Death Wave (31 page)

Adow led Taha into the wavering circle of firelight cast by burning scraps of lumber in a two-hundred-liter drum. Abdallah and several of his chief lieutenants stood there, warming themselves against the chill of the evening. Nearby loomed the ruin of the village’s tumbledown salt factory, a shell built by the Italians in the 1930s, long abandoned. Beyond, at the end of a long and rickety pier, Abdallah’s boat creaked and thumped with the movement of the surf. Other armed guards moved at the edge of the light, and Taha knew there were more in the ruins. The salt factory had become Abdallah’s fortress.

“So, my old friend Taha!” General Abdallah said, looking up from the burning drum with a broad, toothy grin. The looks on the faces of his lieutenants were darker, less open. “What news from our esteemed Ministry of Ports and Sea Transportation?”

Ahmed Babkir Taha had grown up in Hafun, but he’d moved to Mogadishu as a teenager, gone to work for a well-to-do uncle, and eventually been able to get an education in neighboring Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa. With his uncle’s import-export firm, he’d traveled as far as Cairo and Damascus, attracted the right attention, and finally been appointed as an assistant undersecretary of the Ministry of Ports and Sea Transportation within the Somalian transitional government-in-exile. His position gave him access to important information about what ships and cargos were entering Somalian waters.

That was information for which some groups paid handsomely.

“General Abdallah,” he said, bowing, then awkwardly saluting. “Your Excellency!” He was never quite sure of the proper protocol when dealing with these people … and a mistake, an insult, could be instantly fatal. “Excellent news!” he continued. “A cargo ship will be entering our waters in two days. A Russian ship, the
Yakutsk
. Her cargo is primarily machine parts and tools, but I was given information that she has another cargo on board, a highly secret cargo hidden among the crates of tools. My sources say that it is an extremely valuable cargo. The Russians will pay anything you demand to recover it.”

“And what cargo would that be?” Mohammad Fahiye asked. Fahiye, Taha knew, thought that he was a TFG lackey and did not trust him.

There was some truth in that, of course. Taha
did
work for the Transitional Federal Government, certainly … though his personal loyalties lay elsewhere. Like most of the locals, he believed that the government-in-exile was weak, a tool of the African Union and other foreign interests.

Then again, al-Shabaab was linked with the foreign al-Qaeda.
Everyone
in Somalia these days had foreign ties.

And in truth, Taha was less a supporter of the TFG than he was an enemy of the fundamentalist Islamic groups like al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam.

“Tell me about this ship,” Abdallah said, his dark eyes glinting in the firelight.

“She is a small and aging freighter, Shanghai to Haifa, with stops in Singapore and Karachi,” Taha said. “Twelve hundred tons. Speed less than twenty knots, a crew of twenty-one. There may be small arms aboard, but the ship otherwise is unarmed.”

“Allah be praised!” Adow said. “This may be what we’ve been looking for, my friends!”

Allah be praised indeed…

Taha was a devout Sunni Muslim. He believed implicitly in the power, the protection, and the mercy of God.

With that merciful God’s help, he would destroy these monsters.

Taha stood quietly as the pirates discussed the news. Adow, especially, seemed eager to go after the Russian ship, but Abdallah was hanging back, suspicious, perhaps, of such an apparently easy target. The foreign, Western navies had made things far more dangerous at sea lately. But as the earnest discussion continued, it appeared that Abdallah might be growing more interested as well.

Take it
, Taha thought.
Take the bait!

“Then this Russian ship with its valuable cargo will be moving up the Red Sea?” Abdallah asked. “There with Allah’s help, we will have her.”

The militia’s leaders burst into cheers and wild cries of
“Allahu akbar!”

HOTEL SOL
PUERTO NAOS
LA PALMA, CANARY ISLANDS
FRIDAY, 1755 HOURS LOCAL TIME

“You can’t stay here,” Lia told the writer as he sat down on her bed. “My people are making arrangements to fly you back to the States.”

“But … I’m not done here.”

“Done with what?”

“My
research
!”

“Mr. Carlylse, have you heard a word of what I’ve been telling you? The JeM wants you dead!”

“Yes, but why? I’m not a threat to anyone!”

Lia shook her head, exasperated. Carlylse seemed to live in a tightly wrapped little world of his own and had trouble seeing beyond his next deadline.

“Look, just tell me some more about this book of yours, the one about 2012 and the tidal wave.”

Carlylse fished around inside the zippered outer pocket of his suitcase and produced a paperback book. The cover showed the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., beneath ominous black skies, with a gray-green ocean wave towering hundreds of feet above the dome. The title,
Death Wave: The 2012 Prophecies Fulfilled
, showed in stark contrast against the dark and lightning-shot clouds.

“You know about the 2012 prophecies, right?” Carlylse asked her.

“Not much. Something about the ancient Mayans, right?”

“Right. The Mayans had a fantastically accurate calendar. They divided up history into four ages, or ‘Suns,’ each under the light of a different sun god, each one doomed to destruction. We’re in the Fourth Sun, the fourth age, now—and it ends in December of 2012.”

“And you think that an earthquake on La Palma is going to usher in the end of the world?”

“Certainly the end of the world as we know it. This island, this little fragment of lost Atlantis, is a kind of time bomb. When it goes, hundreds of cubic miles of rock will fall into the ocean and raise a tidal wave nine hundred feet high. Six hours later, that wave will start hitting the U.S. East Coast, up in New England, and by that time the waves will be down to a hundred fifty feet high, and they’ll smash over ten miles inland.”

“That doesn’t sound like the end of the whole world.”

“With the United States crippled? Our economy literally washed down the drain? The United States could be reduced to third-worldnation status. The financial collapse would bring down industrial economies all over the world. You’d have the radical Muslims claiming that Allah was ushering in a new age. You’d have hungry populations crossing borders like locust plagues, eating everything in sight. You’d have—”

“I get the picture.” She turned the paperback over, read the backcover blurb, and smiled. “Tell me, Mr. Carlylse, do you actually
believe
the stuff you write?”

“Well,” he said, and he sounded sheepish, “first and foremost, I
am
in the entertainment business.”

HAFUN
NORTHEASTERN SOMALIA
FRIDAY, 2212 HOURS LOCAL TIME

Taha returned to his home an hour after meeting with Abdallah and his lieutenants. He was still alive—and all praise to Allah for that small fact—and the al-Shabaab pirates had taken the bait.

It was now out of his hands, and in the hands of Allah the compassionate, the Most High.

Taha’s home was one of the older buildings, a mud-brick dwelling belonging to his father and his uncle. He greeted his father and mother in the front room, then excused himself as quickly as he politely could to go to the room in the back that served as his bedroom when he was in Hafun.

Here, one wall had been partially broken down by the tidal wave and crudely patched over with lumber and sheets of plywood. It was wet and it was drafty, but it served well enough when he wasn’t in Mogadishu or Addis Ababa. He went to the back corner next to the patchwork and began moving aside scraps of wood.

Perhaps, because of what he’d done this evening, Abdallah, Adow, and the rest would soon be gone. He prayed that that would be the case …

Like Taha and the others native to Hafun, Abdallah and his al-Shabaab militiamen were Sunni Muslims, but theirs was a different flavor of the holy faith, a faith largely alien to the fishermen of the northern coast, the region known as Puntland. It had been one thing when Abdallah had arrived with his boat, offering to help the fisherfolk of Hafun. It had been something quite different when Adow and other Sunni clerics with the group had begun imposing their beliefs on the locals.

The fact that Abdallah and his people were pirates meant little. Then inhabitants of Hafun made their meager livings by fishing, and everyone knew that more and more Somalian fishermen had been switching over to more lucrative means of earning an income these past few years. It had started innocently enough when some Somalian fishermen had begun boarding and seizing the fishing boats of other nations—Kenya and Djibouti, especially—that were entering Somalian waters to fish illegally. With no working government, no coast guard, no navy to keep the poachers out, the fishermen had begun taking matters into their own hands in order to preserve their own livelihoods.

It had not been long before they’d discovered that they could make far more money by capturing foreign cargo ships or the yachts of rich Europeans and holding them for ransom. That was all simply business, and a means for survival. Taha had done quite well for himself and his family by selling information on foreign ship movements to various pirate gangs.

No, the piracy meant nothing. Al-Shabaab, though, had become a monster.

For over a year now, Abdallah and his people had been terrorizing the inhabitants of Hafun and nearby Foar and Jibalei, implementing the shari’a, religious law, with a brutal, insanely self-righteous fervor. Taha knew well that the path of submission to Allah required sacrifice and hardship. Simply attempting to eke out an existence in Puntland required sacrifice on a daily basis.

But this was something more.

Since their arrival last year, al-Shabaab’s clerics had begun enforcing their version of shari’a on the region’s female population—ordering families not to allow their daughters to attend the foreigners’ schools on pain of death, ordering families to have “the cutting” carried out on all of their daughters in accord with ancient tradition, ordering the wearing of scarves and veils as well as the traditional head coverings to comport with
their
ideas of what constituted proper modesty.

Perhaps the most bewildering of all was the recent ban on bras, seen as “deceptive,” and therefore in violation of Islamic law. Beginning in Mogadishu in 2009, al-Shabaab militia gangs had been rounding up women and inspecting them in the streets. Those found to be wearing a bra were publicly stripped, given twenty lashes, and forced to shake their breasts in front of the militiamen after the whipping.

Women found to be wearing trousers could receive forty lashes, the maximum allowed by shari’a, after being stripped and shamed.

What, Taha wondered, could a just and merciful God possibly care about women’s clothing when the people were starving to death? The local people couldn’t protect themselves, were too poor, too hungry, too demoralized to attempt to flee.

In any case, where could they go?

Even worse was the enforcement of the cutting.

Taha still felt a certain fearful ambiguity about that. The cutting of a girl’s genitals when she approached marriageable age had long been sanctioned by Islamic culture and was common across Muslim Africa. What was not well known, however, was that the cutting was not required by the holy Qur’an; rather, it was an outgrowth of local cultures, something likely practiced here long before the Prophet’s message had come.

The militants like al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam claimed that only a rigid adherence to traditional Sunni values and religious law would save the people in the eyes of Allah—and that included everything from proper modesty to the cutting. Taha, however, had seen enough of the world to know that the
interpretation
of Islamic law and custom was different in, say, Cairo, where female genital mutilation was actually against civil law, than it was in a small village on the Horn of Africa.

He’d first begun to recognize the importance of those differences in interpretation when his ten-year-old sister had died in agony from an infection two weeks after she’d undergone the cutting.

Even in Egypt, most women still required their daughters to undergo the ordeal. Lately, though, more and more of the people, especially the younger ones, and especially the women, had been saying that perhaps the foreigners were right—that if the cutting was not enjoined by the holy Qur’an, then it was not necessary. They said that education, even of
girls
, was more important than the blind observance of ancient custom.

The outsiders, the militants from the South, carried a different message, and in Taha’s eyes, their message was not religion but an abomination, and Taha was determined to fight them in any way that he could.