Jake donned the fatigues, folded a boonie hat into his pocket, and loaded up a beige Toyota pickup with everything he thought he might need to accomplish his mission. There were so many guesses and estimates in his planning, so many variables in the composition of his adversary, that he needed a lot of options. He needed to be able to change his plans on the fly when something inevitably went wrong.

He covered all the gear in the truck bed with a canvas tarp and tied it down. Even in war-torn Somalia, the pickup truck’s cargo would raise a few eyebrows. Jake, fully dressed, caught a few hours of shut-eye and was on the road before dawn. He passed swiftly through the deserted streets of Mogadishu, stopping briefly at the British embassy to mail the letter to Pickens’s children, before turning southwest on the coastal road to Dujuma. The entire trip would take eight to ten hours.

The sunrise was muted by thick cloud cover as Jake drove along the ocean road. A strong easterly wind had been blowing for days, building heavy seas and an endless procession of whitecaps that kept even the ubiquitous small fishing boats onshore—no mean feat in a nation rocked by famine.

He reviewed his plan as he drove, constantly refining it and planning for contingencies, but there were more unknowns than knowns, and the permutations were endless.

Jake didn’t fear death, but he did fear failure. He’d used that fear in the past to drive him forward, to elevate himself to the task in front of him, but letting fear be his motivator and not his master was a tricky balance to maintain.

He was six hours into the drive when he turned onto a road that paralleled the Jubba River. Flowing south from Ethiopia, the twisting waterway was a critical vein of life through Somalia’s barren interior. For hundreds of years, its fertile floodplains had provided for the farmers who’d settled along its banks and the herders whose livestock had once been the backbone of the region’s economy.

The tiny village of Dujuma was one such settlement. Situated on a wide bend in the Jubba, it had a few dirt roads and maybe thirty buildings, the most luxurious of which had cinder-block walls, glassless windows, and a solitary goat lying in the shade of its corrugated tin roof.

Past the village, another dirt road disappeared into the hills. According to the overhead reconnaissance photo that Jake was now using as a map, the road led to Yaxaas’s camp. Jake wanted a closer look, but he drove past without slowing. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself in case the warlord had scouts in the village.