The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

I squinted around the bluff. Half a dozen Somalis paced here and there with rifles. The angle of the Land Cruiser indicated the direction of the road. But escape was impossible for now.

  I sighed and dialed the number.

  Omar took the phone, and when somebody answered, he said, “Hold on please for the hostage.” I said, “Hello?” and heard my mother ask, in a sane and sensible voice, for the name of my childhood cat.

  Someone had prepared her for the call. I repeated what Omar had said about the president. “The men here say I’ll be shot if there’s a rescue attempt. They mentioned something about a rescue the other day?”

  “Oh, yes, the rescue!” she said, and from her tone I thought something had gone right. There must have been headlines, TV reports. But I decided not to upset the pirates by asking for details.

  “Mom, they want twenty million dollars.”

  She seemed short of breath. “Where are we going to get twenty million dollars?”

  Good question. I had no kidnapping insurance. My application for coverage had been rejected in the weeks before we left. Independent journalists were often turned down; but now I was boiling in hell for my decision not to call off the entire trip.

  I delivered a veiled message to Suzy, my ex-girlfriend in Berlin and an author. “Tell her, ‘Three books to Judith.’”

  “Which books?” Mom said.

  “Suzy will understand.”

  I wanted Suzy to send two manuscripts and a book proposal to her agent in London. Sell the books, I thought—let me help raise the money. Of course, raising millions of dollars with a book, even three books, was a joke. But the prospect of tangling up my family with these nasty criminals made my stomach swim.

  “I’m also supposed to tell you that I won’t get any food if you don’t send money now,” I said. “They’ll stop my water and food in twenty-four hours.”

  The apparent high stakes of this call summoned so much adrenaline that knowing what to say was impossible. She had handwritten notes beside the bed, a list of things to ask; but notes were flimsy preparation for a conversation with pirates. “Whenever a phone call came in like that, my brain just went in circles,” she said later. To me, her questions sounded cool minded and calm—the FBI had coached her well—but her thinking blurred on the phone, and so did mine. Later she couldn’t even remember the pirates’ promise to let me starve. “I was probably in shock,” she said.

  After the call, I clambered down the slope again with Ali’s Brother. The silence on the camp, in the slanting late-afternoon light, felt eerie. Rolly had nothing to eat. He lay on his mattress and sipped bottled water.

  “How much they want for you?” he asked.

  “Twenty million.”

  “Yah, me too.”

  I couldn’t believe that. “Really?”

  “Yah! Twenty million! For me and Marc.”

  “Ten million each. Jesus.”

  “Your family can pay?” he said.

  “Not even close, Rolly.”

  “Is too much,” he agreed, with a grave expression. “You know how much is twenty million in my country?”

  “I can take a guess,” I said.

  He creased his forehead while he made the calculations. “Is a lot of money. You can buy house, you can buy car . . .”

  I chuckled. “A pretty nice car.”

  We wondered if the pirates would feed us. We felt taut with hunger. I thought about my phone call, about the shock of mortality in front of Duulaay’s weapon and the ranting of Omar. We have information that you are a spy. Was that what Boodiin had meant by “mistake,” back in town? Did he consider me a spy? Had a rumor burned through the savanna that I worked for NATO, or Atalanta, and could this misunderstanding be corrected? Or was I giving the laws of this underworld too much credit for logic?

  In the distance we heard the sound of a tool, of metal and earth, like a spade slicing the ground. A breeze stirred the branches, and the horselike vultures whinnied somewhere on the slope.

  Rolly rubbed his face with one hand.

  “Ah, Michael,” he mumbled. “Why you come to this bad place?”

  “I can’t remember,” I said.

  Part 3

  Living in Civilization Keeps Us Civilized

  I

  Two nights after the phone call I drifted half-awake in the moonlight because the Somalis were shuffling and gathering up clothes and guns. I tried to sleep again, but Ali’s Brother ordered us up. “Go, go, go, go. Come on.”

  I stood and settled my wrist in the sling. Pirates picked up our mattresses and wandered down the valley. “Where are we going?” I said, and when I missed my cue to walk, Ali’s Brother hit me in the face.

  “What the fuck was that for?”

  The Somalis said, “Shhhhh,” and someone shoved me. “Go, go, go.”

  We pushed through switch-like tree branches and thornbushes until somebody discovered a high shelf of dirt overhung by low trees. One pirate climbed up a face of rock and soil and ordered us to follow.

  “You want me to climb that?” I said.

  “Haa.” Yes.

  “My wrist is broken.”

  “Go, go, go, go.”

  The wall stood eight or ten feet high. We clambered up on roots and rocks to a natural, hollowed-out thicket. Our mattresses were handed up, and someone folded them into this hollow and spread them on the ground.

  “Okay, Michael?” one of the pirates said, pointing into our new home through the thorns.

  “No.”

  The pirates bedded down outside the thicket. It was like a slumber party. For a while we heard no other noise besides a strange, trilling chorus of nighttime creatures in the valley, a million unseen insects and birds offering thin rills of song to the desert sky.

  I couldn’t sleep. My face still stung from the blow, and soon we had to listen to a handful of our captors whispering “Allahu akbar” and genuflecting in their cotton sarongs. Until then I had never seen a pirate pray. I had believed the conventional wisdom that pirates were un-Islamic, irreligious, so listening to the prayer boiled my blood.

  Rationally, of course, I knew that wondering how a pirate could justify himself to God was as ridiculous as asking a Mafia hit man why he went to church. But imagining these contradictions in a stranger is different from experiencing them as a captive. The idea that a pirate could pretend to holiness, would even pray at the site of such a naked crime, opened a ferocious channel of rage.

  I remembered what Gerlach had said in the car when we drove past the mosque in Hobyo: “Pirates are not real Muslims.” I also remembered my visit to Djibouti in 2009, when I spent four days on the frigate Gediz, where an officer had said the same thing. The Gediz was a Turkish warship in the NATO fleet, charged with capturing stray pirates in the Gulf of Aden, and during our brief September voyage, the high-wind summer monsoon had just ended, so “pirate season” was about to start. “But it’s Ramadan now,” our minder, Yaşar, had said. “It might be quieter for this reason.”

  Yaşar had moody eyes and an appealingly awkward, earnest manner. Another journalist on board asked if Ramadan would be a motivation for pirates. “I’ve heard they like to go out during Ramadan,” he said, “because if they die, the rewards for jihad are double.”

  Yaşar shook his head. Pirates were infidels, in his opinion as an observant Muslim: “They are thieves.” He gave us his line of argument by quoting a story from the hadith, a body of traditional stories about Mohammed. “When he was coming from a war, Mohammed told his followers, ‘We have just come from the lesser jihad. Now it is time for the greater jihad.’ That means the inner struggle—the struggle against yourself, your feelings,” said Yaşar. Theft was a selfish temptation for every true Muslim to resist. “So I don’t think the pirates can do this for jihad. If they say they do, they have misused the word.”

  I liked Yaşar immensely, and most Muslims I knew held the same commonsense ideas. What he’d said about Ramadan, though, implied that pirates observed it. I had this ep
iphany rather late, lying in the dark next to Rolly. I’d been so quick to agree with Yaşar on the Gediz that I had missed the more important idea. Pirates—who rode diesel-powered skiffs to hijack massive cargo vessels, who didn’t mind notoriety as thieves in the international press—fasted for Ramadan.

  Understanding this required some background. Yaşar couldn’t represent Islam as a whole, because nobody could; the religion has never had a pope.* By saying pirates weren’t religious, Yaşar and Gerlach had both engaged in takfir, the rejection of one Muslim by another.

  Like most Somalis, though, my guards were Sufi. They were also Sunni as opposed to Shiite.* (Sufism coexists with either denomination.) Many orthodox Muslims rejected the old, sometimes quirky, highly mutable traditions of Sufism, but Sufism had followers around the world, even in places—like Somalia—where people often didn’t bother with the word. In many regions Islam had expanded precisely because Sufis could tolerate the absorption of odd, provincial, non-Islamic beliefs. Ryszard Kapuscinski’s neat distinction between two kinds of Islam would have categorized average Somalis as “people of the road and of the bazaar” and lined up Sufism with an Islam of sea travelers and businessmen. Ordinary Somalis listened to music on their phones, smoked cigarettes, and chewed khat. They venerated their ancestors. They had integrated their ancient clan structures into a Sufi cult of genealogies and saints.

  For Sunni fundamentalists, though, music and cigarettes were religious infractions, and sainthood and ancestor veneration were deep heresies. A rift between Sufism and fundamentalism partly explained Somalia’s ever-shifting civil war. The Wahhabi jihadists in al-Shabaab had declared regular Somalis, like my pirates, impure, and some of our guards would later boast about their battles with Shabaab elsewhere in Galmudug. As a foreign journalist in another setting, I would have wanted Sufis like these gunmen on my side.

  But whenever I thought about “pirates,” part of my brain wiped the religious dimension away. Until this rage-filled moment in the bush I had thought of Somali pirates as lapsed Sufis by definition, indifferent and godless, not the sort of men who would pray in the wilderness at night.

  Of course I knew about Sufi “whirling dervishes” in Turkey, I knew about the Sufism of hippies—I had even read Robert Graves’s mysterious assertion that Sufism was older than Islam itself. He’d called Sufism “an ancient spiritual freemasonry whose origins have never been traced or dated. . . . If [some Sufis] call Islam the ‘shell’ of Sufism, this is because they believe Sufism to be the secret teaching within all religions.” It all seemed wonderfully strange and enlightened. The Sufi poet Rumi, in his famous Masnavi epic, wrote that “thousands of hidden kings” were exalted by the love of God, and by “kings” he meant the unknown dead as well as King David, Jesus, and Mohammed:

  I swear by those made of pure light from Him,

  Such men are fish which in His ocean swim.*

  But Rumi’s graceful verse was light-years from our camp in that dry and desolate valley, and it would be months before I understood what was going on.

  II

  In the morning the camp was silent, but I had to pee. We’d slept under a thick, sideways-growing tree with sharp thorns and loose, fibrous bark. A sandstone boulder leaned over our feet. Stiffly, carefully, I arranged my wrist in the sling and crawled through a gap in the thicket of thorns. Outside our rustic prison I saw a half-dozen Somalis cocooned in their own sarongs, lying on dirty mats.

  They used the word ma’awiis for “sarong,” and now I saw that the thin skirts could serve as sleeping bags in the bush as well as traditional dress. They were just long tubes of cloth, imported, usually, from Indonesia. They kept off the damp.

  One cocoon stirred. A thin effeminate Somali named Abdul lifted his head.

  “Kadi,” I announced.

  He waved his hand in the direction we had come, down the wall of rock and dirt. We were stuffed in a corner of the wooded valley, which wasn’t a single long cleft in the savanna but a system of overgrown crevasses that were probably dry riverbeds, or wadis. Our crevasse had a sloping gravel bottom and some tall outcroppings of sandstone. The whole valley, I thought, might flood in a heavy rain.

  I found a private place to pee behind an outcropping, beyond Abdul’s line of vision, which must have annoyed him. I squinted along the wadi and saw our path from the previous night. A thick fallen log lay across the trail. If I wanted to, I thought, I could run out in that direction—I did have shoes on—but where to? The guards might hear my footsteps, or catch sight of me clambering over the log. They might also be good trackers. A young Somali in Galkayo had told me a story of a girl who ran into the bush to escape her family before they could subject her to the ritual of womanhood referred to as “female circumcision,” which is not circumcision but the bloody removal of the clitoris using broken glass or a razor blade. “Her people were nomads,” the Somali had said with a shrug. “They can track animals for days. Of course they found her.”

  I returned to camp. Angelo crawled into our thicket and sat politely on the ground with his rifle. He guarded us in silence for a while, until Rolly thought to ask, “Angelo, why we move last night?”

  Angelo pointed at the sky, mimicked the flight of an aircraft with his hand, and used an LED on his cigarette lighter to flash the ground.

  “Aeroplane?” I said. “Or helicopter?”

  Angelo nodded vaguely.

  “Helicopter here? Or out there?” I said, and waved into the uncertain distance.

  He imitated the wave.

  “Hmm,” I said.

  Angelo sat with his limbs folded like a wooden marionette’s, half shading his eyes with one hand, out of shyness or contrition. I couldn’t tell if he meant that someone had attempted a rescue or that surveillance planes had buzzed the camp. But I felt a charge of sudden, irrational hope.

  Our first few days in this camp were quiet, though the pirates claimed we were surrounded by al-Shabaab. When a car arrived with provisions, Ahmed Dirie came down the slope looking sweaty and excited from a difficult drive. He chattered, and somebody translated. Al-Shabaab had stopped the car at a roadblock, he said. The gunmen had detained Ahmed Dirie and his driver, tied their hands behind their backs, and shot the driver—a man we’d met, called Muse—in the head. For some reason they hadn’t shot Ahmed Dirie.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Al-Shabaab!”

  There was no other explanation. At first I felt queasy about the death of someone I knew. Then I wondered if the story was meant to frighten us.

  Abdinasser the Sahib carried down a load of cooked pasta in plastic shopping bags, shouted, “SAHIB!” and plopped one bag in front of us on the dirt. “Baasto!” he added.* The spaghetti was mixed with onion and boiled goat, somehow still warm. Rolly and I had forks, but no bowls. We had to take bites, one at a time, straight from the dusty bag.

  Abdinasser also brought us a much-needed nail clipper. After lunch I tried it out, and the first thing I noticed about this item was the dullness of the blades. They chewed, more than clipped. I sat on a boulder near the edge of our dirt platform, aiming the fragments of nail into a trench of bushes and rocks. This process took a while. My position left me exposed to the sky.

  Ali’s Brother stood outside our thicket and said, “Michael.”

  I decided to ignore him.

  “Michael,” he said again, and I started to feel annoyed. Did he really want me to move? Why couldn’t I sit on a rock?

  I went on chewing at my nails and noticed an odd faint sound, an uneven buzz in the sky. Ali’s Brother crawled into our hollow. He gazed with dead eyes and gave me a direct order in Somali. I knew what he wanted; but the mechanical noise was distant enough to ignore.

  He snapped a twig from the overhead tree and started to whip my arm, the way a nomad might whip cattle.

  “No, don’t hit me,” I said in a loud voice. He kept at it, so I shouted, “Don’t fucking hit me! What is this man doing?” and the other Somalis scolded him through the th
icket. He shoved me toward the mattress and I yelled another protest. By now the overhead noise was undeniable, and my heart beat with excitement.

  “Shhh!” said the pirates.

  The plane seemed to move in long, lowering circles over the valley. I listened to the propellers and imagined a fat long-distance Orion,* something like the plane that had filmed the Taipan pirates from seven miles off. We’d camped in this valley for almost a week without hearing a passenger plane, so a commercial flight path was out of the question.

  I said something out loud to Rolly, but the Somalis hissed, and Rolly held up a knotty finger. “Not make them angry, Michael.” The idea that someone knew enough about our location to send an Orion gave me a thrill of terror and hope. Angelo’s gossip about a plane, like the talk of a rescue during my phone call, was enough to raise the proposition that another raid might target us.

  The corkscrew traced by the plane seemed to rise again. We couldn’t tell if it had spotted our camp. It never flew straight overhead. A real spy mission could have watched us from several miles off, well out of sight, which meant that if we could hear the plane, someone wanted us to hear the plane, unless it had just wandered into range by accident, like a lumbering bear.

  At last the sound grew faint again and vanished. Our guards sat around in unmistakable terror.

  “They scared, eh?” said Rolly. “They think that plane come for you.”

  I smiled for the first time in several days.

  “I think maybe it did.”

  III

  While Rolly and I tried to sleep that night, we heard a passionate argument among the guards about a “helikopter” and a “telefon,” and I started to wonder if the hostage rescue Mom had mentioned bore some relation to my capture. The pirates had stolen my smartphone, among other things in my backpack. Ashwin would have provided the number to both Washington and Berlin. The raid had targeted the other hostages, obviously—I couldn’t imagine SEALs moving in on a camp that wasn’t well known to American surveillance—but suppose they had some reason to think I was there, too? Suppose my phone had found its way to that camp? Suppose a pirate had turned it on?