Somalia had a lot of rivers.

There were two main ones, the Shebelle and the Jubba, and like the Tigris and the Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the basin between the two rivers was the most fertile land around and where most of the population had settled.

The Shebelle was closer to Mogadishu, but for most of its length it ran through territory that had belonged to the Hawiye for centuries—an unlikely spot for a Darood warlord to build a camp.

So Jake focused on the Jubba.

It meandered south from Ethiopia to the Indian Ocean . . . for 550 miles.

Two hours later, he pushed back from the computer and cursed again.

There were seventy-one facilities that had the potential to be armed training camps, so Jake eliminated anything that was in a city or town, along a main road, or in the populated areas along the coastline—they would all be too conspicuous.

Which left thirty-six possible locations.

Thirty-six places to hide a deadly biological agent.

Thirty-six possible targets, Jake thought.

He started ranking them but stopped a third of the way through. It was pointless with the satellite images he’d found online. Jake had been a strategic weapons analyst in his prior life at CIA and had been an acknowledged expert at analyzing overhead imagery, but the low-resolution images he was now using simply didn’t have enough detail to differentiate between them, even for him.

What he needed was a Predator or some other surveillance aircraft to overfly the sites. Their sophisticated sensors could search for radio-frequency emissions and perform multispectral analysis—searching for heat signatures and other signs of recent human inhabitation, then further explore areas of interest with high-resolution imaging equipment. In different circumstances, Jake could have passed the coordinates over to JSOC or CIA’s aviation wing and have the data collected on all thirty-six sites in a matter of hours.

It would have been an easy ask if he weren’t persona non grata back at the Agency.

He was mindlessly staring at the computer screen when it hit him.

Someone had already done it.

Jake went to the basement, triple-checking that he’d disabled the self-destruct system before he opened the hatch—just about the only way his day could get any worse was if a dozen blocks of plastic explosive detonated underneath his feet at twenty-six thousand feet per second.

He wandered through the stacks of weapons, still amazed and dismayed by the firepower Pickens had been able to acquire on the black market. With Pickens dead, Jake would at some point have to contact his superiors at CIA and notify them about the arms cache. He certainly wasn’t going to call Cawar and sell the weapons back to the largest illicit arms trafficker in Africa.