“Ask NSA.”
Nearly a thousand miles north in Maryland, an American Somali lifted the headphones off his ears.
“One man said, ‘The dollars have arrived.’ The other replied, ‘Tomorrow night,’” he said.
Tampa called the Tracker in London.
“We got the two messages, all right,” the communications intercept people told him. “But they were using a local cell phone network called Hormud. We know where the first speaker was—in Marka. We don’t know who replied or from where.”
Don’t worry, thought the Tracker. I do.
13
Colonel, sir, they’re moving.”
The Tracker had been dozing at his desk in front of the screen in the London embassy that showed him what the drone over Marka could see. The voice was from the speakerphone linked to the control bunker outside Tampa. The voice belonged to M.Sgt. Orde, back on shift.
He jerked awake and checked his watch. Three a.m. London time, six in Marka, the darkness before dawn.
The Global Hawk had been replaced by one with full tanks and hours of loiter time before it, too, would run dry. On the Somali coast, there was the tiniest pink blush across the eastern horizon. The Indian Ocean was still black, as was the end of the night over the alleys of Marka.
But lights had come on in the Preacher’s compound, and small red blobs were moving about—the heat sources caught by the drone’s body sensors. Its cameras were still on infrared mode, enabling it to see in the dark what was going on ten miles beneath it.
As the Tracker watched, the level of daylight rose with the sun; the red blobs became dark shapes moving across the courtyard far below. Thirty minutes later, a garage door was opened and a vehicle rolled out.
It was not a dusty, dented pickup truck, the all-purpose personnel-and-load carrier of Somalia. This was a smart Toyota Land Cruiser with black windows, the vehicle of choice of al-Qaeda right back to bin Laden’s first appearance in Afghanistan. The Tracker knew it could hold ten people.
The watchers, four thousand miles apart in London and Florida, watched just eight dark shapes board the SUV. They were not close enough to see that in the front were two of the Pakistani bodyguards, one to drive, the other heavily armed in the passenger seat.
Behind them sat the Preacher, shapeless in Somali robes with head covered, and Jamma, his Somali secretary. The third seat went to Opal and the other two Pakistani guards, making up the only four the Preacher could really trust. He had brought them all from his days in the Khorosan killer group.
The last was squatting in the baggage area behind the rows of seats. He was the Sacad Duale.
At seven Marka time, other servants hauled the gate open and the Land Cruiser rolled. The Tracker faced a quandary: Was this a red herring? Was the target still in the house, preparing to slip away, while the drone he must now know was above him went elsewhere?
“Sir?”
The man with the control column in the Tampa bunker needed to know.
“Follow the truck,” said the Tracker.
It led through the labyrinth of streets and alleys to the outskirts of town, then turned off and drove under the cover of a large, asbestos-roofed warehouse. Once in there, it was out of sight.
Fighting to control the panic, the Tracker ordered the drone to return to the residence, but the compound and its yard were wreathed in shadows and quiet. Nothing moved. The drone returned to the warehouse. Twenty minutes later, the large black SUV emerged. It drove slowly back to the compound.
Somewhere down there, it must have sounded its horn, for a single servant emerged from the house and opened the gate. The Toyota rolled inside and stopped. No one got out. Why? wondered the Tracker. Then he caught it. No one got out because no one was in it except the driver.
“Get back to the warehouse fast,” he ordered M.Sgt. Orde. In reply, the controller in Florida simply widened the camera lens from close-up to wide-angle, capturing the whole town but in lesser detail. They were just in time.
From the warehouse, not one but four half-body pickups, the so-called technicals, were rolling out one after the other. The Tracker had almost fallen for the basic switch.
“Follow the convoy,” he told Tampa. “Wherever it goes. I may have to leave, but I’ll stay on my cell.”
• • •
In Garacad, Mr. Ali Abdi was woken by the growling of engines below his window. He checked his watch. Seven a.m. Four hours until his regular morning conference with London. He peered through the shutters and watched two technicals leave the courtyard of the fort.
It was of no matter. He was a very contented man. The previous evening, he had secured the final concurrence of al-Afrit to his mediations. The pirate would settle with Chauncey Reynolds and the insurers for a ransom of five million U.S. dollars for the Malmö, including cargo and crew.