Robert Ludlum's (TM) The Janson Option (Paul Janson) Page 18

  Janson was not surprised when he inspected their cargo through his monocular lens that the trucks were carrying bundles of khat leaves. Their expensive escorts suggested big-money narcotics shipments to the suqs of Mogadishu. Come night, he and Kincaid would either hide in the back of a truck or hijack an SUV.

  While they waited, they used the time to run a preliminary “mea culpa”—their post-mission assessment—dissecting what they had done during the Tarantula raid and what they could have done better. Failure was failure, but you only got better when you examined failure with an honest eye. Janson conceded that he might have been overly cautious. He worried that Kincaid would take his admission as license to risk rash action next time, and he said so aloud.

  “If I was too cautious, it’s not your job to make up for it by being reckless.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ordinarily, she would have admitted to risking the hostages’ lives—and their own lives—by not obeying instantly the order to fall back. But she did not mention it. Not even a sarcastic “Sorry about that, Colonel.” Janson knew that he had to remind her forcefully that discipline kept operators alive, but she was taking the loss of Allegra very hard, and he decided to let it go until later.

  Bats began darting through the shadows, dodging the debris hanging from the ceiling. But before the dark settled in thickly enough to provide cover to make their move, 100mm tank guns begin echoing off the inland hills. Ugandan T-55s chasing al-Shabaab, as the gunrunners’ sources had reported, Janson guessed.

  The cannon fire had the effect of taps saluting an early end to the day. Drivers and guards hurried to their vehicles and resumed their southward run to Mogadishu. The cooks rolled up their tarp, stacked pots and plastic chairs in a Toyota pickup, and took off on spinning wheels north toward Harardhere.

  Janson and Kincaid watched and listened for convoys that might not stop until the cooks returned in the morning.

  Suddenly Kincaid whispered, “You know that picture of the long-haired, pale-eyed gal you showed me in Florence?”

  “Flora in Botticelli’s Primavera. The flower goddess.”

  “That’s who she looked like.”

  It was not their way to distract themselves when standing watch, but Kincaid was hurting, and Janson tried to keep her talking.

  “Allegra?”

  “Spitting image.”

  “Her ancestress could have posed for Botticelli.”

  “I don’t mean that way. She looks like she knows hard times.”

  “She’s kidnapped.”

  “I mean hard times before. Back in her life, sometime.”

  “You saw a lot through your Panoramics. I couldn’t even tell if the hostages were dead or alive.”

  “It’s the angle she holds her head,” Kincaid whispered. “It tells me all I have to know about her.”

  Janson studied her face in the fading light. To his eye, the Botticelli image that captured Kincaid was Pallas and the Centaur—the cool-eyed guard arresting an intruder, the centaur, who looked stunned and amazed that she had clamped onto a fistful of his hair before he even saw her coming. Pure Kincaid.

  “What do you know about her?” he asked.

  “She’s an escaper.”

  “Like you.”

  “Like me. Paul, we have got to—”

  “We will.”

  “Forget Helms, we’re going to rescue that woman.”

  Janson would not forget Kingsman Helms, but he replied, simply, “We will rescue that woman.”

  “How?”

  Janson had been thinking on it since he had ordered the retreat from Tarantula. Instead of answering Kincaid, he pulled a sat phone from his waterproof pack and was pleasantly surprised that the phone was not wet.

  “Who you calling?”

  “Quintisha, first. Then the guys in Mogadishu…Good morning, Quintisha. Things did not go as planned. Would you please lean harder on our New Jersey computer hacker? We need that oligarch’s yacht and we need it now. No one has come through. I think he’s our best option, or last hope…Right, through Lynds Shipworks…No, Jess is all right. But we’re running out of time.”

  He ended the call, switched to a throwaway cell phone, and dialed Salah Hassan, the Minneapolis real estate mogul he had sent to Mogadishu. Waiting for Somalia’s ramshackle cell towers to make it ring, he whispered to Kincaid, “Remember the picture of the yacht? What color was the helicopter?”

  “Both gold.”

  He got the mogul’s machine. His cheery Hassan Real Estate greeting ended, “Have a greaaaaaat day.”

  Janson left a message with no names: “Neither young gentleman is answering his shanzhai.”

  Seconds later, the throwaway vibrated. It was Hassan, who spoke as circumspectly. “Our student has disappeared, according to our entrepreneurial parolee. It’s possible he’s looking for a certain cleric.”

  “That’s exactly what I told him not to do.”

  “Apparently he did not listen.”

  “Has our entrepreneurial parolee made contact with anyone useful?” Janson asked, meaning Ahmed’s former-pirate relatives or a negotiator hungry enough to risk prosecution.

  “I’m afraid not. He started a business the day we arrived.”

  “Like the business he got paroled from?” Janson asked. East Africa was a transit point for smuggling Asian cannabis and opiates to Europe. Lawless Somalia was a trafficker’s haven. And drug transit points always suffered a spillover effect; the volume of the stuff moving through the territory created lucrative markets of domestic users.

  “All I know is he’s riding around Mogadishu in a big SUV.”

  Janson rolled his eyes at the sagging roof. How much collateral damage were Catspaw’s eyes and ears wreaking on poor Somalia? Ahmed had sure as hell gone native at the speed of light. But Ahmed’s SUV was small potatoes compared to Hassan’s own adventures. The realtor’s Mogadishu ride, Janson had learned while working his phone in the Seychelles, was an armored-up Mercedes, which befitted his new station.

  “I hear you purchased a seat in parliament.”

  Salah Hassan offered no apology. “Better an honorable man than thieves and warlords. We need a new parliament, not a repeat of the old. I’m no thief and I’m not a fighter. I only want to get things done.”

  “You got them done quickly.”

  “Elders of my clan were on the selection committee. What can I do for you, Paul?”

  Janson heard less an offer than a busy man ending a conversation.

  “Do you have friends at the airport?”

  Hassan said, “Since my purchase, as you so delicately put it, I have friends everywhere.”

  “I want someone at the airport to keep an eye out for a gold Sikorsky executive helicopter.”

  “I can do that,” Hassan said briskly, then tried to close the conversation with a cool “Anything else?”

  Janson said, “Success in my business means getting in and out without being noticed. In your business—your new public-service business—public credit for rescuing Mrs. Helms could burnish, even elevate, a member of parliament’s reputation both here and abroad. It might even legitimize his election in eyes beyond the cozy clan world.”

  Hassan asked, “How much credit would you share?”

  “In your new post, you are in a position to earn all the credit. Can I count on you?”

  “Company!” Kincaid whispered.

  Janson and Kincaid slithered apart and covered the doors with their MTARs. He had heard it too. Not khat trucks rumbling on the road. Nor the AMISOM tanks in the hills, but men running—the al-Shabaab fighters who had escaped the tanks—running headlong for cover in the desperate hope of holing up for the night back where they started.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Janson saw a slight figure push the door open just enough to slip through and close it behind him. He tsked a heads-up into his lip mike to Kincaid, who was covering the opposite door, and shifted his weapon to single-shot. The flash- and noise-suppressed MT
AR would take the intruder down without alerting the men behind him. But Janson held his fire. He saw no weapons.

  Moving swiftly in utter silence, he halved the distance between him and the intruder, who was sticking by the door, staring into the dark interior, and halved it again. Janson was nearly beside him when he turned. Janson saw his face. A boy. Not even a teenager, but a tall, thin boy of ten or twelve dressed in a ragged striped shirt, shorts, and plastic flip-flops.

  He saw Janson, six feet away. His eyes widened and his whole face lighted up. “SEALs!”

  It was a vivid reminder that while they were dressed in black and armed to the teeth, the NGO papers they carried in the event of running into EU patrols, AMISOM troops, or American Special Forces wouldn’t pass the giggle test. But they passed the boy’s test. He looked ecstatic.

  “SEALs,” he exulted. “SEALs. Thank Almighty God.”

  Janson pressed a finger to his lips. “Quiet,” he whispered. “Who are you?”

  “Abdi. I am kidnapped when I came home from school.”

  “When?”

  “Months. Al-Shabaab. I ran when the tanks came. Now they’re chasing me.”

  “How many?” whispered Janson.

  The boy’s joy turned to terror as behind him armed fighters pushed in the door. Janson switched to full auto. Then he saw that they were dressed like Abdi and were boys themselves, only slightly older if at all, but cradling AKs and pistols. One held an old Soviet grenade launcher bigger than he was. Another was tripping over a long belt of machine-gun cartridges draped around his neck like a beach towel.

  Janson felt as if the building had dropped on him.

  He sensed Kincaid gliding across the room to take them with enfilading fire.

  “Shit!” he heard her whisper in his ear bud. “They’re kids.”

  Angry children chasing frightened children.

  He had seconds, if that, to make “Janson Rules” work for him. He could hear Denny Chin mocking him. Janson Rules. Fann-tass-tic. Children were by definition civilians. The rules said no civilians in a cross fire. But these children were armed like soldiers and about to unleash automatic weapons with reflexes that would outspeed adults. No torture? At least there was no time for that. No killing anyone who’s not trying to kill us. Fair enough. They would try to kill him and Kincaid. They were a single heartbeat from firing their weapons. But they were children.

  If a single, soft tsk in his ear bud could sound like a question, Kincaid was asking him, What do we do?

  The paradox of atoning for violence with violence was staring at Paul Janson from the empty eyes of the child soldiers. These were the children who had scrawled the graffiti of pistols and assault rifles. Like children who would not pick up their toys, they had left the place littered with parts of road mines and suicide vests.

  “Talk to them, Abdi,” Janson told the boy cowering at his side. “Tell them to put down their guns and we’ll give them safe passage.”

  Abdi shouted toward the doors. There were three at the door, crouched in firing stance, two with AKs, one with the grenade launcher. They shouted over their shoulders in high-pitched voices. A mob outside shouted back. It sounded, Janson thought, like a community-theatre production of Peter Pan.

  “What are they saying?”

  Abdi said, “They ask, ‘Where?’”

  “Anywhere they want.”

  Abdi called again in Somali. The boys inside the door and those behind them started shouting back and forth. Then they shouted at Abdi.

  “What?” said Janson. “What are they saying?”

  “They don’t know anywhere. Only here.”

  “OK…Tell them…” They were children. He had to make up their minds for them. He said, “Tell them we’ll all stay here tonight. Tell them I will ask—tell them I will make the AMISOM general give me a cease-fire.”

  Abdi translated. The boys started arguing.

  Janson said, “Tell them tonight we are safe here.”

  “They don’t believe you.”

  “Tell them I have MREs to eat.”

  Abdi started to translate.

  Suddenly every head swiveled toward the rumble of a tank in the dark.

  They’ll run, thought Janson. They’ll run and hide.

  For one second it seemed he was right. The mob of boys still outside the door whirled and ran. But for the boys trapped inside, fear turned to anger and they turned their anger at him. The one in the lead whipped up his weapon. For the first time in his life, Paul Janson froze.

  “Wing ’em!” said Kincaid, opening up before they could pull their triggers, cutting their legs out from under them with well-placed shots of her silenced bullpup. Galvanized, Janson fired too, but missed completely. He could not believe it. He was so close to the target that the shot could not be missed, but it was as if an unseen hand had reached from the depths of his mind to jerk the gun.

  The boy he missed whirled in Kincaid’s direction and sprayed a burst from his AK. To Paul Janson’s horror, she flew backward, flung ten feet by the impact. Janson fired at the boy’s legs. He missed again, stitching a slug through the kid’s belly.

  It was over in two seconds.

  Janson bounded to Kincaid and yanked an I-FAK, infantry first-aid kit, from his pack.

  “Where?”

  “Left leg, inside.”

  “Bone?”

  “Jesus, I hope not.”

  “I am so sorry.”

  “Fix it,” she said through gritted teeth.

  Janson used the kit’s shears to widen the bullet hole in her wet suit.

  “Paul? Is it the bone?”

  The bone would be bad enough. His first fear was the femoral artery. It would be damned-near impossible to tourniquet a severed artery so near her groin.

  He had already almost gotten her killed by screwing up. He could not screw up now and let her die by mistake. He had to put his head back in a clear and cold place.

  He found the pencil hole of the wound where the bullet had entered and pressed against it with an anticoagulant gauze. Dreading the wound he would find at the back of her thigh, he cut swiftly through the wet suit.

  AK-47s fired a full metal jacket slug an inch and a half long and a third of an inch wide. At a velocity of 2,900 feet per second, the bullet traveled through flesh on a straight path for seven inches before it yawed sideways. If it yawed and turned sideways before it exited Kincaid’s thigh, it would blast a wide cavity, shredding her biceps femoris muscle, severing hamstrings, and threatening the many blood vessels that branched so vigorously from the femoral artery. If the bullet yawed it would exit explosively, opening a large, ragged wound shaped like a star and she would be lucky to live, much less walk.

  He found an exit wound only slightly wider than the entry wound. Minimal tissue disruption. And judging by the trickle of blood, her main vessels were intact. Lucky breaks he didn’t deserve. He pressed on more anticoagulant gauze and secured them both with an elastic Israel bandage.

  Heart in his throat, he felt for more damage. He could never forget tourniqueting an operator’s leg while Doug Case was alongside him working on the guy’s arms. After they got the hemorrhaging stopped, they found a grapefruit-sized cavern in his gut. He found no wounds in Kincaid’s torso. She had taken only the one hit.

  But Janson’s relief that a so-called flesh wound had spared her internal organs and spine was undercut by the possibility of damage by the shock wave that the bullet’s high-energy impact could rocket through major blood vessels to her brain. Thank God she seemed to be breathing normally, as apnea would be an immediate effect of that ballistic pressure wave.

  She spoke suddenly. “How’s the exit look?”

  Again he felt relief because she sounded alert and aware.

  “No muscle hanging out.”

  “Hope scars don’t turn you off.”

  “Dr. Olsen will be acquiring another Delahaye,” he answered. Olsen, the finest plastic surgeon they knew, collected antique French automobiles.


  “Did you do the kids?”

  The boy who had shot Kincaid and whom Janson had shot was dead. Two boys writhed on the floor with wounds to their legs. Janson grabbed his I-FAK.

  “Abdi, help me talk to them.”

  There was no answer, and when Janson looked, he saw the kidnapped student dead with a bullet hole between his eyes.

  The door flew open. Green-beret Uganda troopers smashed through it, weapons poised to fire. The kids on the floor whipped up their guns. The troopers opened up with a roar and in seconds both al-Shabaab were shot to pieces. The troopers whirled toward Janson and Kincaid.

  Paul Janson blocked Jessica Kincaid with his body and reached for his MTAR. He was still holding the surgical scissors in his left hand and the lead soldier saw it and the bandage and gauze-pack wrappers. “Don’t shoot!” he shouted to the troopers behind him. “Only a medic.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  40°56' N, 74°4' W

  Paramus, New Jersey

  Tell me why I shouldn’t hang up.”

  “Catspaw,” said the woman on the phone.

  “Hold on.”

  Morton threw money down for his breakfast and hurried out of the diner into the parking lot and climbed into his car.

  “What can I do for you?” As if he didn’t know he hadn’t yet found the Russian yacht. She did something new in his experience, saying, as if desperate, “It is more important than ever and terribly urgent that we find that yacht. Nothing we’ve tried has worked. We’re counting on you to save the operation.”

  “That could get expensive,” Morton suggested, to see what the market might bear.

  It was scary how much ice she could pack into her musical voice. “Friends, Mr. Morton, never take advantage of friends in need.”

  Morton did not know who these friends were. All he knew was that they paid what they promised and had never tried to screw him yet. “You know,” he said, “you are absolutely right. I apologize for any misunderstanding I might have caused. I’ll get right on it.”