Death Wave

and your first book was published in 1998. The book was called Gray Terror: The UFO Abductors, and was a minor commercial success—”

“Hey!”

“You met John Pender at a book convention in Atlanta the following year, and—”

“All right Hold it! Hold it! What’s the point of this?”

“To prove to you that I am a U.S. federal agent with access to a great deal of background information on you. Information that foreign terrorists wouldn’t have.”

“I don’t know. My wife was a foreign terrorist after she was hospitalized the first time. She would know all of that stuff.”

“And she wouldn’t have told me that she was schizophrenic. Her medical records, however, are another matter. Mr. Carlylse, can we please continue this discussion in my room? Unless you really want to discuss me with hotel security or a couple of assassins from the Army of Mohammad.”

Reluctantly, he began gathering his things.

HAFUN

NORTHEASTERN SOMALIA

FRIDAY, 1940 HOURS LOCAL TIME

The place still hasn’t recovered, Ahmed Babkir Taha thought as he walked along the sand through the darkness. Not completely. I wonder if it ever will?

Even now, well past sunset, the pounding of hammers could be heard farther up the hill from the beach, as small handfuls of people continued to rebuild. A few lights shone here and there. It was late enough in the year that the wind coming in off the ocean was quite chilly. Unfortunately, it was also dry, with the promise of yet more crippling drought.

God the most merciful had not been merciful to the town of Hafun — Xaafuun, in Somali. Drought, crushing poverty … and on December 26, 2004, an earthquake fifty-four hundred kilometers away, off the distant coast of Sumatra, had generated a tidal wave that had swept across the Indian Ocean, wreaking untold damage and killing 230,000 people in eleven countries.

Hafun, a fishing village located on a sand spit just above sea level here at the very tip of the Horn of Africa, had been the population center hardest hit on the entire African continent. Some 280 people had been killed or missing, though only nineteen bodies in all had been recovered. Eight hundred homes had been washed away, the wells poisoned by saltwater, the fishing boats destroyed. The land here was parsimonious, barren, and unforgiving; some families had maintained small plots where they’d grown peas or lentils, but fishing had been the principal local industry. The tsunami had left the local people with nothing.

Picking his way through the darkness, Taha made his way out of the town, following a worn track across the sand toward the ocean, guiding on a small cluster of flickering lights on the beach. The pound-pound- pound of hammers, he thought, was a beautiful sound. The sound of rebuilding.

The sound of life.

Since the beginning of 2005, the town had started to rebuild, though this time the structures were rising higher up along the ridge of sand, some five hundred yards from the sea. The people were terrified that the waters would come again. Foreign aid had come to the impoverished area, and UNICEF had been attempting to establish a school for the local children, a school for girls as well as for boys, of all things. While anything resembling a real government in Somalia had collapsed in 1991, this northeastern corner of the country, the Horn of Africa, had stabilized somewhat over the past few years, with an uneasy balance between the Transitional Federal Government, operating out of Ethiopia, and the opposition party, the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia.

It hadn’t been perfect. ARLS antiaircraft guns had repeatedly fired at aircraft bringing emergency food and medical supplies to the region, and the rivalry between the TFG and the ARLS continually threatened to slip back into civil war. Still, it had been a start, a small one, back to sanity and self-sufficiency. The Bars region around Hafun had long traditionally belonged to the Majeerteen sub-clan of the Osman Mahmoud. They were the true power here, the true government. Or they had been.

Then the outsiders had come.

With the TFG ruling from next-door Ethiopia, most of south and central Somalia was still held in the grip of various rival Islamist gangs — the most powerful being the Hizbul Islam and the rival al-Shabaab. United African forces — Kenyan and Ethiopian troops, mainly — had been alternately battling and attempting to appease the Islamist militants.

Neither military intervention nor negotiation had made much headway.

He was approaching the camp on the beach now. One of the guards stepped out of the shadows, blocking his way. “In the name of Allah and His Prophet,” the man said, “you will halt!”

Man? It was a boy, a child no more than fifteen years old. The AK-47 rifle he held with wavering hands looked nearly as large as he did.

Taha raised his hands chest high, palms out, to show he carried no weapons. “God willing, I am here to see General Abdallah,” he said. “He knows me. I’ve been here before.”

The boy seemed uncertain, and Taha felt sick fear prickling at his spine. These people were perfectly capable of shooting a man dead in the street for no reason at all save that they mistrusted him, that they didn’t like his looks or his demeanor, that they thought he’d failed to show proper respect.

“I’ll take him, Oamar,” another voice said. Abdiwahid Eelabe Adow stepped out of the night. “It’s all right.”

Oamar gave Taha a surly look, then nodded, lowering his rifle, and Taha relaxed slightly. He knew Adow, one of Abadallah’s chief strongmen and the cleric of the group. At least Adow wouldn’t shoot him on sight.

Adow gestured toward a fire burning in a drum on the beach a dozen meters away. “And what brings you to our humble camp this time, Taha?” Adow asked pleasantly.

“News from Addis Ababa,” Taha replied. “A possible target with a fabulously rich payoff.”

Adow snorted. “Better than the last few targets, I hope. The Westerners have been guarding their ships more and more closely. Business has become … very difficult, of late.”

“This one,” Taha replied, “is unprotected. God willing, it carries a cargo of great value.”

“We’ll see. There’s the general.”

Taha despised the group known as al-Shabaab, Arabic for “the Youth.” Principally active in southern Somalia and in the capital of Mogadishu, they’d been fighting a bitter war there against the TFG. In recent months, they’d moved into the Hafun area as well, a region long under TFG control and protection. Ostensibly, they’d come with their boats, offering help. In fact, they were pirates, heavily armed raiders who set to sea every few days in hopes of catching one of the fabulously wealthy cargo ships passing through Somali waters. They would board a likely-looking vessel, hold the ship and crew hostage, and demand a ransom from the company or even the country owning the ship.

It was more dangerous than fishing, but much easier, and the potential rewards meant inestimable wealth and power for those who succeeded.

General Abdallah, Taha knew, was not a real general. He’d been part of the crew that had seized the Ukrainian merchant ship MV Faina in 2008. That vessel had been carrying thirty Russian tanks and tons of ammunition and weapons to Kenya when it was seized. The owners had paid 3.2 million American dollars for the Faina’s release — and Taha knew that many of the machine guns and RPG launchers on Abdallah’s boat had come from the Faina’s hold. His share of the ransom had made him obscenely wealthy by Somalian standards, and he’d used that wealth to buy and outfit a larger boat with which to score even greater successes. It was no secret that Abdallah planned to consolidate his political and military power, carving out his own personal warlord’s empire from the northeastern Somali coast.

Adow led Taha into the wavering circle of firelight cast by burning scraps of lumber in a two-hundred-liter drum. Abdallah and several of his chief lieutenants stood there, warming themselves against the chill of the evening. Nearby loomed the ruin of the village’s tumbledown salt factory, a shell built by the Italians in the 1930s, long abandoned. Beyond, at the end of a long and rickety pier, Abdallah’s boat creaked and thumped with the movement of the surf. Other armed guards moved at the edge of the light, and Taha knew there were more in the ruins. The salt factory had become Abdallah’s fortress.

“So, my old friend Taha!” General Abdallah said, looking up from the burning drum with a broad, toothy grin. The looks on the faces of his lieutenants were darker, less open. “What news from our esteemed Ministry of Ports