Black Flag

by David Ricciardi

  The country fell into civil war.

  There was no law, no order, no government services.

  Foreign governments sent peacekeeping forces but most of those left after a few years, judging the mission to not be worth the cost. Between 300,000 and 500,000 Somalis died. Over a million lost their homes and livelihoods.

  The clans resumed their roles as the primary administrative authorities in Somalia, enforcing justice, brokering deals, and taxing the population. Many clan leaders grew corrupt, using their clan’s cash flow to amass personal fortunes. Soon they were building armies and fighting one another.

  They’d become warlords.

  Nothing was off-limits in their quest for money and power: extortion, drug smuggling, human trafficking. The civilian population of Somalia was caught in the middle of the warlords’ frequent conflicts and routinely subject to brutality and deprivation.

  The warlords fought in the streets of Mogadishu, and they fought in the countryside. The constant battles came at an enormous cost to the population. Those lacking the ruthlessness necessary to gain and retain power were eventually killed or relegated to administrative positions within their own clans.

  It was a power struggle that raged for decades, claiming victim after victim, until the struggle to be the next dictator of Somalia had come down to two men.

  * * *

  —

  THE ONE THEY called Badeed had been one of the earliest Somali pirates.

  Hungry and made homeless by the civil war, he’d been thirteen years old when he rowed out to a pleasure yacht anchored off the beach. He climbed aboard at night, while the British couple who owned it were asleep, and robbed them in their berth at knifepoint—relieving them of three hundred pounds, a few radios, and a Swiss watch. By the time he hauled his boat back onto the beach, the victims had already raised anchor and begun to sail away.

  It was a seminal moment for the young boy.

  There would be no consequences.

  He sold the swag and used the proceeds to buy an old pistol and a smoky outboard engine. He gathered friends and robbed more boats. The group soon acquired rifles and began boarding commercial ships. When the ships stopped anchoring near land, Badeed bought a second engine, slightly larger than the first, for his eighteen-foot wooden skiff. Soon he was attacking targets that were fifteen miles offshore and under way, steering the mismatched outboards by their tiller handles while his cohorts fired Kalashnikovs at the ships’ crews until they stopped their vessels.

  It was during the eighth of these offshore boardings that he’d acquired his nickname. Most Somali men had them—unflattering monikers that highlighted some unfortunate physical characteristic. He’d been scrambling up a wooden extension ladder, halfway up the side of a ship with a rifle slung over his shoulder, when a wave rolled under the skiff and knocked the ladder out from under him.

  He wasn’t in the water more than a minute when a shortfin mako shark took a bite out of his leg.

  From then on, he was known as Libaax Badeed baa Cunay. It meant “The One the Shark Has Eaten,” but everyone called him Badeed.

  Though the attack left him forever scarred and with a limp, its timing was fortuitous. Badeed used his convalescent time to think about his business, and he quickly realized that the five to ten thousand dollars that he was making from stealing portable electronics and the crews’ personal possessions were never going to make him rich. He started running his pirate gang from shore, using the proceeds from each mission to fund three more.

  Soon his crews were launching high-speed skiffs from eighty-foot motherships and using rocket-propelled grenades to attack armed and fast-moving ships. But Badeed’s teams were no longer robbing the ships’ crews; the pirates were bringing them back to shore, to his hometown of Kitadra, a Hawiye clan stronghold.

  With white sand beaches, turquoise waters, and palm trees overhanging the ocean, the tropical beach community would have made a popular port of call for cruise ships, but the men Badeed brought to Kitadra were far from tourists. They were hostages. Ransom payments were demanded from shipowners, insurance companies, family members, and anyone else who had an interest in the survival of the captives. Some of the men were held for weeks and some were held for years. Many died waiting for money that never came.

  But it made Badeed a millionaire many times over.

  He became chief elder of the Hawiye clan.

  And he raised an army.

  With the unemployment rate in Somalia above 50 percent, thousands of Hawiye clansmen joined up for little more than a meal, a gun, and a mat on which to sleep. From former military officers to boys too young to shave, Badeed’s fighting force took shape. He struck at the hearts of his rivals, quickly defeating all of the other warlords.

  Except one.

  * * *

  —

  LIKE MOST SOMALIS, Yaxaas was tall and lean, and his shoes were covered with dust from the dirt streets, but unlike most Somalis, his shoes were made from crocodile skin, and he owned the streets.

  His father had been a high official in Siad Barre’s regime but had resisted Barre’s growing embrace of Islamic socialism. He didn’t approve of the socialists’ flawed economic policies, their fundamentalist religious beliefs, or their overbearing Soviet masters.

  He was executed soon after they took power.

  On the day he learned of his father’s death, the boy’s mother revealed that his former nanny, a Bantu slave girl who’d been sold to his grandfather many years earlier, was his natural mother. The boy was cast out—no longer welcome in the family home.

  He was nine years old.

  The filthy alleys of Mogadishu were far from the socialist workers’ paradise envisioned by Barre, and the boy was soon reduced to fighting stray dogs for scraps of fetid garbage.

  He’d been living on the streets for three years when a Darood warlord known as Madowbe saw him wrestle a snarling mongrel to the ground and snatch a discarded chicken carcass from its mouth. Madowbe stopped his Cadillac sedan and his two bodyguards hauled the boy into the back seat. The warlord took one look at the boy’s chipped and crooked teeth, and from that day forward, he was known as Yaxaas.

  It meant “crocodile.”

  The warlord’s men spent a year training the boy to be an enforcer. He was sent to a jungle camp where he learned to fight and to kill. He learned well. Using his bare hands to end a man’s life elicited no more emotion from the thirteen-year-old than changing his shirt.

  The warlord realized that the boy’s mind was even tougher and more capable than his body. Yaxaas was given a job collecting protection money from local businesses. His production was exceptional. Shopkeepers and restaurateurs who’d resisted for years quickly submitted—or they found their loved ones kidnapped, tortured, and eventually killed.

  Yaxaas climbed swiftly up the clan hierarchy. He spent several years bribing public officials, extorting foreign aid workers, and leading the clan militia. It was a productive and profitable time for the young man. He’d found his calling in the warlord’s organization.

  Until the warlord got in his way.

  Madowbe had sensed the younger man’s ambition and worked to keep his protégé in check, but in a quiet moment alone, Yaxaas beat his mentor with his fists and didn’t stop until long past the moment of death, until the warlord’s face was unrecognizable.

  And Yaxaas became the new Darood warlord.

  He gained power and wealth rapidly, and though he’d always resented his nickname, he made it his own. He bought crocodile shoes, crocodile belts, and even a pair of crocodile-skin cowboy boots.

  Six years later, he bought a real crocodile.

  Fourteen feet long and eleven hundred pounds, with skin like cobblestones and teeth like icicles, the Nile was the largest species of freshwater croc in the world—an apex predator.

  And Yaxaas kept it out
side his office.

  The warlord’s compound filled an entire block in the Yaaqshiid District in eastern Mogadishu and he’d acquired it several years earlier when a missile launched at Ethiopian peacekeepers had slammed into the residential area. The blast destroyed several small homes, killing six and wounding eleven more. Yaxaas evicted the survivors and had the land bulldozed.

  From the outside, the cinder-block building looked like a warehouse that one might find in any urban area: surrounded by a high perimeter wall topped with barbed wire, a sturdy steel gate, and several vehicles. But the large courtyard in the center of the square building looked as if it belonged in a Mediterranean palazzo. It held a lush garden with a pond, a dozen different species of ferns, hundreds of Giant Protea flowers.

  And the crocodile.

  Little Yaxaas.

  FIVE

  THOUGH IT WAS small by Western standards, Pickens’s CIA safe house was luxurious for Mogadishu. It had two bedrooms with air conditioning units built into the wall, a combined kitchen and family room, tiled floors, and working plumbing. But as it was in most buildings with concrete walls, cellular coverage inside the safe house was terrible, and Pickens had gone outside to make a call on his mobile phone.

  Jake was sitting on his bed. He’d just finished typing a cable to headquarters on his laptop and was looking forward to indulging in one of the house’s greatest luxuries—a shower just after the water truck had just made its weekly delivery.

  Between the drought and the civil war, most of the city had no public water supply. The only way for homes to get fresh water was by delivery—usually from a truck, but nearly as often from a donkey cart with a plastic tank on it. But in either case, home delivery was expensive, and most of the city’s poorer residents were forced to carry water by hand from neighborhood wells.

  Jake’s first few days in-country had been so hectic that he’d been living out of his duffel bag and washed little more than his face. A real shower with real water pressure had passed the point of luxury and now become a necessity. He hauled his duffel out of the closet and accidentally dragged away a brightly colored woven mat that had been covering the closet floor.

  Underneath it was a trap door.

  Jake tugged at the recessed handle, but it didn’t budge.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” Pickens was standing behind him.

  “Didn’t mean to pry, just curious.”

  “You’d be a lousy field officer if you weren’t.”

  Pickens moved some clothes out of the way to reveal a digital keypad. He entered an eight-digit code.

  “Try it now,” he said.

  Jake lifted the trap door easily. Below it was a stairway.

  “You’re not cleared for this,” Pickens said, “but we’re partners now, so no secrets.”

  The two men had saved each other’s lives—it had forged a bond.

  Pickens fist-bumped Jake and flipped a light switch at the bottom of the stairs.

  “Holy shit,” Jake muttered.

  “The program serves a dual purpose,” Pickens said. “It takes this stuff off the streets and redistributes most of it to our African partners in the war on terror.”

  Jake walked farther into the cavernous room. Stacked floor-to-ceiling were wooden crates and plastic containers with identifying marks stenciled on their sides: rifles, pistols, ammunition. He looked to the right and spotted the raw materials for IEDs: crates of explosives and artillery shells. He looked to the left: RPGs, Russian land mines, and large, olive green crates with Chinese characters on them.

  “Are those—”

  “FN-6 shoulder-fired missiles,” said Pickens. “Designed to target low-flying aircraft. The Chinese sold them to the Saudis, who gave them to the Syrian rebels, who sold them in North Africa to generate some cash. Over here are a couple crates of PE8—British plastic explosives—that just showed up one day at a shop in Mogadishu. It’s serious stuff, and I’d never seen it in the Horn of Africa, so I bought every last block.”

  Pickens opened the top crate, revealing dozens of two-kilogram packs.

  “Like I said, I buy some of it just to take it out of circulation. Once it ends up on the dark web or in the crypto-bazaars, we lose it forever.”

  “How long have you been at this?”

  Pickens laughed. “Since the CIA was called the OSS.”

  Jake wandered through the basement in amazement. “Did you always dream of being an arms dealer?”

  “The only arms I dealt were these.” Pickens flexed his biceps. “I wanted to play in the NFL.”

  He was quiet for a few seconds. His lighthearted mood disappeared.

  “And I did it . . . I walked onto the New York Jets after college, added another twenty pounds of muscle, and suited up for the kickoff return in the first game of the season. Tore my hamstring halfway down the field and got cut that night. My pro football career lasted one play.”

  “Sorry, John. That must have been tough.”

  “It was a good lesson. My parents raised me to believe that if I worked hard enough, I could have anything I wanted, but that’s not how life works.”

  “Not always, but you’re serving your country, helping to stop a civil war, and keeping weapons out of the hands of warlords. That’s a job worth doing.”

  “Maybe, but it doesn’t pay much, and my wife divorced me when I skipped my first rotation back to the States. Now I see my kids three or four days a year. The job has cost me a lot.”

  Jake understood the sacrifice better than most. Born Zac Miller, he’d been chased across two continents, shot, and nearly killed on his first field mission for the Agency. The political fallout had forced him to fake his death, change his name, and abandon the only woman he’d ever loved.

  And it got worse from there.

  He derived a great deal of satisfaction from what he did—the mission to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves was what drove him forward when it would have been so easy to quit—but the toll on his mind and body was enormous.

  Only a handful of people knew the real story, and Pickens wasn’t cleared for any of it.

  “Sorry, brother,” said Jake.

  “I’m cool with it, but I’ve learned that you’ve got to do what you can, when you can, because you never know when your time is up.”

  Jake examined a crate of AK-47s lying open against the wall. On the side was stenciled SO XDS.

  “What does that mean?” he said.

  “Somali Army issue. Somebody raided an armory outside town, sold them to a dealer, and the next day you could buy one in the Bakaara Market for seven hundred bucks. That’s the scale of the problem we’re dealing with down here. Someone literally stole the army’s guns.”

  Jake kept walking. Along the back wall was a bench press, a gun safe, and a concrete ramp to a set of Bilco doors that had to be opened from the inside.

  “And all you have protecting this is that trap door in my closet?” Jake asked.

  Pickens gestured to the ceiling. Evenly spaced around the room were two dozen blocks of C4 plastic explosive that were connected by bundles of explosive detonating cord that ran to an alarm panel.

  “You wire that yourself?” Jake asked.

  “With a safe-separation timer, a collapsible circuit, and everything.” Pickens grinned. “I’ve become something of an expert in the field.”

  “It would turn this place into a volcano.”

  Pickens nodded. “If you hear the alarm, it’s probably too late.”

  “Do the sellers of all this stuff know you’re Agency?”

  “Hell no.” Pickens laughed. “And I’ll be doing this long after you’re gone, so I’ll need to maintain cover while you’re here. I won’t be able to go to every meeting with you.”

  Jake nodded as he walked around the basement. “I just can’t get my head arou
nd all the weapons,” he said. “How many arms dealers are there in Somalia?”

  “Too many to count,” said Pickens, “but most of the serious stuff is handled by a dude named Cawar.”

  SIX

  THE NICKNAME MEANT “one eye.”

  He’d lost the other one to an American bullet during the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, but unlike most men who’d lost an eye, Cawar didn’t wear a patch or dark glasses.

  It was just sewn shut.

  And by the looks of it, by someone with no prior experience in the field.

  * * *

  —

  HE’D GOTTEN HIS start soon after the Barre regime was deposed and Somalia fell into civil war. Frustrated with the near-anarchy, conservative Muslim elements in the southern part of the country had formed what came to be known as the Islamic Courts Union. Its original goal had been relatively narrow in scope—to provide a judicial system that transcended the clans, in this case, a system based on Islamic sharia law.

  But like most bureaucracies, the ICU continually sought to expand its mandate and soon attempted to regulate all aspects of Somali life, by force, if necessary. By 2006, the ICU controlled most of the country from the southern border with Kenya up to the capital city of Mogadishu.

  What passed for a government at the time and its Ethiopian allies advanced on the city, but Somalia was already in a massive humanitarian crisis, and retaking Mogadishu would have been costly in treasure and in lives. The government forces feared that an invasion would turn the city’s densely packed streets into rivers of blood.

  So they laid siege to it.

  Overextended across the country, weakened by a string of defeats, and facing a patient foe, the ICU appealed to the nation’s clan leaders to broker a deal. The clans whose power had once offended the Union now became its only salvation. The ICU sheiks approached Cawar—already a respected elder of the powerful Isaaq clan—and negotiated the surrender of the ICU’s armored vehicles, small arms, and heavy weapons. It was a massive collection of armaments, enough to deter two national armies from invading the capital city, but the clan took control of the weapons without incident. The ICU sheiks resigned their positions, the fighters melted into the population, and the government troops retook the city.