Crossbones (8 page)

“The wind, eh?”

“That’s right, the wind.”

The boy is not convinced.

“And your clothes, where are your clothes?”

“Inside.”

YoungThing considers his next move, and the implications if it does turn out that the Old Man lives in the house. He stares at the man, wondering how he can make him disappear before the advance team arrives. He could act like a trained insurgent—shoot first and explain later that he found this worthless hobo in the garden, insisting that he lived here. But the option of shooting the old man does not appeal to the boy. Yet how will he explain himself to the leader of the cell when he shows up?

The old man is saying, “My name is Dhoorre,” and his outstretched
hand waits, ready to shake the boy’s. When the boy doesn’t react, Dhoorre says, “At least tell me your name.”

Then he takes one speedy step closer to the boy and another step closer to the door. The muscles of the boy’s neck stiffen, his jaw goes taut, his whole attitude becomes more threatening. He raises his gas-operated AK-47 and presses the selector switch that turns it fully automatic. This action gives him the composure of a boxer who has just won a KO in the second round.

“I wouldn’t act the fool if I were you,” says the boy. “It is at your peril that you take me for a lamebrain. You make one foolish move, you are dead.”

Fresh worries congregate in Dhoorre’s head, where they huddle together like a clutch of poorly clad men suddenly exposed to unseasonable frost. This is the closest Dhoorre has been to danger in his seventy-plus years. His hand runs over his head, smoothing what hair there is, a head as bereft of hair as it is of new ideas. How can he bring his peace-making pleas to bear on a young mind that has known only violence? He moves nearer to the boy, no longer afraid.

“Go ahead,” he says. “See if I care. Shoot.”

“I won’t shoot unless I have to,” the boy says.

They embark on a badly choreographed, lurching dance.

“What’s the matter?” challenges Dhoorre.

“One wrong move and you’re dead.”

In their gyrations for more favorable positions, Dhoorre now has his back to the door. All he has to do is move a step back and he’ll be inside the house, the boy outside. But to what end?

“Why are you here, armed?”

“I am not authorized to tell you.”

The word
authorized
coming out of such a small thing gives Dhoorre a jolt. Perhaps this is one of the boys he’s heard about—the new order
of youths trained for a higher cause, who, even though they receive their instructions from earthlings, ascribe their actions to divine inspiration. He has heard about boys such as this, whom Shabaab has kidnapped and then trained as suicide bombers, boys and a few girls who see themselves as martyrs beholden to high ideals. But what can this boy want? Or, rather, what can his superiors want? And why here, why him and his family? He must disabuse the boy of the notion that he, Dhoorre, harbors any resentment toward religionist ideals, it is only that he privileges dialogue, prioritizes peace.

“I am not an enemy to your cause,” Dhoorre says.

Their eyes meet, the boy’s glance anxious in its desire to make sense of the old man’s sudden friendliness. Dhoorre’s gaze takes on a more incisive shrewdness, his bearing grows more sanguine. He adds, “Tell me what you want done and I will do it.”

“Just relax,” says the boy. “That’s all.”

Dhoorre asks, “How can I relax when you haven’t told me why you are here in our house, with a gun, threatening to shoot me, an old man, of the same age as your grandfather, if you have one?”

“You say our house? How many of you live here?”

“My son, his family, and I.”

The exchange is interrupted by YoungThing’s cell phone. He is aghast. Perhaps the advance team from the command center is already at the gate, waiting to be let in. His voice breaking, he says, “Yes, Sheikh,” several times, bowing in deference to his absent commander. Dhoorre can sense an abrupt change in the boy’s body language, as though he has just realized that he has made a major gaffe, maybe even disobeyed a command. From the little he can gather, the boy is being told off by the man he addresses as Sheikh.

When the call finally ends, the boy seems more agitated than before and barks orders to Dhoorre. “Follow me into the house.”

When they are past the threshold, the boy says, “Go into the bathroom
and bolt the door from inside. Be quick about it. And make no sound.”

“What’s happening?” asks Dhoorre.

“I’ll do all I can do to spare your life,” the boy says.

When Dhoorre goes into the bathroom, the boy bolts the door from outside, too, and then goes to welcome the men at the gate.

AHL FEELS ELATED, LIKE A MAN WHO HAS THE WORLD IN HIS
sights, when he lands in Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa, forty-eight hours later. Relaxed, he walks over to the officer at Immigration to exchange brief banter with him, in Somali.

It’s been a tiring journey, the longest Ahl has undertaken for quite a while. It has also been almost as taxing as when he used to fly from Europe as a student, across the entire world to visit his mother and other family members in Malaysia. But he was younger in those days, and there was a lot of excitement in planning and then executing his travels. Not so anymore, or not this time. Until his arrival in Djibouti, there has been hardly any joy in making the trip.

So far, everything has gone without a hitch. In Paris, he picked up his visa from the Djibouti consulate in time for his departure out of Orly. They hardly bothered to scrutinize his form once he started speaking in Somali, if hesitantly at first. Ahl put “tourism” where the form asked the purpose of his travel, well aware that many people do not think of Djibouti as a tourist destination. Of course, he was tempted to tell the truth: that he was on his way to the Horn of Africa
in search of his missing son—there is no equivalent, in Somali, for
stepson
. Anyhow, from what he has read, Djibouti is worth a visit. Nature lovers especially are bound to admire the lunar look of the landscape, which boasts of geological wonders on a par with the best anywhere.

French was the operating language in the aircraft. In addition to a two-day-old
Le Monde
, Ahl found a copy of a day-old
Le Canard Enchaîné
, the French satirical paper, in his seat. He read the two papers, now one and now the other, since both had front-page pieces about a Panamanian-flagged, Norwegian-owned chemical tanker seized by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden, with the
Canard
providing more sensational copy about the seizure of the vessel and giving more inside information about the hostages’ communication with their families. The 50,000-ton bulk shipper had a crew of sixty, many of them—almost two-thirds—from Korea, and the captain was Norwegian.

On a
Canard
inside page, the article claimed that the hijackers were treating the hostages well, allowing them to speak to their families once a week. From the conversation between the seamen and their families, it became clear how the pirates had captured the boat. They arrived in twelve-foot fiberglass speedboats with inboard motors, escorted by two smaller skiffs with outboard motors; a mother ship waited close by. The ship, weighed down with heavy cargo, moved slower than the small boats. The second mate had alerted the captain to the presence of the boats. But before the captain was able to organize a way of repelling the attack, a dozen armed men had gained access to the tanker before the seamen had a chance to lock themselves in. The leader of the pirates found his way to the captain’s cabin, put a machine gun to the captain’s forehead, and vowed to kill him unless he instructed his men to go where they were told to go and do what they were told to do. The ship was directed toward Garcad, which came within view the following day. There, the captain was allowed to
make a call to the shipowners to inform them of their new situation. According to him, they wouldn’t release the ship unless they were given $25 million.

Too tired to read any more, Ahl puts the newspaper away. But as he tries to sleep, he keeps thinking about the details of several other attacks—on luxury yachts, on an Israeli boat carrying chemical waste, on a huge Korean-owned tanker loaded with almost sixty tanks and other heavy weapons, destination unclear. Certainly the pirates received intelligence from an unnamed informant, who suggested that the buccaneers approach with only two skiffs and attack from the port side. No doubt the pirates would not know that the seamen keeping watch were likely to focus on the starboard side. One of the pirates would claim later that they knew the nature of the cargo as well, having received intelligence about it. He went on to say that they knew, too, that the cargo would in itself interest the world media, a shipment of weapons intended for Sudan, where it would fuel the civil war to flare between north and south.

Ahl is aware of another more recent hijacking. The Saudi-owned supertanker
Sirius Star
had been taken by a hardened lot of pirates armed with shoulder-launched antitank weapons, rocket-propelled grenades, Kalashnikovs, and other small arms. The pirates had taken the ship close to their lair, within view of Hobyo. Several men from the Courts entered the fray, claiming that the pirates would not be allowed to hold hostage a ship that belonged to a Muslim nation. According to reports received in Minneapolis, it was this delegation for whom Taxliil had acted as translator.

On another occasion, persistent rumor had it that Taxliil, whom “History” (the instructor of the unit to which he was seconded) looked upon with favor, because he had been teaching her English, was given the honor of escorting the envoys from the Courts to meet up with a delegation that had arrived in Kismayo following the capture of an
Iranian-flagged boat in Puntland. The ship moored near the ancient historical town of Eyl, along with several other ships held within view of the town. While the negotiations for the release of this ship dragged on for months, rumor spread in the town that the pirates assigned to guard it were starting to lose much of their hair and breaking out in rashes or suffering skin burns. One of the pirates spoke to the local press of exposure to radiation or heavy doses of chemical waste that the ship was carrying.

Ahl is about to fall asleep when he hears the captain announce that they will be starting their descent into Djibouti in a few minutes and that the passengers must make sure their seat belts are on.

In his hotel room, Ahl lies on the bed, fully clothed and waiting for a local SIM card so that he can send a text message to his wife and to Malik, to let them know of his safe arrival. The air conditioner is on, and so is Al Jazeera, blaring in Arabic. As he listens, he thinks how every decade brings its own political troubles: Palestinians hijack aircraft for political reasons; the Italian Red Brigades kidnap Aldo Moro; the German Baader-Meinhof group assassinates bankers and top government officials. Just like Al Qaeda and its offshoots, of whom Shabaab claims to be one, are doing in Somalia. Despite the differences in their modus operandi, the differences in the provenance of their adherents, the use of terrorism for political gain runs through them. There was a time, in the sixties, when university-based movements engaged in agitations, albeit not as deadly. At present, entire regions are considered “terrorist territories”; entire nations are said to “host terrorism.” Western commentators clued in on recent events add Islam to the equation, work it into the quandary, as if the idea to terrorize is in the Muslim’s genetic makeup, forgetting that more Muslims than non-Muslims die at the hands of terrorism.

Now Ahl hears the maids in the corridor making a loud ruckus over a missing broom, nearly coming to blows over it. How he wishes Somalis in Minnesota showed the concern for their sons’ disappearance that these women do about a missing broom. The Somali imams at the mosques in Minnesota responsible for the young men’s disappearances go unchallenged. The feeling among Somalis is that it is a “clan thing.” The curse of it, Ahl thinks. Somalis, adept at surrounding themselves with smoke screens, relish confounding issues. You are seldom able to corner them, because they know how to give you the runaround.

The phone in the room rings, reception telling him his SIM card has arrived. He collects it immediately, then sends brief messages to Yusur and Malik, giving them his Djibouti mobile number, which will be valid for only twenty-four hours. On learning that the airline offices reopen at four, he takes a nap.

In a dream of a clear quality, he meets a Somali woman unknown to him in a room in an unfamiliar city. They talk about nothing in particular for a very long time. Then they go for a walk, up a mountain, into a valley of extreme greenery, the leaves shiny, the shade of the trees delicious. To make him speak, a masseuse offers him a massage.

He wakes up, feeling rested.

In search of something to eat, Ahl walks out of the hotel and turns left. He has a cap on against the glare and the midday heat. Here the sun is very, very strong and, never weakening, bakes everything in sight, shortening one’s shadow, almost obliterating it. He knows from having lived in Yemen that only after the sun has exhausted its stamina the afternoon shadows emerge.