A Creature of Smokeless Flame

by Margaret Ball

  Great. This was practically the first ever time I’d had a chance to use my passport – London doesn’t count; I was only there one night, and I spent most of that night dodging German bombs. And what did I get to see on this trip? An airport hotel and a rape house in Frankfurt, and a fortified perimeter in Mogadishu. Oh, and one tiny glimpse of the African, excuse me, Indian Ocean from the airplane window.

  “Stop pouting,” Brad told me. “This is not America, or even Germany, and I’m going to keep you safe whether you like it or not. Ten days ago, al-Shabaab blew up a market in the city. Four days ago, they kidnapped a German nurse who made the mistake of working in a hospital outside the Green Zone. Yesterday a car bomb exploded on Maka al Mukarama – that’s like the main street of Mogadishu.”

  “What did they demand?”

  “Huh?”

  “For the kidnapped nurse?”

  “Oh.” Brad looked sick. “They… didn’t want a ransom. Her body… has been found.” His tone suggested that I didn’t want to know the details. I decided to quit grumbling about things like having to stay in the nice safe Green Zone.

  Er, make that mostly safe. Two hours before our arrival, mortar fire from outside the perimeter had destroyed most of a runway and all of a Turkish Airlines 737 bound for Dubai. Fortunately, most of the passengers hadn’t boarded yet.

  Just another day in beautiful sunny Mogadishu.

  Jerry Ortiz, the very junior field officer who had been sent to escort us to the CIA compound, imparted that bit of information as a way of encouraging us to hurry up and get off the runway. It did not noticeably dampen his cheerful assurances that Mogadishu was much, much calmer now than back in the bad old days of, say, three years ago, when al-Shabaab still controlled a significant part of the city. Apparently kidnappings, car bombs, and occasional mortar fire were just nuisance-level problems, like, say, traffic accidents. Besides, an immediate retaliatory air strike had already wiped out that particular mortar position.

  And we would have plenty of people to talk to, even stuck inside the Green Zone, because the CIA compound was where American and African instructors ran a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents. Many of them, Brad informed me, were defectors from al-Shabaab being trained to go back out and fight their erstwhile comrades.

  Well, Ben and Brad had plenty of people to talk to. I was told that al-Shabaab fighters were pious Muslims -for some definitions of ‘pious,’ anyway – and would not respond well to being interrogated by a mere female. So – having made that resolution to quit grumbling about the unfixable – I smiled sweetly and accepted Jerry Ortiz’ offer to show me around the compound while the men did the important work. OK, maybe I did grumble a little, but mostly internally.

  It was a sizeable place; had its own walls, with guard towers at each corner, protecting a lot more buildings than I’d expected. One of them sported extra Somali guards at the entrance. Armed, of course. “That’s where we keep the detainees,” Jerry said casually. “Suspected of being with al-Shabaab. We interrogate them to determine which ones can be turned or at least released back into the community.”

  “You interrogate them?”

  A flush colored Jerry’s face and made him look even younger; kind of like my kid brother Andy, only with sideburns. Somebody really ought to tell him that the sideburns didn’t make him look older, they just made him look like he was trying too hard. Wasn’t going to be me. “Well, not me personally, but sometimes I sit in on the interrogations.”

  “What else do you do here?”

  He flushed even harder and began a series of rambling statements that all sounded like variations on ‘open the mail,’ and ‘take lunch orders.’

  “Not you personally,” I said, “the CIA in general. This office must be pretty active if you need so many buildings. How many operations do you have going on?”

  “None,” Jerry said with surprising firmness. “We do not conduct operations here; we’re strictly here to advise the Somali national security forces.”

  “Uh-huh.” And in between offering advice, they probably sold bridges in Brooklyn and oceanfront property in Lampasas. Ten buildings – I’d counted them now – just for advisers and trainers? But it wasn’t nice to put Jerry on the spot. I could probably get the real story from Brad, later. For now, I just let Jerry continue his spiel. He told me the best place to get seafood at the beach (Banadir Beach Restaurant, unbombed since 2016 – not that I had much hope Lensky would agree to take me there) and the best time of year to visit Mogadishu (now; it was the cool season – yes, really, this was a lot cooler than December – and the rains were mostly over.) “Just two months ago, Maka al Mukarama was under water!” he exclaimed dramatically.

  “What, the main street? Don’t they do drainage around here?”

  “You recognized the name!” Jerry was flatteringly impressed. I may be somewhat ignorant of a few geographical details, but I’m not stupid. Lensky had just told me about Maka al Mukarama.

  “For years Somalia’s problem has been drought,” Jerry explained, “but this May a typhoon moved in and sat over the country for days. Nobody was prepared for that; the Long Rains haven’t delivered much rain for a decade. Then it all arrived at once.”

  Made me feel right at home; Texas has much the same pattern. It really, really doesn’t rain until you’ve all but forgotten that water can fall out of the sky; then it really, really rains until you completely lose that urge to run outside screaming, “Free water! Free water!”

  We do have working storm drains in Austin, though. Well, mostly working. Well, only a few minor, low-lying places flood on a regular basis, and none of them are anywhere near Congress Avenue, which you could consider our main street. Well, they’re not near the part of Congress that’s north of the river, anyway.

  Maybe I wouldn’t be making any snide comments about Mogadishu’s infrastructure, or lack thereof.

  After graphic descriptions of the havoc caused by the flooding, Jerry seemed to run out of things to say. I seized the chance to ask him one of the questions Ben and Lensky were presumably asking al-Shabaab defectors at this very moment. “Have you ever heard of an al-Shabaab leader called Omar al-Zanji?”

  That name had been one of the rewards of bugging the house in Frankfurt. That, and the presumption that if Somalis knew inside details about the bombing the perpetrators must have been al-Shabaab, had brought us to Mogadishu. Oh, and the temporary presumption that Harrison was right in his guess that the perpetrators had paranormal abilities. Most of the CIA investigation was happening in America, for obvious reasons. Normal people, no matter how good their network of terrorist cells, might have had some difficulty reaching out from Somalia to stage an attack in the United States, let alone right inside CIA headquarters. They might have had even more difficulty in smuggling three kidnapped American children out of the country and across the globe to Somalia.

  But we had encountered beings – perhaps not technically human – who could have done it without breaking a sweat. Take Shani Chayyaputra, the Master of Ravens, for example. He didn’t even suffer from the limitation that handicapped our topologically based teleporting, the need to have visited and assessed a location physically before teleporting to it; we knew that from the events of last January. In response we had hardened the anti-teleportation shields over the Center’s offices and employees’ homes. But it had never occurred to us to offer such protection to the entire CIA headquarters. Look, after the attack that may seem like gross negligence. All I can say is that a week before this bombing, an offer from us to wander around the Langley offices scribbling topological diagrams on the walls would have been met with hearty laughter. Actually, I don’t think the reaction would have been very different even after the bombing.

  No, I didn’t think the Master of Ravens was behind this. He attacked for financial gain or for revenge, not for political reasons. And his last encounter with us had apparently encouraged him to give up operating in America altogether.
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  But it seemed entirely possible – probable, even – that there could be other beings, natural or supernatural, with abilities similar to his. We were certainly a lot more open to that possibility than were most of the people at the CIA, and they were the ones funding us.

  Naturally I didn’t go into all that with Jerry Ortiz. I just tossed the name out and let it float around in his mind for a few minutes.

  “Al-Zanji,” he repeated, and then slurred the words to something that sounded like ‘Azzanzhi.’ “That’s a strange name for an Arab.”

  I shrugged. “Not saying he is Arab. He’s just… a person of interest. Surely al-Shabaab isn’t run by Arabs? I thought it was a Somali group.”

  “An Islamic Somali group,” Jerry said, “and most of their leaders take Arab names. Prestigious-sounding Arab names that translate to things like ‘Father of Storms,’ or ‘Death to the Infidel.’ Your guy’s name just… well, if it means anything, it would mean ‘Omar from Zanzibar.’”

  “Oh.” I didn’t want to ask where Zanzibar might be when it was at home; fortunately, Jerry’s zeal for imparting information led him to tell me anyway. “It’s a large island off the coast of Tanzania – well, technically it’s part of Tanzania. Before Independence they were separate countries, Tanganyika and Zanzibar; then they got sort of welded into one, called Tanzania. But Zanzibar’s always been a bit different from the mainland. Very isolated, very Islamic, supposedly very haunted.”

  This all sounded promising.

  “If you weren’t so sure this guy is al-Shabaab,” Jerry went on, “I’d say he sounds more like a member of Jeshi-la-Rashiduni – the Army of the Rightly Guided. They split off from al-Shabaab about six months ago to form their own group, more Africa-oriented, more about restoring the independence of Zanzibar and the Swahili coastal belt.”

  “Would there be anybody here who knows about Jeshi-la… what you said?” I would have to start writing stuff down. My funny-word stack was overflowing.

  “Mmm. Well, there’s this one woman who might talk to you; I think her boyfriend was involved. Thing is, Fadiya doesn’t speak English. Or Somali. She’s from Kenya. The coast. And we don’t have a Swahili terp – ah, interpreter – available for you right now.”

  “I’d like to meet her anyway. Woman to woman, you know… we might understand each other better than you think.”

  Heaven knows what Jerry thought that nonsense meant, but he gave me a slow nod as though I’d just invoked some deep feminist wisdom. What I meant was that if Mr. M. spoke Swahili as well as Pashto, Somali, and everything else, Fadiya and I would be able to communicate just fine. Always assuming she could deal with a talking turtle-headed snake as an interpreter. I figured there was no need to bother Jerry with those details if I could just get him to leave me alone with Fadiya.

  I was feeling considerably more dubious about my plan to use Mr. M. by the time we tracked down Fadiya in a courtyard just outside the prison building. She was covered from head to toe in a black nylon sack that must have been hellishly hot in this weather. One small, plump brown hand emerged from a slit in the black draperies to hold a flat basket of rice. Every once in a while she gave the basket a languid shake and something inside the sack jingled musically.

  “Jambo, Fadiya,” Jerry said slowly.

  The black-veiled head inclined. “Sijambo, Jeri.”

  “Ah… Hiki Thalia. Jina lake Thalia.” Jerry had found an all-new pronunciation for my name: thah-LEE-a. He shoved me towards her and retreated. “That’s all the Swahili I know. You’re on your own now.”

  “Sa-LEE-ah,” the woman in black repeated.

  What the heck, I’ve been called a lot worse things. “Saliya,” I agreed.

  “Jina langu Fadiya.” She paused, waiting.

  That had to mean, ‘My name is Fadiya,’ didn’t it? OK, I could do this.

  “Jina langu Saliya.”

  “Hujambo, Saliya.”

  “Hujambo, Fadiya.”

  The black veil erupted in giggles. “La! La! Sijambo!” She added something else that I couldn’t relate to anything that had been said so far.

  “She asks if the man has left,” Mr. M. informed me. “Tell her, ‘Ndiyo.’”

  “Undeeo?”

  Another burst of laughter, and the veil over Fadiya’s nose and mouth dropped, revealing a round, merry face framed in folds of black. “Unasema Kiswahili kama mzungu, Saliya!” She took my hand and I saw what had been making the noise; both wrists were covered with brilliantly colored thin glass bangles.

  I’ll quit describing the multilingual details there, if nobody minds. It wasn’t at all straightforward, and I almost got thrown out right at the beginning, when she realized who – or what – was interpreting for us. She shrank away from Mr. M., whispering something about majini and shetani, and reached for her veil again. He intoned something long and musical that didn’t sound anything like Fadiya’s language.

  “Of course it did not sound like Swahili; it was Arabic,” he informed me later. “I quoted from a sura of the Koran.”

  “There’s something in the Koran that tells people not to be afraid of talking turtle-snakes?”

  Mr. M. preened and admired his own reflection in his shining scales. “Do not be silly. It would not matter what the verse said, she does not know Arabic anyway.”

  If you ask me, there’s a good reason why Americans don’t do foreign languages. The possibilities for confusion and complication seem to be endless.

  In any event, after Mr. M. established his Islamic bona fides by chanting Koranic wisdom at her, Fadiya became positively chatty—and I discovered that I had struck gold.

  It was easy to see why she was so willing to talk; there didn’t seem to be a lot of women in the compound. Clearly she was bored, lonely, and ready for any entertainment. Once you’ve been reduced to shaking the husks out of a few handfuls of rice for employment I suppose anything – even telling your life story to an idiot mzungu girl who has to have everything explained in the simplest possible terms – seems like an improvement.

  (Mzungu, by the way, means ‘European,’ ‘foreigner,’ ‘not African,’ or ‘white,’ depending on whom you ask. A Kenya-born farmer of English heritage is mzungu. The very black American CIA field officer I was to meet later was described as mzungu, but only after he opened his mouth to speak Swahili with a strong Brooklyn accent. I was mzungu. But a Chinese contract worker who spoke no African languages, he wasn’t mzungu. All clear now? Sheesh. This kind of thing is why I prefer mathematics to languages. At least our definitions are consistent.)

  Fadiya had quite a story to tell, once she got started. To me it was a heartbreaking story, but she recounted it with smiles and laughter. Except the part where – well, I’ll get to that.

  She herself was from Mombasa, which I can now tell you is not the same as Mogadishu; it’s another seaport, some way south of Mogadishu, on the coast of Kenya. She had married a man from Zanzibar last year, when she was fourteen. No, she wasn’t forced to marry him, she had loved him from the moment her parents introduced them. He was from a good Arab family in Zanzibar and was considered quite the catch for a girl from a poor neighborhood in Mombasa. Also, he was extremely good-looking. He was very religious; he never missed Friday prayers and always gave alms to the street beggars afterwards. And he was very generous to Fadiya. Here she showed me her bracelets. There were thin gold bangles here and there among the jingling glass ones. That was a lot of gold to give to a wife who hadn’t even borne a son yet, she told me.

  According to Fadiya, all was peace and harmony until her new spouse met those men from al-Shabaab. He took to bringing them home with him on Fridays; she set out the meal for them and retired modestly into a back room, but she could hear their arguments. They said that a young, healthy man like her Omar—”

  I startled and Fadiya lost the thread for a moment, inquiring if something had bit me. I apologized and assured her that I was fascinated by her story. The truth, that.

  Well,
Omar’s new friends had told him he had a duty to join their jihad against the infidel. He hadn’t exactly disagreed, but he’d said that there were plenty of opportunities for jihad right there on the coast, freeing the Swahili people from colonial oppression.

  (I asked Brad about that later. Hadn’t Kenya been independent for, like, over fifty years? How much colonial oppression could still be happening? He explained that to the Moslem Swahili, the tribes that had taken over Kenya after Indepencence were as foreign as the British. Jomo Kenyatta’s tribe, the Kikuyu, had monopolized the government of the new country for many years, and even now power moved uncomfortably between Kikuyu, Luo and other inland tribes which the Swahili considered practically pagan. The current president, Uhuru Kenyatta, was Jomo Kenyatta’s son.)

  Over the weeks, Omar’s friends began winning the arguments. Still, it was a shock to Fadiya when Omar announced one day that they were going to Somalia to join the jihad with al-Shabaab. A foreign land, far from her family, where they didn’t even speak Swahili!

  “Was that when things started going wrong?”

  Fadiya shook her head decisively. No, it was a woman’s duty to obey her husband. Naturally she had come with him to this strange land, and had continued cooking his meals and warming his bed in between the unexplained absences that began after they came north. She assumed he was going out with his friends from al-Shabaab to strike at the imperialist wazungu, but of course it wasn’t a woman’s place to ask about such matters.

  I began to understand why Brad and Ben had been okay about only talking to men.

  The real trouble, Fadiya said, had begun after he was detained here in the CIA’s unofficial prison on suspicion of working with al-Shabaab. They’d questioned him for a month, and when he finally got out he was different: harder, angrier. Hating America even more than he hated the people who’d actually controlled the Swahili coast, from English to Kikuyu. And particularly hating the CIA, whom he accused of insulting and humiliating him.

  Shortly after that, he disappeared again. This absence lasted for nearly two weeks, and his Somali ‘friends’ had started hanging around and bothering her. She’d threatened that if they didn’t treat her with respect, Omar would kill them on his return. And she’d been ecstatic to see him again – but it hadn’t been what she expected.