None of the information they’d received had mentioned the sheer hostility they would face from the ship’s crew.
It surprised the man — he wouldn’t deny that. He would have thought that the men responsible for commandeering this ship regularly turned a blind eye to all kinds of shady dealings.
Maybe they’re that naive, he thought. Maybe they don’t know.
It was impossible. Even the most hands-off forms of illegal trade involved some kind of knowledge. These men would know that ninety percent of the TEUs they transported back and forth across the world’s oceans were either undeclared or reported inaccurately. It was the nature of the world.
They must not be used to dealing with our types, the man thought.
Their usual shady dealings were separated by a metal container.
The presence of the rugged combat veterans unnerved them.
That much was clear.
‘Do we have to do things my way?’ the bearded man said.
If they wouldn’t willingly co-operate, he would make them. They had come too far to fall short due to the temperamental feelings of a disgruntled band of crew members. The fee to clamber aboard back in port had been substantial — frankly, the man couldn’t believe that the crew’s superiors hadn’t communicated that to them.
Then again, this industry was mind-numbingly enormous. Holes existed, communication failures occurred, and crew members got pissed off. It was the way of life out here.
So is this, the man thought.
He signalled to one of his friends — a beefy, muscle-clad bald man with a permanent sunburn and cheap black sunglasses to complement his faded khakis. The pair had worked together for as long as he could remember, and it only took a single flick of two fingers to spur the guy into action.
The enormous man strode straight across the room, wrapped one hand around the skinniest crew member’s throat, and hurled him into the nearest wall. The kid bounced off the metal and collapsed in a heap on the cold floor, not seriously hurt but effectively intimidated into submission.
The big guy stepped back, lined up a kick, and swung a steel-toed boot into the crew member’s ribs.
A sharp crack rung through the cramped room, plastering grimaces across the faces of the other crew members. One of them moved imperceptibly, taking the slightest step forward as if he were about to stick up for his friend.
Big mistake.
The heavy bearded man punched him square in the nose, jarring enough to send the second kid flailing back in a tangle of limbs, hands flying to his face.
The first man smiled wryly and watched as the crew froze simultaneously, shocked by the sudden violence. Even though they had operated around legal jurisdiction for most of their careers, the criminal world often relied entirely on trust. The man wondered if any of the crew members had experienced such violence up close before, seeing with their own eyes the devastating effects of a powerful adversary with no regard for pleasant co-operation.
Probably not, judging by their reactions.
All of them clammed up, their skin paling and their eyes widening, looking like a group of deer in the headlights of an oncoming vehicle.
‘Hey—’ started the Spanish guy, the one who had given them all the problems.
‘What are you going to do?’ the first man said. ‘Ring your bosses? They’ll chew you out for speaking an ill word about us. Do you know how much we’re paying them? All of you, shut your mouths, and do as we say. Then we won’t have any more problems.’
The man scraped his chair back, signalling that the conversation was over. The crew members hurried for the door — one-by-one, the only method available in such a tight space. The air hung thick in the room, choked with sweat and fear. The two injured crew members filtered out last, one sporting a freshly broken nose and the other clutching his torso with white knuckles, grasping the region he had been struck by the steel-toed boot.
The last guy gave a pathetic whimper as he exited the room.
‘Too far?’ the enormous man said as the squad was finally left alone.
The first man shook his head. ‘Needed to send them a fuckin’ message. Entitled pricks. They’ll do what we say.’
‘And if the payload isn’t there when we need it to be?’
‘This ship isn’t moving until we get what we’re after,’ the man said. ‘There’s too much at stake here. All our futures…’
The enormous guy nodded. ‘Let’s hope it all works out.’
‘It will. I’ll make sure it does.’
8
There were no windows fixed into the fuselage of the cargo plane, and it made the descent into Mogadishu uncomfortable as all hell. King considered himself hardened to the ambiguous nature of the battlefield, but diving into a war zone with no view of the landing area, left to simply stare at the walls of a long metal tube that could be blown out of the sky at any moment — it rattled him, literally and figuratively.
He jolted and bounced in the seat, fixed into place by the harness strapped painfully tight across his chest. Even Lars went uncharacteristically silent as the cargo plane looped around its landing site.
The journey had passed slowly, no thanks to an unexpected eight-hour stopover in Algeria.
‘We can’t do anything about it,’ Lars had muttered as the pilots refused to explain the impromptu landing fourteen hours previously. ‘We agreed to be flexible when we organised with the airline to catch a ride. Sometimes business calls.’
They’d sat restlessly in a humid open-air warehouse as the pilots waited for an express delivery of supplies from a neighbouring village. The private airfield sat at the base of two towering hillocks, both covered in dead grass and soaring far over their heads, obscuring the view of the countryside. After nearly a half-day of waiting, both King and Lars concluded that Algeria was boring as all shit, and they were ecstatic when the pilots signalled that their work was done and it was time to press forward into Somalia.
Over the remainder of their flight time, Lars filled him in with more details as to the nature of the strange incident that had occurred in Somalian territory.
Bryson Reed had single-handedly made himself public enemy number one. His operational objective — at all times, without fail — had been to remain in AMISOM territory, providing the muscle for the peacekeepers as they set about trying to lend assistance in any way, shape or form to the troubling civil war that had plunged the country into anarchy.
He, and the United States government, had no jurisdiction or blessing to venture out into the war-torn city. Lars told King it was a blessing that a handful of troops were allowed into Somalia in the first place. They weren’t supposed to be there, all things considered.
And neither was King.
It explained the unidentifiable cargo plane and the silent way he’d been funnelled into Mogadishu, arriving without any fanfare or notice of any kind. King preferred it this way in any case — if no-one knew who he was or what he was doing there, he had the element of surprise to his advantage.
The more details Lars provided, the more determined King became to get to the bottom of what had unfolded.
As far as he could tell, Reed had landed himself in hot water.
Three days ago, after a shootout at the Port of Mogadishu in the middle of the night, three al-Shabaab militants had showed up to confront Reed at the peacekeepers’ compound.
They had clearly been paid handsomely by shadowy figures at the port to deal with the nosy American and take him out of the equation for good. Reed had been en route to his usual guard shack at the very edge of AMISOM territory when the trio had ambushed him along the side of the road. They’d each received a bullet to the head for their troubles and Reed had voluntarily retreated back to the peacekeeper HQ to quarantine himself until the attention died down.