Black Flag

by David Ricciardi

  And Cawar became the largest arms dealer in Africa.

  Government officials, Islamic radicals, other clan leaders, and the nation’s warlords all sought his support, but Cawar remained steadfastly neutral. He sold weapons and ammunition to anyone who could pay, never tipping the scales too far to one side lest the conflict come to an end. War wasn’t just good for business. It was his business.

  Cawar reinvested the proceeds from his initial windfall and cultivated fresh sources of new weapons from black markets on three continents. He became immensely rich, but worked out of a dingy warehouse in the northern Shibis district halfway between the Damanyo government military camp and the local soccer stadium. It was outside his traditional clan stronghold in the Hodan district, and surrounded by squalid private homes, a truck dealership, and the Islamic University.

  But Cawar had chosen the location carefully, intent to show that he was a friend to the government, the people, the warlords, and the religious.

  An equal-opportunity merchant of death.

  SEVEN

  THE MAN WAS on his knees, pleading for his life.

  They always did.

  It was pathetic.

  The forty-six-foot fishing boat rolled a few degrees as a small swell passed underneath her. The calm winds and a cloudless blue sky would have been ideal weather had it not been the same, every day, for the past two years. The sun had been relentless: scorching fields, killing livestock, and starving the population.

  It was the same offshore.

  Hot, still, oppressive.

  It was time to finish this thing.

  “Two things can drown you,” Badeed said to his captive, quoting an old Somali proverb, “too many enemies and too much water. Unfortunately for you, you have both.”

  The warlord nodded to his henchmen.

  One of them kicked the prisoner in the back, sending him face-first onto the deck, and bound his wrists behind his back. The man was in tears, explaining that he had a family, that he would come up with the money, if only the warlord would let him live.

  But the time for that had passed.

  One of the crew rolled an empty fifty-five-gallon drum across the deck and poked a few holes in it with a screwdriver and a hammer, although the barrel was so old and rusty that he hardly needed the hammer.

  The prisoner was spewing gibberish now—alternately threatening and cajoling his captors. Two deckhands yanked him to his feet and stuffed him in the drum. Another one dumped an eleven-inch brown rat into the barrel before clamping on the lid.

  The rat shrieked its displeasure.

  So did the man.

  Cries for mercy echoed from inside the barrel as the two largest deckhands lifted it from the deck and balanced it on the ship’s gunwale.

  Badeed gave the signal. It was a subtle gesture, no more than a flick of the chin, but two seconds after the warlord did it, the barrel tumbled into the ocean. Water seeped through the holes while the man thrashed inside, desperately trying to escape.

  The rat attacked, fighting for the rapidly shrinking space inside the barrel that still had air. Squeals and screams floated over the water as the drum drifted away.

  Blood seeped into the ocean.

  The waters off the coast of Somalia were excellent fishing grounds and dense with marine life, and the deckhands traditionally made bets on whether the sharks would come before or after the prisoner drowned. The predators usually investigated the barrel with their snouts and their teeth until they found a spot where the rusted metal was soft. Then, like a can of tuna fish, they’d tear open the metal and feast on the meat inside.

  The irony was not lost on the warlord.

  But no bets were made today. The crew was eight miles from shore, the heat was stifling, and Badeed had an important lunch meeting. The barrel had just dipped below the surface when they fired up the engines and headed for the dock.

  EIGHT

  THE TWO MEN had met for lunch for nearly a decade. Though families and careers and the other complexities of life often caused their outings to be rescheduled, they were never canceled, for the meetings were more than social gatherings. They were matters of life and death.

  Despite a thatched roof providing shelter from the sun, and two overhead fans stirring the otherwise still air, the open-air restaurant was mostly empty. The thirteen armed guards stationed along the dead-end road might have had something to do with it, but no one complained, because Badeed owned not only the restaurant but the town as well.

  “You have done wonderful things for your hometown,” said Cawar.

  Badeed might have dismissed the compliment as an attempt to curry favor were it not true. The warlord had provided Kitadra with not only security but a medical clinic, a school, and a new mosque. He had done the same for the Hawiye areas of Mogadishu. In the absence of an effective central government, the clan leaders had stepped into the void.

  For a reasonable fee, obviously.

  “I am sorry I was delayed,” Badeed said. “I had some business to attend to.”

  The two men raised their glasses of sweet chai tea. The conversation meandered like a winding river, touching on family and friends, who’d been born and who had died, and of course, the drought, and how to best profit from it. One of Badeed’s associates had become fabulously wealthy after wresting Mogadishu’s bottled water concession from a Darood clan rival.

  The two men shared plates of stewed camel meat and roasted goat.

  “Business has been challenging of late,” began the arms dealer. “So many AMISOM and U.S. forces are here that what used to be simple is now complex and what used to be highly profitable is now much less so. Were it not for a single large client, my business would be down significantly from last year.”

  Badeed looked at his lunch guest and waited.

  The arms dealer looked around to ensure no one was in earshot. They were mostly alone in the restaurant, but the dramatic gesture had the desired effect—Badeed leaned forward to hear better.

  “Yaxaas has been arming to the teeth,” said Cawar.

  Badeed scowled at the mention of his nemesis. Yaxaas had demanded protection money from him in the early years of Badeed’s ascendancy, and the two warlords were now the dominant powers in Somalia—evenly matched after nearly a decade of armed conflict. The country would belong to whoever was able to defeat the other.

  “What’s the old crocodile up to?”

  “I do not know his plan,” said the arms dealer, “but I can feel his ambition.”

  “He is like a shadow,” said Badeed dismissively. “In the morning he is turned in one direction, and in the evening, the opposite. I have seen this before.”

  “Not like this. He is spending every last shilling on arms and men.”

  “Then do me a favor, old friend—for every weapon he buys, you must sell me two.”

  NINE

  YAXAAS STOOD IN the bedroom adjoining his office. A Bantu girl lay naked on the bed next to him, rubbing her wrists where the handcuffs had dug into her skin.

  Though Mogadishu was barely a hundred miles north of the equator, the room was pleasant with a ceiling fan turning slowly overhead and the French doors open to the courtyard.

  A white goat stood among the flora, eyeing the pond. It took a step forward, poking its head through a cluster of ferns. The water was twenty feet away.

  The goat walked to the pond’s edge, took a sip, then raised its head in alarm. Its eyes, with horizontal slits for pupils, could see almost three hundred degrees around its body—and they’d sensed motion.

  But it was only a gust of wind rustling the plants.

  The goat lowered its head and resumed drinking.

  The fourteen-foot-long crocodile exploded forward, closing the distance in less than a second. The goat turned to run, but the prehistoric predator clamped its teeth around the goat’s r
ear leg. The croc’s jaws were the most powerful force in the mammalian world, exerting almost 3,500 pounds of pressure per square inch. The goat wasn’t getting away.

  Little Yaxaas dragged it backward into the pond, and the goat’s plaintive bleating stopped as the croc took it to the bottom.

  The warlord smiled and finished getting dressed.

  Yaxaas walked downstairs and out of the building. A security guard carrying a Kalashnikov unlocked the gate as the warlord approached. Other guards were already out on the street, patrolling the perimeter.

  The dogs were on their feet, waiting. One was missing a leg, another an eye. All had scars on their necks and haunches. They were wild, feral animals, snarling and nipping at one another as the warlord approached.

  He took a basket from one of the guards and tossed chunks of goat, cow, camel, and chicken to the street, letting the dogs determine who would eat and who would not. In ten minutes, they’d eaten more meat than the average Somali family would consume in a month, or maybe a year.

  A few beggar children were out as well, watching with dirty faces and bare feet, but Yaxaas had nothing for them but scorn.

  He knelt down and let the dogs lick his hands. Maybe it was gratitude, or maybe the animals were just lapping up juices left over from the meat he’d thrown, but the warlord didn’t care. He scratched the last mutt behind the ears for a few seconds and headed inside past his guards.

  His only son was waiting for him.

  Born thirty-two years earlier to a mother who’d disappeared a few months after his birth, he had inherited many of her physical qualities—he was taller and more muscular than Yaxaas—but his personality had undoubtedly come from his father.

  He was known as Nacay. The nickname meant “detestable” and it had not been given in jest. Even Yaxaas had blanched at some of the things his son had done. Where the father was calculating and dispassionate in the application of violence, Nacay was capricious and often viewed it as a form of entertainment. He reveled in the suffering of others, taking an almost erotic pleasure in watching someone—be it man, woman, or child—beg for their lives.

  “Cawar is waiting in your office,” he said.

  The warlord grunted and father and son went inside to join the arms dealer. Adorning the walls of Yaxaas’s office were African tools of war from the last ten thousand years: iron axe heads, copper spear tips, and dozens of knives and daggers. It was an impressive collection, worthy of a museum—or a slaughterhouse.

  Cawar rose from a rattan sofa and greeted his host. He gave Yaxaas a three-foot-long Ngulu sword. Its question-mark-shaped blade was designed to catch and sever a man’s neck.

  “I will find a place of honor for it.”

  “I am sorry for arriving unannounced,” said the arms dealer, “but if I hadn’t, I believe that you would wish I had.”

  “All is forgiven. We have been friends for many years and survived many trials together.”

  Cawar smiled. “Like the Ethiopians?”

  Yaxaas snorted and slowly shook his head.

  The arms dealer turned to face Nacay. “It was many years ago, when your father was still working for Madowbe and I had not yet acquired my trading business. We were driving an old truck on a dirt trail at night, with no muffler and no lights, when we were suddenly blinded. There were so many spotlights, headlights, and searchlights that I thought we had driven straight into the sun. We were surrounded by Ethiopian security forces.”

  “There must have been fifty of them!” added Yaxaas. “All yelling and pointing weapons at us. We stepped out of the truck with our hands up when their officer approached and demanded to know what we were up to.”

  “I told him we were delivering vegetables,” Cawar admitted sheepishly.

  “We had no bananas, no cucumbers, absolutely nothing to support the fiction. Old Cyclops here couldn’t even remember what kind of vegetables we were supposed to be carrying when the soldier asked him.”

  “The officer opened the back of the truck and there was nothing there. We told him we’d sold everything and were on our way home, but he didn’t budge, so Cawar offered him twenty U.S. dollars. He took it but still didn’t move, so Cawar gave him another twenty.”

  “I saw him shift on his feet,” Cawar said, “so I knew we had him. I gave him a handful of Ethiopian notes, probably worth another five dollars, and told him it was all we had. The soldier waved us on, and we made it home a day and a half later, none the worse for wear.”

  “They were looking for poachers,” said the arms dealer.

  “And we had a quarter of a million dollars hidden in the truck’s spare tire!” said Yaxaas. “That army officer could have been rich.”

  The three men were still laughing when the young girl knocked on the door and entered. Cawar examined every curve of her body as she poured three glasses of tea through a strainer and walked out of the room.

  “Tell me what’s bothering you,” Yaxaas said.

  “It was told to me in confidence . . .”

  The warlord looked sideways at his old friend.

  “Out with it,” said Yaxaas. “You can take her home with you to salve your conscience.”

  Cawar’s leering eyes shifted to the warlord. “It’s Badeed. He’s amassing men and weapons . . . far more than he needs for defense.”

  “So what does he have planned?”

  “Forgive me for being blunt, but these skirmishes in Mogadishu have weakened you both.”

  “So he’s re-arming?”

  “It’s more than that . . .”

  Yaxaas gave his old friend another look.

  “He thinks you’re weak,” said Cawar. “He senses an opportunity to consolidate power once and for all.”

  “Then he’s stupider than I thought. Whatever he’s buying, I’ll buy double.”

  TEN

  IT WAS JUST after midnight when the twelve pirates split up.

  Eight stayed aft and four went forward, led by a tall man with piercing blue eyes.

  Though the DoubleDown was technically a Suezmax-class ship, anyone outside the shipping industry would have called it a supertanker. Nine hundred feet long and one hundred sixty feet wide, the ship steamed through the Arabian Sea at eighteen knots as she ferried a million barrels of jet fuel from a refinery in Mangaluru, India, to the Mediterranean Sea.

  Clad in gray and black camouflage, the four pirates advanced in the shadows of several large cargo transfer pipes that ran the length of the ship. By the time they reached the foredeck, they were seven hundred feet from the superstructure and invisible to the crewmen standing watch on the bridge.

  There were two former French marines facing forward, watching the sea and crewing a mounted machine gun. They were part of the ship’s vessel protection detail. The armed detachments had been effective against the first-generation pirates who’d assaulted ships using extension ladders and AK-47s, but the group of men that had snuck aboard the DoubleDown was nothing like first-generation pirates—they were a tier-one special operations team specializing in noncompliant boardings—and short of a military force, they had no equal.

  They advanced slowly, silently.

  Maritime assault boots. Knees bent slightly. Rifles at high ready.

  From twenty yards away, the pirates lined up on the two vessel protection marines and fired a suppressed round into the back of each man’s head in case he was wearing body armor.

  “Bow clear,” said the lead pirate over his radio.

  “Bow clear, roger,” came the reply from the mission commander.

  The breacher in the team of eight pirates used a Halligan tool to pry open a metal door at the base of the superstructure and the eight men poured inside. There was a staircase ahead and a few utility rooms to the sides, but no sign of the ship’s crew. Two pirates held the space while the others returned outside and divided their force onc
e again. Three went to port and three to starboard.

  The pirates had practiced the takedown so many times that they knew how many steps it was between each turn, every blind spot, and every area that presented a risk of fratricide.

  They reached the port and starboard exterior staircases and climbed five flights. The next level up on the T-shaped superstructure held two metal catwalks. Known as bridge wings, they were outdoor extensions of the bridge that allowed the ship’s officers to walk the full width of the ship from eighty feet above the deck.

  The teams crouched along the catwalks until they reached the doors to the bridge. One of the pirates from the port-side team peeked inside. It was a massive room—seventy feet wide and eighteen feet deep. Except for the dim red lighting, it looked more like a high-rise office building than a ship. There were leather chairs, a dozen computer monitors, and six men standing watch.

  The DoubleDown’s chief mate was discussing the ship’s malfunctioning electronics with the chief engineer. The two men speculated that only a generator malfunction, or maybe a massive solar flare, could have caused everything to crash simultaneously.

  “Could be an electromagnetic pulse,” suggested one of the other officers.

  Each was hesitant to voice what he really thought.

  The chief mate had spent sixteen years as a merchant marine officer, mostly on tankers plying the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. He was no stranger to the threat of piracy. He’d been at sea during its heyday in the Gulf of Aden, and it was not something one forgot—stories of ships’ crews being held at gunpoint off the Horn of Africa for months or even years, living in fear and filth until distant insurance companies and faceless shipowners could agree on ransom payments for the safe return of the ship, crew, and cargo.