In Cold Blood (6 page)

THE SOMALIS were using an old trawler as the mothership. They had transferred the six officers plus the four soldiers from the
Carolina
to one of the skiffs, sailed south for three or four miles, Joe couldn’t be sure, and met up with the trawler when the big freighter was just a smudge on the horizon. The ship was in a terrible state, barely seaworthy, and, for the first time that day, Joe had been grateful that the surface of the ocean was glassy smooth. The four skiffs, including the disabled one, had been tied to the back and the trawler had towed them behind it as they set sail to the west. They had lined them up on the deck, five abreast, with two Somalis guarding them with AK-47s. The sun was overhead and blisteringly hot. They were given a two litre bottle of water to share out between them and Joe insisted it be rationed carefully. He did not know how far they had to go.

It turned out that they had sailed for ten hours before they saw land. It appeared as a dark line on the horizon and then, as they drew closer, details began to emerge. They were headed for a town. Joe looked at it as they rose and fell on the swells. There was a thin outcrop of rock that protected the littoral, an old Portuguese lighthouse standing uselessly at the westernmost tip. Behind the natural harbour wall was a port, with skiffs tethered to wooden jetties, and a fringe of beautiful white sand that would have graced the pages of the most exclusive holiday brochure curled away with the shape of the bay. Beyond that was the town, a series of square white buildings in the familiar Somali fashion. Behind the buildings was desert, everything coloured with burnt reds and oranges.

Joyce was sitting next to him. His team had thrown their weapons over the side when it was obvious that they were outgunned. That made sense.

“Do we know where that is?” Joyce asked him.

“We’ve been heading south west,” Joe said. “There are a few coastal towns like that all the way down to Mogadishu. Hobyo, Haradeere. Barawe. I don’t know enough about them to know which one it might be.”

“You ever been here before?” Joyce said.

“You kidding me? No.”

“I have.”

“What the hell for?”

“Old job,” he said vaguely.

“And?”

“What’s it like? You don’t want to know. The worst place on earth. The very worst place.”

The Somalis said very little. Farax had the best English. The others spoke it in a rudimentary fashion, just enough to make themselves understood.

There was plenty of time for thinking and Joe had spent it trying to work out what was happening to them. Normal procedure would have been to stay onboard the ship until the ransom had been delivered, usually dropped from a plane to land on the deck. The ransom would have been paid. What was twenty or thirty million dollars compared to the value of the cargo, the ship, the crew? But Farax said that he was not interested in money and nothing he had done since had suggested that was untrue. The alternative was unpleasant, and Joe did everything he could to avoid thinking about it until he could not avoid it any longer. He knew about al Shabaab from the newspapers and the television. Somalia had been torn asunder by a brutal civil war that had raged without cessation since the late eighties. The fighting had made it a failed state, a place with no effective government, and into the vacuum had come the terrorists who thrived in lawlessness. Al Qaeda had based their camps here. They had been replaced by al Shabaab, ‘the Party of the Youth’, and they had seized whole towns and held them. Joe didn’t know much more than that, apart from the commentators he had read agreed on one thing: they were worse than al Qaeda.

FARAX HAD been sitting at the stern of the boat for most of the journey. The skipper had reduced their speed as they approached the coast and now they were drawing to a standstill, a sea anchor dropped over the side. Joe watched the young man as he pushed himself upright, stretched his arms, gathered his AK and stepped carefully until he was in front of him. He lowered himself to his haunches and pointed to the town ahead of them.

“That is Barawe,” he said. “Do you know it, Joe?”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“Al Shabaab controls it. It is our town. Look at it.”

There was a crystal clear lagoon and, beyond it, there were rows of white houses, square and boxy.

“You will stay here with us.”

“For how long?”

“For as long as it takes for our message to be heard.”

“What message?”

“Our message of jihad. Your government must listen, captain. You will make them listen.”

Joe bit the inside of his mouth, unwilling to press for fear of the answers that Farax might provide. He looked at the man: he was young, in his mid-twenties, if Joe had to guess; his skin was clear; his eyes were large, the whites prominent against his very dark skin. He was absently stroking the tips of his fingers against the barrel of his battered old AK.

“You answer question for me, Joe,” he said.

“If I can.”

“You have man with long rifle aboard,” he said, unable to find the word for sniper. “He shoot man and then shoot engine, yes?”

Joe shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Big gun. Fifty caliber.”

Joe felt Joyce stiffen next to him.

He shrugged at the question.

“You must tell me who did this.”

“I’m sorry, Farax. We have no-one like that.”

He smiled at him again, the same smile that he had used just before he had pumped half a dozen rounds into Vasquez’s chest but, this time, there was no repeat. “I understand why you say nothing. I do the same, if it were me. But I know you have men here, on boat, who are soldiers. Sailors do not use such weapons. They do not have the skill. And a soldier is worth more to al Shabaab than a sailor. You must remember that, Joe. You understand?”

“I do, but it’s not relevant…”

Farax laid a hand on Joe’s shoulder. “We will talk about this again.”

THEY UNTETHERED the skiffs and brought them around the port and starboard. Farax indicated that they should get into the boats and, once they were safely aboard, the sixty horsepower outboards were opened all the way to maximum and they bounced across the shallow waves into the harbour. It was a wet, bumpy ride and Joe held on to the gunwale. They swerved into the opening of the harbour, flashed past the abandoned lighthouse and proceeded to the shore, driving right up the beach. They lurched to a sudden stop. One of the other hijackers shouted at them, “Out! Out!” and they did as they were told. Joe’s feet slapped down onto the wet sand as the second and third skiffs followed them up the beach. Joe looked around and saw a fleet of small boats on the beach, attended to by twenty or thirty men. Some were working with angle grinders and welders on engine mountings, others were siphoning fuel, others were attending to damaged hulls. It was busy with activity. Whatever this place was, it was important to them.

They were led at gunpoint up from the harbour through dusty streets, the sun’s glare blindingly bright against the whitewashed walls. The foreigners were penned in by the Somalis, AKs lowered and readied. There was no use in trying to resist. Where were they going to go? Local fighters appeared along the street as the procession climbed up from the beach and soon there was an excited, fractious atmosphere. A couple of the men from the boat aimed their AKs into the air and fired off celebratory rounds. It set off others, and, soon, their passage was marked by an earsplitting barrage.

Joyce was alongside him. Joe had watched as he had been herded from the trawler and the man’s
sangfroid
was remarkable. On first glance he might have appeared above it all, but Joe had watched him carefully. He noticed that Joyce was observing everything and everyone, soaking it all in. The signs of stress were difficult to find. There was a barely noticeable tic in his right cheek, above the line of his jaw, but that was it. Joe knew next to nothing about him or the men from Manage Risk. He had been pleased that they had been included on the crew roster but, save that they were all ex-military, he was ignorant about them.

“You can’t give us up,” he said in a terse whisper as they climbed natural steps to the street level above.

“I wasn’t about to.”

“They will kill us if you do. You know that, right?”

“I won’t say anything.”

“And your crew?”

“They’re good men. They won’t, either.”

“What he was saying about soldiers, that was true. This is all about propaganda. If they think we’re all just sailors, maybe we get out of this in one piece. It’ll definitely give us more time.”

“You don’t think this is about a ransom?”

“These boys? No. They don’t need money. They run the coastline north of here. They don’t need whatever it is your company would pay to get us back. This is about ideology. We are their chance to make a big splash.”

“So … what will they do?”

“They’ll hold us. Parade us in front of the cameras. Get us to make statements denouncing the Great Satan, all that shit. I figure we’ve got six months before they change tactics. It might get dangerous then, but that’s more than enough time for your government or my employer to decide to teach these pricks a lesson they’ll never forget.”

Joe looked up, eyes forward, and saw that Farax was watching them. His eyes glittered with malevolent interest, cunning, and Joe suddenly felt as if the young man had the ability to look right through him. He swallowed down his fear as they continued on.

THEY CONTINUED NORTH. They passed a mishmash of construction styles: the boxy white houses, concrete blockwork buildings with corrugated tin roofs, dwellings that were little more than tents. There were a handful of shops with little in the way of goods on display. There were no bars, and no sign of any alcohol, anywhere. People continued to stop and stare. They made for an incongruous parade.

The man in the lead stopped and pointed sharply to his left. They turned through a gateway, not even big enough for a car, and into a reasonably sized compound. It was walled on all sides, an eight foot rendered barrier that, while crumbling in places, would still be a significant obstacle to scale for anyone who might come and rescue them. There was a brushwood hut in the corner of the yard where two goats bleated at the disturbance. Steel gates slammed shut behind them, sealing them inside.

The house in the middle of the compound was three storeys high. It was made from thick stone blocks and the windows were thin and miserly, covered by green shutters. The entrance had once been grand, but the fine design had been blasted by the salty wind and no-one had cared to maintain it. The house was topped with a decorative crenelated pediment that had been scarred by the passage of time, too, and when they got closer Joe saw jagged holes where the stone had been chipped away by automatic gunfire.

There were two armed guards at the main door and they moved aside as the procession approached. They went inside. It was dark and damp and difficult to make out any details. They passed drums of well water, a hole-in-the-floor privy and a series of rooms in which bed rolls had been arranged. Quarters for the men, Joe guessed. They continued deeper inside, the leader pausing at a door to unlock it, and then opening it to reveal a flight of stairs that descended to a basement.

“Down,” he said.

They did as they were told. There was a single bare lightbulb at the foot of the stairs and, in its feeble light, the descent on the stone treads, slick with moss and lichen, was treacherous. There was a further door at the foot of the stairs and it, too, needed to be unlocked.

“Here. You stay here.”

Joe was the first inside. They were in the basement. It was a large room that must have stretched out beneath the footprint of the house above, with dimensions of perhaps twenty metres by ten metres. There was a rough dirt floor, concreted over in places, damp from moisture that streamed from the ceiling and ran down the walls. It was windowless and lit only by the dull light that seeped in through a grid of ventilation bricks that were set into the wall just below the ceiling and another bare sixty watt bulb, not nearly bright enough to cast aside the deep shadows in the corners of the room. A tarpaulin had been spread across a quarter of the space and a series of mattresses had been stacked atop it. That was their sleeping arrangement. There were no chairs. A couple of buckets on the far side of the room were the toilet facilities.

“We can’t stay here!” Harry Torres exclaimed.

“What would you prefer?” Farax asked him.

“I wouldn’t keep my dog down here.”

“
Harry
,” Joe said. “Take it easy. That won’t help.”

“Come on, Joe, this is bullshit.”

“And getting agitated about it is not going to help us at all. Calm down.”

Torres flashed a hot stare at him, but held his tongue.

Farax retreated to the door. “I will return later, Joe,” he said. “Perhaps we can talk about improving your accommodation. You know what you have to do.”

Joe’s stomach turned over. He could feel Joyce’s eyes in his back. “I’m sorry, Farax. Really.”

“Later, Joe. We talk later.”

The door shut behind him.

MOHAMMED SHOWED Pope to one of the guest rooms. Beatrix went back down to the shooting range and unlocked both cupboards. She collected her gear in a pile on the floor: a pair of Kiowa lightweight tactical boots, Mechanix fingerless gloves, a Tactical riggers belt and a collection of magazine and dump pouches. She added night vision binoculars, a Leatherman Wave multi-tool, two hydration pouches and a zippered nylon pouch that contained twenty four anodised steel throwing knives. She dropped in three flash-bangs and three fragmentation grenades. Her primary weapon was a Heckler & Koch MP-5 with a full thirty round magazine in the weapon and another couple of spares. She chose a Glock 17 for her secondary weapon. Both the Glock and the MP-5 were chambered for 9mm cartridges. She only wanted to carry one type of cartridge.

If she needed anything else she would scavenge it when she got to Somalia. She knew it would be simple enough to do.