by Tom Young
Gold shifted into reverse. Checked the mirrors. Two other cars stopped behind her, but not at an angle to block the road. No signs of gunmen. She backed up a few yards, shifted into drive, stomped the gas, turned the wheel.
She’s on it, Parson thought. In the Army, Gold had learned to drive a vehicle as tactically as he could fly a plane. He knew what she was thinking: Keep moving or die.
The Land Rover’s tires threw grit as Gold executed a 180-degree turn back toward the airport. That worked for Parson. Unarmed and in a thin-skinned SUV, he wanted to get away from trouble as quickly as possible.
Four hundred yards behind them, figures darted among the stopped traffic. Men with guns. They fired at something; Parson could not see the target.
The gunfire spat intermittently. Five or six shots, then a pause. Then another five or six rounds on semiauto. Sounded almost like a training drill.
An ambush, all right. Just not against this Land Rover. Not yet, anyway.
Gold drove for about two miles. Parson wondered whether multiple attacks would come, but he saw no more signs of trouble. Finally, Gold pulled over beside a dirt soccer field. At the far end of the field, shreds of netting hung from a rusted goal frame. The area looked safe enough—no cars or buildings within a few hundred yards, so no one could get close to the Land Rover unobserved.
“You guys okay?” Gold asked. She sat with her foot on the brake, transmission still in drive, ready to move fast if she had to.
“I’m good,” Parson said.
Stewart sat up in the front seat. She adjusted her blouse, retrieved her Dior sunglasses from the floor. She looked pale but not terrified. Wisps of her red hair, loosed from the rubber band, lay across her cheek.
“Good driving,” she said. Stewart braced herself against the dashboard. She let out a long breath as if struggling to keep her composure.
Parson still didn’t know what to make of this woman, but he gave her credit for not screaming and freaking out.
“Sorry to grab you by the scruff of the neck,” he said.
“No, it’s okay,” the actress said.
Parson wished he had his weapon with him. He made a mental note not to go without it again; he’d just avoid walking through the civilian passenger terminal.
“What do you think that was all about?” Gold asked.
“Not something random,” Parson said. “Sounded like they took their sweet time firing into one particular car. If they’d wanted to kill just anybody, they’d have sprayed full auto on everybody.”
“Lucky for us, maybe,” Stewart said.
“Yeah,” Parson said, “but somebody else just had a real bad day.”
Though he had no confirmation of a fatality, and he’d not seen much of the attack, he’d heard plenty. The sounds carried echoes of a well-planned and well-executed hit. In Parson’s long travels he had witnessed all manner of death and injury—so much that he’d learned the patterns of violence, its varied natures, much the way he could hear an airplane and tell fighter from transport, turboprop from turbojet.
Twenty minutes passed with no more booms or gunfire.
“Whatever happened,” Parson said, “it’s probably over. Might as well get back to the hotel.”
Gold drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, thinking.
“Yeah,” she said. “Even if that was one of those double attacks that target first responders after the initial blast, the secondary strike would have happened by now.”
“I don’t think that’s what it was.”
“Me neither.”
Gold turned the wheel to move back into the street.
“What do you think is the safest route?” Parson asked.
“Let’s go back the way we came,” Gold said. “If the shooters fled on foot and are still running around, I don’t want to bump into them. That’s less likely if we stay on the road they ran away from.”
Made sense to Parson. If the police blocked off the attack site, Gold could just detour where necessary. You could overthink these things and still get killed.
Gold made a U-turn and headed back toward the Sheraton. Sure enough, the traffic slowed where a police car blocked the road, blue lights flashing. A Djiboutian officer dressed in olive fatigues with blue epaulets diverted traffic down a side street.
“Seems safe enough now,” Parson said. “Let’s see if we can find out what happened.”
As Gold pulled up near the police vehicle, Parson dug his wallet from his pocket and pulled out his military ID. Rolled down his window.
“We’re with the United Nations,” he said. Not entirely the truth, but Gold was UN, at least. “Is it all right if we observe?”
Parson planned to keep his distance, but he wanted to know more about the threat. He handed over his ID. The officer read it, handed it back.
“You may, Colonel,” the man said in accented English. “But please do not cross the yellow tape.”
Gold parked the Land Rover along the side of the street. Crime scene tape marked off an entire intersection. The tape carried script in both of Djibouti’s official languages, French and Arabic. The French wording read SCÈNE DE CRIME, NE PAS ENTRER. Parson, Gold, and Stewart got out of the vehicle.
The smoking carcass of an armored Toyota SUV sat in the middle of the intersection. Two police officers worked around the wreckage, pointing and snapping photos. The driver’s door hung open. A covered body lay slumped on the ground beside the vehicle. Blood soaked the front seat, and more blood stained the door and the pavement beneath.
“That’s horrible,” whispered Stewart. She raised her camera, adjusted the zoom, and took a picture.
Parson and Gold moved as close as the crime tape allowed. From a distance of about forty yards, Parson tried to discern the story told by the evidence. An explosion had clearly struck the Toyota, but not ripped it apart. That was interesting; some IEDs, especially EFPs, or explosively formed penetrators, could rip right through armor. Parson had seen those used in Iraq; the blast formed a slug of copper that could turn an up-armored Humvee into a tangle of scrap metal. This explosion, however, had inflicted only enough damage to stop the vehicle.
Brass cartridge casings lay scattered all around. Rounds had gouged white pocks in the Toyota’s bullet-resistant glass. Most of the bullets had hit near the top of the back window. There, concentrated fire had opened a baseball-sized hole in the glass.
Son of a bitch, Parson thought. Yeah, they did take their time—and aimed at the seam between the glass and the metal. The weakest point.
No such thing as bulletproof glass, he knew. Bullet-resistant glass only bought you time. In this case, not enough.
Gold went to the officer directing traffic and asked, “Who was the victim?”
“His identification said Dr. Maurice Kalinga,” the officer said.
Gold’s mouth dropped open slightly, and she closed her eyes for a moment.
“Was anyone else with him?” Gold asked.
“No, ma’am. A terrible crime, I must tell you. We found him beheaded. They took the head.”
Gold closed her eyes again. Stewart shuddered.
“Al-Shabaab?” Parson asked.
“Unknown,” the officer said, “but that is a fair guess.”
Wouldn’t be the first time al-Shabaab had struck outside of Somalia, Parson knew. They stormed that mall in Kenya in 2013, and in 2010 they bombed bars and restaurants in Kampala, Uganda, on the night of the World Cup Final. The Uganda attacks killed more than sixty.
“Sophia,” Parson said, “you look like you recognize the victim’s name.”
“I do,” Gold said. “Dr. Kalinga is—was—the police training director of the African Union Mission in Somalia.”
“Oh, hell.”
“Bastards,” Stewart said.
“Did you know him?” Parson asked.
So, what had actually happened here? The bad guys would have used a bigger IED if they’d just wanted Kalinga dead, Parson figured. They stopped his car, then drilled through the glass with rifle fire, only to kill him with a knife? That didn’t make sense.
“A botched kidnapping,” Gold said.
“You’re reading my mind,” Parson said.
Yeah, Parson thought, they’d shot through the glass and ordered him to open the door. But some of the bullets had probably hit him. Maybe they saw he was mortally wounded. No point abducting somebody who has about ten minutes to live. So instead of putting a living Dr. Kalinga on camera as a hostage, they did what they’d consider the next best thing: take his head and put that on video. Dear God.
“I want the world to know what they did to him,” Stewart said. “Do you mind if we stay a few more minutes?”
Parson shrugged. Stewart put away her still camera and retrieved a video recorder from her backpack. She aimed the camcorder and began shooting. She panned along the street, adjusted the zoom, took a long shot of the wrecked SUV.
“Based on initial reports,” she said as she continued recording, “this is the murder scene of an official with the African Union Mission in Somalia. Dr. Maurice Kalinga worked with an organization trying to bring order to chaos, to help some of the most victimized people on this continent. And he paid with his life.”
Stewart turned the video camera toward Parson and Gold.
“These are my hosts, Sophia Gold and Michael Parson,” the actress narrated. “Both are highly decorated veterans of the war in Afghanistan, now using their skills to fight a different kind of war. But, sadly, today looks all too similar to the sort of conflict they’ve seen before.”
At the moment, Stewart sounded more like a TV reporter doing a standup than an actress making a movie. Maybe she was serious about shooting the documentary she mentioned. Parson just wished he didn’t have to star in it.
“Carolyn,” Gold said, “go ahead and take all the video you need. But don’t post anything online while we’re still in Africa.”
Stewart stopped the camera and nodded. Then she took more footage of the murder scene. People began to emerge from nearby buildings; workers at a Mobil station across the street went about their tasks. A man walked past, leading a donkey burdened with crates of fruits and vegetables. Static crackled through the air, and the amplified words of a muezzin called the faithful to pray.
8.
In a Djibouti slum, Hussein and the other soldiers of God hid and waited for darkness. They huddled in a makeshift home built of discarded cinder blocks and tarps. Apparently, heaven had blessed their mission, just as the Sheikh had promised. None of them had died or suffered an injury; Hussein and the five other boys, commanded by Abdullahi, had stolen away to this safe house. A brother in jihad had scouted the abandoned dwelling days before.
The orange tarp that made up part of the roof gave a copper glow to the room as the sunlight filtered through. Hussein thought the glow looked like firelight without a fire. The dirt floor felt cool. A dead rat lay in a corner, and the rat smelled bad.
“I wish we could have taken him alive,” Abdullahi said. “But we took him, all right.”
Abdullahi hefted a bloody canvas bag. It contained the head of the kafir the al-Shabaab squad had come to capture. One of the boys giggled.
“Quiet,” Abdullahi hissed.
The boy put his hand over his mouth but continued to snicker. The weird laughter went on for so long Hussein wondered if something was wrong with the boy. Hussein found this mission glorious, to be sure, but not funny. Worth a lot of fruit, he hoped, and maybe even some meat later on. Too bad that rat was too rotted to cook. Hussein had eaten rats before.
At the very least, he felt the satisfaction of having done his job well. As instructed, he’d taken a position at the rear of the infidel’s vehicle. He’d chosen a spot where the back glass touched the metal. Aimed carefully and fired.
The first bullet gouged a white hole and ricocheted off the glass. The next shot dug its own little trench and sang off into the distance. So did the third and fourth rounds.
Other boys fired at other spots. They peppered the vehicle, scalloped the windows and pricked the metal. Chips flew with each bullet strike to the glass. But no one else could manage to put two shots close together. In their excitement, the other boys seemed to forget the special way to shoot.
Not Hussein. He could follow simple instructions.
In the safe house, he remembered how he’d moved a little closer to the vehicle and pulled the trigger a fifth time. The fifth bullet hit near enough where another bullet had struck that it deepened the furrow in the glass. White flakes flew. Hussein fired again and again until he opened a hole in the supposedly bulletproof rear window. Nothing could stop holy bullets. He widened the hole with more shots.
“Out of the car,” Abdullahi had shouted to the kafir.
The man inside did not obey. Abdullahi motioned for Hussein to keep shooting. One of the bullets hit the man inside. The kafir cried out in pain.
“Open the door or we will shoot you again,” Abdullahi screamed.
The infidel opened the door and slumped halfway out of the car. Abdullahi ran over, grabbed him by the collar, and held him up to examine him. Hussein could not see what damage his bullet had done, but apparently the infidel was too wounded to take hostage. Abdullahi unsheathed his machete.
The victim screamed for only a few seconds, but the bleeding went on forever. More blood than when Hussein used his machete on the kafirs at the crossroads. Worse than slaughtering a goat. He almost wished Abdullahi would stop. But now Hussein felt ashamed of that thought. Wasn’t this Allah’s work? Who was he to think it should stop?
When Abdullahi finished sawing, he picked up the head by the ear. The kafir’s eyes remained open, oddly calm. Despite the calm appearance, surely the man was in hell by then.
Hussein thought in silence until distant sirens and shouts brought him to the present.
“The police are looking for us,” Hussein said.
“As we said they would,” Abdullahi said. “Everyone stay quiet. They will not find us. But if they do, you will all fire your rifles until you have achieved martyrdom.”
Hussein sat with his back to the wall, AK-47 at the ready. He still had half a magazine of bullets. The weapon smelled of burned gunpowder. The weapon made him a man.
His service for al-Shabaab gave him new purpose. Earlier, in his sinful life outside the ways of God, he had not expected to live long. He had seen so many other children die in so many ways: His playmate Fatima, part of her head blown off by a stray bullet. His friend Kaahiye, torn nearly in half by a speeding truck. Seven-year-old Saad, drowned after falling off a fishing boat.
But now Hussein thought of the future. As he grew older, what great things might he do? He might even learn to read. Then he could read the Quran. He could read for himself the passages the older men had told him about. The words that said kill all the infidels. That said women must remain hidden and must not seek learning. That said girls must be cut a certain way or they will become harlots. All these words were in the book; the older men said so.
The sound of sirens faded away. The hand of God must be pushing the police to look in the wrong places, Hussein thought.
Abdullahi crept around the house until he found a plastic water bottle. He opened it and drank, then handed it to one of the boys.
“Drink and pass it around,” Abdullahi ordered. “Save some for everyone else.”
When Hussein’s turn came, he took two swallows and passed the bottle back to Abdullahi. At that moment, footsteps sounded outside. Had the police arrived? Hussein clicked the lever to make his rifle shoot one bullet at a time.
/> “Shhhh,” Abdullahi said.
Hussein held his breath. Everyone remained silent. All the boys raised their weapons. The giggler put his hand over his mouth to stifle more laughter. What was wrong with that boy? Hussein tried to remember the strange boy’s name. Dawo. Yes, Dawo the giggler.
Voices sounded from outside. Not those of police.
“Who lives here?” a female voice said in Somali.
“No one,” a male voice answered.
“Come on, there’s nothing any good in there.”
“I found some khat leaves once. They were too wilted, though.”
The footsteps sounded closer.
“We will get in trouble,” the girl said.
“No, we won’t. Nobody lives here.”
Abdullahi put down his rifle and crouched near the canvas flap that served as an entrance. He motioned for Dawo, who was one of the bigger boys, to join him.
“If they come in,” Abdullahi whispered, “everybody help me grab them. Do not let them cry out. Do not fire a weapon.”
“Do we hack them?” Dawo asked.
“No. They might scream. Just keep them quiet.”
The footsteps sounded closer.
Go away, Hussein thought. You will make us get caught. Go away.
A shadow fell across the canvas flap. A sandaled foot appeared beneath it. Dawo’s eyes grew wide. A hand moved the flap aside.
Abdullahi and Dawo sprang. Abdullahi grabbed the figure at the flap entrance. Turned out to be a thin teenage boy about Hussein’s age. Dawo seized the girl, another teenager.
The girl tried to scream, but Dawo put a hand over her mouth. Abdullahi wrestled the boy to the ground, and they dragged both of them inside. The boy kicked and struggled. He made a grunting sound when Abdullahi punched him in the stomach. Hussein grabbed his feet to help hold him down. Another of the al-Shabaab fighters put a hand over the boy’s mouth.
“Quiet,” Abdullahi said. “If you speak above a whisper, we will kill you.”
The captives’ eyes darted around at the soldiers of God. To Hussein, their eyes looked like those of a pigeon he once captured, right before he wrung its neck to pluck and cook it. Abdullahi drew his machete, held it up, and said to the male captive, “Listen. Are you listening to me? Nod your head if you are paying attention.”