Pickens spotted an accident blocking the road ahead and turned down a narrow side street to avoid a potential ambush. Lined on both sides with crumbling stucco buildings, it was impossible to tell where the blown sand ended and the cracked pavement began. He steered carefully around a man sleeping in the shade of a parked car and back onto a larger road where the two men could relax—somewhat.

“I’ve never seen a man knocked out of his shoes before,” Jake said.

Pickens grinned.

“The key,” he said, “is to rotate your hips and follow through on the swing.”

Jake checked the side-view mirror. “Too bad those idiots didn’t know anything.”

It was the third meeting they’d had in the four days since Jake had arrived, and each one had nearly cost him his life.

“We’ve got to start somewhere,” said Pickens.

John Pickens had been with the Agency for twenty years and working the Mogadishu account for the last eight. It was a medium-sized CIA station, but most of his fellow officers in the Directorate of Operations were working with their counterparts in the Somali National Intelligence and Security Agency or deployed in Counterterrorism Center teams. The CTC pursuit teams were the sexier side of CIA and, for the past twenty years, counterterrorism had been the fast track to advancement.

Pickens was in a career backwater.

“Everyone knows you’re understaffed here, John, but this is a new threat and we need a new response. Seven tankers have disappeared without a single distress call or ransom demand.”

Pickens snaked around the site of a recent IED attack. Two days prior, al-Shabaab terrorists had daisy-chained together half a dozen 122mm Russian artillery shells and detonated them in the back of a delivery truck. One hundred forty-six people had died. The air still smelled of diesel fuel and gunpowder, burnt plastic and seared flesh. An African Union soldier was in the blast pit, searching the twisted chassis for a vehicle identification number while children played nearby on piles of concrete rubble that had been their homes just forty-eight hours earlier.

“I told Ted this should be a joint op with FBI,” Jake said, “and he told me to shut up and find out who’s in charge of the pirates.”

“Is that what Black Flag is about?” Pickens looked over. “Is Graves looking to put people in the ground?”

Ted Graves was chief of the Agency’s Special Activities Center. The paramilitary officers under his command operated in the field with little oversight and were known for using their considerable autonomy wisely and ethically.

The same could not be said for their boss.

“Phase one is to identify who’s behind it,” Jake said. “I’m guessing phase two is rolling him up, but Ted hasn’t shared his long-term strategy with me.”