“We’re fifty miles from the farms growing AA-grade coffee beans, and they have the nerve to serve instant,” Ritter said.
“War is hell,” Mike murmured as he munched on a mahamri.
Ritter checked his watch and scanned the passing traffic. Battered trucks and vans puttered by, adding the smell of exhaust to the funk of sweaty bodies and third world sewage systems. Their contact was late, and as the only two white faces on this street, they could practically be spotted from orbit.
“You have any guesses on who the original buyer of the… item is? Can’t be the Iranians — the delivery boat went right past it. Thing like this should be damn expensive, more than the people we normally deal with could afford,” Ritter said. Terrorists normally bought their weapons in small batches, spending their money as soon as it came in from donors. To save up anything more than a few million dollars for a purchase was out of character for al-Qaeda and their ilk.
“Maybe a country? Iran slipped enough to Hamas or Hezbollah for the purchase?”
Mike shrugged.
“Good talking to you, Mike.”
A van with a door bereft of paint pulled up next to the café, and the driver rolled down his window. An African with a wide smile and gleaming ivory teeth smiled at Ritter.
“Hey, boss, you going on safari in Amboseli?” he asked, his accent thick and local.
“No, Tsavo,” Ritter answered. The van’s side door slid open, and a Semitic-looking man with gold-rimmed aviator glasses waved Ritter and Mike inside.
“Didn’t our mothers warn us about getting into cars with strangers?” Ritter said to Mike as he left a generous tip and picked up his backpack. Mike took the rest of the mahamri with him, plate and all.
The seats of the van felt like they were made of a sliver of torn leather and springs. The open windows and fine coating of road dust promised a long trip without air-conditioning.
“Sorry we’re late. Traffic,” said their driver, who now spoke like an Englishman.
“When was your last operational update?” asked the man in the sunglasses. All business. That was a trait Ritter could appreciate.
“Nothing since we got off the plane in Nairobi and got the pickup location,” Ritter said.
“We have the target location. We’ll lift off soon as we get to the airfield,” Sunglasses said.
The van smacked a pothole and sent mahamri flying. One piece remained on Mike’s plate. He offered it to the man in the sunglasses, who shrugged and took it.
“How long of a drive?” Ritter asked. The road ahead was unpaved. Shoeless children darted across the road. Men in carts powered by wide-horned buffalo drove the beasts onward with switches.
“Not long. Maybe three hours,” said the driver.
Calling it an “airfield” was being polite. A decrepit hangar that looked like it had been smuggled from the Soviet Union and reassembled by a construction crew without the original designs squatted next to a strip of packed dirt surrounded by scrubland. The airfield was half an hour from the last sign of civilization.
Ritter and Mike walked around the hangar toward the sound of voices, their minder, the man in the sunglasses, a few steps behind them.
A red and black Russian Mi-8 helicopter sat in the hangar, blades drooping over a dozen men in dark-green fatigues, who clustered around a table. The compartment on the upper turbo shaft engines was open, exposing a mess of gears and nozzles that looked rusted and neglected. Each man had a Tavor battle rifle slung over his shoulder.
“Not again,” Ritter said. The Mi-8 had been in service since the 1960s, and this one looked old enough to have flown for the Soviet army in Afghanistan. Maybe he had a ride on a German U-boat from the First World War to round out his travels on dangerous machines.
One of the men broke away from the table, a hawk-faced soldier in his early forties. He didn’t walk so much as he swaggered right up to Mike and squared off against Ritter’s partner.
“You son of a bitch,” Hawk Face said.
“Moshe. You still mad about Beirut?” Mike said.
Moshe’s stern face broke into a smile, and he reached for Mike. Ritter tensed; their day was about to get a lot worse if Mike broke every bone in Moshe’s body.
Ritter’s jaw went slack as Mike and Moshe hugged like old friends. Mike was never one to display affection for anyone or anything beyond killing terrorists.
Moshe shouted to the other soldiers in rapid-fire Hebrew and got a few laughs.
“I never thought you’d go freelance,” Moshe said to Mike.
Mike shrugged. “Same work, better pay.”
Moshe led them toward the table. Piles of sand and cardboard boxes modeled a village and surrounding terrain next to a different airstrip. A plastic toy airplane sat on the “runway” outlined by the scratch of a knife.
“Sorry if we don’t have 3-D models and PowerPoint slides you Americans might be used to. This is on the quick and on the cheap. We’ve got the time and location for this package of yours.” Moshe picked up a combat knife, which had sunk into the sand table. He leveled the blade at Ritter.
“Mike, I know what you can do. How’s this guy?” Moshe asked.
“He’s not bad but not up to your standards,” Mike said.
“Really, Mike? That stings.” Ritter had been trained, by Mike no less, to be deadly with everything from his bare hands to a .50-caliber sniper rifle. He was a veteran of two combat deployments with the army and countless lethal operations with the Caliban Program.
“Don’t take it personal. Not everyone can be Mossad,” Moshe said. “I’ll have you on over watch with Shlomo. Shlomo!” Moshe called over the driver from earlier, who’d changed into the same dark-green fatigues as the rest of the team and carried an M24 sniper rifle in his hands.
“Shlomo, this is your new best friend. Let’s go over the rest of the plan before we load up.”
The Mi-8 dropped them off 150 miles into Somalia, not far from the city of Bardera, a stronghold for the al-Shabaab terrorist group that ruled most of the countryside beyond the capital of Mogadishu.
The team marched the last five miles through a moonless night to a hillside overlooking a strip of packed earth. Shlomo killed two sleeping dogs with his silenced M24 sniper rifle before the rest of the team, minus Ritter, crept to the airfield.
Ritter and Shlomo had two hours to wait until the sun rose and the delivery would arrive. Shlomo’s job was to surveil the airfield and provide pinpoint fires, when needed. Ritter’s job was to protect Shlomo.
“I’m telling you, the hummus in Tel Aviv is the best in the world,” Shlomo said in a loud whisper, his gaze never wavering from the scope.
“I’ve had your hummus. There’s too much tahini, and it dilutes the taste. You go to Beirut, and it’s got more chickpea and more garlic for a smoother texture,” Ritter answered. They’d gotten to know each other as the sun rose, and the friendly discussion had drifted to food. The conversation wouldn’t stay friendly if they kept talking about hummus. The beige spread had become a nationalistic flash point between Arabs and Israelis in the past few years, as if they needed something else to fight about.
“Texture? If my bubbeh heard you say that, she’d — I see something,” Shlomo pulled the sniper rifle closer to his body and exhaled slowly.
Ritter looked at the airfield through a pair of binoculars and saw a shirtless Somali man stretching in the doorway of one of the three packed mud-and-thatch-roof buildings sitting kitty-corner to the airfield.
Ritter keyed his mike. “One military-aged male in the entrance of building two looks like he just woke up,” he said. Two clicks on the net signaled that the message had been received. The team lying in the brush near the airfield wouldn’t risk detection by speaking.