Extraction (John Taylor #8) - Chapter 12

Washington D.C.

It was getting late and Kara was about to pack up for the night. Packer had made several more calls throughout the day, but most were routine and didn’t seem to apply to what was happening with Taylor. A few calls had convinced Kara that he was behind what was happening over there. He’d made several comments that suggested the people he worked for didn’t know what he was doing, and suggested that the entire operation in Somalia was some kind of scheme to make a lot of money.

Of course, that was all just her impression. While she thought it was clear and it might be enough to convince Robles to start investigating him, it might not, since it was all impressions. So far Packer hadn’t said anything direct that would tie him to something illegal.

She was just reaching to switch off the scanner when it buzzed to life with another call.

“Yes,” Packer said.

“We have confirmation. Taylor walked away and knows about the package. He’s talking to someone from the agency, although we don’t know who.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. His wife’s started making noise, asking questions about what’s happening over there and she’s specifically mentioned stolen tech. We’re days away from an investigation getting opened. We need to shut down before they have a chance to start poking around. It’s getting too hot.”

“We’re not shutting down shit. Do you know how much money we’ve spent on this?”

“It won’t matter when we get shipped to fucking Gitmo. There are too many eyes on us, the auction is days away, and we’ve lost the package.”

“I can fix this.”

“How?”

“We’ve already covered our ass on this end and once the sale goes through, there won’t be anything to look at. Hell, Barsane did us a favor taking hostages. If the people we sent over there never come back, there won’t be anyone but us to say what was actually happening.”

“If he hasn’t killed them yet, he’s not going to. Not at least until he’s gotten someone to pay him for them.”

“That’s not what I was thinking. Barsane has enemies over there. They haven’t taken him on because they’d lose too much and weaken themselves, but if we put up a big enough bounty, they’ll take care of Barsane for us, retrieve the package, and get rid of the witnesses.”

“What about Taylor. If his wife is making noise, she had to hear it from him. Odds are he knows what’s going on.”

“They can take care of that too. Put the word out that we’re putting a bounty on Taylor.”

“What about the deal for getting the package back. Should I put the word out about that too?”

“No, I don’t want to go through channels with that. They might not be able to trace it back, but someone’s bound to catch wind of it. Let’s go the other way. Reach out to Barsane’s competitors about the bounty on Taylor and set up a call with me. I’ll talk to them one-on-one about what else we need them to do. We throw enough money at this, and all of our problems can get solved at once.”

“Okay, I’ll take care of it.”

The line disconnected and Kara finally stopped holding her breath. She finally had enough that even Robles had to listen to her, but now she wasn’t sure she wanted to talk to him about it. She’d listened to enough of Taylor and Loretta’s stories about how things worked in investigations to know these things took time. If they waited to make a move until after Packer arranged the bounty for Taylor’s death, there wasn’t anything Robles or anyone over here could do to stop it. Taylor was good, but he was also alone in a very hostile country. If someone was going to stop Packer before it was too late, it would be Kara.

She had the beginnings of a plan, but she’d have to go back home to make it work. She only hoped she could get back before it was too late.

Hofyo, Somalia

Taylor stopped the truck when he was about a mile out from the Barsane’s village. It was extremely late, which was good since it gave Taylor the cover of darkness, which also meant it would be fairly quiet. If he came rolling up close to the village in the beat-up old truck, someone was going to hear it, and if Barsane was at all security-minded, they’d come check it out.

He also didn’t have much beyond his GPS, second-hand directions, and a somewhat outdated map of the region to go by. He didn’t want to end up blundering over a ridge right into the village if he could help it.

Even on foot, he almost stumbled onto it. Unlike the compound that was situated below hills, the village was built on a high point where a hill flattened out into a plateau. Unlike modern towns that constantly gave off a glow of lights, this village hardly had any electric lights, and the few it did have were very dim. Taylor got within a hundred yards of the closest huts before realizing he was on top of it.

Just like the village his young friend had been from, this place was a mismatch of buildings. There was an actual building made out of brick and steel in the center of the village, surrounded by a tall wall with barbed wire across the top. Just past it, things became a lot less modern. The nicest houses had stucco walls and thatched roofs and the worst were basically lashed together bundles of sticks and branches that were themselves lashed together to make a wall, with a grass thatched roof kind of just laid on top. Taylor would be surprised if it managed to survive a strong wind.

Since he was looking straight into the village, instead of down onto it, Taylor thought for a moment the streets were deserted. Backing off as far as he could and keeping mostly below the flattened out plateau, he circled around to a rise on the southern side of the village that would offer him the only position to see down into the village and get a fuller idea of what kind of opposition there was. As he circled, he started seeing men wandering around in groups of two and three, assault rifles slung under their arms. Although it seemed closer to wandering than patrolling, there were enough of them that, even before he got close, he could see it was going to be impossible to just sneak in, and definitely impossible to sneak a bunch of hostages out.

Things seemed pretty bleak before he got to the hill and started making his way up the rise. Taylor couldn’t get to the top, because there were a handful of guys stationed up there with a pair of what looked like an older model Russian PK machine guns set up. They were facing perpendicular to the town, which gave them a pretty wide field of fire. From their position, they should have been able to see Taylor when he’d gotten close to the village, but like the guys patrolling, they weren’t paying that much attention. Most of them probably felt pretty secure that no one would mess with them in the heart of their own territory.

The machine gun nest wasn’t, however, the thing that worried Taylor. His bigger concern was the old Russian made tank sitting on the other side of the village. It had to be forty years old at best, but with the limit of high ground to operate from, it would be hard to get at for the simpler RPGs found in this part of the world and it would eat through guys in trucks only armed with AK-47s pretty fast. Taylor couldn’t help but wonder where the hell he’d managed to get one, although maybe one of the old soviet satellites had just offloaded it when they were selling off all the rest of their old stock in the early nineties as the Soviet Union fell apart.

Taylor backed his way down, being more aware of the machine gun nest and the guys on high ground. He’d gotten lucky so far, but this whole trip could have ended badly if these guys were even a little bit professional. Making his way back to his stolen truck, Taylor tried to work his way through a plan. Sneaking in and getting the hostages out was clearly a non-starter. As was any chance of getting outside help to deal with it. Luckily, using limited assets without the availability of additional US forces was specifically what the Special Forces did, and Taylor already knew what he could do to make this work.

Of course, a lot of the groundwork hadn’t been done and he’d be going in with a lot less intel than he normally would have liked, and he wouldn’t have the rest of the members of an ODA to rely on, but you made do with what you had.

By the time he got back to the truck and slowly worked his way out of Barsane’s territory, Taylor had a plan.

Wajideeb, Somalia

Taylor backtracked his way towards the compound and the village he’d left Lopez in. he had a rough idea of where the Feedh Ilaah was based from his young friend’s father, the one whose brother served with that particular militia. He hadn’t said it outright, but there were enough context clues from the few things he and his wife said to give Taylor a place to start.

While any contact with local fighters was a problem, this was much closer to Taylor’s field experience than anything he’d done with the FBI. One of the primary tasks of Army Special Forces was coordinating with local allies, whether they be warlords or freedom fighters, and working to direct those allies to achieve whatever goal the brass had decided needed to be achieved. While he was doing this solo and without any significant backing, it was still a dance he understood.

The hard part was going to be making contact. When he was doing this kind of thing in the Army, they’d use local assets to make initial contact and feel out whoever they were hoping to work with before sending in the first Americans. Sometimes, if local allies weren’t available, they’d have to rely on in-country assets like CIA operatives, who were better equipped for making that initial contact. Once their new ally was aware that members of the US military were coming to work with them, Special Forces would be deployed and they’d take it from there.

Now, Taylor had to do that first step on his own. It was going to be made harder by the incursion into Feedh Ilaah territory by Barsane’s men and a second incursion by a US-based PMC. All that activity would have the warlord and his people on edge, and make them automatically more suspicious of anyone showing up on their doorstep. Unfortunately, Taylor didn’t have a lot of other choices. He needed a combat force to help assault the village where the hostages were being held, and this was as close as he was going to get to it.

Taylor once again got close and started to look for a place to hide his stolen vehicle. The upside to this region was lots of crevices, ravines, and depressions big enough to hide a vehicle in. Eventually, he’d press his luck one too many times and it would be stolen by someone who stumbled across it. This time, he found a separate place to hide his rifle and the ammo for it, covering it with rocks under a large flat rock that jutted out from the hillside and made an overhang, and then covering it with brush and rocks until it looked like just more hillside. He’d keep his sidearm, but if things went bad and he did manage to get out of the village, he’d want to have access to a weapon. If not he could always walk back and retrieve this one.

He also hid his satellite phone with the rifle, since losing that could be devastating. Although it had already been made clear that he wasn’t going to get any help from the outside world, if he did manage to pull this off, he would still need to arrange for transport out of here, and Wheeler was definitely the type to use a non-secure call as a reason to leave Taylor to rot.

This village was much like the last two he’d seen, with the huts and buildings all having a wide variety of construction material and quality. It just showed how standard it was in this part of the world for people to just make do with whatever they could, scratching out a bare subsistence existence. Just like Hofyo, the militia here didn’t seem to operate in any organized way. It said something that he could make it halfway to the center of town before three men with slung AK’s noticed him.

As soon as he hit town, Taylor walked in with his hand’s palm open and away from his body in a clear sign that he was not going to cause trouble. He was still kitted up in the gear that he’d worn during the failed raid that clearly marked him as a combatant which, along with his white skin, would put the militia members on edge, considering the history of the country and its dealings with Western military.

The three men pulled up their slung weapons and started shouting in Somali. Although Taylor didn’t speak the language it wasn’t hard to work out what they were yelling.

“I need to see Tahiil Gehdi,” Taylor said in Arabic, identifying the leader of the Feedh Ilaah. “I have a proposition for him.”

Two of the men looked to the third, suggesting they didn’t speak Arabic.

“Why shouldn’t we shoot you right here, American.”

Taylor was pretty sure the guy was just guessing, since he wasn’t wearing any kind of identifying patches or anything and his Arabic wasn’t heavily accented. Of course, of the western powers, the US had the most active influence in the region, so it hadn’t been a stretch.

“I’ve come in peace and I have both information and an offer for your commander. If he finds out what I have to say later and learns he lost out on this opportunity because you shot me … I’m sure you know what kind of man he is.”

I actually had no idea what kind of man Gehdi was, since it wasn’t like I was able to do research on him from a satellite phone. While I would have preferred to come to this better prepared, it wasn’t a stretch to assume a violent warlord that was able to maintain control of such an inhospitable country would react poorly to his minions’ mistakes.

The third man said something in Somali to his two friends, probably a translation, that began a back and forth between them, with the occasional head nod or gesture towards the center of the village, which was probably where Taylor would find Gehdi.

One of the men reached down and removed Taylor’s pistol from its holster, sticking it in his belt. Even though the safety was on, not that the man would have known that since he didn’t check, Taylor was pretty sure he wouldn’t have trusted a small piece of metal and plastic to keep him from shooting his nuts off. He’d seen people do that all over, both in America and in third world countries, and never understood the impulse to put a loaded firearm with the muzzle pointed directly towards your own crotch.

“Go,” the Arabic-speaking man finally said as their conversation concluded, gesturing with the rifle towards the center of town.

All three were jumpy and Taylor made sure to keep his hands out away from his body and tried to be very purposeful in any move he made, since they seemed the type to shoot their prisoner if they got spooked.

They led him into a larger, flat-roofed building that sat at the center of the village. Taylor couldn’t help but notice how much the layout of this place matched the layout of Barsane’s village, although the house at the center of Hofyo was significantly nicer than this squat building. The only thing it had going for it over the other buildings that surrounded it was a solid flat roof instead of a thatched one.

Stopping at the front door to the building, they said something in Somali to the guard stationed by the door. Though, calling a sub-twenty-something kid sitting in a folding chair with his rifle propped against the wall almost an arm’s length away a guard seemed a bit of a stretch. The kid grabbed his rifle and disappeared inside the door, which to its credit was an actual door, at least. A few minutes later the kid emerged opening the door and standing back for Taylor and his three new friends to walk through.

Inside was a single, not overly large room with a fold-out table being used as a desk on the same side and a couch plus a couple of chairs at irregular instances on the other two. The far wall had a door that, if this was Gehdi’s home as well as his office, would probably have his bedroom behind it.

Taylor could pick out Gehdi, who was sitting at a chair by the desk, only by the military-style uniform and assorted medals he was wearing, which clashed with the mismatch of clothes everyone else had on.

“I hear you have information for me,” he said in heavily accented English.

“That and a deal.”

“What brings an American to our small village? A member of the American CIA, perhaps?”

His tone was friendly, although Taylor could see the ruthless killer in his eyes. Taylor had seen this before. It was some weird kind of affectation that seemed to happen sometimes with third world dictators, warlords, and military commanders where they decided to adopt the personality of a Victorian-era British officer, at least until they got angry.

“I was part of a team that tried to free hostages that were being held in an old British fort an hour south of here,” Taylor said.

Since that was in Gehdi’s territory, it was unlikely he didn’t know what was going on. Northbridge would have had to pay him off in the first place, since they’d have been snatched up by Gehdi himself if they’d been squatting. It was also unlikely he didn’t know about Barsane’s incursion into his territory or the hostages Barsane’s men had taken.

One of the keys he’d learned over the years working with locals is, if at all possible, to avoid lying to them. While there were always things you couldn’t say, getting caught in a lie would make everything a hundred times harder, and that was when they were already pre-disposed to work with you. In this case, where they were as likely to just shoot Taylor outright as work with him, it was even more important.

“I was told you were all killed.”

“No. I escaped, and I think a few of the injured men were taken with the rest of the hostages back to Hoya when they left.”

“I see. That does still not explain why you walked into my village, however.”

“Like I said, I have information for you and hopefully we can come to a deal.”

“So what is this information you want to sell me?”

“I’m not selling. This is for free. I know you know about Barsane’s hostages. What I’m not sure you know about is the deal he is working on to sell those men.”

“I had heard the ransom was turned down?”

Taylor tried to keep his face neutral. He couldn’t mention the targeting system the CIA actually thought Barsane had been going for, because if Gehdi knew about it, any help he did offer would disappear as soon as Taylor got his hands on it. They’d know anything Taylor could offer would pale in comparison to what it was worth. Taylor had hoped to play off the hostages and their ransom as what Barsane was hoping to profit from, but if Gehdi had sources enough to tell him that the ransom had been denied, then that wouldn’t work.

There were two basic options left to him. He could either lie about what Barsane was going for to generate leverage, or he could tell Gehdi the truth and deal with the consequences after the fact. Taylor opted to land somewhere in between, which could blow up in his face if Gehdi knew about the tracking system. Taylor hoped that the fact that Gehdi hadn’t yet moved on the compound to deal with an incursion in his territory was a sign that he hadn’t seen it as immediately urgent, which might be a sign that he didn’t know about the targeting system.

“It was, but the people he got a hold of are technical specialists with sensitive information. We believe that he was trying to ransom them to the US’s enemies, which is why he didn’t kill them when the ransom was denied and why he took them back to Hofyo instead of leaving their bodies behind when his men pulled out.”

“Okay, so he is selling them to the highest bidder. Why should this interest me?”

“Because he is offering them for a significant amount of money. I know that the Muharibi Allah have been pushing hard into your territory. So far you’ve done a good job of keeping them back, but imagine how much more difficult things would get if Samatar Barsane suddenly got a large influx of cash to buy more weapons and men?”

Taylor could see Gehdi work this through. Right now, things were at an equilibrium, but he had to know that wouldn’t last. According to Wheeler’s brief, Barsane had been widening the capability gap for the last several years, and if the trajectory continued, the Feedh Ilaah wouldn’t be able to hold out forever. Gehdi had to know that and Taylor was pretty sure the look that crossed the man’s face was him doing the math about what that did to his ability to withstand them. What Taylor didn’t expect was the sly smile that Gehdi suddenly gave him, looking at Taylor in the same way a hawk would look at a mouse.

“And you are here to offer a deal for us to stop the Muharibi Allah from selling these men, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Money?”

“Some,” Taylor said. “Plus assistance in making sure the Muharibi Allah don’t get theirs.”

Of course, Taylor didn’t have that kind of money, but he knew where he could get it. Not that it mattered until Gehdi agreed to the deal.

“And you want me to risk my men on … what, an attack on the Muharibi Allah?”

“Not exactly,” Taylor said, starting to explain until Gehdi held up a hand.

“Even if we stop him from getting paid, we weaken ourselves in any attack on him. I am, however glad that you’ve come to us. Unless you’re planning on giving us as much as Barsane thinks he’s getting.”

“No, but mine is guaranteed. You have me here as leverage.”

“Nothing is guaranteed until I have the money in my hands, and you’re worth more than leverage. When I heard about the bounty for an American wandering around our region, I didn’t expect him to just walk into my village.”

“Bounty?” Taylor asked, his stomach clenching.

“It seems you aren’t the only one who wants to stop the sale of these people. Word has come down that someone is willing to pay a lot of money for us to retrieve these hostages for them, but only if we can find a certain American whose picture looks a lot like yours. So we thank you, for your help solving the problems with the Muharibi Allah. Take him.”

On Gehdi’s command, the two men standing on either side of Taylor grabbed him and started to pull him out of the room. Taylor didn’t struggle or fight them. There might be a way out, but trying to fight unarmed in a room full of armed men wasn’t the way to do it. There might still chance, but he’d have to be patient and work out his options.

He was realistic about his chances, though. Odds were he’d signed his own death warrant when he’d walked into this village.