Pickens pressed another button on the device and Mahad’s mobile phone started to ring. The IMSI catcher spoofed the phone’s caller ID into displaying a number from one of the other pirates.

Pickens killed the transmission the instant Mahad answered.

Dropped calls weren’t unusual in Mogadishu’s buildings. The concrete walls often interfered with cell reception.

“Hitting him again now,” said Pickens.

Mahad’s phone rang again as Jake reached the end of the street.

They were three hundred feet from the pirate’s house. As it had been both times earlier in the day, the gate was open. The pirate had grown complacent living in Somalia, where there were no consequences for the life he’d chosen.

But that was about to change.

“He’s on the ground floor,” Pickens said. The IMSI catcher also had direction-finding capability, indicating the azimuth and elevation of the signal it had locked onto.

“Bring him out,” said Jake.

Pickens initiated a call using another pirate’s caller ID and dropped it as soon as Mahad picked up. Now he was probably wondering what was happening.

“Hitting him with the third number now,” Pickens said.

They were a hundred feet from Mahad’s gate when Pickens spoke into the phone in Somali. “I’m outside. We have to—” he said before dropping the call again.

Jake turned into the driveway and stopped fifteen feet from the front door just as it opened. The pirate shielded his eyes as the SUV’s high beams blinded him.

“What’s going on, Badu?” the pirate said. “Jave is calling me too.”

Jake stepped out and fired a Taser into Mahad’s chest. The two metal prongs blasted the pirate’s pain receptors with fifty thousand volts of electricity. Jake cut the power a second after Mahad hit the ground.

Pickens slapped a piece of duct tape over his mouth, cinched flex-ties around his wrists and ankles, and frisked him for weapons before putting a hood over his head and tossing him into the back of the SUV.

Jake backed out of the driveway and the men were back on the street twenty-eight seconds after they’d pulled in. They’d practiced the takedown half a dozen times that afternoon in an abandoned lot in Mogadishu.

Pickens had the butt of the machine gun resting on his hip, the barrel angled up through the open window. Though there was no indication that they’d been seen, good tradecraft dictated that they take precautions. They spent two hours running a surveillance detection route that took them outside the city and back in, through high-security neighborhoods and ones with none at all. By the time they pulled into their central Mogadishu safe house, they were confident that they weren’t being followed.