The Hunters

by Tom Young

  The boy nodded.

  “We only want you to be quiet. We will tie gags in your mouths. If you scream, you will die. If you stay quiet, you will live. Do you understand?”

  The boy nodded.

  “And you?” Abdullahi pointed his machete at the girl.

  She nodded.

  “Gag them,” Abdullahi ordered. “Use rags. Tear your shirts if you have to. Find something.”

  Hussein looked around the hovel. He found remnants of a dirty sheet, and with his machete, cut two strips. Handed them to Abdullahi, who forced the captives to open their mouths and let him tie the cloth strips as gags.

  “Cut more of that cloth,” Abdullahi said.

  Hussein did as ordered, and Abdullahi used the strips to tie the captives’ hands and feet. When he finished, the two looked like goats trussed for market. Dawo laughed at them, and Abdullahi slapped him and told him to keep quiet.

  Never before had Hussein handled prisoners. He had killed with fury, because the men told him those he killed were enemies of God. But never had he taken hostages like a pirate.

  “Are we going to sell them for money?” Hussein whispered.

  “No, idiot,” Abdullahi hissed. “They are worthless.”

  The insult stung, but Hussein knew Abdullahi was right. The pirates took crewmen from foreign ships. Rich infidels working for rich countries. Probably no one would or could pay ransom for two poor teenagers. Just as no one would pay ransom for Hussein.

  Abdullahi sat back and looked at the prisoners. He had a worried look on his face. Sometimes the older men appeared worried and even fought among themselves. These things troubled Hussein. The older men were supposed to lead the jihad, to know all things.

  “When we try to go back to the boat in the dark,” one of the boys said, “they will tell on us.”

  “We must kill them,” Dawo said.

  Through the gags, the young prisoners made pleading sounds. The girl shook her head from side to side. Tears streamed from her eyes.

  A fine punishment, Hussein thought, for kafirs to sit and listen to their fates decided. But were these kafirs? They had mistakenly wandered to the hiding place of the soldiers of God.

  “But if someone hears us killing them, we will still get caught,” another boy said.

  “Silence,” Abdullahi said. “I will decide.”

  The girl kept looking around, crying through her gag. She looked at Hussein.

  Hussein looked away. He looked at the dead rat. When he looked back up, the girl was still staring at him.

  Hussein looked away again. The girl might have been his sister, though Hussein could not remember his sister’s face clearly.

  “What if they are faithful?” Hussein said. “Then they will help us.”

  “Faithful?” Abdullahi said. “This girl is walking around uncovered with a male. She is a whore, and the boy consorts with whores.”

  “But—”

  “Did I not call for silence?” Abdullahi said.

  “Maybe if we leave them tied—”

  Abdullahi’s face flashed with anger. He got to his knees—he could not stand erect without ruffling the tarp roof—and leaned toward Hussein. Clamped his fingers over Hussein’s cheeks so that his mouth twisted into a foolish-looking shape. Hussein pressed his lips closed to look more like a man.

  “I said quiet,” Abdullahi said. Spit flew from his mouth.

  Hussein wanted to hit Abdullahi with his rifle. He wanted to shoot Abdullahi with his rifle. Yet he could not. Abdullahi was a leader of the jihad.

  Abdullahi let him go, sat down again across from the prisoners. Hussein rubbed the back of his hand over his mouth and glared at Abdullahi.

  When I lead the jihad, Hussein thought, I will say you are a kafir.

  Hussein wanted to leave the captives tied. Maybe they were good Muslims, despite what Abdullahi had said about the girl. Hussein’s mother had been a good woman; he knew that for sure, and she did not always cover her head. Even if the boy and girl were infidels, they could not untie themselves before the soldiers of God reached the boat at nightfall. If the prisoners were good, God would send someone by morning to untie them.

  Mercy did not enter Hussein’s thinking. No one had ever shown him any mercy. The best thing, the quietest thing, he believed, would be to leave the prisoners tied. We are lions of jihad, Hussein thought, but a lion does not kill everything it sees. A lion kills only when it must.

  As a man who would someday read the Quran and lead the jihad, Hussein knew he must think about such things. The aim here was to keep them quiet. The giggling fool Dawo did not think about things.

  The sun began to set. Hussein watched the copper glow under the orange tarp darken to bronze. Soon the al-Shabaab fighters would make their dash for the sea and get back home.

  Abdullahi stared at the prisoners. Then he announced, “We will silence them for good.”

  The boy and the girl started their muffled wailing again. This time they wailed louder. Maybe their gags had worked loose.

  “Let me do the girl,” Dawo said. “Let me do the girl.”

  Abdullahi nodded, and Dawo grabbed at the girl. Held her down on the dirt floor. The girl kicked, and he hit her on the head. Then he began to choke her.

  Dawo started giggling like a mad jinn. Abdullahi slapped him. Dawo let go of the girl’s throat long enough for her to let out a dampened shriek. Dawo stopped giggling but kept his wild grin. Put his hands back onto the girl’s neck and choked harder. The girl flailed and struggled.

  The boy sat trembling and silent. Abdullahi put away his machete and drew his other knife. A fearsome thing, with a blade as long as a dog’s front leg. Notches along the top of the blade for sawing. Hussein had seen this knife take the hand off a thief.

  “Hold him still,” Abdullahi ordered.

  Two of the other al-Shabaab boys pulled him down.

  Hussein did not help. His idea would have been better, he knew. He sat and glared with his arms folded.

  The girl stopped struggling. Dawo let go of her. He breathed in and out hard. The girl’s dead eyes stared up at him.

  “She thinks I am handsome,” Dawo said.

  Hussein picked up the dead rat and threw it at Dawo. Missed. The rat thudded against the cinder-block wall. No one else saw Hussein throw the rat. They were all looking at the other captive.

  “Hold his mouth closed,” Abdullahi ordered.

  One fighter put two hands over the boy prisoner’s mouth. Another clamped a hand under the prisoner’s jaw.

  Abdullahi kneeled over the prisoner. The boys holding the captive’s mouth closed had to fight him. Their shoulders shook as they forced his head down.

  With a sawing motion, Abdullahi stroked the blade across the boy’s throat. Hussein heard a popping sound, like when a man cleaning a fish cuts open the air bladder. The boy bled for a long time. He bled until it was dark outside.

  9.

  The atmosphere in the Sheraton Djibouti Hotel felt like a siege. American military personnel had received orders to stay inside after the terrorist strike in the city. The State Department urged civilians to sit tight, too. In his current role, Parson wasn’t sure which status applied to him, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going anywhere tonight. Parson, Chartier, Gold, Geedi, and Carolyn Stewart had little choice but to eat at the Sheraton.

  At the hotel restaurant, some of the diners looked frightened, some looked annoyed, and some looked unconcerned. At Parson’s table, the conversation went on as if no danger existed. The actress chatted amiably with the whole crew, but she seemed most taken with Geedi. In his flowered Hawaiian short-sleeved shirt, the flight mechanic resembled a college student on spring break more than an aircrew member on a mission. The white tablecloths, the potted ficus, the well-presented seafood made it hard to believe terrorists lurked outside and starvation
loomed nearby.

  “So, what made you join the Air Force?” Stewart asked.

  She took a sip of wine as she waited for Geedi’s answer. Left red lipstick on the glass.

  “I wanted to give back to the country that took in my family.”

  “Fascinating,” Stewart said. “And after the Air Force, you went to World Relief Airlift to give back to your home country?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Parson forked a chunk of Lobster Thermidor as he followed the conversation. He was paying for his own meals during this mission; in fact, he’d told the waiter to bring him the bill for the whole table. It still felt a little strange to eat gourmet food in the hunger-ravaged Horn of Africa. Gold sat beside him. She spooned an oyster from her Oysters Rockefeller and placed it on Parson’s plate.

  “When did your family leave Somalia?” Stewart asked.

  Geedi looked around the restaurant. Hesitated before speaking.

  “Ah, I don’t mean to be rude. But I’d rather not discuss it here.”

  “Forgive me,” Stewart said. “I was the rude one, asking a personal question like that.”

  “Not at all,” Geedi said. “I don’t mind telling you, just not in public.”

  Stewart regarded him for a moment. Took a bite of her shrimp salad.

  “In that case, would you mind if I interviewed you on camera? In a more private setting, of course.”

  Geedi looked over at Parson.

  “You’re a civilian now, dude,” Parson said. “Colonels can’t tell you what to do anymore.”

  “In that case,” Geedi said, “I don’t see the harm in it.”

  After dinner, the crew gathered in Stewart’s hotel room. An open laptop computer rested on the room’s steel desk. Notepads, Stewart’s Nikon, and pens surrounded the laptop. The actress invited Geedi to sit in one of two leather chairs. Chartier leaned across the bed. Parson and Gold sat cross-legged on the floor. Gold placed her hand on Parson’s back, a small gesture of affection now entirely proper. No longer a member of the active-duty military, she did not have to conceal their relationship—such as it was. However, they still refrained from more obvious displays. Old habits died hard.

  Stewart took the second leather chair, and as she fiddled with adjustments on her video camera, she said to Geedi, “When you answer the questions, talk to your friends instead of the camera. That’ll look more natural.”

  Geedi sat up straight and grinned sheepishly at his crewmates. He wore a lavalier microphone clipped to his shirt collar. To Parson, the flight mechanic looked like a nervous schoolkid called on by the teacher. But when Geedi began answering questions, he surprised Parson with his grave tone and with a story Parson had never heard before.

  “When the civil war began in Somalia in 1991,” Geedi said, “my uncle worked for Radio Mogadishu. The station got shut down, and my uncle found himself without a job. I don’t remember much of this myself, but my parents often spoke about it.”

  Geedi explained how his uncle somehow scrounged a low-wattage AM transmitter and put together his own private radio station. The station amounted to little but the transmitter, an antenna mounted on top of an abandoned clinic, a four-channel audio board, and one microphone. Such makeshift radio stations were not new; some warlords used unlicensed radio to beam propaganda to a population that was sixty percent illiterate.

  But Geedi’s uncle served no warlord, nor did he try to make money with the station. In Mogadishu, who would have bought advertising? The uncle merely wanted people to know what was going on.

  “He was a broadcaster,” Geedi said. “I guess that means, by nature, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. And he felt he was helping the best way he could during a crisis.”

  The famine became the uncle’s top story. He told of the bodies sewn up in cheesecloth, left by the side of the streets for pickup like daily garbage. The children with limbs like sticks and the distended bellies of kwashiorkor, a swelling of the gut caused by extreme protein deficiency. And the attacks on food convoys and distribution centers, by warlords who hijacked the supplies and sold them for arms.

  “Mohammed Farrah Aidid’s men warned him to stop,” Geedi said, “or he and all his family would be killed.”

  One day the radio station fell silent. Relatives went to check. The uncle’s bullet-riddled body lay slumped over the audio board.

  “They had cut out his tongue and draped it across the microphone,” Geedi said. “The rest of the family knew we had to leave.”

  Geedi’s father spent his last shillings to buy a rust-bucket Fiat for the escape to Kenya. The Ethiopian border was closer, but Geedi’s dad had fought Ethiopians in the Ogaden War and did not want to travel in that direction. Somewhere in the Middle Jubba administrative region of Somalia, the Fiat broke down. Geedi, his parents, and an aunt and a cousin made the rest of the journey on foot.

  “That part, I remember,” Geedi said. “I remember that my parents were very scared, and that scared me. They tell me I cried all the time. Some of the time, my father carried me. Some of the time, I walked. They tell me I lived up to my name.”

  “How is that?” Stewart asked.

  “Geedi means ‘traveler.’”

  Geedi said the family skulked through the landscape like fugitives. In those desperate days, anybody might attack you for money, food, or perhaps your clothes and shoes to trade for food. Rumors spread that the starving even resorted to cannibalism, though Geedi recalled no hard evidence of that. More than likely, he said, the strictures of Islam prevented that particular horror.

  The little food they’d carried with them did not last long because they had packed for a car trip, not days of hiking. When the tinned fish, crackers, and bottled water ran out, the group turned to scavenging.

  “We came upon a cornfield,” Geedi said. “At first we thought Allah had answered our prayers. But of course, with such a famine going on, all the ears of corn were gone.”

  So they ate leaves and stalks. The dried corn leaves carried the texture and taste of old paper and probably about the same nutritional value. Geedi’s parents saved for him the most edible parts—the core of the stalks, which still retained a little moisture. His dad whittled sections of the stalks with a folding knife and cut bite-sized portions for little Geedi.

  Parson listened to the story in amazement. Now and then he and Gold glanced at each other. Geedi’s tale reminded him of their trek through the Afghan mountains years ago, though the weather and terrain had been vastly different. But he and Gold had faced that ordeal as well-trained, well-armed adults. Parson could hardly imagine going through something like that as a child—or as a civilian with the responsibility of protecting that child. He had no idea he’d been flying alongside someone with such a harrowing background, and he wanted to comment and ask questions. But he didn’t want to interrupt the recording, so he kept quiet and listened.

  “We took to moving mainly at night,” Geedi said, “and we avoided the main roads.”

  One evening as they began the night’s trek—right around sunset—they came upon a tamarind tree heavy with vultures. Geedi’s mom wanted to avoid the tree and the ill-omened birds, but his father knew the tamarind pods might provide a little sustenance.

  As the group approached the tree, Geedi eyed the great birds, their bald heads like the skin of old men. The vultures flapped off the branches and formed a black cloud circling the tamarind. Beneath the tree lay three skeletons, nearly all the flesh and viscera picked away. From the remnants of clothing hanging on the ribs and clavicles, Geedi discerned a mother, a father, and a child. Much like his own family.

  Carolyn Stewart kept recording, holding the camera to her eye.

  “Did that frighten you?” she asked.

  “You bet it did,” Geedi said. “That could have been us any day.”

  Parson continued listening in rapt silence. Strange to
hear such a tale told by someone who spoke with an American accent, using American slang.

  Geedi and his family eventually came to the Jubba River. Not a creek you could step over, but a wide artery that drained the basin of southern Somalia and spilled into the Indian Ocean. There was no bridge where the family came to the shoreline. Seeing no other option, Geedi’s father took a chance and approached a man fishing from a wooden boat.

  The man wanted payment to ferry the family across the river. Geedi’s dad had nothing to offer but his pistol. He handed the revolver to the boatman. The boatman stuck the weapon in his waistband and motioned for everyone to come aboard.

  The crossing frightened Geedi. The river flowed fast and muddy. Eddies swirled and foamed. Crocodiles sunned themselves on a sandbar.

  As the boatman rowed, he kept staring at Geedi’s cousin, a pretty girl of thirteen. When the boat grated into the wet sand on the other riverbank, the man pulled the revolver.

  “The girl stays with me,” he said.

  Geedi’s dad pulled an oar out of an oarlock. Held the oar like a rifle with a bayonet affixed.

  “I don’t think so,” Geedi’s father said.

  The boatman pulled the trigger. Click. Tried to fire again. The hammer dropped on six empty chambers.

  Geedi’s dad lunged with the oar, rammed the narrow end into the boatman’s stomach. The man dropped the pistol into the boat as he tumbled into the water. Geedi’s father picked up the gun. The crocodiles slid off the sandbar. They began swimming toward the would-be kidnapper and rapist as he splashed around and struggled to stay afloat.

  “Our barter did not include ammunition,” Geedi’s dad said. “You assumed.”

  “Please help me out of the water,” the man shouted.

  Geedi’s father considered for a moment. He pocketed the pistol, extended an arm, and helped the miscreant back into the boat. The man collapsed into the hull, soaked. Geedi’s aunt fell on him with punches and kicks. So did his mother. The crocodiles swam around the boat, disappointed.