The Desert and the Sea

by Michael Scott Moore

“You have my German passport,” I said. “Maybe the German government can help.”

  I didn’t think it could, but I was surrounded by armed men and had to say something. Garfanji hollered my answer to the others. They shook their weapons in approval. Garfanji suggested a video. The whole episode, from start to finish, was pirate theater—Garfanji’s Theater of Cruelty in the woods—and while the teenage cameramen adjusted their tripod, a few pirates stepped behind me, quietly, holding heavy weapons. I didn’t notice them at first.* Other pirates insisted I wear a blanket over my head, to disguise me from aerial surveillance.

  “This blanket?”

  “Haa, yes.”

  It was the pink flowered blanket I carried everywhere. I also wore a pink tank top and bright-green soccer silks. I hadn’t shaved in weeks. I was grimly aware that in the video I would look not just wretched but ridiculous. I draped the blanket over my head, and soon Garfanji played the inquiring journalist, shouting from behind the camera.

  “What are you requesting from the government?” he said.

  “I have to request, from the American or the German government, the full ransom,” I answered, as rehearsed.

  “Which government, especially, will pay?”

  “The German government?”

  “And how do you want it to pay?”

  “They need to give an answer within three days,” I said.

  “Is there any problem if they do not pay?”

  “Yes. If there’s no answer . . . the kidnappers here will sell me to al-Shabaab.”

  Afterward, I sat on the ground and watched Garfanji mount a rise of alluvial soil to address the men. He’d pretended to mediate between the hostages and this wild gang of bosses; now he rose to his true role as their chief. He swung the bamboo cane and pontificated. He reminded me of Jack from Lord of the Flies—“tyrant” was too big a word. He was a play-tyrant, a sadistic bully removed from any government or power to contradict his nasty will, and he introduced me to the real meaning of anarchy, where justice and reason, the conceits of civilization, just evaporated like a fog. I watched Garfanji rave. I strained to understand his speech, and in the afternoon light streaming through the trees I noticed for the first time how this pirate lord—this high-voiced, overweight child—had flecks of gray in his hair.

  The young cameramen packed their equipment. After Garfanji’s speech, they paused in front of me to apologize. One had small wire-frame glasses; he looked idealistic and spry and spoke decent English.

  “We can’t do anything here,” he said. “We are only journalists. We will put these videos on the internet.”

  “What for?” I said.

  “We will tell people about your plight.”

  “This wasn’t journalism,” I said, with a gesture at Rolly. “It was humiliation.”

  The young Somali adjusted his glasses and said, “Humanitarian, yes.”

  I squinted at him. There was no way either boy could have reached this corner of the bush without a clan connection to the pirates. I didn’t believe their story. Humanitarian was also a special word in places like Somalia; it stood for the U.N. and the Red Cross, for Médecins Sans Frontières, for all the organizations that provided a link to the greater, more merciful world.

  “That’s not what I said,” I told him.

  XIV

  The pirates loaded Rolly into a car and led me up a dusty incline, away from the trees. Garfanji said it was time for a phone call. He tapped my chest with his bamboo cane and swore that if my family didn’t send twenty million dollars in three days, I would be sold like chattel to the jihadist beasts. Other bosses, including Duulaay and Ahmed Dirie, sat in the dust around a big thornbush, aiming their rifles at my head.

  “Mohamed, I’m cooperating,” I said. “Why are you acting like this?”

  That tripped him up, too—he had no response when I acted reasonable. He scrolled through the list of contacts on his phone and found my mother’s number, pressed “call,” and handed it to me. Her contact name on the screen was “Habar Galo.” Mother of the Infidel.

  “Hello?” said the infidel’s mother.

  “Mom,” I said, “the men here are threatening to sell me to al-Shabaab within three days if they don’t get their money.”

  “Okay,” she said, playing it quite cool.

  Garfanji repeated his demand for a letter of absolution from the president. “It must be signed by Obama! It must have a White House seal!”

  “How should she send it?” I asked.

  “She can send it by email,” said the pirate boss.

  “You can just mock something up in Word,” I mumbled into the phone.

  “Oh,” said my mother, who would have been coached on this question by the FBI, “I don’t know if we can do that, Michael. That would be forgery.”

  “Tell her the demand is still twenty million,” Garfanji said. “What is her counteroffer?”

  Mom answered: “Eight thousand? Maybe we could go up to ten.”

  The distance between the two offers made me dizzy, but I felt proud of my mom. It was the only serious response.

  “She says ten thousand.”

  “Oh, now she is joking,” said the pirate.

  “She thinks you’re joking,” I blurted.

  “Can I call him back at this number?” Mom said.

  I hesitated. The question implied caller ID. It didn’t seem wise to tip off Garfanji to the fact that she could see his number. He bellowed again about “twenty million,” so I skipped her question and said, “He says the whole amount has to be wired to Somalia in three days. All twenty million.”

  “Can we call him back at this number?” she repeated.

  I glanced up. “She wants to know if she can call you back at this number.”

  “What does that mean?” Garfanji hollered and began to lose his mind. “Is she tracing this call? How does she see my number?” He took the phone and roared that I would be sold to terrorists. “Three days!” he cried. “Not three months! THREE DAYS.” He ended the call, dismantled his phone, and flicked out the SIM card. It was a small and fiddling gesture that proved tricky for a pirate lord to accomplish with real diabolical finesse. The card fell into the dust, and he used his sandaled foot to stamp it, over and over, to ensure that the Mother of the Infidel would not be calling him back.

  A sale to al-Shabaab was on the dark edge of my mind before and after this call; but as long as the groups were at war, I thought it would remain theoretical. Garfanji had assembled a private militia around Hobyo in part to protect his business interests from al-Shabaab, and I was one of those interests. The jihadists also claimed to oppose piracy for religious reasons. But that was like saying Somali pirates were just poor fishermen—al-Shabaab probably did profit from pirate ransoms by taxing the gangs in regions where they coexisted. Would they reverse the flow of money, and strengthen the pirates, to nab an American? An asset sale like that was hard to imagine. But not impossible.

  We returned to Mussolini’s Farmhouse in the late afternoon. Marc was there, and around dusk the pirates served us a large platter of rice. We weren’t allowed to talk. My fork trembled in my fingers; I felt enraged and confused. I expected to be driven far into the wilderness that night, maybe back to the wooded valley with the horse-voiced vultures.

  Around sunset, while storm clouds massed like dark cliffs over the sea, Duulaay appeared in our doorway with a rifle on his shoulder. “How are you, Rolly? Fine?” he said, and smiled like a hyena, hoping to joke away the bitterness of the horrible afternoon. “‘I am fine’?” he added, and I think this odd phrase came from Somali English primers, an answer parroted from grammar class, which Rolly was supposed to parrot back. (Q: How are you? A: I am fine.) I wanted to shoot Duulaay with his own Kalashnikov. Rolly gave a feeble, ironic, grandfatherly chuckle.

  But when the pirate left, we prepared our beds for the night on the floor, and in the fading light Rolly gave his own interpretation of the grammar lesson.

  “Me, I want to d
ie,” he said.

  Part 5

  Flight

  I

  My mother’s professional cool on the phone was deceptive. “Of course, I was freaking out,” she would say later. The call from Garfanji woke her up before dawn, and she knew little about al-Shabaab; she had no way to assess the pirate’s threats. FBI agents arrived at her town house later the same morning with a laptop. They sat around the mess on the dinner table and reviewed the conversation. “The FBI told me, ‘Don’t get all stressed. . . . First of all, the pirates and al-Shabaab hate each other. So the terrorists are not about to pay the pirates any money.’”

  Whenever the FBI paid a visit, she served coffee and bagels, and whenever a meeting or a phone call had been scheduled in advance, she ordered sandwiches. Later she baked banana bread and cookies. She’d started to think of the agents as surrogate family. One of them, named Steve, said, “She was so incredibly generous in spite of what was going on, we had to tell her, just, to stop. Because she would have done that every time we came over.”

  Steve lived about a mile away in Redondo Beach. “There were times,” he said, “when there was nothing going on, and I would go over there to check in, and just talk about other things. To keep her somewhat focused on trying to take care of herself, and make sure she was keeping busy.”

  Mom had made an agonizing decision to keep my case quiet in the news. At her instigation, Der Spiegel asked for an embargo on the story from American and European outlets, and the result was a near-total news blackout on stories about my case. The logic went that hostages made famous by coverage became more expensive.

  Whenever negotiations faltered, though, so did Mom’s faith in the tactic, and sometimes she warned negotiators and officials around her that she wanted to tell the world. “I’d call up and say, ‘Steve, I’m gonna go national!’ . . . And then he would come over and we would discuss the possible outcomes.”

  The point of big publicity in a hostage case is to exert pressure on a sluggish or recalcitrant government. Since the U.S. and German governments had both mobilized, Mom decided to keep quiet. The final decision was always hers, so I don’t question it.* But the embargo failed to shorten my stay in Somalia. As long as I had a radio, I listened for clues about my case, and it seemed curious that the World Service never mentioned it even during reports about Somalia. Part of me felt isolated and forgotten; I had no idea what was going on. But I also knew that publicity would give leverage and comfort to my kidnappers. My guards even listened to the radio like eager kids whenever we made a video. They wanted to hear my name; they looked forward to a media circus, and it frustrated them to hear nothing.

  While Mom reviewed the first video in the first week of May, Steve and the other agents pointed out that I looked alert and decently fed. I wasn’t starving. I had to speak under duress, but the bristle of machine guns and grenade launchers made the agents laugh. “I mean, it looked so horrible, and so scary, but it was meant to intimidate,” Mom said. “They would say, ‘Look at how they’re pointing their weapons. This is all staged for optimum effect on the family.’

  “That’s how we watched every film.”

  I made five proof-of-life videos in Somalia. This first one came up for sale in mid-May. A Somali sent an email to Ashwin in Germany, offering the footage for two thousand dollars. Ashwin declined. Instead it wound up, later the same month, on Somalia Report, a news site, which broke the embargo. It became the single well-known clip from my time as a hostage.

  II

  Rolly and I drifted to sleep in Mussolini’s Farmhouse while a storm broke outside. Through the window we could see lightning flash over the ship in piled banks of blackening cloud. Around nine o’clock, the pirates woke us up. “Come on,” they said, but I balked at the idea of driving off in a storm.

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Go, go, go, go.”

  Rain pattered the tin roof of the gloomy Italian ruin. I climbed into the Land Rover feeling depressed and convinced the pirates would drive us to some distant corner of the bush, to make us miserable in the storm, if not to sell me to al-Shabaab. Instead we went speeding through the damp white sand on the Hobyo waterfront and stopped in front of a skiff. We boarded like before, in warm, slapping waves; lightning flashed over the Naham 3; but our pilot didn’t rush. He still had standing orders to keep his speed down, so we chugged gently through rocking swells in the rain.

  Returning to the ship quelled my terror of starting a new chapter as a hostage, I suppose because the familiar scenery was reassuring, but I also had a strange optimism about escaping, somehow, at sea. I liked the ocean. I felt halfway to freedom out there. And I would be easy for surveillance planes to track.

  No one on the ship had expected to see us again. There was a flurry of excitement on the work deck before we retired to our cabins. When I woke in the morning, around six, the Filipinos had made coffee and some wads of celebratory fried dough. I sat on the fiberglass bench and noticed the creak of a cricket under the damp floorboards. A gray dawn light had spread across the ocean, and I was just wondering whether the cricket had sailed from Mauritius with the Naham 3 or somehow hopped its way from the Somali mainland when Tony said:

  “Helicopter this morning, Michael.”

  “Really?”

  “Half an hour ago,” he said.

  “What did it do?”

  “It circled the ship, only.”

  I told him what Garfanji had done on land. The story spread among the Filipinos, and by the time Rolly came down the steps before breakfast to sit in our corner, it was like the advent of a wounded king. He found his tin mug and accepted coffee from Ferdinand.

  “How do you feel?” I said.

  He shook his head. “Me, I hurt, Michael.”

  The other men woke up and stowed their bedrolls. We spread our mattresses under the conveyor belt, and Rolly rested for a while. When he told the story himself that morning, he seemed to relive each humiliation with the stick. “BAP! BAP!” he said. “They think I Israeli. This fat man! He think he find something with his computer.” Rolly’s face looked wooden. “Me, Israeli?”

  We spent the rest of the day in a state of relief, sitting under the conveyor belt and watching the crew toss out fishing lines. Rolly gave me the Creole names of the fish that came over the side. Some were exotic to me—including groupers, spangled emperors, humphead snappers, and rainbow runners—but the most common fish were the karang, a small yellowspotted trevally, and the inedible scavenging remora, which clung to the sides of the ship and cleaned up scraps of anything.

  Rolly watched with such a yearning professional interest that I said, “Don’t you want to fish?”

  “Oh, me, I like to fish,” he said. “At home I go to fishing because it make me happy. You understand? But I no like to remember that here.”

  I understood very well. We’d learned to hood ourselves in Somalia, to starve and blunt our pleasures, to protect ourselves from madness.

  Under the rising heat on the ship I remembered my dad’s passion for fishing, his motorboat on a trailer in the driveway, and his eagerness to drive it up to a reservoir in the mountains north of L.A., where he could waste an afternoon in the hot sun, with a beer, waiting for trout. Mom and I went with him, normally, but we couldn’t appreciate the solemn need to keep silent on the boat, which seemed as important for my father’s nerves as it was for the fishing project. Mom would chitchat, impishly. Dad would say, “Shhhh. You’re scaring the trout,” and Mom and I would giggle.

  Good Christ I missed my family.

  But I no like to remember that here.

  “Now we on the ship again,” Rolly remarked after a while.

  “You feeling better?”

  “Ahh,” he said, and gave a dismissive wave.

  III

  After the early helicopter visit, I made a point of waking up around five every morning, because the prospect of jumping for a helicopter at that hour, when the pirates were drowsy and the sun cast bl
ue shadows on the landward side of the ship, gave me hope. I would be harder to see in the half dark—harder to shoot—and I looked forward to taking the pirates by surprise.

  The Filipinos kept a plastic alarm clock near their wok and electric kettle. I asked Tony if I could take it to my cabin at night. He said yes, but after I had done it twice, one of the Chinese-speaking crew objected. He was an older man with a potbelly and melancholy eyes, an alternate engineer, actually from Taiwan. The crew called him Taso.* He didn’t seem to get along with the Filipinos or with Li Bo Hai, the first engineer, who had pounded my back into shape when I first came onto the ship.

  I tried to explain why I wanted the clock, but Taso didn’t understand. When I continued to borrow the clock, he stopped the generous favor of taking our bowls before each mealtime to serve us food. At last I quit using the clock. But Taso’s objection signaled something more important. We were no longer guests aboard the Naham 3. After our return from land, we had joined the hostage crew.

  Our rights to the captain’s cabin also disintegrated. When Tuure left on shore leave, a Somali we called “Big Jacket” shut down our bathroom privileges. Big Jacket was a skinny guard-lieutenant who wore an oversize blue blazer in every kind of weather. He didn’t like having to muster his men to attention whenever we climbed the stairs. But it bothered me to lose even a small and petty freedom to such a low-ranking guard. “They’re just making up rules,” I grumbled to Rolly.

  “I not care,” said Rolly. “I shower with salt water, like the children.”

  “He didn’t say no shower; he said no toilet upstairs.” I glanced at Rolly. “You’re giving up too easily. These guys are just lazy.”

  “This man, Big Jacket,” he said.

  “Yeah, Big Jacket.” I smiled at the name. “He thinks he runs the ship.”

  “But he got the gun.”

  After lunch that day, Rolly undressed near the front of the deck and took a cold saltwater shower. It made an impression on the crew. I still resented the pirates’ arbitrariness, so I copped an American attitude of protest. When Big Jacket disappeared to another part of the deck, I took my bright-yellow towel and went up the stairs to demand a shower. The baffled guards let me go. As a team, they didn’t know their own rules.