by Dave Eggers
An official notice from the U.S. State Department said that “there are no plans for a US government-coordinated evacuation of US citizens at this time. We encourage all US citizens to shelter in a secure location until they are able to depart safely. US citizens wishing to depart should do so via commercial transportation options when they become available.”
This led to the creation of a website, StuckInYemen.com, which documented the plight of those remaining in Yemen. The site was supported by the American Muslim advocacy groups including the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Asian Law Caucus. The site grew to include a registry of seven hundred Americans hoping their government would provide a way out of Yemen.
Under pressure from Arab American civil rights groups, another State Department spokesman, Jeff Rathke, explained that those Americans remaining in Yemen had made their own bed and now they must lie in it. Because they had ignored long-standing warnings from the American government, he implied, this was on them. “For more than fifteen years the State Department has been advising U.S. citizens to defer travel to Yemen, and we have been advising those U.S. citizens who are in Yemen to depart,” he said.
At another State Department press conference, another spokesperson, Marie Harf, referred vaguely to escape “opportunities” for Americans.
One reporter asked her for clarity. “What are those opportunities?” he asked. “Swim?”
—
Mokhtar needed to get out immediately. He had to make it to the SCAA conference in Seattle, and he had to escape the escalating violence (in that order). Every day, he checked with the travel agent to see if any flights were leaving. But the airport was still in shambles. There was no hope of it opening anytime soon.
The bombing continued, most of it concentrated at night. The Saudis had named the campaign Operation Decisive Storm, and claimed to have the participation of nine other nations, most of them with predominantly Sunni populations. Jordan, Morocco, Sudan, Kuwait and Bahrain had supplied fifteen jets each. The United Arab Emirates had provided thirty. Senegal, Qatar and Egypt were part of the coalition, too. But most of the operation was Saudi led, with 100 Saudi jets participating and 150,000 Saudi troops mobilized.
The scope of the bombing expanded. First it was the air force base outside Sana’a and munitions dumps. Then major roads connecting the capital to Taiz and Aden. By Saturday, March 28, at least thirty-four civilians had been killed in the strikes.
—
By its fifth day, the bombing had become oddly normalized, at least in the center of Sana’a. Mokhtar went to Andrew’s house. Andrew might have options, he thought, might have answers. He definitely had qat.
Mokhtar got in a taxi and directed the driver to El-Bonia. When they were close to Andrew’s house, smoke billowed from the taxi’s engine.
“Overheated,” the driver said, and they stopped.
Mokhtar got out and saw a shop selling flower necklaces—a Yemeni version of a Hawaiian lei. He laughed to himself, thinking he’d buy one for Andrew and one for Ali. Some kind of bombing-survival gift. He bought two and got back into the taxi as the driver closed the hood.
Andrew and Ali laughed when Mokhtar presented the leis. Andrew put his on, and the three men sat in Andrew’s apartment and stuffed their cheeks with qat. Mokhtar opened his laptop, looking for news. There was nothing promising. He went on the U.S. State Department site to see if there were any options. None. The afternoon wore on.
At dinnertime Ali said he’d drive Mokhtar home. The city was quiet. Knowing the bombing could start anytime after dark, the residents of Sana’a had gotten into the habit of choosing their destinations before night fell. No one wanted to be in the streets after that.
The sky grew dark while Mokhtar and Ali were still making their way across the city. And now Ali suggested going to the mill. He needed to be there, and it was on the way to Mokhtar’s. Would he mind?
Mokhtar had no choice. All the taxis were gone for the night. They went to the mill. On the way, the bombing began. This was the first night Mokhtar was moving while the bombs fell, and the sensation was new. The ground rumbled beneath the taxi. There was the faint shushing of faraway targets reduced to dust.
When they got to the mill, they watched the war through the window. Antiaircraft fire lit up the sky. Mokhtar turned on his phone’s camera and filmed the tracers as they flew upward beyond Faj Attan Mountain. The Saudis had hit a munitions dump. An orange cloud of fire bloomed to three hundred feet. There were explosions within the explosion. It was no more than a quarter mile away.
It’s time to leave Sana’a, Mokhtar thought.
But this was no time to leave the mill—at least not that night. With this new attack so close to the mill, Mokhtar had no idea what might happen next. The Saudis had already hit homes, markets, hospitals, but there had been some ostensible plan to their bombing. Now it seemed possible they might begin bombing industrial buildings. There could be chaos, looting. Mokhtar thought of the five tons of coffee he had stored in the mill. If it was stolen, that would extinguish all the work of the last eighteen months.
“You know what?” he told Ali. “I’ll stay here tonight.”
Ali refused to leave him. “I’ll take you home,” he said. There was no logic in staying so close to this last explosion, he insisted.
Mokhtar told him to go home, that he’d stay and watch the mill.
Ali left, and Mokhtar set himself up in the office. He gathered the couch cushions and fashioned himself a bed. The bombs shook the city every ten minutes, but he grew used to it. Just before midnight he found himself drifting off to sleep.
His phone pinged. Don’t check it, he told himself. Just try to sleep.
He checked it.
It was a message from Summer Nasser. Mokhtar knew her through social media; she was a Yemeni American based in New York. While visiting family in Aden, she’d gotten stuck in Yemen, too. She’d heard there was a Greek ship leaving Aden in the morning, at 9:30 a.m. She was going to get on it.
“I’ll save you a spot,” she said.
CHAPTER XXX
THE SUMMER SHIP
MOKHTAR WAS SUDDENLY VERY awake. Aden was an eight- or nine-hour drive, due south. He’d have to find a vehicle that could make the trip. And a driver. Maybe a bodyguard. They would be traveling through an active war zone. There could be dozens of checkpoints. He’d have to pack a sampling of his beans, and enough cash to get on the ship and onto a flight to Seattle. They’d have to drive double time through the heart of Yemen, in the middle of an all-night Saudi bombing campaign. It was a ludicrous proposition.
But then Mokhtar had an equally absurd vision of himself in Seattle, speaking to coffee buyers there, telling them the story of Yemeni coffee, collecting orders, preselling tons of coffee, making this business real. He wanted that. And he didn’t want to let Saudi bombs determine what he could and couldn’t do. He prayed the Istikhara, a prayer to God to provide answers.
Is this the right path? he asked Allah.
He felt an answer: it was right.
That was enough. He wanted to go, and Summer’s message appearing just after he’d seen a nearby mountain explode: it seemed like a confluence of meaningful indicators. The last time he’d had this same feeling—a feeling of destiny obliterating all doubt—was when he’d seen that Hills Bros. statue across from the Infinity and decided to devote his life to coffee.
He called Summer. “I’m coming.”
He called Andrew and told him about Summer and the Greek ship.
Andrew was half-asleep.
“Don’t go,” he told Mokhtar. “Aden is an actual war zone. There is an actual ground war happening there.”
Mokhtar was undeterred. Andrew called Ali.
“Can you talk some sense into Mokhtar?”
Ali called Mokhtar, but Mokhtar couldn’t be dissuaded. Finally Andrew and Ali gave up trying to stop him, but they wouldn’t let him go alone.
Mokhtar called his family’s driver, Samir. M
okhtar asked him to go, told him he’d be well paid. Samir was terrified.
“No,” Samir said. “And you shouldn’t go either.”
Mokhtar hung up. He had no options.
Meanwhile, Ali called two friends, Sadeq and Ahmed. They lived in the neighborhood of Andrew’s mill and had helped the night before, when Andrew moved his beans from the mill to his house. They agreed to make the drive to Aden for a modest fee. Sadeq said he could borrow the truck he usually drove during the day. He didn’t own it, but the company he worked for wouldn’t know. Mokhtar negotiated a price for the vehicle and for Ahmed to drive through the night, Sadeq along for numbers.
—
Mokhtar started packing. What did he need? He rushed back to Kenza and Mohamed’s apartment and put two clean shirts and a pair of pants in a backpack with his phone and laptop. He added a change of socks and underwear. He strapped four thousand dollars in U.S. currency to his waist and tucked his Colt .45 into his belt.
Now the beans. He borrowed a hard-shell Samsonite suitcase and went downstairs to his sorting room. He grabbed a bag of beans from Haymah. The widow Warda’s. The General’s. Hubayshi’s. What else? He saw the faces of the farmers. How could he leave any of their work behind? He settled on an assortment from the north and south, from six different farms. Whatever he brought would have to represent Yemeni coffee in Seattle. A sampling of the best beans he had—the best beans grown in Yemen in eighty years, a haphazard but still significant representation of the coffee from the country where coffee was first cultivated and the manifestation of five hundred years of tradition.
Mokhtar closed the suitcase and tried to lift it. It was too heavy and wouldn’t zip. He had to lighten it. What segment of the history of Yemen could be removed? If he’d had time to do this right, to pack six suitcases, as he’d planned, to carefully choose his samples and then get on a plane out of Sana’a like the businessman he’d fashioned himself to be, he wouldn’t be looking at a suitcase after midnight, having to choose which regions of Yemen would not be represented when he reintroduced the country’s coffee to the world. He removed a dozen samples and closed the suitcase. He carried it downstairs and waited for his ride.
Sadeq pulled up in a sixteen-wheel flatbed. It was big enough to haul a car on top. And it was white. Any hope of slipping unseen through the night evaporated. They would be announcing themselves to anyone on the road and anyone bombing from above. A bright white flatbed truck moving through the Yemeni night in the middle of the most severe bombing campaign of the new war.
“Okay,” Mokhtar said. “Let’s go.”
It was just after midnight. They had nine hours to get to Aden.
CHAPTER XXXI
THE ROAD TO ADEN
THEY LEFT THE CITY as it shook from another strike.
“We’ll be okay,” Sadeq said.
Mokhtar looked at this man. In the rush of preparations he hadn’t considered that he didn’t know these two people, Sadeq and Ahmed. He knew nothing about them other than they were friends of Ali. They were both about his age. Sadeq had a tangle of wild black hair and wore a traditional outfit—more in keeping with the northern tribesmen than the urbane capital dwellers. Ahmed, with short hair and a well-kept beard, wore pants and a polo shirt. Mokhtar was about to drive nine hours with them, to meet a ship he knew nothing about. He didn’t even know where the Greek ship was going.
They left the city without incident but knew that they’d soon be stopped at Houthi checkpoints. They were monitoring the movements of people and possible opposition, weapons, everything.
The two-lane road wound out of the city. They were going about 130 kilometers per hour, far too fast to be making the turns they were making. At the first checkpoint, Ahmed slowed as a trio of soldiers came into view. Mokhtar expected to be stopped, questioned, inspected. But the soldiers looked at the truck, at its front grille or license plate—Mokhtar couldn’t tell—and waved them through.
The second checkpoint was different. The soldiers, in a mix of National army gear and Houthi garb, waved Ahmed to a stop.
“Where are you going?” they asked.
Ahmed told them the truth—that Mokhtar was trying to get out of the country through the port in Aden, that they were transporting a small sampling of Yemeni coffee. The soldiers wanted to see it. Mokhtar got out and untied the suitcase. He knew it looked unusual, and admitted to the soldiers that using a giant flatbed truck to carry one black suitcase had the appearance of something nefarious. He laughed. The Houthis did not share his mirth.
Mokhtar opened the case, showed the soldiers the beans, and soon heard himself explaining the history of coffee in Yemen, how he intended to restore the global stature of Yemeni beans. He went on and on as he always went on and on. The soldiers didn’t care about the history of Yemeni coffee.
“Go,” they said.
Ahmed drove away.
Every twenty minutes there was another checkpoint. Sometimes they stopped and explained their cargo and destination. Sometimes they opened the suitcase and revealed the coffee. Other times they were just waved through. Mokhtar couldn’t get a grip on the system, if there was one. More and more it seemed odd when they weren’t stopped. When this happened, he noticed a certain chain of events. Each time, the soldiers looked at the license plate, or something at the front of the truck, nodded, and let them pass. Mokhtar couldn’t make sense of it, but they were making decent time and he had no reason to question it. They were on pace to make it to Aden by 8:00 a.m. He expected eventualities, unforeseen obstacles, but so far they were ahead of schedule.
—
At about one-thirty, they were stopped at a checkpoint. They explained where they were going.
“You headed through Yarim?” the soldier asked.
Ahmed and Mokhtar confirmed they were. Yarim was a small town between Sana’a and Ibb. It was barely on the map, but Mokhtar knew it well—he stopped there often when traveling north or south.
“There’s going to be trouble down there,” the soldier said.
“What do you mean?” Sadeq asked.
“Don’t go through Yarim,” the soldier said, and waved them on.
But they had no other options. The highway passed directly through Yarim. They shrugged it off. Maybe they were overconfident. The Houthi checkpoints had been easy. They felt invincible and had seen no evidence of the Saudi bombing since they’d left Sana’a.
They drove toward Yarim.
—
Yarim was twenty miles from the checkpoint where the soldier had given his cryptic warning, but five miles from the city, in the dark roadside, they began to see civilians fleeing, heading north, some walking, some running. It was 2:00 a.m.
“What the hell?” Ahmed said. Traffic slowed and soon stopped just outside of town. As they got closer to Yarim, the trickle of people fleeing turned into a flood. Thousands of people were fleeing along the roadside. Cars going north moved slowly. Cars going south, in the direction of Aden, weren’t moving at all.
A man ran from the town screaming. He pointed at Sadeq’s truck. “You’re gonna burn! You’re gonna burn!” he yelled.
Mokhtar got out. The air was unusually warm, and there was an acrid smell coming from the city—something was on fire. He asked another man, walking away from the town, what was happening.
“The Saudis just bombed the town,” he said. “They were after an oil tanker. They hit a yogurt truck. They killed ten or more—kids, babies.”
But it had happened only minutes earlier. How had that Houthi soldier known it was coming?
Ahead, the orange glow of multiple fires silhouetted the buildings in the town center.
“We have to go around,” Sadeq said.
They turned off the main road and found a dirt road that circumvented the city. Their headlights illuminated the quick shadows of people running. Yarim was a cauldron.
“Do we stay? Help?” Mokhtar asked Sadeq and Ahmed.
Staying would serve no purpose. They couldn’t help.
They weren’t firefighters or paramedics. And what about the chances their truck would be a target? The bombers had targeted oil tankers and had hit a yogurt truck. They needed to move on, get away from the city, from civilians.
But now the truck was stuck.
Mokhtar and Sadeq got out. They couldn’t see the road or even the wheels. Mokhtar used his phone’s flashlight to illuminate the problem. The wheels were spinning in six inches of mud. Pushing a six-ton truck was not an option. They tried wedging rocks under the tires, to no avail. They looked around for help, but the scene was chaos. No one would help a passing truck. In minutes the three of them were calf-deep in mud and the truck hadn’t moved. They needed a tow.
Sadeq waved down a passing motorcycle and in seconds was on the back of it and was gone. He hadn’t told Mokhtar or Ahmed what he was doing. Mokhtar stood in the dark. He stared into the black sky, the stars tiny and bright. They’d driven two hours from a city on fire into a town on fire.
Forty minutes later, a pair of headlights appeared. It was a truck. Sadeq jumped out. In the middle of Yarim, reeling from a Saudi bombing, he’d somehow found a tow truck. The driver dragged their rig from the mud. Ten minutes later they’d paid him and were on their way again. They sped around Yarim and were back on the highway. Mokhtar looked at his phone. It was almost 3:00 a.m.
His phone was running out of juice. They couldn’t make it to Aden in time, he knew. And if Yarim was just bombed, other cities along the way could be bombed, too. Next time, they might not be so lucky as to arrive afterward. Now this plan seemed ill advised. In the truck, Mokhtar gave Sadeq and Ahmed the option to abandon the trip.
“We can turn around,” he said. “This is all wrong. The Saudis are targeting trucks. That could have been us.”
“But it wasn’t,” Sadeq said. “Think of it. God was looking after us.” In the moment, the logic seemed sound.