“Two more days,” Julie told the women. “Arch talked to the negotiator, a Mr. Grafton. The money is coming. Just two more days and we’ll be free.”
When Nora finally lay down and closed her eyes, she tried to get some perspective on her life and her recent adventures. She often did that in the moments before sleep overcame her, but tonight the emotions threatened to overwhelm her. She needed to surpress them, try to wall them off. She certainly didn’t want to think about the details of the torture of Ragnar, which had been a catharsis, a break.
I’ve broken with my past life, she thought. From here until the end it’s a new adventure.
That thought allowed her to relax, and she slept as the dawn turned into day and the first rays of the sun sneaked through the gun ports into the fortress.
Jake Grafton was also lying down, trying to relax enough to sleep. He was in some ramshackle dirt-floored building a couple of miles up the river from the beach town, Eyl proper. East Eyl. Eyl Beach. Eyl by the Sea, the jewel of Somalia.
Around him he could hear men farting and snoring and coughing, and the groaning strain of the cots on which they lay.
He was acutely aware of the Walther in the ankle holster. They didn’t search him, merely took his com unit and headset. Told him where to lie down. He had obeyed.
Of course, the act of pulling that pistol from its holster would get him shot immediately. He had no intention of doing so. Not anytime soon, anyway.
He lay there listening to the night sounds and wondered if Yousef el-Din’s pocket radio controller would indeed trigger the trench bomb. He and the Israelis thought they had disabled all the detonators and antennas … But! Maybe they missed one. Or two. Maybe it wouldn’t be a really big bang, but a little one. Maybe there would be no bang at all. If Yousef pressed the button and nothing happened, he was going to be very surprised. Also very unhappy. Disappointed, too.
Maybe …
Jake Grafton was still going over the maybes when he drifted off.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
WASHINGTON, D.C.
Encrypted Top Secret Flash messages were launched into the ether at the speed of light from desks in Washington, Langley and the Indian Ocean, and at most of the military commands in between, and other encrypted Flash messages came zipping back, again at the speed of light.
Toad Tarkington received an avalanche of demands to be told in exquisite detail all that had happened in Eyl to date and what was going to happen in the future. Was or was not the trench bomb safe? Tarkington was given orders to report on the state of health of the Sultan prisoners, the status of the television news teams and the status and circumstances of any civilian casualties caused by the U.S. military or anyone else.
For his part, Toad informed the bureaucrats that Jake Grafton, the American envoy, was the prisoner of Yousef el-Din, the local Shabab banana, and that Ragnar was dead.
Toad and Grafton had a plan, of course, that they had made and massaged since the president appointed Grafton, and Toad undertook to state to the powers that be that the plan didn’t require any participation from Grafton.
Then he turned the whole message mess over to his chief of staff, who could draft answers and kiss ass at the speed of light whenever required.
In Washington the president took another smoke break with Sal Molina. “Whaddaya think?” the elected one asked after that first blessed drag of cigarette smoke.
“You know Grafton,” Molina said. He stretched out his feet as far as they would go and jammed his hands in his trouser pockets. “Ragnar got his lesson, and now it’s the Shabab’s turn. The thing about Grafton: Anything can go wrong, and if it does, he has probably prepared for that eventuality.”
The president spun his chair so he could look out the window at the floodlit Washington Monument rising like a giant phallic symbol against the black night sky.
“This military adventure won’t go over very well in Europe. They call us unprincipled cowboys now; if there are any significant casualties, they’ll call us worse.”
“The Shabab did the pirates. God only knows how many of those bastards they slaughtered, but we didn’t do it.”
“Grafton’s a genius.”
“Maybe the queen will knight him.”
“I just have this suspicion,” the president mused, “an inkling perhaps, just an itch between my shoulder blades, that this whole thing is out of control. It’s like a televised debate, with the cameras on and the swine reporter grinning like a moron on crack, and you just know the son of a bitch is going to ask you an unexpected question that will make you look like a friggin’ idiot in front of everyone on the planet. That’s the feeling. I got it big-time. This whole pirate gig is going to turn out badly.”
“Grafton is the best—”
The president smacked the table with one hand. “Homicidal Muslims, grinding poverty in Africa, people starving by the millions, polluted oceans, vicious pirates—this isn’t Johnny Depp swaggering in front of a camera wearing more eye shadow than a whorehouse full of sluts. This is real as a heart attack. That Grafton … he can certainly smash things. That’s the easy part. I have to pick up the pieces.”
Sal Molina sighed. After twenty-five years in politics, he thought most politicians had the courage of mice, present company included. They were constantly congratulating themselves on having the fortitude to take political risks, when the worst that could happen was losing some votes. Molina tried to recall just what the president had done about poverty and starvation in Africa, vicious pirates and polluted oceans. Maybe he made a speech or two. Tut tut.
All the guts inside the Beltway wouldn’t be enough for a Vienna sausage, Molina thought savagely.
I woke up with the sun in my eyes. I got up, went to the eastern edge of the roof and pissed through a gun port as the warm desert wind pushed on my back and the sun warmed my face. One of the guards eyed me, thought about shooting me and apparently changed his mind. Everyone has to piss, even infidels. He settled for a rude gesture.
Ahh, morning in fabulous Eyl. With any luck, this would be my last one. Tomorrow morning I’d either be dead or someplace else.
I turned on my headset. Not a lot of battery left, but maybe enough.
“Red Control, Tommy. Where is Grafton?”
“Good morning, Tommy. All indications are he’s in a hut in West Eyl. We’ve counted over two hundred armed men in that vicinity.”
“Thanks. I’ll get back to you.”
I went downstairs and found Arch Penney, who was conferring with his crew, trying to figure out how to feed eight hundred fifty people and not poison them. It was a tough problem. My personal contribution was to refuse to eat anything. Fasting wouldn’t give me the trots, although the water might. I had to drink it anyway.
“Did you bring binoculars from your ship?” I asked the captain.
He nodded.
“May I borrow them?”
His wife had them. He told me where she was and I went.
Nora Neidlinger was still asleep, and the women were talking in hushed tones. Nora’s daughter was asleep beside her. No one asked me what had happened to Nora, and I wasn’t letting on that I knew.
Lying on my belly on the roof, looking through a gun port, I surveyed the beach. A few kids were fishing in the surf, but there were no SEALs lying around. I wondered where they were. Looked the Sultan over. Probably aboard her, but I saw no one. She appeared to be a derelict.
Lots of guys with assault rifles wandering around Eyl. Up on top of the lair amid the rubble, in pickups in the plaza, stealing food from the locals. I could see men literally carrying pots out of the houses scattered about while women screamed at them and children cried. Those holy warriors … The distance was too great to see much detail. I needed to get closer.