Pirate Alley: A Novel (33 page)

*   *   *

The battle west of town, up the river, was heating up. A cacophony of automatic weapons could be heard, almost a continuous background noise. The pirates and Shabab were shooting it out.

Jake Grafton took Captain Arch Penney’s arm and pulled him to one side. I sidled closer so I could overhear what he said. Eavesdropping is one of my failings.

“The pirates have buried explosives in a trench around this building, Captain. Tons of them. They say they will blow the fort up and kill everyone if the ransom isn’t paid. We need to find the radio receivers and batteries that power the detonators. To do that, we’re going to have to eliminate the guards.”

“Eliminate?”

“We are going to kill them,” Grafton said flatly. “After we do, I want you to get some of your men and carry the bodies down to the beach. There is a sand overhang at the high tide level. Put them alongside it and cave it in, covering them up.”

I could see Penney mulling it.

“What if some of them are only wounded?”

“Finish them off. Think you can do it?”

“They threw some of my wounded men into the ocean to drown. Yes.”

Jake nodded, then turned to me. “Tommy, give me that Ruger.” I had the silenced assassin’s pistol in my hand.

That was Jake Grafton. Make no mistake, he could pull a trigger. One time in Hong Kong I saw him—

Now he glanced at the guards, who were intent on the drama in the plaza in Eyl, about a mile away but plainly visible. Muzzle flashes strobing the darkness, the burning pickup …

I pulled the Kimber from my waistband.

“No,” Grafton said. “No noise yet. Give me the Ruger.”

“No,” I said. My voice came out a croak. “You’re the brains. I’m just a shooter.”

I knew this was coming, so I didn’t freak out on the spot. I didn’t think Mrs. Carmellini’s boy Tommy was going to get much older, but what the heck! I had the silenced Ruger .22 in my hand. The magazine held nine rounds, and I had a spare loaded magazine in my pocket.

I looked at the faces around me, Arch Penney, his wife, the chief steward, and behind them passengers, their faces barely visible in the dim light.

Grafton slapped me on the back, then used his headset to tell E.D. and Travis I was coming out. Heard them Roger the heads-up. In a way, that was comforting. With night scopes on their rifles, those two snipers were almost as deadly after dark as they were during the day.

I stepped outside, walked toward the two gate guards, who were nervously watching the battle in the town. They glanced at me, didn’t pay me much attention.

I put the pistol right behind one man’s ear, pulled the trigger, then shot the other one before the first one hit the ground.

A forty-grain .22 bullet isn’t much of a weapon unless it’s fired into the skull at point-blank range and penetrates the bone into the brain mass. A solid point is best for this kind of work; a hollow point may explode against the skull and not penetrate the brain case. Still, only one bullet may not kill, may merely put the victim in the hospital with a horrible brain injury, making him a vegetable. Eyl didn’t have a hospital, but still. I shot each man again in the head while he lay on the ground.

Then I picked up their assault rifles and the bags that held their extra magazines and hustled back to Grafton, who was standing in the portal to the fortress.

I gave him one rifle and an ammo bag, and he set off up the stairs toward the roof. I followed.

“We have to take out the men in the foxholes,” he said over his shoulder. “The bomb dudes gotta disconnect the radio receivers from the batteries.” On the roof he waved me toward the north side of the big roof, and he ran toward the south side.

The crenellations in the wall around the roof, designed so that cannons could blast away at ships in the roadstead or troops advancing along the beach, gave us excellent fields of fire. We were looking down into the foxholes, which weren’t really foxholes at all, but merely mounds of earth. The guards had been on the outside, so they could look toward the fort and keep people from crawling out the gun portals, but now they were on the inside of the mounds, looking out. Survival instinct, I guess. Down there in the darkness were the muzzle flashes. Nothing was happening in the fort.

They were hard to see at first, but as my eyes became adjusted to the low light leaking from the gun portals I could just make out the guys hunkered down in the first guard position, with their backs to me.

Since I didn’t have an ounce of sporting blood in me, I shot them both in the back as fast as I could pull the trigger. Ducked down and ran to my left, toward the next portal.

These guys were looking around in all directions, trying to figure out what was happening. I popped the first one, but the second guy hosed a bullet my way. Must have gone over my head toward Arabia, because I didn’t hear it smack into the stone. I shot him before he got off a second shot.

Somewhere behind me I heard the boom of the Sako. E.D. or Travis was helping Grafton nail the guards over there. Grafton’s rifle cracked repeatedly.

By the time I got to the third guard position, it was empty. The guys were probably boogying down the hill toward the beach. I got a glimpse of one and sent a bullet after him to speed him on his way.

The easternmost guard position was empty.

Grafton left me on the roof while he went below to get the bomb disposal guys into action. In a minute I saw the three of them working with a shovel below my position, along the wall of the fort, digging around an antenna that disappeared into the earth.

Things were quieting down in Eyl. Every now and then a heavy machine gun aboard
Sultan
—I saw the muzzle flashes—put a burst into Ragnar’s lair, probably just to keep their heads down.

A couple of sharp cracks reached my ears, different from the reports of AKs or machine guns. Or the Sako. I couldn’t place them.

“E.D., where are you?”

“In the brush up on the hill above the fort.”

“Keep an eye peeled.”

More gunfire. Several RPG explosions. I saw two launchings, the signature flames unmistakable, and heard the warheads detonate. Eight or ten minutes passed, and the battle up the river road quieted down. An ominous silence settled over this corner of Africa.

On my headset I heard the SEALs giving orders. Any pickups coming into town from any direction were to be disabled.

After perhaps ten minutes, Grafton called me on the headset. “Come on down, Tommy.”

He was waiting at the portal with the Mossad bombers.

“It wasn’t AN in that trench,” he told me, his voice tired. “It’s PVV-5A. Tons of it. Looks like they laced it with a little diesel fuel as a booster for the fuses. We found six radio-controlled detonators, each powered by three pickup-truck batteries. That’s all of them, I hope, but who the hell knows? The only way to be sure is to find one of their garage door openers or radio triggers and push the button.”

I just nodded. Grafton was a gambler with absolutely no nerves. He could clean out Las Vegas.

“We have to check out Ragnar’s hive,” he muttered.

I nodded.

Grafton keyed the transmit button on his belt and spoke into the headset mike. “Red Leader,” Jake Grafton said. “This is Team Leader. Light them up.”

“Aye aye, sir. Blue Leader, anytime you are ready.”

I heard the words in my headset. Then I saw more muzzle flashes from the
Sultan
. A heavy machine gun sprayed the side of the hotel. I could see the sparkles of glass cascading down, hear the smacks as .50 caliber bullets tore into the side of the building, hear the ripping bursts carrying over the water.

For a second I thought of Nora Neidlinger, who was in that building, but then I pushed her out of my mind. She elected to stay … that was her choice.

*   *   *

By some miracle, Ricardo’s cameraman had his camera running and the feed going to the satellite. He was standing in the door of the shack, Ricardo right beside him still on the satellite telephone, talking excitedly about what he could see.

The cameraman aimed his camera at Ragnar’s building, scanned the pickups. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe it was luck. Whichever, he caught everything that happened in the next thirty seconds.

*   *   *

As the .50 caliber machine gun opened up, Bullet Bob Quinn settled on a machine gunner in the back of one of the pickups. The lights of the hotel were behind him, limning him. He was a nice target. The ship’s movement brought the crosshairs onto him, and Quinn pulled the trigger. The recoil made him disappear.

“Got him,” the spotter said. “Try the gunner on the truck to the left.” Quinn shifted his aim.

Then an RPG round shot toward
Sultan
trailing a streak of fire, the rocket exhaust. Simultaneously the machine guns in one of the pickups opened up on the
Sultan
. It got off two bursts before the fifty chewed into it. Pieces flew, and the fuel tank exploded. Two other technicals got under way, only to be hit by automatic weapons fire that seemed to be coming from the beach. The last one started moving … and was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. It too exploded and began burning brightly. A man with his clothes on fire managed to bail out and run about ten feet before he collapsed. The barrel of the machine gun in the bed pointed at Mars, up there somewhere in the night. Flames and flashes lit up the plaza as machine-gun ammo and RPG warheads in the beds of the trucks cooked off. It looked as if a string of large firecrackers was popping.

All four pickups had been destroyed in about fifteen seconds.

“Hellfire inbound.” That was the voice of the controller aboard the flagship. The drones were shooting.

The first Hellfire missile exploded on the right front corner of the roof, a bull’s-eye on the machine-gun nest. Two seconds apart, three other missiles impacted.

Through his scope, Quinn could see that the guns were gone, the sandbags lying about haphazardly. No one moved. No doubt they were all dead.

His spotter called a target, a man in the door of a house to the right, aiming an RPG-7 launcher. Bullet Bob fired first, and the RPG went soaring into the night sky. The rocket exhaust must have ignited the house, because it burst into flame.

*   *   *

“Go,” Grafton said and slapped me on the back.

“Okay.” I started walking into the darkness toward Eyl. The Israelis were right behind me. I keyed my mike. “Red Leader, this is Carmellini. Coming down.”

“Roger that.”

We broke into a trot, which soon became a run. Down the hill in the darkness, running, breathing hard, the sounds of gunfire in our ears … I confess, I was getting into the combat zone where it didn’t matter if I lived or died. I had been there before, and it is addictive. Maybe it’s the adrenaline. Or the knowledge you are cheating the devil.

The pickup that had been on fire was now just a glowing mass of twisted metal. Some bodies lay scattered about as I ran across the open space, followed by my two Israelis, but I was following a crowd. Four SEALs in black were ahead of me. I slowed my pace as they charged into the building.

There was the stutter of a submachine gun, just a short burst. Taking my time, I walked into the entrance and paused. The electric lightbulbs were still illuminated, so the generator was still going. Somewhere. I didn’t hear it. A pirate’s corpse was arrayed on the floor against the far wall, still bleeding from multiple chest wounds. Maybe his heart was still pumping. I didn’t know or care. The SEALs were gone, up the stairwell.

The two Mossad agents had pistols in their hands. They looked around, then nodded at me. I could lead them or follow them. I was tempted to sit down in one of the old stuffed chairs and let them do their thing. However, if I did that and the trench bomb around the fort went off, destroying it and murdering everyone in the place …

That damn generator. Radio controls would probably be battery operated, but if there were a landline to the detonators, the generator was probably rigged to power it. It wouldn’t be high in the building since it used diesel fuel. The pirates wouldn’t want to carry cans up the stairs. The basement, then.

A burst of submachine-gun fire rattled down the staircase. Then a couple more. The SEALs were cleaning the place out.

I went around the stairs, found a door and opened it. There was an electric lightbulb on the ceiling, illuminating stairs going down. Now I could hear the low, steady throb of a diesel engine.

I found the Kimber .45 in my hand. When I drew it I don’t know. Suddenly I realized it was there. I cocked the hammer and put the safety on. Some people carry those things cocked and locked, but without a holster to put the thing in, I never had that kind of sangfroid. Sooner or later I would have managed to shoot myself. I laid the assault rifle on a chair and, with both hands on the pistol, started down.

*   *   *

Mike Rosen was in the e-com center aboard
Sultan
when he heard the .50 caliber machine gun the SEALs had brought aboard open up. There was no mistaking the trip-hammer rips of a heavy machine gun firing bursts for anything else.

One of the windows popped. Rosen could see a hole in the glass, small, with cracks radiating out from it. Although he didn’t know it, a bullet from the machine gun in one of the pickups in the Eyl square had found its way here. Just one. The only casualty was the glass.

He looked out the window and saw the burning pickups in the square in front of Ragnar’s lair, saw muzzle flashes from automatic weapons and the distant flashing on the hills, up toward Eyl West.

He got back on his computer and began typing. The words poured out as fast as he thought them. He was a good typist and he was good with words, which were his stock-in-trade. Every minute or so he hit the
SEND
button; the Internet could crash anytime, and even if it didn’t, he wanted to report as close to real time as he could.

At Rosen’s radio home, KOA Denver, the e-mails were put on the Net at the same time the announcer read them over the air. All up and down the front range of the Rockies, people pulled their vehicles to the berm of the highway or the edge of the street and turned the volume of their radios up. Rosen wrote for them. He could see them in his mind’s eye, and he wrote word pictures just for them.