The Watchman (24 page)

‘I don't believe it.' Tober's voice was a whisper. ‘A ghillie net.'

‘He says many bad things will happen to this house tomorrow,' Madar continued. ‘That is why he told me I must leave.'

‘Why? What's happening tomorrow?'

But the shock of the beating was too much for Madar, and he said, ‘I am sorry – I do not know. I feel sick.' With that he turned and vomited, coughing and spitting into the corner.

Angela reached out a hand to comfort him. But he shrugged it off and moved away.

‘I don't get it,' she said to Tober, as they moved back to their mattresses and allowed the youth to settle down. ‘Is he saying there's a Special Forces guy out there?'

‘No idea. There were no contingencies for it. It was a talk, so why bother?' The irony in his voice was evident.

‘But the netting – and being so close to the house? It has to be. Who else could do that?'

‘Foreign Legion, maybe. They have specialist units.'

‘But?'

‘Unlikely, if it's one man. And it's a long way from their area of operations. He might be a forward observer for a bigger unit.'

She detected doubt in his voice. ‘But you don't think so.'

‘Forward observers don't get this close. They stay back and watch, and report.'

Angela felt a flutter of something in her chest. Relief? Excitement? She wasn't sure. But the knowledge that there was somebody out there, close by and highly skilled at concealment, was enough.

It meant that they weren't alone.

‘I wonder what the time is?' The thought came out aloud.

‘Midnight or after. My timing's shot to buggery locked away down here.'

She tried to put some levity in her voice, but her words came out shaky. ‘Really? I thought you guys had internal clocks zeroed to the nearest second.'

‘That's SAS,' he replied. ‘Bunch of time-keepers.'

‘And you're different how?'

‘I'm a boat person.' She could hear a smile in his voice. ‘SBS are more … spiritual in style. We go by the stars.'

‘Pity we can't see any.'

‘Get some rest,' he said. He switched off the flashlight. ‘No point worrying about it until they make a move.'

She stared hard towards his voice in the dark, remembering what he'd said earlier about getting one chance only and being ready to take it. ‘You think that time is here, don't you? Our one chance.'

‘Yes.' His voice was calm. Solid. ‘It looks like it.'

She lay down and tried to sleep, and wondered what the morning would bring.

A
t SIS headquarters in London, Tom Vale was jolted awake by his phone. He coughed and rolled off his camp bed, jarring his knee on the floor, and snatched up the receiver from the edge of his desk.

It was Portman.

‘There's been a change of plan,' the American announced.

‘Go on.' Vale sat down at his desk with a tired sigh. He knew this wasn't going to be good news. Outside the window it was dark, but he didn't bother checking the time. It was the middle of the night and there was nothing he could do, no matter what Portman was about to tell him.

‘Your two people are to be executed.'

‘
What
?'
Vale got to his feet and felt the floor shift. He'd been prepared for something bad but this was far worse than he'd expected. ‘Why?'

‘Because al-Qaeda want it this way. This was probably the plan all along. Musa's given the order and is stirring up his men. He's calling it “
adrabu fawq al-'ana
”.
You know what that is?'

‘Yes.' Vale felt sickened. He'd seen the videos. Striking at the neck. Giving it a fancy name didn't make it any easier to stomach. It had all been a lie – and they had fallen for it. ‘Do you know when?'

‘At dawn. It's to be videoed.'

‘Of course it is.' He felt suddenly impotent, as if all his skills and experience and thought processes up to now counted for nothing. Dawn in Somalia was only hours away. ‘There's a strike force on the way – finally – but they'll never make it in time. You'd better get yourself out of there.' He had to tell Moresby. It was too late of course, but the bloody man had to know that he could have avoided this if he had given it proper thought. It would mean the end of Vale's career, once Portman's presence was revealed; running private operations was frowned upon these days. But after what was about to happen, he wasn't sure he cared a damn.

‘Me? I haven't finished yet.' The words were faint, but clear enough, and carried a tone of optimism. ‘What do you know about Musa?'

Vale sat down again, his legs weak. ‘What do you mean? What can you do? You'll get yourself killed. You didn't sign up for a suicide mission.'

Portman chuckled softly. ‘Really? You should have made that clear. Tell me about Musa.'

Vale fought to rally his thoughts, his brain like mush at the change in developments. ‘Uh … Musa. He's a powerful clan leader from way back. His family have been clan chiefs for generations, but he's the most extreme in outlook. Educated in Beijing and France, he's said to command quite an army, and his men have been fighting the Kenyans to the west of Mogadishu. Two years ago he torched an entire village he suspected of informing on his whereabouts. Men, women and children – even the animals.'

‘And your people are sitting down to negotiate with him?' Portman's disgust was evident.

‘Just recently, Musa's been showing signs of mellowing, of wanting to put a stop to the conflict. These talks were thought to be a move towards some kind of normalization.'

‘Really? Looks like you got that one wrong.'

‘Clearly. What are your plans now?'

‘I haven't decided. But you should know that those green boxes on the beach contain a supply of C-4 explosives and detonators with remote triggers.'

‘Jesus,' Vale muttered. ‘You've seen them?'

‘Yes. That's not all. The detonators have an integral power source. No wiring, no mess – just slap on and go.' Portman described them and read out the manufacturer's code numbers.

Vale scribbled down the numbers, his heart sinking. Somehow Musa had found a source of supply that put him a long way ahead of the usual pirate or extremist threat in the region. If these things were now on the open market, it wouldn't be long before they began to turn up elsewhere. Like Afghanistan. Europe. He had to pass on the information as soon as he could.

‘I'll be in touch when I can,' Portman continued, breaking in on his thoughts. ‘I think you'll know what I'm going to do soon enough.'

‘Wait. Portman.' He made a rapid decision. It was based entirely on emotion, but it was all he had left. He couldn't allow Angela Pryce to go through what Portman had outlined – it was too hideous to contemplate. That left only one way out.

‘What is it?'

The line crackled. It served to highlight how distant Vale felt right now, how remote he was physically from what he was about to suggest. ‘Is there anything you can do for … for Pryce and Tober?'

‘Like what?' Portman sounded pragmatic, his voice flat, and Vale figured the man knew what was coming. He was a professional.

‘If you can't get them out … don't let them suffer.' It was all he could think of to say.

‘I won't. You have my word.'

There was a click and the line went dead.

I
sat and watched while everything went quiet. What Vale had just asked me to do was a hell of a thing. But I wasn't surprised. Asking for his own people to be taken out by a friendly bullet rather than the blade of a terrorist group would not have come easy to him. No commanding officer likes to be in that position.

The fact was, I'd been thinking along the same lines. If I couldn't get Pryce and Tober out in one piece, the least I could do was to take the initiative away from Musa; unable to get his sick piece of propaganda, it would at least snatch a part of his plans out of his reach.

I gathered together what I needed. Waiting for developments was no longer an option; I had to take the offensive while I still could. And from what Vale had said, help was too far off to do any good. Musa was firing up his men to a fever pitch, no doubt with tales of honour and revenge and a strike against the infidels, with great rewards in heaven awaiting those who assisted him. Once he got them to a certain point, there would be no going back.

I had no doubt now that this must have been his plan all along. The offer through Xasan of negotiations for the release of hostages had been an elaborate ploy. He might not have known that two of the hostages he was already holding were UN personnel, but he knew well enough the value of luring in two members of a top western intelligence agency, one of them a woman, to use as propaganda material. And the extreme nature of the demand had worked; it had played Moresby and his colleagues into thinking Musa was some kind of desperate paranoid, so who should be surprised?

With Musa and Xasan gone, the guards had soon got tired of patrolling and settled down together at the side of the villa. That was fine by me. Laziness was good. I slipped out of my hide, this time taking the AK and the Vektor, with the C-4 strips and triggers in my backpack and the detonators in my pocket. I was loaded down more than I liked, but I'd coped with heavier supplies before. Right now I needed firepower in case things got sticky and I got cut off from my hide.

I by-passed the building by a wide margin and headed for the boxes on the beach. I got to them without seeing any guards and set about helping myself to more supplies.

I assembled two of the explosive packs and placed them under the boxes, then moved out and placed two more halfway down the beach under some old netting and cork floats. The charges were bigger than I needed, but I was looking for as big a bang as I could get. I wasn't aiming for wholesale slaughter, but to disorientate.

I still had the three packs I'd taken first time round, and these I'd reduced in size. I grabbed three more detonators and triggers and added them to my backpack for later.

Next I made my way to the skiffs. These were a problem; they offered a means of escape, but also a means for Musa and his men to move about – and I wanted to avoid that. But since I couldn't use them immediately, I had to look on them as a liability.

I tested the direction of the breeze. It was light and heading offshore. I took a risk that it wouldn't change and opened one of the fuel containers. I splashed some of the contents around the bottom of each skiff and over the engines. The aroma was powerful up this close, but I was hoping none of the guards around the house had a good sense of smell.

The skiffs were too far apart for me to light them all in one go; the moment I showed a flame the game would be up. So I placed a full-size explosive pack in the middle skiff and soaked the sand between it and its neighbours with fuel. I was trusting to luck that the flame from the explosion would move across each side and complete the job.

I threw the empty fuel container aside and jogged back up the beach, and found the track leading towards Dhalib and Kamboni. I picked a point two hundred metres from the villa and laid two more small charges, then made for higher ground above my hide from where I could watch the party. It was too dark to see much detail, but I knew my field of fire was clear, and I was only a short run from the front door of the house. I made sure I had sufficient cover in case of random intruders, then laid out the remote triggers in a row and waited.

I gave it an hour. The few men left in the house would have been left buzzing by Musa's passionate rhetoric, and I needed them to get it out of their system and go to sleep. The last thing I needed right now was a revved-up sentry with heightened nerves and an itchy trigger finger.

When the time came I selected a remote from the row in front of me. Took a deep breath and pressed the button on the side.

Nothing happened.

F
or a split second my gut went cold. Damn. What had I done wrong? Had I missed a safety switch somewhere?

Then it happened. The explosion down near the waterline was impressively big. It lit up the beach for a brief second, the flare of light bouncing away across the surface of the sea in the background. The central skiff took off, breaking in half as the bottom was blown out of it, the two ends folding in on themselves. I caught a snapshot glimpse of plastic containers going into the air, then one of the containers carrying fuel exploded in a ball of flame and orange smoke, showering down on everything within a thirty-metre radius. Everything went dark again for a nano-second before another flash came, this time as the fuel-soaked sand around the skiff on the left ignited and burst into flames, followed quickly by the third boat going up like a pyrotechnician's dream.

The two guards outside the villa came awake and began running around and screaming at their colleagues inside. One of them let off a couple of rounds in the general direction of the water, then did the same off to one side, and I guessed the play of light and shadow had fooled him into thinking they were under concerted attack from the sea.

The men inside burst out of the door and raced towards the side of the property overlooking the beach, also firing off random shots into the darkness. I couldn't see them all clearly, but I estimated there were four or five. No problem; them I could handle.

What I couldn't be sure of was how many remained on guard inside, nor what their reaction would be if they assumed they were under attack. Their orders might have been to kill the two prisoners.

I was going to have to move fast.

The men outside were doing what I had expected of them: heading down on to the beach to investigate. In the flickering light coming from the burning skiffs, I counted four, bunched together, rifles at the ready, moving cautiously and ready to jump at the first sound. I was glad I wasn't part of their number; the last thing you need in a group under attack is for one of your colleagues to start shooting wildly.