The Somali scratched his belly and trundled toward a patch of brush a dozen yards from the house.
“Levi, Ehud, he’s coming right for you,” Shlomo said into the mike. The two Mossad operatives were in the grass around a bush, which was the height of a man. Ritter waited, unsure whether they’d take the Somali out before he could spot them.
The Somali stopped a foot away from the bush, unzipped his pants, and emptied his bladder into the grass. He finished and wandered back to his hovel.
“Repositioning,” Levi said over the radio. Ritter watched him crawl inch by inch away from the puddle.
A smear of dust rose over the hills beyond the airstrip, and two dirt-caked trucks drove into view. The leading and trailing trucks each had a heavy machine gun mounted on a jerry-rigged mount; both were packed with armed Somalis. The truck in the middle had an enclosed bed.
“Convoy approaching, three technicals,” Shlomo said, giving the radio shorthand for civilian vehicles converted into military vehicles.
Ritter focused on the rear truck, which rode high on its axle. The nuke case was close to five hundred pounds, which should have weighed the truck down.
The convoy stopped at the trio of houses, and the fighters jumped from the trucks. Most lit cigarettes. One Somali stood behind the NSV depressed almost straight to the sky. The other gunner stuffed his cheek full of khat and sat on top of his truck’s cab. The shirtless man from earlier reappeared and shook hands with a Somali wearing a beret, who had been riding inside one of the trucks. There was the headman.
A Somali woman wrapped in a red-and-yellow jilbab, her head covered by a scarf, chased two children out of a mud house. The kids ran among the armed men, skipping and trading high fives. They were a complication.
The drone of an airplane filled the air. A prop plane descended through the morning haze on approach to the airstrip.
“Here we go,” Shlomo said.
Mike’s hand gripped his Tavor machine gun, waiting for the signal to end the lives of every armed Somali he could see. He focused on the enclosed truck and wondered whether the 9mm rounds in his weapon and in the rest of the Mossad team’s weapons would puncture the lead case around the nuke.
Nuclear weapons were notoriously delicate devices and required nearly perfect activation to begin the cascade of neutrons that would cause a nuclear explosion, but hitting one with a stray round was a risk he didn’t want to take.
The Cessna Caravan propeller plane bounced against the end of the runway before finding purchase on the ground; then it shimmied to a stop in a cloud of dust. The Somalis milled around their trucks as the man in the beret approached the plane.
The side door on the Cessna’s fuselage popped open and slid aside. A white man, with greasy, blond hair that hung loosely down to the base of his neck, waved to the headman from the opening.
Mike waited as the two men spoke to each other; then the headman grabbed the blond by his shirt and hauled him from the plane. He kicked at the blond until the pilot held up his hands in surrender, the sound of the still-spinning engine diluting his frantic words.
The headman yanked the pilot back to his feet and shoved him toward the mud houses.
Two Somalis dropped their rifles in the beds of the gun trucks and ran to the plane. They pulled a black case from the plane and struggled to carry it in the headman’s wake. The man in the beret extended the antenna of a satellite phone and made a call.
“That your package?” Moshe asked into the radio.
“Unsure. We need the pilot alive to verify,” Ritter answered over the radio. The nuke shouldn’t have been in the plane; Ritter was keeping their options open. “Wait until the guy in the beret finishes his call. Let him report that the payment is received.”
Moshe nudged Mike. “You remember how to count?” he said.
Moshe spoke Hebrew over the radio, and Mike aimed his Tavor at a Somali taking a deep drag on a cigarette.
“Schloshah… shnayim… echad.”
Mike squeezed the trigger and fired. His shot joined the rest of the synchronized volley from the rest of the Mossad team. His target collapsed, then rolled onto his back. The Somali looked down at the hole in his chest in disbelief. Mike put the next round in the man’s forehead.
A Somali man ran around one of the trucks, Mossad bullets smacking into the steel sides. An arm snaked over the bed and pulled a rifle from under the dead gunner, a victim of the first volley.
Mike aimed for the gunman’s exposed shins beneath the bottom of the truck and fired off a burst. Blood and muscle splattered from the impacts, and Mike heard the man’s howls as he collapsed to the ground. Another burst silenced him.
Mike pushed himself to his feet and followed Moshe as he charged across the ground toward the nearest mud hut. Dead Somalis littered the area, while the Somali woman screamed, one child held against her legs, the other boy sobbing next to the wheel of the enclosed truck.
Moshe rounded a corner and shouted in Swahili, his weapon raised and ready at his shoulder. Mike sidestepped next to Moshe.
The headman was behind the pilot, a pistol to the back of the man’s skull. The headman darted from side to side, keeping the pilot in the line of fire between him and the Mossad agent. Commands and pleas in three languages rocketed through the air.
Mike eased to Moshe’s left and waited for the Somali to make a mistake.
The Somali overcompensated for Mike’s maneuver and gave Moshe the inch he needed.
A single round cracked from Moshe’s weapon, and the back of the Somali’s head exploded.
The pilot, a scrawny man, his dirty, white, buttoned shirt untucked and waving around him like an unfurled sail, pressed fingers against the left side of his face, where the bullet had nearly missed him, and checked his fingertips for blood.
“Fuck man. Give a guy a hint before you do that,” the pilot said. His Afrikaans accent and panic made his words almost incomprehensible.
Moshe slapped Mike on the shoulder and ran off.
Mike kept his weapon trained on the pilot.
“What’s your cargo?” Mike asked.
“I don’t know! I just get paid to transport. I charge a little extra not to ask those kinds of questions,” the pilot said.
“Name!”
“Gert Botha, Botha Airlines. Nice to meet you,” Botha said. He turned and kicked the dead headman with his toes and yelped in pain.
“This dead poes gesig was supposed to take the case, and I was cleared to leave.” Botha ran a hand through his greasy hair and smiled at Mike. “So, my job is done, ja? Why don’t I leave and we pretend this never happened?” He smiled with about as much sincerity as a used car salesman.
Mike motioned to the case lying in the dirt, flanked by two bodies. A padlock dangled from it, security tape wrapped around the edges.
“Open it,” Mike said.
“Sure. Why not? Let’s see why it’s so damn heavy.” Botha kept his hands up as he walked to the case. He pulled a key ring from his pocket and removed the padlock. He used the key to split the security tape and flipped the case open.
“That Arab bastard — he could have paid more,” Botha said as he looked at the stacks of bank-wrapped euros and dollars.
Mike reached past Botha and knocked the paper currency out of the box, revealing a steel lockbox. Botha protested and picked up money from the ground.
Mike flipped open the steel box, and gold glimmered in the morning light. Hundreds of coins were in the box. Payment in cash and gold made sense to the Somali pirates. It was painfully easy to freeze a bank account. Cash in hand was harder to impinge.