Fractured: International Hostage Thriller

by Clàr NÕ Chonghaile

  Something touched my arm and I was yanked from my past. It was Abdi. He said nothing, just took my hand and led me across to the hut. We passed under the low door, through the ashes of a dead fire in the centre of the room, and across to the deepest shadows at the far wall. The hut was just a frame of sticks covered with woven mats, some of which had rotted away. I looked up through the broken roof at the stars, a poor man’s observatory. I took a deep breath, trying to stop the panic rising in my chest. Another room. I felt as though the walls were moving towards me.

  “We will stay here for a while,” Abdi whispered, unwrapping the scarf around his leg and grimacing as some dried blood tore off with the cloth.

  “The moon is too bright now to run.”

  “Where are we going?” I asked, licking my teeth with my parched tongue, hoping to wring some moisture from somewhere.

  Abdi reached into his bag and handed me a bottle of water.

  “Don’t drink too much. I don’t know how far we will have to walk before we get some more. We are going to Mogadishu.”

  Abdi’s spoke softly, but certainly.

  “How far is it?”

  “About ninety kilometres. We will follow the main road. It is over there,” Abdi said, lifting his arm and pointing across me.

  “Will they follow us?”

  “I do not know. Yes, probably. For some time, at least. But I have family around here. My clan comes from this region. I am hoping we may be lucky.”

  It sounded like a frail hook for even the slightest of hopes, but I realised I was completely dependent on this teenager now. I was the foreigner. If we survived this, it would have nothing to do with me. I was still a prisoner, of my ignorance, of my weakness, of my inappropriateness here.

  “Thank you, Abdi,” I said. “You are taking a huge risk. Why are you helping me?”

  Abdi turned his face to mine and in the pale light, he looked even younger than before.

  “I don’t know. I have no one. So it does not matter what I do. But I am tired of always having things happen to me. My father died. My brother died. My mother died. These things happened to me. I have never done anything except come to my cousin, and work for him here. And still things keep happening to me. I wanted to do something myself.”

  He spoke slowly, almost as if he were speaking to a child. He looked away again. He was wise enough not to expect or want a response. I didn’t know what to say. And so we sat in silence under the woven mats, listening to the bigger silence outside, waiting for the clouds to come.

  “When will they find out I am gone?”

  “Soon.”

  Abdi reached into his backpack and pulled out some crumpled pages.

  “This is the letter you gave me. You will give it to your mother yourself. If you still want to.”

  I took the pages, looked at Abdi and tore them into pieces. I scrabbled at the soft earth and I buried each wrinkled witness to my despair. If Abdi was my saviour, I needed to believe in him. I needed to show him my faith. I buried them deep for him, and maybe for me. A scribe’s offering to the gods of hope.

  “You remind me of the mother of my son,” I said, when I had finished and could bear the rustling silence no longer.

  “Esther is a survivor like you, Abdi. They cut off her arm in Sierra Leone and she fled to Liberia. She survived the civil war there, saw horrible things just like you. But she is still in Monrovia, caring for our son. She made her own decisions. You are making yours. That is not something I have ever done well.”

  Abdi seemed to ignore me.

  “I am sorry I forgot to bring you shoes,” he finally said.

  I laughed, and it felt good.

  “You saved my life,” I said, swallowing the ‘for now’ that flashed in my brain like the neon entrance to a sleazy club.

  I touched his arm. “Don’t worry. I’ll put some cloth around them.”

  I ripped the end of my frayed, dirty robe. I tore off four strips and wrapped up my feet as best I could.

  “We will find some shoes.”

  “Honestly, Abdi, don’t worry. If I have no shoes, maybe I can leave no footprints.”

  Abdi did not smile. He was looking up through the mats to the sky.

  “The clouds are back. We must go. We must go as far as we can before dawn.”

  He stood up and offered me his hand.

  “I hope we will make it, Peter Maguire.”

  It was the first time he had said my name.

  “But if we don’t, I will have done something at last. I will have tried.”

  The black of the night was leaking out of the sky when Abdi stopped me again. By this stage, I was almost sleepwalking. I was no longer conscious of my sore feet, or the dark, or the land around me. I was all pounding heart and rasping breath, my whole being reduced to these two cardinal functions. My fingers were still gripping Abdi’s shirt, but when he stopped I almost walked past him, twisting his shirt around his waist. His hand pulled me back. We had stopped under a thorn tree. I could see a huddle of huts in the distance.

  “There is a village ahead. I have clan there. I must go first and see if they will offer us shelter,” he whispered.

  “Why would they do that?” I asked.

  “Because I am clan,” Abdi said, a hint of a smile in his voice.

  “There are some things that are hard for foreigners to understand, and maybe this is the hardest. My clan will support me even if it is risky. It is their duty, even though I do not know this family very well. They are on my mother’s side, her cousins. But also, they hate Al-Shabaab.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they tax our people. Because they make us obey their laws – no television, no music, beards, veils. Because they have brought the world here, the Ethiopians, the Ugandans, and the others, and because they have turned this country into a playground for violent men from other countries who have no business here.”

  He stopped as his voice cracked. He took a moment to calm down as he bent to retie the scarf around his injured leg.

  “I will go in alone. I must see if Mukhtar is there. He is the leader of the clan in this village. I must speak to him alone first. I will not be long. Stay here.”

  He limped off. I sat under the thorn tree, leaning against its slender trunk, grateful for the hard ground beneath me. I watched the world turn from black to grey, and prayed to all the Gods I had for so long ignored to bring Abdi back to me. My eyelids were sliding shut but I fought to stay awake. I could not let death creep up on me. The birds were beginning to chirp and the dry earth was starting to sweat when, before I knew it, sleep claimed me.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  NINA

  I woke hot and sticky, wondering where I was. I had slept like a child in the foetal position, but my body can’t really do foetal anymore, at least not willingly. As my bones creaked into place, and my brain engaged, I realised I needed to find Edward. I had not seen him since the day before. I could hear purposeful male voices, heavy vehicles revving and above and below it all, was the dull thud of artillery somewhere in the city. The sounds did not scare me anymore.

  I was caught in my first gun battle in Abidjan in 1979 – it was a nothing event, not even a footnote in history. Some criminals, thugs as we called them, stormed a restaurant on the lagoon on a sweaty, shisha-filled night as Tim and I ate spicy chicken and rice, swaying to Lebanese pop and laughing about nothing. Three men in jeans, with scarves round their faces and baseball caps pulled low over their foreheads, burst into the main dining room, firing their sub-machine guns in the air. I had never heard gunfire so close.

  I dived under the table with Tim, shaking uncontrollably at the thought of those random bullets whizzing around the room with who knew whose name on them. I felt so vulnerable. It is humiliating and humbling to know that there really is nothing you can do. It must be the same feeling people get when the plane starts to go down, or the ship starts to tilt towards the waves, or in that fleeting second when you realise you have lost cont
rol of the car. No one was killed that night. We were ordered to our feet and one of the gunmen came around to take our jewellery, wallets and purses. We gave them gratefully, fingers fumbling. I did not dare to look into the attacker’s face as he stood beside us. But I remember his smell – strong and sharp. The smell of anger, limitless power and opportunity.

  Guns and, more specifically, bullets still terrify me. But years in this business have refined my terror – I know now how to distinguish bullets that will kill you from bullets that are far away, destined for someone else’s soft body. Unless they sneak through the air, silently and maliciously, plotting a course that will change your life, and all the while, you stand there, chatting inanely, oblivious.

  I finally tracked Edward down to the canteen. He was sitting alone, his laptop in front of him, a mug of cold coffee by his side. I sat down on a plastic chair opposite him.

  “Did you get some rest?” he said, without taking his eyes from the screen.

  His fingers were flying over the keys and I noticed how delicate they were, thin and long, the fingers of a flautist. His fingers did not fit.

  “I slept, or something like it,” I said, swallowing a yawn. “Where have you been?”

  “I had things to do,” he said, and I resisted the urge to laugh.

  I hoped he wasn’t going to treat me like this for long. I sat, and patiently waited for him to elaborate. Eventually, his fingers paused their cyber concerto, he shut the laptop brusquely and finally met my eyes.

  “I have some news,” he said. “But frankly, I’m wondering if I should even tell you. I don’t want to get your hopes up too early.”

  “Edward, with all due respect, don’t you dare patronise me,” I said. “I appreciate you are the expert here, and my son’s life quite probably rests in your hands, or pretty close to them anyway. I’m not a novice at this kind of thing, or this kind of place. I know there are things that you cannot tell me, and I think I am smart enough and experienced enough to know what they are, but if you have news about the whereabouts or health of my son, I expect you to pass that on. Now.”

  Edward smiled.

  “Don warned me you would be difficult. Okay, sorry if I offended you. It’s just I am not one hundred per cent sure of the information I have.”

  “How sure are you?” I asked sharply.

  “About seventy per cent. We’ve heard that a prisoner escaped from Al-Shabaab near Wanlaweyn last night.”

  He held up his hand as I opened my mouth – he’s done this before for sure, I thought in the part of my brain that kept working normally despite the emotional whirlwind whipping through the rest.

  “I can’t tell you how we know, and like I said, the information is not confirmed. I need to make some calls and maybe head back into the city to try to get a better handle on things. I may be gone for a while, but I’ll call here to let you know if anything new comes up.”

  I tried to be rational, to treat this news as any other information I might get on a story. Interesting but the sourcing was flaky. Even if it was true, it didn’t mean Peter was safe. Edward clearly did not know where he was. So he was still in danger.

  Edward grabbed a laptop case from beneath the bench, slipped the computer into it, and rose.

  “Stay here. There really is nothing you can do now except wait. Here.”

  He emphasised the last word and then he was gone, pulling his mobile phone from the breast pocket of his incongruously crisp blue shirt as he pushed open the door on the broiling sun.

  I sat at the table for a moment, but I couldn’t bear it. I would walk, just as I had walked after I found out that Peter was Shaun’s child. Then, I struggled up mossy hills and plunged gratefully into the cool valleys of the Cévennes in France, breathing in the heady scents of cypress and eucalyptus, hoping their purity would somehow be transmitted to me.

  Now, I headed out of the restaurant and went to find Colonel Mugweri, pulling my sunglasses over my eyes, feeling the heat like a hammer through my canvas floppy hat. Mugweri was standing by a block of brick dormitories, chatting to some of his soldiers. They laughed uproariously, and he grinned like a man who is used to making people happy. He saw me, bent his head to whisper to his crowd. Their eyes swerved nervously towards me.

  “Did you rest, Mrs Walters? Would you like me to assist you in any way?” he asked as he approached me across the hot sand.

  “Would one of your men be able to show me around the base?”

  He arched an eyebrow so that it peeked cheekily above his Ray-Bans.

  “Why? It is very hot now, and if I understood correctly, you are not here to work but to wait for your son?”

  It was a question, but also a reprimand. I have often found men in uniform, whatever their nationality, to be experts in turning any sentence into a barely veiled admonishment.

  “Colonel, what do you do when some of your men are killed out there?” I said, waving towards the edge of the sprawling compound of half-finished buildings, bulging, split sandbags, and coiled razor wire.

  “Say there is a gun battle and you hear of casualties. Do you rest? Do you drink tea? Do you sit around waiting for someone to come back?”

  Mugweri smiled and turned to squint into a sky so perfect it seemed to have lost its way to paradise.

  “I am older than you, I am a different colour, I am not a soldier. But like you, I cannot just sit here while everyone else searches for Peter. Get someone to show me around. Let me see a little of what brought him here. I have come so far, and who knows, maybe I will be the only witness to his last story. I hope to God not, but if this place was worth Peter’s life, then I’d better see what I can see.”

  “As you wish,” Mugweri said, sighing. He dug out his phone and barked out a few words in what sounded like Swahili.

  A few moments later, a short man with a bulldog face and a canine grin that revealed very yellow teeth came marching towards us. Sweat dripped into his eyes from under the rim of his helmet, and his rapid blinking made him look like a peculiarly nervous killer dog. He saluted vigorously, the action extravagant like his appearance.

  “Private Nabakoba, this is Mrs Walters. She is our guest. She would like to visit the base. Take her on a tour. She can go anywhere,” Mugweri said, adding a few words, again in Swahili.

  Nabakoba saluted again, and Mugweri marched off. I extended my hand to my new minder.

  “My name is Nina,” I said as his fingers grazed mine, and then pulled back quickly.

  “What would you like to see?” he asked in a high-pitched tone. This bulky soldier, whose forehead was hiding under his too-big helmet, was just a boy. He was maybe nineteen.

  “Nothing in particular. Just take me around the base. I want to see what you do here. My son came here to write about this place. I want to imagine what he might have written.”

  I left the ‘in case’ unspoken. It hung heavy in the air.

  “First, we must make you safe,” he said.

  He led me to an office, again in a shipping container, where he pulled a faded flak jacket from a pile balanced precariously on metal shelves.

  “I am sorry. It is not strictly necessary to wear these on base, but since you are a civilian, and…” He faltered.

  “Old?” I suggested, laughing a little.

  “No, no,” he blustered. “But in the circumstances…”

  “Don’t worry. I understand,” I said, struggling into an unwieldy, unyielding jacket.

  The heft of it, and the stale smell of sweat, propelled me back to Baghdad in 1991, my last real assignment. Then I was doing a job, something necessary, or so I told myself when the bullets and mortars got too close, and my fear saw me huddling behind a wall, all thoughts of being a witness to history buried by a primal desire to survive.

  We started walking across the sandy yard. I felt like an ungainly tortoise but Nabakoba strode along briskly, his squat frame bearing the extra weight of the Kevlar easily. Some people are born to wear four-inch heels, I thought, and some t
o wear flak jackets. It was only 9am, but already the heat was a physical presence. All consuming.

  “We will start with the clinic. It is always busy. There will be much to see there,” said Nabakoba, gesturing to a building near the perimeter of the base.

  “You are from Uganda?” I asked as we walked, pointing to the red, yellow and black stripes on the arm of his shirtsleeve.

  “Yes. You have been to my country?” he said, his smile broadening until I shook my head.

  “No, I mostly worked in West Africa when I was younger,” I said. “Do you come from Kampala?”

  “No, I am from a small village in the western district of Rukungiri,” he said, dragging the words out slowly, as though he doubted my interest.

  “I live with my older brother on his farm.”

  “How long have you been here?” I asked.

  “Six months. So I have three months left on this tour. God willing, I will be home in November and this year, we will celebrate Christmas in style. But not too much style.”

  He chuckled, a sly, knowing laugh.

  “I want to buy my own field. And build a house. I hope to be able to do that after this tour. And then if I need more, maybe I can come back again.”

  “You would come back again?” I asked, though I was not particularly surprised.

  I could imagine his brother’s little iron-roofed house on a green hillside. I suppose if nothing else, war offers potential for improvement, if you can just avoid being killed.

  “Yes. This is good money for me. I did well at school but there was no money for college. So I was just like everybody else at home. But now I am special. After the bombings in Kampala last year, in fact, we are heroes. When I last went on leave, people treated me with respect. I had no problems getting a seat in the taxis.”

  He laughed, with the innocent delight of a teenager discovering something new and fresh about life. I remember that.

  “They know what we do now. And they know why we do it. And for us, it is good money. We have a future.”