The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

  My mother was seventy-two at the time, spry, with glasses and a sweet, beaming smile, and her retirement was less than relaxing, as far as I could tell from Berlin. She kept up a bruising schedule of tennis and golf. Her first name, Marlis, was a German contraction of “Maria Elisabeth,” and her last name, Saunders, had changed with her second marriage. Her husband, Lou, had retired from an aerospace firm called TRW (later absorbed by Northrop Grumman). They lived in a town house in a suburban grid built in the fifties and sixties to shelter TRW engineers and middle managers. The sprawling, sun-beaten beach cities of Los Angeles had grown rich since the seventies; but my mother’s condominium was stuck in time.

  She had been sitting and reading a newspaper at home when five people in suits climbed out of a nondescript American sedan by the curb. The strangers roused her curiosity. It was about noon on a winter Saturday, and on Saturdays, in Redondo Beach, people didn’t walk around in suits.

  Family friends were due at the door any minute. She was looking forward to lunch at a Mexican restaurant. Through a window she saw the five suits clustered on the porch, and she opened up. One of them flashed a badge.

  “Mrs. Saunders?”

  “Yes?”

  “When I saw their badges,” she said later, “my heart just dropped. It was the worst day of my life.”

  The FBI investigates any major crime against an American, at home or overseas. The German Bundeskriminalamt, or BKA, also investigates crimes against Germans. So agents from the BKA appeared at my uncle’s door in Cologne. More BKA agents went to the Spiegel office in Berlin. FBI agents also visited the Pulitzer Center, in Washington, D.C., and in every case they gave instructions on how to react. “Basically they told us how to keep calm in case a pirate put you on the phone and threatened to cut your fingers off,” said Charles Hawley, a colleague and friend at Spiegel Online.

  Mom’s town house became a hive of federal activity. The agents wanted to know about my trip, about Ashwin and Gerlach, about my acquaintances and friends. They wanted to tap the landline. They told Mom what to say in case a pirate called. They tried to ease her mind by saying my kidnappers just wanted cash, not a dead hostage. Mom spent the afternoon in a blurred state of shock. “Their BlackBerrys were going like crazy,” she remembered. “I had no idea so many federal agents lived around here.”

  Meanwhile, her friends arrived for lunch. A crowd of Germans and Americans from my parents’ distant past descended on the condominium from various parts of L.A. “Denis and Sylvia and Hilde arrived, and they were all shocked,” my mother said. “They didn’t even come in the house.”

  Hilde was a friend of the family; Denis Lyon was the bearded and gravel-voiced man who’d been on my mind in Idaan. It surprised his wife, Sylvia, to see Mom at the door with a tear-strained face. “Your mother came to the door and told us what happened,” she said. “Then two FBI agents came to the door and said, ‘We’d prefer if you didn’t come in right now.’

  “And Denis said, ‘We better go outside.’”

  I hadn’t seen Denis or Sylvia, or any of our old friends, in years. They belonged to my earliest memories. Nevertheless, it strikes me as a weird coincidence that Denis had a peripheral presence around my kidnapping in both parts of the world, not just on my mind in Somalia but in front of my mother’s door. “My dad was extremely concerned about you and devoured every piece of information he could find,” said his daughter, Sonja, much later. “We talked about you often, and one of the many times when I asked him what could be done to get you out, he simply said, ‘I don’t have an answer for that, kid. Michael is stuck between a rock and a hard place.’”

  IV

  The next morning, at the filthy house, I noticed a difference in my inventory of things. Someone had delivered a case of bottled water and a tub of dry oatmeal. But a bottle of mango juice was missing. While I sat up on my mattress and thought about how to eat the oatmeal, a furtive pirate squinted into my room.

  “Wuuriyaa!” he said. “Mango!”

  “Hmm?”

  “Give me mango.”

  “Why?”

  “Mango, mango.”

  One of the drinks was an oversweet mango soda, which looked unpleasant, so I handed it over. The man disappeared without a word. I felt affronted: Why would a pirate bum a drink? The pirates gave me drinks. I had no source for food or drink besides pirates.

  Another hostage came out of the next-door room and went to the toilet. I caught him speaking a broken, maritime-sounding English. He still had twin furzes of hair over his ears; the guards found him comical and called him “Lorry.” He asked for a haircut, and when I caught a glimpse of him again, he had short-clipped hair and looked almost dapper.

  The maritime sound of his English made me think he was a merchant sailor, or else raised on some island with a British colonial past, or both. He ducked into his room without glancing at me. I sat on my mattress and started to crave both coffee and oatmeal. But when I bothered a pirate for boiled water, he didn’t seem to understand.

  “Caffè!” he said with enthusiasm and pointed at my thermos.

  I shook my head. The thermos was full of tea.

  Evidently I was a stupid hostage. The guard stalked over to open a packet of instant coffee and dump the black dust into my plastic strainer. He motioned for me to hold it over my cup, then poured hot tea through. The resulting liquid was muddy, cloying, molasses-like, but heavily caffeinated.

  “That is disgusting,” I declared.

  “Caffè!” insisted the Somali.

  “It is not.”

  I sat there with my weird beverage and reflected on the continuing problem of oatmeal. I didn’t want it cooked with water from the well, but if I could coax a guard to boil some bottled water, we might get somewhere.

  Flashlight Man strolled into my room and opened the rusted shutters on the window Boodiin had ordered me not to open. I cringed and waited for gunfire. Instead, a lively conversation developed between the pirate and the guard outside.

  The window itself had no glass, I noticed, but a fixed, florid-looking metal screen. Inconvenient for escapes.

  When the conversation ended, Flashlight Man left the shutters open, as if he’d never heard of Boodiin’s order to keep them closed, and on his way out the door he stooped to pick up my canister of oatmeal.

  “Hey!” I said, and my raised voice upset the Somalis.

  “What is the problem?” one of them said.

  Sudden outrage stiffened the hairs on my neck. “That guy stole my oatmeal.”

  The Somali smiled sympathetically, as if I had again failed to understand.

  “Oatmeal should be in the kitchen,” he said. “Is better that way.”

  “Why?”

  No one could answer my question. I thought the paradox was clear. The pirates gave me the fucking oatmeal. Why would one of them steal it? The calamity of my abduction on a remote edge of the world expressed itself in minor irritations, and A pirate stole my oatmeal became an obsessive chant in my head.

  A pirate stole my oatmeal. A pirate stole my oatmeal.

  That evening, Ahmed Dirie came into the room with a plastic-wrapped mosquito tent, which the boss must have ordered, to keep me malaria-free. The net baffled Ahmed Dirie. I had the dubious pleasure of watching him and one other Somali pull out the flexible sectioned tent posts, assemble them, try to stuff the lances through the loops in the net, and fail. Ahmed Dirie and the other guards were too looped on khat by this point in the day, or just too thick, to perform such a delicate operation. They left the net in a pile. One of the rods had broken, and eventually someone cleared it away.

  You have made a mistake, Boodiin had said. Mistakes are human.

  A pirate stole my oatmeal.

  I spent three or four days in this anxious and stricken and irritated state before Boodiin escorted a new man in, hours after sundown—an unarmed older Somali with a small, peppery beard and a patient, intelligent manner.

  “He is a doctor,” Boodiin said.<
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  By the dismal light of a fluorescent lantern, I unwrapped my improvised sling. My wrist had swollen. I could still feel shifting, clacking scraps of bone. The doctor’s eyes moved from Boodiin to me to Ahmed Dirie, who stood in the door. He was a different sort of person from the pirates—a man with a conscience, to judge from his harrowed face—and he seemed uncertain, if not afraid.

  “It is not broken,” he said after a brief examination. “It is only cracked, and it will heal in three weeks.”

  From a bag of utensils he produced a splint made of bamboo strips and faded purple cloth. He sewed it onto my wrist with a needle, biting the thread to cut it free. I appreciated the handiwork, though it seemed like a lot of painstaking effort for a treatment that would help so little. I was in no position to argue, but my wrist was broken.

  I fell asleep with the splinted wrist across my chest. I woke up again in the dark to the clang of the compound door. A car pulled in and rumbled. Much later I would get used to a pattern of switching houses at night, but I understood without being told that an engine idling in darkness was a bad omen. My heart began to pound. Soon the men hustled me into the crowded Land Cruiser, where only one other hostage—“Lorry”—sat watching the young pirates with a grandfatherly look of disgust. Ahmed Dirie sat in the passenger seat and grinned. Other pirates squeezed in around us with their weapons, acting panicky, and before the sun rose, we drove far into the bush, without any clear destination.

  When the sun was high, Ahmed Dirie pointed at the sky and spoke to me in rapid Somali. They were upset about a plane, or something in the air.

  “Are you a Marine general?” Ahmed Dirie’s driver suddenly demanded.

  “What? No.”

  “Colonel?”

  “No.”

  Whatever had happened, they held me accountable. They thought I was U.S. military. Full of panicked emotion they told me something urgent in Somali, sprinkled with incomprehensible English.

  “Helicopters!” Ahmed Dirie said. “American!”

  All I understood was that a dozen people had died in some distant place.

  “Oh boy,” I said. “Boom-boom? Fighting?”

  “Yes!”

  U.S. forces rarely operated inside Somalia. Ever since the Battle of Mogadishu, the military had kept ground missions here to a minimum. I shrugged and figured the pirates were just repeating a crazy rumor. The excitement subsided, and we drove at random across the desert bush for the rest of the morning, sometimes, for some reason, in circles.

  V

  Four days after my capture a posse of American helicopters rescued the two kidnapped aid workers, Jessica Buchanan and Poul Thisted, from a bush camp south of Galkayo. They were sleeping in the open, surrounded by Somali foot soldiers. A team of Navy SEALs parachuted some distance from the camp and marched up quietly with rifles. They shot nine sleeping guards and hustled Buchanan and Thisted away to a helicopter.

  That evening, my mother watched a State of the Union address on TV. Cameras showed President Obama’s entourage entering the House chamber. “Obama marched in,” said Mom, “and as usual he shook everybody’s hand. He came to Leon Panetta,” who was secretary of defense. “The camera was focused on them, and usually they don’t record any of the conversations, but when he came to Leon Panetta, he stopped and said, ‘Good job tonight.’ He kept shaking his hand and said, ‘Really good job tonight.’ Nobody knew what that was about. But the next morning, it came out that Buchanan was rescued.” The leap of hope my mother felt at the news wilted into disappointment that I wasn’t among the rescued hostages. Her circle of golf and tennis friends—athletic Republican ladies, dry-humored retirees—wondered out loud whether the SEALs would do it again. “My friends all called,” Mom said, “and they told me, ‘If anything happens to Michael, it’s going to be Obama’s fault!’”

  The rescue came early in the morning on January 25, 2012. FBI agents assigned to my case discussed it with Mom, but only in general terms. “They never said it, but I think rescuing you was always in their sights,” she said. “Of course, it had to go through the White House. No one could orchestrate a rescue without Obama’s okay.”

  Thisted was Danish; Buchanan was American. They’d both worked in the calm northern province of Somaliland for the Danish Demining Group, a European nonprofit dedicated to pulling up live mines. I’d learned little else before I went to Somalia—why they went to Galmudug, exactly who had captured them—and as a hostage I heard nothing about their rescue right away. All I knew in Somalia was that America’s military presence on the Horn of Africa had less to do with pirates than with tracking al-Shabaab. The Buchanan rescue was therefore a promising sign. It showed that Obama would send a team to Somalia for a humble pirate hostage, even with European powers involved. It showed leadership. “The United States will not tolerate the abduction of our people,” Obama said after his State of the Union address. “We will spare no effort to secure the safety of our citizens, and to bring their captors to justice.”

  VI

  My fellow hostage had small eyes and a bald pate over his trimmed hedge of gray hair. His skin was coffee brown, rather than black, and I still couldn’t place his nationality, although I learned his full name, Rolly Tambara. Every time I asked where he came from, he lifted a knotty, twisted finger to his lips. I gathered that he and his now-missing friend were seafarers, but the vessel he named, the Aride, left me clueless.

  Around sundown that evening, we found an empty spot on the savanna to meet a second car, which delivered piles of khat and plastic bags full of cooked pasta. The pirates laid a mat in the dust beside our Land Cruiser. We were supposed to relax. But my wrist hurt, and I had no idea where we were headed. All I wanted to do was get there. I still lived in a world of logic and purpose and resolve, and I hadn’t figured out how much pointlessness a hostage has to put up with.

  The hard and dusty savanna stretched in every direction—we saw nothing taller than white thornbushes and windswept acacias—but the sun went down in magnificent silence, infesting the whole lunar landscape with a soft red glow.

  “Where’s your friend?” I mumbled to Rolly.

  He shrugged. “I not know. They leave him behind.”

  “In the house?”

  “Yah.”

  Now his accent sounded French. I asked another question, but Rolly raised his finger. Wrong time to talk.

  After sunset, we piled into the Land Cruiser again and set off into wooded highlands. The car pounded and rocked on the trail—for several hours—and we had to listen to Somali folk music blaring on the stereo. It had a stark, twanging, mournful sound I might have enjoyed in different circumstances. For now it was the sound of oppression.

  In the dark wooded hills, we sometimes came to a steel bar blocking the road, a gate of some kind, so the driver had to lean on the horn until a group of graceful women in robes emerged to open the gate and sweep away dust in front of us with hand brooms. It felt dreamlike and strange, since women were already so rare; this world of khat-chewing pirates was almost entirely male.

  At last we came to a ridge road overlooking a valley. Gunfire flashed and boomed in the distance. We slowed until a car overtook us, and soon Ali Duulaay leaned in to glare through a window with his flashlight and give terse orders in Somali. Rolly and I had to get out and walk through a nearby thicket of thornbushes. “Where we going?” demanded Rolly, because no one seemed to have the slightest idea. Ahmed Dirie just muttered, “Go, go, go, go,” and later I would refer to these bushes as “the Garden of Pointless Torture.”

  At the exit to the Garden, our car waited for us. We climbed in, bleeding slightly. Duulaay appeared with two gunmen to deal some more abuse. He ordered Ahmed Dirie to step out, and between the vehicles he hollered and beat Ahmed Dirie with a stick. His henchmen blasted two deafening, flashing rounds into the air, and we saw Ahmed Dirie’s form buckle between the cars. He panted in pain while Duulaay ordered us to step outside. He examined our faces using the flashlight. He must not
have liked the look on mine, because with no explanation he clubbed the side of my head with his fist and my eyes bloomed with floating light.

  “Motherfucker,” I hissed.

  Duulaay, satisfied, climbed into our car with his men and drove off.

  The pirates forced us to march down a bluff along a cliffside trail. Pale moonlight revealed some kind of wooded valley, but we stopped at a shallow cave in the cliff wall, where two men dropped our foam mattresses. My ear still rang from the blow, and I must have shivered from the damp, or from raw nerves, because a skinny, gentle Somali said, “Michael. No sleep?”

  “No blanket,” I explained.

  He happened to be wearing a leather bomber jacket. He slipped out of it in the dark and let me sleep in it. I don’t know how I lost consciousness that night, after such a long and evil day; but I didn’t open my eyes again until a warm light had started to creep across the valley.

  VII

  Rolly, flat on his back, was awake. When I sat up he said, “What’s the matter.”

  “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “Piss?” he said kindly. “Or shit?”

  “Piss.”

  “Is called ‘kadi.’” He addressed the guards. “Hey!” He pointed at me. “Kadi, kadi.”

  One of the guards led me up a narrow trail to a pile of trash, gestured at it, and wandered a little farther to post himself with his Kalashnikov and gaze across the valley. We stood on a crumbling bluff that overlooked a gorge in the dry savanna, filled with dusty trees.

  Two pirates carried our mattresses down the hill and we followed, picking our way through green bushes and white thorn branches. We settled under a bower of trees at the bottom of the valley, and the pirates made a production of filling in gaps around us with white thorn brambles. “Qorrax!” they said, and pointed at the sun, as if they wanted us to be comfortable and cool. But no sun streamed in from that direction. It crossed my mind that the obsession with shade—as well as all the hysterical driving around—owed itself to a fear of drones.