The perimeter of the compound must have cost a staggering amount alone — barbed wire topped the wall in an unceasing contorted mess. At random intervals, portholes had been carved out of the rock to make way for fearsome-looking turrets. He recognised them instantly — they were Browning M2HB heavy machine guns, used by the U.S. military for decades.
He wondered how this place had managed to get hold of them, and more importantly, how they had managed to keep hold of them.
Then he remembered the hundred-thousand dollar payment to the Somali Police Force, and it clicked that there was more money involved in this operation than he could possibly fathom.
He didn’t hesitate when the compound materialised ahead — any kind of weakness would be seen as suspicious. Instead, he tuned his hearing to the sound of hundreds of people and vehicles milling about on the other side of the wall and made up his mind to press straight through.
Whatever it took.
He spotted the front entrance to the complex, wide enough to fit the largest of transport vehicles through without any problems. It was the only way to catch a glimpse of what lay within the walls — he saw vast warehouses made of corrugated steel and enormous semi-trailers splayed at random across the main aisle, a vast stretch of concrete as wide as a football field.
The scale sent a shiver down his spine. In comparison to the scene he had stumbled across, he was puny, insignificant in comparison. What could he possibly hope to achieve in this madness?
He could kill one man.
That was all that mattered.
The front gate had been heavily fortified in similar fashion to the rest of the compound — its gate had been constructed of solid steel, made of thick bars that ran vertically across the face. A guard booth with bulletproof windows and another Browning turret lay attached to the exterior wall, directly near the gate. King made out the silhouettes of three men within the small fortification.
It was a similar style of set-up to the peacekeepers’ compound back in Mogadishu, the only difference resting in the amount of zeroes thrown on the end of the budget.
But the added security didn’t change the basic fundamentals of human nature.
Act like you belong.
King screeched to a halt in front of the guard booth in the kind of rush that signalled he had places to be. It couldn’t have worked better.
One of the Somali guards stepped out of the booth, clutching a Kalashnikov AK-47, but the way he let the barrel drift to the road between his feet told King that he had no intention of using it. King raised his eyebrows as the man strolled toward the vehicle, indicating that he was in a rush.
The guard stopped by the driver’s door and merely grunted.
No English.
It didn’t matter. Most intentions in the criminal industry could be communicated with simple gestures that transcended all language barriers.
King reached over to the passenger seat, scooped up the majority of the hundred-dollar bills the police had given him, and handed them straight to the guard without a moment’s hesitation. Then he tapped his bare wrist twice, evidently pressed for time. He settled back into his seat, letting all the tension go from his limbs, and stared straight ahead through the steel bars of the front gate.
Clock’s ticking.
I’ve got places to be.
The guard put two and two together. Nothing about the jeep signalled that it belonged to U.S. military — the faded olive paint could have belonged to any faction, and there was no insignia to argue otherwise. Apart from that, King displayed zero warning signs.
The guard must have figured that a white man with boatloads of cash driving right up to the gate without a worry in the world obviously had something to do with the man who had entered the compound earlier.
If Reed had come straight here, things would unfold without a hitch.
For a brief moment, King stiffened as he realised the silence had elongated to an uncomfortable length. The M45 underneath his right leg made itself known, digging into his hamstring, as if silently instructing him that it might be needed.
He sure hoped not.
Then the guard turned on his heel, pocketing the bulk of the money in one smooth motion, and disappeared into the guard hut. A few seconds later, the gate crawled open with an electronic whine. King let out a sigh of relief — masking it from view of the ragtag guard team — and took his foot off the brake.
When there was enough space to fit through, he let the jeep roll slowly into the compound, refusing to accelerate in case it drew unwanted attention to his arrival.
He plunged into the industrial complex, took one sweeping look around the place — and suddenly, everything made sense.
He knew exactly what Reed had got himself involved in.
He scolded himself for not understanding sooner.
29
At surface level, nothing caught the eye.
King realised he had entered the compound with a predetermined idea of what he might find. His mind had conjured up the image of thousands of illegal weapons and piles of smuggled narcotics, hidden from sight by the enormous wall surrounding the complex.
The truth was banal in comparison.
But that was the beauty of it.
He slowed the jeep to a crawl as he passed through the small army of hired workers swarming the compound, many of them directing semi-trailers into cargo bays or navigating forklifts around hundreds and hundreds of wooden pallets. The pallets were stacked high with every commodity King could think of — he gazed out across a sea of food and bottled water and entire containers packed with cigarettes and standard commodities like clothes, building supplies, raw materials, electronics…
Reality set in.
This was a small city teeming with supplies of every shape and form, all transported to the distribution hub in Afgooye along a back route through Mogadishu. Staring out at the operation, it took King some time to realise exactly why such a staggering amount of goods were brought through unchecked channels.
Then it all clicked.
This was the world of extra-legal services. The rumours of guns and drugs were powerful tools to distract people from the reality that most of the goods that avoided regulations were the usual commodities you wouldn’t look twice at. King certainly hadn’t. When he’d first rolled the jeep into the compound he’d barely noticed the thousands of pallets, dismissing them as a front to hide the true nature of the business.
This is the business, he thought, realising the kind of profits that could result from this kind of scale.
King had bristled at the notion of an illegal smuggling ring running all kinds of horrors out of the port — assault rifles, sub-machine guns, semi-automatics, cocaine, heroin, meth. In truth, the smuggling ring existed, and it obviously turned over unfathomable amounts of cash, but it didn’t deal with the product King had expected.
The tens of thousands of refugees crammed into the temporary camps around Afgooye needed to be fed, clothed, supplied with the necessities.
Realisations hit home. No taxes, no customs, no tariffs, no accounting services, no auditing. There was room for millions — no, billions — of dollars of potential profit, just by providing the kind of banal services that the entire country needed to function.
All that money had to end up somewhere.
That’s what Reed was doing.
King suddenly realised that Reed had sold him on the tantalising illegalities too.
Hook, line, and sinker.
Reed had spoken of a notorious smuggling ring dealing in the kinds of illegal goods that would have snatched the attention of a guy like King — and it had worked flawlessly. In truth, there were no guns or drugs — or if there was, they made up such a small percentage of the extra-legal goods to be a non-factor.