The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  On Saturday mornings in Northridge, Dad would sometimes pause between chores in the garage to stare at Tom and Jerry with his bifocals on, smiling. He loved those cartoons. I tried to imagine what he thought of the jazz. Maybe the garbage-can mayhem reminded him of Spike Jones, who was on the radio during his childhood, or Betty Boop singing “Hell’s Bells”—but come to think of it, he never collected jazz, and when he returned home to drink in the evenings, he would slump in one of the living room chairs with the stereo tuned to easy listening. Coastin’ with you here on the coast. K-O-S-T, Los Angeles.

  After Mom kicked him out, Dad tried to sober up. His formal appeal to come home, after six months at Raleigh Hills, took place in the living room, where he used to listen to the radio, and I think he followed some formula of apology. Mom wasn’t convinced. Our house had been quieter since he’d left—no arguments or fights—and she knew he wasn’t free of pills. Some addicts try to manipulate people, and Mom had a delicate instinct for Dad’s deceptions and tricks. She understood herself as a protector of house and child; she acted flinty and strong, and when she shook her head, I was quietly on her side.

  What neither of us knew, of course, was that this living room apology was a Hail Mary shot, Dad’s last-minute bid for redemption.

  XI

  Helicopters and surveillance planes paid occasional visits during our first three weeks on the water, and one afternoon in early May, while I sat on the tuna bench, a black, open-sided helicopter came within two hundred yards of the ship and circled us. Pirates readied their rifles. They growled at me to drape the pink blanket over my head, to sit still, and when the machine passed into view, it felt like a taunt. The little machine crossed the clear air between us and Hobyo in smooth, wasplike flight, daring the pirates to shoot. Even without my glasses I could pick out the helmeted sniper aiming his weapon. For the first time I considered a leap off the ship. But the Somalis were hopped-up, agitated. Suppose I snapped the uneasy ceasefire? Would there be a gun battle? I wanted to end this vile situation for my family; on the other hand hostages might die; on the other hand, I could just dart across the deck; on the other hand, I liked to plan things a little more carefully; on the other hand, the helicopter was right there—

  It made a single pass around the ship, without waiting for me to make up my mind. I hadn’t even unclenched my teeth before its rotors chopped into the distance.

  This brief but nerve-charging visit left me excited and depressed, and it must have rattled the pirates, because Ali Duulaay came aboard the next day in a blue, half-unbuttoned shirt and paced the ship with a handgun. He conferred with the guards before disappearing up to the bridge. Late in the morning, he squatted in front of us, with the translator Abdul, and they presented an ultimatum to Rolly.

  “These guys talked to your family,” said Abdul, referring to Duulaay and other bosses on shore. “If your family can’t pay the money in three days, you will be killed.”

  “Three days,” Ali Duulaay emphasized, holding up three thick fingers.

  Rolly squinted and tried to understand. It was never smart to take a pirate at face value, also not wise to disregard him. But they didn’t elaborate. Duulaay turned to me and said something acidic and grave. “He says the planes and helicopters gotta stop coming,” Abdul translated. “If there’s any trouble from America, you will be shot.”

  “I know.”

  Duulaay’s well-formed face had a pattern of pockmarks, like acne scars, and there was a violent undercurrent of strain in his eyes.

  He must have changed the guards’ standing orders not to fire at aircraft, because later in the afternoon an Orion cruised high over the Naham 3, and the pirates loosed a thundering volley of rounds. Hostages scattered. Abdul cackled at the uproar. The fear in the crew was involuntary—it must have been the first moment of sustained gunfire their eardrums had endured since the hijacking—and Abdul found it hilarious. “Don’t worry, you guys!” he shouted, but fear had seized us all, and I stood up, too, as quietly as possible, because of Duulaay’s threat, and hid in the work area, just in case, until the spy plane disappeared.

  XII

  “In three days, I going to die,” Rolly said later in the afternoon. “I say hi to God for you.”

  “Yup,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “What you do without me?” he chided.

  “I don’t know.”

  I really didn’t.

  Rolly couldn’t ignore the threat from Duulaay, but he also couldn’t believe it. His mind returned to the problem in trenchlike cycles, the way it returned to his daily anxieties. He fidgeted for a while.

  “Twenty million dollars, Michael.”

  “I know.”

  “They trying to kill me.”

  “I doubt they will,” I said.

  “You know how much twenty million dollars is in my money?”

  “It’s twenty million dollars.”

  “Yes, but—in Seychelles rupees.”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Is one hundred—wait, two hundred . . .” He shook his head and came back to his usual refrain. “Is a lot of money. You can buy house. . . . You can buy car. . . .”

  “Rolly, with twenty million dollars you can buy a corporation.”

  “Heh, heh.”

  The next day, he admired his yellow Thai sandals and said, “Michael, not to worry. Soon you have my shoes.”

  “How come?”

  “Because in two days, I going to die.”

  But the third day passed quietly. The pirates ordered us upstairs at sundown while a storm approached. The Naham 3, in the fading light, rocked in high waves like an enormous cradle, and I went to sleep in my cabin thinking Ali Duulaay had been full of thuggish nonsense.

  Later that night, Abdinasser shook me awake.

  “Sahib,” he whispered.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Hobyo,” he said, and held a flat hand, jovially, up to his ear. “Telephone, telephone.”

  He wore his rifle and a turban. I had a feeling of dread.

  “No, sahib.”

  “Telephone!” he said. “No problem!”

  I hesitated, because a move to Hobyo seemed decisive. I thought we would never see the Naham 3 again. The pirates were too frightened of helicopters. The prospect of returning to Somali soil also filled me with foreboding and fear. The muscles around my spine hadn’t fully recovered from the skiff accident on our first night, about three weeks before, so I didn’t relish a boat ride; and I wondered what would happen to Rolly.

  The ship rocked hard, in a mild rainstorm. The fluorescent-lit cabin swung and tilted like a lantern in a farmer’s hand. I packed up, and when I walked down the narrow corridor the walls knocked my shoulders and almost unbalanced Abdinasser, with his rifle. A warm drizzle fell on the deck outside. We saw how Rolly and a handful of pirates, including Bakayle, had already boarded the skiff, which heaved up and down beside the ship while Hen struggled with the rope.

  I looked down at the moiling, floodlit sea. It hurt my back just to watch it.

  “No,” I said. “Not in this weather.”

  I started back upstairs.

  “Michael!” Captain Tuure and a bearded translator named Abdiwali caught up with me on the upper deck. “You must go ashore,” the translator said.

  “Why? No.”

  I had no authority, no particular plan, just the courage of my own recalcitrance, and I had a true instinct to fear whatever waited for us on land. I headed back to my cabin. More Somalis closed ranks around me. I told Captain Tuure through Abdiwali, “The last time I rode in that skiff, the pilot hurt my back. That was a calm night.” I shook my head. “I won’t go in this weather.”

  “But you must go.”

  “Why must I?”

  One large pirate grabbed my shirt and pulled me toward the lower deck. “You have no choice,” he said. “It is an order.”

  “I will tell the pilot to drive slowly over the waves,” Tuure promised.

 
Of course it was a hopeless cause. The men were armed. I returned downstairs and handed my bag to one pirate. Soft rain pattered everywhere, and the skiff knocked against the hull. It lurched up and down in slow, twenty-foot intervals. The trick was to ride the boat down to the bottom of the swell, like an elevator. “Do not jump while the boat comes up,” said one of the Somalis. After the peak of the next swell, which carried the boat to within a yard of the cutaway rail, the men shouted, and I jumped. The landing was surprisingly soft—easier than jumping the same distance onto hard ground—and Abdinasser grabbed my jersey. I sat on the bulkhead, next to Rolly, who looked frustrated with my reluctance. “Ah, Michael,” he said in his rueful voice. “Not make them angry.”

  The pilot moved with gentle speed over the spitting waves. Our ride through the wind and drizzle had an almost sinister softness, and instead of running like devils we chugged and slopped along until a wave caught us, the propeller whined, and we stranded, suddenly, on the beach.

  Bakayle, Abdinasser, and a few other pirates crammed us into a Land Rover. The moon-tinged clouds were marbled and heavy. We drove along familiar paths to Mussolini’s Farmhouse and parked beside another vehicle, but we had to wait while two Somalis climbed onto the roof of the other car and held their phones up, as if to sniff the air for drones.

  This tactic baffled me; I’d never seen it before Ahmed Dirie’s mysterious effort a few weeks earlier. (Drones could pick up cell-phone signals, but could it work the other way around?) While my brain spun for an answer, Bakayle grinned at us from the front seat. His whole presence felt unquiet and cruel. His character lacked a moral brake, any glint of compassion. He said something in Somali and made a flying gesture with his hand. The pirates in the Land Rover laughed.

  “Tomorrow you will get your plane ticket home,” one of them translated.

  XIII

  In the morning Rolly and I found ourselves crammed into another car, with more gunmen, driving through the dusty bush to the west of Hobyo. A pirate named Dag sat next to me, ruminating on stems of khat, sometimes allowing his mouth to hang open. Dag could brood for ages with an occasional dreamy smile, like a wistful girl, only to come up with some foul remark.

  “Michael,” he said, “you must ask your family to send money. Otherwise the pirates will sell you to al-Shabaab.”

  “Well,” I told him, “you have to lower your demand.”

  “How much are they asking?”

  They, as if Dag were not a pirate.

  “Twenty million.”

  “I think they will accept ten million,” Dag said.

  “How sensible.”

  Camels gazed in the scrub outside. Their rear ankles had been fettered by nomad owners, and when we zoomed past, they would lift their noses and make awkward hops away from the car. Furry wild hogs also scurried through the dust.

  “Michael, Rolly!” cried Bakayle from the front seat, pointing at the black-and-white bush pigs, which to my poor eyes looked like undergrown dogs.

  “HAM!” cried Bakayle.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Rolly muttered.

  The cars wound toward a sloping, wooded area where other cars, and other Somalis, waited under the trees. I’d never seen this place before. Rolly mumbled that he and Marc had lived here once, in a shady washout, which later flooded.

  “We call it the River,” he said.

  We parked under some trees, and the guards marched Rolly away behind a thicket, where unknown Somalis had gathered.

  “Don’t worry,” Dag told me. “It is not al-Shabaab.”

  I squinted at him.

  Something weird was going on. They moved me to a more luxurious SUV, outfitted with video screens in the headrests. We sat around while Somali pop videos played like entertainment in a waiting plane—stiff dancers, awful processed synthesizers—and I had time to think that bush pigs were ugly animals, that I might not eat pig, either, if I lived in this part of the world. Then a phone rang. A guard rolled down his window and we heard a harsh voice cry out. “Rolly!” said Abdinasser the Sahib, and the pirates led me to a cluster of tangled trees where a group of men stood or squatted in the dust. Some wore turbans and keffiyehs, all held long weapons, and I spotted Bakayle, Ali Duulaay, Ahmed Dirie. A gathering of pirate bosses? Or a convention of bosses, clan leaders, and investors. They watched me for a reaction with wary eyes, like predatory cats. I didn’t understand at first. They were waiting. On the other hand, something worse waited, something more malevolent that they wanted me to observe.

  Rolly dangled upside down from a tree.

  “Oh, fuck,” I said.

  He swung free in a pair of cotton shorts; his arms flopped like a rag doll’s. They’d tied him by the ankles to a heavy bough. A plump, deep-black man with a high voice whacked him on the chest and feet with a bamboo cane. It was a torture scene from old Islamic memory, when Ottoman officials used to tie the feet of criminals and subject them to bastinado, or public foot whipping. Two teenagers filmed it. Other Somalis ran up to kick Rolly in the ribs with their dusty feet; they seemed to enjoy it. Rolly didn’t scream again. He closed his eyes and let it happen, and I wondered if he was in shock.

  The plump man—Garfanji—handed his cane to another Somali and came up the slope. He squatted some distance away from me and glanced up with his peculiar squint.

  “Hello, Michael, do you remember me?”

  “Yes, Mohamed.”

  “Your friend Rolly is being punished.”

  “What for?” I said.

  “He will not say he is Israeli.”

  The idiocy hurt my head.

  “Well,” I said, “he isn’t Israeli.”

  “I have found proof on the internet!” Garfanji answered.

  The man with the cane slid it through the cotton knot at Rolly’s feet and used it to turn his whole body this way and that while other men kicked. I was about to point out that Rolly spoke no Hebrew. But that could have led to an awkward line of questioning—“Have you been to Israel?” (I had)—so I decided to say, “He speaks like a man from the Seychelles.”

  This answer was no use to Garfanji; he said nothing. I had to wait while Duulaay harassed my friend with a lit cigarette. He held the filter end to Rolly’s upside-down face and spoke with a mocking smile. He tried to slip the cigarette between Rolly’s lips.

  “No, Ali, you know I no like cigarettes,” Rolly said. But Duulaay was grinning.

  The other Somalis went on with their torture in a bizarre and listless way, running up to kick him, or trading blows with the cane, as if they could think of nothing else to do. The Somalis were like boys who’d found something to engage their casual cruelty on a weekend afternoon. I marveled at how thin an excuse any man needed to treat another like a piece of meat. Duulaay took the cane and whacked Rolly in swift, sharp blows on his exposed chest, his stomach, his thighs. The cane left fading marks on his light-brown skin; Rolly winced but kept silent. Even when Bakayle made taunts about his ransom—“We will get fifty million dollars from your family!”—he pretended not to hear. But from that day on, he would refer to Bakayle as “Fifty Million.”

  At last the pirates lowered him to the dirt. Rolly lay on his side, propped on one elbow, to gain his breath. “I want you to counsel him!” Garfanji shouted at me. “Explain to him that it will be better if he admits that he is from Israel.” I went to sit near him and asked two Somalis for food and water. Abdinasser brought a bottle and a box of biscuits. I welled up with pity and fear; I had no idea what to do. “Are you hungry?” I said, and Rolly nodded. “These men have gone crazy, Rolly; they think you’re from Israel.” He shrugged. One of the teenagers photographed us. “Try to relax for a while,” I said. “I think it’s over.”

  The fear and helplessness were so extreme, and so contradictory, that I sank into a dark and peculiar calm. It was like the moment when Duulaay shook his pistol in my face. After the mortal shock I found a strange, ice-cold balance. I returned to where Garfanji squatted, and he said that “these men”—the tur
baned bosses—wanted to know why no one had wired my ransom. The demand for my hide was still twenty million dollars.

  “I want my money!” Garfanji blustered.

  “You’re asking too much,” I said quietly. “Even you know that.”

  He bellowed my answer to the assembled pirates, who hollered their dissatisfaction and shook their weapons. They held machine guns, grenade-mounted rifles, and AK-47s. One looked like Mustaf Mohammed Sheikh, the pirate Ashwin and I had interviewed in Hobyo. He kept a keffiyeh wrapped around his face, so it was hard to tell, but the resemblance chilled my blood.

  Garfanji said I would be sold to al-Shabaab in one hour if the money wasn’t sent immediately. “They are coming here now!” he said.

  He was lying, but he was in command: I felt a mixture of fear and ashen contempt.

  “We don’t have the money,” I said. “There just isn’t that much money available.”

  “You’re lying!” he shouted. “I have looked into your bank account! I know how much money you have.”

  It was true that his men had stolen a bank card. I didn’t know if someone had hacked the account. But I said: “So you know I don’t even have one million, Mohamed,” and that tripped him up. Garfanji had an image to maintain. Any answer he gave would upset his projection as an all-seeing, all-demanding crime lord. Either he knew we weren’t rich or he didn’t. He couldn’t be all-seeing as well as honest. I watched him carefully, and from the way he dissembled, I gathered he had not cracked my account.

  “The American government hasn’t given us any answer,” he said. “How can we find more money?”