And in a mud-brick fort in the hills behind the bay of Garacad, a sadistic clan chief known as al-Afrit, the Devil, planned to send a dozen of his young men back to sea, despite the risks, to hunt for prey.
9
There was indeed a code in the messages from Dardari in London and the Troll in Kismayo and it was broken. The two men communicated apparently in clear because both GCHQ in England and Fort Meade in Maryland are suspicious of transmissions that are clearly in code.
So vast is the commercial and industrial traffic flying through cyberspace that not everything can be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. So both centers of interception tend to prioritize the evidently suspicious. Somalia being a highly suspect place, only the harmless-looking would be studied but not subjected to the top-of-the-list decryption tests. So far the London/Kismayo traffic had got away with it. That ended.
The traffic purported to be between the head of a large foodstuffs manufacturer based in London and his manager in a location producing raw materials. The traffic out of London appeared to be queries concerning local availability of fruits, vegetables and spices, all locally grown, and their prices. The traffic out of Kismayo seemed to be the manager’s replies.
The code’s key was in the lists of prices. Cheltenham and Ariel got it about the same time. There were discrepancies. Sometimes the prices were too high, sometimes too low. They did not match the real prices on the world markets for those products at that time of year. Some of the figures were genuine, others unrealistic. In the latter category, the figures were letters, the letters made words and the words made messages.
The months of exchanges between a fashionable town house in London’s West End and a warehouse in Kismayo proved that Mustafa Dardari was the Preacher’s outside man. He was both financier and informer. He advised and warned.
He subscribed to technical publications dealing intensively with the West’s counterterrorism thinking. He studied the work of think tanks on the subject, taking technical papers from the Royal United Services Institute and the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and their U.S. equivalents.
His e-mails to his friend revealed he frequented, at a social level, the tables of those who might have a senior civil servant, military or security figure as their guest. In short, he was a spy. He was also, behind the urbane, westernized façade a Salafist and Jihadist extremist like his boyhood friend in Somalia.
Ariel spotted something else. There were single-letter typing errors in the texts, but they were not random. Very few nonprofessionals can type long passages without occasionally hitting the wrong key and creating a one-letter typo. In journalism and publishing, the correction of these is what copy editors are for. But so long as the meaning is clear, many amateurs do not bother.
The Troll bothered, but Dardari did not. Because his typos were deliberate. They occurred only once or twice per send, but their appearance was rhythmic, not always in the same place but always in sequence with the ones in the previous message. Ariel deduced they were “tells”—small signs which, if they were not there, would warn the reader the sender was under duress or the computer was being operated by an enemy.
What the traffic did not confirm was two things the Tracker needed. The messages referred to “my brother,” but that could be a greeting between fellow Muslims. They referred to “our friend,” but never Zulfiqar Ali Shah or Abu Azzam by name. And they never confirmed that our friend was resident not in Kismayo but in a compound in the heart of Marka.
The only way he would achieve these two proofs and the authority to go for a terminal strike would be positive identification by a reliable source or the Preacher being goaded to make a terrible mistake and go online from his home. The Global Hawk high above the Marka compound would hear it instantly and snatch it out of space.
To achieve the first, it would need someone in a distinctive and preassigned headdress or baseball cap to stand in the courtyard, look up at the sky and nod. Tampa would see that staring face, as Creech had seen Anwar al-Awlaki look fatally at the sky, his exposed face filling a whole TV screen in an underground bunker in Nevada.
As to the second, the Tracker still had an ace of his own to play.
• • •
The MV Malmö eased out of the canal at Port Suez and into the Red Sea. Capt. Eklund offered his thanks and farewells as the Egyptian pilot slipped over the side to his waiting launch. Within hours, he would be on another freighter heading north.
The Malmö, back under her own command, nosed south toward Bab al-Mandab and the eastward turn into the Gulf of Aden. Capt. Eklund was content. She had made good time so far.
• • •
Opal returned from his work at the fish dock, checked that he was completely alone and unobserved and retrieved his radio from beneath the floor. He knew these daily checks to see if there had been an incoming message were the danger points in his life as a spy inside the al-Shabaab fortress.
He took the set, linked it to the charged battery, put on his earphones, took out pen and notepad and prepared to transcribe. The message, once slowed down to reading speed, took only a few minutes, and his pen raced over the paper making Hebrew characters.
It was short and to the point. Warm congratulations on tracing the pickup from the warehouse to Marka. The next time that happens, do not follow immediately. Return to the set and alert us that it is heading north. Then hide the set and follow. Endit.
• • •
The Taiwanese trawler was well east of the Somali coast and had not been stopped. There was no reason why she should be. A low-flying patrol plane, spotting for one of the international naval forces now trying to protect international shipping from Somali pirates, had dipped to have a look but had flown on.
The vessel was clearly what she was—a deep-sea, long-distance fisherman out of Taipei. Her trawl was not down, but there was nothing odd about that if she was looking for fresh and better waters. She had been captured by al-Afrit weeks before, and that had been noted—but under her real name. That name had been changed. Her Chinese crew, under threat, had been forced to paint a new name on her bows and stern.
Two of the same crew, all that were needed, were now on the bridge. The ten Somali pirates were crouching out of sight. The patrol plane crew, scanning with binoculars, had seen the two Asian men at the wheel and suspected nothing. The two men had been warned that any attempt to gesture for help would result in death.
The trick was not new, but it remained extremely hard for the international force to detect. Somali skiffs, pretending to be innocent fishermen if seen and intercepted, did not take long to expose. They might protest they needed their AK-47 Kalashnikovs for self-protection, but that could hardly apply to rocket-propelled grenades. The clincher was always the light aluminum ladder. You do not need it to fish, but you do to scale the side of a merchantman.
Somali piracy had taken some devastating knocks. Most big and valuable ships had taken on a team of professional ex-soldiers, who carried rifles and knew how to use them. About eighty percent were so protected. The drones now flying out of Djibouti could scan up to 40,000 square miles of sea in a day. The warships of the four international flotillas were helped by helicopters as wide-ranging scouts. And, finally, the pirates, captured in greater numbers, were simply being tried, found guilty and detained in the Seychelles with international support. The heyday was over.
But one ruse still worked: the mother ship. The Shan-Lee 08, as she was now named, was one such. She could stay at sea far longer than an open skiff, and her range was immense. The attack skiffs with their fast outboard motors, were stored belowdecks. She looked innocent, but the attack skiffs could be on deck and in the water in a few minutes.
• • •