Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Janson Option (Paul Janson) (7 page)

7°59' N, 49°51' E
Off the Coast
Eyl, Somalia

T
he attack helicopters bearing down on
Tarantula
were so close that Maxammed could see snipers strapped in the open doors. In that same instant, the stone fortress at Eyl suddenly sprang into view—a dusty brown windowless pile baking in the sun. The haze had lifted so quickly and unexpectedly that Maxammed thought in his panic that the helicopters had somehow blown it away with their powerful rotors. Impossible. They were only machines and the sky was huge.

He had a split second to make a decision that would save his life or end it. Every fiber in his body was screaming, Get inside, get under cover. He hesitated, frozen in place.

Lead rained down around him, splintering the planked surface of the wheelhouse roof, screeching across the carbon fiber beneath. He could not believe they would shoot without warning, and now he knew that as much as he wanted to hide, this was his last chance to resist or it would all be over.

“Farole! Bring the women,” he shouted, praying to God that Farole would have the courage to drag them into the storm of fire. High-powered rifle slugs crackled past his head.

“Maxammed!”

It was Farole, eyes wild with fear, yet burning with the same determination Maxammed felt coursing through his veins. Farole was dragging two women onto the roof, the old one and the countess. Maxammed sprinted toward them, flung one powerful arm around the countess’s waist, and raised her up in front of him like a shield.

A
LLEGRA
H
ELMS WAS ASTONISHED
by the pirate’s strength. He was swinging her like a doll. Bullets cracked the air with a noise so loud they hurt. It was a miracle they missed. But they could not keep missing for long.

Maxammed jerked her against him. She could feel his heart and could smell his fear. He was soaked with sweat. He staggered. She thought he had been shot and her hopes soared. But he kept his feet and she realized a bullet had passed so near it seared his skin and made him flinch.

The shooting stopped.

But the danger wasn’t over. It had just begun.

The helicopters thundered lower, with soldiers poised to rappel down onto the yacht. When she tried to slide out of his arms, the pirate clutched her so tightly he bent her spine backward. Allegra cried out in pain.

Maxammed drew his pistol, waved it in the air for all to see, and held it to her head. Farole repeated the action with his hostage.

Allegra felt the barrel of his gun pressing to her head, hard and hot.

I will die in an instant, she thought. It all will end and I will never even hear the gun that kills me. I will disappear and never hear the shot.

“K
EEP TURNING!
” Maxammed shouted to Farole. “Keep moving!” And they spun like dervishes so that only a madman or cold-blooded murderer would dare take a shot. Maxammed imagined the soldiers in the helicopter watching his every move. He waved his pistol in a wide arc—signaling,
Move away! Get away from my ship!
—and pressed it back to the woman’s head.

The helicopters hovered, thundering, blowing wind. Then they slowly backed away, pivoted in the air, and raced back to their ship. Only then did Maxammed see the markings on their tail booms. When he did, his knees felt weak.

“Chinese,” he said. Had I but known, he thought. “I might have lost my courage.”

“Americans,” said Farole, pointing at another ship that had drawn within a mile, and how lucky they had been was suddenly so clear that Maxammed felt his stomach nearly give way. The Chinese were the most violent of the navies that patrolled the Indian Ocean, except for the Russians. They would have shot him and the hostages had the Americans not come along. Not that the Chinese feared the Americans. But they would know the Americans were observing and videoing their every move and they feared finding themselves gunning down hostage women on CNN and YouTube.

“God is good,” Maxammed told Farole.

He dragged the woman toward the stairs.

The yacht was close to land. He could distinguish individual buildings in Eyl, the old fish plant and a large half-built house of a clansmen who had been killed before it was finished.

“Hurry up!” he called to Farole. “What’s taking you so long?”

“Mine is dead,” said Farole. “It makes her heavy.”

A bullet had pierced the older woman’s chest. But the methodical Farole had had the presence of mind to hold her head up to pretend she was still alive.

“Well done,” Maxammed said. “It’s all working out. Here come our friends.”

Skiffs were putting out from the beach, packed to the gunnels with fresh men to guard the hostages and finally let them sleep. In one was a sheep they would slaughter to feast. In another, bundles of green khat.

Farole asked, “Will we go ashore?”

Maxammed’s weary, bloodshot eyes narrowed. He had spotted a sight less appetizing than a fat sheep—three clansmen of Home Boy Gutaale, who were beaming covetously at the magnificent
Tarantula
.

“Maxammed? Can we go ashore?”

“We will see what we will see,” said Maxammed, keeping his options to himself, though in truth he had just vowed to himself never to leave the ship until he got the ransom. No way he would surrender his precious hostages to a relief crew. Neither did he intend to let anyone “borrow”
Tarantula
to act as a mothership for a pirate run. Not even Home Boy’s clansmen—
especially
not Home Boy’s clansmen. He would stay aboard until it was over.

In the meantime, he celebrated. He had caught a great ship and landed it. The Chinese and the Americans would hang about for a while, but they had a huge ocean to patrol and many ships to protect. They wouldn’t stay long. The worst was over. He had stood unscathed in a sandstorm of bullets. Suddenly Maxammed felt invincible, as if God had enclosed him in his own hand that nothing could penetrate. He had survived explosions and blood. Nothing could touch him now.

“You fucking coward!”

He was still holding Countess Allegra.

Allegra pushed away from him and knelt by the dead woman’s body. Her eyes were wide open, empty and ugly. Her husband came running. He knelt over her, pressed his white head to her bloody chest and wept as if he would die.

Allegra looked up at Maxammed with an expression of hatred. She searched for words, but all she could say was “coward” again.

Maxammed shrugged. “Dead is dead. Not dead is not dead. You’re lucky you were with me instead of Farole.”

“I don’t feel lucky.”

“I do,” said Maxammed. “I have moved under a magic star.” He turned to Farole and commanded, “Make a course along the beach, up and down, back and forth. Never drop anchor.”

“O
UR
M
USLIM FRIENDS
say that only Allah knows when and where you will die,” Doug Case told Luke Bing, a retired petroleum scientist who was tied to a chair and had a ball gag in his mouth.

“Our Muslim friends are immensely ignorant about many things, yet on this issue they are spot-on. Allah calls the time and place, just like our God. But
you,
” Case said, rolling his wheelchair close enough to touch him, “
you
have it in your power to decide
how
you will die. Slowly and painfully? Or will you slip off too quickly for pain or even fear?…Obviously, you can’t speak your answer, but you can nod. Nod if you understand what I just said to you.”

Bing sat there, staring, still overcome, Case realized, by disbelief, the voices of reason still screaming inside his head:
One minute I’m driving my magnificent Bentley to my beautiful ranchette—twenty acres of pasture and spanking-new horse barns—with the sweetest pole dancer I ever met sitting beside me. Next minute I’m tied to a chair in a dank cellar with a madman in a wheelchair. What happened?

“Here’s what happened,” said Doug Case. “You, Dr. Bing, a petroleum scientist, betrayed your employer who paid for your education decades ago at Texas A&M and MIT, and ever since paid you a handsome salary for your considerable expertise. Big bucks, generous stock options, incredible pension. You produced brilliant scientific proof that Somalia sits on top of huge oil reserves. But you then turned around and sold that same report to an agent for China National Oil.”

The petroleum scientist tied to the chair shook his head.

Doug Case flicked open a gravity knife, slid the blade between the man’s cheek and the ball gag, and cut the strap. “No?” he asked. “You didn’t sell it to a Chinese?”

“I didn’t sell anything,” Luke Bing said in a rush. “He approached me. I didn’t sell him anything.”

“Even if I stand corrected,” said Doug Case, “I fail to see how that changes the fact that you betrayed your employer. Why didn’t you report his approach to your security officer? The Manual of Employee Conduct is crystal clear on that issue: employees privy to sensitive information are to report immediately any attempt to obtain the incredibly valuable information acquired in the course of their work.
Sir!
We’re talking about hard-won exclusive knowledge of information worth billions.
Billions,
with a
b
. And you handed it over to the fucking Chinese for a Bentley.”

Bing got indignant. “You spy on us.”

“Us?”

“We who do the real work for ASC.”

“No, sir, I did not spy on ‘us.’ The American Synergy Corporation has sixty-eight thousand employees. It would not be practical to spy on sixty-eight thousand people. But we did not get rich and powerful
not
paying attention to the details. So when a top petroleum scientist retires young, acquires a Bentley convertible, and moves halfway across Texas to a posh ranchette near hip and trendy Austin, where he thinks no one will notice him, we notice. Even if he puts out a story that he inherited money when Aunt Matilda died, we notice. He went to MIT, after all, he’s smart enough to know to put out a story.”

“I want a lawyer. And if I am not officially under arrest, I want to be immediately released and returned to my vehicle.”

Doug Case shook his head. “Let us go back to the beginning of our conversation. The lady who falsely represented herself as a pole dancer and pulled a gun on you is not a cop. The tattooed gentlemen who delivered you to this cellar and tied you to your chair are not cops. And Allah and our God both agree that when your number is up, your number is up. But unlike most poor devils,
you
have it in your power to decide
how
you will die. Will it hurt or will it be like falling asleep?”

Case moved even closer. “Not up to God. But up to you…And me, of course.”

“What do you want?” Bing whispered, suddenly a believer.

“I am going to show you photographs of Chinese gentlemen. You will identify which man approached you and then you will tell me everything about him.”

Doug Case had the photos on an iPad.

As he held the screen up to Bing’s eyes he said, “I will do you one more kindness and warn you that there are ringers among the photos. Some are the enemy. Some are ordinary businessmen. Do you understand what I am telling you?”

The scientist nodded.

“Let’s begin. This man?”

“No.”

“This.”

“No.”

“This.”

“That’s him.”

“Fuck!”

“No! It’s him. It’s him. It really is him. I swear it.”

“Oh, I believe you. I was just hoping it wasn’t. He’s the sharpest one in the bunch. Tell me what you know about him.”

The rogue scientist told Doug Case a lot of details, most of which he already knew. Bing didn’t know his name. But that didn’t matter. ASC’s Global Security Department employed more intelligence agents and private contractors than many nations, so Case already knew his name—Kin Poy Lam—though he’d been hoping it was someone less formidable than the senior field executive for the People’s Republic of China’s Ministry of State Security, East Africa Bureau.

On the other hand, Mr. Kin was under a lot of pressure and might be vulnerable, as long as he had no idea that ASC had learned about the Bentley. And worth manipulating if he was—as the petroleum scientist’s admission confirmed—the PRC’s point man in Somalia.

“You realize, Mr. Bing, that in the course of our conversation you ceased to deny that you sold secret information.”

“I’m not an idiot,” said Bing. “Clearly, you knew a lot. All you needed was confirmation. So now what?”

“Don’t worry,” said Doug Case. “I’ll keep my word.”

“Let me go?”

“I did not promise to let you go. I promised to let you die without suffering pain or fear.”

53°32' N, 9°50' E
Finkenwerder Airport
Hamburg, Germany

I
t was raining in Hamburg.

When the Embraer’s engines fell silent at the Airbus Company terminal, a striking woman in her fifties—a tall brunette with violet eyes—came out to greet Janson and Kincaid with an umbrella large enough for three. Janson hugged her close and kissed her on the cheek.

“Great to see you, Petra. This is my associate, Jessica Kincaid. Jess, my old friend Colonel Petra Rasmusson.”

They shook hands, Petra smiling warmly at the younger woman, Kincaid wondering if the MUST colonel was this gorgeous in her fifties what a knockout she must have been back when she worked with Janson.

Janson asked, “How’d you make out?”

“Herr Lynds, the owner, is standing by to give the personal royal tour. He has been led to believe that you are private security consultants paid to evaluate the success chances of a raid conducted by Special Forces.”

“Perfect, thank you.”

She ran her eyes over his face. “Still trying to save the world?” she asked softly.

Janson winked. “Just making up for bad choices.”

“It agrees with you. You look well.”

“Will you join us?”

“No, I’d only get in the way. I have a car ready to take you if you like.”

“Thanks, we booked a rental.”

It was a two-liter Passat 170-horsepower TDI diesel sedan. Janson punched a street address into the GPS, followed by the shipyard’s address. Kincaid drove.

“You worked together?”

“Russia.”

“Doing what?”

“Remember when the FSO was poisoning Russian exiles in London?”

“I was in high school.”

“Turned out the Russians had one hotshot killing them all. The Brits were hell-bent on a trial, even though he was safely back in Moscow. So it fell to Cons Ops. MUST, Swedish military intelligence, offered a hand with the penetration. Petra got me across the border, pointed me in the correct direction, and got me out again.”

“How?”

“Cruise ship. Honeymoon cover. She’s a real pro.”

Kincaid told herself that she did not want to know the details from forever ago. Jealous? Goddamned right I’m jealous, and no apologies. Thank God she had not done something really awful like grab Janson’s arm as if to say,
He’s mine.

Janson was looking at her curiously. The man was a mind reader.

“What’s she doing in Germany?” Kincaid asked.

“Lynds was originally a Swedish yard. Moved to Hamburg lock stock and barrel when Sweden’s shipbuilding collapsed and hooked up with Schmidt.”

“Great-looking woman.”

“Played hell with her career,” said Janson. “I mean, how do you disguise an operator that beautiful?”

“She’d have to be a mega-chameleon.”

Janson’s phone rang. He answered, listened, said “Thank you,” made two quick calls, turned off his phone, and removed the battery.

“We’re still employed,” he told Kincaid. “Our guys convinced the Chinese that raking the vessel with gunfire might prove fatal to the hostages.”

“How?”

“Flew a drone around them and threatened to stream the video. God bless YouTube.”

“Can we get faces off the video?”

“They think yes. We’ll see. The latest is the yacht is cruising circles a couple of miles off Eyl.”

“Will the SEALs hit it?”

“Doubt it. When the Chinese opened fire, Mad Max went straight to human shields.”

The GPS took them to a hole-in-the-wall T-Punkt cell-phone store on a side street a few blocks from the railroad station. Kincaid drove past and around the corner. Janson deleted the address from the GPS and jumped out when she stopped for a red light. He walked back to the shop. The elderly Indian clerk behind the counter stood next to a pink Deutsche Telekom T-Mobile logo as tall as he was. A scratched glass counter held cell phones, memory cards, and SIM cards with prepaid minutes. A wall-mounted rack displayed skins and headsets, batteries, and chargers.

Janson bought a four-pack of precharged batteries and paid cash. Then he said, “I have an ancient Nokia that needs a battery.”

“May I see it, please?”

“It is back at the hotel,” said Janson.

The elderly Indian bowed his head with a private smile. “Excuse me, sir.” He stepped from behind his counter, checked that no one was coming in the door, and tugged the wall rack, which hinged open on steep and narrow stairs. He switched on a light. Janson descended to a cool cellar that smelled of the rivers that riddled the city.

“The safe,” the Indian called down, “is—”

“I can find it. Please shut the door.”

There weren’t that many places to hide a safe in a small shop’s basement. Having established similar stash points in cell-phone shops around the world, Janson had seen them all. This one was hung from the rafters, concealed by a teak armoire made a hundred years ago in Bombay. A sixty-gram can of WD-40 stood on top. Janson directed the water-displacing spray around the dial and waited for it to seep around the spindle before he spun it. The first three of the six-number combinations were all different, easily remembered by transposing the letters of the city’s name.

He opened the door on a cubic foot of space that contained money, passports, driver’s licenses, credit cards, cell phones, and an IWI Jericho 941 pistol. He took a German driver’s license and passport, and a phone. He inserted the precharged batteries and made a call. “Barorski,” he said, “it is Saul.”

Daniel Barorski’s silence spoke of fear and greed.

Janson said, “If I need you, could you meet me in Beirut tomorrow?”

“Where in Beirut?”

“Zaitunay Bay.”

“It could be possible.”

“Make it possible. I’ll call when I decide,” said Janson, and hung up.

He pocketed the passport and license, removed the batteries from the phone, and locked it, the money, and the gun back in the safe.

Kincaid picked him up opposite the railroad station and drove to the shipyard.

Strict security started outside the gates of the Lynds & Schmidt Shipyard. They were told to leave cameras, phones, and weapons in the car. After posing before an airport-type body scanner, they were driven in a van past the blank walls of a covered dry dock. Rolf Lynds’s office overlooked the crowded River Elbe and the Lynds & Schmidt piers. The interior windows viewed the design loft, where naval architects, interior decorators, and engineers labored at CAD monitors.

Lynds apologized for the tight security and explained that it was necessary to protect his wealthy customers’ privacy and safety. Not to mention
his
business from “occupiers” protesting inequities. Though it was not yet lunchtime, he’d already had a drink or two and was talkative.

“It is so ironical. My cheap-labor competitors in the Gulf states mock my labor force for costing fifty euro an hour. I pay it gladly for experience that makes a better boat than can be made by guest workers shuttled in and out of barracks. Besides, better a business where human beings can live with peace in their lives, go home each night to their families, drop their children at school, and return to the yard rested. For this ‘crime’ the occupiers stalk me and my clients.”

Janson said, “We need to know where on the ship the pirates are likely to hold the hostages.”

“Behind every great fortune lurks envy.”

“And we need to know their options if our clients decide to board forcibly. Is there a safe room where the crew might be hiding?”

Lynds had already unrolled
Tarantula
’s builder’s plans and had the paper drawings supplemented by a digital display on a twenty-seven-inch Phillips LED monitor.

“Two safe rooms,” he answered. “The first is here, forward of the engine room, fully armored. You’d need a howitzer to break in.”

“It’s big.”

“Enough to hold the full crew and twelve passengers. Crowded, but sufficient with secure air sources and food and water, and satellite phone and distress beacons.”

Janson studied the drawing. Kincaid studied it on the monitor.

“What is this space?” she asked, zooming in.

“Within the safe room is the sabotage room.”

He smiled proudly at the puzzled expressions on his guests’ faces.

“Sabotage room?”

“It is unique, I believe. We suggested it to the owner and he saw the advantage. The main electrical boxes are housed inside, while fuel lines for the high-speed turbines are routed through it. From there, it is a simple matter to stop the turbines by cutting off their fuel, reducing the boat’s top speed to twenty knots. And if so desired, the victims who are hiding can disable most of the boat’s instruments by directing powerful electrical surges through the wires, blowing fuses, burning circuits. That would be a last resort, of course, but they could render the boat blind and deaf. The attackers could only communicate with their own handhelds, and navigate with their own GPS if they possessed it. But most important, no radar.”

“Meaning they can’t see patrols farther than they can eyeball.”

“Precisely. Do you know whether they used it?” asked Lynds.

“No,” said Janson. “Where’s the second safe room?”

Waves of light rolled across the LED screen as Lynds scrolled through scores of drawings. “It is very little. Only the owner knew of its existence. Here we are. Between Frame 42 and Frame 43.”

He slid the cursor arrow to a hatch in the shell plating.

“This is an airlock in the bottom of the ship. Inside is a raft and SCUBA gear for an underwater escape.”

Janson and Kincaid exchanged glances. “Can it be opened from outside, underneath the ship?”

“I wondered if you would ask.” Lynds fished a small piece of knurled steel from his pocket. It was about the size of an automobile lug nut and had an octagon opening in the middle of it. “Six bolts secure it. They can be unscrewed from outside. Slip this key inside them, turn it with an ordinary tire iron. You unscrew them, the plate hinges open. You swim into this space. You close the plate, you open this hatch, and you’re in the ship.”

“How do you open it against the water pressure?” asked Janson.

“Each bolt admits water—essentially opens a leak. As it fills, the water drives the air out and pressure is reduced.”

“How long does that take?”

Lynds shrugged. “Not long, I should think.”

“How long?”

Lynds opened a window and typed in the search box. “Four to five minutes.”

Kincaid asked, “How many people can fit in that lock?”

“Unfortunately,” said Lynds, “it was not made for more than one. And it would take a very coolheaded swimmer or trained diver like the boat’s owner to make it out and safely to the surface—leaving his friends to fend for themselves.”

Kincaid and Janson exchanged another glance. One at a time would be too slow. Anything that slowed an operation upped the risk. They made precise measurements of its location under
Tarantula
anyway. Neither loved the hatch option. At this stage, with events in flux and no predicting how they would break, they would be derelict not to seize any chance of an extra arrow in their quiver.

They took notes on the deck plan. The ship was even bigger than they had imagined. “Like raiding a shopping mall,” muttered Kincaid.

Lynds grew more talkative as they were leaving.

“We actually designed for Mr. Adler a submersible escape boat that could be secreted in the yacht’s hull.”

“A submarine?”

“How many people would it hold?”

“Six or eight,” said Lynds. “But either the expense was too great, or he was less interested in saving his guests than saving himself. We sold it to a Russian oligarch who will need to escape from the police when he runs afoul of Putin.”

Janson and Kincaid exchanged an almost invisible glance.

Survivors keep far-fetched standing by
.

Dream it up before the lead flies
.

Small subs were common. There were thousands in the world, some were rich men’s toys, some used for tourist rides. Most served undersea research and offshore petroleum infrastructure. But in every case, their range was limited. To reach the remote Eyl, a small submarine would have to launch from, and return to, a nearby mothership. Janson thought immediately of tapping an old friend at Woods Hole. The Oceanographic Institution very likely had a research vessel working in the Indian Ocean. He dropped the thought as quickly. There was no way to sneak a slow-moving research vessel into Somali waters; not only would the pirates not be fooled, they would eat it for breakfast. The same would hold for petroleum explorers or seabed-pipeline installation ships.

But a yacht, thought Janson—a fast megayacht that secretly carried a submersible escape boat—would be a mothership beyond suspicion. He saw in a flash how to make the pirates welcome it with open arms.

“Which oligarch?” Kincaid asked casually.

Lynds demurred. “I am sorry, but a secret escape hatch must be secret. A secret submarine, even more so.”