They had not included pressure gauges with their tanks to economise on space, but Jack knew that he must be down to his final few minutes of air, and he looked along the surf line for a possible egress point. Ahmed and Costas were off to the right, and Costas gestured forcefully for him to follow, his arm trailing tendrils of blood. A white-tipped reef shark appeared below them, swimming in wide circles, and then another joined it. Jack tensed; where there were small sharks, bigger ones were sure to follow. The last thing they needed was for it all to end in a feeding frenzy, just when they were so close to their goal. He swam determinedly toward Costas, keeping at least two meters below the surface. Ahead he saw a cavernous opening between rocky outcrops and the shoreline that he knew must be Costas and Ahmed’s objective, somewhere that promised calmer waters beyond, a place where they might surface unseen. He sucked hard on his regulator, knowing that he only had a couple of breaths left, but kept going. To surface now, still more than ten meters from shore, would be to risk being driven against the rocks before reaching that entranceway, and also being seen by those of the gang who were ashore and might be searching for survivors from the trawler.
He dropped down to the shingle-strewn entrance to the cavern, took a final breath from the tank and then powered forward behind the other two, swimming beyond the protective rock wall of the entrance and ascending inside, exhaling to avoid an embolism as he came up. As he reached the surface, he spat out his regulator, took a few deep breaths and then looked around, treading water hard to keep afloat. The sun had risen above the eastern horizon and bathed the rocks in light, sparkling off the water. They were in a small pool that formed a narrow inlet, protected on both sides by a rocky shoreline that rose several meters above the level of the water, the shingle sloping to form a rough beach. The other two were already making their way out, and Jack followed them, pulling himself up and sitting in the shallows. He stripped off his mask and fins and unstrapped his cylinder, dropping it beside him, and then crawled over to Costas, who was lying inert on the shingle, the sun on his face. He leaned over him, dripping water, and opened Costas’s good eye, inspecting the pupil.
“Hey, what are you doing?” Costas said, sounding half asleep. “This is my beach time.”
“Just checking for concussion. You look fine. Anything broken?”
“A few teeth. Maybe my jaw. Nothing too serious.”
Jack unzipped the main pouch on his belt, took out a bottle of coagulant powder and spilled it on the wound, then wrapped it in a shell dressing and pinned it. Ahmed scrambled down from the side of the inlet where he had gone to check out their surroundings. “Okay,” he said, squatting down, speaking quietly. “There are two guys with Kalashnikovs about three hundred meters west, inspecting the bits of wreckage that have come ashore. Another guy’s marching up and down talking on a phone, gesticulating. I’m guessing he’s the gang leader, the Boss. The skiff’s nowhere to be seen, but I imagine the entrance to the submarine pen must be somewhere nearby, and that’s where it’s gone. I can see where we need to go.”
Jack peered at Costas. “If you’re not up to it, you can hold down the fort here while we go in. If all goes according to plan, there should be a section of Somali marines coming ashore from the patrol boat within the hour.”
“Are you in contact with them?” Costas asked.
Ahmed shook his head. “Radio contact is too risky. There’s a chance of being overheard. But I’ve set a locator beacon on that rock above us, something they can follow. This inlet will be a good beaching point for their Zodiac.”
Jack reached into the pouch on his back and pulled out a waterproof package, passing it to Costas, who unwrapped it, revealing a second Beretta in a holster. “Thoughtful of you, Jack.”
“What was it you said a few days ago? The buddy system. We look after each other.”
“Right on.” Costas staggered to his feet, shook himself and pulled back the slider on the pistol, chambering a round. “Full mag?”
“Full mag. Two more with the holster.”
Costas slotted the holster over his shorts, held the gun down and paused. “I wanted to ask about Zaheed. Last I saw of him he’d taken a round in the chest.”
Jack gave him a grim look and shook his head. Costas nodded slowly. “I thought so. No way am I waiting this one out. There’s someone here I want to meet again.”
“Me too,” said Jack. He stared down at the shingle. For the first time in as long as he could remember, the thought of Landor did not make him feel apprehensive, uneasy, the old sense of guilt. Seeing what they had done to Costas had removed all that. Now all he wanted was to get into that pen and end the job, to see Landor finished for good.
Costas looked at Ahmed. “You good to go?”
Ahmed pulled the slider on his own pistol. “Good to go.”
“Okay,” Jack said. “Let’s move.”
23
Ahmed led them forward over the rocky edge of the inlet, Costas following and Jack bringing up the rear. Before leaving, Jack had made Costas eat the energy bar that had been in a pouch on his belt, and they had checked him again for signs of concussion. The Somali naval base doctor and two medics had come along in the patrol boat in anticipation of casualties, with a standby arrangement for medevac by helicopter to a French fleet auxiliary ship with a full operating theater, part of the Combined Task Force flotilla currently off the coast of Yemen.
Jack’s friend who headed the anti-piracy force had offered to divert a Royal Australian Air Force P-3 Orion surveillance aircraft over the island, part of the routine anti-piracy patrol carried out between Oman and the Horn of Africa that had recently been retasked to deal with the threat of naval incursion from Iran. Captain Ibrahim had advised against it until they were certain that Costas was safe. Like the terrorists, the pirate gangs were not easily intimidated by Western military force, having seen it come and go with political change and knowing that the task force might be prevented from interdiction by restrictive rules of engagement. Seeing an aircraft might only stoke up the pirates’ defiance, and result in even more erratic violence. Ibrahim could request task force assistance once his marines were engaged and under fire, but until the landing team arrived in their Zodiac the three of them were on their own. Their priority now was to discover the U-boat pen and secure its contents before any damage could be done, particularly if those contents included potentially lethal radioactive materials.
Ahmed signaled for them to stop, and they squatted down among the rocky outcrops, looking around. A light breeze had sprung up from the east, bringing with it the smell of burning from the wreckage of the trawler. For the first time Jack could see the island in its entirety, a desolate rocky outcrop less than a kilometer across, almost flat and with hardly any vegetation. The rock had been eroded by sea and wind into a variegated surface of fissures and gullies, something that might slow their progress but would provide cover as they approached their target. Ahead of them, where Ahmed had earlier seen the two men inspecting the wreckage, lay the beginning of another inlet like the one they had just left, only much wider and cutting deeper into the island. There was nowhere else obvious for the skiff from the trawler to have gone, and this was their best bet for the U-boat pen.
Ahmed signaled them forward, and Jack acknowledged. They crept on, weapons at the ready, and a few minutes later reached the edge of the inlet, taking cover behind a crest of rock that overlooked the water about twenty meters away. “We need to get in there fast,” Ahmed said. “If they discover we’re here, they’ll make a fortress of it, and this could go on for days. But from inside we can clean them out like ferrets in a rat hole.”