Tracker stared, fascinated. They had all been wrong—CIA, TOSA, Counter-Terrorism Center—to think their quarry had emigrated from Pakistan to Yemen. He had probably been there but had moved on to seek sanctuary not with the AQAP, the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but with the fanatics controlling AQHA. Al-Qaeda in the Horn of Africa, formerly called al-Shabaab, which controlled the southern half of Somalia, among the wildest countries in the world.
There was much to research. So far as he knew, Somalia, outside the guarded enclave surrounding the token capital Mogadishu, was virtually out of bounds since the slaughter of eighteen Rangers in the incident known as Black Hawk Down, which was die-stamped onto the American military memory—and not in a pleasant way.
If Somalia had any fame at all, it was for the pirates who for ten years had been hijacking ships off the coast and ransoming vessels, cargoes and crews for millions of dollars. But the pirates were in the north, in Puntland, a great and desolate wilderness peopled by clans and tribes that the Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton had once termed “the most savage people in the world.”
Kismayo was in the deep south, two hundred miles north of the Kenyan border; in colonial days a thriving Italian trade center, now a teeming slum ruled by Jihadi fanatics more extreme than any others in Islam.
“Do you know what that building is?” he asked Ariel.
“No. A warehouse, a large shed, I don’t know. But that is where the Troll operates the fan base. That is where his computer is located.”
“Does he know you know?”
The young man smiled quietly.
“Oh, no. He never spotted me. He is still running the fan base. He would have shut down if he knew I was watching him.”
The Tracker backed out of the loft and eased himself down the ladder to the landing below. He would have it all transferred to TOSA. He would have a UAV, a drone, circling silently and invisibly over that shed within days, watching, listening for any cyberspace whisper, sensing body-heat movements, photographing comings and goings. It would transmit everything it saw in real time to screens at Air Force Base Creech, Nevada, or Tampa, Florida, and thence to TOSA. Meanwhile, there was much to do with what he had brought back from Islamabad.
• • •
The Tracker stared for hours at the photograph he had swiped from the picture treasured by Mrs. Ali Shah. He had had the laboratory enhance the quality until it was pin sharp. He looked at the two smiling faces and wondered where they were now. The one on the right was irrelevant. It was the boy with amber eyes whom he studied, as in World War Two General Montgomery had studied the face of Rommel, the German Desert Fox, trying to imagine what he would do next.
The boy in the photograph was seventeen. That was before he converted to ultra-Jihadism, before 9/11, before Quetta, before he walked out on his family and went to live with the killers of Lashkar-e-Taiba and the 313 Brigade and the Haqqani clan.
The experiences, the hatred, the inevitable killings witnessed, the harsh life in the mountains of the Tribal Agencies—all that would have aged the face of the laughing boy.
The Tracker sent a clear picture of the Preacher now, masked though he was, and the left-hand side of the picture from Islamabad to a very specialist unit. At the Criminal Justice Information Services, an FBI facility in Clarksburg, West Virginia, there is a laboratory that is expert in aging faces.
He asked them to give him a face—the face of now. Then he went to see Gray Fox.
The director of TOSA examined the evidence with approval. At last they had a name. They would soon have a face. They had a country, maybe even a city.
“Do you think he lives there, in that warehouse in Kismayo?” he asked.
“I doubt it. He has a paranoia about being elusive. I would bet he resides elsewhere, records his sermons in a single room with a camcorder, backed by a bedsheet-sized backdrop inscribed with the usual Koranic verses as we see on the screen, then lets his assistant, the one we now call the Troll, take it away and transmit it from Kismayo. He’s not in any trap yet, not by a long shot.”
“So what next?”
“I need a UAV over that warehouse on virtually permanent station. I’d ask for a low-flying mission to take side-on pictures of that building to see if there is a company name on it, except for one thing. I believe it would be a waste of time. But I have to identify who owns it.”
Gray Fox stared at the image from space. It was clear enough, but military technology would be able to count the rivets in the roof from 50,000 feet.
“I’ll get on to the drone boys. They have launch facilities in Kenya to the south, Ethiopia to the west, Djibouti to the north, and the CIA has a very covert unit inside the Mogadishu enclave. You’ll get your pictures. Now that you have his face, which he seems so keen to keep covered, and his name, are you going to blow his cover away?”
“Not yet. I have another idea.”
“Your call, Tracker. Go for it.”
“One last thing. I could ask, but the weight of J-SOC behind it would be helpful. Does the CIA or anyone else have a secret agent buried inside South Somalia?”
• • •
A week later, four things happened. Tracker had spent the time steeping himself in the tragic story of Somalia. Once, it had been three regions. French Somaliland in the far north was now Djibouti, still with a strong French influence, a resident Foreign Legion garrison and a huge American base whose rent was crucial to the economy. Also in the north, former British Somaliland was now just Somaliland, also quiet, peaceful, even democratic, but bizarrely unrecognized as a nation/state.
The bulk was former Italian Somaliland, confiscated after World War Two, administered for a while by the British and then given independence. After a few years of the usual dictatorship, the once thriving and elegant colony where wealthy Italians used to vacation had lapsed into civil war. Clan fought clan, tribe fought tribe, warlord after warlord sought supremacy. Finally, with Mogadishu and Kismayo just seas of rubble, the outside world had given up.
A belated notoriety had returned when the beggared fishermen of the north turned to piracy and the south to Islamic fanaticism. Al-Shabaab had arisen not as an offshoot but an ally of al-Qaeda and conquered all of the south. Mogadishu hovered as a fragile token capital of a corrupt regime living on aid but in an encircled enclave whose border was guarded by a mixed army of Kenyans, Ethiopians, Ugandans and Burundians.