“There will be a lot of money,” Jake said, “once we talk to your boss.”

“You pay me,” said Dameer. “Then you go to Kitadra.”

It was the pirate capital of the world.

With no prospects on land, young Somali men with nothing to lose had taken to the sea to kidnap their way to riches, but aggressive countermeasures by ships’ crews and the world’s navies ensured that by 2015, the era of the Somali pirates was dead.

But it had made a comeback.

A new type of piracy had emerged in the last six months, and it was far more profitable and far more lethal than the old one. With each attack, twenty men disappeared and twenty million dollars’ worth of stolen cargo vanished—neither the crew nor the ships were ever seen again.

And it was a lot of money—enough to exert enormous influence over the broken nation of Somalia. It backed private armies and bribed corrupt politicians. It supported terrorism and funded human trafficking. For the country’s citizens, it meant a lifetime of living in fear: extortion, rape, murder.

The new wave of piracy was about to put the struggling country down for good.

And Jake and Pickens had been ordered to stop it.

“Who do you work for?” Jake asked.

Dameer said something in Arabic to his accomplices.

Jake didn’t know the Somali dialect well, but he understood enough of what Dameer had said to know what was coming next.

And it wasn’t good.

Pickens spoke Arabic and Somali, but he stuck to English around the locals. He learned a lot more when they thought he didn’t understand.

Like now.

It was going to be four-on-two. Dameer and the man with the machete, plus the two men with the Kalashnikovs, but they were so doped up that they probably couldn’t hit the air in front of them. The biggest risk from those idiots was a ricochet.

But it was a real risk.

The small room was made of concrete with a corrugated steel roof. Each bullet would have a couple of chances to find a target and if the gunmen went full Somali-style—rifle held at the waist and trigger held down until the gun was empty—there was a better-than-even chance that no one on either side would walk out alive.

The two Americans made eye contact. Pickens nodded almost imperceptibly.

Jake snapped his head back, shattering the nose of the man with the machete, then grabbed the hand with the knife and pushed the blade away.

The man staggered backward with tears in his eyes and blood streaming down his face.

Jake turned and punched him in the throat, then kneed him in the groin. The Somali crumpled to the ground, out of the fight.