“Not so fast,” the man said, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. “Has my boy been giving you trouble?” He swung his rifle toward the downed man, firing a ten-round burst that ripped up his chest and into his head, exploding it like a watermelon. Costas stared in horror, his ears ringing from the noise, and then slumped back, wiping the spatter of blood off his face. The Boss grinned, showing a mouth full of gold. “See? No more trouble.” He took out the cigarette and spat a jet of khat juice on to the corpse. “Plenty more where he came from.” He sniffed exaggeratedly. “Man, it stinks down here. We need to get you some fresh air.”
Costas rolled back, looking at the man. He had spent hours listening to him in the Toyota and through the hatch in the boat when it had been left open, but this was the first time he had seen him. He was young, too, but better fed and sharper-looking than the other one had been, his eyes less hazed by drugs. He spoke in a curious patois that seemed to owe something to hard-edged Hollywood gang movies of recent years, but that could have been a result of time spent in the US or Canada. Now he sat down beside the body, placed the Kalashnikov across his knees and offered Costas the cigarette. When he refused, the Boss leaned forward, looking him over with an exaggerated expression of surprise and contempt. “I’m examining my merchandise, and I don’t like what I see,” he said, digging a lighter out of the fallen man’s pocket and flicking it under Costas’s chin, examining his bruises and shaking his head. “I don’t see anyone paying a ransom for you any time soon, my man.”
“If you kill me, your paymaster from Deep Explorer isn’t going to be too pleased, is he? Nor are my friends in the Somali navy.”
The Boss stared at him, his jaw dropping theatrically, then sniffed and spat at his feet before suddenly letting out a high-pitched peal of laughter and slapping his knee. He jabbed the hand with the cigarette at Costas. “You trying to frighten me, man?”
“Just putting you in the picture.”
“I’ll tell you about the picture.” The Boss leaned forward, his face contorted. “That man Landor? He’s here now, upstairs. He’s different, he understands us, knows what makes us tick. The rest of you are all the same, Americans, English, you come here thinking you can take us on, and you run away as soon as you get a bloody nose. The Somali navy? Give me a break, man. And you know what? I’ll take his money, yes. But he and I have an agreement. Part of what’s on that island is mine. What we’re going to find now.”
“You might want to take care. It may be a little hot for you to handle.”
The Boss got up, staring, the whites of his knuckles showing where he was clutching the rifle. “Are you doing it again? Are you doing it again?”
“Just a friendly word of warning.”
Costas knew what was coming. He had provoked it, but he had known it was going to happen again at some point and he just wanted it over with. The blow when it came threw him back against the side of the hull, a blinding pain exploding behind his eyes. Then he felt nothing.
Jack gunned the Zodiac forward, twisting the throttle as it rose out of a deep trough and then easing it back again as he dropped down the other side, trying to keep a steady speed. Rather than taking the patrol boat’s larger rigid-hulled Zodiac he had opted for the four-meter inflatable with its forty-horsepower outboard, keeping their profile as low as possible and reducing the chances of anyone on the trawler spotting them. If he had tried to plane over the waves, the shriek of the propeller rising out of the water between the peaks might have given them away. Stealth was of the essence, and their progress so far had been good enough, meaning that they should be closing in on their target before dawn.
He lowered himself to the floorboards, sitting with his back against one pontoon and his feet against the fuel tank, holding the tiller of the outboard with one hand and the painter line with the other. Wedged in the bow was Lieutenant Ahmed, keeping as far forward as possible so that his weight would stop the boat from flying upward as they rose above each trough. As soon as Jack had extracted confirmation from Macinnes on Deep Explorer that Costas was on the trawler, Ahmed had immediately volunteered for the mission, and Jack had seen the necessity of having two men in the boat, doubling the firepower. This operation was about rescuing Costas, but confronting the pirates was also a Somali naval responsibility, and Ahmed was the spearhead of their new rapid-reaction force, trained at the US Navy SEALS base at Quantico. With the plan they had devised with Captain Ibrahim for dealing with the trawler, Ahmed’s diving skills would also come in very useful.
They were about two nautical miles ahead of the patrol boat and less than half a mile now from the trawler, all of them heading in a line toward the little island to the west of Socotra. Jack glanced back, throttling down even further to reduce the phosphorescence in their wake, thankful for the rough seas that should help to keep them concealed. He pulled the tiller sideways to aim at a rogue wave, climbing it and then pushing the tiller to get back on course, trying to keep his profile as inconspicuous as possible in the event that anyone in the trawler ahead was actually keeping a lookout. Everything was as close to black as they could make it — their wetsuits, their faces — and it was a moonless night, still more than an hour away from dawn. He ran again through a mental checklist of their equipment. Both men wore three-liter air tanks that would give them about twenty minutes or so underwater, with octopus rigs so that they had two regulator mouthpieces each. In backpacks beside the cylinders they carried small fins and low-volume face masks, with Jack carrying a second set. Around their waists they wore equipment belts with holstered 9mm Beretta pistols, spare magazines, fragmentation and stun grenades, and in Jack’s case a flare gun as well. Ahmed also had an MP5 submachine gun and a bandolier on his chest with additional magazines, his role being to provide suppressing fire to allow Jack to find and extract Costas.
All they could do now was to keep going, to hope that the timing was right, to pray that nobody in the trawler saw them. An hour earlier, a drone launched from the patrol boat had seen the trawler’s skiff leave and go on ahead, taking one white man who could only be Landor and at least a dozen others of the gang toward the island. It meant that there would be a reception for Jack and Ahmed if they did get to the island themselves, but that was too far ahead in the plan to think about now. The immediate consequence was fewer men to deal with on the trawler itself, a slightly higher chance of success if they did get on board. It was an audacious plan, but there had been no other way of interdicting the trawler without making their presence known in advance, potentially jeopardizing Costas’s chances even further.
Jack had tried not to think about that, having blocked the worst-case scenario from his mind. Costas was only valuable to Landor as long as he thought his capture was deterring Jack from following him to the island. Landor himself might have bitten off more than he could chew. The gang boss was by all accounts a shrewd operator, wily enough to guess that the value of whatever lay on that island was a lot greater than he had been promised as payment. Landor might have offered him a cut, but that in itself might be seen as a sign of weakness, as if Landor were desperate. What seemed certain was that Costas would have little interest to them as a hostage for ransom, that his life would be forfeit the instant they knew that Jack was on their trail, the moment any of them saw the Zodiac approaching. Even if he were not killed immediately, Jack knew there would be little chance of reasoning with the gang, most of them probably off their heads on drugs, their boss a ruthless psychopath. All he cared about now was Costas, and the certainty that without their plan his friend would die.