Robert Ludlum's The Janson Option by Paul Garrison

Author:Paul Garrison [Garrison, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

TWENTY

Paul Janson banged open his seat belt, pushed out the passenger door, and jumped.

Forty knots of prop wash flung salt spray like a water cannon. He landed one boot on the float, leaned into the speeding plane’s slipstream, kicked off the float, and clamped both hands on the wing strut. He pumped his legs to swing his weight farther outboard to counterbalance the wing that the sea was pulling under. The wing fought like a maddened animal. The pounding water, the roar of the engine, the propeller wind—all were chaos in the dark until he sensed a purposeful rush behind him.

He reached back for Kincaid.

Their hands locked.

Janson used his strength and her momentum to catapult her past him. Kincaid grabbed the wing with both hands and slung her 130 pounds farther outboard to add to his weight, levering it down. The Otter hung in suspension, port wingtip angling toward the sea bottom, starboard wing thrusting at the stars. Then it tugged its wing out of the water, slowly righted on both floats, and glided to a stop in the lee of the dhow.

Kirpal Singh cut the engine, and the propeller stopped thrashing. Sailors threw lines. Janson and Kincaid caught them and passed the hose to Clarence Choh, who rammed the hooded nozzle into the Otter’s fuel port.

* * *

“THESE ARE NOT ROADS,” Home Boy Gutaale complained to his driver and his bodyguards. “These are not even goat paths.”

The red-bearded warlord had been two and a half days leading a convoy of armored-up SUVs from Mogadishu to the Puntland town of Eyl. To call the roads horrible was to utter a statement without meaning. His driver, Mohammed, the cheeky one who had been through the wars with him, said, “Goat paths do not befit the future George Washington of Soomaaliweyn.”

Everyone laughed and Gutaale swore an oath that had his fighters smiling one second and cheering the next: “When we have won. When Soomaaliweyn is one. We will kill every tax collector who collected money for roads. But before we kill them, we will cut their feet off so their stumps can feel what it was like to walk their roads to Eyl.”

The goat road meandered across a land of rock and sand and hellhole heat wherever the hills blocked the wind. For miles at a time it was so empty it looked like no human had ever lived there, and so hot that no one would ever want to. Then, around a bend, boys would materialize from nowhere, leading a donkey or chasing a camel. Then more empty miles, hotter and hotter even as the sun fell low in the sky.

The hills were casting long shadows and the light was fading when suddenly his cell phone rang.

“Speak to me!” said Home Boy Gutaale. Thanks to cell towers sprinkled forty miles apart, his mind was connected to a world his body could not at this moment imagine. A cherished lieutenant was calling a heads-up from the far side of the moon in Mogadishu.

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