A New Hunting Ground
I took the arms dealer up on his offer.
I couldn't run a caravan for a while in any case. The slaves I'd been gathering would have to go into the construction of the lord's castle, and becoming a lord meant more than selling them off. I needed new work ready. Plant your flag and there is a great deal you have to put in order—and just as much worth trying.
Marco had the castle well in hand, so there was no point in my wasting time on it. My return to the company was suddenly only four months off. I meant to spend what remained of that window for all it was worth.
First I moved the goods piled in the warehouse on the outskirts of Cairo into magic pouches. Split across several of them, everything fit in the end. Then I changed my face, boarded a plane, and headed for Mogadishu.
Mogadishu.
The airport in Somalia's capital was so rundown that calling it international felt like a stretch. The moment I stepped off the plane I rented several vehicles and drove them out toward a stretch of beach on the city's edge.
A mansion on the shore.
I leased an entire estate walled in by high fences. Given the security, a luxury hotel in central Mogadishu might have been the wiser choice—but I was of a mind to welcome intruders, so it hardly mattered. If anything, for what I had planned, a house with a wide yard was the better tool. Land came cheap in this country, and the estate boasted a courtyard of nearly half an acre.
Living here for several months would take preparation. I sent IS No. 1, IS No. 2, and Istanbul No. 1 into the city for supplies, then headed into Mogadishu myself with Maximus beside me.
The first stop, as ever, was the street in front of the Mogadishu courthouse. In any society the sharpest minds gather in the legal trade, and I sought out one of the larger firms. Under the pretext of business I signed them on to handle my affairs, and through the lawyers I sorted out whatever living here required.
People, first. Months under one roof meant I needed hands for the drudgery—cleaning, cooking, the rest of it. I left the commission with the law office and went back to the mansion.
The slaves I'd sent out returned with a rented truck. I drew the goods back out of the magic pouches and loaded them into the bed again, then brought out the Toyota pickup as well. I stripped the plates off one of the rented cars and fitted them onto the pickup. By the time the work was finished, the sun was sinking in the west.
We still had a long way to go. I left the mansion with the slaves, and we drove south split between the Toyota and the truck.
Three hours down the coastal highway brought us to Caenawa, a small city in the south. Following the instructions I'd been given, I took the vehicles up onto a cliff overlooking the sea.
Waves murmured faintly below. We pulled into an empty lot under a bleak sky, where the guests who had arrived ahead of us were waiting.
The moment we showed up, engines that had been still turned over, and headlights flashed in a repeated pattern. I had No. 1, in the driver's seat, blink ours back.
A short while later we stopped the truck and the Toyota, got out, and walked slowly forward. I was dressed in Arab clothing, so there was little chance they'd see my face—and beneath the hood I had already swapped it, as usual, for that Italian bastard's.
While the cargo was being shifted off the truck, Maximus and I laid two hundred kilograms of drugs from the cases out on the ground. The men who saw the pills stacked thick bags on their side in turn.
Five million dollars for two hundred kilograms. I took the heavy bags—five hundred banded stacks of ten thousand dollars apiece.
It was a business that ran, after a fashion, on trust. Each side took what it had come for, and I handed over a contact.
"If you need anything else, reach me here. I can bring it in with the rest. No sense letting some middleman skim you."
The man opposite hesitated, then answered in a voice that didn't quite believe me.
"And I'm supposed to trust a man who won't even show his face?"
He was picking a fight over the black hood covering mine.
"Don't like it, then there's no deal."
I pushed back just as hard. He wavered a moment, then changed his tone.
"If I change my mind, I'll call. Once I've tried the product."
"Suit yourself."
We drove off in our separate vehicles.
About two kilometers out, I turned the cars beneath a lonely overpass. Once I was sure no one was watching, I drew one of the vehicles we'd rented here out of a magic pouch. We switched cars, and seated again I took a crystal orb from inside my clothes.
The goods had already been magically marked. Following the direction the orb showed, I drove the new car after them in silence.
They were bound for a small village some fifty kilometers off. Three hundred households, if that—and at the center stood the largest building in the place. Circling the outskirts, I confirmed the orb was pointing straight at it. Then I parked a little way off and got out alone.
"Wait here."
My body melted into the dark, rose slowly into the air, and slipped back into the village.
I had found one of their southern hideouts.
I climbed onto the roof of the building where they were staying and cast an eavesdropping spell, listening in on what they passed along. Where the goods were going. Who was coming to collect them, and when. How the recruit training stood. When the leadership meeting had been set. All of it.
The drugs they had bought were meant for trainees and fighters. Know the delivery times and places, and the locations of their subordinate cells become much easier to pin down.
I set down everything I overheard, carefully, on a tablet. After about an hour, sensing the invisibility spell was nearly spent, I returned to the car.
After that I went back and forth from Mogadishu, visiting the secret hideout night after night and gathering what I could. Along the way, following the routes the drugs traveled, I identified several regional branches and training camps. The greatest find of all was Al-Shabaab's clandestine recruitment office in Mogadishu itself.
They had once come close to swallowing the whole of southern Somalia, and the organization was spread across the country. With a rough picture of them in hand, I moved on to the next stage of preparation.
Taking them would require a great deal of groundwork. The transport route was far longer and more tangled than it had been in Syria. In a case like this, one large shipment beats many small ones—which meant the sea.
I checked the sea lane. Up the Red Sea, through the Suez Canal, and on to Alexandria: ten days to two weeks, by my guess. I contacted the ferry captain who had handled the last run and asked about his schedule, and we locked in a date he could make.
You always need a fixed point to plan around. The latest I could stretch it was two months out. Until then I had to gather as much cargo as possible and have it ready to load.
When an enemy is built like a cell network and works in hiding, tracking them is the hard part. Rounding them up is comparatively easy. They are scattered, and the lines between them are few, so you simply sweep them up one site at a time.
How I would take them could wait. First I decided to prepare a place to hold them until they could be shipped. A house with a wide yard was perfect for that.
I stepped out into the courtyard, took out the magic ring, and spoke.
Dig Earth
I drove a shaft down beneath that vast courtyard. As I dug, Maximus and the slaves raised posts and beams from iron pipe and planks bought at the market. Wearing strength-enhancement items, the slaves each put out the work of ten men, and because the magic cut the earth into clean rectangular blocks, we could brace the space with posts and beams without any further shaping.
I went down four meters, then began widening the hollow sideways. Once the rough layout was set, I left the labor to the slaves, boarded a plane alone, and flew back to Cairo.
After they parted at the hotel, Choi Jeong-ah wandered Cairo on her own, posting as she went, and checked her DMs whenever she had a moment.
"Tch. What an asshole. Seriously."
Those two days in the luxury hotel still felt like a dream. A suite of some fourteen hundred square feet. Breakfast in the VIP lounge each morning; the hotel pool and spa in the afternoon, working out and soaking the fatigue off at once. In the evening she called room service and ate steak or seafood against the night view of Cairo and the Nile. And once a pleasant buzz set in, as it naturally did, she finally got some release on that plush bed.
He wasn't like the fit guy in his twenties she'd been with before, but the sex had been satisfying in its own way. The unhurried style of a man in his thirties, maybe. Nothing rushed, nothing reduced to the finish alone—he took his time with the foreplay, and she reached the peak slowly, with room to savor it. Not the electric thrill of a gorgeous face, but something that settled her. The occasional bold experiment that caught her off guard was cute, too. More than anything, the money and the ease, the ability to give her a place and an experience that fully satisfied her, more than made up for the rest.
If she had never known, it might not have mattered. Having tasted it once, the life she had come back to felt all the shabbier.
"Right. He just wanted a one-night stand. Nasty old bastard."
She consoled herself with the follower count, which had jumped by five thousand in that short span. She was about to head off in search of the next shoot when a notice popped up that a DM had arrived.
Choi Jeong-ah hurried into her messages.