Fractured: International Hostage Thriller

by Clàr NÕ Chonghaile

  One of the guards, a pockmarked teenager with bird-like hands, sat in the back with me. The other sat beside Guled. They put their guns between their knees and hunched forward, eyes glued to the road. The teenager had a mole on his neck and a pistol in his belt. He nodded at me, but did not speak. The older one muttered a few words in Somali to Guled, who raised his eyebrows skeptically. I was nervous and alert, but not scared. I trusted Guled, and I knew he would have hired reliable men from his clan.

  Everything in Somalia revolves around the clans. It’s the most intractable element of the seemingly endless conflict, and the one that is most inaccessible to me. I simply cannot understand these ties that go back generations, that are revered above and beyond the realities of today. What does clan matter when the whole country is burning? I know that’s simplistic. I know that question doesn’t do me, or the story, justice. But deep down, when the more sensitive quotes are written up, and my articles have been finely balanced and subbed for political correctness, deep down this is what I think.

  Guled lived in a government-controlled area close to the presidential palace. His house was a quiet place of dusty carpets, a few pieces of life-laden furniture, and the comforting aromas that said a woman was around. When Michelle moved into my flat in Paris two years ago, she brought those smells with her. A faint whiff of perfume, a hint of unknowable creams with mysterious functions, soft scents, the essence of woman.

  Guled’s wife, Aisha, came from the kitchen to greet us, wiping her hands on her robe before adjusting her yellow headscarf to hide, momentarily, the girlish smile that sat amid the crow’s feet and wrinkles. It was khat time, and Guled sank to the floor, with his back to the wall in the dining room. I joined him. I like khat. It is the perfect drug for a new arrival in Somalia. At first, you feel euphoric, you delight in your crystal-clear mind, even the conflict seems logical. But later, this joy evaporates and depression sets in. You get cranky. Fantasy with a reality-check kicker.

  We chewed and spat the streams of brown juice into Guled’s silver spittoon.

  “It’s much worse than the last time you came,” he said, finally.

  “Nobody expects the government to last much longer. Not that that’s all bad. They’ve been useless. But then, what’s the alternative?”

  He closed his eyes and shook his head.

  “AMISOM?” I asked.

  Guled smiled and shrugged.

  “Same problems as before and the extra troops haven’t really helped. They are attacked. They shell the market. People die. They are attacked. They shell the market. They are not helping. But there is talk of an offensive to clear the city. It will be difficult,” he said, with the deadpan understatement that characterises many Somalis.

  “And Al-Shabaab, where are they at these days?”

  “They are strong,” Guled said, with a hint of admiration. He spat, smoothly.

  “They still control parts of the city, and down south, it’s all theirs. They killed the interior minister last month. His niece blew him up. She was one of them. They are everywhere. And new fighters keep arriving. From Pakistan, Britain, America, Sweden, Germany and many from Yemen.”

  He nodded his head slowly.

  “But there are splits too. Some of the Somalis don’t like the way the foreign fighters are climbing the ranks. They are angered by the power they are given, their fame. So there is something to exploit.”

  We chewed silently for a while. We both knew that nobody was ready yet to make the kind of commitment that any exploitation of internal splits would require. The AMISOM troops didn’t have the training, or subtlety, to do it.

  “And you, and Aisha? You are managing?”

  He sniffed, as if the question was offensive, which in a way, of course, it was. But how else could I phrase it? Perhaps I could have done it more sensitively in Somali but my knowledge of Guled’s language was shamefully limited; I knew little beyond mahadsanid, the ‘thank you’ so little used in this brusque land.

  “We are struggling, friend, but what do you want?” Guled said. “This is Somalia. We are alive, we eat today, we pray for tomorrow.”

  It happened three days later. We were driving along the seafront, passing buildings so battered they looked like medieval ruins. Windows like gouged-out eyes, roofs like caved-in skulls.

  But in some places, in the old city by the cathedral, if I squeezed my eyes into slits, blurred my vision, I could almost glimpse the past: instead of a fragile stack of bricks reaching beseechingly to the clouds, I could imagine the two towers of the cathedral rising above yellow taxis in the square below; I could see swaying palm trees fringing sandy pavements; I could hear the low thrum of Vespas. If I closed my eyes completely, and listened to the scream of the gulls, and tasted the salt on my lips, and maybe had the good luck to catch the guns asleep, I could go deeper into the past. Until Guled swerved to avoid another cavernous pothole and I smashed my head into the doorframe. That’s what you get for dreaming here.

  Guled was driving like a maniac, or like anyone in Mogadishu, and humming along tunelessly to an Arabic song on the radio. I can’t remember what the song was. I only caught snatches above the judder of the Toyota’s old engine, the breaking waves and the occasional pop-pop of gunfire behind the crippled buildings. I feel now that I should remember the song. It’s an important detail.

  I do remember I was trying to imagine what the port was like centuries ago, before Somalia became a byword for hell, or chaos, or whatever the latest nut graph of choice is for us journalists. Mogadishu, the ‘Seat of the Shah’, a city with clout and custom, where frankincense, myrrh and beautiful cloths were traded. I was thinking of how catastrophic the fall from grace had been.

  And then it started, with a squeal of tires. They came like children, heard before they were seen. We had no armed men this time. This was supposed to be a fifteen-minute trip through government-held territory. I just had time to find Guled’s misty right eye in the rear-view mirror before they were upon us.

  Their technical – a pickup with a machine gun bolted to the floor behind the cabin – came roaring out of a side street, jolting to a stop in front of us. Five, six, maybe eight men, armed with sub-machine guns and pistols leapt out, screaming, firing into the air. Some wore aviator-type sunglasses, some wore boots, some flip flops, all were strapped with bandoliers of ammunition.

  Guled stood on the brakes and they came running. I don’t remember if he said anything to me in those few seconds. I didn’t hear him if he did.

  They pulled me out. Hands everywhere, ripping off my hat, pulling my hair, slapping my head. They threw me in the road. I gashed my knee when I fell. I grunted. I was new to pain then. I looked to the car. Guled was still sitting in his seat, his hands raised. He was talking in rapid-fire Somali. I had never heard that tone before. His voice was an octave higher. I don’t know what he said. I suspect it didn’t matter. I tell myself this because to even entertain the idea that there was something to be done, or said, or given, or bargained for, is too awful.

  A skinny man in a red-checked scarf and sunglasses, a cartoon mobster, was screaming at Guled, gesturing to me. Guled was shaking his head, never taking his good eye off the yelling man.

  “Leave him alone. He doesn’t know me. He’s just a driver,” I yelled. “He’s just a fucking driver!”

  The butt of a gun slammed into the side of my head, catching the delicate skin just above my eyebrow. The blow knocked me to the ground. Dust and blood in my eyes, gulls screaming overhead. I dared to look again.

  The guy with the sunglasses was looking at me. Guled was looking at me, all eyes above that big nose and trembling lips. He looked like a frightened old man and I realised, suddenly, how wrong it was that he was here. Casually, the guy turned away from me, and shot Guled in the left side of the head. My friend’s eyes didn’t leave mine until his head jerked sideways, blood and brain spraying onto the windscreen. I screamed, a raw, animal cry, as my brain struggled to catch up with my eyes.

&n
bsp; I was terrified, but not for myself. It was the magnitude of what had just happened. And the speed. I didn’t expect death to be so sudden. It was too abrupt to be real. And then it was gone, Guled’s lolling, shattered head was gone. Someone had stuffed a sack over my head, over my burning, wet eyes. I was dragged across the ground, my legs useless to me now. They threw me into the back of their technical and kicked me into a ball. I welcomed the blows. I wanted oblivion. I embraced it gratefully.

  I know now that those first guys weren’t anyone. They were just bandits, war opportunists. They might have joined in the fighting sometimes, on one side or the other, but basically they were guns for hire. On that day, July 26, they were working for themselves. A few dark, dread-filled days later, they sold me to Abdi’s group. I call it Abdi’s group although he is the most insignificant player in this farce.

  The original group, Guled’s murderers, didn’t have the ability to hold me. That was not their thing. Somalia’s war is an industry, and like any other industry, there are specific functions that are carried out by specific people. The first guys were the grunts, Guled was a statistic and I am, or was for a while, the story. Was I also the catalyst?

  I don’t know how they knew where we were. Maybe one of Guled’s neighbours informed on us. Perhaps the shopkeeper in Guled’s street where I bought two bottles of lukewarm Coke that morning. Maybe one of Guled’s relatives, jealous that he was working for a foreigner and getting a salary.

  The trickier question is why. Why did Guled have to die? They could have beaten him and left him. Or maybe he recognised the pickup, or one of the men. Maybe that is what that high-pitched, panicked conversation was about. The fact that I don’t know infuriates me. I put Guled in that situation. I should know exactly what happened, I should not be lamely speculating because I don’t have enough local knowledge to understand.

  Not that I forced Guled to work for me, or for the paper. It wasn’t like that. And it wasn’t just about money. Guled had worked with the Somali National Media Agency for years, and then with Radio Mogadishu. But reporting became too dangerous when Al-Shabaab started killing journalists. He became an undercover fixer, perhaps believing that working for an international newspaper would offer better protection, as well as more money.

  I asked him once why he did not leave Somalia, why he kept working here?

  “Will your paper fly me and my family to Washington? Will they give us all visas, find us a small house, help us set up a business?” he had asked.

  I met his smile with my own, not mocking him, mocking myself and my world and the stupidity inherent in my question.

  “Of course not. And where else would you have me go? Nairobi? Yes, I could live in Nairobi. I could live with my people in Eastleigh, and go to the mosque, and chew some good khat. But then I am just another Somali living in Nairobi. What is that? And my son, and his daughter? They would come too. And what then are they? Somalis living in Nairobi. Somalis paying bribes to the police so they don’t arrest them for being Somalis. And so it goes on.”

  He paused. Ahmed, a rake-thin, intense twenty-five-year-old with his father’s laugh but not much reason to use it, lived in Guled’s house with his timid wife, Ubah, and daughter, Lila, a two-year-old with seen-too-much eyes. Ahmed had been studying to be a teacher until Al-Shabaab closed his college. He now worked in Bakara market, doing odd jobs or selling fruit bought from relatives who had farms upcountry. Ahmed was hunched like a man who felt all struggle was futile, but something about his eyes suggested there might be something else smouldering inside.

  “And if your paper would not give me the money to fly my whole family to Nairobi, do you suggest I walk across the border to one of those camps? You would have me live in Dadaab, that sweating fleapit? You would have Lila grow up there? You’ve seen it. She deserves more,” Guled said, smoothing the girl’s soft, black hair as she sat on his lap.

  Lila tilted her head, turning her serious eyes up to her grandfather. She was a quiet toddler, restrained already by the chaos outside her home. Not for her the mad, dashing whoops and shrieks of other children. It was as if, knowing her life could be short, she had decided to grow up fast.

  “You know, Peter, I am no idealist. Maybe the opposite. But if we all leave, who will save Somalia? Not your lot, for sure,” Guled said, spitting out another mirthless chuckle.

  Guled Adan didn’t die because he was a hero. He died because he did a job – a lot for money, a little for professional pride, a little because it was fun, and maybe a lot because I happened to be there that July 26th. In Somalia. In the back of his car. Or maybe because I bought those Cokes.

  If I survive this, that thought is waiting for me. Godwin is waiting for me, and Esther and Michelle. Because this, this unbearable hiatus, is just part of my story. And maybe not even the most interesting part.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ABDI

  I don’t know why I gave him the cigarette. I suppose I felt sorry for him. I will not tell the Sheikh. He would not approve and I don’t want to make him angry. He is a silent man, but like a scorpion: when he strikes, he will be fast and fierce. And then, this job is important. It will not be for long. I still think I was right to leave Mogadishu. Especially after Nadif. It is good that we brought the prisoner here. It was not right to keep a man like a rat in the dark. It reminded me of how we used to hide in the cellar during the heavy fighting when I was a boy. But at least I had hooyo’s arms around me, the shield of a mother’s love. Or Nadif holding my hand.

  Here at least the prisoner has some light. Not that I feel any real sympathy for him. But it is a question of dignity. I know what they say about us. They say we love war. They say we cannot be helped, we are bloodthirsty, we care for no one, we are ruled by our clans. These things and more I read on the Internet when I visited cyber cafés with Nadif, in the time before. They are wrong. We don’t love killing. Ask me, ask my friends. Why would we not want to live? What kind of person does not want to live? But we live here, at war, so what do you want?

  I was born in Mogadishu in 1993. The year of the Battle for Mogadishu, but in our house, the year of my birth. Nadif was two then. He was a child of the world after leader Siad Barre, a baby born in the chaos of that afterlife. My mother says he hated me at first. He used to try to push me off her breast. I can imagine her husky, deep laugh as she tried to keep him off her knees. Hooyo would have called my father. “Omar, take him please. What an angry one we have!”

  The day the American helicopters were shot down, the day we call Ma-alinti Rangers, my father ran into the house and bundled us downstairs to the basement. We lived just a few streets north of where the first helicopter crashed. My mother had heard the noise and was peering through the bullet holes in the gate when my father banged on it. He rushed in, his 6ft 2in burly frame making her feel unreasonably safe. I don’t remember this, of course. My mother told me later. Even Nadif didn’t remember that day, though he used to talk about it a lot, after he joined them.

  “The infidels were afraid to come back after that,” he would say as we sat under the mango tree on the edge of a patch of waste ground between our house and Bakara market. He would laugh and punch me on the shoulder, knowing I did not like it when he talked like that. Many of the boys from our neighbourhood came to that tree. Maybe we thought its thick branches and wide, rubbery leaves would protect us when the mortars started to fall.

  Sometimes we played football on the sandy, barren lot nearby. But we didn’t go into the open ground so often after Abdirakim and his brothers were killed when a shell landed on them. But that makes it sound too simple. They were blown to bits. The littlest one was only three. He was never found. He just disappeared. Everyone said the shell was fired by AMISOM. I don’t know. I wasn’t there that day. And anyway, what does it matter who did it?

  Nadif was my hero. When I was a child, he looked out for me when others made fun of my stutter. But time does not stand still, and by last year he had become a warrior for a cause I could
not share. He was still my hero, my handsome brother with his curly hair and thick beard. But it was not just a beard anymore. It started as a fad, then it became a way of avoiding trouble, and after he joined them, it was a political statement.

  As the beard grew, so the words coming from inside it became louder, fiercer. But for a while, even when he was ranting about the infidel, even when he was carrying his gun and shouting at wide-eyed, diminished people at roadblocks, his eyes were warm. To me, he still looked as though he was about to burst into laughter and punch me on the shoulder. Then, he was still my brother, but I wonder if that was still true at the end.

  When we were younger, he taught me about football. He supported Manchester United, like many of our friends. Before Al-Shabaab came, we would watch matches at an iron-and-wood bar near the market, standing outside and straining to see the tiny screen inside. Nadif worshipped Ryan Giggs. I liked Gunnar Solskjaer, though I could never say his name right. I liked his face. He looked kind, almost like a child. Nadif told me they called him the baby-faced assassin. I liked that too. The bar owner didn’t like us being there, but as long as we didn’t come in, he let us gather like flies in the rain. If we became too rowdy, he would waddle out, swinging a broom, gently clipping bottoms and shins. It was a game. The beautiful game.

  When Al-Shabaab came, they put an end to football. They put an end to so many things.

  Our house was by the market, on the edge of Al-Shabaab territory. It is clear to me now that Nadif was always going to end up with them. It was because of my father, but also because of the way Nadif was.

  My father was killed near a bread stall at the market during a three-hour battle between government soldiers and their Ethiopian friends, and Al-Shabaab. I don’t know who fired the mortar that chopped my father into pieces so that we never found his left leg. He was buried without it. That was my leg. When Nadif and I fought about sitting on his lap, he would lift us onto his knees, saying, “Boys, I have two beautiful knees. I have two beautiful sons. Where is the problem?”