Fractured: International Hostage Thriller

by Clàr NÕ Chonghaile

  “Yes, like the seventy-two virgins. Let’s hope there is quality as well as quantity,” he said with a snigger that showed me my brother was still there, inside this eyeless face of a warrior.

  “It seems a stupid idea to me,” I said. Maybe that snigger had allowed me to relax a little.

  “Why kill yourself for something you cannot be sure of? However bad things are here, at least we know what they are. I think being a martyr is stupid.”

  Nadif’s arm came out of nowhere and suddenly I was sprawled on the ground, the Coke bottle spinning in the sand beside me, the delicious liquid leaking away just inches from my mouth, which was full of dirt and grit.

  “Don’t you ever say such a thing again,” he growled in a low voice.

  I lifted my head and squinted into the sun. Nadif stood like an executioner above me, backlit and featureless. He swung back his boot and kicked me in the ribs. I gasped and coughed, spit sticking bits of grass to my lips.

  “I mean it, Abdi.”

  His voice was kinder now but it almost sounded like he was pleading for something I couldn’t give him.

  “You desecrate the names of the martyrs. People we know, who have decided to do what is right, to support the jihad. You lie here, like a worm, keeping your head down, doing nothing to avenge our father, and all the fathers, and you dare to question the martyrs. I am hungry for the chance to join them. I am eager to die, Abdi.”

  He lifted his gun onto his shoulder and turned to go.

  “It is unlikely we will meet again. I am going out of town for a while. I don’t think there is much for us to say to each other anymore. Goodbye, little brother.”

  Nadif was right. I did not see him again until they brought the pieces to our house. I guess he was not technically a martyr. He blew himself up by accident. Maybe he wasn’t as ready as he thought. Nadif was always good at talking himself up. I will never know what went through his head in the second between his mistake and his death. There must have been a moment. I wonder, did he think of the seventy-two virgins, or did he worry he would be shortchanged because he was dying in an accident?

  As I lay in Abdulghani’s hut, I thought of one of our more famous, or perhaps notorious, proverbs: I and Somalia against the world. I and my clan against Somalia. I and my family against the clan. I and my brother against the family. I against my brother.

  Nadif was dead. He had made his choice. He had not lived long enough to reach the end of the proverb. I had lived less but already I was there. And now I knew what I was going to do once I was free of the prisoner. I had nothing left to live for, and there was one job where that would be an advantage. I smiled as I finally felt sleep claim me. There was, after all, a place for me yet in this land.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  PETER

  The sound of distant shooting woke me from a sleep I half hoped might be something else. For a moment, it was dark around me and I could feel another world fading into the corners. I tried to hold onto the dream, but trying to catch the fragments of Esther, of Godwin, was like trying to close my fingers around smoke. Before they had even faded, those images were fake. I haven’t ever seen Godwin in the flesh. My son turned five on July 15th. I had wired Esther some money before I got here, and asked her to buy him a present. It did not calm my guilt. The gesture, for that is all it was, taunted me with its futility.

  Another burst of gunfire. I could hear shouts outside and bare feet slapping into the hard earth. With consciousness, fear returned, but I was so worn out, I couldn’t bring my body to react. I rose sluggishly to my knees, shaking my head. For a moment, I felt the strongest urge to lie down again, pull the thin blanket over my head and curl up. Maybe everything would go away.

  As a child, I used to listen to pop songs on a wheezing transistor radio under my duvet. It was a teenage rebellion, I expect, but a hidden one. I was supposed to be asleep, instead I was whispering the lyrics under my breath, dreaming of adventure and love, and indulging in the kind of sentimentalism that only teenagers can really understand. The songs made me believe I could be a rebel, live whatever life I wanted and to hell with the consequences. Breaking hearts was good, as long as it wasn’t mine that was being broken. I know better now.

  Mukhtar ran in, carrying an AK-47. His hands were steady though his voice shook, and I suspected The Professor was excited rather than scared.

  “Get out. They are coming for you.”

  I straightened, my breath already coming in gasps as if the sight of the jocular man, stripped of his lopsided smile, had dealt me a physical blow somewhere below my diaphragm.

  “Al-Shabaab. They are outside the village, coming from the main road. You need to head to Mogadishu, now. Someone is coming for you. Ahmed, Guled’s son. Abdi will go with you and Abdulghani will drive. We have a car at the back of the compound. Go. Allah be with you.”

  He disappeared again, slipping through the door without looking back. The gunfire was coming closer now. I edged out of the hut, my head reeling as I tried to digest this new information. But there was no time to think. Mukhtar was with seven or eight other men, all armed, standing by the weak walls of the village compound, near the main gate. In the distance, I could see two technicals roaring towards us. They were perhaps 300 yards away. This time, we would not make it.

  Mukhtar and his men seemed to be holding their fire. The heavy green gate in the wall that marked the edge of the village was closed, and they were huddled behind a piece of corrugated iron they had dragged behind the stones. I wanted to tell them that the rusty iron would have no hope of stopping most bullets. I remembered that from our hostile training. Crouching and cursing my height, I ran behind my hut, heading away from the gate. Running again, but this time I had shoes – Abdi had brought me a pair of dirty white trainers just before I slept.

  “Here, Peter!”

  It was Abdi again, my guardian angel. He was sitting in the passenger seat of a faded red Sedan. The door of the back seat was open and I jumped in, grazing my shin on the running board. I collided with a man-boy clutching a sub-machine gun. He shifted slightly. He had the beginnings of a beard and a manic smile that made me wince. His fingers looked too small for the trigger they were wrapped around. I resisted the urge to slide the barrel away from me. The driver said nothing but I could see his eyes in the rear-view mirror. They were neither hostile nor friendly. He glanced at my reflection curiously, then turned the key, muttering something in Somali to Abdi.

  There was a small gate in the back wall of the compound. A young boy of about eight swung it open and we roared onto a bumpy plain that seemed to stretch endlessly to the horizon.

  “We will have to stay off the road for a while,” Abdi yelled.

  I put my hand up to grab the handle above the door but there wasn’t one, and my head smashed into the window. The man-boy beside me was bouncing around like a metal shot in a pinball machine, his finger still caressing the trigger.

  I pinned myself back in the seat, trying to get as far away as possible from the barrel of the gun.

  “How did they know how to find us?” I yelled above the wailing motor and the distant sound of guns.

  Abdi was silent for a moment.

  “Maybe they asked Yusuf about my ties in this area.”

  “Who is Yusuf?”

  “He is my cousin. I was working for him at the other compound.”

  “Did he know your plans?” I asked, my mouth dry and gritty already from the dust we were churning up around us as we tore through a flat plain of scrubs, thorn trees and termite mounds reaching for the sky like sandcastles abandoned by giant children.

  “No, no. But he knows my family. He would have known about Mukhtar. They are cousins too but they have fallen out.”

  “Still, why would Yusuf lead them to his cousin?”

  Abdi was silent. I kicked myself for the question. Despite everything that had happened over the past weeks, I was still trying to impose a foreign order on this land. I was still alienated by my fixed
ways of thinking. I could see my young saviour’s face in the wing mirror, but I saw him in flashes, disjointed. I saw Abdi’s eyes, then his nose, his jaw. But the overall impression was of a boy who understood too much and he knew the knowledge was dangerous.

  We fell silent. The other men said nothing. Our driver’s fingers were white around the steering wheel as he struggled to control the car. I caught his eyes studying me again in the mirror. He said something in Somali. Abdi replied.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “Abdulghani was wondering how much Al-Shabaab were going to ask for you. The ransom.”

  “They would have killed me anyway,” I said flatly.

  “Of that I am sure,” Abdi said, nodding.

  “Will Mukhtar and the other men be all right?” I asked, acutely conscious of the childishness of my question.

  “I don’t know,” Abdi said shortly.

  “I am sorry,” I said, and that was it. I felt as if something had broken inside me, some last fragment in the wall of certainty that surrounded my life. Everything was gone.

  “I am sorry,” I whispered over and over.

  I could see Abdulghani’s eyes widening in the rear-view mirror as he watched me muttering, rocking back and forth, my breaths coming like strangled sobs. The man-boy next to me seemed not to notice. He was staring out the window at the nothingness flying past.

  I wanted to explain but I knew it didn’t matter. I was not scared. I was distraught because I was the perfect victim. I had let myself become the perfect victim and in my shallowness I had dragged others down with me. Here in this strange land, I was doing what I had always done. Fucking up other lives through my ignorance and my carelessness. Fucking up my own life by refusing to acknowledge the definites. We hold these truths to be self-evident. I had to accept the evidence of my self. I had a son, I had a woman who loved me, and another, I had two fathers. I needed to stop fleeing these truths. It might not be the life I wanted, or the one I had planned. It might not even be a life I could deal with, but I had to try. These were the cards I had been dealt. I hoped I would be given a chance to try.

  The car jolted, there was a teeth-tingling screech of metal, and then we were on tarmac.

  “This is the road to Mogadishu,” Abdi said. His words had the timbre of a prophecy.

  I ran my hands over my face. My eyes in the rear-view mirror were bloodshot and small. The sudden silence filled the car. The road stretched before us like a ribbon, flat and winding.

  “Will we meet any roadblocks?” I asked, trying for a normal voice, trying to swallow the trace of tears.

  “I don’t know,” Abdi said.

  He was leaning over the dashboard, peering into the hazy distance. Abdulghani cursed as we swerved to avoid a pothole, then we all fell into a tense silence. We had gone maybe thirty minutes when Abdi muttered something in Somali. Abdulghani leant forward, peering through his small round glasses. The man-boy sat up straight, pushing against me as he leant into the gap between the two front seats. A car was coming. No, it was a technical. As it sped closer, I could see a man standing behind the mounted gun, scarf fluttering in the breeze. On this empty road, the speeding car had the force of a vision, getting sharper by the moment as it ate up the distance between us. Abdulghani floored the accelerator and our car leapt forward. For a wild moment, I thought we were playing some bizarre game of chicken. Red racing towards white on this empty road under a cobalt blue-and-violet sky, and a sinking sun. If we crashed, it would be a rainbow.

  “It’s them, it’s Ahmed,” Abdi said.

  Abdulghani sighed and released the accelarator as though the breath he forced out came from his very feet. We slowed to a stop, not even bothering to pull in. We had passed no traffic since leaving the compound. The technical screeched to a halt some ten yards ahead of us. The man behind the gun stayed where he was, legs splayed, hands on the gun. His scarf had fallen onto his shoulders, exhausted, twitching. Behind him I now saw three other men, crouched in the truck’s flatbed. They jumped out, two taking up positions at the back of the truck, facing back the way they had come, facing back to Mogadishu, the city that could give me back my life.

  The other man moved forward. He was tall, white, stocky, with a crewcut. He wore aviator sunglasses and carried his sub-machine gun easily, like a hockey stick. No one had moved from our car. And then the door of the pickup opened. It took me a second to recognise my mother. I could see her but it didn’t make sense. My mind didn’t seem to be able to compute the messages being sent to it from my eyes. She had her hands over her head and as Abdulghani finally cut our wheezing engine, I heard her calling, “Peter, Peter. It’s okay. We’ve come to get you. You are safe now.”

  I looked for Abdi in the side mirror. He nodded. I got out of the car slowly. I did not run to my mother, I stood with my hand on the top of the car door, shielding my body and looked. My mother started walking towards me, her hands outstretched in an empty hug.

  After everything, it seemed too easy. I squinted past her. Another man had climbed out of the pickup cabin. I recognised Ahmed. He lifted his hand from the barrel of the AK-47 he was cradling and waved. A brief flash of fingers, but he did not smile. Guled’s shattered head flashed before my eyes like those vivid bursts of nightmare that sometimes light up the back of my eyes in those moments before I sleep. When I finally had the courage to leave that car door and walk across the road, I was heading to Ahmed and not my mother. My mother belonged to another life, one that I knew I would have to reconstruct. Ahmed belonged to the now, to the here. I needed to apologise to him. As useless as I knew it would be. If everything that had happened to me since I was kidnapped was some kind of dream, or half-life, then Guled’s death was the last time I had felt part of reality.

  “I’m okay, Mum. Really.”

  She tried to hug me, I grabbed her hands as she raised them to encircle me and brought them in front of my chest, squeezing them harder than I meant to. She was covered in a fine dust and there were sweat patches under her arms, but her eyes were bright, and she looked younger. I had seen what she was looking at in fragments in the car’s mirrors – bloodshot eyes, dirt, a beard, matted hair. I didn’t recognise my own face.

  “I must see Ahmed.”

  She nodded and somehow untangled her fingers from mine. I had not stopped squeezing.

  “Ahmed, I am so sorry about your father. Please forgive me.”

  I didn’t dare extend my hand. Words might be weightless, maybe even pointless, but a formal handshake seemed like it would be offensive. Ahmed looked at me for a long moment.

  “My father liked you, Peter. I have come to get you to honour his name and your friendship.”

  “How is your mother?” I asked.

  “She is at the AMISOM base with my wife and Lila. They are fine.”

  My mother had joined us with the white man.

  “Peter, this is Edward. He has been helping us find you. We really need to go now. It will be dark soon.”

  “Give me a minute. Just a minute. I need to talk to Abdi. He’s the one who helped me escape, I owe him my life.”

  I turned my back on the trio standing by the pickup truck, my mother sandwiched between the two men, one black, one white, both armed. Abdi was still in the sedan. Abdulghani had lit a cigarette and opened his door, his feet resting on the road. The man-boy had got out and leant his gun on the roof of the car. I recognised the self-consciously nonchalant pose of the teenager.

  The first shot rang out before I got to the car. I heard something ping off the pickup behind me, and in that second of silence, I spun around, falling to the ground, looking for my mother. As I pirouetted into the dust, I caught a glimpse of a cloud of dust, maybe two, heading towards us across the scrub-covered plains to our right. I knew it was them. There was an inevitability to the roar, the dust, the gunshots.

  The man with the scarf, still standing by the machine gun, started firing wildly, screaming something angry and ritualistic. Spent casings ricoch
eted off the floor of the pickup and onto the road, their tinny pings like xylophone notes ringing out over the booming of the gun. The air quivered and I covered my head with my hands. I pressed into the ground but it would not give.

  I started to crawl on my elbows towards the pickup. My mother was running now, the white man had one arm around her and was firing his gun towards the dust clouds coming ever nearer. They made it to the back of the pickup. I was almost there when I felt the air crack and heard a sick gurgling. I looked up, the man with the scarf had slumped over his weapon. The back of his head was gone, the black-and-white scarf was turning red. I staggered to my feet and sprinted to the back of the pickup truck.

  They were upon us now. The two technicals screeched to a halt twenty yards from the red Sedan. The white man and the two Somalis were beside us, all huddled at the back of the pickup, but for a second no one did anything, no one said anything.

  A silence descended that was thick with absence. I chanced a look over the tailboard. Abdulghani’s body was sprawled on the tarmac, his feet sticking out in front of the tyre. The man-boy was standing as he had been before the firing started. His gun was still resting on the roof of the Corolla in a spreading pool of his own bright red blood. I couldn’t see Abdi. The passenger door was open.

  “Don’t shoot yet.”

  It was Edward.

  “We only have one chance to get out of here.”

  He motioned to the two Somalis huddled beside us, his palms open, his head shaking. They looked terrified. They were just teenagers.

  “Al-Shabaab,” whispered one.

  I nodded. I couldn’t even pity them. I had nothing left except a selfish terror and an overwhelming fatigue that made me want to lie down in the shade of the pickup, close my eyes, and let events take their course.

  “They are coming,” the white man whispered.

  “What are we going to do, Edward?” said my mother, her voice trembling.

  I looked at the white man too. I didn’t know who exactly he was or what he was doing here, but I hoped he’d have an answer. He shook his head and his shoulders slumped.