In Cold Blood (13 page)

She turned around and retraced her steps back to the truck.

Bashir had finished and was wiping his face with a towel.

“Very hot work,” he said.

“Here.” She handed him one of the
sabmuusas
.

“Very good,” he said, biting down.

She ate hers, too. It was ground fish spiced with hot green pepper, the pastry thin and crispy.

“How far from here?” she said when they had finished.

“One hundred seventy-five kilometres. We will be there in four hours.”

THEY WERE a short distance to the north of Jilib when there came a sudden juddering from the left hand side of the truck. Bashir struggled to maintain control before the juddering abruptly worsened. They heard a repeated
slap slap slap
from outside. He freewheeled over to the side of the road and parked on the rough strip of rocky scrub between the asphalt and the sand.

Beatrix opened the door and jumped down to the ground. The rear tyre on her side of the truck was flat.

“Damn it,” Bashir said.

“Do you have a spare?”

“Yes.”

“And a jack?”

“Of course.”

“So, it’s not a problem. We change it.”

She found a couple of decent sized rocks from the side of the road and used them as chocks to stop the front and back wheels. Bashir rolled a spare out of the back of the truck and dropped a jack after it. Beatrix took off the veil and gown and set to work, sliding under the truck and positioning the jack on the beam of the frame just behind the front of the rear wheel. She raised the jack until it was supporting the truck.

Bashir was standing next to her, watching. “You want a hand?” he asked, evidently embarrassed to be rendered otiose, especially by a woman.

“Don’t worry. I’ve got it.”

“It would be better if I did it. It would not be good for you to be seen.”

“I’ll be quicker than you,” she said.

He fussed around nervously as she set to it.

“How far are we from Barawe?” she asked.

“Thirty miles.”

“How much further can you take me?”

“I take you to the outskirts. Maybe two miles from the town. Is that alright?”

“Works for me.”

She loosened the lug nuts, jacked the truck properly off the ground, kicked the wheel until it fell off and then placed the spare on the hub. She was about to replace the lug nuts when Bashir cursed colourfully.

She stood up and straightened her back, shielding her eyes as she looked back down the road to Jilib.

An old, black Nissan flatbed pickup truck was climbing the coast road towards them. As it drew nearer she saw that it was what they called a ‘Technical’, a Toyota Hilux with a big Russian 12.7mm calibre DShK machine gun mounted in the back. There was a driver, a passenger next to him and six masked men in the back, legs hanging over the sides, their flip flops dangling. They all had AK-47s.

“It is an al Shabaab patrol,” Bashir said.

“What will they do?”

“They will ask what we are doing.”

“And?”

“And I will say I have come from Dadaab to make a collection in Barawe.”

“And they’ll believe that?”

“We must hope so. Please, you must get in the truck. Shut the door. We must hope they have not seen you.”

Beatrix made a reflex assessment of the situation. They were a minute away. They must have seen her by now. She certainly did not have time to finish off fitting the new wheel so that they might make an escape. Even if there was time, the Technical was faster than the battered old truck and the 12.7mm machine gun would make short work of it. The desert was bleak and empty on either side and, if she ran to the west, she would be cut off by the sea before she had covered a kilometre. No. A tactical withdrawal was impossible. They were going to have to face them.

She pulled herself into the cab and shut the door. She checked in the mirror that the veil of the niqāb was covering her eyes.

She watched as the Nissan slowed and drew into the side of the road twenty feet behind them. Bashir waited for them. One of the men in the back jumped down and came towards him. He was wearing a
ma’awii
, a sarong-style skirt, and two bandoliers of cased cartridges crossed over his chest. His face was covered with a red and white chequered
kufiya
. The other men in the back of the truck were dressed similarly.

Beatrix could hear the conversation through the open window.

“What are you doing?”

“I have a flat tyre, brother.”

The man rested the stock of his AK on the sandy asphalt, his hand around the barrel. “Where are you going?”

“Barawe.”

“What for?” His Arabic was halting. He was not a native Somali.

“I make a collection there.”

“Of what?”

“Fruit, brother.”

“And then?”

“Back to Dabaab. The camps.”

“You have a woman with you.”

Bashir hesitated. “Yes. She is in the truck.”

“Who is she? Your wife?”

“No…”

“Tell her to come here.”

“She is tired. We have had a long…”

His voice tightened with anger. “Tell her to come here.”

Beatrix opened the door and jumped down to the road.

“Assalamu alaykum,” the man said. Peace be upon you.

Beatrix’s Arabic was better than his: “Wa alaykum us salaam.” And peace also be with you.

“You were changing the wheel.”

“Yes, brother.”

“That is not a job for a woman.”

“Two people are quicker than one.”

“It is not a job for a woman.” He turned to Bashir. “She should not be outside the house. It is an offence.”

“I am sorry,” she said.

She saw the man’s eyes narrow with suspicion. “What is your name?” he asked her.

Beatrix thought fast. “Fatima.” It was the name of Mohammed’s wife.

“And where do you live?”

“I live in Dadaab.”

She saw a glint of cunning in his eyes. A predator trapping his prey. “Where in Dadaab do you live? Where exactly? Which street?”

Beatrix recalled the maps she had studied. “Jidka Barawe,” she said. “Near Barka Shaqaalaha. The restaurant. Do you know it?”

He paused, the wrinkles around his eyes suggesting a frown. “You must come with us.”

“Why?”

“Because you should not be out on the road like this. It is an offence!”

Beatrix felt the adrenaline spiking her veins.

Bashir was backing away.

“You,” the man said, pointing at him. “Stay there.” He turned, put his fingers to his lips, and whistled. “I need two of you,” he called out. “And bring the lash.” Two men dropped down from the flatbed and slouched across to them.

“Please,” Bashir said.

The first man turned to the newcomers. “This dog has brought this woman from Dadaab. What do you think of that?”

One of the men pulled the
kufiya
away from his mouth and spat on the ground. He had a coil of rope with him.

“Hold him,” the first man said. “He must be whipped.”

The men each took an arm and grabbed. Bashir was too terrified to move.

The first man approached Beatrix until he was oppressively close to her. She stepped back. He came forward again until he had penned her against the back of the truck.

“I think she is lying to us,” he said to the others. “You are not from Dadaab. I do not believe you.”

“It is true.”

Last chance
, she thought.
One more step.

“I think perhaps she needs to be whipped, too.”

“I agree,” one of the new men said, his leer obvious even behind the scarf.

Beatrix’s hand was hidden by the folds of the gown. “Please, brother.”

The first man reached a hand for the veil and, as his fingers closed around the fabric and moved it aside, he saw her flinty eyes. It was the last thing he would ever see. Beatrix’s hand struck out from the folds of the niqāb, her
kukri
gripped tight in her fist. The blade sliced across his throat, opening it from the point of the left clavicle all the way in a diagonal line to the side of his throat below his right ear. His eyes bulged at the impossible, horrible unexpectedness, his lifeblood spurting out for every dying beat of his heart.

The fighter to the left of Bashir dropped his AK into the grit and sand, his eyes bloated with terror.

Beatrix allowed the upwards momentum of her first stroke to abate and then slashed back down again, spinning the grip in her palm so that the tip of the curved blade was pointing back down again, the smooth stroke terminating between the second man’s ribs, the blade puncturing his heart.

The third man turned and ran back towards the truck.

Beatrix muscled the
kukri
out of the torso of her second victim and, aiming and flinging the knife as she dropped down to her knee, sent it at him in an unerring course that ended with the blade buried up to the handle between his shoulders.

Bashir gibbered in terror.

She reached down for the fallen AK and a spare magazine, flicked the selector to automatic and fired in controlled volleys as she walked to the pickup. The windshield went milky white as it spiderwebbed and then, immediately afterwards, splashed vivid red from the inside as the driver and passenger were peppered by the barrage.

The magazine went dry. Beatrix pressed the catch to eject it, canted the fresh magazine forwards so that the lug on the front engaged with the recess in the magazine wall, then pulled it back sharply until it snapped into place.

The three men in the flatbed vaulted the gate and ran.

Beatrix zeroed on the man to the left and fired.

Two bullets thudded into his back.

She switched to the man in the middle.

A bullet severed his spinal cord between the fourth and fifth vertebrae. He dropped, paralysed.

The third man was fifty feet away and running hard. Beatrix pressed the stock into her shoulder, zeroed the front and back sights, and squeezed off a final three round burst.

Two shots missed. The third blew his skull apart like a rotten cantaloupe.

Eight men.

All dead.

Less than twenty seconds.

The man she had paralysed was moaning incoherently. She was on the way to the pickup and so she charitably put a round into his head.

She tore the
kufiya
from one of the men and used it to clean the blood from her knife. She dropped the soiled garment into the flatbed.

She scavenged three full magazines from the dead bodies and returned to the truck.

Bashir was on his knees.

“I’m not going to insist you take me into Barawe,” she said, “but you need to get me closer than this. Like we agreed. Alright?” He was shaking. “Come on, Bashir. Get up.”

“You are not a journalist.”

“No. I’m not. Get up, Bashir, or I’ll take the truck and leave you here.”

She went back to the wheel, took up the wrench and started to tighten the nuts.

“WE CAN’T just wait and do nothing,” Joe said.

They had moved to the far side of the room, leaving two men near the door so that they could hear if anyone approached down the stairs.

“We’re not going to.”

“So what are we going to do?” Harry Torres retorted angrily.

Joyce and the three other men from Manage Risk had become much less self-assured and much more defensive. It must have been obvious to them that they were relying on the sufferance of the others now.

“I don’t know,” Joe admitted.

“You want to know the way I see it?” Torres asked. “We should give them what they want. Maybe that will mean the rest of us can live.”

“We’re not doing that,” Joe said. “We talked about that.”

“And they keep killing us.”

“They were just doing their jobs.”

“Pretty fucking poorly!” Barry Miller said with sudden heat. “Look where it got us!”

Joyce got up and came over. The others followed behind him.

“About time,” Miller said. “You better have an idea to get us out of this.”

“I told the captain. We’re in a bad situation. There’s no easy way out of this.”

“So, what? You want us to do what? Wait?”

“That’s our best option.”

Torres gaped. “Are you
serious
?”

“There’s nothing we can do down here. We would all be killed.”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re like cattle waiting for the slaughter here.”

“We won’t have to wait much longer. You want to know what’s happening outside? Two things. Your government knows where we are. The first thing, they’ll have drones overhead right now. High up, invisible, but they’ll be getting real time video and intel. They might have a satellite, too. They’ll know where we are, how many men they have, their defensive posture, everything. The second thing, they’ll have men ready to come in and get us out. Could be Delta, could be the SAS. They’ll be close now. They’ll have been flown into theatre overnight. Maybe they jumped into the sea and got picked up by a frigate. Maybe they’re in Kenya or Ethiopia, ready to get on board a Hercules now. But close. And when they get here, they are going to chew these fishermen up like you wouldn’t believe.
That’s
when we make our move. That’s when we get out.”

“That’s all very interesting,” Torres said, “but you’re guessing. You don’t know any of that. Maybe they don’t know where we are. Maybe they decide this place is impossible to attack. Fuck, maybe they just drop a bomb and take all of us out together.”

The other men sounded their agreement.

“That’s not how it’s going to happen,” Joyce said.

“Look, I don’t like to say it, really I don’t, but we’ve got another card to play. We can say it was you who took out the boy on the boat.”

“And they’ll kill us.”

“We’re all dead anyway.”

Joyce looked at Torres hard and cold. “You’re not telling them anything.”

“You going to try and stop me?”

Torres had a reputation as a bit of a firebrand.

“Harry…” Joe said.

Before Joe could tell him to stand down he had taken a step towards Joyce and squared up.

“Harry…”

Joyce flashed his left hand towards Torres’s face in a feint, Torres raised his hands to block, Joyce sidestepped him and hooked his right arm around his throat. He took a quarter turn and squeezed, choking Torres and then forcing him to his knees. Joe stepped forwards but he was blocked off by McGuinnes, the number two Manage Risk man. The other men got to their feet, but Bloom and Anderton stepped into their way.