The assault team performed well, completing their first run-through in seventeen minutes and thirty-one seconds, with two assaulters suffering simulated non-life-threatening injuries. Nacay moved the “defenders” to different parts of the model, and ran it again.

By the fifteenth repetition, the pirates flowed through the target in thirteen minutes and forty-seven seconds and not a single defender got off a shot.

The assault team was ready.

FORTY-TWO

THE HELICOPTER LIFTED into the air over Mogadishu as the pilot pulled back on the collective.

Kenyan by birth, he had been trained by his country’s Defence Forces to fly Russian Mi-17 transport helicopters. The twin-turbine Mi-17 was large and capable, but frequently down for maintenance due to a shortage of spare parts. With a low mission capability rate, the pilot’s flying time suffered, and he put in a request to transition to the smaller Hughes OH-6.

It felt like a sports car compared to the lumbering Mi-17.

And the pilot treated it like one—routinely flying between trees at high speed, occasionally doing aerial loops, and once, just for fun, landing on the bed of an unsuspecting flatbed truck as it drove down a highway at fifty miles per hour.

It was the last stunt that had gotten him discharged—the Kenyan military was not awash in excess funding and the pilot’s superior officer didn’t want to have to one day tell his commander that they’d lost a precious rotorcraft while one of his men had been hotdogging.

But the skill and the audacity of the stunt had also gotten the pilot his current job.

The MD 520 he flew for Yaxaas was almost identical to the OH-6, except the new helicopter lacked a tail rotor, instead using high-velocity air to control its heading. Several manufacturers had experimented with the unusual design, but it added weight and maintenance expense and had remained a niche segment of the market. But it was an important niche that had one significant advantage over its tail-rotor-equipped brethren. It was quieter.

Much quieter.

—

WITH THE HELICOPTER’S doors removed and its main rotor spinning overhead, the air blowing through its cabin was a welcome change on the ninety-seven-degree day. The pilot flew northeast along the sandy coastline for fifteen miles until they reached a deserted stretch of land and abruptly turned out to sea.

Nacay was in his usual seat to the pilot’s left, and he entered a set of coordinates into the GPS as the helo accelerated to 125 knots. The ocean blurred beneath them as the helicopter flew just fifty feet above the surface. The pilot climbed to three hundred feet once they were ten miles offshore and out of sight of land.

Forty minutes later, he backed off the cyclic and slowed the aircraft.

“Mothership in sight,” he said over the intercom.