Nearly an hour later, the Ka-27 approached the freighter. The helicopter was manned by a pilot and copilot plus two Chinese marines acting as observers. “ Wuhan, this is Patrol Unit Three,” the pilot radioed, “we are approaching the Yutian, and we have the suspect vessel in sight. It is a ten-meter open-hull motor vessel with two armed persons aboard. There is a rope ladder on the Yutian’s port side midships at the low-ramp gunwale and the suspect vessel appears to be tied to the Yutian. Four suspects are holding about a dozen crewmembers at gunpoint near the bow. We are fifteen minutes until bingo fuel. Request instructions.”
“Patrol Three, this is Wuhan, you are authorized to fire warning smoke at the suspect vessel,” came the reply. “Remain well clear of hostile fire. We are dispatching another patrol helicopter and are under way toward your position.”
“Acknowledged,” the pilot responded. On intercom he said, “Prepare for smoke-rocket launches from the port launcher, crew.” Flying about a half mile from the freighter, the pilot armed his weapon panel, pedal-turned slightly right, and pressed the red button atop his control stick three times, firing three forty-millimeter unguided rockets ahead of the freighter’s track.
“ Wuhan, this Patrol Three, I have fired three smoke rockets ahead of the freighter,” the pilot radioed. “It was clearly observed by the suspects. The suspects on the boat are not moving. The suspects holding the hostages are waving their AK-47s at me. They-” He stopped his narration in shock when he saw one of the pirates, who appeared to be no more than a teenager, turn back to the hostages, lower his AK-47 to his hip, and fire, cutting down the first row of hostages. “The pirates are killing hostages!” he screamed on the radio. “They are murdering them!”
“Patrol Three, Patrol Three, remain clear of hostile fire!” the commander of the Wuhan radioed.
But the Ka-27 pilot couldn’t hear him, or ignored him if he did. Instead, he pedal-turned to the right, moved in closer to the freighter, and squeezed the trigger on his control stick. The 7.62-millimeter machine gun on his starboard-side pylon chugged to life. The pilot carefully walked the bullet hits up the side of the freighter and across the deck, killing two of the pirates and scattering the others. “Take that, you murderous bastards!” the pilot shouted. “Take-”
“RPG! RPG!” the copilot shouted. “Break left!”
But it was far too late. A pirate aboard the smaller boat tied to the freighter had immediately raised a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, aimed, and fired, and from about a hundred yards away, he could not miss. The grenade round hit and exploded, and the Ka-27 burst into flames and dove straight down into the Indian Ocean.
OLD PORT DISTRICT, MOGADISHU, SOMALIA
LATE THAT NIGHT
The pirate mother ship, a thirty-meter oceangoing tugboat captured by pirates several months earlier, had returned at flank speed to its berth at the Old Port of Mogadishu, northeast of the new port facility and east of the slums of downtown Mogadishu, after the news came that the crew of one of their pirate ships had shot down the Chinese patrol helicopter. The port’s old piers had not been rebuilt after years of disuse, but had been repaired enough to service the mother ship and its small fleet of pirate assault vessels, including enough roadways and security positions to allow refueling and rearming the vessels and their crews. It was the busiest the Old Port had been in many years. The crew didn’t much care about how well they secured the ship-they tied it off, threw some pieces of corrugated tin and canvas on it to disguise it the best they could, then got away as fast as they could.
Old Port had been the location of several foreign embassies headquartered in the Somali capital, all now closed, when Mogadishu was one of the largest and busiest ports in all of East Africa. Now various warlords and pirate captains occupied the old embassy buildings as their headquarters. The buildings in the Old Port district had been rebuilt and fortified with the millions of dollars of ransom money paid by shipping and insurance companies around the world to have their vessels, crews, and cargo released by the pirates over the years. The nearby Abdiasis district, with its beautiful white-sand beaches, sports facilities, and tree-lined neighborhoods, had been taken over by the pirate captains and the warlords who controlled them, creating a security buffer between themselves, the teeming squalor of the city, and the continuing civil war that kept the government nonexistent, the entire country lawless and fractured, and the economy in shambles for almost a decade. But if a visitor was transported to the area and saw only Old Port and Abdiasis, he might conclude that Mogadishu was an up-and-coming city striving for greatness.
A meeting of the mother ship’s captain, six of their boarding crew-boat captains, and the local warlord was called to discuss the downing of the Chinese patrol helicopter. In the former French embassy building, across the street from the Abdul Rahman Mosque and a large madrassa, they watched news coverage of the incident on satellite TV, but there was not much yet. Discussions centered around where to move the base of operations-it was a given that the Chinese, or someone who belonged to the Combined Task Force antipiracy group, would respond.
Unknown to the Somali pirates, the Chinese response was already under way. An unmanned patrol aircraft that had been launched to assist the Kamov patrol helicopters had been diverted when the mother ship was observed fleeing the area, and the UAV followed it back to the Old Port. It was easy to spot exactly where the mother-ship crew went after disembarking, and the crew of the Wuhan watched as the meeting of the band of pirates commenced. The Wuhan had been moving toward shore, and in ten hours was now within range.
As soon as the meeting started, the captain of the Wuhan ordered the attack to begin, and the ship fired four C-802L cruise missiles toward the Old Port. The C-802s were reverse-engineered French Exocet antiship missiles, modified and improved for land-attack missions with greater range and speed, a larger five-hundred-pound high-explosive warhead, and a GPS satellite navigation system with an infrared terminal guidance seeker. In five minutes, the missiles crossed the remaining distance between the Wuhan and shore and destroyed the old French embassy and the Abdul Rahman Mosque, a suspected pirate haven.
THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW, RUSSIAN FEDERATION
A SHORT TIME LATER
“Premier Zhou, this is President Truznyev calling,” Igor Truznyev, the president of the Russian Federation, said on the secure telephone connection to Beijing. The former head of the Federal Security Bureau, the new name of the defunct Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or KGB, Truznyev at age sixty-eight was much older than most of his recent predecessors, but was in excellent health and took great care of his body and mind. Tall, loud-voiced, and imposing, with a mane of thick silver hair, thick bushy eyebrows, and thick legs, Truznyev often walked the streets of cities, towns, villages, factories, and farms throughout Russia even in the worst weather, greeting citizens with a hearty handshake, accompanied by an impressively small and remarkably inconspicuous security detail.
Truznyev was unabashedly “old school” and a fierce nationalist, strongly believing that Russia had to be governed by a strong central government willing to do whatever it took to run the vast country and secure its mostly indefensible borders. Most Russians embraced the very same ideals and voted overwhelmingly for him, securing his second term with 82 percent of the popular vote-even without his networks of internal security officers squelching all signs of dissent or opposition anywhere in the country, Truznyev would have won the election by an overwhelming majority.