Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Janson Option (Paul Janson) Read online

  “Not at that distance. But they’re a dime a dozen in Lebanon.”

  Helmeted motorcycle cops streamed onto the promenade, reinforced in seconds by four-man squads in Dodge Chargers. Moscow pressed a button on his phone and the boat’s captain scrambled up to the flying bridge.

  “Start the engines,” Moscow ordered. “Stand by to slip our mooring.”

  The captain raced down the stairs.

  Janson said, “Why don’t we step into the cabin so I can pay you in private?”

  Inside, Janson opened his carry bag and passed Moscow banded stacks of euros. Moscow watched the stack grow. “Enough,” he said. “You’ve overpaid.”

  “By fifteen percent,” said Janson.

  “To what do I owe such unearned largesse?”

  “I’m hoping you’ll do me a favor.”

  “If I can.”

  “I don’t doubt that assassins are a dime a dozen in Lebanon. But I do doubt that many are Chinese.”

  “You saw a Chinese in your lens? I saw a broad-shouldered Westerner.”

  “I saw his face.” A big man, tall as Denny Chin, though considerably heavier than Denny, and definitely Chinese, a northerner descended from Manchurian horsemen.

  Moscow shook his head. “Who would go to the trouble of importing a Chinese to a city that has no shortage of assassins? Especially to shoot a man any number would kill for free.”

  Janson shoved the money across the table. “I’d be interested in the answers you get when you ask around.”

  SIXTEEN

  2°2' N, 45°21' E

  Mogadishu, Somalia

  Problem, boss,” Sarah Peterson called from the right-hand seat as Lynn Novicki lowered the Embraer across Somalia’s Shebelle River Valley.

  The morning after he left Beirut, Janson was pressed against a forward cabin window, watching the land slide beneath the plane. The three-month-long gu rains had just ended and Somalia looked greener than he had expected. The river itself was gray and fringed with trees. Ahead sprawled Mogadishu, an enormous city of low buildings on the edge of the Indian Ocean. Taller buildings and a dozen orange construction cranes clustered around the harbor, a mile-long dimple in the shore encased in man-made breakwaters. From the plane, still high up and several miles off, Janson could not tell whether the cranes were operating or abandoned.

  “Nairobi ATC reports, quote, ‘possible disturbances’ around Aden Adde International Airport.”

  Nairobi was seven hundred miles to the west. “What does Mogadishu say?”

  “Mogadishu doesn’t have their act together to manage flight separation. UN air traffic controllers run Somali airspace from Nairobi.”

  “But they reopened for scheduled flights. Turkish Airlines flies in daily. They must have somebody in their tower.”

  “Tower doesn’t answer,” Sarah answered, and Lynn said, “Nairobi says the airport manager got shot on his way to work this morning.”

  Janson had heard that earlier in the day. It was the third assassination of the week in Mogadishu, following those of a journalist and an expatriate banker. Some blamed underground al-Shabaab kill cells that stayed behind when the militant Islamists fled the capital. Some blamed warlords. Others blamed the Italian.

  “Flip on the camera and give me a flyover.”

  In a radio exchange with Nairobi, Sarah secured permission for the course change, then activated the HD video array in the Embraer’s nose. Lynn steepened their descent and soon Janson could see the city’s tight street grid that ran to the edge of the blue ocean. It looked quiet, sunbaked, and hot. Red-tile roofs predominated, though near the harbor larger white buildings—villas, office buildings, hotels, and government houses—reared above the trees. Over every neighborhood, graceful white minarets speared the sky. The cranes near the harbor stood still, and few boats moved on the water.

  Janson scoped the outer district around the airport, eyeing the video on one of the Aquos 1080 high-def monitors. He saw plenty of bomb damage, craters and half-demolished houses, but nothing that appeared current. No smoke rose from the surrounding neighborhoods of low buildings. He zoomed in on the streets. While he saw no signs of battle, there were few people out in the midday sun. On the other hand, that sun reflected off numerous shiny tin roofs, which indicated a brisk business in rebuilding.

  The airport’s ten-thousand-foot runway lay on a north-south axis. It paralleled the ocean a few meters from the beach, separated from the clear water by scrub brush and sand. On the inland side were a modest, one-story terminal building, a scattering of private and charter jets, a gleaming white-and-red Turkish Airlines Boeing 737-800, a four-engine Airbus freighter, some boarding-stair trucks, and a squat control tower. Barracks for United Nations troops were clearly marked with a giant “UN” painted on the roof.

  Janson spotted a square shadow in a stand of palm trees near the south end of the runway and zoomed in. A low-slung Soviet-era T-72 main battle tank lurked in the palms’ thin shade, draped in camouflage netting. It was probably a “monkey model” that the Russians exported to poor countries, although a funny-looking array on the foredeck could be a modern LAHAT launcher, a reminder that all sorts of oddities could be found cobbled together in Africa’s war zones. Whatever it was, it appeared to be keeping the peace.

  “OK, Lynn, let’s go down there.”

  Sarah cleared a landing with Nairobi. Lynn swung north, then circled around and lined up to descend into the south wind. “Seat belt, boss.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Janson, buckling in.

  He was still swooping the cameras around, looking for trouble he might have missed earlier. They came down fast—Lynn had earned her spurs landing transports through Baghdad rockets—pushing the Embraer’s approach-speed limits to minimize exposure to ground fire.

  “Two hundred,” said Sarah, who was monitoring the altimeter.

  “Technical!” warned Janson.

  “Whoa, Nellie!”

  The long-bed four-by-four Toyota pickup truck with a heavy machine gun on the roof of the cab shot out of the surrounding bush and raced onto the runway waving black flags. Masked fighters—al-Shabaab, judging by the fleeting glimpse Janson got of black-and-white kaffiyeh headdress covering their faces—jammed its cargo bed, passenger cab, and running boards.

  “Up!” said Janson.

  Lynn hauled back on the control column. Sarah shoved the throttles. The big Rolls-Royces bombarded the air, and Janson felt his seat slam into his back.

  “Where the heck is he going?” asked Sarah, who was watching on a repeater in the cockpit.

  Janson zoomed in on the truck. “Anywhere he wants to.”

  So much for the Islamist fanatics’ retreat to the bush. The technical bristled with grenade launchers and assault rifles.

  Three more technicals manned by fighters in floppy hats and camo fatigues swarmed onto the field and chased after the first, exchanging fire with mounted machine guns and rocket launchers. The al-Shabaab lofted grenades into the UN barracks, which set the wooden structures burning. Another technical came boiling out from a stand of thick brush flying black flags. It joined the al-Shabaab and they counterattacked, charging down the runway at sixty miles an hour.

  A third group of technicals burst from a hangar and raced past the main terminal, raking the others with rifles and grenades. The Airbus freighter trundled away from the terminal. Before it got two hundred meters, a rocket grenade set it on fire.

  “Not today,” said Janson. “Outta here.”

  “Glad to hear it, boss. Where to?”

  Baidoa and Baraawe, the nearest Somali cities with a six-thousand-foot runway, the Embraer’s minimum, were one day controlled by local clan warlords and the next in the grip of al-Shabaab, while Harardhere in southern Puntland was a pirate stronghold where Janson’s $25 million Embraer could end up held for ransom, along with him and his pilots.

  That left Nairobi.

  But a retreat to the Kenyan capital would slow him down.

&n
bsp; Janson looked east over the boundless Indian Ocean.

  Airline pilots minimized jet-fuel costs by flying their planes light, which meant carrying only enough reserves for safe margins of extra range. But Catspaw pilots flew heavy and topped up their tanks repeatedly for unpredictable changes of course. Earlier, with only a thousand miles to go to Mogadishu, Lynn had insisted on a refueling stop in Addis Ababa. Janson had asked whether she couldn’t stretch it, but she had exercised a captain’s prerogative. Now he blessed her for it.

  “Can we make it to the Seychelles?”

  “No prob.”

  He keyed his sat phone to tell Kincaid to meet him in Victoria, capital of the Seychelles Islands.

  * * *

  THE T-72 THAT Paul Janson had spotted in the palm trees belonged to the Somali warlord Home Boy Gutaale. Gutaale was a middle-aged, dark-skinned giant with a thick beard dyed henna red. He was proud of his nickname Home Boy and prouder still that Somalis desperate for a powerful leader called him the George Washington of Soomaaliweyn.

  Gutaale’s tank, thirty years old but extravagantly teched-up, provided shelter from the deadly storm of small arms fire and rocket grenades lashing the airport, and relief from the heat, being air-conditioned as well as armored. Narrow glimpses of the battle offered by view slits were augmented by a panorama from sophisticated optics in the tank’s periscope.

  A tall American crouched under the low ceiling beside Gutaale craned his neck to watch the Embraer 650 fleeing the gun battle. The private jet, which was racing west over Mogadishu, suddenly looped 180 degrees and disappeared east over the Indian Ocean.

  Gutaale, as tall as the American and much broader in the chest and shoulders—and crouching as uncomfortably—grinned at the tank’s driver and gunner, smaller men suited to the cramped interior. His grin was infectious and they smiled back, delighted to be in the famous Home Boy’s presence. Their smiles got bigger when Gutaale asked their guest, “Would you like to see what your gift to Somali stability does to a technical?”

  “Stability?” the American shot back. “You promised stability. I see supposedly defeated al-Shabaab fanatics blowing up your goddamned airport.”

  “The attack is a sign of their weakness,” said Gutaale. “Al-Shabaab is losing ground. But,” he conceded, “you are right, my friend, in that it might appear to a stranger who does not understand the situation that al-Shabaab has the upper hand this afternoon…”

  The red-bearded warlord snapped an order. His gunner tracked the nearest al-Shabaab technical. A laser-guided antitank rocket leaped from the array on the forward deck, flashed across the runway, and bored into the crowded truck. Its warhead detonated, and the explosion flung burning men into the air.

  The other technicals scattered, fleeing into the bush north of the runway, east onto the beach, and west into city streets.

  Gutaale laughed. “For your viewing pleasure, my generous friend, a vivid example of the application of force in the service of stability. On behalf of my countrymen, thank you for your gift to the cause of Greater Somalia.”

  The tough-talking American gaped. He looked horrified by sudden death close enough that the smell of burning flesh penetrated the air conditioning. Gutaale saw a man on the cusp of enlightenment. A successful transition could make him even more useful, and Gutaale sought to soothe him.

  He spoke with the self-assurance of the effortlessly charismatic. Allah had blessed him with a rich voice to entrance a hundred fighters around a campfire, or give courage to a single comrade cowering from helicopters.

  “You come from life, my friend. In your dollar country, life and stability are yoked like blood and bone. We come from death. In my degraded country, death and instability twirl like sand and wind. Your farms are abundant, your hospitals gleam, your schools resound with the dreams of learning. We learn death. Our teachers are famine, pestilence, and war.”

  The tall American was recovering from his shock, tranquillized, as Gutaale intended, more by the confident rumble of his voice than his rambling speech. The Somali steered him back to reality, pointing at the smoke rising from the huddled bodies around the burning technical.

  “Somalia is beset by enemies. Al-Shabaab roams the provinces of Bay, Hiiraan, Galguduud, and Mudug. Kenya demands Gedo and Juba for a buffer zone. Ethiopia will invade any minute from Ogaden. And no one knows better than you that pirates seize Puntland…” Gutaale paused. But the American was no pushover and revealed no emotion.

  “Without stability, Somalia will be devoured. But if she is chewed into small bits, with her will die dreams of schools. And dreams of hospitals. And dreams of shipping to market the petroleum that Allah buried under our land.”

  “Why do you think I bought you tanks?” said Kingsman Helms.

  SEVENTEEN

  40°56' N, 74°4' W

  Paramus, New Jersey

  Hang on a minute, I have to take this,” Morton told the thief. One of the sat phones in his leather jacket was vibrating. Caller ID was totally blocked. But they had his number, so if it wasn’t a wrong number, it meant money.

  The thief returned his attention to the flat screens over the bar of Jerry’s Sportsman’s Paradise, which were showing football reruns and horse races in real time.

  Morton stepped outside into the parking lot of the New Jersey strip mall anchored by Jerry’s, a hangout for high-end housebreakers and jewel fences. He was a potbellied, pasty-faced, “white-hat” computer hacker who got his kicks switching hats, less for the dough than for the hell of it.

  “Tell me why I shouldn’t hang up.”

  “Catspaw,” said a woman.

  Morton scrambled into the privacy of the ten-year-old Honda that he drove when visiting Jerry’s. No way he’d let the lowlifes see his regular ride and get the idea they should be robbing him instead of robbing for him.

  “What can I do for you?”

  Morton had spoken with her before but had never met her face-to-face and never expected to. She had a warm, musical voice, and a reformatory warden’s precise way with words.

  “We are interested in a megayacht built by the Lynds & Schmidt Shipyard in Hamburg, Germany, for a Russian oligarch. We want the oligarch’s name, the name of the yacht, its current location, and the name of the yacht’s captain.”

  “I can do that,” Morton said, meaning that if anyone could hack into a megayacht shipyard’s computers, he was the man.

  “How long do you estimate it will take you?”

  “Long,” Morton admitted, sticking to his mother’s advice: never promise what you can’t deliver. Stalling for time to think, he heard a heavy truck engine. His windows were closed, so it wasn’t the traffic on Route 17, but coming over her phone, a big semi climbing its gears. It almost sounded like she was in it.

  “Are you there, Mr. Morton?”

  “Businesses that got Russian-oligarch customers are digi-secure up the wazoo.”

  “If you want the job, you must start immediately.”

  “OK if I sub some of it?”

  “Use all the subcontractors you need. There is no time to lose.”

  * * *

  AFTER DARK, in a comfortable office in his villa on the Lido, Home Boy Gutaale challenged Kingsman Helms. “Yes, you bought me tanks. But you promised helicopters.”

  “You’ll get helicopters when you earn helicopters.”

  The warlord sat behind his desk. The oilman paced. A thirty-second loop was playing over and over on Gutaale’s computer screen, footage of the airport battle recorded by his T-72’s optic sensors. He tapped the monitor with his finger. Then he touched the image of each of the bodies smoldering on the runway.

  “You are a guest in my country. As my guest, your blood is more precious than mine. But a guest should never be too independent.”

  “I am a guest in many countries,” Helms shot back. “Those I favor with a second visit are those who treat me like a valued partner.”

  Home Boy Gutaale turned to the map of Greater Somalia that cove
red an entire wall. The nation it depicted obliterated the borders of Ethiopia and Kenya. This was Soomaaliweyn, the ancient kingdom of the Horn of Africa where Somalis ruled two thousand miles of East African coast, five hundred miles into the highlands.

  He switched on a penlight laser and nonchalantly played its red dot at locations where ASC petroleum scientists predicted major oil and gas reserves. “Helicopters—”

  Kingsman Helms cut the warlord off with a sharp gesture.

  “Oil is a hard business, Gutaale. Oil does not come out of the ground easily. It does not come out cheaply.”

  “It gushes!”

  “Try capping a gusher. It is a humbling experience. If it doesn’t kill you, and you manage to contain the oil, you will next learn that moving it, refining it, and selling it are even harder business than finding and containing it. If you don’t want to piss it all away, you will need a partner as much as the partner needs you and your promises of stability.”

  Gutaale pressed his knee against a button hidden beneath his desk. A young man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up bustled into the office without knocking and whispered in Gutaale’s ear.

  Gutaale looked grave. “Thank you.”

  The young man left.

  Helms, still shaken by Allegra’s abruptly ended phone call, asked, “Did that concern my wife?”

  Gutaale said, “Mr. Helms, as you know, I’ve been trying to make contact with the pirate who holds her.”

  Helms knew better than to ask favors of a man he was doing business with. Gutaale knew everyone in Somalia, of course, so he was welcome to help. But it had been smarter to trust Allegra’s life to a top-notch, clear-eyed, straight arrow with no stake in Somalia—Paul Janson—while Helms remained focused like a laser on the biggest deal of his life. Ice water in his veins? What was the alternative? Moaning ineffectually for the woman he loved? The woman he loved deserved the best, and Kingsman Helms was providing it in the best way he knew how.

  “Trying, perhaps,” he answered. “But not succeeding.”