He motored again through the cool of the night. He arrived in time for his shift at the fish market. Only in the afternoon could he compose a short verbal message, dig up his canvas-wrapped transceiver, hook it to the newly charged battery and hit the send button. The message was received at the Office north of Tel Aviv and, by agreement, passed on to TOSA in Virginia.
Within a day, a Global Hawk out of the American launch site in Yemen had found the compound. It took a while, but the message from Mossad mentioned a fruit market, with stalls and produce spread across the ground, just a hundred yards from the compound. And the minaret two blocks away. And the multi-exit roundabout built by the Italians, six hundred yards in a straight line due north, where the Mogadishu highway skirted the town. There could only be one like that.
Tracker had had a link from the J-SOC drone-operating center outside Tampa patched through to the U.S. embassy. He sat there and stared at the three houses enclosing the compound. Which one? None of them? Even if the Preacher were there, he was safe from drone strike. A Hellfire or a Brimstone would flatten up to a dozen of the close-packed houses. Women, children. His war was not with them, and he had no proof.
He wanted that proof, he needed that proof, and when the cryptographers were finished, he figured the Karachi-based chutney maker would provide it.
In his Kismayo cabin, Opal was sleeping when the MV Malmö joined the queue of merchant ships waiting to enter the Suez Canal. For them, motionless under the Egyptian sun, the heat was stupefying. Two of the Filipinos had lines out, hoping for a catch of fresh fish for supper. Others sat under awnings rigged in the lee of the steel sea containers, themselves like radiators, that contained the cars. But the Europeans stayed inside where the air-conditioning run off the auxiliary engine made life bearable. The Ukrainians played cards, the Pole was in his engine room. Capt. Eklund tapped out an e-mail to his wife, and the cadet Ove Carlsson studied his navigation lessons.
Far to the south, a Jihadist fanatic, filled with hatred for the West and all its doings, scanned the printouts of messages brought to him from Kismayo.
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.
Chapter 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.