The two Mossad agents had pistols in their hands. They looked around, then nodded at me. I could lead them or follow them. I was tempted to sit down in one of the old stuffed chairs and let them do their thing. However, if I did that and the trench bomb around the fort went off, destroying it and murdering everyone in the place …
That damn generator. Radio controls would probably be battery operated, but if there were a landline to the detonators, the generator was probably rigged to power it. It wouldn’t be high in the building since it used diesel fuel. The pirates wouldn’t want to carry cans up the stairs. The basement, then.
A burst of submachine-gun fire rattled down the staircase. Then a couple more. The SEALs were cleaning the place out.
I went around the stairs, found a door and opened it. There was an electric lightbulb on the ceiling, illuminating stairs going down. Now I could hear the low, steady throb of a diesel engine.
I found the Kimber .45 in my hand. When I drew it I don’t know. Suddenly I realized it was there. I cocked the hammer and put the safety on. Some people carry those things cocked and locked, but without a holster to put the thing in, I never had that kind of sangfroid. Sooner or later I would have managed to shoot myself. I laid the assault rifle on a chair and, with both hands on the pistol, started down.
Mike Rosen was in the e-com center aboard Sultan when he heard the .50 caliber machine gun the SEALs had brought aboard open up. There was no mistaking the trip-hammer rips of a heavy machine gun firing bursts for anything else.
One of the windows popped. Rosen could see a hole in the glass, small, with cracks radiating out from it. Although he didn’t know it, a bullet from the machine gun in one of the pickups in the Eyl square had found its way here. Just one. The only casualty was the glass.
He looked out the window and saw the burning pickups in the square in front of Ragnar’s lair, saw muzzle flashes from automatic weapons and the distant flashing on the hills, up toward Eyl West.
He got back on his computer and began typing. The words poured out as fast as he thought them. He was a good typist and he was good with words, which were his stock-in-trade. Every minute or so he hit the SEND button; the Internet could crash anytime, and even if it didn’t, he wanted to report as close to real time as he could.
At Rosen’s radio home, KOA Denver, the e-mails were put on the Net at the same time the announcer read them over the air. All up and down the front range of the Rockies, people pulled their vehicles to the berm of the highway or the edge of the street and turned the volume of their radios up. Rosen wrote for them. He could see them in his mind’s eye, and he wrote word pictures just for them.
“Captain, we have all three pirate skiffs on radar.”
“Range?”
“Eight miles.”
USS Richard Ward, an Arleigh Burke–class destroyer, approached Eyl from a course slightly north of west. The commanding officer, Commander Millicent C. Fjestad, had her ship inbound at ten knots. Her crew referred to her as The Old Woman, just as male commanding officers were traditionally called The Old Man. Less reverently, she was called Big Mama behind her back. Still, every man and woman aboard Richard Ward respected the captain. She was a highly competent naval officer who cared about her crew.
Her mission tonight was to sink all pirate skiffs at sea off the port of Eyl so that SEALs could egress without opposition. “Sanitize the area and keep it sanitized,” flag ops said.
Like all American destroyers now in commission, Richard Ward had but one gun. It was a dilly, a Mark 45 Mod 4, in caliber 5"/62. This weapon fired a shell five inches in diameter weighing 70 pounds at a muzzle velocity of 2,650 feet per second. Its effective range was over 20 miles. Aimed by radar and computer, it was accurate and deadly.
The pirate skiffs, however, were not conventional enemy warships, with decent freeboards and a superstructure. They were boats, and their gunwales extended about a foot above the water. They were small, difficult targets. Big Mama Fjestad didn’t intend to miss. She wanted them closer, not hull down on the horizon.
She worried about the depth of the water as she approached the Somali coast. There was a submerged sandbar about three miles offshore, and the channel across it was farther north. Of course the skiffs were inside the bar, cruising up and down, looking for God knows what. The sonar was giving the bridge crew a constant real-time reading on the depth of water.
Not a light shown from Richard Ward as she glided toward the coast. On the deck forward the gun barrel was alive, tracking the northern-most target as the destroyer closed the range.
At three miles from the skiffs, five miles offshore, the water shallowed to less than a hundred feet. Commander Fjestad turned her ship northward to parallel the coast.
Meanwhile, aboard the skiffs, the fireworks and muzzle flashes from Eyl were plainly visible. The crews were not searching the dark sea for enemy ships, but staring toward Eyl as their captains tried to raise someone on their hand-held radios.
Ten seconds after Ward was steady on her new course, the tactical action officer (TAO) called on the squawk box. “We are stabilized on all three targets, Captain. Request permission to shoot.”
“Send them to hell,” Big Mama said, then stuffed her fingers in her ears.
Two seconds later the Mark 45 rapped out three shots, about a second apart. The propellant gases still burning as the shells left the gun muzzle strobed the darkness. Now the gun barrel traversed at 30 degrees a second to the second target and stabilized. Boom, boom, boom, three more ear-splitting reports assaulted the bridge team, most of whom had fingers in their ears or were wearing ear protectors. Traverse to the next target, three more muzzle flashes and trip-hammer reports.
It was all over in twelve seconds.
Five seconds later the bridge squawk box came to life. “Captain, the targets have disappeared.”
“Good shooting, people! Well done.”
The Hellfire missiles that took out the machine guns on the roof of the lair cratered it. Chunks of brick, mortar, concrete and wooden beams were blasted down into the penthouse. Sheikh Ragnar was hit by a large piece, which knocked him unconscious. His two sons were there, and they too went down under the onslaught.
Nora Neidlinger was in the bedroom, under the bed, when the roof caved in. She wasn’t hurt. For a long moment the air was opaque with dirt and dust and explosive residue, but gradually the sea breeze carried it out. From the outside it looked like smoke.
She crawled out and looked around. The lights were still on. She made her way through the rubble and found the three pirates on the floor of the main room. U.S. currency notes were scattered everywhere, like confetti. One of the sons was obviously dead, with a large splinter of wood through his neck. He had bled some, but not much. She couldn’t see his face, which was covered with dirt and small debris.
The other son was still alive. The butt of his rifle was under him. She grabbed it and tugged. It came slowly, then quickly when out from under his dead weight.
She examined it, then pointed it at the man’s head and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
She fiddled with a lever on the side. Tried it again. This time it hammered. The recoil was unexpected and the rifle leaped from her hands. Fell into the blood-and-grime mess that had been his head.
Nora went over to Ragnar and scrutinized him. He was lying faceup, with a bloody spot on his skull, in a bed of currency. His eyes were open and blinking. He was trying to swallow.