His heart beat like thunder against his chest wall.
He couldn’t believe he’d made it out unscathed.
He took a solitary glance at the sea of cash covering the passenger seat, the bundle separated into a thin sheet of notes by the force of the jeep’s acceleration.
Twenty thousand dollars.
A fifth of what Reed had paid the officers.
It boggled his mind, making him reconsider everything he’d discovered up to the present moment. He had automatically assumed that Reed’s claims of a smuggling ring running drugs and guns out of arriving container ships was a false diversion of a tale, but he couldn’t imagine anything else dealing with that kind of money. A hundred thousand USD was a mere afterthought to the man, used to ensure himself safe passage through to Afgooye. No wonder the officers had been so co-operative.
If King didn’t stop Reed in his tracks, the man would flee with millions of dollars in stolen funds. It was the only ultimatum that made any sense. He knew the average Force Recon Marine’s salary was fifty-eight thousand a year, and Reed had thrown that at a cluster of officers twice over.
The gravity of the situation began to sink in.
King clutched the wheel with a determined, vice-like grip and surged through the overbearing darkness toward a remote town in the heart of the Somali countryside.
27
Afgooye snuck up on him in the darkness.
One minute, King’s guard started to fade as the trail ahead blurred into a constant stream of nothingness, pitch dark and surrounded by open fields of dead vegetation and sand. The next, soft light emanated from the surrounding land, barely perceptible amidst the darkness.
His eyes drooped momentarily, a response to his adrenalin levels crashing down in the aftermath of the police stop. He’d been ready to go down in a blaze of gunfire, and his veins had thundered with cortisol accordingly. Now that the threat had dissipated and he was left to ponder what had occurred at the checkpoint, his energy levels plummeted.
He had almost fallen asleep at the wheel when he noticed broad shapes on either side of the trail.
It startled him into action.
Only managing to glimpse the objects in his peripheral vision, he wrenched the M45 out of the storage compartment in the driver’s door and trained the barrel into the darkness.
Energy came flooding back in a wave.
He hadn’t a clue what he was witnessing, but as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark and the surroundings began to make sense, he let the fight-or-flight mechanism tone itself down once again.
There was no threat here.
He gazed out upon rows and rows of tattered canvas tents, arranged in two staggering grids on either side of the trail. It boggled his mind as he considered the scale of the encampments, plunging into the distance where they faded entirely from view. There had to be thousands and thousands of the tents, with barely any artificial lighting to pave the way for civilians. The soft glow came from the odd halogen bulb dotted randomly throughout the twin sites. In the midst of the temporary shelters, King saw silhouettes moving slowly through the aisles, milling around in certain areas, congesting in hotspots. He could see the lie of the land due to the plains sloping away from the trail on either side, allowing the ability to look out at the sea of tents.
Rattled by the sudden appearance of thousands of people, he tore his gaze away from the camps and stared straight ahead, focusing on slicing the jeep through the midst of the tents without attracting too much attention.
He needn’t have bothered.
No-one even glanced in his direction, and he realised they were preoccupied with their own problems. If this trail acted as a major link in a nation-wide trade route, then one more jeep passing by would mean nothing to them.
King could almost taste the raw fear in the air.
He concluded that the camps must be providing shelter to the men, women and children displaced from their homes in the war-torn hotspots of Somalia. He pondered the gravity of the situation for a moment — just as he had considered the scale of the drug trade in Tijuana. Diving into the thick of the action made him realise how insignificant he was in the grand scheme of things.
His actions didn’t matter in the big picture.
But they mattered to him.
If he could prevent a maniacal soldier from escaping scot-free, he would consider it a job well done.
The perimeter of the two camps fell away after another minute of travel. As he pushed through to the town of Afgooye itself, he glimpsed more signs of civilisation — rundown general stores scattered at random across the sides of the trail, litter and waste strewn across the road itself, the distant stirring of commotion. Everything had closed down for the night, but still the aura of human contact covered everything, vastly different from the wasteland he’d driven through once he left Mogadishu behind.
Still, something caught his attention.
He knew Reed had business in this town, and good businesses operated at all hours of the night — something King imagined would be accurate in this situation given the scale of the money involved. He stopped in the middle of the road and switched the headlights off momentarily, plunging everything around him into total darkness. For good measure, he killed the jeep’s engine, silencing the throaty chugging and replacing it with the omnipresent murmur of thousands of refugees in the distance.
He could hear the commotion floating through the town, even at this hour. It took some of the tension away from the fact that he had come to a halt out in the open, entirely vulnerable to an attack.
Despite his mind conjuring up images of Reed ghosting out of the shadows and plunging a blade into his throat, King focused on holding his breath and listening intently for any sign of suspicion.
There.
Somewhere ahead, he heard it. It came from the land beyond Afgooye’s centre, a section of the countryside past the bulk of civilisation. There was commotion in the air, but a different kind.
Industrial. Purposeful.
It didn’t sound like thousands more refugees floating amongst their city of tents — instead, it carried the urgency and pace of men and women on the job, hustling for a paycheque. He heard the faint beeping of a reversing truck, and right then he knew he had found Reed’s destination.
Hoping he wasn’t too late, he fired the jeep back into life, switched the headlights on, and accelerated hard for the other end of Afgooye.
28
King hadn’t been prepared for the size of the industrial complex.
It rivalled the Port of Mogadishu in scale, but out here it seemed a thousand times larger — a small city of warehouses built in the middle of nowhere. He looked in either direction down the perimeter wall of the complex, and found nothing but vast empty space for as far as the eye could see.
Afgooye had turned out larger than he anticipated. It had taken him ten minutes of coasting aimlessly through dusty suburbs to reach the industrial sector. Throughout the journey, he’d been surrounded on either side by residential one-storey clay houses. Half the buildings he passed were painted in outrageous fashion, sporting bright turquoise walls or maroon roofs or any number of other strange amalgamations. When the congestion of the town’s populated buildings began to fade and the vast fields of weeds and sand returned, King’s morale had crumpled as he realised that he might not ever find Reed amidst this wasteland.
Then he hit the concrete wall after two more minutes of steady coasting, and his objective suddenly seemed achievable after all.