was a shed of sorts built into the compound wall. He was thrown inside and heard a bolt slam. It was dark, and the place stank. He knew he had to keep up the act. He sank onto a pile of old sacks and buried his head in his hands, the universal posture of bewildered defeat.

It was half an hour before they returned. The two or three of bodyguard stature were there, but also a new one. He was indeed Somali, and with a cultured voice. Some education perhaps. He beckoned. Opal stumbled, blinking, into the harsh sunlight.

“Come,” said the Somali, “the Sheikh wishes to see you.”

He was marched under close escort into the main building, facing the gate. In the lobby he was given a skilled and thorough frisking. His tattered wallet was taken and handed to the Somali. He extracted the usual papers and scanned them, comparing the grainy photograph to the face. Then he nodded, pocketing the wallet, turned and walked on. Opal was hustled in his wake.

They entered a well-appointed sitting room, where a large fan turned from the ceiling. There was a desk with papers and writing materials. A man sat in a swivel chair, facing away from the door. The Somali approached and murmured in the man’s ear. Opal could have sworn he had switched to Arabic. He offered the seated man the wallet and identification papers.

Opal could see the package he had brought was open and several sheets lay on the desk. The seated man turned, lifted his eyes from the wallet and stared at him. He had a full black beard and amber eyes.