Ilyas waited for the last one to pass into Waris’s keeping, then turned his attention to the bridge. He found the engine controls and killed the engines. They’d need Guleed and the speedboat for a quick getaway if a warship was in range of any mayday the crew had managed to broadcast.
He found the Automatic Identification System (AIS), used by maritime traffic for tracking the location and heading of vessels, screwed into the bulkhead. He was about to smash it with the butt of his rifle when he noticed it wasn’t even turned on. Ilyas shook his head; navigating ocean lanes without AIS was like driving on a busy highway at night with no lights on. He smashed it with the butt of his rifle. There was no need to risk anyone figuring out where this boat was until he or she was ready to pay for it.
The radio station was silent, the hand mike resting in the receiver. This was the eighth time he’d stepped onto a captured bridge, and every time the crew managed to get a distress call out, there was someone on the other end of the radio demanding more information. He kicked at the shattered satellite phone in the corpse’s twitching hand; it was just as dead as its owner. Why make a call to one person who might not answer when a radio broadcast would reach every ship for a hundred miles?
“Nothing about this ship makes sense,” he said. He started to think this prize wasn’t worth the effort.
He heard two bangs of a rifle butt on the forecastle, then three more after a pause. He was needed.
Ilyas stepped over the body and made his way back to the deck. The fishermen were on their knees, hands behind their heads, while Waris and Arale kept watch over them. Arale had a cheek full of khat, his jaw working overtime to chew the narcotic leaf.
Ogaal stood at a hatch leading into the hold, waving at Ilyas for attention.
One of the prisoners was speaking to the rest in a low voice. Might be a prayer. Might not.
“Shut him up,” Ilyas said as he walked past. Arale snapped a kick into the talker’s head and follow up with a stomp on the man’s kidneys. There was no protest from the rest of the prisoners.
“Boss, come see!” Ogaal said as Ilyas followed him into the hold.
A fishing boat should have reeked with the ghosts of thousands of dead fish, no matter how well or how often the hold was scrubbed out. This ship was pristine, a slight smell of bleach in the air. A new coat of white paint gleamed under the florescent lights running along the ceiling.
There was no cargo anywhere in the hold, not even a shipment of ice to chill a catch he could sell back in his home port of Eyl. There was no Western hostage to ransom. No cargo to plunder. He doubted he could even sell this ship to a dealer in Yemen. The only thing this ship offered was a small room, made with steel walls that sat in the middle of the hold. A single double-wide door, slightly ajar, was the only way into the room.
“This had better be good, Ogaal.”
Ogaal ran to the door and heaved it open a bit more, his scrawny limbs straining against the weight. Ilyas ran his hand against the side of the door as it swept past him. Six inches of bare metal lay beneath the whitewashed steel. If the compartment inside was meant to be a safe room for the crew, it was much too small to hold all of them at once.
Ilyas flicked on a light switch in the room, illuminating a cramped chamber that held nothing but a green case, a yard long and a foot wide, on a steel shelf. Ilyas disengaged the latches on the case and struggled to lift the lid open. Why was it so damn heavy?
The lid bounced against the hinges as momentum took it away from him; a yellow and black tri-foil on the underside of the lid warned of radiation danger. Script in a language he didn’t recognize ran up and down the underside of the lid beside the warning symbol. Ilyas looked at the contents in silence. A metallic sphere suspended in a frame, wires equidistant over the surface, was either a demon or his salvation
A camera flashed behind him. Ogaal had his cell phone out, a giant grin on his face.
“Are we rich?” Ogaal asked.
Ilyas was about to force-feed that cell phone to Ogaal when machine gunfire erupted from the deck. Ogaal turned and ran out of the hold without prompting.
The firing had ceased by the time Ilyas made it back into the open air. All the prisoners lay in a heap of bodies; one writhed against the edge of the deck, his hands over the bloody mess that remained of his stomach.
Arale was hunched over Waris, who lay on his side, moaning, as he cupped his hands around his groin. Smoke seeped from Arale’s barrel.
“One of those Philipinos hit Waris in the balls and got his gun,” Arale said, his words garbled by the khat in his mouth.
Ilyas shoved the surviving crewman onto his back with his foot. Ilyas looked down at the dying man and shook his head.
“You’re not from the Philippines, are you?” he asked.
The crewman whimpered, “Balabnida. Apayo.”
“If you insist.” Ilyas bent over, grabbed the man by his shirt, and tipped him over the gunwale. There was a perfunctory scream and a splash as the sea took him. Ilyas didn’t bother to see whether the crewman managed to make it back to the surface.
“Get rid of the bodies. We need to get this boat to Somalia.”
Chapter 2
Natalie Davis splashed cold water against her face and looked up into the bathroom mirror. The florescent lights made her look like she hadn’t slept in days, which wasn’t that far from the truth. She stuck out her lower lip and exhaled slowly.
“Come on, Natalie. All you have to do is get off the plane and go through customs. Just like any normal person,” she said to herself. Her reflection didn’t look convinced.
Her training had hammered proper border crossings over and over again. Be nonchalant, know your cover story backward and forward, and never, ever, panic. Good spies won’t get caught at border crossings. Trust your backstop. The fake identity and history were put together by the best spies in the business.
The butterflies in her stomach didn’t seem to give a damn about the instructor’s platitudes.
A seat belt sign lit up with a chime. Instructions in German and English urged her back to her seat for the final approach into Vienna International Airport.
Natalie patted her cheeks with her fingers and shook her head from side to side. A trick her mother had taught her to clear her mind.
“Hi, my name is Natalie Garrow. I work for Eisen Meer Logistics,” she said. She repeated the words as a quiet mantra. “Garrow”—that was the name on every piece of identification she carried. She wasn’t First Lieutenant Natalie Davis, US Army, anymore. Now she was a fresh-faced MBA with way too much college debt and a skimpy résumé.
Natalie opened the bathroom door and found a frumpy, apple-shaped woman waiting on her.
“Sorry,” Natalie said with a smile as she slipped past the woman.
“Fräulein.”
The woman handed Natalie’s Prada purse back to her before closing the bathroom door. Natalie’s face flushed. The only thing worse than leaving your ID unattended for foreign intelligence services to peruse was to lose it. Natalie clasped the purse against her chest and slipped back into her seat.
The Austrians will make me persona non grata before I even get off this plane, she thought.
She started filling out the customs form left in her seat back and corrected herself. She wasn’t traveling as a diplomat with the State Department. There was no diplomatic immunity to hide behind if she screwed up and got caught. She was an NOC, a Nonofficial Cover officer, and if caught, she could bank on a nice prison cell and a “never heard of her” write-off from the US government.