It was safer not to notice a lot of things that happened in Mogadishu.
The Darood thugs yanked Jake from the car and threw him to the ground.
“He has a tracking device,” screamed the warlord’s son. “Find it!”
The goons stripped Jake to his underwear and found the radio transceiver.
Nacay drew his pistol and pointed it at Jake’s head, but he lowered the weapon when he heard a car engine being pushed to its redline and closing in fast.
“We’ll finish this later,” Nacay said to Jake. “I promise you.”
The men threw Jake back into the sedan and the car did a U-turn in the sandy lot. Nacay lowered his window as they approached the exit and, with the skill of an NBA all-star, lobbed the radio beacon into the garbage truck’s hopper.
Ten minutes later, the white sedan pulled back inside the Darood warehouse. The black SUV was gone, the doors slid shut, and the sunlight vanished. Overhead fluorescent lights struggled to light the cavernous room. All around, the high walls were lined with metal racks filled with boxes of ammunition, crates of weapons, and sundry items acquired by Yaxaas’s men from around the Horn of Africa.
The goons hauled Jake from the back seat, threw him to the floor, and struck him roughly.
A man with a disfigured face approached from a dark corner.
“What do we do with this one?” he said.
“Soften him up,” said Nacay.
“How soft?”
“Liquefied.”
Nacay and his men left in the white Nissan, wholly unconcerned about driving around Mogadishu in a car scarred with dozens of bullet holes.
The man wasted no time carrying out his instructions.
Two of his cohorts manhandled Jake to the back of the warehouse and tied him spread-eagle to one of the metal racks. They were thugs, wholly untrained in the art of extracting information through pain, but information wasn’t their objective. Their goal was pain itself.
And at that they excelled.
* * *
—
THE BUILDING WAS a hive of activity when Jake regained consciousness. Two white pickup trucks were parked in the center of the warehouse floor. Behind them, four men were busy sliding rectangular plywood benches into the beds—it gave the passengers the option of riding with their legs inside or dangling them over the fenders. More men stood throughout the warehouse, speaking a mixture of Arabic and Somali and loading their chest rigs with AK-47 magazines and hand grenades. Whatever they were suiting up for was going to be bloody, and Jake hoped it wasn’t going be another assault on the Ground Branch team. He’d seen the technical open fire on his friends and knew they’d taken casualties. In their current condition, there was no way they could survive a second assault by a force this size.
Jake spotted the man with the disfigured cheek walking toward him in the dim light. He had a pistol in his hand.
Jake closed his eyes and played dead. He knew he couldn’t take much more. But the man had a great deal of experience with torturing people, and he grabbed Jake’s crotch and twisted his testicles as if he were trying to wring out a wet towel.
Jake would have screamed, but his pain needle was already pegged on 10 and his body had only one response left.
He passed out again.
SIXTY-TWO
IT WAS MIDMORNING, the clinic’s busiest time of day, but it looked like dusk on the streets of Mogadishu. Days of strong winds had blown towering dark clouds over the eastern horizon, blocking the sun’s relentless rays and heightening anticipation of the rains to come.
The mood on the streets, even among the line of patients waiting outside the clinic, was one of yearning. Hopes had been dashed before, but after two unrelenting years of drought, cholera, and famine, even dreams had to be seized.
A woman in a tan hijab was next in line when the clinic’s director walked outside past the two security guards to do a preliminary evaluation. The director was kneeling, with a clipboard in her hand, when two white pickup trucks stopped out front.
Ten gunmen jumped out.
The director leapt to her feet and yelled for everyone to scatter, but the patients were sick and slow to move. One of the gunmen saw the director yelling and spotted the clipboard in her hands and identified her as an authority figure.
He raised his rifle.
But the clinic guards were unconstrained by cumbersome rules of engagement—or any rules of engagement, for that matter; it was Mogadishu after all, and ten men with rifles did not portend good news. The guards fired simultaneously into the cluster of gunmen. Neither man had any real training, but they did have automatic weapons, so the law of averages worked in their favor and they managed to hit a few of the attackers—including the man who’d been aiming at the director.
It bought her enough time to grab the woman in the tan hijab and push her inside the clinic, but it was the last of many selfless acts the director would perform in her lifetime. The gunmen counterattacked, and she was hit several times in her hip, back, and arm as she attempted to save the next person in line. She fell to the ground, just a few feet from the clinic that had saved so many but could not save her.
The gunmen continued firing into the crowd until everyone who’d been waiting had either escaped or been killed. The body count was already approaching twenty by the time the head gunman stepped over the director’s body and entered Badeed’s clinic.
It was Masaska.
Yaxaas’s orders has been explicit—the attack on the Darood garage had to be punished, and punished severely. Masaska had neglected to mention to his boss that the attack on the garage was likely retribution for the attack on the refugee camp in Afgooye, but it would not have mattered.
The woman in the tan hijab saw the man with the mutilated face enter the clinic and fled deeper into the building. She’d just made it through the small lobby when Masaska pulled the pin on a hand grenade and lobbed it inside. The explosion blew out the room’s windows, sending shards of glass hurtling outward through the steel bars that had once seemed to provide so much security.
The clinic was long and narrow, and Masaska and his men flooded through it. Most patients were barely able to move, and the attackers walked calmly through the building, firing blindly down hallways and finishing off the wounded with knives and machetes.
One of the invaders, who possessed a live fragmentation grenade and a poor understanding of chemistry, tossed it into a room filled with oxygen bottles. The ensuing explosion destroyed the concrete wall he was hiding behind—and the three rooms around it—killing him and another attacker and narrowly missing the woman in the tan hijab, who was staggering toward the clinic’s exit.
The Darood hit team reached the far end of the clinic and discovered that more Hawiye security guards had arrived. A second gun battle erupted on the street until Masaska grabbed the woman in the tan hijab around the throat and used her as a human shield until he and his remaining men were safely to their vehicles.
By the time the second pickup truck sped away, forty-eight Hawiye patients, workers, and innocent bystanders had been slaughtered.
Such was the endless cycle of violence among the warlords of Somalia.
SIXTY-THREE
SUNRISE WAS STILL a few hours away when twenty heavily armed men climbed into their vehicles.
Badeed hadn’t sat down, much less slept, since the attack on the clinic. He felt an unfamiliar and distinctly unpleasant emotion, somewhere between guilt at not having killed Masaska when he’d first wanted to and fury toward the animal who’d attacked a refugee camp and a clinic in the same week.
The warlord preferred an informal leadership style, but his vast business holdings, his immense wealth, and the constant and evolving friction with the other parties to the civil war necessitated a disciplined command structure, one with a cadre of senior staff running everything from opera
tions and finance to communications and intelligence.
Each branch was efficient and professional, but it was Badeed’s intelligence arm that lifted his organization above its rivals. Led by a fellow Hawiye clan elder, who was also the number three official at the Somali National Intelligence and Security Agency, the warlord’s intel shop had government-quality resources throughout the country.
And every one of them had been searching for Masaska.
The tip ultimately came from a paid informant inside the Darood organization. The target was in a warehouse across town.
* * *
—
“WE CAN HANDLE this,” said Badeed’s chief of operations. Badeed was strapping on an assault vest, and there was no reason for the big boss to risk his life on such a mission.
The warlord put a hand on the man’s shoulder and looked him in the eyes.
“Some things a man must do himself . . . for his soul.”
He climbed into the lead pickup truck and signaled the small convoy to move out. The operations chief had put a man with binoculars down the block from the warehouse twenty minutes after the tip came in, just before midnight.
Three of the pickup trucks stopped a hundred meters away. Badeed’s men exited their vehicles and advanced on foot, hoping to catch the enemy asleep.
Two of Badeed’s men went behind the warehouse. Most power lines in Mogadishu hung in low bunches across roads and sagged diagonally across streets. Sometimes fifty separate wires would be mounted on a single pole, and it took one of Badeed’s men ten minutes to isolate the line into the warehouse.
The other men surrounded the building with Kalashnikov rifles, Norinco machine guns, and a pair of rocket-propelled grenades while the fourth pickup crept forward silently, barely above idle speed, until it was thirty feet from the entrance. Two men ran chains from the truck’s frame and hooked them to the warehouse’s sliding doors.
The driver gunned the engine.
The six-thousand-pound pickup had already accelerated through twenty miles per hour by the time the chains went taut.
* * *
—
JAKE HAD DRIFTED in and out of consciousness many times since the torture had begun in earnest. It was his body’s way of conserving all of its available energy to save itself.
But this time when he opened his eyes, he saw nothing. His world was black. He had no idea where he was or what was happening . . . until he felt the pain.
And it all came back.
Nacay had returned and hooked Jake up to a truck battery with a pair of jumper cables. The warlord’s son had taken an almost deviant pleasure in watching Jake’s muscles and nerves seize up and spasm as the current coursed through his body. A few times, Jake thought his heart or his eyes might explode, but his body had somehow survived. Then had come the burns, and the stress positions that had nearly dislocated both of his shoulders.
A faint glow spilled in through a skylight in the building’s roof. A moment later, Jake heard muffled snores coming from a distant room and realized that he was still in the warehouse, still tied to the rack. The coarse ropes tied around his ankles, wrists, and throat were supporting most of his body weight.
He was still assessing his situation when the warehouse’s sliding doors were ripped from their tracks.
Fifteen feet high and fifteen feet wide, the two metal doors screeched as they buckled and tumbled into the parking lot. A dozen tactical lights swept across the warehouse like miniature searchlights.
A beam illuminated the Darood militiaman who’d been snoring on a cot twenty feet from Jake. He sat up when he heard the noise and saw the lights—and instinctively reached for his rifle, but a burst of gunfire changed his mind.
Into a bloody pulp.
Six more Darood who’d been sleeping elsewhere scrambled to the front of the warehouse but raised their hands in surrender when they saw the superior firepower arrayed against them.
Badeed’s men disarmed them and held them at gunpoint on the ground, their faces pressed against the dusty warehouse floor. There was shouting from outside, and two of the warlord’s men manhandled another Darood thug into the warehouse.
“We caught him out back, trying to escape.”
Badeed shined a flashlight in the prisoner’s face and nodded once.
A soldier kicked the prisoner in the back of the legs and forced him to kneel. Another soldier tied his hands.
“You are Masaska?” said the warlord, but it was a rhetorical question. The hole in his face left by the snake venom was unmistakable. “You destroyed my clinic?”
“I—”
Badeed pulled the top off his cane, revealing a nine-inch stiletto. He grabbed Masaska’s hair and plunged the blade into his chest, where it skewered the diaphragm that allowed him to breathe.
It wasn’t a fatal wound, but it was a painful one.
Excruciatingly painful.
Masaska tumbled to the floor, struggling for breath while surrounded by more air than he could breathe in a lifetime.
Badeed signaled his men with a flick of his chin.
It was time for the next phase of the plan.
The Hawiye goons rolled large barrels into the warehouse. Jake could smell the diesel fuel as they poured it across the warehouse floor. It puddled around the Darood prisoners who’d been tied up in the middle.
“Boss!” said one of Badeed’s men.
He’d found Jake, far in the back, tied to the rack.
The warlord approached and his henchman shined a flashlight in Jake’s face.
Badeed recognized him from their encounter in Kitadra.
“Trouble follows you like a shadow,” said the warlord.
“Yaxaas doesn’t like me very much.”
Badeed raised the stiletto and pressed the tip against Jake’s throat. The blade was still warm and wet from Masaska’s blood.
“And why is that?” said Badeed.
“I tried to kill him.”
The warlord jerked the blade up and back, slicing the rope around Jake’s neck. Badeed cut the ties from his ankles and wrists and two of the warlord’s men dragged Jake outside.
Once all the Hawiye were outside, Badeed nodded to one of his men. The man shouldered his weapon, lined up on one of the empty barrels of diesel fuel, and pulled the trigger.
The rocket-propelled grenade leapt from the launch tube at almost a thousand feet per second, and its 105mm thermobaric warhead exploded as soon as it hit the ground, dispersing oxygen-starved explosives into the air. They detonated a fraction of a second later, igniting the diesel fuel and triggering an explosive pressure wave that even the Hawiye, back at their vehicles one hundred meters away, felt violently in their chests.
Jake was sitting on the liftgate of one of the pickup trucks, dressed in secondhand clothes someone had given him and drinking a bottle of water, when Badeed limped over. He’d cleaned the stiletto and replaced it atop his cane.
“Thank you,” said Jake. The two men spoke for a minute.
Small explosions punctuated the night air as stores of ammunition cooked off inside the warehouse.
Badeed walked Jake to a Bajaj taxi that one of his men had hailed.
“You have heard the expression ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’?”
Jake nodded.
“Your diya is forgiven, and may Allah shower his blessings upon you.”
SIXTY-FOUR
JAKE REACHED THE safe house just before dawn, stumbling the last four blocks on his own because he didn’t trust the Bajaj driver.
He buzzed at the gate and Pickens came out. He’d seen Jake on the video feed on his phone.
“Dude . . .”
Jake was a mess: bruised, bloodied, and wearing the clothes Badeed’s men had stripped from a corpse in the warehouse—complete with bullet holes and bl
oodstains.
“How are Clap and the team?”
Pickens shook his head. The Ground Branch team was out of the fight. Two were dead, and another had been airlifted to a U.S. military hospital in Ramstein, Germany.
“Ramstein might not be a bad option for you,” said Pickens.
“I’m going to take an ice bath. I’ll be fine.”
Jake explained how he’d been captured by Yaxaas and liberated by Badeed.
“Badeed forgave the diya.”
“You know that’s not a gift,” said Pickens. “You owe him now. It might be time to get out of Somalia before the two warlords who run the place both decide to kill you.”
“I’ll figure it out.”
Pickens shrugged. “OK, but you’d better call Graves. He’s been calling every few hours for an update. He sounds worried.”
“I’m sure he is worried,” said Jake, “but not about me.”
Jake swallowed four acetaminophen tablets and four ibuprofen pills while Pickens ran the water and dumped all of their ice in the tub.
Jake lowered himself into the bath. The water turned brown as the dried blood washed from his body. The cold and the drugs soon numbed the pain and he closed his eyes.
Terrible thoughts raced through his mind: Clap and his men being ambushed, the Bakaara Market, Masaska, the torture Jake had endured inside the warehouse and then the horror that had taken place when it was set ablaze—but more than all of that, more than anything, the thought of a bioweapon in the hands of men like the warlords convinced Jake that they had to be stopped.
He tried to clear his head. Too many random thoughts were jamming him up, preventing him from thinking straight. He focused on his breathing, inhaling as deeply as his bruised ribs would allow, and relaxing all of his muscles as he exhaled. Inhale, exhale, relax. After thirty or so repetitions, he drifted off to sleep.
Black Flag Page 21
