LATE THAT NIGHT
The pirate mother ship, a thirty-meter oceangoing tugboat captured by pirates several months earlier, had returned at flank speed to its berth at the Old Port of Mogadishu, northeast of the new port facility and east of the slums of downtown Mogadishu, after the news came that the crew of one of their pirate ships had shot down the Chinese patrol helicopter. The port’s old piers had not been rebuilt after years of disuse, but had been repaired enough to service the mother ship and its small fleet of pirate assault vessels, including enough roadways and security positions to allow refueling and rearming the vessels and their crews. It was the busiest the Old Port had been in many years. The crew didn’t much care about how well they secured the ship-they tied it off, threw some pieces of corrugated tin and canvas on it to disguise it the best they could, then got away as fast as they could.
Old Port had been the location of several foreign embassies headquartered in the Somali capital, all now closed, when Mogadishu was one of the largest and busiest ports in all of East Africa. Now various warlords and pirate captains occupied the old embassy buildings as their headquarters. The buildings in the Old Port district had been rebuilt and fortified with the millions of dollars of ransom money paid by shipping and insurance companies around the world to have their vessels, crews, and cargo released by the pirates over the years. The nearby Abdiasis district, with its beautiful white-sand beaches, sports facilities, and tree-lined neighborhoods, had been taken over by the pirate captains and the warlords who controlled them, creating a security buffer between themselves, the teeming squalor of the city, and the continuing civil war that kept the government nonexistent, the entire country lawless and fractured, and the economy in shambles for almost a decade. But if a visitor was transported to the area and saw only Old Port and Abdiasis, he might conclude that Mogadishu was an up-and-coming city striving for greatness.
A meeting of the mother ship’s captain, six of their boarding crew-boat captains, and the local warlord was called to discuss the downing of the Chinese patrol helicopter. In the former French embassy building, across the street from the Abdul Rahman Mosque and a large madrassa, they watched news coverage of the incident on satellite TV, but there was not much yet. Discussions centered around where to move the base of operations-it was a given that the Chinese, or someone who belonged to the Combined Task Force antipiracy group, would respond.
Unknown to the Somali pirates, the Chinese response was already under way. An unmanned patrol aircraft that had been launched to assist the Kamov patrol helicopters had been diverted when the mother ship was observed fleeing the area, and the UAV followed it back to the Old Port. It was easy to spot exactly where the mother-ship crew went after disembarking, and the crew of the Wuhan watched as the meeting of the band of pirates commenced. The Wuhan had been moving toward shore, and in ten hours was now within range.
As soon as the meeting started, the captain of the Wuhan ordered the attack to begin, and the ship fired four C-802L cruise missiles toward the Old Port. The C-802s were reverse-engineered French Exocet antiship missiles, modified and improved for land-attack missions with greater range and speed, a larger five-hundred-pound high- explosive warhead, and a GPS satellite navigation system with an infrared terminal guidance seeker. In five minutes, the missiles crossed the remaining distance between the Wuhan and shore and destroyed the old French embassy and the Abdul Rahman Mosque, a suspected pirate haven.
THE KREMLIN, MOSCOW, RUSSIAN FEDERATION
A SHORT TIME LATER
“Premier Zhou, this is President Truznyev calling,” Igor Truznyev, the president of the Russian Federation, said on the secure telephone connection to Beijing. The former head of the Federal Security Bureau, the new name of the defunct Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, or KGB, Truznyev at age sixty-eight was much older than most of his recent predecessors, but was in excellent health and took great care of his body and mind. Tall, loud-voiced, and imposing, with a mane of thick silver hair, thick bushy eyebrows, and thick legs, Truznyev often walked the streets of cities, towns, villages, factories, and farms throughout Russia even in the worst weather, greeting citizens with a hearty handshake, accompanied by an impressively small and remarkably inconspicuous security detail.
Truznyev was unabashedly “old school” and a fierce nationalist, strongly believing that Russia had to be governed by a strong central government willing to do whatever it took to run the vast country and secure its mostly indefensible borders. Most Russians embraced the very same ideals and voted overwhelmingly for him, securing his second term with 82 percent of the popular vote-even without his networks of internal security officers squelching all signs of dissent or opposition anywhere in the country, Truznyev would have won the election by an overwhelming majority.
“Good evening to you, sir,” Truznyev went on; then, without waiting for a response, he continued, “What in bloody hell do you think you’re up to in Somalia?”
“Good evening to you as well, Mr. President,” Chinese premier Zhou Qiang replied in Russian, without the need of a translator. “It is exactly as you perceive, sir: a punitive action against Somali murderers. The people of China are tired of their killing and hijackings, and they demanded retribution against those that ordered the slaughter of our sailors.”
“A simple phone call before the attack was in order, sir,” Truznyev said. “We are fellow members of the antipiracy task force, and we have sailors in those waters. An accident or misidentification would have been most unfortunate.”
“Your sailors were in no danger, Mr. President,” Zhou said. “Our naval forces may not be the equal of Russia, but they know how to distinguish a pirate ship from a warship.”
“Meaning no disrespect to the skill and determination of your sailors, Premier, but a call or message would have been welcome. After the attack on your freighter and helicopter, nerves are on a knife’s edge out there.”
“My apologies, Mr. President,” Zhou said. “Perhaps you are correct: A message to our friends and allies in the area would have been wise. But these days it is hard to accurately determine who are China ’s allies or friends.”
“ Russia is certainly no enemy of China, Premier,” Truznyev said. “Our foreign ministers and embassies have long discussed the many ways our countries should be working together. We should be putting ideology aside and joining forces for our mutual benefit and support.” He paused for a moment; then: “I trust you did not notify the Americans of your attack on Mogadishu ahead of time?”
“ Washington would have been the last capital I would have notified,” Zhou spat. “If I had done so, I would not have been surprised if the letch Joseph Gardner would have notified a dozen neighboring nations, told us to warn the citizenry so as to minimize innocent casualties, and had television cameras on hand to document the attack. And all that would be after trying to talk us out of attacking.”
“Their history in Somalia has certainly not been pleasant,” Truznyev said. “I am happy to hear that we have similar attitudes about Washington and Joseph Gardner.”
“I think our interests have been drawing closer and closer in recent years,” Zhou said, “especially since the return of Kevin Martindale and the establishment of the American military outpost in space.”
“I wholeheartedly agree, Premier,” Truznyev said. “The Armstrong Space Station is a dangerous, destabilizing monstrosity, especially since the addition of their weapon satellites. They claim they are defensive in nature, but that is obviously not so, as they have recently demonstrated in Pakistan. The entire world is their target now.”
“ China will never stand by and become a target of American weapons, from the sea, from space, or anywhere else on the planet,” Zhou said, his Russian momentarily becoming strained and garbled as he grew more and more irritated. “ China ’s rights will be respected.”
“As well they should, Premier,” Truznyev said. “ Russia is not sitting idly by while the Americans deploy their weapon satellites.”
“Oh? What is Russia doing about them?”
“Just because they are hundreds of kilometers in space does not mean they are invulnerable to attack,” Truznyev said. “While you build more and more antisatellite missiles, our scientists and computer engineers are discovering other, subtler ways to disrupt them.”
“You must share these ways with China, Mr. President.”
“Perhaps so, if they prove to be effective,” Truznyev said. “So. What more of poor Somalia?”
