Then a tall man dressed in fatigues and wearing red-and-white kufeya scarf led Nairobi outside. He whispered in her ear as a phalanx of armed guards escorted them to three waiting Range Rovers — all ransom money vehicles in Nico’s eyes.
Bahdoon weaved through the wall of guards and stepped inside the second Range Rover with the Tall One and Nairobi.
Is the Tall One the “Ferryman?” Nico asked himself.
Nairobi and the Tall One sat in the backseat of the second Range Rover; Bahdoon rode shotgun in the front passenger seat. That meant she was leaving her vehicle behind, along with the tracking device that Merk planted on the car.
“Damn it. How the hell am I going to follow her now?” Nico said aloud.
The CO wanted to track Nairobi and the pirates, but couldn’t. At least not right away. He saw trailing the convoy close behind as a fool’s errand, since night would reveal the headlights of his vehicle. Nico would have to wait for them to drive a good distance before he shadowed them. Waiting to see which way the convoy turned when it left the compound, he wondered if the pirates would make a right up the hill toward him and drive on to the small shantytown of Burco, a haven for smugglers, pirates, and recruits. Or left, down the Sheikh Pass to Berbera by the sea, where there was a prison and oil installation near the harbor pier.
When the compound gate opened, the first Range Rover turned left, followed by the second vehicle, and then the third. They were all heading down to the harbor, where the hijacked tanker ran aground in shallow water. Nico not only had to wait for all three vehicles to clear the dark road below, but he had to wait for a pair of guards to finish smoking cigarettes. They flicked the butts on the ground and stepped back inside the compound, closing the gate.
With a single guard on sentry duty inside the compound, Nico climbed in the Chinese vehicle and started the engine. He kept the lights off as he turned around, and steered the SUV downhill, keeping his foot off the gas until he coasted by the compound. And then he floored it.
Nico switched on the headlights and headed toward Berbera, in what he suspected would be the start of a long night.
Chapter Forty
Being a former Navy SEAL, Merk knew he couldn’t stay in the cove that night. His cover was compromised, no matter how cautious and quiet the children might be. He figured one of them would say something, a word, a passing remark of a dolphin, a visit by an American. Nor could he travel along the coastal road, as he was unsure whether Somalia had put checkpoints in place or had enacted a curfew. And traveling down the beach was not an option, since he felt at some point he would be spotted out in the open.
He directed the dolphins to swim ahead west and locate a small boat, while he followed them down the beach on foot. Merk kept his head on a swivel, glancing behind to make sure the strand was deserted, listening for voices of people and the sounds of passing vehicles. He panned the sea for activity, surveying the beach ahead. It appeared empty. The eerie stillness along the beach was punctuated by gentle waves whispering every now and then, as they ebbed and flowed.
A klick or two down the beach, a ping chimed from the laptop. Merk stopped, pulled the laptop out of the backpack, opened it, and saw a small craft with an outboard motor through Tasi’s dorsalcam. He took out a pair of night-vision binoculars to see if he could spot the boat and dolphins down shore. Panning the silhouettes along the bight coastline, he spotted a few houses, a pile of nets with a couple of boats pulled on shore, then further ahead off a point the dolphins swimming around the moored craft just offshore. Merk hit a key on the laptop instructing Tasi and Inapo to stay put until he got there.
Merk slid the laptop in the backpack, slung it over his shoulder, jogged down the beach.
When he arrived, he eyed a small run-down house with its lights out. The shades were drawn; a truck parked out front. But it was a couple of dilapidated wooden chairs by the back door that hinted to Merk there were people sleeping inside. He waded into the water up to his waist, quietly slipped the backpack in the boat, and then untied the line of the Boston whaler at the mooring buoy. Unable to untie the last knot, Merk took out a serrated knife and frayed the rope one strand at a time, cutting the line to give it the effect that it had frayed apart.
He rolled on board and signaled Tasi to push the craft away from shore. He then tied a loop on one end of the rope, slipped it over Inapo’s snout, and signaled the dolphin tow the boat out to sea. But Inapo gave Merk a quizzical look. Merk waved the dolphin over, looked him in the eye, and said, “Don’t go soft on me now. We can’t make noise until we are out there,” he pointed. Inapo squeaked a high-pitched whistle, and towed the boat out to sea.
A half klick offshore, Merk pulled the ripcord several times until the engine turned over. With a deep throttle, he revved the power and pushed the prop into the water, taking off. Tasi and Inapo broke away from the boat and swam ahead toward the piers of Berbera, where Merk could faintly make out the silhouette of a small cargo ship listing in the harbor. Based on the size, he knew that the abandoned, rusting ship was neither the hijacked supertanker Blå Himmel nor the American-flagged container ship Shining Sea.
Merk cut the engine and, for the next few hours, let the boat drift as he monitored the dolphins searching the piers and inner harbor of Berbera. At daybreak, the dolphins would survey the supertanker. The dolphins’ underwater reconnaissance netted Merk zilch on the activities of the pirates. The piers weren’t patrolled; only a couple of jeeps were spotted on the beach by the tanker, as the pirates surely kept an eye on their prized catch. He wondered what Nico was up to in shadowing Nairobi in her quest to break into the pirate’s inner circle.
Under a starlit night, Merk lay down to get some shut-eye. He used a backpack for a pillow, felt the sensation of floating. At dawn, they would resume the search.
Chapter Forty-One
Nico drove around the seaport of Berbera. After midnight the town became a virtual ghost town. Other than a few thugs and teenage gangbangers loitering on the streets, there was little activity. The prison lights were banked dark, except for the perimeter fence with a couple of downspout lights flooding the grounds under the watchtowers.
Across a field, a pair of guards patrolled the giant fenced-in oil depot. But like the other buildings in Berbera, many of them were older structures designed in Ottoman architecture. He didn’t dare drive around the storage tanks to the beach where the jeeps had been spotted earlier watching the supertanker grounded by the steel pier that jutted from the onshore fuel depot.
Nico drove down a deserted street and parked the vehicle under a tree. When he climbed out, he checked the front and back seats to make sure he didn’t leave anything behind with the US military brand.
On foot, Nico strolled down one deserted street after another, looking in the driveways, spying on the parking lots behind office buildings, gas stations, and 500-year-old mosques, while staying out of lines of sight from a man milling about a street corner. Nothing turned up in the way of sighting any of the Range Rovers or Nairobi. Did they drive on to Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland? And was it to another warlord or a rendezvous at the airport?
Nico eyed the buildings for a high vantage point that he could climb, stay out of sight in daylight, as he searched the coastal city for a clue to the whereabouts of the convoy.