Born of War

by Anderson Harp

  And as suddenly as it appeared, the gray ship disappeared into the rain.

  “We have the man you wanted to see.” The guard was standing at the door to the room where Faud was sitting on a carpet with his legs folded underneath him.

  “He is here?” Faud looked up from his portable computer. It was one of many that he had, and used. He would switch them on hourly and would often keep them in a truck over a hundred meters from wherever he was staying. It was a precaution he had learned to live with, and one that had kept him alive. Cell phones and computers were switched out. Web addresses were changed daily, if not more often.

  “Yes, we brought him directly from the dock.”

  Faud was still in the house on the far northwestern side of Kissmaayo. They were preparing to move again as soon as the Kenyans began pressing an attack to the west and neared the city.

  “Bring him in.”

  The man was an African whose people were from the south of Somalia. His dark skin was the result of Mother Nature after centuries of evolution for the people who lived near the equator. The skin reacted to the harshness of the blinding sun, making his people much darker than most. His years at sea only made the skin dryer and more wrinkled.

  “Al-salamu alaykum.” Faud stood up to hug his brother.

  “Wa alaykum s-salam,” the tugboat owner replied as they greeted each other with a pat on their chests and then a hug.

  “You brought in the Danish ship several years ago.”

  The tugboat captain smiled.

  “And you were the one who got the yacht.”

  Several foolish Americans had tried to cross near the Horn of Africa in a private yacht. The tug had pulled it into port but it was a disaster, as the Americans had resisted. The young and foolish gunmen with the captain sprayed the cabin with automatic machine-gun fire. The teak wood was shredded and pools of blood were everywhere. The bodies were thrown over the side for the sharks. But there was no bounty. Later, an insurance company from the Virgin Islands negotiated a deal to buy the yacht back for pennies on the dollar. The tug captain was embarrassed by the circumstance when he was told how much the living brought, versus the dead.

  “Yes, brother.” The tug owner let his eyes fall to the ground.

  Faud realized he had said something that he hadn’t intended to.

  “Have tea with me.” He pointed to a place on the rug and the two sat down. “I have asked some brothers to join us.”

  Several other soldiers dressed in the olive drab of their uniforms joined them but sat back from the two.

  “So, what did you see?” Faud asked.

  “It appeared out of the rain.”

  “Did you have radar?”

  “Yes, but it is old, and only a blip showed up for a second. Several of our men were martyred when the wake almost flipped us over.”

  “Blessed are our brothers who are seeing the face of Allah. Allah be praised.”

  Faud held out both hands palms up as if making a blessing on their souls.

  “How did it look?”

  “Unlike anything I have ever seen before.”

  Faud turned to the portable computer, struck some buttons, and did a Google search, while a woman dressed in a burqa brought in several cups of tea. Her hands were covered in black gloves and no skin was shown whatsoever. It was only her eyes looking through the slit above the niqab that showed any sign of a human being. All of the men looked past her, as it was a sin to look at her. It was the law.

  “Is this what you saw?” Faud pointed to an image on the screen.

  “Yes, that is it.”

  “And sound?”

  “Nothing, until it was just upon us.”

  “Yes, I have heard of this.”

  Faud looked at the picture of the Zumwalt. The DDG-1000 was the stealth ship that they feared. It made no port calls and stayed at sea. His intelligence reported seeing the ship as far away as the Pascagoula shipyard in Mississippi.

  “I remember who first told me about this.” He spoke to his lieutenants. “He lived less than fifty miles from the American shipyards and sent us photographs some time ago.”

  The ship was built just outside the city of Mobile.

  “We need to move it again.” Faud didn’t say what. The tug master had no idea what he was talking about. The others in the room did. The DF-21 had to be moved again.

  “Where is Tarriq? Have we heard from him?”

  “Yes. He found our lost brother and they are with the captives near Tayeeglow.”

  “And they are an Amriiki and a French one?”

  The one lieutenant nodded his head in the affirmative.

  “One is a doctor from Paris with the MSF. The other is also with the MSF. She has complained of back pain and he has malaria,” the junior officer reported.

  Faud held up his hand. They stopped talking.

  “Is the chai good?” he asked the tug master.

  “Yes. I have not had sugar in so long.”

  Faud smiled as he sipped the tea. He waited till the man finished his tea and left. And then Faud called the rest of his men back into the room.

  “The MSF and the French will pay well for the one from Paris. The Amriiki, I don’t know. But they must both be alive.” Faud hesitated as he looked out from the arch and towards the sea.

  “And Omar.” He considered his options. “He does not know that Tarriq was ordered to find him?’

  “No.”

  “If he has more cells, as he says he does, there may be value there as well. The money has poured in after the Reagan attack.”

  Faud paused again.

  “If only more had died.” Only the few in the very back of the aircraft were killed as they were flung onto the runway by the force of the blast. The pilots were being praised as heroes for dropping the airplane down so quickly on the runway. The attack had triggered a well-trained Reagan fire crew to be on the runway before the aircraft had even come to a complete stop. As a result, a fire had been avoided.

  “We need more missiles and more money. Keep Omar alive.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  “I am Buckley Warren.”

  “And that is not your real name.” William Parker said what everyone standing there thought. It was a group combined of the MarSOC major, Captain Tola, Moncrief, and Parker.

  “No, it is not, Mr. Parker.” The slender redhead wore a black baseball cap, a long, curly beard, and a khaki tactical shirt with pocketed tactical pants. “And you know that.”

  Moncrief slid in between Parker and the new arrival. He didn’t want any blood, especially since it wouldn’t be Parker’s. The two had a long history, even if it wasn’t with Buckley Warren and Parker. It was a history between the CIA and Parker.

  “Something about you knowing my name and me not knowing yours is a problem.” Parker stared at him.

  “Not for me.” Warren was a wiseass, to boot.

  “Okay, we are on the same team,” the major intervened. There was a mutual distrust for new arrivals. It seemed that, at this point, “more people” were not so much a help as a hindrance.

  “What do you have to add, Mr. Warren?” Moncrief asked.

  “Faud is the money man for Al Shabaab. With Omar’s rise in popularity they have raised a large amount of money and new recruits. They use the hawala system to run the cash.” Warren sounded like a former Air Force computer technician who had been recruited for the Agency. He rattled off the facts like he was rattling off the capabilities of a new piece of computer gear. “Hawala is a system of trust where legitimate money is transferred on an honor code. We just caught two in Virginia who were running money through Kenya.”

  “So Omar is a problem on several fronts?” Tola asked.

  “Several. He also is the poster child for recruits who are coming in from the United States, Britain, Australia, Sweden, and especially Canada,” Warren continued. “They come here, learn the trade, and then get a jet out of Frankfurt to New York with their legitimate, original United Stat
es passport.”

  “It’s very hard to stop them.”

  “And our tracking of his cell phones tells us he has at least one more cell to activate.”

  “Omar?” Parker clarified.

  “Yes, sir.” Warren paused.

  “Some records of Al Qaeda just surfaced in western Africa. The French made a raid on a village where the Al Qaeda cell left quickly and didn’t burn anything.”

  Parker continued to listen.

  “It had payroll, recruitment instructions, and money to pay and convert the locals. Faud handled most of it. He runs it like a bank with expense sheets and reimbursement vouchers. It is amazing. They are going to spread this system across central Africa. It is a franchise of terror.”

  “Neisseria, Ebola, and Al Qaeda. What next?” Moncrief asked.

  “And like your medical diseases, this man-made organism learns from its mistakes. They figured out that the imposing of Sharia law came down too hard on the locals in Afghanistan. The cutting off of a common thief’s hands isn’t too bad, but when you start stoning the village elder’s granddaughter for being caught with the local sheepherder, you start to lose the public.” Warren paused and looked around to see if anyone else was within hearing distance.

  “It is the homeland that we have here. Omar is a threat to America.” Warren was outlining the priorities of the mission. “Your disease problem is tragic but Omar’s recruitment of money and soldiers that come back to hurt America must be stopped at all costs.”

  Warren crossed his arms as if to separate himself from loyalty to anything other than the mission given to him.

  “Your point?” Parker asked.

  “My point, Colonel,” Warren used the title to rely upon the man’s reputation for following orders, “is that we have an MQ-9 sitting up top with a Hellfire missile and if it looks like Omar can’t be gotten any other way, we will take him down.”

  Parker stared right back at him.

  “I am here to tell you,” Warren added, “that the MSF is getting ready to offer two million francs to get their French doctor out of here. It leaves your gal out there with no one thinking of paying that type of money.”

  The major and Tola shook their heads.

  “And our intercepts tell us that she is very sick.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  “So, you are from Atlanta?” Omar said.

  Karen Stewart’s back was killing her. It had gotten so bad that she had reached into Peter’s pocket and pulled out the bottle of aspirin. More than half of the tablets were gone.

  At least our heart patient hasn’t asked for more. She unscrewed the cap and took out two tablets that she chewed on. The continuing lack of water didn’t help, but the bitter aspirin would ease her pain. She made a point of taking no more than two per day as her pain was shared with Peter’s.

  “I was raised there.”

  “Pace Academy.” Omar sat across from her with his legs folded.

  She couldn’t fold her legs anymore due to the back pain and instead was lying on her side.

  “Yes. How did you know?”

  “There is nothing secret on the Internet.”

  An American voice. It was odd how the voice sounded so comforting after the time spent with Xasan and even Peter. Peter spoke English with his French accent, almost singing the words, while Xasan’s pitch was choppy and made sounds like a telegraph.

  “And you?”

  “I am from Mobile.”

  “Are you?” Somewhere in all the confusion of the last several days she remembered hearing of a church bombing in Mobile. It had struck her as odd that an attack had occurred in the Deep South. “That’s where that terrorist attack recently occurred, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Have you heard about Reagan?”

  “The president?”

  Omar laughed. He was not above bragging.

  “No, the attack at Reagan National Airport in Washington. It just happened yesterday.”

  “Why?” She asked the question as a scientist trying to understand why some diseases pick out children and not the old, who have lived a full life. It was the voice of the kidnapped trying to understand why someone would torment another.

  “You are like the others. Allah has told us to not do drugs. Allah has told us to not fornicate. Allah has told us to not obey parents that do not obey His word.” Omar looked up at the sky. “Your whole Western lifestyle makes me sick. If I wear a beard with my turban, you look at me strangely. If I stop to pray, you send me to the back of the cafeteria and make fun of me. Your world is too different and has no meaning.”

  “You mean our world of freedom?” she spoke in a voice of amazement.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  “I have some good news.” Paul Stewart was in the makeshift dining facility sitting across the table from Parker and Moncrief. He was in the white surgical suit that was commonly seen on the CDC side of the encampment. The DFAC, or makeshift cafeteria, was in the middle of the two encampments. Although Marine security extended around both camps, there was a dividing point. The only shared area was the DFAC.

  Everyone took care to not cross over the middle ground, and even the DFAC was divided, with white suits sitting on one side of a partition. At the entrances on both sides were large metal sinks with bottles of soap. And in the middle there were plastic sheets that went from the ceiling to the floor with splits in the middle and wash sinks on both sides of the split. Signs everywhere reminded one to wash. Paper plates and plastic utensils were used and then destroyed.

  “You have news?” Moncrief looked up.

  “Yes, it is about your sick Marine.”

  “Oh?” Parker asked, trying not to look Paul Stewart directly in his eyes. They had just come from the meeting with the CIA. Neither Moncrief nor Parker liked the idea of a Reaper strike.

  “The Marine with your blood is doing better,” Stewart said to Parker.

  “We have another survivor of the meningitis?” Parker asked.

  “Yes.” The doctor had a white Styrofoam cup full of black coffee. He sat down at the table and sipped it. “His temperature has dropped and he can handle light in the room. He is also starting to eat.”

  “Good.” Parker asked, “What now?”

  “We try to pull a common factor out of your blood sample and his.” Stewart played with the coffee cup in his hand as he spoke. “It is what will lead to an antiserum that will stop this thing.”

  “The International Red Cross has set up a camp south of here at Dolo Bay. We are trying to stop the spread of this disease now. It seems that even those vaccinated with our other, older vaccines are not getting sick.”

  “Dolo Bay?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s near the Kenyan border.” Kenya had been waging war with Al Shabaab for well over a decade. Parker knew that if the Ethiopian Army was capable, it would protect the IRC clinic and help slow the surge of the disease. The two armies joining the fight against both Al Shabaab and the disease gave the locals a chance.

  “Yes. We may be able to contain it on this side. Mogadishu is another question. They have over a million and a half people in the city with no clean water. There will be thousands at risk.”

  Djibouti would help as well as the other nations trying to hold on to parts of Mogadishu. Like a fire through the savannah, it would take time and death for the flames of the disease to die out.

  “The one benefit of war is that it hurts the exportation of the disease. There are few flights out of Mogadishu, unlike Cairo or Dubai.” It was a matter of statistics to Dr. Stewart.

  “So I am not as indispensable as you once thought?” Parker smiled.

  “No, you can go home.” Stewart issued the edict having no idea of everything else that was going on. “We have another donor. The Marine is O positive and has survived.”

  “I like that.” Moncrief couldn’t seem to help himself. “We can be in Djibouti on the next Osprey.”

  I never thought of Djibouti as a place I’d want to
escape to. Parker shook his head and then gave Moncrief a look. It did tell Parker what he’d wanted to hear: he had his freedom back. Since healing the disease did not rely upon him solely, he was now free to chase someone he had wanted to find for some time.

  “Doc, have you seen the video?” Parker knew that he couldn’t hold the truth back. The father needed to know what was going on.

  “No.”

  “She’s fine.”

  “Really? Can I see it?”

  “We got a guy here from the Agency. Let’s go see him.” Parker stood up. It was important that he learn what both the father and the doctor thought.

  They used the same secret communications bunker, or SCIF, as it was called, that the satellite feed came in to the day before. Stewart, Parker, Moncrief, Tola, Warren and the MarSOC major crowded into the SCIF’s small space.

  Stewart was given the main seat.

  “This was posted on the Internet just a few hours ago.” Warren pulled up the screen through a feed directly from Langley. It showed the close-up of a man sitting in front of the trunk of a small tree. He was holding his Kalashnikov in his hand like a small flag, with the butt on the ground. He had a peculiar smile.

  The man spoke: “Al-salamu alaykum.” He paused for effect.

  “Greetings from the war to create a true Islamic state. Our jihadists have responded from around the world. They have all taken the tests from Allah and understand that to obey Allah is the only way. We have two friends here that want to go home.”

  The cell phone panned to both Karen and Peter, who were sitting on the ground next to Omar. Karen was covered with a turban wrap that showed her face from the forehead to just below her nose. She didn’t look directly into the cell phone. Peter was white, with sunken cheeks, and swayed as if he was trying to hold on to his balance.

  The man in the video continued: “Our representative has suggested the ransom we require for their chance to go home to their families. Monies from the MSF and Dr. Stewart will allow them to go home today. We look forward to your response soon.”