The Trojan Horse, Part Two
To keep a cover while I tracked them, I rented two trucks and piled the beds high with sacks of flour, then drove on, following the signals the slaves were sending.
The long run ended at Burgabo, the southernmost city in southern Somalia, out on the edge of a small fishing village. I parked and ate inside the tent pitched behind the vehicles. I couldn't set the place up as lavishly as the estate, so the meal had to stay plain—combat rations, eaten while I watched, through a crystal orb, the feed coming in from the items fastened to the slaves.
Two of the three I'd sent in as bait were here. An hour's drive out from Burgabo, a cluster of buildings sat hidden in the middle of open country, dressed up to look like a village when it was in fact a recruit training camp. Some fifty trainees were gathered there, and with the instructors and the guards, roughly seventy in all.
Not bad. The two trucks I'd brought would haul them easily enough. All that remained was to wait for evening, so I let the hours pass. When night came, I would go collect.
Late evening. A half-moon hung overhead, and even that was thinly veiled by cloud. This was country where you couldn't hope for a streetlight, so I ran the truck on its headlights alone, taking the jolting of the road for a long while before we reached the ground near the objective.
"Kill the headlights."
"Yes, Chairman."
The lights went out. In their place I handed over an item enchanted with Owl's Eye and had them keep driving. Another ten minutes in, the truck finally stopped. Over the hill ahead, a small village of clustered buildings waited on the far side. That was Al-Shabaab's training camp.
I stopped the vehicle. This time I wasn't going in myself. I took out the crystal orb instead, and when I worked the magic, the items locked to the slaves' bodies showed me their surroundings—a place that looked like a barracks. In the darkened view, snoring and the grind of teeth took turns filling the air.
"All right. Let's see this magic work. Sleep—activate."
Sleep
The item I'd commissioned from the mage tower was a remote magic trigger. Through the pieces they wore, I could pour magic out around the slaves even from a long way off. This was my Trojan horse. The frequency the sleep spell produced drew the slaves, already asleep, down into a deeper slumber. For a good while now, they wouldn't notice if someone carried them off. Their bodies were becoming magic base stations, and if this was an hour when everyone slept, the effect would run at a hundred and fifty percent.
So, on an evening with the moon behind the clouds, I finally set the Trojan horse in motion. And the sweet part of it—
"Get up, you bastard. It's time to work."
The words landed inside the slave's head. As if that weren't enough, a short electric shock followed—bzzzt—and the startled man lurched upright.
"You're up. Now get into the building across the way."
"Yes."
He pulled on his shoes and slipped out of the barracks.
I worked the slave, sending him through every corner of the camp. The instructors and guards who crossed his path started out furious.
"What are you doing? Why aren't you asleep, wandering around?"
"You little shit. You slacked off during training today, didn't you."
"Get over here. You. Why aren't you sleeping..."
Every one of them, halfway through the snarl, staggered as a sudden drowsiness crashed down, and the instant the slave—under orders to prop them up—stepped in and took their weight, they were gone. He laid the sleepers across nearby chairs and tables, then went looking for the next piece of prey. Like flying a drone, I worked him through the scattered targets, and after twenty-odd minutes of moving from building to building I confirmed there was no one left with their eyes open.
"Looks cleared. Time to collect. Move out."
The trucks rolled again and drove straight into the camp. Before we arrived, I didn't forget to release the sleep magic. The two old trucks didn't make a quiet engine note, but no one came out to look. I climbed down and gave the slaves their orders.
"Go in and bring them out."
"Yes, Master."
Taking them wasn't where the work ended. Fresh goods live or die by shipping and storage, and the trick was moving the catch before they woke. I had the slaves load the merchandise into the trucks, stack by neat stack. We laid down the posts and boards we'd brought and built the load two tiers high, and once both trucks were full we screened off the front and piled the flour sacks back on top. After about an hour, it was done.
"Let's go."
A little over three hours later, the trucks finally reached the Mogadishu Beach Villa. We came in through the wall, pulled around to the backyard, opened the covers laid over the entrance, and hauled the merchandise down beneath them. The slaves dragged the goods out, fastened Submission Collars around their necks, and lowered them into the storehouse. Only when the last of them had been brought down was the work finally finished.
Off to the east, a red sun was slowly climbing from the surface of the sea. I poured a cup of coffee just brewed in the kitchen, stepped outside, and took a short rest with my eyes on it.
"Worked all night. I ought to have at least this much of a reward."
Warm coffee after a night's labor—that was a small compensation. The first slave hunt in Somalia had ended clean.
After that I hit the training camp Somalia Three had moved on to, and took them the same way. The place was a little smaller—about forty this time. Collaring the ones we'd brought in and putting them down in the underground storehouse became a job that repeated itself. Among them were men who weren't broken in yet and fought back. The Submission Collars cinched their throats until they died, and after the others saw that, they obeyed without a fuss. Or rather, they pretended to obey while they watched for an opening.
Later I brought the officer-grade captives up and interrogated them. A few I folded backward at the spine, as an example. When the rest saw what had been a man sprawled on the floor and twitching, they readily gave up everything they knew. Once I had new sites and new routes, I put Somalia One, Two, and Three back in. In a single take I brought in as few as ten pieces of merchandise, and as many as fifty or sixty.
After five places had been cleaned out, the mood inside Al-Shabaab began to change. The men I'd tried to make contact with cut their lines and went to ground. Finding people who had hidden themselves wasn't easy, but there was a convenient side to it as well. They'd be hard to find—and at the same time, they'd have a hard time reaching one another. I'd already planned for a situation like this. From here, there was no need to bother planting the Trojan horse inside. From here, it was time to follow the threads of the cell network I'd uncovered, one by one, and collect. Using force pushed the loss rate up, and there was the problem of not being able to take as many in a single sweep. On the other hand, I no longer needed the tedious business of throwing out bait and waiting. Tracking the organization as it strung itself out in scattered points, the hunts of the small groups went on.
Kenya. The United States Embassy in Nairobi. The largest CIA operations headquarters in Central Africa sat inside that very embassy, in a conference room among the offices on the second floor.
Mitchell was a CIA officer. Once, lean and quick, he had covered the African theater on his own two feet. Now he was a middle-aged man comfortable only when he could rest his bulging belly against the desk, and these days the young agent Smith did the running in his place. Looking over the photographs Smith had brought, Mitchell asked,
"This the one?"
"Yes. You see the truck here? It's been turning up, the same one, around the Al-Shabaab hideouts where the current problem is occurring."
The CIA had been running surveillance on the terrorist groups active across Central Africa, and Al-Shabaab in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria were the principal targets. Lately, though, strange movement had been picked up inside Al-Shabaab. A number of its operatives had gone missing. At first they had taken it for doctored intelligence, or for the men disappearing in order to carry out an operation. Then they analyzed what the wiretaps and the aerial surveillance produced, and reached another conclusion: someone was abducting them. In the course of that work, they had found an unidentified truck around an Al-Shabaab training camp the CIA was already watching.
"What do we have on this vehicle?"
"What's confirmed so far is that it runs back and forth to a seaside house in southern Mogadishu."
"What the hell kind of people are these? Kidnapping members of a terrorist organization. Christ. No—before that. Is this even possible?"
Mitchell had worked Africa a long time, and he couldn't make it add up. Not one or two. Dozens of men, taken.
"We think they may have used drugs, or some kind of special equipment. Something that paralyzes the body, or drops them into sleep. Or they might have poisoned every last one of them."
"Why, for God's sake?"
"An organ-trafficking outfit, maybe. Something along those lines."
"Crazy. The nerve to knock over members of the worst terrorist organization on earth? Ha."
"In a way, they're goods you can move without any blowback. Kill them, or they go missing, and there's no one to come looking. It won't get reported to the police either. Merchandise with no strings on it, if you look at it that way."
"Right. So the man in that villa is running that sweet little trade?"
"Have we confirmed who he is?"
"What's confirmed so far is two men of Arab descent, one Turkish, a big man we believe is Samoan, and one of Italian origin. Five in all."
"What kind of lineup is that?"
"For now, the Italian man in the frame is presumed to be the boss. There are records of him moving mainly through Damascus, Rome, and Istanbul, and lately he's been assessed as traveling between Cairo and Mogadishu. We're still gathering on the Italian. What we have so far points to a connection with the mafia in Naples, down south."
"The Italian mafia? Well. Multinational, aren't they. Keep watching for now, and get a detailed read on who these bastards are. Once we've got more, we'll sweep the lot of them up at once."
"Yes, sir."
Unbeknownst to the men inside, the eyes of the CIA had begun to settle on the Mogadishu Beach Villa.