It was an unremarkable general cargo vessel, one hundred thirty feet long, with a white pilothouse above her stern and a crane mounted amidships. She could make fourteen knots when she left the shipyard twenty years earlier, but Yaxaas had repowered her when he’d bought her. With a new engine, a new shaft, and a new propeller, she could now do twenty-one knots—a significant advantage when closing on unsuspecting adversaries.

She was named the Triomphe and flew the flag of France; except when she was called the Bonassola, out of Genoa, Italy; or known as the Miro, registered in the Marshall Islands. Even the color of her hull changed frequently, often after every mission. Sometimes she berthed in the Port of Mogadishu but was just as often tied up farther south in Kismaayo. There were usually three forty-foot containers on her deck, except when there were six.

The thirty-two men on board had boarded solo or in pairs, staggered over a period of five hours to mask their number. The mothership itself required only a crew of six, but each of the two semisubmersibles carried six assaulters and a boat crew of four, plus two ground crew and four snipers for the helicopter. Another container in the hold had been fashioned into a bunkhouse. It wasn’t luxurious, but it had lights and air conditioning, and most importantly, it could be sealed and locked if the ship was ever boarded and inspected by naval forces.

The Turk and the Italian were on deck at the bow, smoking cigarettes and watching a pod of dolphins swim alongside when the helicopter landed.

Ten minutes after the helo powered down, the ground crew had folded its rotors and wheeled the entire bird inside one of the containers on deck—to hide it from prying eyes, and to prepare it for attack.

They had four days.

FORTY-THREE

IT WAS NEARLY time.

Boat-1 had been motoring south for almost four hours. For most of its time afloat, the thirty-eight-foot assault craft looked like a go-fast Cigarette boat, but it was actually a semisubmersible, a relatively new class of vessel that was capable of sealing itself up tight, filling ballast tanks with seawater, and moving slowly through the ocean with no more than eighteen inches—just enough for the windshield and a few instruments—riding above the waves.

She was invisible to the human eye and to radar.

Boat-1 was running at three knots with its navigation lights off and its ballast tanks full when the former Polish commando spoke up. It was just past 02:00 hours and he was inside the sealed hull, looking through a small periscope.

“This could be our boy—starboard quarter, bearing 165 degrees.”

The boat commander looked with his own gyro-stabilized scope.

“That’s him. Call the boss.”