by Dave Eggers
The hotel was cheap and dingy. The three men said their goodbyes to Tank Top and made for the stairs.
“Oh, wait,” Tank Top said. The three men turned around. “Be careful tonight. There are some guys around, guys like the one who picked you up earlier.” Mokhtar knew he meant Ammar. “They go around at night making trouble. I don’t think they’ll come tonight, but just be aware.”
—
Mokhtar, Sadeq and Ahmed were exhausted and emotionally wrecked. They collapsed on the beds, and Ahmed slowly recovered the composure he’d lost in the jail. Lying on the bed, staring at the wall, Mokhtar felt increasingly ill at ease. They shouldn’t have stayed in Aden.
Sadeq, though, was acting like he was on vacation. He wanted to switch rooms to get a better view.
“Are you serious?” Mokhtar asked.
“This whole place is empty,” Sadeq said. “I bet all the ocean-facing rooms are available. We could each get our own.”
Mokhtar told him to forget it. Sulking, Sadeq went to take a shower.
“You okay?” Mokhtar asked Ahmed.
“I’m okay,” Ahmed said. “But I was sure we’d die in that cell.”
Sadeq emerged from the bathroom. He was wearing camouflage underwear.
“Are you crazy? Take those off!” Mokhtar yelled. It was unlikely that the popular committee would see Sadeq’s underwear, but any camouflage clothing would imply their connection to the Houthis. They couldn’t take chances. Sadeq took them off and Mokhtar hid them behind the dresser.
Now Mokhtar was confused about just who Sadeq was. Could he actually be some Houthi sleeper? He didn’t want to ask.
Mokhtar turned on the television. The news showed footage of Houthis gaining ground all over the country. They were gathering a few miles from Aden. Ahmed sighed loudly. As gunfire rattled from the TV, Mokhtar fell asleep.
—
He opened his eyes and saw a row of shadows. It was 2:00 a.m and there were six new men in the room. All hid their faces under keffiyehs. All carried AK-47s, their fingers on the triggers.
Mokhtar could tell most of them were young. Before thinking, he said, “Masa al-khair!” (Good evening!) He said it as if he were hosting a dinner party. Immediately the sense of menace was punctured. The man directly in front of him seemed to be smiling. Mokhtar could see his creased eyes above his scarf.
“What do you mean, Good evening?” another man said. He seemed to be the leader.
Again Mokhtar spoke before he thought. “What do you want me to say, Good morning?”
Ahmed and Sadeq looked at Mokhtar with a mixture of horror and awe. His mouth was going to get them all killed. But Mokhtar felt confident that whatever he was doing was working. He’d talked them out of a few situations before, and this was no different. Already he’d made one or two of the masked men smile. The AKs were a bad sign, but other indicators were promising.
The scarves were a good sign. The scarves meant the men assumed that some or all of their captives—Mokhtar and his friends—were Houthis, and that if they showed their faces, and later freed their prisoners, the Houthis might retaliate against them or their families. The real danger, he knew, was when a group like this didn’t care if you saw their faces. Then you were dead.
The leader asked what they were doing in Aden. Mokhtar told them that they were trying to get to the port, where they would catch a Greek ship headed out. The Arabic word for “Greek” is Yunani, and speaking quickly, Mokhtar made it sound like Irani—implying they were looking for an Iranian ship. The masked men tensed. Iran was backing the Houthi insurgency.
“A what ship?” the leader said.
“Yunani, Yunani,” Mokhtar said. Greek, Greek.
He explained that he was an American, a coffee trader, a businessman, just trying to get out of Yemen with his bean samples.
“You’re proud to be an American?” the leader asked.
Now Mokhtar got worried. Who were these guys? They seemed like popular committee, but they could be al-Qaeda. In Yemen there were strange bedfellows, including some unsettling overlap between the popular committees and AQAP.
“Give me your laptop,” the leader said.
It was a terrible idea to surrender his laptop. In a flash, he remembered Michael Li from his days selling Hondas. Control the conversation.
“Okay, you can borrow it,” Mokhtar said, “but I need it back by seven in the morning.”
He said these words to a group of masked men carrying AK-47s. He insisted on getting his laptop back in five hours, as if he had a conference call at seven he couldn’t miss. Stranger still, the man agreed.
“Okay,” the leader said. “And we need your phones, too.”
Mokhtar, Ahmed and Sadeq handed over their phones. The men took them and left the room.
Ahmed got up and locked the door. “What the hell was that?” he asked. “You told them you need your laptop back by seven? You want us killed?”
In the dark, Ahmed, Sadeq and Mokhtar speculated about who the men were. They contemplated an escape, but there was only one exit, guarded by either this team or the original popular committee.
“Let’s sleep,” Mokhtar said. He was tired and had the strange sense that he would sleep, and that at seven there would be a knock on the door, with one of the gunmen returning his laptop.
Instead they came at 5:00 a.m. Mokhtar felt someone nudge him on the shoulder. He opened his eyes and saw his laptop being returned by one of the masked men. He told the man to put it on the floor. The man obeyed, and Mokhtar went back to sleep.
—
In the morning Mokhtar woke with the rising sun and opened his laptop. It worked, and all seemed unchanged, except the background screen had been altered. He’d had an image of a mountain village in Haraz; now it was a picture of one of Mokhtar’s flyers for a coffee event he’d held in Oakland. His captors didn’t seem to have touched anything else. The only explanation he could conjure was that the popular committee men didn’t know how to use Macs. No one he’d ever met in Yemen could use a Mac. These men had tinkered with the computer long enough to do only one thing: change the background screen.
He went downstairs. The lobby was dark. The exit was blocked by a roll-down door. They were locked in. The man behind the front desk was asleep in his chair.
From the front-desk phone, Mokhtar called Abdul Wasr, the bearded man who had helped free them from the police station. Mokhtar assumed he knew the situation.
“We need to leave,” Mokhtar said. “Where are our phones?”
Abdul sounded troubled. “Are you alone?” he asked.
Mokhtar confirmed that he was.
“There are concerns about your friend Sadeq. They found some troubling names on his phone. The men wanted to take you all last night, but I convinced them not to.”
Abdul told Mokhtar to stay at the hotel. He arrived a few minutes later, and informed Mokhtar that his own phone would be returned soon, but on Sadeq’s phone they’d found numbers of high-ranking Houthis and Houthi collaborators in the Yemeni army. The popular committee planned to take Sadeq for further questioning. Mokhtar assumed he would be tortured.
Mokhtar went back to the room and confronted Sadeq.
Sadeq was blasé. “It’s my cousin’s phone. I don’t know any Houthi generals.”
Mokhtar asked why there were names of Houthi and Yemeni army generals in his cousin’s phone. Sadeq said that his cousin had a delivery-service truck and a wide range of clients—hotels and schools, some military bases.
Mokhtar believed him. Sadeq was not some revolutionary. They’d entered a hotel in a war zone, and he’d asked for an ocean view.
Mokhtar went downstairs and explained this to Abdul. “It’s not possible that Sadeq is some operative for the Houthi forces. You saw him, right?”
Abdul allowed Mokhtar to use his phone. Mokhtar called Ali back in Sana’a.
“You’re alive,” Ali said. “Good. Andrew’s already talking to the girl. To Summer.”
“S
ummer?”
Ali explained, and Mokhtar put it together. The popular committee men had taken Mokhtar’s phone last night, and as they were going through the phones, Andrew called Mokhtar. Not knowing how to use an iPhone, the popular committee men had tried to stop the ringing, but had inadvertently answered the phone and left it connected.
Andrew was able to hear about two hours’ worth of conversations between the men of the popular committee. What he’d heard was disturbing; Mokhtar and his friends were in grave danger. Andrew and Ali spent the night making phone calls. They found Summer’s name, called her, and she made calls until she found where Mokhtar was being held and by whom.
“Now it’ll be okay,” Ali told Mokhtar. “We have all kinds of people talking now. We’ll make sure you’re safe. Summer’s family knows everyone in Aden.”
—
Buoyed by new hope, Mokhtar went back up to the room. He showered, trying to wash the dirt from his feet—he’d been barefoot in the filthy cell the day before. That seemed so long ago now. Alone for the first time in a day as the water fell around him, he thought through the options. Sadeq was now a suspected Houthi operative who had infiltrated Aden, presumably to report enemy positions and capabilities back to his superiors. The popular committees defending Aden were justifiably paranoid about anyone within the city—especially a Houthi who had seen one of their strongholds in the police station.
Mokhtar didn’t know what to believe or do. If Sadeq was a Houthi, could Mokhtar continue to defend him? Was it time to distance himself from Sadeq? And what about Ahmed? Was he complicit?
Sadeq had taken the only towel, so Mokhtar used the linen shower curtain to dry himself. When he walked out of the bathroom, he saw Other Mokhtar. He was with six armed men.
“We’re getting you guys out of here,” he said.
—
Other Mokhtar had been called by Summer.
“You have to leave the city now,” he said.
Why this man was risking so much for Mokhtar, Ahmed and Sadeq was unclear. But Mokhtar couldn’t question it. They were almost free. Then Mokhtar’s mouth opened and said something that in the moment was absurd to all in the room.
“My samples. They’re in a black Samsonite. I can’t leave without them.”
Other Mokhtar winced. “Your what?”
Mokhtar told the story of his coffee beans, the conference in Seattle.
“It’s my whole life,” Mokhtar said.
“Stay here,” Other Mokhtar said.
He and the six armed men left.
“Are you serious?” Ahmed said. “We have a chance to leave now, and we’re staying for your beans?”
An hour went by. Two hours.
Mokhtar, Sadeq and Ahmed watched the war on television. None of them knew the geography of Aden well, but it looked from the reports as if the fighting was all around them. Mentions of Houthis on the news gave Mokhtar a thought.
He looked at Sadeq. “We have to fix you.”
Mokhtar had an extra dress shirt and gave it to Sadeq. Sadeq put it on. The transformation was profound but not finished. Mokhtar gave him his glasses and combed his hair so it looked orderly.
“That’s incredible,” Ahmed said, looking at Mokhtar. “He looks like you.” Sadeq looked like a global businessman—tidy blue dress shirt, spectacles, hair parted neatly on the side. Instantly Mokhtar thought any threat had disappeared. Why hadn’t he done this in Sana’a, before the journey? Too many of his best ideas occurred far after they would have been most useful.
A knock thundered through the room.
It was Other Mokhtar. “I’ve got your suitcase. Let’s go.”
Outside, Mokhtar saw the truck, the suitcase in the back.
“I have to stay with my hotel,” Other Mokhtar said, “but my friend here will go along with you.” He introduced them to a man named Ramsi. “If anyone asks who you are,” Other Mokhtar said, “you’re part of a water treatment company in Aden, and you’re leaving.”
Ahmed started the truck. Mokhtar thanked Other Mokhtar. He owed his life to this man he would never see again. Ahmed pulled away.
There were three checkpoints before they were clear of Aden, and Ramsi talked them through each. They dropped off Ramsi ten miles out of Aden. After that, the roads were clear. They sped the nine hours back to Sana’a unimpeded and arrived that night.
CHAPTER XXXVII
THE PORT OF MOKHA
SITTING IN MOHAMED AND Kenza’s apartment, Mokhtar weighed his options. In the popular committee prison, he’d heard a guard talking about freighters shipping livestock and people between Mokha and Djibouti City. Online, Mokhtar found that the port of Mokha was more or less functioning. It had been bombed by the Saudis repeatedly, and when it wasn’t being bombed, it was being fought over by the Houthi and government forces—but ships were leaving regularly.
He called Andrew.
“You want to take a boat from Mokha?” he asked.
“We get to Djibouti and fly to Addis,” Mokhtar said.
This time Andrew agreed. The Aden trip hadn’t appealed to him, because Aden was an active war zone, and because he’d been holding out hope that a more practical solution would present itself—that the airport might reopen, for example. But that hadn’t happened, and now the SCAA conference was fast approaching. Andrew counted on the conference for a good portion of Rayyan’s yearly sales. He had to be there.
Mokhtar called the U.S. embassy in Djibouti, expecting nothing, but reached a human. He asked, hypothetically, if he and another American were to get passage across the Red Sea, and were able to make it to Djibouti by boat, would they be received by the U.S. embassy and helped in their return to America?
The embassy representative, a friendly woman whose pragmatism was emboldening, confirmed they would.
“We won’t be put in some refugee camp?” Mokhtar asked.
“No, no,” the woman said. “If you make it here, we’ll help you in any way we can.”
Mokhtar and Andrew decided they’d go on Friday, after jumma. Violence was less likely on the Islamic holy day, they assumed.
—
Ahmed agreed to go again—just two days after he had narrowly escaped Aden with his life. Mokhtar was humbled. He barely knew Ahmed a week ago, and now he was risking his life, again, for what—for Mokhtar and Andrew and coffee?
“We’ll be okay,” Mokhtar told him.
Through friends in Sana’a, he’d been connected with a man named Mahmoud, who knew the movements of ships leaving Mokha. Mahmoud assured Mokhtar that he’d take care of the details in getting them on the boat and out of Mokha.
“No problem,” Mahmoud said.
In the morning Ahmed arrived at Mokhtar’s door, driving a pickup. Mokhtar threw his suitcases in the truck bed. They drove across the city to pick up Ali and Andrew. Andrew came downstairs dressed for Friday prayers, wearing cologne and carrying five suitcases full of coffee beans and a basket of Jennifer’s muffins. They took off, and Andrew showed Mokhtar and Ahmed a video on his phone of his daughter Rayyan—she’d been named after his coffee mill. She was two years old and, in the video, was talking about strawberries.
“Why’d you have to do that?” Mokhtar said. He didn’t want to be thinking about Andrew’s daughter when they were driving to Mokha. He wanted to be thinking about prosaic things. Seattle. Beans.
Goodbye Sana’a, Mokhtar thought. He was sure it would be there when he returned—he had no idea when—but there was also the possibility it would be radically altered again. There was no guarantee what the Saudis would do, what the Houthis would do. Yemen could become Syria.
They drove west, through the Haraz mountains. The road was narrow and winding, taking them as high as three thousand meters above sea level. The checkpoints came every ten or twenty miles, but with Ahmed doing the talking, the Houthis allowed them speedy passage.
They made it to Hodaidah and joined the north-south highway. They’d encountered no resistance in the four hours they’d bee
n on the road. The highway was twenty miles inland from the coast and traversed a high flat plain. There were four lanes most of the way, and the checkpoints were infrequent and efficient. They arrived in Mokha by early evening.
—
Mokhtar had read about Mokha, and had named his company after Mokha, and had for years been enthralled with its history. But this was his first time seeing it. The road into the town was potholed and surrounded by crumbling stone dwellings, many abandoned. The fabled port had once been one of the most important in the world, but all that remained were some fifteen thousand impoverished souls. The city had fallen on hard times.
There was one functioning hotel in the city. When Mokhtar, Andrew and Ali walked in, they found a chaotic scene. Everyone who wanted to get out of Yemen through Mokha was there—Ethiopians, Eritreans, Somalis. At the front desk, the clerk was charging about five times what a room would have cost on a normal day. But they had no choice. They paid their money and went to their room.
Mokhtar called Mahmoud, who said he could arrange passage on a ship the next day. He arrived at the hotel an hour later and confirmed they could take a Somali cargo ship that usually brought livestock to Mokha, but had recently been converted to take humans out of Yemen. The next day, he said—or maybe Sunday, he amended—the ship would take 150 people, and a few tons of onions. He’d make sure they had room for Mokhtar and Andrew. The trip to Djibouti City would take anywhere from fifteen to twenty hours.
Andrew was worried. There was no guarantee of leaving the next day. And no certainty about when they would arrive. The math was bad for their roasting schedule. If they didn’t leave the next day, on Saturday, they wouldn’t get out of Djibouti the next day, and that meant they wouldn’t make the 10:00 p.m. flight out of Addis Ababa, and that meant they wouldn’t get back to the United States in time to roast their coffee. Their coffee had to be roasted and rested to be good, and if it wasn’t good, there was no point in any of this.
“So we leave tomorrow,” Mokhtar said.
They ate dinner in the hotel and turned in early. Chewing qat in their room, they heard the roar of three diesel buses pulling up. Through the window they saw dozens of Somalis disembark. Mokhtar assumed they would be on their ship the next day, too. Everyone in the city appeared desperate to leave.