The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  Now Bashko watched me eat, with wary, questioning eyes. He asked if my mother had promised a ransom. She hadn’t mentioned money at all, but I said, “Of course.”

  He seemed to relax.

  “Bashko,” I said carefully, between bites. “Abdi Yare speak—phone call good?” Did Abdi Yare say it was a good phone call?

  Or, more to the point: Are we cool, even though I just ratted our location in German?

  “Haa, yes,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  I tried to relax but couldn’t.

  XVII

  The next morning we heard on the radio that a leader of al-Shabaab, Ahmed Abdi Godane, had been killed by a drone while his convoy paused near a village in southern Somalia. Godane had organized the siege of the Westgate Shopping Mall, in Nairobi, where dozens of shoppers were slaughtered by Shabaab terrorists in late 2013. The gunmen had ordered some of their victims to recite the shahadah before they died (“There is no god but Allah”) so they could distinguish Muslims from kuffar.

  Bashko heard about the strike while he sat wrapped in a blanket, beside his rifle. “Michael!”

  “Hmm?”

  He gleefully whispered the news about Godane’s death, held up his thumb, and smiled. “America, good!” he said.

  Later in the week, I woke up to an almost extraterrestrial noise over the courtyard, an electromagnetic hum, intense but unplaceable, and I wasted no time uttering a prayer in conversational German to describe my location to any nearby snooping drone. The guards mumbled to one another in the dark, and Bashko shuffled out to the courtyard. It occurred to me in a half doze that he and I both had inconsistent views about military drones. As long as they helped us, we didn’t mind.

  Bashko’s rifle banged like a cannon, and I twitched in bed.

  The next morning I asked why he’d fired his weapon. Bashko’s typical answer to such a question would have been “Because, thief!”—meaning a stranger, some lurking Somali—or else flat denial. This time he told me, in a tense excited whisper, that five drones had circled the house for two hours. He’d looked up to see faint lights reflected on a layer of cloud. The lights, he said, were blinking on top of the drones. He had noticed them only because of the weather.

  “Five?” I said skeptically, using five fingers.

  “Five,” he said, flashing the same gesture.

  I wondered if it was a fairy tale. Then I wondered if my German outbursts on the phone had done some good. Then I wondered if we were all about to die in a raid. But Bashko didn’t even wonder why the drones had paid a visit.

  “Because, adiga,” he said. Because of you.

  “No,” I dissembled, with a smile. “Because, al-Shabaab. We are in Harardhere?” I said. “Al-Shabaab is in Harardhere.”

  “Okay, sahib,” he said.

  The whole month of September was a weird fog of rumor and fear. In spite of the new stirrings I hoped for nothing, trusted nothing. I heard a rumor from the guards that someone had arrested Mohamed Garfanji in Mogadishu. Then I heard he’d gone free again. I mulled a hunger strike to force the bosses’ hand. But I wondered whether open defiance would worsen my situation. I thought a labor strike by the guards could easily bring a fire sale of the hostage to another pirate group, or even to al-Shabaab, and if that was true then a hunger strike might bring nothing better. The whole process could start over.

  The swirl of uncertainty nauseated me, and I put no faith in rumors of freedom.

  One morning in late September—the 23rd—Yoonis came to my room with his phone for another conversation with Bob. This time he let us talk for thirty seconds. “Okay, do you have any idea what’s going on?” Bob said, and managed to explain exactly nothing before Yoonis snatched the phone from my hand.

  “Proof of life, only!” he said, and I lost my temper.

  “What the fuck are you doing? You should have let me finish!”

  “Why?” he said. “Tonight, you will go free.”

  “If you’re lying, Yoonis, I swear I’ll stop eating tomorrow.”

  That was a hot flash of temper. I tried to keep hunger-strike plans to myself. Later I caught Yoonis joking about the conversation to Hashi, and I assumed he was proud of fooling me, of trying to raise my hope when my real fate was to be shifted like a sack of millet to some terrorist’s Land Rover.

  Around noon I had to use the bathroom. Before I finished, the main compound gate swung noisily open and a Land Rover rumbled into the yard. My limbs swamped with fear. Cars came at night, as a rule. Hashi stood outside the bathroom with his Kalashnikov and said:

  “Michael? Gari.” Michael, your car is here.

  “What gari? I’m busy.”

  “No problem,” he said.

  My other guards buzzed in the hall like excited schoolboys. Abdurrahman the translator, Madobe, and a runner had arrived in the Land Rover with a sealed clear plastic sack of bound hundred-dollar bills.*

  “You are going free!” said Yoonis when I came out.

  I studied the bills to see if they were fake. Hard to tell. It was a lot of money, but al-Shabaab would have paid in dollars, too (not shillings). It says something about my flinty frame of mind that in spite of the cash, I couldn’t believe I was about to go free. I’d shut down everything in self-defense, and I still had a hair-trigger temper, an animal mistrust of the mysterious changes upending my comfortable prison world.

  “You must pack your bags,” Abdurrahman said. “You are going to the airport.”

  I dropped a few things into my faux-leather bag, in a desultory way, and tied it all up with a dirty rope. The day felt bright and warm. I had time to make a journal entry. “I’m sick and stuffed-up, with clogged ears and blurred eyes, lungs full of bronchitis and a heart full of rage.” One of the guards had given me a bottle of potent Egyptian cough syrup to calm my bronchitis (or whatever it was) and help me sleep. I’d been sick for weeks. Boils thrived on my skin. By now it just felt normal.

  I packed my notebooks away. No one seemed to care about them. A few men wanted to shake my hand. I submitted, but looked away: I did believe I would never see them again, but I thought somebody else would just deliver me to another part of the bush and transfer me to a more dangerous gang.

  I climbed into the car with only Yoonis and Abdurrahman, the two translators. No weapons in sight. That was oddly encouraging. But when the car pulled out of the compound, Yoonis changed his story.

  “We will not go to the airport now. We will give you to some other Somalis,” he said, which was the wrong thing to say to a hostage in my frame of mind. I nearly bit off his head, thinking You just sold me to another gang. I felt blind with practiced mistrust, fierce as a cat piled into a traveling cage.

  The heat and dust of Galkayo seemed pleasant, though. I saw school compounds, semifamiliar houses, and medical clinics. Robed women with children moved along the road. Driving in a car without a tight contingent of armed men felt almost civilized, and it was such a surprise to see everyday life in a Somali town without squinting through a blindfold that I began to notice a different fear, an unexpected panic that all my wound-up defenses might be useless now. I might have to unwind. What if these guys are serious? The streets bustled with people and goats, and trees threw a spangled, fluttering shade. Plastic litter had collected around the bases of the houses and walls, which had painted advertisements and logos, and I wondered, with a stir of nausea, how it would feel to walk these streets like a normal man.

  I’d grown used to being a hostage and I didn’t know how to stop.

  We drove some distance into the bush, where a white sedan waited beside a gnarled acacia. “Get out. You are free,” said Yoonis, and that was it.

  My atrophied arms began to tremble.

  A pirate I recognized climbed out of the sedan, leaving the passenger door open, and climbed in with Yoonis and Abdurrahman. They drove off in a hurry. I found myself alone in the quiet waste with a new driver, who looked almost as nervous as I was. Dust blew up off the bush. There was no
other gang. This new man spoke American English. He described a wild plan to deliver me to a hotel in North Galkayo, where I would meet my mother.

  “Oh, sure,” I said, trembling with fury again, fangs still dripping with sarcasm. “My mother’s in Galkayo.”

  “She is in the hotel.”

  “I thought we were driving to the airport.”

  “We are driving to the hotel first,” said this Somali.

  Fuck off, fuck off, I thought.

  “Great” is what I said out loud.

  While we drove to town he recommended lying far back in the seat and draping my blanket over my head.

  “It’s better if people don’t see you in this car.”

  “Can you tell me what’s going on?” I said.

  “You are okay now. You are free.”

  “I want to talk to somebody.”

  “I will call Bob,” he said.

  He dialed a number while he steered along the dusty road, and on the phone I heard not just Robert, or Bob—the negotiator—but my mother. That confused me. Were they in the same room?

  Her voice sounded musical and happy.

  “Where are you now?” I said. “Not in a Galkayo hotel room?”

  “No, we’re in California,” she said.

  “Your driver will take you to a hotel,” Bob said, “and another man will drive you to the airport. Your pilot’s name is Derek.”

  The fierce pessimism I had applied all morning to these unusual events opened its grip a little. I just wasn’t sure what to feel instead. Freedom seemed as bizarre as a Thanksgiving feast. I was too racked and shattered to face a pleasure like that. While we steered through Galkayo my driver made small talk, chatting like a guarded American, a melancholy kid who wanted to show some friendliness but preferred not to expose too much of himself. (I could relate.) We pulled up in front of a small but tidy hotel under the withering sun, and we spent just enough time indoors to call Bob and switch drivers. Then I rode with another Somali to the Galkayo airport.

  This dry airstrip with a few low buildings was so mythic to me, such a magnet for my fantasies and dreams, that it felt odd to see it in real life. On the square of tarmac where I had shaken Ashwin’s hand before his flight to Mogadishu I now saw a single-engine Cessna. A bantam, leathery pilot wearing mirrored sunglasses stepped out, paused under the wing, and snapped photos of me emerging from the car.

  “For your mother,” he said.

  “You must be Derek.”

  I gave him a real but weary smile. Derek was the first competent man I’d met in two years (since I’d left the Naham 3). He shook my hand and offered me a cheap blue backpack stuffed with clothes. One of my rubber Thai sandals broke as I stepped into the plane—just in time—so I was pleased to find a fresh pair of sandals in the backpack. Also a tube of Dramamine.

  Derek rearranged some bags in the cramped space behind our seats while I rooted through my new belongings.

  “Flew in with my own fuel,” he chatted, pointing at large plastic tanks in the hollow tail section behind our seats. He’d emptied the tanks into his plane while he waited. “For the return trip.” Galkayo’s airport lacked reserves of the right kind of fuel, he said, so he’d buzzed up from Mogadishu in this little plane like a flying bomb.

  The backpack also contained a new shirt, protein bars, toiletries, a pair of glasses with the wrong prescription, and a pair of waterproof safari slacks with a tag from the Djibouti NAVEX. I blinked and remembered the feeling of hot sun pressing down on the air-conditioned shop, and I noticed an unexpected rush of gratitude for the cheap racked clothing and the thousand brands of shampoo.

  Derek chatted away in fluent and reassuring English. He sounded Scottish or South African. His plane had an old-fashioned instrument panel—crowded with black meters and dials, no digital screens. He climbed in and slammed his flimsy door. I fastened my seat belt. We put on headsets, ready to go. The tarmac in front of us lay empty, but a Somali guard asked us to wait “just half an hour.”

  “What for?” Derek asked him.

  “A journalist is coming; he wants to take your picture,” said the Somali.

  “No,” I told Derek.

  My head felt cramped; my body felt limp and weak. I would feel cramped and weak for months. People have said, “You must have been overjoyed,” but joy wasn’t on the menu that afternoon. Any ransom is a filthy compromise, and I’d lived like a hated castaway for so long it was hard to imagine that anyone wanted me back. I blinked in the hard sun and tried to unstick my brain.

  “Galkayo tower, Galkayo tower,” Derek radioed, and gave his call sign. “Request permission to take off,” he said. “Two souls on board.”

  No response from the tower. He let the plane roll forward.

  “Galkayo tower, Galkayo tower,” Derek repeated, and I felt another tremble in my atrophied muscles. Two souls on board, I thought. He has a point. A living dog was better than a dead lion. I had sometimes wished for the moral clarity of a rescue, but violence would have been a compromise of a different sort; it would have endangered the people who came to get me. It would have killed Bashko and Hashi and Farrah. It might have killed me. The bosses, in any case, would have survived.

  “Sometimes they don’t answer,” Derek mumbled.

  My daily sense of terror and waste had started to scatter like a fog, and the changes panicked me. Oh God oh God what now. After years of halting speech in one kind of pidgin or another I wasn’t sure where to put the things I felt. Gratitude was too weak a word. Maybe Lazarus led out of the tomb was no less tongue tied. It just felt fine to sit in the warm cabin of a functioning plane. I looked at the cracked and sun-beaten white buildings of the airport—these objects of fantasy for two and a half years—in mute animal wonder.

  “Galkayo tower, Galkayo tower,” Derek repeated. “Request permission for takeoff. Two souls on board.”

  At last there was noncommittal noise from the radio.

  “Yes, okay,” crackled a voice, and Derek lined up his plane for takeoff.

  Part 9

  Fugue

  I

  We wore sunglasses because of the glare, and we spoke through mouthpieces on our headsets because of the propeller roar.

  “I know two of your friends,” Derek said.

  “What?” I said, still disoriented by the series of events.

  “I flew a pair of Seychellois fishermen out of Somalia the same way. From Adado.”

  “Rolly and Marc!” I said.

  “That’s right.”

  Most of my past felt like such a thin fantasy that it overwhelmed me to hear about people I knew.

  “When did they go free?”

  “That was in November 2012, I believe.”

  “My pirates said there was a ransom of four million dollars.”

  “I imagine they did say that.”

  We soared over the sere, flat, hot desert bush, over clusters of villages and roaming packs of camels. The plane wobbled in a headwind. Derek said, “We’ve got three and a half, maybe four hours to go, depending on wind. We might hit turbulence—you normally do near Mogadishu in the late afternoon. I was getting nervous there at the airport, to be honest. Much later and we would’ve had to spend the night.”

  I took a Dramamine.

  I didn’t know how to hold sustained conversations.

  “You do this for a living?” I said.

  “Oh, yes,” Derek said. “Spent seventeen years in the military, nine in the SAS.* Afterward I started my charter business in Nairobi. I thought, You’ve got to use the training. Otherwise, what is it for?”

  Derek showed me his right hand, which lacked part of an index finger. “Lost that in Oman in 1975,” he said. “I’ve got a metal knee, too. Jumped from a plane with the Americans near Fort Bragg, through two layers of cloud. Conditions perfect, but my knee happened to come down on a sharp rock. Broke the kneecap.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Gotta be careful of that.”

  Derek was Scots by h
eritage, but he spoke with a mild South African accent. He’d lived much of his life in East and South Africa. An old breed of bush pilot.

  We approached Mogadishu from the north and circled over long lines of surf near Lido Beach, the city’s public waterfront. Clear weather let us see the whole jumbled sprawl of what used to be a grand African city. We came down over the water to land on an exhaust-scarred runway, where a pair of SUVs waited along the edge. Men wearing beards and mirrored sunglasses gave directions with their arms. When I climbed out, four of them hustled me, like pirates, into a baking Land Rover.

  The guys in the car were American and German, from the FBI and the BKA. One of them took my blood pressure. I showed them the boils on my skin and the Egyptian cough syrup I’d been drinking. They said a military plane would land soon and fly me to Nairobi. I sat like a castaway in that hot car, swathed in my pink flowered blanket, relieved to be out of Galkayo but nervous not to be out of Somalia. After twenty minutes, an olive-green cargo plane landed with an incredible wind and roar. It was a C-130, not very different from the big planes I’d heard in the air as a hostage. It lined up near our Land Rover and lowered a tail ramp, showing a greenish interior outfitted for medical care. I sat on a stretcher fixed to the floor of the plane. An Air Force doctor quizzed me and took my blood pressure. He asked if I wanted to spend the flight lying on the stretcher.

  “No, it’s not that bad,” I said.

  He gave me a sleeping tablet “for later tonight,” and warned me not to down it with alcohol. I hadn’t been in the presence of so many well-meaning people in too long; I wasn’t sure how to behave. Without my glasses I couldn’t make out individuals, but wandering back and forth in the hollow, dim-lit fuselage were placid-faced young airmen wearing khaki jumpsuits. Soon we strapped ourselves to seats along the inner wall, and one bearded man, an FBI agent named Kevin, sat next to me.