The Devil's Waters (3 page)

“Quincy, get on the other side of the basket. Wally, we’ll hand him up to you. Start tying the kid down.”

Wally jumped into the copter.

On the count of three, LB and Quincy lifted the boy. Wally grabbed the head of the Stokes litter to guide it onto the HH-60’s floor.

LB indicated the IV bags for fluid and
antibiotics lying in the skins beside the boy. “Hang those up.”

“Got it.”

The copter’s engineer found a fruit roll-up to lay on the kid’s chest. LB tossed it back, explaining that the kid was headed for surgery and couldn’t eat.

The rotor spun faster, ready to go. The engine whined to a higher pitch, and the copter bounced, eager to be airborne.

With Wally focused on the IV bags, LB pointed to Doc, then at the kid. Doc nodded.

LB slammed shut the HH-60’s door. Grabbing big Quincy’s sleeve, he ran past the cockpit, knocked knuckles on the cowling, hauled Quincy out of the prop wash.

With no hesitation, the blades whirled harder, the chopper’s wheels growing light on the bare earth. Inside, Wally framed himself in the large window of the shut door, leaning across the Stokes litter and the kid in it.

Wally’s gloved palms flattened on the impact glass. He eyed LB from the rising copter.

Wally didn’t order the HH-60 to set back down and let him off. He knew the gangrenous boy had to get to Bagram fast. Both choppers hung on the edge of the chasing squall. Like the good officer he was, Wally assessed the situation. He took the appropriate action and did nothing.

LB waved up from the fading ground. Wally mouthed the words that had given LB his call sign years ago.

You little bastard
.

Today

Gulf of Aden

3 miles off the coast of Qandala

Somalia

Yusuf Raage lifted his arms as if he might
catch the falling treasure.

He stood alone atop the superstructure beside the radar arrays and quiet smokestack. Below him and all around the freighter, on top of containers, dozens of his men watched his gesture of triumph. They raised their own fists, weapons, voices, at the parachute drifting millions of dollars down to them, and at their clansman and captain, who’d made it so.

Beneath Yusuf’s boots, from the wheelhouse, came cheers also from the
MV Bannon
’s crew, seventeen Malay ratings and five Indian officers celebrating the white cask splashing down. When the chute collapsed into the blue water, the crew stamped their feet, pounded the steel walls, to ring in their freedom.

In the brilliant afternoon, a single-engine plane flown by white men in sunglasses banked low, keeping an eye on the transaction. Yusuf lowered his arms to his hips to stand like a king on a hill, a warrior king who had taken this hill, not one born to it. For six months this steel behemoth had been his prize. He’d captured it on the open sea, brought it here, dropped anchor three miles offshore from his home village. He’d made the ship a fortress, then priced
it and sold it. The lives and possessions on board had been under his hand. At times he’d threatened the captives, claimed at key points in the negotiations that he would sink the
Bannon
with all hands if his ransom demands were not met. In the end, he’d hurt no one, as was his intention. The price paid after half a year was the amount he’d asked for after three days. The barrel of money bobbing on the ocean freed Yusuf, too. He did not need to stand here any longer.

A long skiff raced to the cask a hundred meters off the starboard beam. Yusuf’s cousin Suleiman dragged the barrel out of the water. He cut away the chute. In the slow-circling plane, one of the insurance company’s Frenchmen snapped photographs. Yusuf was not concerned that his picture was being taken. It served his purposes to be known.

Barefoot, Yusuf stood before the cask. The barrel rested on the long chart table in the
Bannon
’s sun-bright bridge. He wore a ceremonial
ma’awis
sarong, a loose silk
khameez
blouse, and an embroidered
taqiyah
cap. Acting like a priest, he laid hands on the cask.

Beside him, Suleiman held a handgun on Ashwin, the
Bannon
’s captain. Another younger cousin, Guleed, pointed a rifle at Chugh, the first mate. The Indian and Malay crew were lined up in front of the long wheelhouse windshield. The remainder of Yusuf’s team, two dozen from his Harti subclan of the Darood, waited around the ship; still too soon to put down their guns and grenade launchers. Five live goats had been ferried on board for the final feast. Somewhere on deck, cutthroat knives were being sharpened, fires readied. The Frenchmen in their plane circled and photographed all this.

Yusuf raised his head as if from a depth to open his eyes on the
Bannon
’s captain, Ashwin.

Yusuf held out an onyx-handled blade. In
English, he said, “Come, Captain. You do the honors.”

The Indian, smaller than Yusuf by a head and a hundred pounds, stepped forward. The man had handled himself and his crew well during the ordeal of the ship’s hijacking and long negotiations. They’d surrendered the ship quickly; only a few had been fired upon by Yusuf’s pirates. In captivity, the discipline of Ashwin’s men’s had rarely wavered; they’d offered no resistance nor chicanery and had kept their ill opinions of their Somali captors largely to themselves. No one jumped overboard. Why would they, three miles from a lawless coast into shark- and seasnake–infested waters?

For twenty-seven weeks, Yusuf saw to it that the hostages were well fed, though the captain seemed too distressed to eat. Every Sunday the crewmen were allowed to contact their families by satellite phone. The trouble was made not by the seamen, who had no interest in anything beyond their liberation, but by the ship’s European owners, who poor-mouthed their ability to pay. After this, his sixth hijacking, Yusuf knew well all the ship owners’ ploys. The longer they allowed the pirates to hold their ships, the better their payouts from their insurance. The owners always waited until the economics shifted in their favor before settling up.

In front of the audience of his captive crew, the little captain held out a brown hand for the knife. Privately, Yusuf was sorry to see the weight Ashwin had lost.

Yusuf bent to the man’s ear. “Understand. You will open this barrel. If there is a bomb or anything unpleasant inside, it will surprise you first.”

The captain smiled wanly, beaten down by his imprisonment. Ashwin snipped the plastic straps. Yusuf retreated, motioning for the captain to crack the lid. Nothing emerged from the white barrel but the reflected glow of green.

Ashwin folded
back the cask’s top. He did not step away but stayed rooted in front of the money. Yusuf, done with the captain now, retrieved the knife and shunted him aside. Suleiman walked the short man away on the end of his pistol, as Yusuf planted his broad palms on 3.7 million American dollars.

A rush charged up his arms, expanding his chest. He exhaled slowly through his nose, for everyone on the bridge to hear. The Indians and Malays watched him over Guleed’s leveled Kalashnikov. Funny. Of all the things Yusuf had held hostage—this weathered ship, three thousand cargo containers, the owners’ schedules and profits—these little brown lives were what the money had bought back. His gaze fell into the cask to the banded stacks of bills, sheaves of dollars. How wonderful to be worth this.

Yusuf considered his own two cousins and his clansmen, waiting. He knew their poverty because he’d shared it, and he’d ended it. Today, they had this value too.

Plucking one bundle of the cash, Yusuf held it with both hands over his head like the heart of a beast.

“Kill the goats.”

His cousins lowered their weapons. Suleiman came to Yusuf’s side. Guleed clapped and jogged out of the wheelhouse to issue the order that would begin the butchering and cooking of their last meal aboard the
Bannon
. The Indians and Malays, for the first time in months, were left unguarded. They moved unsurely, like men wearing shoes that were too big.

Yusuf spoke to the captain: “Take your men outside. Let the French snap your pictures from their plane to show your families you’re all right. We’ll eat, then we’ll be gone at sundown. The ship will be yours again.”

The little Indian asked, “Will your men return what else they have stolen? Our computers, cell phones, cameras, clothes?”

Yusuf waved
a bundle of dollars beneath his nose to sniff it like a bouquet. He laughed down to his bare feet on the cool floor. He said only, “Suleiman.”

Yusuf’s lieutenant, narrow-faced and gold-toothed, raised his handgun. “Get some sun, man.”

The captain nodded in the manner of an educated fellow, completing his judgment of Yusuf and likely all Somalis as thieves and worthless. He stepped away with an incline of his head, still the pirate king’s prisoner.

Alone on the bridge, Yusuf and Suleiman counted the ransom. The cousins combed through banded bills to be certain of the denominations, all thousands and hundreds. When they were assured of the amount, Suleiman unzipped several satchels. Yusuf tossed him bricks of dollars.

The merchants were paid first. For the three months the
Bannon
rode at anchor offshore, the villagers of Qandala had kept Yusuf’s twenty-man guard teams supplied. In daily motorboats, they ferried out fresh food, drink, Kenyan
qaat
leaf to chew, laundered clothes, time cards for the guards’ cell phones. Yusuf pitched to Suleiman enough packets for $300,000, a 200 percent profit. The chief of the suppliers was Suleiman’s brother-in-law. His sister had married outside the Darood clan, a Rahanweyn, the farmer caste,
ashraf
. This generosity should help keep the peace.

Second came the large share for the financiers, faceless money that flowed from offices in Dubai and Mombasa. These funds were made available to only the best crews, all arrangements done in secret. They paid for Yusuf’s equipment, and in return took a one-third interest. The moneymen had provided skiffs and motors, weapons and ammunition, radios, food, and the fuel used at sea while Yusuf and his boarding crew searched for a suitable target.

The financiers’ portion required
a large duffel. One million, one hundred thousand dollars. A massive profit. A car and unnamed armed men would arrive at Yusuf’s compound tonight.

Next came the local elders,
odayal
. The Darood chiefs granted anchoring rights off Qandala; from the south, the Hawiye of Hobyo in the Mudug allowed Yusuf to hunt in their waters. Suleiman stuffed two bags each with $184,000, 5 percent.

Now, the class A and class B members of the crew. One B share was worth the prearranged amount of $10,000. Yusuf’s company of men had hired forty-five of these as militiamen to guard the hostages and the ship during the negotiations, as interpreters, cooks, janitors. Most of these were teenagers, poor boys who flocked to join the pirate companies, many of them younger relatives of class A shareholders. They were unproven, often illiterate, but they were given tasks and weapons. Most of their guns were left without bullets in case the hostages revolted, tempers flared, or someone grew angry or dulled by too much
qaat
. They pilfered from the captives in petty ways that Yusuf allowed, and earned a pittance from the pirate trade that would change their lives for the better. Suleiman snagged $450,000 out of the air from Yusuf.

That left $1.5 million for the A shares.

These men had risked their lives with Yusuf on
bad-weyn
, the deep water, to capture this ship. For a week in April, well before the monsoon season, Yusuf, Suleiman, and a dozen others had floated in the Gulf of Aden on their dhow mother ship. Hundreds of freighters passed them, all bound north to Suez or south from it. The commercial ships formed convoys passing Somali waters, escorted by coalition warships from forty countries that shadowed the convoys and spoiled for a fight with pirates. Other Somali crews trolled these waters, but Yusuf’s dhow was familiar to them, and they kept a distance. For a week in the gulf, Yusuf, Suleiman, and ten others bobbed and plotted, navigated, caught and cleaned fish, did their shifts in the deep of the night and the stink of
diesel. They found no ships they felt sufficiently vulnerable; all were either too fast, too tall, or too close to the warships. Yusuf turned his dhow east into the Indian Ocean, away from the nuisance of the coalition’s guardians. For ten days more they scanned the blue swells for passing freighters and tankers, looking for a sluggard, loaded to the hilt, low freeboard. They found the
Bannon
five hundred miles west of the Seychelles doing only sixteen knots, stacked with containers, unwary of pirates. Yusuf and his crew sped alongside in wooden skiffs. They raked the steel sides with bullets, held high their rocket grenade launchers to threaten the behemoth into slowing more. They boarded her easily with grappling hooks and ladders. They fired no more shots, cowed the ships’ mates into hostages, and turned her for the Somali coast, home to Qandala.

Counting out the money for this team, Yusuf grinned that they were not worthless men, though they were brigands. They were hard men of the sea, fishermen before, pirates now.

He had twenty-five class A shares to distribute, each valued at $68,000. The assault team of fourteen had voted Suleiman an extra half-share for being the first to board the
Bannon
. One half-share was to be given to the widow of a clansman who’d drowned months ago on an earlier, unsuccessful trip; three shares would be split between the families of six men captured last spring by a Chinese warship, jailed now in Kenya.

These shares went into another duffel, to be handed to the men at a celebration at Yusuf’s compound in Qandala tomorrow. The remaining shares were split between first mate Suleiman, who stuffed two into his own sack, and Yusuf, six as captain.