The Delta Solution Page 16

  Tom then spoke to the bank, which had the finances in order, much to the amusement of the manager in Nairobi who was becoming used to this one-way avalanche of cash being transferred to the local savages up the beach in Somalia. Nonetheless he stepped forward and had the cash ready and bagged for collection.

  IT TOOK FOUR DAYS for the pieces to fall into place. The main holdup being for the Dutch Navy to fly one of their state-of-the-art Lockheed Orion P-3C Mark IIs from a base in the south of France, where admirals were conducting a naval program of cooperation with the French.

  They needed to fly first to Cairo, refuel, and then go on to Nairobi. The navy was willing but had to deal with the admirals first, and that necessitated a new aircraft being flown down from the Hague. But in the end it was all slotted together, and on a burning hot afternoon, six days after the Queen Beatrix was captured, four carloads of Mohammed Salat’s staff were gathered on the beach northeast of Haradheere.

  The commander-in-chief was in attendance along with eight of his palace guard. There were also two representatives of the village elders, plus two executives of the Haradheere Stock Exchange. This was the biggest business they had ever had, with $6 million on the line, and shares in the mission already trading at $40 each.

  According to Salat’s watch, the Dutch Orion was six minutes from making the drop. But quite suddenly, out over the flat sandy land to the southwest, he could see a tiny speck in the sky, an aircraft, flying low and not particularly fast. And somehow he knew this was the one.

  No one spoke as the ASW Orion came howling high over the terrain in a giant circle. It made its pass perhaps a half-mile back, away from the water. And then it accelerated out to sea, further north and heading east directly offshore, until it almost disappeared.

  Salat’s already cold heart was chilled even more while he speculated that maybe everything was off and that the Europeans and the Americans had somehow joined forces and planned to attack the Beatrix and wipe out the Somali Marine force. The C-in-C knew how rapidly things could change in this lawless arena in which he saw himself as the undisputed ringmaster.

  Salat was not sufficiently foolish to underestimate the power of his opponents. And he could easily imagine the major Western naval powers growing very seriously vexed at his constant and expensive harassment of the world’s shipping operations.

  Again he checked his watch—only three minutes to go—and through his binoculars he once more spotted the big gray military aircraft to the north that was turning directly toward him.

  Without a word, Salat pointed, and every eye on the beach followed the direction of his arm straight up the tideline, perhaps only a hundred feet above the surf, and from here at least, it looked like it was travelling like a bat out of hell.

  The Orion came screaming in, low and fast, 250 miles per hour, and a pile of six mailbags, all roped together, came tumbling out of its bomb bay. There was no parachute, nothing except the bags, and they turned over and over, swept backward by the slipstream as they fell.

  They hit the sand at a shallow angle, about fifty yards north of where the party stood, kicking up a dust cloud. The ungainly pile came scuffing and rolling to a standstill. And the guards chased in to retrieve the bags.

  Mohammed Salat stood and watched the aircraft bank hard left and head once more out to sea, gaining height as it went. The observers on the beach turned their eyes toward the palace guards dragging the mailbags across the sand.

  They delivered the bounty to their leader, who unzipped one bag and thrust his hand inside. The bag was crammed with neat bundles of fifty one-hundred dollar bills, two hundred of them, the standard packing procedure designated by the manager of Barclays Bank on Moi Avenue, Nairobi, when preparing the pirates’ biweekly ransom money for the private aircraft drop.

  Salat stared down at the bags of money, six of them all checked and correct. He’d actually stopped counting halfway through the second bag because it was obvious each one was identical. Salat delved into each of the six and randomly selected a bundle and pulled it out for a check. No variation.

  “Load the merchandise into the cars,” he ordered. And then he called Ismael Wolde on his cell phone, speaking in what he believed to be clipped military tones.

  “Ransom paid in full. Vacate the Queen Beatrix immediately and return to the Mombassa. We all await the arrival of heroic Somali Marines. Send ETA.”

  Wolde responded in the way he’d read was appropriate for battlefield commanders: “Roger that, sir,” snapped the pirate chief. “Over and out.”

  ON THE BRIDGE of the Queen Beatrix, Wolde dialled the number of the Mombassa and ordered Captain Hassan to bring the big fishing boat close-in for the marines to disembark. Then he turned to Captain van Marchant, offered his hand, and said that it had been a great pleasure to work with him. The master of the Queen Beatrix could not believe this farce being played out right in front of his eyes.

  Nevertheless he shook hands with Admiral Wolde, politely said good-bye to Elmi Ahmed and the junior guard, and watched them leave the bridge, shutting the door behind them. They travelled down in the main elevator, and Ismael asked Kifle Zenawi to inform his troops that everyone was to assemble immediately on deck.

  He formally saluted his 2I/C and was rather proud when Ahmed returned the traditional mark of respect. And one mile away, over the stern rails, he could see the welcome sight of Captain Hassan’s Mombassa charging in at flank speed behind a surging bow wave.

  One way or another, Admiral Wolde would leave the Queen Beatrix a contented, fulfilled, and wealthier man. He’d enjoyed this mission and no harm had been done. So far as he knew, no one bore him and his men any ill will. The ransom was paid and the massive tanker was on its way.

  He gazed over the water with some satisfaction as the Queen Beatrix made her turn back to the east and onward to the Malacca Strait and the South China Sea.

  Wolde was a man of considerable imagination, easily visualizing military-style operations and able to work with his fellow commanders and combat troops. He was at home in planning meetings, fitting in nicely with the forecasts, hopes, and expectations of his C-in-C.

  And their success rate was so utterly formidable that he now believed they could not fail. For Ismael Wolde, defeat had become unthinkable. He was also conscious of the sea change that consistently occurred in the minds and demeanor of his captives. Their opening hostile attitudes always dissolved into acceptance and then submission.

  In the several days he had spent in the company of the captain and his Dutch officers, he had grown to like them. He was extremely gratified there had been a complete absence of violence—no one wounded, no one killed.

  Wolde, in general terms, was in accord with the often-stated view of the Chinese despot Mao Tse-Tung: “Real power comes from the barrel of a gun.” And indeed that had been his experience. The mere sight of that heavy machine gun, held by Somali warriors with ammunition belts slung across their chests, had always been sufficient to force a crew to surrender their ship.

  The only time there’d been real trouble was on board the Niagara Falls, and that was only because the captain had panicked. It had been completely unnecessary.

  So far as Wolde was concerned, his boarding and threat levels were as close to perfect as they could be. His men were trained to the minute and could be relied upon thoroughly. Their shore-based commander was a wise and accomplished planner and financier. The money was safe. The investment solid. The little marine fortress of Haradheere was close to impregnable.

  Ismael Wolde, the newest admiral in East Africa, had it made. He was a master of his trade and commander of the oceans. What he did not know, however, was that 1,500 miles away, one of the most powerful shipowners in the world, Constantine Livanos, was about ready to kill him. And that 6,000 miles away in New York, Athena Shipping president Tom Sowerby would willingly have throttled him. And that two hundred miles south of New York, Admiral Mark Bradfield was planning to destroy the Somali Marines’ forthcoming operat
ions. And that 3,000 more miles away in San Diego, Commander Mack Bedford was making contingency plans to take the Somali pirates off the map.

  Ismael Wolde had undoubtedly become a world military figure. But not in quite the way he had envisaged.

  CHAPTER 6

  COMMANDER BEDFORD COMPLETED HIS TWO-WEEK STINT AS proctor to the BUDs INDOC class. He worked mornings and spent the afternoons recruiting more outstanding SEALs to join his clandestine Delta Platoon.

  He raided the teams and watched the final tests being conducted in the pool by more advanced BUDs classes, where there were several guys almost ready to join. He knew precisely who he was after because he understood as well as anyone that there are people who have a God-given ability underwater.

  In Mack’s opinion, this was one of several aspects of SEAL training that couldn’t be taught from scratch. It could be honed but not taught. Even he, the Moby Dick of a coastal Maine shipbuilding and fishing town, had summarily failed at his first try at Pool Comp.

  He’d never forgotten that shameful day when they had ordered him out of the water and sat him against the wall in the line of failures who could not cut it in deep water.

  On reflection, his instructors may have been enjoying a well-intentioned laugh just as a warning. They’d failed every member of his class that day, but they’d permitted a select few to get back in and try again. Pool Comp is traditionally the graveyard of BUDs students.

  And for Mack’s forthcoming operation, boarding large ships captured by pirates, he needed men who were perfectly at home in the water. Because there would be setbacks. Men would end up in the ocean, probably in the dark, possibly in rough water. But they would have all of the right equipment. They just needed to be those guys of whom his very first BUDs instructors had said, “For us, water is a sanctuary because no other armed force in the world can operate in it like we can.”

  Deep into the second week as proctor, he found such a character in SDV Team 1 in the final stages of preparation for a return to Afghanistan via the US base in Bahrain. They were in the huge training pool at the time, conducting some informal races, and there was one kid, way out in front, who could really swim. Even wearing his big SEAL flippers, he looked like an Olympic finalist, slicing through the water using that special SEAL sidestroke—long, dead-smooth power strokes. He looked more like a fish than a human being, the obvious result of about 10 million timed laps in this very pool.

  His name was Barnaby Wilkes. He answered to Barney, and when Mack sent someone to pull up his records, he was unsurprised to see he’d been Honor Man in Pool Comp. He’d also been right up there over the O-Course and had done well as a sniper.

  Barney was twenty-four, a petty officer second class, due for promotion probably before his Alpha Platoon left for the Gulf. He was from Morehead City, beyond the salt marshes of North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, south of Cape Hatteras and about twenty-five miles northeast of the gigantic US Marine base of Camp Lejeune.

  Barney was a SEAL warrior from his combat boots all the way up to the brown-and-green drive-on bandana he wore into combat. He was six feet three inches tall, 210 pounds, with a deepwater seaman’s blue eyes, outlandishly strong, and as much at home underwater as he was on land.

  His combat record was rock steady. He’d shown profound courage under fire and was widely rumored to be going to officer training school at the conclusion of his next tour of duty. In another parlance, he was judged to have “the right stuff” to become a commissioned SEAL commander, one of Coronado’s chosen ones.

  Thus young Barney was mildly surprised to be informed by his CO that he was not going back to Afghanistan after all, that he had been selected to transfer to the newly formed, highly classified Delta Platoon under the command of the legendary Mackenzie Bedford.

  In the normal run of things, Barney would not have been overjoyed about leaving his team, but the reputation of his new CO was not much short of legendary. Mack Bedford was the SEAL officer who had single-handedly gunned down a large group of Iraqi insurgents on the Euphrates River and then been court-martialled in such a colossal miscarriage of justice that they brought him back when the verdict was publicly deplored by everyone at SPECWARCOM.

  The story was not, of course, quite accurate, but it was good enough for the entire population of Coronado. Because out there, they don’t have any public heroes, only private ones, known only to a few. Mack Bedford, on this base, had transformed that stereotype. Everyone knew who he was, and Barney Wilkes, swimmer, warrior, and southern raconteur, would be proud to serve under his command. Darned proud. Yessir.

  Another recruit to Mack’s Delta was Cody Sharp, a thirty-one-year-old native of North Dakota, chief petty officer with SDV Team 1 in Hawaii. Cody was an old friend of Mack’s. They’d been in Iraq together, and among his many talents he was an excellent boatman and qualified to pilot navy helicopters. He was a gunner by trade and had made Honor Man in his Unarmed Combat course.

  Mack wanted him as a personal bodyguard—as well as everything else. The heavyset, laconic former cowboy from the northern prairies was real pleased to be joining his old teammate from along the Euphrates River. When Mack had been reprimanded by the judge at his court-martial, it had taken three very senior officers to persuade CPO Cody Sharp not to resign from the United States Navy and return to his father’s cattle ranch in the Badlands.

  Meanwhile, several other officers were helping Mack in his search for personnel. But they were on the other side of the country in Dam Neck, Virginia Beach, where the ultra-secretive but too-big DEVGRU operation was sited. These officers were anxious to dispel the obvious conclusion that top people were being cherry-picked to serve with the new Delta Platoon on the West Coast.

  Thus several outstanding SEALs suddenly vanished overnight from Dam Neck on mysterious inter-naval transfers. No one knew where they had gone, and everyone knew better than to ask. The Navy SEALs’ version of omerta made the average Sicilian Mafia don look like a chatterbox. That code of silence, drummed into them since BUDs, followed them throughout their careers in the branch of the US Navy where everything is classified.

  So it was that Mack Bedford’s platoon took shape, imperceptibly, with new arrivals training informally on the beach, practicing with the boats, the high-powered Zodiac inflatables, and in the pool. For one week Commander Bedford had them all transferred to the SEAL Jump School at Fort Benning, Georgia, where they secretly honed their parachuting techniques, especially the HALO system—high-altitude, low opening—involving freefalling from 26,000 feet.

  In Mack’s judgment there was a limited number of ways any combat platoon could board a ship, and one obvious scenario was a high-level parachute jump into the ocean, from where they would be retrieved by SEAL small-boat crews and transported to the ops area.

  All of the personnel from DEVGRU were top class. Between them they could achieve anything they attempted, and within two weeks Mack had them integrated with the nucleus of his new group: Chief Petty Officer Brad Charlton, Petty Officer Second Class Shane Cannel, Lieutenant Josh Malone, PO2 Barney Wilkes, and CPO Cody Sharp.

  Three more days working together, forming their swim partnerships and appointing team leaders, and the entire platoon would be decamping every morning for the San Diego Navy Yard, currently the biggest in North America and the hub for the warships of the Pacific fleet. The SEALs would travel by truck because it was more anonymous than by boat, driving straight across the two-mile long Coronado Bridge, two hundred feet above San Diego Bay.

  There they would perfect the brutal SEAL team efficiency, which Admiral Carlow sincerely hoped would, in the not-too-distant future, frighten the living daylights out of the Somali Marines.

  IT WAS 0500 THE FOLLOWING MORNING when the forty-strong Delta Platoon drove out past the SPECWARCOM sentries and headed over the high concrete-and-steel gantry of the Coronado Bridge, directly to the US Navy’s stronghold on the other side of San Diego Bay.

  Nine thousand miles to the east, at precisely that
same time, 4:00 p.m. (local), a hundred-pound ammonium-nitrate bomb, boosted with powered aluminum and TNT, detonated in the downtown end of Churchill Avenue in Addis Ababa, the predominantly Christian capital of Ethiopia.

  It knocked down the grand front façade of a hotel, flattened a singlestory supermarket, and blew four cars across the street, one of which hit a bus stop and killed everyone standing there. Altogether thirty-eight people lost their lives, not including the jihadist driver of the truck that carried the bomb.

  Another 117 people were injured, some by a large container of baked beans that exploded in the supermarket and fired six-dozen red-hot cans straight across Churchill Avenue, mowing down the populace on the same side as the bus stop.

  Addis Ababa was aghast, especially the Christian section, which had not been targeted by terrorists for a very long time. And now it had started again, and the city’s police chief was convinced it was the work of al-Qaeda, operating from one of its bases in Somalia, almost certainly in partnership with the fire-eating, Taliban look-alikes of the ultra-extremist al-Shabaab movement.

  The bomb on Churchill Avenue was classic al-Qaeda. A very powerful IED delivered by a suicide bomber in a thriving area of a big capital city with strong ties to the West. The traditional animosity between Somalia and Ethiopia was a useful smokescreen at the heart of the crime.

  But the interlopers of al-Qaeda had been quietly encamped in both the north and south of Somalia for almost twenty years, cozying up to tribal warlords, befriending the fanatics of al-Shabaab, and fanning the flames of the endless war between the extremists and moderate Somali Muslims.

  It was claimed that Osama bin Laden himself, forecasting world upheaval when he hit the Twin Towers, had personally ordered his troops into Somalia to start a new international base on the Dark Continent.