Dead Centre - Andy McNab [38]
The place was covered with dust. Dust sheets were for the movies, or so I thought. I hadn’t sold the 911 or the flat, or even rented it out when I went to Moscow. I didn’t need to. Prices had taken a hit in the recession, but they’d pick up again. As Mark Twain kept yelling from the Moscow billboards: ‘Buy land: I hear they aren’t making it any more!’
Besides, I didn’t know what I was doing with Anna, and neither, I guessed, did Anna know what she was doing with me. We were sort of experimenting with the idea of living together.
The newspapers were still dominated this morning by the Japanese tsunami and Gaddafi’s war.
Japan had raised its nuclear-contamination alert level as core damage to Reactors 2 and 3 was worse than expected after the ’quake. Panic had spread overseas. Shops in parts of the US had been stripped of iodine pills.
Libya’s government was declaring an immediate ceasefire after a UN Security Council resolution backed ‘all necessary measures’ short of occupation to protect civilians in the country. But no one seriously thought Gaddafi would stop bombing his own people just because he said he would.
Elsewhere in the Middle East, yet another country was going tits up. At least thirty-three anti-government protesters had been shot dead in Yemen and another 145 wounded when government forces opened fire on a group of them. The Arab freedom wave kept on rolling, but at a cost.
It was hard to cut away from it and keep my head full of Somalis and piracy. Until I’d joined the Regiment and had to deal with that shit head-on, I’d thought pirates belonged to a far-off world where the Jolly Roger flew on a Caribbean masthead while all the lads swigged rum and gave it the old yo-ho-ho on the quarterdeck. But these fuckers didn’t sport eye patches and head-scarves. There wasn’t a Captain Sparrow in sight. They ran round in flip-flops, shorts and tank-tops. They carried grappling hooks, RPGs and AK47s. And now they killed people.
2
SOMALIA IS A failed state. Its landmass, which makes up the Horn of Africa, is stuck between Ethiopia and Kenya to the west, and the Indian Ocean to the east. Its northern coastline is on the Gulf of Aden, the other side of which lies Yemen, whose government had just taken to killing protesters. Talk about keeping bad company.
The piracy committed offshore is a direct result of the anarchy that rages on land. The same thing happens in other weakly governed states, like Indonesia and Nigeria, but it’s particularly bad in Somalia. The country has been caught up in civil war since the 1990s. Come to think of it, it can’t really be called a country any more.
In the early 1980s, Somali pirates were mostly unemployed youths who hung round the docks looking for work. The warlords, the clan leaders, bunged them in a couple of boats and sent them out to mug whatever they found coming from the Red Sea into the Gulf of Aden. As one of the choke-points for world shipping, it offered easy pickings.
Piracy grew into an industry. As Rudy had discovered, gangs now roved across thousands of square miles, as far east as the Seychelles, south to Tanzania, and north to the Arabian Sea and Oman. The turf was divided up. The waters of the Gulf of Aden might as well be the streets of Mogadishu.
A typical cell of a dozen or so men goes out into the open sea in two or three skiffs, small, cockroach-infested wood or fibreglass fishing boats, for three or four weeks at a time, taking only a couple of outboards. All other available space is filled with grappling irons, ladders, knives, assault rifles, RPGs and khat leaves, the local narcotic.
There’s nothing to cook with. They catch fish, which they eat raw. The plan is always to find and take over a larger vessel, then live on it and use it as a mother-ship. Which was what must have happened with the skiffs that captured the Maria Feodorovna. They’d have binned the fishing boat and would now be using the yacht as a control base, having taken the hostages