Fractured: International Hostage Thriller

by Clàr NÕ Chonghaile

  The anger was red-hot, exploding in my head like a bomb. I said nothing.

  Maybe all we Somalis are just as they say we are. Maybe we can’t live with peace, maybe all we can do is kill and be killed, clan feuds going back generations, poisoning our present. I don’t care. I want to hurt him. For me, he is them. He has a purpose that I have lost. Or rather that they took from me. For all these reasons, I want to hurt him. And I know how. I will take from him. I will take his prisoner.

  We will go tonight. I can get the keys to the prisoner’s shack. Nobody watches me here. I know why they expect me to be loyal. The shadow of Nadif, my brother, my keeper. We will head back to Mogadishu. There is no Al-Shabaab between here and Mogadishu, or at least not many, and my clan is scattered around this area. Al-Shabaab are further south. That is where they were going to take the prisoner, so we cannot go there. I thought about heading to the border with Kenya but it is too far and for what? The prisoner will find safety in Mogadishu and I have my own reasons for going back. I want to say goodbye. It is too late, but I must do it. Al-Shabaab are in our neighbourhood but I will be careful and I do not fear them now.

  I have stolen a little food from the kitchen and four bottles of water and they are here in the backpack that Yusuf gave me when I told him today that I had decided to go to the border. He agreed that Dhobley was the best place to go.

  “You can cross easily there,” he said as we sat under the acacia tree, watching the foreigners who had arrived in a four-by-four. They had painted the car but the white paint was peeling and I could see the red of the Save the Children logo underneath. It looks like the child has its hands up, in fear. This is how the war here perverts everything.

  The foreigner had gone inside to talk to the Sheikh and the other four men were lounging in the shade. Two of them were asleep, leaning against the wall, their guns between their legs. They did not talk to us when they arrived, but they walked around like they owned the compound, sunglasses glinting angrily. We are nothing to them.

  “It will cost you about $50 to get through the border,” Yusuf continued. “Trucks go through all the time. But the best thing would be to look for Abdirashid, a member of our clan. He will help you if he is still there. You must ask for him when you arrive in Dhobley. Everyone knows him. This is his business. He will give you a good price in honour of your father and your mother, Allah have mercy on their souls.”

  I nodded.

  “Can you pay me today, Yusuf? I need to prepare for this journey, and I want to hide the money carefully.”

  “Very wise,” Yusuf nodded. “I will get your money now. There are many bandits on the road to Dhobley. They prey upon people trying to get out. They will shoot for a few senti.”

  “What about Al-Shabaab?” I asked.

  Yusuf chewed his khat for a moment, his cheeks bulging as though he had some kind of malignant tumour, then he spat noisily into the dust in front of us. His spit stained the ground like blood. I felt lightheaded and looked away.

  Yusuf lowered his voice.

  “Al-Shabaab are always a danger. They are moving a lot these days. But there are also other militia. And then you have the bandits. Just stay off the roads, travel by night, hide when you hear guns and don’t talk to anyone. Be quiet, be invisible and you will get there.”

  “How did you make connections with these Al Shabaab?” I asked.

  Yusuf smiled, his brown, khat-stained teeth like striated river stones in his wide mouth.

  “You know, Abdi, I am a businessman. I must communicate with those who have money. Al-Shabaab has money. They are the ones collecting the taxes from farmers, villagers, even from pirates south of here, near Kismayo. They may not have control of the whole country but they have enough. I need to be able to talk to them. I heard about a white man being held by some thieves. I contacted them. They are nothing, they had been lucky. But stupid too. They killed the man’s driver and his clan had vowed revenge, so it was difficult for them in Mogadishu. I offered to take the captive off their hands. They agreed. I paid and now I will make twice as much by selling him to this foreigner. It is always possible to reach Al-Shabaab. Nadif was not the only one. In our clan, there are many who have seen the way this world works. They have joined the strong men.”

  He spat again and tiny drops landed on my shirt. He was leaning close to me, his hand on my forearm. I had to stop myself from shaking him off. I suddenly hated him.

  “But when things change, we will change too. Al-Shabaab have power now but they are too extreme. This is a grey world, Abdi, there is no room for belief if you want to survive. You must know how to be grey. I am grey, and I am alive, and I am becoming richer. I do not believe in anything. I do not expect anything except the loyalty of my clan, the betrayal of others, and the fact that people will always pay for what they want. So when Al-Shabaab go, because everything eventually changes, then I will become friends with whoever fills that space.”

  Yusuf lectured me for a little longer. He likes to play elder although he is only a few years older than me. He thinks he is a player. I envy his certainty, but I also pity him. We are all being played here.

  It is time to go now. The clouds have come and covered the moon. The shadows will help us. Yusuf, the Sheikh, and the foreigner are eating in the big house. Two of the foreigner’s men are fiddling under the bonnet of their Land Cruiser. Earlier, while the foreigner was inside with the prisoner, and his men took some time to eat in the kitchen, I tore one of the wires out of the car’s engine. My hands were shaking, but I did it. I was grey.

  Before Al-Shabaab came to our neighbourhood, my father had, for a while, owned a blue Nissan with red doors. It seemed to only run when it wanted to, and my father spent many hours working on it. He was a mathematician but he loved the practicality, the fluidity of engineering.

  “See how this works, Abdi. This wire goes here and then this piston moves and then the fuel flows. Isn’t it amazing?”

  I knew he was really talking to himself. He was more amazed than I was.

  They discovered the broken wire when one of the men tried to move the car into the late-afternoon shade by the wall. The foreigner shouted at his driver, the smallest of the silent men who are our guests and masters. The man looked terrified. The foreigner accused him of driving too fast, of hitting a pothole on the track that led from the paved road to the compound. He spoke slowly, as if the driver was an idiot. The man dropped his eyes to the ground. The foreigner never raised his hand but the man shrank from his voice. It made me hate the foreigner more. I hoped nothing would happen to the driver but I have no more room for compassion.

  A guard sat on a chair at the gate. His head was tilted, his legs splayed in front of him, his gun resting by the wall beside him. In sleep, he looked harmless. He was one of Yusuf’s men and so a hired gun rather than a fanatic, but I didn’t plan on using the gate anyway.

  I crept out of the shed where I slept. The clouds had swallowed the shadows created by the showy moon. I melted into the wall and skirted around until I was behind the prisoner’s shack, just below the tiny window that showed him the sky. I slipped round the far wall, the one furthest from the main house but closest to the gate. No one was looking at the shack. Inside was a dead man and a dead man doesn’t move. I got to the corner, held my breath, checked for noise and then made for the door. Within seconds I was inside, in the dark, with the prisoner.

  “Let’s go,” I whispered.

  I could not see him on the mattress. I panicked. Had they taken him inside the main house when I wasn’t looking?

  “Abdi?”

  The voice came out of the far corner. And then I saw him, his white face and hands detaching themselves from the gloom. He looked like a man without a body.

  “Follow me. Do not speak.”

  I edged open the door again. The two men were still fiddling with the car’s engine at the other end of the compound. The guard at the gate had crossed his legs but his head was still tilted sideways, still searchi
ng for a shoulder to rest on. We crept out. I could feel the white man behind me. His breath sounded like screams but then so did mine. I was wearing my flip flops but he was barefoot. I hadn’t thought to bring him shoes. A stupid mistake.

  I locked the door again, my hands shaking. Hoping my fingers wouldn’t betray me like Nadif’s had. We made it behind the shack without being seen. I led him along the wall, heading closer to the part of the compound where the men were fixing the car. The white man put his hand on my shoulder. I shook it off. I kept creeping along the wall until we were behind one of the small houses opposite the main house.

  The outer wall was slightly lower here. A few bricks had fallen off the top and there was a gap in the shards of glass cemented into the top. If we were careful we would not get cut too badly. Nobody could see us here.

  Earlier, I had brought one of the old buckets I used when cleaning the floors in the main house and placed it here. I turned it upside down and motioned for the white man to climb up on it. He did, grabbed the wall and pulled himself up. He was slow, and panting. I could sense the trembling in his arms. I crouched, placed my shoulder under his flailing feet and pushed. He pulled himself higher, scrambled over the wall and dropped.

  I froze. The noise was louder than I had expected. I peeked around the side of the house. The men at the car were arguing over something, voices raised, hands waving. The guard was still asleep. I hopped on the bucket and lifted myself. I am as tall as the white man but my arms are stronger. I hefted myself higher and swung my legs up onto the edge of the wall. I felt my skin tear and a bright pain like a burn, but I bit my lip and dropped down onto the other side.

  “I cut my leg,” I whispered to the dark.

  “Lean on me. Let’s go.”

  The voice was closer than I expected. I felt a hand on my arm, guiding me, into the dark. The sky was black, the moon still hidden in the clouds, but to my right, I spotted a single star. We started stumbling forward, staying away from the track that led to the main road. I wasn’t sure if this was the right direction, all that mattered was speed. We weaved into each other, like magnets pushed together by some force in the air. My leg was wet. I pulled off my headscarf.

  “Wait. A moment.”

  I wrapped the scarf around my leg. I did not want them to follow the blood.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  The white man said nothing, but his hand was on my arm again. It made me uncomfortable. We set off again, two men without faces, without shadows, walking under a single-starred sky.

  CHAPTER TEN

  PETER

  This is a new kind of dark, a new kind of prison. Here, I am caught between captivity and the unknown. The sky and the hard ground are one expanse of nothingness. The clouds cover the moon and I am grateful for this lunar modesty. We need to put as much distance as we can between us and the compound before the silver light pours down again. I know we are not moving very fast and maybe not fast enough. I am scared, exhilarated and terrified, my ears straining for the shouts I am sure will come. And the shots that will follow.

  I wish I could turn my mind off. I need to be a thoughtless automaton now. Abdi is limping, stumbling on the rutted ground as we plunge deeper into this blackness. We have not talked since he told me he cut his leg. We have half walked, half jogged, our hands stretched before us like soldiers blinded by mustard gas. My feet are hurting but the scratches and bruises do not bother me now. Occasionally, the moon peeps through briefly, bashfully, allowing us a fleeting glimpse of the void around us. Shrubs, thorn trees and dusty, cratered ground. We could be in any of a dozen countries I have visited.

  I am following Abdi, my fingers pinching his thin shirt. I can hear his breathing, I can feel it through the thin fabric. Suddenly he stops and points. I can see a darker shadow in front of us. It is a hut, frail and broken but still standing. Abdi motions me to stop and moves ahead, cautiously. There is no light from the hut but that doesn’t tell us anything. There is no electricity for miles around. Abdi’s shadowy form disappears as if by magic and I am alone, standing on the edge of the world, maybe on the edge of my existence.

  My heart is pounding, I am sweating and shivering at the same time. I can hardly believe I am outside again. My body rebels against this disorientation, it wants to shut down. A few weeks ago, I was so free I didn’t even feel it. Now freedom feels awkward, like a new shirt, scratchy and clingy in all the wrong places. I don’t want to think about where we are, or what we will do. I am not ready yet. So I look up into the inky sky where the clouds have parted to show me a speckling of stars. They are fragile, flickering as if they might go out, and I hold my breath. And then the moon, a queen preceded by her courtiers, slips out from the clouds, spilling her limpid mercury-light across the ground, creating shadows and contrasts, like a painter bringing a picture to life. I watch as if bewitched but I am actually under another moon, on that beach in Monrovia, six years ago, walking with Esther.

  We had eaten thick palava sauce and fufu at a little roadside café not far from the beach where waves ended their long journey from another world by crashing exhausted on this new shore. It was the day before the first round of the presidential elections, my reason for coming to Liberia. I had filed my curtain-raiser that afternoon and needed to be up early the next morning to go to the polling stations.

  But I also needed to see Esther. If I were to explain the attraction, it would sound clichéd. She was beautiful but it wasn’t just that. She was damaged and fragile, and different and yes, there was an element of that, although I had slept with women from Mali, and Ivory Coast, and Ghana before. Before Michelle, and since Michelle. I always believed that what happened on the road, stayed on the road. What I didn’t realise is that you had to be fully complicit in this deception, and if you could not forget or erase what happened on the road, your deception swept along its own separate, secret alley before spilling into the other better-known roads that together make up the illusion of a single path through life.

  After our late meal, I walked Esther back to the rehabilitation centre. We went along the beach, slipping off our shoes and tiptoeing through the unstable, grasping fringe where sea meets land. Her left hand was in mine. There were clouds that night too and some rebel stars that naughtily twinkled their refusal to be dimmed. We were silent. The comfortable silence was one of the things I liked about Esther. When she spoke, it was deliberate as though she had been given a finite number of words at birth and was determined not to waste any of them.

  I squeezed her hand and she turned to smile at me. Her teeth were large and bright, but the front two in the centre were slightly crooked. Her brown eyes danced under arching brows. She had dimples in her cheeks and a fine rash of tiny spots across her forehead. She had braided her hair that morning and the oiled plaits shone when the moon finally wrestled the clouds away.

  “Tomorrow, you will work all day.”

  It was more a statement than a question but I nodded my head.

  “You will leave after the second round?”

  I nodded again, unwilling to tarnish this moment with my foreigner’s voice. I felt at one with the sloshing water, the salty breeze, and the far-off sound of cars taking sodden, late-night revellers home. I wanted the illusion to continue. If I spoke, the picture would break into a thousand tiny pieces.

  But she was still staring at me, using her eyes to save her words.

  “I have to leave then, Esther. But I’m sure I will come back. My editors are bound to want a follow-up story, maybe when the new president is sworn in. Especially if it’s Johnson-Sirleaf, and it probably will be. She has…”

  “But will you come back for me, Peter Maguire?” Esther interrupted.

  She stopped walking, pulled her hand from mine and stared at me. She was smiling but there was something sad lurking around the corners of her broad mouth. A tightness that was like the early shadow of a disappointment she knew would be hers.

  “I don’t know, Esther. It’s not that simple. Michelle
is waiting for me. We have a different life in Paris.”

  “I don’t want to be with you in Paris,” Esther said sharply. “I want to be with you here. I like you, Peter. You are different from the men I have met, the Liberians and my own people.”

  She allowed herself a small, ironic smile.

  “And yet in some ways, you are all the same. You are complicated. You do not understand yourselves. You don’t know what you want, but I believe I can help you. You have been kind to me, you have accepted my condition. And I love you for that. We could be happy together. And have you asked yourself why you are sleeping with me if you love Michelle? I could understand that from a Liberian – we have a culture of mistresses. War has poisoned our very morality.”

  She fell silent for a while, shutting me out of whatever memory she was struggling to repress or resurrect. I knew she was thinking of things she could barely describe, and that I would surely never understand even if she could speak of them.

  “But you are from another culture, you value faithfulness. So what is this?”

  I sighed.

  “That’s not how it is. You’re making it much too simple. This is not about different cultures. It’s about me. I love Michelle. In my own way. But I have feelings for you too, Esther. You are beautiful and I want you, but does that mean I can’t also love Michelle and desire her? I’ve never seen it that way.”

  Esther began walking again.

  “Does Michelle know this?”

  “No,” I said, reaching for her hand.

  She let me hold it, closing her cool fingers around mine like a blessing.

  “She wouldn’t agree,” I admitted. “So yes, I am being dishonest to her. But it is who I am. I know what I should do and yet I can’t.”

  “One day, Peter, you will have to choose. Unless you have decided already. That would make me sad but I can survive.”

  Again that ironic smile.

  Esther was not pleading. She was offering me a life with her but my younger self didn’t know how to say yes. I didn’t know if I could say yes. So I chose silence, knowing I would soon be gone, and in my other world, miles away.