More.
He wondered if there were any attractive women in the fortress. Might not a new one be a delicacy in bed tonight? Young, white, with dark hair and shaved legs and big, luscious tits. Ragnar liked big tits and tight, wet pussies with a triangle of curly dark pubic hair. White skin made the dark pubic hair vivid, irresistible. He would ask Mustafa.
FORTY MILES SOUTH OF EYL, SOMALIA
I lay there in the dirt/sand mix of Africa trying to get comfortable. I was on my stomach, with my head resting in the crook of my arm, trying to ignore the hot sun slowly baking me and the itch that had developed on my right ankle. I didn’t think the ants had gotten that far, not yet, anyway, but no doubt if I lay here long enough they would. Ants that would disassemble me piece by tiny piece and carry me away to Ant City to feed the little ones. I was in no mood to be recycled just yet.
It was quiet. Peaceful. Like everyone else on the planet was dead and I was the only one left alive, listening …
As I lay there I thought about many things. How Mrs. Carmellini’s only boy, Tommy, wound up in the African dirt. She wanted me to be a professional something, work in a nice office, marry a nice girl, have 2.5 kids and invite her to visit for the Christmas holidays. I even got a law degree along the way. However, certain character flaws reared their ugly heads and the CIA latched on to me … so there went the nice wife, the kids, and Mom’s Christmas vacation.
An ant crawled up onto my hand. I decided to risk it. I squashed the little bastard with my other hand, moving as little as possible.
I started out in the Company as a burglar and wish I could have stayed at it. Gadgets, bugs and safecracking were my Company specialties, although in the last two years Grafton has sent me to every military and Company school he could think of to teach me tradecraft and unarmed combat. Armed combat, too. I knew how to recruit and run agents, set up drops and lie convincingly. I also knew how to jump out of a plane, kill people with knives, garroting wire and high explosives, could tear down, repair, clean and shoot any weapon in any military arsenal, and could even swim fairly well, although the SEALs refused to certify my swimming skills. Said I wasn’t proficient enough.
I didn’t care: I didn’t want to be a SEAL. What I got out of SEAL training was an abiding loathing of water—I limit myself to showers and an occasional glass of water between meals.
Another school he ran me through that I didn’t do great at was Marine Corps sniping school. Oh, I could shoot fairly well, but I refused to get with the program and commune with blood-sucking insects and lizards, become one with the dirt and sweat, which is what marines are all about. Lying motionless under a bush for days at a time, pissing and shitting in an adult diaper, just to pot someone if he or she happened by was a skill set that I decided I could probably do without. Grafton knew the marines also sent me home without a graduation certificate, although he pretended he didn’t.
The irony of all that training and my current predicament almost brought a smile to my face. Almost.
If worst came to worst, I planned on getting a job at Starbucks and to hell with all of it. At Christmas maybe I’d send Grafton a card, maybe I wouldn’t. I could send Mom a fruitcake.
I was getting really relaxed, itches and all, when I heard the faintest sound of an engine. A gasoline engine. I listened and tried to stay totally relaxed.
After a bit I realized there were two of them, some ways off. I only heard the sounds when the engines revved or topped a little rise.
I knew what they were. Technicals, which were Jap pickups with a machine gun mounted on a swivel in the bed. They were the tanks, jeeps, supply vehicles, scout cars, VIP transport and mobile antiaircraft units of both the pirates and the Islamic fundamentalist rebels hereabouts, the Shabab, the holy warriors who had been trying to take over the country for the last seventeen years. The Shabab wasn’t doing so hot right now, what with the famine in the southern half of the country and the universal opprobrium in which they were held, here and everywhere else. Three million people were in the various stages of starvation and the Shabab refused to allow international aid. Anything delivered anyway they stole.
The drivers of these two technicals were certainly taking their time. We spotted them with binoculars about twenty-five minutes ago and I had been lying here for fifteen, contemplating my itches and misspent life.
A voice in the earpiece. “About a quarter mile away now, Tommy. Act dead.”
I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. Tried to relax every muscle, become one with the earth.
“Two guys in each truck.”
I could hear the engines clearly now. One had the remnants of a muffler; the other was reduced to a straight exhaust pipe, which blatted fiercely.
The two trucks were coming along this dirt road from the south, headed, presumably, toward Eyl or one of the villages farther up the coast. We were inland a few miles from the coast road, which was fairly well traveled. This rutted track through the desert was much less so. There hadn’t been any other vehicles in over an hour.
Not that many people in Somalia were out on the roads. Without a government, with a civil war raging, with pirates along the coast, the country was swarming with armed, hungry men willing to rob, loot, pillage and rape about anybody. Anywhere you went, you needed to be in an armed group that the locals didn’t want to mess with. Sorta like Europe in the Dark Ages, I imagine, or perhaps Wall Street today.
As the trucks approached I practiced being dead.
They were loud and right there when they stopped and the engines dropped to idle RPM. I tried to breathe ever so shallow.
Heard a door slam. Then another. Still, the kick in the ribs a few seconds later was kinda unexpected. I grunted.
A foot in my ribs rolled me over like so much dead meat. I blinked at the light, looked up. Saw a head wearing a rag blotting out the sun. The rays of the sun behind him left his face in shadow.
I realized he had a pistol in his hand.
The guy beside him said something. This guy was maybe twenty, wearing a rag and filthy trousers and shirt. There were two more of them, off to my right.
They jabbered.
The guy who had kicked me before kicked me again, and I curled up into a fetal position.
More jabbering. Laughter. Out of the corner of my eye I watched the closest man. He raised his pistol, cocked it with the thumb of his left hand and drew a careful bead on my little cranium.
I scrunched my eyes shut. Wondered if this was gonna be the big It. All my life, just to get to this.
Then I heard the thunks, the sickening impact sounds of big bullets striking living tissue. I felt a fine spray of liquid. I felt rather than saw two bodies falling.
About two seconds later I heard the shots, just one booming sound, rolling through the low hills and acacia bushes.
Two more heavy smacks, one potato, two … and, again, the report, just one bang.
“Tommy?”
I moved my hands and keyed my mike. “Yeah.”
“They’re down. All four.”
“Yeah.”
I pushed myself to my knees, then stood. All four of them were dead. Ratty clothes, sandals, Russian weapons, scraggly beards and head rags. One guy had guts hanging out. Blood sprayed everywhere. I felt the puke coming up my throat and managed to shut my eyes and keep it down.
The trucks were still idling.
My part in this little murder scene was designed to get them out of the trucks. We didn’t want the hardware damaged.
I was checking out our new rides when the guys came down from the hills carrying the Sakos, E.D. and Travis Clay. They paused to inspect the corpses.
E.D. looked me over. “You got sprayed with blood,” he said.