Pirate - Duncan Falconer [0]
The Hostage
The Hijack
The Operative
The Protector
Undersea Prison
Mercenary
Traitor
Non-fiction
First Into Action
Copyright
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978-0-748-12223-3
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 by Duncan Falconer
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
www.hachette.co.uk
To Jamie Seward: a rich
pirate to be sure but one
of the good guys!
Contents
Also by Duncan Falconer
Copyright
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Epilogue
Prologue
Dinaal Yusef had lived in Bogota for five years before he learned why he had been ordered to begin a completely new life there. He first arrived in the Colombian capital on vacation: or at least that was the way his leaders wanted it to look. In reality he was there to carry out a preliminary assessment of the city. And to ascertain what he needed to do to be able to apply for a resident’s visa. Yusef was a tall, handsome and athletic man in his late twenties, and he was well educated, having attended university in Barcelona, where he had lived for fifteen years. He’d been born and grown up in a small town on the Kashmir border in Pakistan. But a wealthy uncle living in Spain had adopted Dinaal and brought the boy to live with him after his mother and father, a policeman, had been killed in a dawn raid by the Indian army.
In the second week of Dinaal’s month-long visit to Bogota he met a young local girl. He frequented the street café where she waited on tables. After just a few days he’d charmed her, completely turned her head. It had been easy enough for a man of his looks and intelligence to convince the girl, who had left her village only a few months before to find work in the city. It was almost as easy convincing her parents. After a brief but passionate affair, he flew back to Spain promising to return to marry her. Three months later he was as good as his word.
It was a union of love for the Colombian only. For Dinaal, it was one of convenience. It meant he acquired his permanent resident visa. And completed the first stage of his assignment. Dinaal had been sent to Colombia to set up an undercover operations cell. So he needed to be married. It was a necessary tool. It allowed him to stay in the country for as long as he wanted and to travel abroad at will and return at will. Without having to deal with the usual visitor’s visa complications.
He waited a year before he travelled out of Colombia. Dinaal went back to Pakistan for the first time since his youth. On arrival he took the first of many trips into Afghanistan to meet his bosses. These visits, mostly into Kandahar, never showed on the pages of his passport. Because he was always guided in and out through the mountainous, arid borders by people who knew how to avoid Pakistani troop patrols and Western Coalition forces.
It took close to three years to get the Bogota active unit numbers up to operational strength. The secret cell was made up of six other men, all of whom had been recruited from madrassas in various parts of the world that taught an extreme form of Islamic jihad. The seven men had subsequently attended jihadist training camps once a year for weeks at a time, and on one occasion for two hard months straight. They’d learned the art of terrorism. They’d taken weapons and explosives training and been drilled relentlessly on how to conduct themselves undercover. Only one of the men was a native Colombian.