“Technical,” Gerlach translated. “We don’t know what kind.”
I didn’t see it at first. The battlewagon stood to the left of the road, loaded with drowsy-looking men.
“Can we just drive on?” I said.
Gerlach said, “It is one of ours.”
I saw the words kibir jabiye on the technical and felt a moment of relief. A car honked. The technical jerked to life. I had not flown to Somalia to test my nerve against the worst fears of a foreign correspondent—I didn’t want to tempt death—but I had broken one of the cardinal rules of anyone who pokes around in troublesome parts of the world, which is to keep your family’s lives unaffected. The horror of crossing that line wasn’t evident to me when the technical approached the car, with its cannon aimed through our windshield. It wasn’t even clear when a dozen or so men jumped off, holding weapons. It wasn’t clear, because my brain recoiled in denial. I told myself it was a traffic stop. These armed clan soldiers just wanted to see my passport. No problem! My German passport was here in my bag. I had never witnessed denial working in my own head with so much specific clarity, but it moved like a gyroscope compensating for a drastic blow that hadn’t even arrived, to maintain some balance, and when the gunmen swarmed to my side of the car and fired into the air, the balance wobbled and my bowels twisted and I understood very well what the fuck was going on. I leaned against Gerlach to cover my face with one arm, as if that would help. When I turned out to be alive in spite of the thunder of gunfire I held the door closed with my right hand. They wrenched it open and pounded my wrist with their Kalashnikovs. I had never felt so much violent malice at such close range, and I kept pulling at the door, hoping to buy time while our guard in the front seat performed his job. I was confused by the number of men who kept pounding my wrist with their gun barrels. I felt bones crack, I let go of the door, and they pulled me into the dust outside and beat me on the head.
Maybe death arrives with the same sudden malice, the same transformative shock. I noticed a lack of gunfire from our guard. He must have quailed at the sight of the cannon. “Somebody help me!” I shouted while the men slugged my face and broke my glasses in the dust. “Somebody help me.” Of course nobody did. Somalis in the cars behind us, respectful of the violence, just watched. Gunmen pulled at my arms and ripped my shirt. I heard Gerlach shout. I couldn’t tell whether kidnappers had subdued him in the car or pulled him into the road, whether this abduction was about to spark a clan war—I was only aware of gunmen, shouted Somali, and white dust. I struggled. The kidnappers pulled my backpack away, and I noticed blood on my clothes from the gun muzzles clobbering my scalp. My wrist ached, and I tried to see faces, to recognize any of the kidnappers from our Hobyo guards, but in the blur of kicks and rifle blows nobody looked familiar.
The horror of crossing that bright, clear line drenched me like a cloudburst, like blood and sweat, and I wanted to rewind everything. While they dragged me away, I felt a reflexive horror for my family and the burden I was about to become.
The men bundled me into a waiting Land Cruiser and drove me to a house on the edge of Galkayo. One of them handed my backpack to a tall and furious-looking man in the driveway. He took the bag but waved us off. We sped away to the east, and I sat with ripped clothes and a bleeding scalp, squeezed by three gunmen, bouncing across the bush, for several hours.
“Okay, okay,” the pirates in the front seat said. “No problem.”
The car bounced brutally over a ledge, so my head hit the roof and left a bloodstain on the fabric.
“Fuck!” I said, and pointed at the blood, cradling the broken wrist in my lap.
At first I spoke mainly in obscenities.
“Okay, okay,” they said.
Part 2
Underworld
I
Near sundown we arrived at an outdoor camp in a reddish, sandy part of the bush. The pirates walked me to a foam mattress waiting at the foot of a squat and crumbling cliff. My torn shirt dangled from me like a scarecrow’s. I was half-blind and still delirious, but I could make out other Somali gunmen, and other hostages.
The sun sank behind us. We had driven from that direction, which meant Galkayo lay to the west. We hadn’t shifted very far north or south, from what I could tell in the car. So, by a rough guess, we were in northeastern Galmudug. Sa’ad territory.
“Okay, Michael?” one guard said.
This earnest young Somali wore a turban around his head and stood on a rise, with his Kalashnikov, and the marbled sky behind him had thin swirls of reddish cloud.
“No,” I said after a while.
I squinted at each guard to see if I recognized anyone from our hired team. They weren’t the same men. But if they were Sa’ad pirates, it didn’t matter. My hosts had betrayed me. Sa’ads had promised to protect me; a Sa’ad, somewhere, had turned.
The men from the Land Cruiser mingled with the other guards. One sloped around with an ammunition vest dangling from his shoulders. His face looked half-melted with anger; he had rotten teeth and stained-looking eyes. The others called him “Ahmed Dirie.”*
Another name I heard over and over was “Abdinuur,” normally pronounced with an exclamation point: Abdinuur!
My body felt battered and tense, but for some reason I thought about my backpack. I was still fresh enough as a hostage to care about my things, like a man who’d lost his head and wanted to put it back on.
“They took my bag,” I told the young guard. “Can you ask someone for my bag? It’s a maroon backpack. With a camera in it.”
“They steal your camera?”
“Yes.”
“Thieves!” he blurted.
I looked at him curiously.
One very dark, very thin Somali came to squat near me with a bottle of water, a can of tuna, and two narrow loaves of bread. I tried to eat. I noticed dried blood on my hands and shirt; there must have been blood in my hair. My wrist throbbed, and when I inspected it, tenderly, I felt pieces of bone moving around.
The watchful silence in the camp made an eerie counterpoint to my ferocious instinct to be free. My still-intact sense of self—the energetic part that identified with possessions, habits, achievements, needs—protested in panic. You can’t do this, it wanted to say. But of course they could.
The sun set. Everything blurred without my glasses, and after an hour we all sat around in the pitch black, wholly blind, at the base of our sandstone cliff, which sometimes dropped bits of sand on our shoulders. I continued to sit straight up on my mattress, blinking. The pirates wanted me to sleep. One of them, on my left, lanced a flashlight beam into my eyes. He expected me to lie back so he could have a conversation with Ahmed Dirie, on my right.
“Sleeping! Sleeping!” he said, and in the dark I offered him a middle finger.
If I’m in the way, I thought, you can damn well set me free.
This part of the bush was arid savanna, a parching transition zone between the ocean and the Ogaden Desert, which stretched north and west into Ethiopia. The landscape had a blanket of hush. But the deep peace of the countryside felt as harrowing as my capture: the pure distance from my family, the stir of commotion this crime would cause at home—in Los Angeles and among my friends in Berlin—set up a quiet, drumming dread. Now I belonged to an underworld of captives who radiated rumors, like the whispers of ghosts, into the more ordinary world. I wondered if Ashwin had called anyone. If Gerlach was free and alive, he would have called Ashwin by now in Mogadishu, and Ashwin had my mother’s number in California.
Had Gerlach been captured? Or Hamid?
Was there some kind of war now between subclans of Sa’ads?
Or had my fixers sold me out?
Somehow I must have slept. After the sun rose in the morning, the pirates stuffed me into the rear seat of a car next to a pair of other hostages, both in their sixties. One looked African, but the other was hard to make out. He had cocoa-colored skin and twin furzes of gray hair sticking out over his ears, like a Pacific Islande
r. This was Rolly Tambara. We were about to become excellent friends.
Armed pirates crammed in beside us and tied our arms together. Ahmed Dirie gave orders from the passenger seat. His melted-seeming face and rotten teeth were heavy with melancholic rage. The car was the same as yesterday’s, I noticed. It had the bloodstain from my scalp.
After half an hour of cruising and swaying along the Pirate Road, a second car overtook us. We stopped in the soft white sand. The pirates said, “Go, go, go, go,” expecting us to cram into the second car. The orders confused us. A tall Somali from the other car, who had an authoritative squint and wore a half-buttoned dress shirt, hollered, “Come on, come on,” as if we weren’t moving fast enough. While I ducked into the other car he hit me hard alongside the head.
“No!” he said, as if I had misbehaved. “No, no!”
“Fucking hell,” I said.
This man appeared at our window and said to me, in clear English, “We know about your activities as a journalist, but it is okay, if you can pay the ransom, you will go free.”
Then he climbed into the first Land Cruiser and sped off.
We continued south for almost an hour but finally steered into the walled compound of some filthy, decrepit house, where the pirates led the two hostages through a doorway and hustled me into the neighboring room. Bare, blue-painted concrete; shuttered windows.
I sat on the floor. Hard to tell where we were. This house lay on the edge of the first town we had met coming south along the Pirate Road, either Hobyo or Harardhere. (Some of the guards had yelled, “Harardhere!” into their phones.) I squinted and tried to bring the yard into focus. At least twenty Somalis lazed on the sunlit concrete with their Kalashnikov rifles and tripoded machine guns, chewing khat.
Flies flurried near my doorway.
Judging by the flies, I thought, we were in Hobyo.
Ahmed Dirie dumped my mattress on the floor. Other Somalis carried in a tall thermos of tea and a few cans of tuna. One handed me a packet of instant coffee and a small plastic strainer. “Caffè!” he said with a smile. His enthusiasm was infectious—I love coffee—but he mimed pouring the tea through the strainer, which made no sense. At home, I had a cheap espresso machine that coughed and gasped and filled my kitchen with the smell of steam-pressed coffee every morning. I was a snob about it. Otherwise I led an unostentatious life—no car, simple furniture, no TV—and, of course, when I traveled, I could tolerate all kinds of thin and miserable, warmed-over jus de chaussette.* But at home I drank good coffee. I missed it in Somalia, not from my first day in the country, but from my first day as a hostage.
Another pirate slid a bowl of cooked brown beans onto the floor of my room. I was hungry but still nauseated by the new conditions. Someone handed me a spoon. I ate in silence, flicking away flies.
The yard outside my door included a round concrete well and a number of dusty tires. The steam rising from my pot of food seemed to distill an odor of shit or stagnant water that permeated the compound. The beans must have been cooked with well water. This idea churned my stomach, and after a few bites I retched and puked on the steps.
“Problem!” the pirates said.
They had trouble finding a rag to clean the mess; they shouted and scowled. Flashlight Man gaped at me from the yard, the way a zoo visitor might watch a dromedary. I hoped he understood that the vomit had been a commentary on my new status as a hostage as well as a criticism of the food.
After an hour, a smooth-looking man came in, wearing slacks. He introduced himself as a translator. I learned later that his name was Boodiin, but he never said so. Instead he offered warnings and condescending wisdom. I had made a mistake, he said. Mistakes were human. I should not open the windows. An armed guard waited outside every wall. “If you open a window,” he said, “you will die.”
“Hmm.”
“You must eat,” he advised me. “If you don’t eat, you will die.”
“The food is disgusting.”
“What would you like to eat for breakfast?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe oatmeal.”
“You must eat.”
He had a lean face with busy eyes. His loose Western clothes gave him status compared with the guards, who wore a slouching, half-traditional uniform of sleeveless T-shirts and skirtlike sarongs. Boodiin was about thirty but hard to pin down. He seemed nervous and twitchy.
By now I had tied a sling around my wrist made from a piece of cloth, which he noticed with some concern.
“What is wrong with your hand?”
“It’s broken,” I said. “The wrist is broken. I need a doctor.”
“You mean it was broken in this operation?” he said, gesturing vaguely out the door.
No, motherfucker, I’m in the habit of walking around Somalia with a broken wrist.
“Yes” is how I chose to phrase it.
“I will submit your request.”
II
It was an interesting sentiment to hear from a man who stood to grow rich on my ransom. You have made a mistake, he said. Mistakes are human.
Clearly I had fucked up, but from Boodiin’s point of view, what could have been my mistake? He must have meant journalism, nosing around in a pirate gang’s business. But Sa’ad pirates had little to do with the Taipan. Most of the pirates in Hamburg were Darod, from Puntland, rivals to my supposed hosts. I hadn’t even made it to North Galkayo to research that part of the story. So, I thought—squinting out at the shadows of Somalis chewing khat in the yard—what had I done to threaten these men?
Boodiin referred to a “bad group,” meaning the men who’d kidnapped me. He insisted that the guards holding me now were the “good group,” as if I ought to be nice to them. In spite of my blurred eyesight, I could spot at least one of my captors lazing in the yard. The slouching, rage-addled Somali called Ahmed Dirie relaxed in a yellow sarong next to a tripoded machine gun.
I scowled at Boodiin. He wasn’t even a good liar.
“What’s your name?” I said.
“Ali.”
But the real Ali, the Ali who mattered, was Ali Duulaay,* who’d slugged me on the Pirate Road. I learned his name later. He paid two visits to the house, and at first I recognized him only as a tall and menacing figure who stood, like a taciturn soldier, in the bright doorway and came in to ask questions in slow and broken English. He was middle aged and well built. He wore khakis and collared shirts as well as his Kalashnikov. He squatted in front of my mattress on the first visit and inspected my swollen wrist.
His mind moved to other things. “You are German?”
“My German passport was in my bag,” I said. “You have my bag.”
I thought he might be the man who’d received my backpack in front of the house in Galkayo. If I wanted my things, maybe he was the man to ask. I copped a sudden attitude with Ali Duulaay, an air of ownership and expectation at odds with my new role.
“You took my backpack,” I babbled. “Someone has my backpack. Bring it here. It has phone numbers. I need to make a telephone call. Someone should bring my backpack here, with all my notebooks. They have phone numbers, that kind of thing.”
He stared at me with hard, unblinking eyes.
“You are also American.”
“I’m a German citizen,” I insisted.
He stood up to leave.
“I will send a doctor.”
I’d left my U.S. passport in Nairobi, along with a laptop and other important things. I had not wanted to alarm Galmudug officials with an American passport when I landed in Galkayo—I’d wanted to pass as European. But Duulaay could have googled my name, and if news outlets had reported my kidnapping, he could have read every word.
You have made a mistake, Boodiin had said. Mistakes are human.
The guards handed me toothpaste, a towel, shampoo, and an assortment of mango drinks, as well as some plastic-wrapped shirts and shorts. They ordered me to change out of my bloodied clothes, the old long-sleeved shirt and cotton slacks, wh
ich were torn but still comfortable, so tossing them into a pile for the pirates to dispose of raised feelings of panic and loss. There was nothing wrong with my previous clothes. There was nothing wrong with my previous life. The sense of waste was sickening. The new clothes felt too tight.
I changed awkwardly, gingerly, without the benefit of a button-down shirt. I stuffed my wrist through a tight polyester sleeve. The guards watched me dress. Then one of them ordered me out to the shower.
“Now? I just put this on.”
“Now, now. Come on.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“Go, go, go, go.”
So, at gunpoint, holding a new bottle of shampoo, I picked my way across the filthy compound yard. The pirates watched me with curious loathing. The shower was just a walled-off corner, open to the sky, with a pit toilet. One gunman handed a jerry can full of water past the sagging metal door.
While he waited, I undressed and threw the fresh clothes across the top of the dusty wall, which had ornamented breeze-blocks I could squint through. I saw the blur of an unpaved road and a few distant, impressionistic white houses. (Beyond a couple of yards, without my glasses, everything looked like Monet.) Also bushes and a seaside horizon. Robed women and goats wandered along the road.
None of it helped orient me; none of it told me where to run.
I used my left arm to lift the jerry can and dump water on my head. Probably well water—I tried to avoid my face. I lathered everything with shampoo and rinsed myself in careful slops. It was a nice evening, I noticed. The sun was going down, and in the distance I heard Somali children sing.
III
From such a remote corner of the world, I found it hard to imagine what my mom in California had learned, or how she’d learned it. But the chain of information was swift. Gerlach had called Ashwin, who had called U.S. and German authorities from Mogadishu, and FBI headquarters in Washington had mustered five agents in southwestern L.A. County within twelve hours of my capture.
The Desert and the Sea Page 5