Chapter 8

Woqooyi Galbeed Province, Somalia

They made good time the rest of the march and made it to the compound only a few minutes behind Stone’s timetable. Considering the stop to deal with the local kid, that was pretty impressive. He might be cruel and foolishly discount the risks, but at least Stone was good at getting his men where they needed to be.

They stopped on a ridge a half-mile out from the compound that their topographic maps showed as an overlook to the small depressed area the compound sat in. Taylor was amazed that the British had built a fort here. It didn’t maintain the high ground, it had poor visibility on two sides and an aggressor could get within a hundred yards or so of the walls before they were out in the open. He’d read of several colonialist military debacles where the British, or the French in a few cases, had taken a lazy approach to their strategic planning, choosing convenience over strategy, and gotten almost wiped out for it.

The fort here followed a similar setup to the one the British lost during the retreat from Kabul in the eighteen hundreds and the French lost at Dien Bien Phu, which had an eerily similar setup in a valley overlooked by hills they didn’t control. In this case, Taylor could see why they chose this spot, since the primitive road that ran south, more or less parallel, ran right past the fort, which would allow them to move material and control trade, but they could have done the same thing with the fort up on a more commanding position like the one Taylor and Stone now sat on, leaving a detachment down by the road if need be.

Of course, it wasn’t a fort any longer. The brick and stucco walls had been replaced, or at least covered up, by concrete ones. Stone had managed to get some satellite maps of the area from somewhere and they’d gone over it at Camp Lemonnier, so they knew the only permanent settlement in the area, besides the compound, was a small village about three miles to the north. They still had several hours of dark left and they needed to be sure, though, so they set up and watched the countryside in all directions, but mostly kept an eye on the compound.

Because it was late, there wasn’t much movement except for a couple of sentries on the blown open front gate that looked extremely bored and spent more time talking to each other than watching the countryside. While that did lean into Stone’s ‘amateur’ theory of what they faced, in Taylor’s experience, guys like this might be lax on things like security and cohesion, but they made up for a lot of that in sheer aggression.

The other thing Taylor noticed was how many vehicles there were, with almost a dozen cars and pick-ups parked around the structure, which meant there could be thirty to fifty men in the compound, which was a bad ratio. In the open field, a trained squad of ten men could hold down and push back that many using cover and moving under a base of fire, but inside a closed space, their small group could get chewed up pretty bad.

“That’s a lot of vehicles,” Taylor pointed out.

“Doesn’t matter. Look at the guys by the doorway. Total amateurs. Once the fun starts they’ll turn and run.”

“And if they don’t?” Taylor asked. “There could be thirty guys in there and I don’t care how shitty they are, that’s a lot of lead getting thrown around. You’re going to lose men and you’re going to lose hostages.”

“So what, you think we should just walk away?”

“I’m not saying that. I’m saying we need to be smarter about this. They aren’t going to stay here forever. They’re sitting on another warlord’s territory. They’ll have to move the hostages before long. We could hit them as they come out, take most of them out early. If you don’t want to wait, we could try and take the building quietly instead of running in guns blazing. There are better options.”

“We stick to the plan. Since the last ransom demand was rejected by Northbridge, the hostages are on a ticking clock. At some point, they’re going to decide to cut their losses, kill the hostages and get out. Every minute we wait is a chance we might be too late already.”

That was the first time Taylor had heard Stone offer any concern for the lives of the hostages, and he didn’t buy it. Taylor didn’t know what Northbridge had been working on there, other than knowing it was important enough to stage this entire rescue mission to retrieve it, so there was no way of knowing what they were trying to keep the militia from doing. If it was data, maybe they wanted to keep them from decrypting or accessing it; if it was physical, maybe it was to keep them from using it. Whatever it was, Stone clearly felt he was on a time limit and wasn’t going to wait to reacquire it. Unless Taylor was willing to try and take out Stone’s entire team and then rescue the hostages on his own, he was just going to have to go along and hope Stone didn’t get the hostages killed before it was too late.

So Taylor kept watching the small compound, waiting for Stone to give the word that they were going, trying to think of any way this wasn’t going to end up a complete disaster.

Washington D.C.

Kara was sitting a few doors down from Packer’s brownstone apartment in Mary Jane’s car, watching his front door and listening for a ping from the cell phone scanner to tell her he was making a call. Mary Jane had been a little nervous to loan her car at first since, although Kara had her license, she’d only driven a handful of times in her life, and D.C. was not the best place for a new driver to practice. Kara had managed to talk her way through it without directly lying to Mary Jane about what she needed it for, but only barely. She also only had the one day, since her friend would be back in town tomorrow and would almost certainly insist on driving.

Kara was sure that, had she explained the whole thing, Mary Jane would have been on board with helping her track Packer. She’d dealt with the man on her own and hated him, partly because he’d come very close to letting a maniac murder her in her sleep. Kara wanted to avoid that if at all possible though. Partly, because she didn’t know where this whole thing would end up and Kara wanted to avoid passing any trouble on to her friend, but mostly because Mary Jane would mean Secret Service agents.

Mr. Carter had made it pretty clear what she was doing was very much in the grey area of the law, and she seriously doubted Mary Jane’s Secret Service detail would let her do it if they knew about it. So she really only had this one day to follow Packer and work out an alternative plan for how to tail him the next day.

It turned out that it was a lot easier than she anticipated. She’d gotten the tracker on Packer’s car without much of a problem, and that’s where the activity stopped. Packer left a few times, once to go to a neighborhood store and once to step out and make a phone call, but he never even got in his car, let alone drove away from the apartment.

Kara had wondered why Packer had walked out of his house and down the street to the river to make his call, but that was explained a few hours later when a woman in exercise clothes left his house. She was pretty sure Packer wasn’t married so she had to assume this was some kind of girlfriend, although the idea of anyone being romantically involved with that troll completely boggled her mind. The call itself, while not directly referencing anything illegal, had been incredibly shady, and she could see why he wouldn’t want it to have it in front of a witness, even one he was dating.