[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel by Richard Marcinko Page A

addition to one of the farm fields that checkerboarded the nearby hills.
    We stopped in front of a newer two-story building on a street just off the main drag. Taban put the car in park, but left the motor running as we got out.
    Rooster and Goat clung to me as Taban led the way into the building; Abdi and the others spread out along the street. I was surprised to see that the front door was made of plate glass, but wasn’t sure exactly how to interpret that—was it an eccentricity, or a sign that the place was becoming more stable? Then again, for all I knew, the glass had been boosted from one of the ships they’d hijacked recently.
    The door opened on a hallway with a set of stairs on the right. The scent of fresh paint hung in the air, though the pale blue walls were covered with enough smudge marks and gouges to give Martha Stewart a heart attack. We went up the stairs to the strains of a British rock ’n’ roll song from the early 1960s—“Ferry Cross the Mersey,” by Gerry and the Pacemakers. How I recognized it is as much of a mystery as why it was playing here.
    The music was coming from the large room on the right at the top of the steps. I looked inside; four very large African women were dancing in what looked like a class, doing a kind of free-form interpretation of the 1960s Twist. The walls were bare, except for a rail that ran along the sides.
    “This way,” said Taban, pointing to a door on the left side of the landing.
    He knocked, and without waiting for an answer went inside. Rooster and Goat practically pushed me to follow.
    A middle-aged man sat at a desk to the left of the door. He had an iPad in his hand and was playing Angry Birds when we walked in.
    He practically jumped from his seat, jabbering and grabbing Taban in a bear hug. Taban reciprocated, and the two men carried on like a pair of old ladies comparing notes at a grandniece’s wedding. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying, since it was all in Somali. Finally, Taban shook his hand and led me back to the door.
    “What was that about?” I asked as we began trudging down the steps.
    “We have to go to the port,” he explained. “We will meet the people you want there.”
    The “port” consisted of a beach with a dozen small skiffs scattered around the dunes, and another three or four in the rocks. Twenty years before, the people who lived here were all fishermen. They took small, hand-carved boats out into the ocean, where they heaved out nets that would have looked familiar to the Roman soldiers who first passed through in the years before Christ was born. There were still fishermen here, but now they were in the minority—piracy was the lifeblood of the village, and the families who mined the sea were considered old-fashioned.
    A herd of six or seven camels scattered up across the dunes as we turned down the narrow road from the main city, which was roughly two miles away. The shanties that had dominated only two years before had been replaced by larger buildings. These weren’t about to appear in Architectural Digest anytime soon; the stucco and block construction had as much charm as your average bomb shelter. Still, here it passed for great wealth, and was a pretty visible symbol of how piracy had turned the economy around.
    So were the brand-new Jeep Cherokees parked in front of the squat, purple building on a rise overlooking the polluted creek.
    “Whatever you do, praise the food,” Taban whispered as he pulled the truck up the street to park. “Just don’t eat any of it.”
    The stench that struck me as soon as I was through the door told me the food was almost surely anything but good. My stomach kicked at my chest as we walked past a tall screen decorated with a Chinese-print fabric of an African safari. The dining room beyond the screen reminded me of a high school cafeteria. Long tables covered by vinyl tablecloths flanked a center aisle that led back to a set of double doors to the kitchen.
    Two men