Dead Centre (23 page)

Every open space was clogged with makeshift shelters, round stick huts covered with layers of rags, or shacks made of scraps of wood and rusted wriggly tin.

I saw now where the smog came from. Tyres were burning everywhere, sending plumes of black smoke over the low rooftops.

The pavements were filled with people just lounging about, doing nothing. What was there to do? Most of the women were
burqa
’d up in black or bright orange, with scabby kids at their heels. Old men in loose cotton skirts and worn-out plastic sandals crouched in the uneven shade of the acacia trees. The Italians must have planted them years ago, and they still hadn’t quite given up the struggle. Telephone poles leant at crazed angles, with a metre or so of wiring hanging loose.

There were a few vehicles on the road but nothing to slow us down. A wagonload of goats had nothing on a 12.7mm machine-gun. Every single wall was pitted by strike marks from RPGs or rounds. After years of fighting the government, the Americans and finally each other, the whole place was shot to fuck. And the red desert continued trying to reclaim the city for itself.

Awaale was still gobbing off into his mobile. He was happier now. I could see the old smile on his lips in the rear-view mirror. Before long he placed a Marlboro from the pack in his shirt pocket between them and lit up. The wagon bumped up and down, almost in time with what sounded to me like the same never-ending song on the radio.

Cars and pickups suddenly crammed the streets. Rusty trucks leaking diesel and minging old French saloons from the 1970s rubbed shoulders with brand new Mercs. Famine or feast: this was more like the Africa I knew. Kids darted down alleyways, their runny noses clogged with dust. Meat hung from street stalls, swarming with flies. Bored-looking men and women squatted beside piles of bruised fruit at the roadside. One guy under a beach parasol sold nothing but batteries.

The buildings were in better condition here, and slightly more substantial: two, three and four floors, with air-conditioners humming on the outside walls. Water streamed from the units, staining the already badly stained white paintwork. It wasn’t the only clue that this part of town was where the money hung out. The ads here weren’t faded and the latest BlackBerrys and iPads were on display in the shop windows.

Metres from the brand new Mercs in the traffic, guys sat in old armchairs with weapons across their knees. They were probably guarding the
hawala
brokers. Most people here depended on money from relatives overseas to survive. A million Somalis had fled the country. Between them, they sent home about two billion dollars a year to the poor fuckers they’d left behind. I wondered whether Ali in Barratt Street had a slice of this action.

The lads in the armchairs weren’t short of competition. Every man in sight was toting some form of eastern-bloc AK or light machine-gun. The really flash boys carried RPGs in their ancient canvas day sacks.

5

STOPPING AND STARTING every ten seconds, we ground our way through the chaos. The driver of the technical in front eventually got bored and his gunner, who had the best sun-gigs of all – massive blue mirrored stars with white frames – raised the weapon and loosed off two long forty-five-degree bursts. The moment people realized they weren’t under attack they just got on with their lives again, but the birds didn’t come back in a hurry.

We bounced from pothole to pothole. My head shunted left and right. Awaale closed down his phone and slid it under his Marlboros. His eyes scanned left and right as we picked up speed.

‘Where are you from, Mr Nick?’

‘London. What about you? Where did you learn such good English?’

‘With my father.’ He pointed beyond the huge snake of illegal wiring that hung from pole to pole across the street, towards a five-storey building with shuttered windows. The wall facing us had a large painting of a TV, and next to it the words
VIP Institute
.

‘Look, Mr Nick. Do you know what that building is?’

‘I guess it must be where we’re going to meet Tracy and the other two.’

He tilted his head towards the driver and told him of my stupidity. He had to shout over the music. They both had another chuckle.

‘No, Mr Nick. That’s the Olympic Hotel. Black Hawk Down – have you seen the movie? My father – he’s famous.’

‘I haven’t, but I know the story.’

We came level with the building. A leaking pipe had filled the ruts in the road with water. Dogs lapped at it like they hadn’t drunk for days.

‘This is where the attack started. The Americans came to capture General Aidid, but it was a trap. The general was a great man.’

The driver had started scanning left and right as well. The lads on the back were edgy. Everyone was on his toes.

‘You know about General Aidid and the trap?’

I nodded. General Mohammed Farrah Aidid hadn’t actually been a general but the clan warlord who’d controlled the city back in 1992. Operation Restore Hope hadn’t been designed as America’s biggest gangfuck since their failed attempt to rescue hostages from their Tehran embassy in 1980. It was intended to relieve the famine by securing a corridor for the aid to get through. The clans had carved up the country for themselves. With no overall government or structure, the whole country was dying of starvation. The aid convoys were hijacked. The clans fed themselves and their machine, just like Joe’s mate Mugabe was still doing in Zimbabwe. Control the food and you control the people.

The Americans began to make headway. By 1993, the famine was winding down. George Bush Senior came to witness their success for himself. US forces were looking to leave, and undergoing a lengthy handover to the UN. The Pakistani Army and a handful of others flew in, ready to continue the good work. But there was a problem. Aidid was pissed off at being marginalized by the rest of the clan leaders. He decided he was going to show everyone who was boss. In June that year twenty-four Pakistani UN soldiers were ambushed and massacred. Some were disembowelled; others had their eyes gouged out.

Suddenly the Americans were no longer on a humanitarian mission. They were at war. The soldiers who’d come to feed the hungry were back in combat. The next few months became one long street battle. Casualties on both sides were high.

The US’s resolve weakened. They looked for an exit. On 3 October they thought they had the answer. They’d received information that Aidid was holed up in the Olympic Hotel. Delta Force – the D Boys – assaulted the building. It was an ambush. Two Black Hawks were taken down by RPGs in the middle of the city. Firefights kicked off as US forces tried to extricate the aircrew. Nineteen US soldiers were killed and eighty-four wounded, along with an unconfirmed number of clan fighters. The Americans said more than a thousand; the clans said 113.

The world didn’t see the street fighting and the casualties. They saw a Black Hawk pilot being dragged through the streets in his underpants with ropes round his ankles. It played for days on CNN and all the national outlets. Bill Clinton had taken over from Bush Senior. He couldn’t understand how a humanitarian operation had turned into a complete disaster. He ordered US forces out. And he was wary of helping anyone again. That was why the Rwanda genocide was allowed to happen in 1994, and the Srebrenica massacre in 1995. Nobody in the White House wanted another dead American dragged through the streets of a foreign city.

We bounced past the hotel and off the main drag, through a rotting labyrinth of muddy stone rag-covered huts. Hundreds of thousands of human beings existed here and mangy dogs skulked in the shadows. Kids with misshapen heads and contorted limbs haunted the irregular dirt streets and cactus-lined paths, massive growths hanging from their bodies.

High-voltage cables sagged dangerously low across the gaps between tin-roofed dwellings. The whole place was strewn with rubble, fetid rubbish and, of course, burning tyres.

Rubble, rubbish and yet more smoking tyres lay around a large man-made mound about two hundred metres away, on top of which stood a lone shack with a cart outside. The king must have lived there.

The locals melted away as soon as they saw the technicals screeching to a halt. Faces appeared at the grilles of old steel doors. A dog barked at the tailgate of the wagon in front of us and was soon kicked away by one of the lads in trainers.

Awaale leapt out. ‘Mr Nick, come.’ He motioned for me to follow. Kids screamed on either side. We walked down a narrow alley. The traffic noise became a distant hum. Birds twittered. It was almost like a Sunday stroll, until a distant burst of automatic fire broke the spell.

‘Where are we going?’

‘I want to show you what the tourists are missing.’

6

WE FOUND OURSELVES beside four single-storey houses that had been blasted and burnt out years ago. In their midst stood a copse of bright green cactuses about the size of a tennis court. They were just over head height, some with bright red flowers.

Awaale stood there proudly. ‘This place, my father made it famous.’

I knew I should have been admiring his dad’s cactus allotment, but I couldn’t help myself. ‘You think tourists would flock here to look at this? Awaale, I don’t have the time, mate. I really need to see Tracy and—’

His hand came up.

I was pissing him off. I needed to wind my neck in.

‘All in good time, Mr Nick. Look more closely.’ He bent from the waist and I followed suit. He pointed. ‘Lower.’ It was definitely a command, not a request. I knelt in the sand. Under the canopy of spikes I could now see curls of razor wire, guarding a profusion of twisted metal shapes. Then I spotted US Army initials, black on dark green.

The carcass of a Black Hawk.

‘Your father …?’

‘My father shot this down. It was the first. My dad is famous.’

He turned and shouted, and one of the lads came running over with an RPG launcher.

‘He used one of these.’ He rested the weapon on his shoulder and pointed it at the sky. ‘My father – a great man.’

I looked back at the wreckage under the cacti. A multi-million-dollar machine, taken out by a $310 kick up the arse.

The Black Hawks had flown low over the city with snipers on board to support the attack on the Olympic Hotel. The intelligence guys had determined that RPGs did not represent any air-defence threat. They thought that if you aimed the weapon into the sky, like Awaale was doing, the back blast would hit the ground and take out the firer – and no way would the clans fire it from a rooftop because they would be spotted immediately and hosed down. But Aidid knew better – and he knew that the best way to hurt the Americans was to shoot down their helicopters. The Black Hawks were like the Apaches in Afghanistan – the symbol of the US’s power and the clans’ helplessness.

Aidid had planned his ambush well. He had smuggled in Islamic fundamentalist soldiers from Sudan who’d fought against Russian Hind gunships in Afghanistan. They showed men like Awaale’s dad how to modify the RPG so they could fire from the street. All they had to do was weld some curved piping on the end to deflect the back blast – adding that extra ten dollars to the original $300 cost.

Something else. RPG grenades burst on impact, so it’s hard to hit a fast-moving target with one. The ‘advisers’ fitted the detonators with timing devices to make them explode in mid-air. That way, they wouldn’t need a direct hit to bring down a Black Hawk. The
mujahideen
also taught Awaale’s dad and his mates that the heli’s tail rotor was its most vulnerable spot. They taught them to wait until the Black Hawk passed over, and to shoot up at it from behind.

The whole operation to capture Aidid from the Olympic Hotel had been supposed to take no more than thirty minutes, a typical enough time for an SF op. Instead, once this Black Hawk had come down, it had spiralled into eighteen hours of urban combat, as US units tried to fight their way in to rescue the crews and shooters. Then another $310 dollars’ worth brought down a second Black Hawk, and the nightmare was complete. Two posthumous Congressional Medals of Honour, the equivalent of our VC, were awarded for that night’s action. Aidid wasn’t touched. It wasn’t until three years later that he was killed in the city during a clan battle.

I stood up and brushed the sand off my hands. ‘Where’s your dad now? Is he still alive?’

‘He’s a taxi driver in Minneapolis.’

‘You went with him?’

He nodded.

Now I knew where the accent came from. The US had stopped their aid to Somalia, but they hadn’t turned their back completely. As the cactus allotment sprouted and grew, the US had opened its borders to refugees, especially the educated or moneyed ones. The vast majority of them joined their mates in Minneapolis. Before long, it was the biggest Somali population on the planet outside Somalia itself. Even Easton couldn’t compete.

I stood there as the RPG was handed back. If Awaale was telling the truth, the guy who took down the first Black Hawk was now driving Americans home from the airport. I guessed his war stories weren’t part of his cabbie chat.

‘Why are you smiling, Mr Nick?’

‘You must be very proud.’

‘Sure I am.’

There were shouts. He looked away sharply. The smile dropped from his face. He shouted back.

‘We have to go, Mr Nick.’

He didn’t wait for my answer. He was already legging it towards the technical. I didn’t need to know what the fuck was going on. All I needed to know was that if he was running, then so was I.

7

THE CREWS WERE getting sparked up, but it wasn’t because they were scared. It was worse than that. They were almost hyperventilating with excitement.

I heard screams and wails from inside nearby buildings. The people who’d run back into their homes knew what was about to happen.

We jabbed down a series of narrow alleys. He was too busy yelling at his crews to pay any attention to me. None of them was taking cover.

The shadows from our left were lengthening, but I could still just about see what was happening in the gaps between buildings. There was around an hour until last light.