Exile

by James Swallow

  *

  The Calypso XV gas rig had been built by men who said it would be a monument to new ideals and greater prosperity for the nation of Somalia, but those sentiments had been lies from the start.

  Like the multinational corporations that had sent their fleets of factory ships to drain the coastline of fish stocks and the criminals who sank barges full of toxic waste in the shallows, the Calypso was the product of minds who saw the lawless, poorly governed seas off the Horn of Africa and wanted to plunder them. With no national administration to waylay them and few with the will to enforce applicable laws, the men from the West buried a great concrete pylon in the ocean and started drilling for natural gas.

  Calypso XV was all that remained of their ambition, almost a decade later. Abandoned in place after poor yields and a faraway financial crisis conspired to ruin its creators, the monopod rig protruded from the dark waves like a grey stone tree trunk. Its canopy was a blocky mess of industrial machinery. Rusted, decaying pipes festooned the structure. The multiple decks were derelict, and for a long time they had been left to fall apart and tumble into the sea.

  For Abur Ramaas, it was one more sign that his path was the right one. God had allowed venal men to build this thing, and then punished them with its failure. There was a certain kind of justice to that, the warlord reflected. And in the spirit of balancing the scales still further, he had taken control of the Calypso rig as part of his schemes to unite the pirate clans of the surrounding regions.

  As a boy, Ramaas had listened to the Christian missionaries who told him stories about the ancient history of Europe and the massive stone fortresses that dotted the landscape. Now the Westerners would have to come to his castle. Fitting that it sat atop the ocean, amid the seas he had known since he was a youth. From here, he would return Somalia to the strength it had always been denied. He would free his nation from the shackles of the West for all time, and make himself a king in the process.

  We have never been pirates, he told himself. We are not criminals. We deny the laws of those who say it is so.

  Ramaas looked out over the water from atop the gangway where he stood, and showed his teeth. Very soon, he would have everything he wanted.

  ‘Boss?’ He heard an awkward shuffle of feet and turned to see Little Jonas approaching him along the creaking deck. He was only a few years Ramaas’s junior, but the man’s small stature and odd gait made him appear strangely childlike, and so ‘Little’ he became. ‘More boats out there.’ He waved in the direction of the sea and the black horizon with his bad right hand; it was crooked like a talon, although it didn’t affect the man’s skills with computers.

  Jonas had a sharp mind and a wicked streak, both qualities that had ultimately brought him into Ramaas’s orbit. Jonas’s father and mother had fled to America in the 1990s and he had been raised there. An affinity for both crime and technology had soon brought him to the attention of the authorities, and Jonas ultimately found himself fleeing his adopted country for the nation of his birth – and it was there that his skills were found to be of use to his familial clan. Jonas was the one who set up the voice-over-Internet network Ramaas used to coordinate with his men, and Jonas was the one who had learned how to hack the shipping logs of the cargo vessels sailing through the Gulf of Aden, all the better to target the richer pickings and let the loads of lesser value pass unmolested.

  With his help, Ramaas was turning the wheel of history, pulling Somalia back toward what it had been in years past – a place to be feared, where those who crossed its sea-lanes would have to pay a tribute or perish.

  Ramaas smirked. Now that ideal seemed small. Now his name was being spoken in the castles of all the world’s warlords, and he liked how that felt. ‘What boats?’ he demanded. ‘American? Chinese?’

  ‘Yes. Russian too. They are obeying you, boss. They are staying out past the line you gave them, and no jets have flown over us.’ Little Jonas said it with an air of confusion, as if he couldn’t quite believe it was happening.

  ‘Fools,’ said Ramaas. ‘Do they think we would obey them if our places were reversed?’ He laughed at the idea.

  Below, bobbing on the surface of the calm ocean, a docking platform rose and fell in the gentle swell. Moored to it were a cluster of smaller boats – a few military-style rigid inflatables, a handful of raider skiffs and two out-of-place motor yachts. This was the fleet that had brought the supplicants to Calypso XV, along with a couple of helicopters parked on the broad landing platforms atop the rig. Ramaas’s ‘guests’ had been given accommodation in the abandoned living quarters, and it amused him to imagine these men from their great nations being forced to spend a night inside the stinking, rusting hull of the old rig. After all the indignities his nation had suffered, it was another small victory.

  ‘Will any of them kill each other before dawn?’ Ramaas wondered aloud. The bidders were not just from the nations he had directly threatened; arms dealers, envoys from terrorist factions and what the Americans like to call ‘non-state actors’ were in there too. ‘Rats,’ he said to the air. ‘A cage full of rats all wanting to tear out each other’s throats . . . but too afraid to take the first bite.’

  ‘Another message came in over the radio,’ said Jonas. ‘Someone else wants to join our game.’

  ‘Did they pay the toll?’ Ramaas took a deep breath of salty air. All interested parties had been required to lay down a quarter-million-dollar payment just to be allowed to approach the rig.

  Little Jonas nodded. ‘The Combine are on their way now. They don’t like to be left out of things.’

  Ramaas gripped the gantry’s rusted guide rail and for a moment he didn’t know if he should spit or roar with laughter. Finally he nodded and let a smile crack his face. ‘This is good,’ he muttered. ‘Let them come! It is right they should be here. I want them to see it.’

  There was an implied dismissal in Ramaas’s words, but Jonas remained, absently kneading the wrist of his crooked hand. He shot the other man a questioning look and finally he said what was on his mind. ‘We are not challenging the crew of a ship or the fat, rich men in some office a thousand miles away, boss. These are soldiers.’

  Ramaas waved the words away. ‘White men sent ships to kill us before and they failed to wipe us out. They sent troops here when I was a child! But we are still here and they are gone!’ His voice rose, drawing the attention of some of the other men nearby on the gantry. ‘I will make these ones vanish too.’ He bit out the next words, making every one of them a bullet. ‘And we will still be here.’

  *

  At first Lucy supposed they were going to murder her anyway, as the pickup stopped at a decrepit mini-mall sandwiched between a pair of three-storey apartment blocks.

  The pain was making it hard for her to concentrate, but she shrugged off an offer of help from one of the gun-thugs and made a point of hobbling into the building herself. She couldn’t afford to show weakness.

  The back door opened into what had once been a tiny fish market, but the smell of dried blood was layered over the briny odour baked into the walls and the floor. She cast around, finding a steel table with a sluice grate in the middle of it and a workbench laden with surgical tools. It reminded her of a Mob doctor’s den she’d once seen in New Jersey, but back then it had been someone else with a wound on them and Lucy had been the shooting party.

  Stark light was thrown from a fluorescent strip in the ceiling, and from out of the gloom around its edges came an older man with the kind of gangly, ropey build Lucy had come to associate with the locals. His face resembled a piece of ancient petrified wood, all cracks and pits, and it was framed by glasses with thick frames and a grubby kofia cap.

  He frowned at her as if he were some distant relative coming across a wayward child. ‘Oh, daughter, what happened to you?’ The old man’s voice had a lilting accent Lucy couldn’t immediately place. He took off his cap and stuffed it in a pocket, waving her over to the steel table as he moved to a butler sink to w
ash his hands. ‘Guhaad, is this your doing?’ He glared at the man who had captured her in the TV station.

  The gunman shook his head. ‘If I wanted her dead, why would I be bringing her to you, old fool?’ He waved at the air, as if he was dismissing a nagging insect. ‘Make sure she doesn’t die.’

  Half the money she had promised Guhaad was already filtering its way into a set of Wells Fargo and Bank of America accounts held by fake names up and down the Eastern Seaboard of the USA. Lucy had spoken to the cab-driver uncle in New York via cell phone as they rattled down the highway, not exactly at gunpoint but as near as damn it. It turned out that good old Uncle Yarisow had a sideline as a hawala broker, a less-than-legal conduit for money that Somalian immigrants used to send cash back home. Rather than trusting banks, brokers like Yarisow maintained an informal network of transactions based on bonds of clan loyalty and familial trust. Guhaad was cutting him in for a fat percentage of the agreed fee, which Lucy was drawing from an emergency Rubicon slush fund. Making the call and activating the money transfer would raise a red flag back in Monaco, but the exchange wouldn’t be interrupted. I hope, she added silently.

  She couldn’t stop herself letting out a moan of pain as she climbed onto the table. The old man came over and unwrapped her makeshift bandages. Lucy smelled the pungent copper tang of her own blood and mint from his breath. He smiled at her, adjusting his glasses. ‘We have some work to do. Tell me your name.’

  ‘Lucy.’ She had to grind out the word. ‘What’s yours, Pops?’

  ‘Pops.’ He repeated the word with a grin. ‘I like that. Yes. Pops.’ A fresh wave of agony rocked through her as the old man touched the hilt of Saito’s knife where it was still lodged in her, and his expression became serious. ‘Daughter, this will be harsh for you. Strength now, yes?’

  Lucy felt the blade start to move, and a firestorm burst across her nerve endings. She couldn’t stop herself from releasing a scream –

  *

  – and time blurred around her like fog.

  She shifted, gathering bits of consciousness back to her, and saw light glistening through the contents of an IV saline bag hanging from the fluorescent light fitting above.

  Lucy’s hand slid down to where she had been stabbed, fingers finding a deadened region of flesh there, bound beneath thick gauze bandages. She blinked to find focus and her gaze raked across the room, settling on a silver steel spike resting across a kidney basin. Saito’s misericorde blade had been excised from her and cleaned.

  ‘You can return it to whomever gave it to you,’ said the old man, as he came into view. He held up a hand to stop her from rising. ‘Not so fast, Lucy American. Go gently or the stitches will break.’

  ‘What happened . . . ?’

  ‘You passed out from the pain. It was good. I kept you under while I worked, it seemed the best idea.’ He came close and she smelled mint again. ‘It has been a few hours.’

  ‘You speak good English,’ Lucy noted.

  ‘E parlo italiano,’ he added, with a wan smile, switching from one language to another. ‘Russkiy slishkom malo.’

  ‘An educated man, huh?’ She drew a shaky breath and slowly took stock of her body’s condition, mapping it out.

  ‘And your next question is, Why is a clever old man living in a place that smells of stale fish?’ He chuckled. ‘I have been here since before you were born, child.’

  ‘Right. So where is . . .’ She reached for the gunman’s name. ‘Guhaad?’

  ‘He hasn’t gone far.’ That was as much a threat as it was a warning. The old man offered her his hand and she rose to a sitting position. ‘Move slowly. I used surgical staples to close you up, but they will open again if you decide to dance.’

  ‘I’ll keep that in mind.’ Lucy took in the room and immediately saw it through a soldier’s lens, looking for things that could be weapons if the need arose. Guhaad’s men had taken her guns and her knife. Her eyes hesitated on Saito’s dagger.

  ‘For now,’ continued the old man. ‘Tea.’ He wandered off, disappearing through a set of dirty plastic flaps hanging across a doorway, and she heard him talking to someone else, the words too indistinct to be clear.

  She slipped off the steel table, ignoring a faraway throb of dull pain from her gut. Lucy crept around the room as quietly as she could, trying to get a sense of who her new caretaker was. The old man clearly had some medical training – that was obvious in the professional manner with which she had been patched up – and by the look of him he had to be in his seventies if he was a day. One table was overflowing with piles of old books and vinyl records, and she frowned at it. What Lucy needed right now was something more modern; a cellular phone she could use like a rescue flare to contact Rubicon. Her own sat phone was gone, probably taken while she was unconscious. There was no way to know when Guhaad would get back, and she wasn’t hopeful about her chances of dealing with the gunman and his pack of thugs in her current condition. She needed another option.

  The old man came back into the room. ‘Tea will be ready in a –’ He stopped and gave her a stern look. ‘What did I tell you?’

  ‘I’m not dancing.’ She forced a smile, and tapped the books. ‘Quite a collection you got here.’

  He flashed his teeth, showing a gappy grin, and came over, fishing out a dusty hardback with a sun-bleached red cover. ‘Relics of times past,’ he explained, cracking open the book. The yellowed pages were dense with tiny lines of Cyrillic text. ‘Before the Civil War here, back when I was your age . . . I was a doctor with the Army. We were Socialists then, you understand? The Soviets were our allies . . .’ A shadow passed over his face. ‘Well. We believed they were.’ He tossed the book back on the pile, as if he was suddenly annoyed with the idea of what it represented. Instead, he picked up one of the old records, and Lucy saw that the label said it was a recording of La Bohème. ‘At least the Italians left us with some culture, eh? They were in charge when I was a boy. ’ The shadow in his eyes returned again. ‘They cut up our lands like meat. And it has been the same way ever since.’

  He was giving her an opening, so she took it. ‘I thought things were different now. AMISOM is here, right? The African Union Mission helped put your own people back in charge.’

  ‘Did they?’ said the old man. ‘What do we have now? A government of splinters? Backed by troops from Kenya, Uganda and other countries who care nothing about this one?’ He shook his head. ‘They are content to let us eat ourselves as long as we do it quietly. It is a crime, daughter. A crime.’ He put down the record and wandered away.

  ‘Is that why you work for Ramaas’s men?’ she asked.

  He stopped, his back to her. ‘He is a beast, that one. But is that what we need? A wolf instead of sheep?’ The old man turned back toward her. ‘Everyone is tired of following politicians who only talk and talk. Even your people feel that way.’ There was a pause. ‘You hope that the older you get, the more you would come to ease with the way the world is, yes?’ He shook his head. ‘Not so. I am angrier with the men in power now than I have ever been.’ He gestured at the air. ‘Let him burn it, daughter. Let him burn them all. How else do we make them understand?’

  The plastic flaps moved and a skinny young boy in a pale blue soccer shirt backed into the room, bearing a tray with cups and a pot of tea. He rasped out a breath with each step he took, his lungs labouring. Lucy caught the aroma of hot apples and her mouth watered.

  When the kid turned around, she saw that his right leg was missing from the knee down, replaced with something made of leather and grubby pink plastic. With exaggerated slowness, he brought them the apple tea and poured out measures for both of them. Lucy took hers gratefully and gave him a wink.

  ‘Look at him and then at me,’ said the old man, nodding at the boy. ‘A lifetime of years between us, and what we have in common is what the West took from us. My past . . . His future.’

  ‘He was . . . wounded?’ Lucy found a chair and sat down, cradling the
tea in her hands. She was still shaky from blood loss and fatigue.

  ‘He was born that way,’ explained the old man. ‘Deformities from the contamination of the water table. Another gift from the Italians.’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’ Lucy sipped the tea and watched the boy cross to the table where she had been patched up. He set to work cleaning up the mess that had been made in saving her life.

  ‘Uranium. Lead and cadmium, mercury.’ The old man ticked them off on his bony fingers. ‘Poisonous remains from chemical factories and hospitals. Ships laden with it were deliberately drowned out in our seas and every time there is a tsunami on the other side of the world, it washes up on our shores. Slow venoms to go along with all the rest.’

  She said nothing, taking in his words. Lucy had heard stories about organised crime groups accepting bribes to spirit away toxic waste from corporations and governments that didn’t look too hard at where the material was headed.

  ‘So many gifts we have been given,’ he said bitterly. ‘Until our sons started attacking ships in the Gulf, no-one knew we existed. Until America made a film of it.’

  Lucy put down the cup, listening to the seething fury in the old doctor’s words. ‘If you think that’s true, why did you save my life?’

  ‘I don’t blame you.’ He smiled again. ‘You are not rich. You do not toy with lives for profit. I see it. You’re a soldier, yes? I was too, once. Like those poor fools on the ships . . . Just ordinary people made to serve the ones with no hearts.’ He paused. ‘And also I was told to. Guhaad tells me. He is Ramaas’s right hand.’

  She licked her lips and leaned in, deliberately holding eye contact with the old man, trying to bring him into a confidence. ‘Ramaas is threatening to kill a lot of innocent people. People like me, old men like you and kids like him.’ Lucy nodded toward the boy. ‘Ramaas has put a gun to their heads.’

  ‘People in the West?’ he asked. When she didn’t reply, he went on. ‘It is hard for me to feel sorry for them. All my life, they have been coming here to use my country for whatever they wanted.’ He got up and left his tea untouched. ‘And now we have a chance to oppose this, you want us to do nothing?’ He walked out of the room before she could frame an answer.