Crossbones (51 page)

Before the passengers are to board the plane, Xalan writes down the name of a hotel in Djibouti where they can stay in the event they make it past immigration. She also copies the home telephone and mobile numbers of a very good friend of hers there, a radio journalist who, depending on how they fare, will meet them and take them to the hotel at least for the first night.

FOR THE ENTIRE FLIGHT, TAXLIIL AVOIDS MAKING EYE CONTACT
with Ahl, from whom he sits as far away as possible. He acts disdainful of Ahl’s suggestion, whispered in English, that he open the passport and get to know his presumed identity.

There is order in Djibouti, when they land and when they disembark. Uniformed ground personnel shepherd the passengers from the aircraft on foot to the arrivals hall. The security is competently vigilant, but without a show of naked authority. There is confidence in the organized efficiency of state power, whose trappings are evident. Given the size of the country, there are numerous aircraft on the tarmac and on the runway, with the flags of many nations on them.

Their flight has landed near the hour when many a Djiboutian loves to enjoy a sit-down chew, and a fearful slowness ensues. Ahl senses that the immigration officers on duty are eager to rush the passengers through the formalities. He is relieved not only because they are now beyond Shabaab’s reach but because he derives comfort from the sense of order everywhere around them. He likes to know where
he is with authority; he loves it when he can challenge the rightness or the wrongness of the actions ascribed to the state. In Bosaso, state authority was so diffuse he could not tell who was in charge. He fills in the entry forms, stating the purpose of his visit and estimating the duration of his and his son’s stay at a week maximum.

He is still worried about Taxliil’s mood, though, and whether he is harboring a desire to get caught, deported, or denied entry. Is Taxliil martyring himself belatedly, to make up for a previous failure? Does he, like many misguided youths, place an exalted value on obduracy? Impervious to Ahl’s mild admonishments, expostulations, and appeals to get on with it, Taxliil doodles at the top and bottom of the entry form. Two different immigration officers ask Taxliil and then eventually Ahl what the problem is, and Ahl says to both, “The difficulties with teenagers.”

He does his utmost not to lose his temper, and with his teeth clenched in frustration, takes the form from Taxliil’s clutch and says, “Let me fill it in.”

Taxliil says, “There is a problem, though.”

“What’s the problem?”

“I don’t like something about this passport,” Taxliil says.

“What don’t you like about it?” Ahl asks.

“It makes me a year older. I don’t like any of my aliases, either.”

Who says that there is no life after death? Ahl remembers a line from Auden: that “proper names are poetry in the raw.” Ahl reads the run of names to which Taxliil is supposed to answer—Mohammed Mahmoud Mohammed—and cannot help agreeing that, taken together, they sound like a made-up name. So in a moment of rare sympathy, Ahl pats him on the back and fills in the forms when Taxliil raises no objections.

They form their own line, being the only passengers left. As they approach the immigration counter, Ahl says sternly in muttered English, “Let me do the talking, if you don’t mind.”

Mercifully, Taxliil nods his head.

Since none of their names match and since Ahl is traveling on an American passport, which has in it a Djiboutian exit and entry stamp from less than a fortnight ago, and since Taxliil bears a Somali passport, issued a year earlier but not used up to now, they will need to give some explanation to smooth out the apparent discrepancies. Ahl feels more confident that going to the immigration counter together offers him a better chance to explain the discrepancies between the names. After all, it is not unusual in this part of the world for parents and children to bear different surnames. Besides, with any luck on their side, the immigration officer may have no way of knowing about the phoniness of Taxliil’s travel document.

The immigration officer is very courteous; he welcomes them both to Djibouti. He takes a long time studying in turn the passports and their details, then looks from Ahl to Taxliil and back, and detects no family resemblance in the faces or in the sameness of the nationalities of the passports.

Ahl can see that Taxliil is nervous. He has the temperament of someone with an impulse to barrel up the stairway and run for it, or to blurt out something incriminating. Ahl volunteers, “He is my stepson,” and leaves it at that.

Taxliil says, “No way will I return to Bosaso.”

As with toothpaste out of the tube, no attempt to put it back in will work, despite Ahl’s attempt to dismiss the disclosure as no more than a teenager’s gaffe. When Ahl tries to explain, Taxliil won’t let him, speaking petulantly and saying, “Leave me alone.” The immigration officer takes his unrushed time to study the passports some more and to scrutinize the forms several times more. He doesn’t say anything to either of them. He picks up the telephone and whispers a mere two words into the mouthpiece, in French.

Another officer, senior to the one at the desk, arrives inside a minute.
He, too, peruses the passports and takes in Ahl and Taxliil’s faces, as if searching for a clue. He makes a one-word phone call. A third officer, senior to both, joins them.

Ahl and Taxliil are escorted to a cubicle within the airport structure. They are put in separate rooms and are asked questions about their identities, where they were born, where they have come from, and about their final destination. New forms. New questions. Their addresses, home phone numbers, relationship, and workplace or name of school in Minneapolis. They are provided with new forms to fill in. Same questions, different officers, their conversations taped, and their fingerprints taken.

Just before nightfall, two minivans arrive to drive them out of the airport grounds to a police station a kilometer away, where they will separately undergo a longer and more detailed interrogation, first by the Djibouti authorities and then—but then, Ahl can’t tell what will happen after that, can he?

Xalan has kept tabs on Ahl and Taxliil’s movements from the moment they boarded their flight until their arrival in Djibouti. Her friend the Djiboutian radio journalist confirms to her that they are in the hands of the state security and, according to an immigration officer who has confided in him and has told him of the procedures the two have been made to go through, that the two have been taken in separate minivans to an unknown destination.

Xalan asks the journalist how he knows all this.

“The officer is my mate and we chew together,” he replies.

Cambara shares the latest news about Malik, who is still in no state to speak, much less comprehend what is going on, with Bile, who relays
it to Xalan, so that she may pass it along eventually to Yusur. Xalan, for her part, tells Bile what she knows about Ahl and Taxliil so far and all that she has learned from the radio journalist in Djibouti. Cambara shares the latest news about Ahl with Jeebleh, who met her flight in Nairobi and took them by the waiting ambulance to the clinic, where Malik is now recovering after surgery.

Cambara says, “But what will Djibouti do with them?”

“They won’t slit their throats,” Jeebleh says. “Whereas Shabaab would if they got a hold of either of them.”

Cambara says, “That’s a relief.”

“That’s the bright side.”

“But what’s their status, in Djibouti?”

Jeebleh, the student of Dante, describes Ahl and Taxliil’s status as “purgatorial”—an in-between state, in which they are afforded the opportunity to gain a spiritually more satisfactory cleansing than what they would expect if they had stayed on in Somalia and been taken by Shabaab.

Cambara says, “I think I know what purgation is: the discharge of waste matter from the body, isn’t that right?”

Jeebleh answers, “Yes, the discharge of waste matter in a ceremonial or ritual manner. And because Ahl and Taxliil are kept separately, each will rid himself of all defilement—especially Taxliil. Their situation is ‘purgatorial’ in that they may now view Bosaso as being akin to their idea of an inferno. Taxliil has his private hell to confront: a human bomber chickening out at the last minute is no easy matter for the mind to process.”

Cambara asks, “Where does Djibouti come in—I mean purgatorially speaking?”

“I am convinced they are in less of a hell than the one they would be in if they had fallen straight into the hands of Shabaab, the FBI, or Homeland Security in the U.S.,” Jeebleh says.

“You’re saying they are in ‘friendlier’ custody there?”

Jeebleh says, “Djibouti will be empathic to a young Somali teenager in Taxliil’s situation, caught in the politics of self-murder. The state may enter into a government-to-government deal during the extradition process. While waiting for their condition to be clarified, they will not be tortured or humiliated.”

Cambara calls Bile to tell him all this, and to report on Malik’s condition. The doctors in Nairobi do not consider Malik out of danger yet, but they have deemed him “lucky to be alive.” His feet are up in a cast, and tubes are running into almost every orifice. His head is in a cast, too, wrapped so tight it would be uncomfortable for him to smile, even if he wanted to. He can’t breathe without help: his lungs are punctured.

Journalists living in Nairobi have been coming in droves to the hospital, though. Some have even autographed Malik’s cast, noting the dates and places where they worked with him on assignment and inscribing get-well messages in Dutch, French, Arabic, and English. A British female journalist and a Canadian male reporter bring flowers and keep vigil in the corridor of the clinic, waiting and chatting.

But Cambara cannot speak any longer. “Good-bye for now,” she says. “Malik is waking.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is a work of fiction, set against the background of actual events whose retelling I’ve layered with a membrane of my own invention, and all the characters populating its pages have their origins in my imagination.

In writing it, I’ve borrowed from numerous sources and on occasion relied on interviews I conducted in Puntland and in Mogadiscio between the end of December 2008 and the end of February 2011. Among the many texts I’ve read, consulted, or borrowed from are “Nine Journalists Killed in Somalia” (Africa News, 2009); “Somali Canadian Journalist Killed” (CBS News, August 11, 2007); “Even in Exile Somali Journalists Face Death” (
The Christian Science Monitor
, August 12, 2007); “Somalia Journalist: ‘I Saw My Boss Dead’” (BBC, June 19, 2009); “Gunmen Assassinate Prominent Somali Journalist” (CNN, February 4, 2009); “Fifth Journalist Killed This Year” (Committee to Protect Journalists, June 8, 2009); Eric Schmitt and Jeffery Gettleman’s “U.S. Says Strike Kills Leader of a Somali Militia Suspected of Ties to Al Qaeda” (
The New York Times
, May 2, 2008); “Recruited for Jihad” (
Newsweek
, January 24, 2009); Richard Matthew’s “Recruited
for Jihad? What Happened to Mustafa Ali?” (Minneapolis
Star Tribune
, February 9, 2009); Abdisaid M. Ali’s “The Al-Shabaab Al-Mujahidiin: A profile of the First Somali Terrorist Organization” (Institut für Stategie- Politik- Sicherheits- und Wirtschaftsberatung, Berlin, 2008); Steve Bloomfield’s “Anger at U.S. ‘Rendition’ of Refugees Who Fled Somalia” (
The Independent
, March 23, 2007);
Muslim Human Rights Forum’s Horn of Terror: Report of U.S.-Led Mass Extraordinary Renditions from Kenya to Somalia and Ethiopia and Guantánamo Bay—January to June 2007—Presented to the National Commission on Human Rights on July 2007;
Talal Asad
On Suicide Bombing
(Columbia University Press, 2007);
Somali Customary Law and Traditional Economy: Cross-Sectional, Pastoral, Frankincense and Marine Norms
(Puntland Development Research Centre, 2003); Nigel Cawthorne’s
Pirates of the 21st Century: How Modern-Day Buccaneers Are Terrorising the World’s Oceans
(John Blake, 2009); David Cordingly’s
Under the Black Flag
(Random House, 1996); Abdirahman Jama Kulmiye’s “Militia vs Trawlers: Who Is the Villain?” (
The East African
, 2001); “Speedboats v Warships: Why Piracy Works” (
The Sydney Morning Herald
, November 19, 2008); Michael Scott Moore’s “What Are Those Ships Doing off the Coast of Somalia” (Miller-McCune, November 18, 2009); Clive Schofield’s “Who’s Plundering Who?” (
Conservengland
, November 23, 2008); Clive Schofield’s
Plundered Waters: Somalia’s Maritime Resource Insecurity
in
Crucible of Survival
, edited by Timothy Doyle and Melissa Risely (Rutgers University Press, 2008); “Somali Piracy Began in Response to Illegal Fishing and Toxic Dumping by Western Ships off the Somali Coast” (DemocracyNow.org, April 14, 2009); Andrew Harding’s “Postcard from Somali Pirate Capital” (BBC, June 16, 2009); Mary Harper’s “Life in Somalia’s Piracy Town” (BBC, September 18, 2008); Najad Abdullah’s “Toxic Waste Behind Somali Piracy” (Al Jazeera, October 11, 2008); Mohamed Adow’s “Somalia’s Trafficking Boomtown” (BBC, April 28, 2004); Robyn Hunter’s “Somali
Pirates Living the High Life” (BBC, October 28, 2008) and “How Do You Pay a Pirate’s Ransom” (BBC, December 3, 2008); “Pirate ‘Washes Ashore with Cash’” (BBC, January 12, 2009); Daniel Heller-Roazen’s
The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations
(Zone Books, 2009); Mary Harper’s “Chasing the Somali Piracy Money Trail” (BBC, May 24, 2009); “This Is London—The Capital of Somali Pirates’ Secret Intelligence Operation” (
The Guardian
, unsigned, May 11, 2009); Chris Green’s “Mystery of ‘Hijacked’ Cargo Ship Deepens” (
The Independent
, August 18, 2009); Cahal Milmo’s “Insurance Firms Plan Private Navy to Take On Somali Pirates” (
The Independent
, September 28, 2010); Daniel Howden’s “The Jailed Pirates That Nobody Wants” (
The Independent
, April 14, 2009).