Fractured: International Hostage Thriller

by Clàr NÕ Chonghaile

  Mukhtar chuckled again and, taking the prisoner’s hand, began to lead him back to the village. The sun was slipping above the horizon now. We were men with shadows again. I followed.

  The last time I had seen Mukhtar was when I was perhaps seven. He came to our home after Abdulkassim Salat Hassan was elected president and returned in triumph to Mogadishu. I remember Mukhtar as a tall, dashing man, with a head of dark hair that seemed to have a life of its own, as though it was shot through with his own personal electricity. He would have been about thirty then, an old man to me, but somehow he seemed younger than my parents. He smiled a lot, joked with Nadif and me, brought sweets for us, and then magicked them from behind our ears. He was not a close relative, but he stayed for a few days, and his presence made the house ring with laughter, his shameless chuckle rising above our giggles, my father’s deep laughter and below them all, silent but supportive, my mother’s indulgent smiles.

  Mukhtar led the prisoner to his hut. It was small and away from the perimeter fence of thorn branches.

  “Stay here. You can sleep, and perhaps you will dream of your future. While you do that, we will discuss it. Do not leave, please. You may want to rush to Mogadishu but the roads are not safe.”

  “Is this area controlled by Al-Shabaab?” the prisoner asked, his eyes flicking nervously to me.

  I stayed silent. This was Mukhtar’s home and this was now his problem. I had made it his problem but I was grateful that we stumbled upon his village. Perhaps the gods of destiny have decided to take my side. At least for a short while. This is just one moment. I have no illusions that it means anything. In this land, moments come and go but you can never trust them to last. Peace is fickle, war is random, death is the only constant. We are not dead yet, but that just means that we could die at any moment.

  Nadif used to say he was not frightened of death. And then, later, when his eyes grew hard and his face dark, he would say that he welcomed it. I think I am finally beginning to understand what he meant then. Though it took his loss, and the loss of my mother, to bring me to this point.

  “No, Al-Shabaab do not control this area,” Mukhtar mimicked the foreigner’s accent with a smile.

  “But, it is not clear who does. It depends on what you mean by control? Al-Shabaab come here, certainly. What is to stop them? This country has become their playground. But we also have militias, our own and others. You have been to Disneyland, perhaps?”

  The prisoner shook his head, managing a bewildered smile.

  “Shame. It looks very… bright and shiny. This is East Africa’s Disneyland. There are rides, kingdoms to explore, treasures to find. How do you say it in the US? Ah yes, where dreams come true. That is Somalia in a nutshell. Although we can also do nightmares.”

  “I’m not American. I am British. Or Irish. You can take your pick.”

  For the first time in days, I heard anger in the prisoner’s voice. It cheered me. Anger is a force for life. I would like to feel more anger. But I have no one to blame for the past six months, and everything that went before. I have no one and everyone and that is the same. Who should I blame? The dead? The living? Myself? The foreigners? The other foreigners? Anger cannot thrive in this confusion.

  “My apologies. We are a simple people. You are a foreigner so we make assumptions. Perhaps you can understand why.”

  Mukhtar’s words were conciliatory, almost apologetic, but I could hear the laughter underneath.

  The prisoner rubbed his face again. He started to say something, stopped.

  “I owe everything to Abdi. I will wait for his decision about what to do next. Thank you.”

  He bent to enter the hut.

  Mukhtar waited until he was gone.

  “Well, Abdi. I think you have become what they like to call in the West a hero. Let’s see if the others agree.”

  I did not think they would. We headed to a large hut in the centre of the village where Mukhtar would meet the other elders, where the prisoner’s fate would be decided, and by extension, mine. I knew I was in no immediate danger. Nobody in this village would kill me, but they could kick him out and that might amount to the same thing. I cannot abandon him now. I have changed his fate, and I must stay the path.

  Inside, the hut was thick with smoke. In the gloom, six men were faceless mounds of shifting shadows. The fire had withered to a whisper of flame and a sliver of acrid smoke.

  Mukhtar found a space and I crouched beside him. There was silence. A silence that speaks of the absence of something powerful.

  Mukhtar spoke, all trace of laughter now gone. He had made light of the situation with the prisoner, but in here, in this dark hut where the deepest of our thoughts and traditions were gathered, there was no place for jokes.

  “We have a decision to make. Abdi, our cousin and our kinsman, has brought this man to us. We can debate his decision another time. I will simply say that this is the son of Faduma and Omar, both now dead, may Allah welcome them into his presence. This is a good boy and his decision will not have been made lightly.”

  There were some grunts, some shuffling of feet and clearing of throats. The shadows were full of unseen eyes, all focused on me.

  “We must decide what to do with the prisoner. Al-Shabaab will be looking for him. They may come here. If they do, we will deal with that. The prisoner needs to go to Mogadishu to be safe. Will we help him? Can we help him?”

  For a moment, nobody spoke. Then a voice came from our right.

  “There is more to this than you say, Mukhtar. Abdi is your cousin and our kinsman. But Guled Adan was also the cousin of some of us here, a member of the sub-clan.”

  I stiffened. I had heard what had happened to this Guled, of course. When I was sent by Yusuf to be with the first group of kidnappers in Mogadishu, before the prisoner was transferred to Wanlaweyn, they told me a driver had been shot. I did not realise he belonged to one of our sub-clans. This was bad news.

  “Guled, may he rest in the arms of Allah, was killed because he was with this foreigner. There is a debt to pay here. The foreigner must pay it.”

  There was some murmuring of agreement. I could not see the speaker. Mukhtar learnt towards me and whispered.

  “That is Ali. You do not know him. Now you see, Abdi, this is more complicated than you perhaps thought.”

  Clearing his throat, Mukhtar spoke.

  “This is true, Ali. And yet the foreigner did not shoot Guled. It was a Somali who did that. What kind of person shoots an old man for being in a car with a foreigner? This was a crime and I trust that all of you from Guled’s branch of the clan will deal with that man in the correct way.”

  “It will be done,” said Ali, leaning for a moment out of the shadows so that I saw thick brows, eyes like pools, and a wide mouth. “Ahmed, Guled’s son, is taking care of that. But now, Ahmed needs to know of this new development.”

  Mukhtar nodded.

  “I will contact him,” said Ali. “I will be happy with whatever he decides. It is his decision to make.”

  There was a rustling and Ali rose, slipping out of the hut on long legs, and already pulling his mobile phone from his shirt pocket.

  “Would anyone else like to speak?” Mukhtar asked. “Are there any other issues to consider in this?”

  “I agree it should be Ahmed’s decision,” said a thin voice from our left. I recognised the weak tones of Abdulghani, another of my mother’s distant cousins.

  “But I also say we should support Abdi. He has taken this step, he has sought refuge here. It is our duty to protect our clansman and by extension, his… his companion. We must do what is right.”

  Abdulghani was a trader who had had a small business selling phone cards in Kismayo in the south of the country. When Al-Shabaab took over the town, they forced him to pay protection money, beat him when he was late, and stole his produce. He came north earlier this year, leaving his wealth, his new home, his hopes. He was a bitter man. He had never dreamed he would have to work on the land again
, eking a living from this poor, unreliable soil. He was also a lazy man. My mother called him a wastrel, and rolled her eyes to heaven whenever his name was mentioned.

  His speech was followed by some muted sounds of assent. Al-Shabaab were no friends of my clan. Some of the men here had lost family members to this latest war, some had lost money, some had been forced to move. All felt humiliated. Mukhtar never knew who fired the mortar that destroyed his family, and scarred him on the outside as well as the inside, but in these situations you blame those you already hate.

  I wondered if these men knew about Nadif. They must do, but my father’s kindness, generosity and dignity would have carried more weight with these elders than the mistakes of a teenage boy. And then, they would understand Nadif’s reasons for wanting to take up a gun.

  “Thank you, Abdulghani. I see your remarks are not without support here,” said Mukhtar, the lilt of a chuckle returning to his voice, like a shy teenager entering a room of elders, quietly, hugging the walls, hoping to pass unnoticed.

  “Let us wait to hear from Ahmed. Until then we will do nothing.”

  We sat in silence for a while, but this was a more serene silence. Some of the men began to whisper among themselves but the voices were tame now, the urgency was gone. I tried to relax. There wasn’t any more I could do.

  Ali came back, pushing aside the blanket in the doorway and bringing with him a rush of fresh air and a burst of light. I had forgotten it was day already.

  “Ahmed is coming. He says we must not harm the prisoner. This foreigner was his father’s friend. Guled respected him and Ahmed says he does not blame the foreigner for his father’s death. He said this man deserves to live.”

  There was some disgruntled murmuring from around the walls but I knew now Peter Maguire was safe. I suddenly felt exhausted. I whispered to Mukhtar who quickly clapped his hands and declared the meeting over.

  “Let us wait for Ahmed. He can take the prisoner back to Mogadishu. He is coming with men?”

  Ali nodded.

  “There should be no problems on the road from here to Mogadishu. The militias are fewer and we know people on the roadblocks. Ahmed will choose good men from among his own people.”

  “He will not bring the foreign troops?” Mukhtar asked.

  Ali shook his head, and murmurs of approval rose alongside the grunts and sighs as six bodies rose awkwardly from the dirt floor and filed out of the hut into the hard light of a fresh day.

  I went to lie down in Abdulghani’s hut. There was a thin mattress on the floor and I fell onto it. But Abdulghani wanted to talk. He had lost everything in Kismayo and had he been a braver man, he might have found a way to nip at the heels of the ‘dogs’ of Al-Shabaab, as he called them.

  “I had a good business and hope for the future. And then, these teenagers come, waving their guns, racing their technicals up and down the streets, scattering the dogs, and the chickens, and the people. They think they own this world and the next, these children. In my day, we would have grabbed them by the neck, beaten them well and taught them to respect their elders. They have no respect, these foreigners. And make no mistake, many of them are foreigners. Bringing their Wahhabi rules and hunger for power and greed to our land.”

  Abdulghani paused and my eyelids slipped lower. I hoped he had finished but he wasn’t there yet.

  “I tell you, Abdi, they have ruined this country. I am old enough to remember the past and to appreciate it. Siad Barre was bad, but under him, we could at least pull together something of a life. Then we had the chaos that followed his death when brother fought brother. But nothing has been as bad as now. These Al-Shabaab brought the Ethiopians to our country. They made the US see us again after we had managed to turn them away in the 1990s by showing them that we could not be beaten in our own land. But now, now we are being defeated and humiliated, by our own misguided youth. I have lost everything, Abdi. You see me here, back in the village, back in this land of nothingness, me, a man who had a house, a shop, a livelihood.”

  He shook his head sadly, but also triumphantly, because here, everybody has a story but his, in his eyes at least, was one of the most tragic. A kind of victory in a country where broken lives were all that was left. One-upmanship of sorrow.

  “And these suicide bombings? Who are these boys who blow themselves up? Why do you need to kill yourself here? Life will sort you out soon enough. All this talk of seventy-two virgins waiting for them, and rivers of honey? Okay, maybe getting honey here is difficult today, but virgins? Are not our women, here and now, beautiful enough to make a man live? Why put off until paradise what you can have now?”

  Abdulghani chortled in the way single men do when they talk about women. I know this laughter. It is the laughter of a man who knows nothing about women, a man who tries to cover his ignorance with noise. Before, before everything, I might have joined him. Not now. I couldn’t listen anymore.

  “Please, Uncle. I am very tired. I do not wish to be rude but I need to sleep.”

  Apologising, Abdulghani left the hut. I sank into the mattress, closed my eyes and thought of Nadif. And the time we had argued about the virgins.

  Nadif had been long gone from our home but I bumped into him one day a few streets away. It was after midday and since the fighting had died down, as it did everyday because of the heat, my mother had sent me out to see if I could find some flour to make bread for our evening meal.

  I didn’t see Nadif at first. I heard the roar of the technical and without looking, I moved closer to the crumbling walls of the small shops and shacks along the street. I always felt nervous walking too near those walls. Mogadishu seemed like a city that could fall on you at anytime, burying you quietly, undramatically so that nothing would be left except a pile of rubble that looked exactly like all the other piles of rubble. I kept my eyes down. We have a saying: Do not walk into a snake pit with your eyes open. But what if you live in a snake pit? Best to keep your eyes lowered.

  “Abdi! Abdi!”

  I looked up. Nadif was standing like a hero behind the machine gun welded into the flatbed of the pickup. He yelled at the driver and the beast slowed. He jumped down. A checked scarf covered his face and his eyes were hidden behind dusty sunglasses. I felt a pang of envy. Here was my elder brother. He was somebody, with a gun hanging casually over his shoulder. He was a master of these roads. I was less than the chickens that scattered out of the way as the technicals roared past, a puny seeker of milk and flour.

  “My brother, how are you?”

  Nadif hugged me fiercely, as though he needed to make up for the past six months when we had hardly seen each other. He smelt of men, tobacco and something else that was strong and dusty, and had traces of the sea and spices. He smelt like adventure would smell if you could buy it in a ruby-coloured bottle from the medicine men in Bakara market.

  “Let’s get a drink.”

  Nadif led me to a kiosk where he bought two Cokes. Behind the casual way he handed over the money, I could sense his pride. He could now offer me a Coke. The last time I drank a Coke was at my father’s funeral. Then, I drank it quickly, shamefully. I enjoyed it, but I did not want anyone to see that I could be so superficial as to enjoy such a thing at the funeral of my father. I remember being surprised that Coke could still taste the same, in this new world where I would grow up without a father.

  Nadif led me to the mango tree beside the football field, where we had sat so many times before. Some little boys were perched on the wall when we arrived, pushing and jostling, and laughing when one of them slipped off. They scampered away, eyes big with terror and delight, when Nadif approached.

  “How is Mother?” Nadif asked, as if he was talking about a distant relative.

  “She is okay. She looks thin. She worries about you and sometimes it is hard for us to find food now that there seems to be fighting every day.”

  Nadif nodded solemnly.

  “Soon, we will have taken the rest of Mogadishu. The government’s troops are
nothing, and AMISOM… They are their own worst enemy. Most of their soldiers can’t even shoot straight, country boys from backward places! Soon we will force them to leave. You saw what we did last week? The attack on the base? They cannot even secure their bases. That was Mohyadin, remember him?”

  I thought of the plump boy with very hairy eyebrows and a thin fuzz on his head. He used to sit near me in class. He was a joker and got me into trouble more than once with his quips about our teacher. He would whisper a joke, and I would burst out laughing. Mohyadin would paste a look of total innocence on his face, his bushy eyebrows climbing up his wide forehead like caterpillars.

  “What do you mean, that was Mohyadin?”

  “I mean,” Nadif said, “that he was the one who drove the bomb into the base. He messed up though because they spotted him. Still, he managed to detonate the bomb, and three or four of the enemy were killed.”

  Nadif laughed loudly, maybe even a little too loudly.

  “I told them he was too nervous for the job. They thought he was ready to be a martyr. He was ready but he wasn’t good enough.”

  “What about you?” I asked nervously. “Are you ready to be a martyr? And what does that mean, Nadif?”

  Nadif turned his face towards me, but kept those big-man sunglasses on so that all I could see was my own reflection.

  “I am ready,” he said in a soft voice. “Ready and able.”

  “But why would you want to kill yourself, Nadif?” I said.

  Today, here, now, that question seems naïve. Today, I can imagine a host of reasons to kill yourself. If I had that conversation with Nadif now, maybe he would not have become so angry.

  “I am fighting jihad, child,” Nadif said scornfully. “It is my duty. I am ready to go to Allah, and enjoy the rewards of the faithful.”

  “Like the seventy-two virgins?” I asked.

  Nadif laughed.