[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel (9 page)

His nephew frowned from the corner. The expression seemed permanent.

Taban’s optimism faded when I told him why I had come.

“A very risky trip for you, Mr. Dick,” he warned. “Fat Tony is very far from here, and if we drive, there will be many risks.”

“You’ll be well paid.”

“I am not worried about me. For me, there is no risk. For you…” He shook his head.

“What’s life without risk?” I asked. “Speaking of which, how ’bout a second helping of that roadkill stew?”

(IV)

Taban and his nephew Abdi met me at my hotel the next morning. Dressed in a light tan suit over a black T-shirt with a pair of Ray-Bans and a NY Yankees baseball cap, he looked vaguely like an American actor on holiday.

I, on the other hand, looked as African as I could manage with my white skin. I wore an oversized green khaki military uniform “borrowed” from some African Union soldiers for a few dollars, and a very loose head scarf that concealed much of my face. Even Taban was impressed.

“You look Russian, Mr. Dick,” he said approvingly. “Very good. You are ready?”

“Very ready.”

“Abdi, take our friend’s bag.”

“I have them,” I said, picking up my battered overnight bag. Aside from a change of clothes and a few electronic items I might need, the bag was empty. The narrow ruck on my back had some more tactical gear, but it too was very light.

Abdi frowned, and walked toward the door.

“Is he ever in a good mood?” I asked Taban.

“But he is very happy today,” said Taban. He didn’t seem to be joking. “He is a very good boy, Mr. Dick. To me, like a son.”

Taban led me through the lobby, past the two bellhops who accessorized their uniforms with bandoliers and assault rifles. A pair of Land Rovers and six men with rifles were waiting at the curb. Taban walked to the rear of the first and retrieved an assault rifle—the MP5 was too valuable to take on the road.

“Take, take,” he said, sounding as if he were talking about hors d’oeuvres.

I took an AK47 for myself. (Paratrooper’s model with the folding stock.) It was one of the lighter weapons in the back of the truck. Besides a pair of RPGs and a British mortar, there were two Belgian light machine guns and a Russian PKP “Pecheneg,” a light machine gun used by the Spetsnaz special op troops. There were also two boxes of grenades, and dozens and dozens of spare magazines for the AKs. I helped myself to plenty of the latter, then took a seat in the front of the first Rover. Taban was driving; two of his men, Rooster and Goat, were in the backseat. Abdi was driving the others in the second vehicle.

Mogadishu sprawls like a cockleshell from a small downtown area near the port. The federal government controls only about a quarter
8
of the city proper, its pie-shaped wedge bordering the water in the south quadrant.

There aren’t any skyscrapers, but if you happen to visit—something I don’t recommend—you’ll be surprised by the number of modern buildings. Somalia was an Italian colony and protectorate until 1960, and by African colonial standards at least, was relatively civilized.

At first, the difference between the government zone and the area to the north dominated by al-Shabaab was subtle. Teenagers with AKs patrolled the streets in front of rundown buildings—barely a difference there. Then I started noticing graffiti and walls with more holes than bricks. Then came the open pit fires and crowds of women standing and staring, as if they’d just received electroshock therapy and were waiting for the buzz to subside.

We were headed inland, but our destination was a village named Eyl, some five hundred miles north on the coastline. Eyl has gained some notoriety of late as the supposed capital of the pirate force terrorizing the waters off northeastern Africa. It’s located near the bottom of Puntland, the spear-shaped northern region that includes much of the area used as a base by various pirates. Everyone—except the UN and Foggy Bottom
9
—pretty much considers Puntland a country separate from the rest of Somalia. It has its own lawless government, meaning that it’s basically ruled by its own set of tribal leaders, warlords, and ne’er-do-wells.

The different categories are significant to actual Somalis. If you’re an outsider, the chaos is pretty much seamless.

The region itself is your basic desert scrubland, with marginal ability to support agriculture. Drive up the highway from Mogadishu and you’ll see vast rolling hills of gray rocks and tan grit pockmarked with clumps of stunted greenery.

We drove northwest out of the city, then angled up on a long, straight road that stayed some eighteen or twenty miles from the coast. Taban claimed this was for security, and there was some truth in that—the road along the sea is (slightly) more dangerous. But there was also less chance of running into a government (local, mostly) checkpoint. Given that Taban didn’t like to pay tolls, the route had probably been chosen because it was cheaper as well.

Dust furled from the Land Rovers in a pair of vertical tornados as we drove. Once outside the city, Taban became talkative again. A few months before my visit, SEAL Team Six had made a rather dramatic rescue of two American hostages in Gadaado—a village in Puntland not all that far from where we were going. Since then, said Taban, his services as a negotiator had been in more demand. He was a rare thing for Somalia, an honest person.

“Soon, this will all end,” he told me solemnly and with more than a little sadness. “The insurance companies are taking a harder line. The pirates and kidnappers will learn that they will be punished rather than cheered, they will begin to find other work. There will be no more big paydays for them—or for me.”

“Then what will you do?”

“I will have my restaurant,” he said brightly. “Tourists will come, and I will be a very rich man.”

Mogadishu, tourist destination? I’m sure it would rank right up there with Orlando and New York. But I didn’t have it in my heart to step on his dream.

*   *   *

We got to Eyl about midafternoon, and drove through the dusty main road at a steady but slow clip—too fast and you were obviously scared, too slow and you were too good a target. Steel-roofed houses were scattered along the scrub almost like a child’s toys left out overnight. Just beyond them were much larger houses with high walls around them to keep the animals in and the riffraff out. The center of town looked like a downtrodden mishmash of one-story buildings dating from the mid-twentieth century. There were maybe two dozen lean-to storefronts, open to the street, and a handful of simple but new brick-block buildings that dwarfed everything around them. Most of these, Taban explained, were restaurants, built for the hostages who were kept here.

“There must be quite a lot for them to have restaurants,” I said.

“Two hundred here. But in all this city, there is still only one good place to eat.”

Pairs of men in light brown khakis sporting AKs stood in front of several of the buildings, but otherwise the main drag looked like any other sleepy town in Africa. In many respects, Puntland was safer than Mogadishu—
if
you belonged here.

If not, you were soon either joining the guests at the restaurants, or a permanent 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 in checkered pants and cooking smocks stood over a counter, arguing vigorously over some fine point of food preparation. The one on the left had an eight-inch chef’s knife, which he flicked against a chopping board to accent his points. The other had a cleaver, which he flailed around in the air, either chasing some unseen fly or demonstrating how he would install several new scars to the other man’s scalp.

Taban continued past them to a set of steel steps in the right corner of the kitchen. I followed. The door at the top was open, and we walked into a room filled with personal computer stations. Only about half were occupied; I counted a dozen men hunched over the keyboards, pecking furiously.

“Fat Tony has been branching out,” whispered Taban as we walked toward the back of the room. “They are now doing e-mail solicitation.”

“My old friend, Taban,” said Fat Tony, rising from an upholstered chair in front of a TV set. “And my very good friend, Mr. Dick. We have met in the flesh for the first time.”

He clasped my hands as if I were a long-lost relative—one who’d recently won a very big lottery.

“Very pleased to meet you,” I told him as he released me. I resisted the temptation to count my fingers.

“It is the pleasure mine, to meet a man of your caliber.” Fat Tony’s accent if not his grammar shaded toward Britain, where he had gone to school. “Have you seen my restaurant?”

“Yes.”

“For our clients,” he confided in a stage whisper. “They are not used to the local food. Taban gave me the idea.”

Taban beamed proudly.

“Unfortunately, we didn’t have sufficient notice of your visit,” continued Fat Tony. “Or we would have prepared a great feast. We will still have a dinner, though—our best food on short notice.”

“Please, don’t go to any trouble,” I said.

“Trouble? For a famous American? There is no trouble!”

“We have some business to discuss,” said Taban.

“First, some refreshment,” insisted Fat Tony. He started for the door.

“What’s with all the computers?” I asked.

“Data processing. New area of business growth.”

You know those scam e-mails that fill your in-box with news of a lottery you’ve never heard of? And the notes about a downtrodden widow who needs an American connection to liberate ten million dollars? They don’t just come from Nigeria anymore.

Fat Tony took us downstairs to the restaurant and sat us in the middle of the room. A pair of skinny young men appeared within a few moments carrying pitchers of water and a few cans of soft drinks. I passed on the water—always wise in Africa—but took one of the soft drinks to be sociable. It tasted like a cross between coconut juice and very weak ginger ale; nothing that couldn’t be improved by a little gin.

“So, Mr. Dick,” said Fat Tony finally. “How can I help you?”

“I represent a group of investors who will have a ship sailing in the area very soon,” I told him. “And they want to insure safe passage.”

His eyes widened, and he asked for details. I gave him a cagey response, enough to make it clear that I was buying safe passage for a shipment of drugs without actually saying that.