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 epiphany 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.
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 thicket. 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.”
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?
My heart thumped. If the hostages were dead, I would have their lives on my conscience.
Two days later another car arrived, and a number of new Somalis hiked down to the camp. They brought a watermelon, more vanilla cookies, and a live goat, which Angelo slaughtered on the bluff. Our camp also gained a new boss. Ali’s Brother disappeared, and a quirky and gentle new Somali stayed behind. Mohammed Tahliil had a shy, snaggletoothed smile and a furze of almost Ethiopian-looking hair. He seemed at first like a low-ranking man, a cook, because he was so diligent about building a fire and providing us rice and tea. Unlike the others, he seemed to enjoy his work.
“We call this a ‘cat’ in the Seychelles,” said Rolly.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“A man like that, who work in the kitchen.”
The next morning, a Somali dropped something rectangular at my knees, a wallet-like case. “Okay, boss,” he said and added two packs of batteries. From the furtive way he behaved I knew to keep it quiet from the other pirates. Rolly noticed and said, “Ah, you get a radio?”
“Shhh,” I whispered. “We can listen to the news.”
Reception was terrible. But I found English lessons in Chinese, news in Somali, something in Arabic, and a keening, lonely call to prayer. With difficulty, I stumbled across a station with officious British voices.
“Holy shit.”
“What you got?” mumbled Rolly.
“It’s the BBC World Service.”
After two weeks in the wilderness, the World Service felt like a miracle. I stood up to ask Tahliil for “water-caffè.” By the time another news bulletin came around, in half an hour, I could sit on a boulder, in the cold morning sun, with a glass mug of instant coffee in one hand and the murmuring, staticky radio to my ear, feeling almost human. All I needed was a boiled egg.
We listened for news about Somalia; instead we learned about a hurricane off Madagascar, a sinking Italian cruise ship, and Syria’s deepening civil war.
“I work on a cruise ship like that,” Rolly said after a while.
“Really?” I said. “Where?”
And he was off—Rolly’s term of relative silence had ended. Between spurts of news on the BBC, I learned all about his previous life. In the eighties he had worked as a steward on a Greek cruise line, sailing the Mediterranean from Italy to Israel. He mentioned passengers who tipped well, and passengers who didn’t. (After two and a half decades, those details remained in his mind.) He also told a good story about a forced-air heater in a hotel room in Greece. “I put this electric heater on. And the stove, you know, it was gas—you can make your tea on this stove. But it leak. And me, I don’t smell this gas.”
His room had a sliding glass door overlooking an Athens street. When he turned on the heater, it ignited the leaking gas and forced a tremendous plume of flame through the door.
“Mi-chael!” said Rolly, squeezing his eyes at the memory. “That glass shatter! Thank God, nobody was in the road. The man there, the manager, he say it cost three thousand drachma to fix. I give him four thousand. Is not a lot of money. But he say, ‘Not talk about this to your wife.’”
He acted roosterish about his early career as a fisherman and a laborer in the 1960s, when he went skin diving for sea cucumbers and sea turtles. His job on the cruise line represented an international phase, when he saw the world and earned a good salary. His wife had worked as a housecleaner in the Middle East during the same period, and they traveled back and forth—a season in the Seychelles, a season abroad. But after several years they settled in Mahé for good. Rolly grew out of his life as an employee by purchasing the Aride, a yellow fishing cruiser with a sleeping cabin and four fixed drop lines. For the first time in his life, he ran his own show. Long experience of the Seychelles’ reefs and shoals made him a good skipper. He sailed out for days at a time. “Other fishermen, they follow me,” he boasted. “Because in the harbor, they see I come in with a lotta fish.”
“What do you catch?”
“Red snapper, island snapper, like that.”
But now the Aride was gone. He thought about it every day. He’d neglected to buy insurance. His family was poor.
“Mi-chael—” he concluded. “When you poor, people look at you like this.” He gave an evil squint. “But when you rich, people say, ‘Look at this rich man!’”
Rolly was a chatterbox by nature, and once he decided to talk, he chattered about anything that came into his head. I never felt bored. His English reminded me of the French-inflected Caribbean patois in Derek Walcott’s plays, Ti-Jean and His Brothers or The Sea at Dauphin—his voice could be dirty, low-down, clever, funny, and sad. He told me a Seychellois legend about a madman in the woods. “We are like the Dodosya under a rock,” he said. “We say that in the Seychelles. Dodosya, like a crazy man.* He go to the forest because his wife no good. He sit under a rock and laugh, laugh, laugh. These men got us here in the forest like that.”
A sandstone rock in the forest, though, was no match for Somalia’s weather. Even during the dry season, water could pour like a faucet into the arid savanna. One night we woke up to a wet patter on the leaves. The pirates told us to pack our sparse belongings into plastic bags. They drove us like cattle through a gentle rain—down the crevasse, up a trail, across the thorn-grown bluff—until we piled, wet and exhausted, just before the downpour started, into a waiting car.
We sped through the forest and the bush at top speed, for several hours, until the pirates pulled off to one side of the road and waited on a moonlit expanse. We had outrun the rain, at least for now. Somali folk music pounded and scraped from the stereo. We had no choice but to listen to a stark female voice and a careening, melancholy oud.* In a Somali musician’s hands the oud can sound spare and thorny, like the savanna itself, and this song was so strange I started to pay attention. The woman used a glottal stop to keep time. A glottal stop is a consonant sound in Somali—it’s written into words as an apostrophe or as a c, which is why one common spelling of Galkayo includes a c—Galkacyo—and why Sa’ad has two syllables.*
The woman sang whole trills of glottal stops, in perfect time, to drive the rhythm of her song. My resistance melted. The music had a strange beauty, and the bending, frantic oud reminded me of American blues.
I had just started to forget where I was when our driver pulled out his smartphone, flipped through some pictures, and tilted his phone back to show me a photo of my own face in the dark. A chill washed through my limbs. Pirates laughed. It was my own author photo, ripped from the New York Times. The bosses must have sent it around to their foot soldiers’ phones.
Soon we drove to a dismal stone ruin with faint light glowing behind colored rags in the windows. Pirates wrapped a blindfold around my head. I stumbled up a broken stone staircase, and when they unwrapped me, I stood in a half-lit honeycomb of crumbling, filthy rooms. Pirates listened to twanging folk music and sat in front of piles of leaf, chewing their narcotic cud and staring up with startled, stoned, urgent expressions, as if we’d interrupted them. Thorn brambles were stuffed in one doorway—tumbleweeds in place of a door. Someone led us down the hall to a tattered cloth hanging in another doorway, and behind it three mattresses lay on the ground. A tall man slept on one.
“It is Marc!” Rolly whispered.
We set down our bags. Marc stirred and spoke from the corner, and Rolly answered him in minor-toned Creole. In the light from a fluorescent lantern I saw Marc was an old man with stiff limbs. I shook his leathery hand.
“He say is getting better,” said Rolly. “He feed himself now.”
“Better from the electrocution?” I asked.
“Yah.”
A man came in wearing a white shirt and dress slacks. I recognized him in the uneven light as Boodiin, the translator from our first house.
“You are safe here now, you are okay,” he said. “You can sleep.”
I didn’t feel safe.
“Are we in Hobyo?” I said.
“Yes.”
One or two men in another room began to pray, and their chanting mixed with the clamor of folk music on their phones.
“Can you ask the men to turn their music down?” I said. “It’s very loud.”
“I will ask,” he said. “But these men are soldiers.”
So?
“Ask them to be quiet soldiers.”
He went out. The volume lowered on one or two phones. Boodiin returned, and I remembered my manners and thanked him. He wondered if it would rain again. He was in a hopped-up, conversational mood, although he’d instructed us to sleep.
“I hope it won’t rain, because I want to go fishing tomorrow,” he said.
“Really?” I said. “What do you catch?”
Boodiin dressed like a small-time businessman, a hustler putting on airs, more than some kind of fisherman.
“Lobster, I fish for lobster,” he said. “I hope tomorrow I will catch . . . five k-g!”
He raised his eyebrows and smiled. “Five k-g,” about eleven pounds, was meant to be a lot for a man like him. I remembered thinking before that he was a world-class liar; now his will to disorient me rattled my nerve. Was I expected to believe, on this particular layer of hell, that pirates were just needy fishermen? I remembered Boodiin’s admonition from our first meeting in Hobyo—You have made a mistake—and wondered if he would repeat it. My real mistake had been coming to Somalia at all. What did I think I would find around here? Pirates who trusted writers? Truth? Some war correspondents come away from the battlefield more disoriented than before, less confident about the facts, and by now I just wanted to be unconscious. I wasn’t in the mood to hear Boodiin offer up some pirate public relations line. This trashed and nightmarish stone building stood in a uniquely desolate part of the world, where escape was impractical and even my dreams of freedom had no obvious place to wander; but it was Boodiin’s insistent dishonesty that gave me the creeps.
“That man get seasick,” Rolly said when he left. “Boodiin, he not a fisherman.”
I snorted.
“How do you know?
“When I come to Hobyo on the Aride,” he said, “he get on with some other bosses. After five minutes, he go to the rail and vomit.”
At dawn I saw more of the house. We’d slept in a filthy room colored with layers of pastel paint, flaking blue and yellow and dusty green. The thick walls rose twelve feet overhead to reveal a barnlike space crossed by rafters. Birds fluttered among them. The slanted corrugated roof had rust holes that shone bright from the morning sun.
My blood pressure had a way of zinging to a certain level every morning when I woke up from a benign dream to realize I was in Somalia. Angelo now sat folded beside the doorway with a rifle across his thighs, deep in thought, shielding his forehead with one languid hand. He noticed me stir.
I cleared my throat and said, “Kadi?”
He leaned through the hanging cloth to give an order. Feet shuffled; Kalashnikovs clacked. The hall was like the room, a pastiche of flaking paint, except that a patterned ceiling that must have once decked the entire building still remained, half broken away. Lengths of wirelike metal suspended the remnants of it. This ruin, in its day, would have been a well-appointed European-style house.
“Toilet?” I asked, since no Somalis were offering guidance.
One of them waved into a room near his end of the hall. There was a toilet inside, but it looked as if someone had assaulted it with a sledgehammer. The floor had a litter of rock, plaster, and dried human shit. The toilet was a broken plinth of porcelain with a hole gaping into a stinking watery sump.
I peed into it.
“Somali bullshit,” I whispered to the guards on my way back, making sure to remove my shoes and leave them in the filthy hall. By now Rolly had woken up. “What is this place?” I said when I sat down.
“I not know. I stay here before.” He glanced around. “Angelo say is seventy years old.”
“Really?”
“Thick walls, eh? And this roof is good iron.”
The deep-set windows had broad sills of concrete on either side. The walls were a yard thick and almost twelve feet high. The design felt Fascist monumental, simple but massive, like a farmhouse built by Mussolini.
“Seventy years ago,” I said, “the Fascists were in charge here. This place might be Italian.”
“Yah?”
The colonies of Italian and British Somaliland had united in 1960 to become modern Somalia; but during World War II, they had fought on behalf of their colonial masters. Gerlach had told me one of his earliest memories was the sight of Somali soldiers marching through Galkayo for the Italians. I remembered an excellent book by Gerald Hanley called Warriors, about Somalia during and after World War II. Hanley was an ethnic Irishman, born in England and sent by the British Army to East Africa. He had no passionate loyalty to the British Empire, so his book is an independent-minded snapshot of Somalia during that dramatic span of years when war had weakened Europe’s colonial grip on much of the world and Africa was full of hope. “I can remember sitting by the waterhole,” he wrote, “wondering how it was that the war I had joined because it was against Fascism had landed me in ragged shorts and shirts in a geography like the moon where Fascism had vanished like a thin mist and the war had rolled far away into distant silences.”
Marc stood up, gingerly, to use the toilet. He was shy, almost docile, and he looked older than Rolly, though he was younger by seven years. He had imploring eyes and white-dusted hair, and he held his arms in-curled, like broken wings.
When he returned to lie down, I saw how weak his arms were from the electrocution. But I caught no trace of resentment in his manner. He was gentle and calm. He lit up when Rolly spoke to him in patois, which sounded like mischievous broken street French.*
For lunch that afternoon, the pirates delivered a large, restaurant-prepared platter of rice, yellowish and decorated with wedges of lime. For some reason, they brought a separate bowl for me.
“You get extra?” said Rolly.
“I don’t know. I don’t want extra.”
We shared it equally. Khat arrived at the house while we ate. Strange voices outside began to shout. Our guards gravitated to rooms across the hall to watch the commotion through the windows. Even Angelo stood up to crane his head.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
Angelo patted his hand at me, as if patting an invisible dog. The shouting grew louder. Angelo picked up his gun, and I felt a wash of anxiety.
“Angelo,” Rolly whispered. “Problem?”
Angelo shook his head. “Problem khat.”
The noise rose to a near riot. The only word I could make out was not khat but bariis.* That was the word for rice. “Bariis! Bariis!” the strangers were shouting. I looked at Rolly and nodded at the platter.
“Someone saw them deliver our lunch,” I said.
Either it was a food riot, or the fancy tray had tipped off a rival group to our presence. It occurred to me that members of Gerlach’s subclan might want to rescue us. A rescue by SEALs sounded risky enough; I hadn’t considered the prospect of a Somali militia battle.
The shouting grew louder. Ahmed Dirie came in to dig through a pile of belongings in the corner for his military vest, an olive-green jacket with pockets for Kalashnikov magazines. He strapped it around his belly.
“No problem,” he told us and stepped out.
Rolly grunted. On a normal day as a hostage, the worst condition is uncertainty, a sheer terror of what might happen. This riot made it worse. The ferocity of the shouting altered like the weather but never dissolved. I didn’t believe Angelo about the khat. On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine pirates growing so passionate about anything else, except maybe a fight over hostages. We heard gunfire—crackling warning gunfire, aimed at the sky—but the noise rolled on and on, rising and subsiding, for most of the afternoon. We felt like trapped animals. I don’t want to die, I thought. I don’t want to die.
The riot was a mockery of my fledgling wish for a military raid. I sat on my mattress in a pair of thin cotton shorts and a T-shirt, helpless as a boy, leaning against the yard-thick walls and wondering how to defend myself against death when it came, if it came, in a scatter of ricocheting rifle rounds.
Angelo sat down again and mumbled, “No problem.”
Rolly tapped me on the elbow. “These men always say ‘no problem,’ Michael. When they say ‘problem,’ I think on that day we die.”
“We might die right now,” I suggested.
“No say that,” Rolly answered.
When the riot dissipated, Rolly turned to our guard and said, “Angelo—why?”
“Problem, bariis?” I interjected with a crooked smile.
“Problem khat,” Angelo said.
When we complained about the wretched toilet room, pirates took us elsewhere for piss breaks and showers—out to an expanse of white rocks littered with goat and human shit. Beyond this dead zone stood the crumbling walls of an even older house, which someone had built by mortaring field rocks together. When I took a shower inside this ruin, I noticed that rotting wooden beams were slanting through the tops of the rough white walls. Also European-looking, like something from a spaghetti western.* Below us, to our right, lay the dull ranked houses of modern Hobyo. Beyond them, the vast blue sea.
I wondered if Hanley had seen these buildings after the war. He certainly knew the feelings they evoked. The heat and isolation and dry loneliness of Somalia had carried some British soldiers to the edge of suicide, and Hanley tried to make sense of the ones who pulled the trigger. “It does not follow that because all the suicides I knew were very serious, earnest men with little sense of humor, that only the humorless kill themselves when they are in good physical health and still young,” he wrote. “We do not know the size and strength of our manias until they fall upon us and drag us down, or the barrenness of our inner deserts until real loneliness, fear, bewilderment and sun-madness have cast us into them.”
I wasn’t yet in the grip of a mania—not sun-mad, not bewildered—but suicide was more than a literary topic for me. My father had killed himself. Mom had called it a heart attack to protect my impressionable mind, and I could understand the compulsion to shield a twelve-year-old kid from the shattering awareness that his father no longer wanted to live. But the fairy tale had lasted almost thirty years. I’d learned about his suicide only after some research as an adult.
I did remember Dad’s drinking bouts—how he yelled when he drank, then forgot what he yelled. He also took Tylenol with codeine. He suffered from arthritis in his back, and before my mother evicted him, I remember Dad standing up from a nap one weekend afternoon to find her watering plants in the yard. “Five hours, no pain!” he said, and he must have meant the codeine, because he said it with the earnest passion of a man who wanted to convince his wife of something questionable.
“That Tylenol is super,” he said.
“Mm-hmm,” Mom said.
Her attitude to his shysterism was to roll her eyes and keep watering the oleanders. Mom was a liberated woman for her time and place: tennis-playing, cigarette-smoking, ironic. But, even from her earliest girlhood she had a conservative understanding of right and wrong. Her first full sentence, as a two-year-old, burst out at a zoo in Frankfurt in the 1940s, when an elephant stole a wooden stick from her young hands by reaching its trunk through the bars of its cage. “Elephant took my stick,” she blurted, looking for justice from the adults around her. “But he’s not allowed.”
After seventy years that story surfaced sometimes at family dinners, in L.A. or Cologne, to howls of laughter.
Moving from a small German town to L.A. in the sixties was a long, pioneering step—glamorous from one point of view, dangerous from another—and her father at first refused to fly halfway across the planet just to visit her. The family lived in Europe, either in Catholic parts of the Rhineland in Germany or across the border in southern Holland. But Mom liked the New World. Germans impressed her as kind of stuffy and cold. She was traditional but free-spirited. She liked the weather in California; she liked the wine and the tennis in December.
She kicked Dad out at the start of 1981. He found a bachelor apartment in our neighborhood and checked himself into an alcohol rehab center called Raleigh Hills, a short-term residential hospital with psychologists and counselors, mild and soft-spoken people who, when I visited, made a point of explaining alcoholism as an incurable disease. How it altered the mind, how it could turn a strong man into a raging stranger. A twelve-year-old could understand that. But I didn’t understand the pills, and when Dad seemed to master his urge for alcohol in the middle of his year of exile, I thought he’d won. He asked to move home from his apartment. Mom said no.
“He wasn’t ready,” she said afterward. “He hadn’t even quit drinking. He certainly hadn’t given up the codeine.”
We learned about his death, at the end of the summer, only when he failed to show up for work. The police went to his apartment and opened the door. Mom came home and told me the news. I believed her heart attack version of events because everything Dad liked was bad for his heart—cigarettes, booze, the rim of fat on every barbecued steak—but even at twelve it was a surprise to hear that no one would conduct an autopsy. How could they know it was a heart attack? That discrepancy, along with some others, lingered at the back of my mind long into what I thought of as a well-adjusted adulthood. In 2010 I ordered a copy of his death certificate, on a hunch. I had just read Legend of a Suicide, the novel by David Vann, which paints an adolescence lived under the shadow of a father’s suicide. It sounded like a grim way to grow up. I’m glad that didn’t happen to me, I thought, about a week before Dad’s death certificate came in the mail.
I opened the envelope standing at my breakfast table in Berlin, which overlooked the cobblestones and the swaying, wavering, massive green trees in the park. I pulled out the colored certificate and saw four strange words in the bureaucratic box labeled cause of death:
GUNSHOT TO LEFT CHEST
I swayed a little on my feet.
At the time I was happy in Europe, far from the oppressive heat of strip malls and liquor stores in Southern California. But the notion of a gunshot blast in Dad’s little apartment brought back all the hot and stifling emotion I associated with L.A. It was jarring, revelatory, alien, bizarre.
Mom and I saw each other every year or so, either in Germany or in L.A. We had suffered a lot together, but we rarely talked about the past. We maintained a warm and cordial relationship. The unspoken idea was to keep from dramatizing our troubles, to keep from wallowing. I saw the drawbacks to this very German arrangement as well as the benefits—I wasn’t Californian enough to insist on “talking it out”—but the alternative was a closet-skeleton secrecy, a habit of suppression. In high school I had suspected Mom of “denial,” of covering something up with her cheerfulness and her relentless California pleasures, but after a while I realized the white wine and the games of tennis belonged to a conscious method of moving on.
A month after I had ordered the certificate, Mom happened to visit Berlin. I brought up the suicide over dinner at a small restaurant. She said, “Oh—yes,” as if she’d been meaning to mention it all this time.
“Was there a note?” I said.
“No note.”
And, I guess, we didn’t need one. What had happened was clear. Gutting and tragic, unspeakably bleak—but in part of my mind, for decades, perhaps I already knew.
One night Ahmed Dirie came into our room and pointed at me.
“Come on!” he said. “Get up.”
He expected me to bolt to attention. I made a point of adjusting my sling, pulling on each sock and shoe, and gathering my spare items for wherever we were headed.
Rolly groaned at my recalcitrance and muttered, “Not make them angry, Michael.”
Together with Mohammed Tahliil—the reedy group leader from our forest camp—Ahmed Dirie held my elbow and walked me across a sandy waste of weeds and goat droppings, away from Mussolini’s Farmhouse to the newer, more thickly settled area, where slab houses stood in rows. As a free man, I had eaten lunch in this neighborhood with Gerlach and Ashwin. The moon was bright, the air was misted with brine, and to our left I noticed a blinking light on top of Hobyo’s cell-phone tower.
We passed a Somali in a collared shirt, sitting on a berm of sand. I recognized Ali Duulaay and moved toward him; but the others steered me away and led me along a compound wall, where they unlocked a clanking door.
The house had raw concrete floors and slab walls painted powder blue. No furniture. A plastic-wrapped mattress and pillow waited for me on the floor of one room. It was a safe house, new looking but barren, half-built, maybe waiting for a spurt of ransom cash to finish construction. By the light of a fluorescent lantern, I unwrapped the mattress and tried to make myself comfortable. A generator grumbled in the distance.
Was this new arrangement a response to the riot outside Mussolini’s Farmhouse? A new phase of captivity? Or just softer accommodation for the American? I didn’t like one option better than the others, and while I pulled the thin blanket around my shoulders and tried to sleep, the generator stirred up dreams of helicopters and deliverance by gunfire.
I called this place “Mohammed’s House,” because Tahliil seemed to be in charge. The guards acted mild mannered, less intentionally cruel. They let me sit outdoors in the afternoon. They spread mats on the porch and offered me cigarettes and khat. A “good group.” I resisted the khat even when I felt depressed, since I didn’t want to pick up a habit, but once in a while, with a bottle of mango juice or a glass of oversweet tea, I allowed myself the pleasure of a cigarette in the prison yard.
One morning on the porch I noticed some useful items scattered on the pirates’ mat, not just Kalashnikovs and khat but also cigarette lighters, pens, and grade-school notebooks. The guards used these notebooks to keep track of their shifts.
The young pirate named Hersi offered me a cigarette. When I lit up, I noticed that his lighter had an LED at one end.
“Can I keep this?” I said.
“Haa, yes.”
Hersi flipped through a menu of songs on his phone. Pirate phones provided several forms of entertainment and distraction, not just songs but also video clips and recorded Sufi sermons.
“K’naan!” he said, and played something by the Somali-Canadian rapper.
The song Hersi had chosen—“Until the Lion Learns to Speak”—resembled a Somali folk song I had noticed in the pirates’ SUV. It had the same call-and-response, the same urgent falling rhythm. But the Somali version sounded more traditional.
Hersi and another guard talked about K’naan in excited voices. A translator named Yoonis, who sat with us on the porch, said, “They are his cousins.”
“Both of them?” I weighed the likelihood in my mind. “Both Hawiye?”*
“Yes.”
“Are you all Sa’ad?” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
I didn’t care very much.
“This group, the good group, is Sa’ad,” he said. “The big group is Hawiye and Darod.”
“A mix of clans,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Can I borrow this notebook?” I said.
“Yes.”
I scrounged a pen, too, and retreated to my room, where I started a journal. From the radio I learned the date and made small notes about each day. But I had to restrict the writing to an hour or so at a time, because it bothered my wrist.
One afternoon I took notes on a fascinating BBC report about spy plane flights over Somalia. The correspondent flew with the Royal Australian Air Force “over the pirate-infested waters off the Horn of Africa.” Its P-3 Orion amounted to an airborne surveillance station, stuffed with equipment and analysts. Every morning, these enormous planes lumbered out along predetermined paths from Bahrain, in the Persian Gulf, which told me that my guessed-at location on any given day would be one stop on a long, bureaucratic mission.
This gave me an idea. I figured drones were overhead, too, somewhere out of sight, so I started going to the bathroom with Hersi’s cigarette lighter in my shorts pocket. The sky at dawn and sunset was dusky enough to make a sharp LED shine like a dim little star—I hoped—so I aimed the light through a toilet-paper tube, to hide the glare from my guards, and flashed SOS at the sky in Morse code.
To my surprise it seemed to work. Surveillance planes started cruising low over Hobyo every other day. One afternoon, while I sat on the porch, I became aware of a distant buzz, strengthening over Hobyo like the noise we’d heard over the forest. Hersi’s eyes widened.
“Michael! AC!”
They hustled me into my bedroom and closed the dented shutters. The pirates called these aircraft “AC,” as shorthand for AC-130. The C-130 Hercules is a workhorse transport plane, similar in size to an Orion, but it can be outfitted for harder jobs, and a variant called the AC-130 gunship had hunted Somali jihadists in a battle for Ras Kamboni, near Kenya, in 2007. The carnage was so notorious, I think the pirates knew no other name.
Each room in Mohammed’s House was a cube of concrete. The prospect of a raid sending bullets around in the dark tended to paralyze me. The less confusion, I thought, the better. One morning I drew a map of the compound in my notebook. I wrote in block letters that I slept alone in this room, while guards slept in this and that room: “7 GUARDS TOTAL,” I wrote, and slipped the page into my shorts pocket.
“Kadi,” I said.
The men stood at attention with their rifles and watched me cross the yard. I locked the outhouse door and unfolded my map. No drones or planes were visible. But I knew the rumor that certain spy satellites could read license plates from orbit. It was an antiquated rumor, maybe an urban myth, but my notebook page was almost the size of an American license plate, and I had nothing better to do.
For the next week I unfolded the map on every trip to the bathroom. I made a point of taking a piss at the same time every morning, around six, because my only hope for such a desperate plan would be regular habit. I doubted a drone analyst would just stumble across an image of me flashing vital information from a compromising position; but if the LED signals drew attention to the house, and operators learned when to watch for my toilet runs, well, after a while, I thought, we might get somewhere.
My guards had a knee-jerk terror of aircraft, matched by a wild and defiant bravado, as you would, too, if you had to worry about a SEAL raid. I tried to imagine what they were thinking. The history of Somalia’s bloody relationship to air power stretched back further than Ras Kamboni or the Battle of Mogadishu. It dated to 1920, when a squadron of Royal Air Force planes landed in British Somaliland. In those days, few people on earth had seen flying machines of any kind; but Douglas James Jardine, the military chronicler of Britain’s imperial adventure in Somalia, pointed out that the “Z” squadron’s arrival in Berbera caused very little stir.
The average unsophisticated Somali, instead of expressing surprise and admiration at such a remarkable invention of modern science as the aeroplane, gave but a passing glance at the machines and remarked that the Somali would also build aeroplanes “if he only knew how.”
That’s from Jardine’s colorful but colonialist 1923 book The Mad Mullah of Somaliland. It describes the British war against Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan, who filled the same role in the Western imagination in the early 1900s that Osama bin Laden occupied a century later. According to Jardine, Sayyid Mohammed “traded upon the avarice and superstitions of his fellow-countrymen to convert them into robbers and cut-throats.” Maybe; but a lot of Somalis still consider him a national hero.
Sayyid Mohammed came from the Ogaden, northeast of Galkayo, and his fighters were Somali herdsmen who gave up traditional clan allegiances to become “dervishes,” or Sufi devotionalists.* He stirred his men through fiery sermons to a spiritual-political cause. “With all the corrosive invective of the born agitator and the recklessness of the reformer,” wrote Jardine, “he inveighed against the luxury of the age. He proclaimed that the Somalis were wasting their substance on riotous living, especially on tea-drinking. He protested against the immorality of chewing kat, or the gluttony of gorging the fat of sheep’s tail.”
Sayyid Mohammed’s odd strain of Sufism had historic links to Wahhabism,* which means that Sufi mysticism and Salafi fundamentalism aren’t mutually exclusive in this part of the world. Somalia has absorbed larger or smaller waves of fundamentalist influence from the Arabian Peninsula for at least two hundred years. The most recent wave started in the eighties, when Somali migrants moved north for Saudi service jobs. (Some came home radicalized.)
The more I thought about the tidy categories Kapuscinski had noticed in North Africa, the more they tended to blur. There was a spectrum of Muslim belief, and a tincture of Wahhabism in Somali Sufism accounted for Sayyid Mohammed’s dervish holy war.
His logic toward the British, in any case, was irrefutable. In 1903, Sayyid Mohammed wrote:
I have no cultivated fields, no silver or gold for you to take. You gained no benefit by killing my men and my country is of no good to you. . . . If you want wood and stone, you can get them in plenty. There are also many ant-heaps. The sun is very hot. All you can get from me is war. . . . If you wish peace, go away from my country to your own.
Sayyid Mohammed wanted to liberate his people from Europe and unify them under Islam, and he gave the British seventeen more years of sporadic war until London decided to solve the “dervish problem” with aircraft. The “Z” squadron’s bombing raids in early 1920 were a military experiment, the first Western air assaults in Africa. Sayyid Mohammed and his dervishes were far from prepared. One dervish told him the incoming planes were “chariots of Allah come to take the Mullah up to heaven.” Another declared them a Turkish invention from the Great War, bringing tidings of triumph from Istanbul. Sayyid Mohammed believed this man, put on his best clothes, and went out to meet the messengers.
“Then the first bomb fell,” wrote Jardine. One adviser “was killed outright, and the Mullah’s garments were singed. Thus the first shot all but ended the campaign.”
Sayyid Mohammed’s dream of a united Somalia ended that afternoon in the desert. He survived until the end of 1920, only to die of the flu.
One day I sat with Yoonis and Hersi on the porch, drinking from a bottle of mango juice and trying to enjoy the sunshine. Hersi handed me a stem of khat. “He wants to know if you are his friend,” said Yoonis. “He says he makes sure that you have mango juice and tuna fish every morning. He says you are his sahib.”
“Mm-hmm,” I said.
“He says we may not get so much payment for protecting you in this house. Not as much as we thought. He wants to know if you will send him ten thousand dollars when you are free.”
I cleared my throat and thought about it.
“Of course,” I said at last, and Hersi looked surprised.
“Yes?” he said.
“If he gets me out tomorrow, he can have my firstborn.”
Yoonis and Hersi conferred.
“He says he would rather have the money,” said Yoonis.
I shrugged and sipped my mango juice. Dry tree branches growing over the compound wall wavered in an ocean breeze. I heard cattle groan beyond it, some kind of cow or buffalo.
“Hersi wants to know,” said Yoonis finally, “if you have ever had sex with a woman with a clit.”
I nearly spat my mango juice across the porch.
“He wants to know if you can bring him one,” he added.
“A girlfriend with a clitoris?”
“Yes.”
Somehow Yoonis knew the slang word better than the real one. I squinted at him. “You mean because all the girls in Somalia are ‘circumcised’?” I said. “Don’t men in Somalia support this tradition?”
“I think it is not so much fun,” Yoonis confessed.
“Why do Somalis do it?”
“It is in the Koran.”
I shook my head. “No, it isn’t, Yoonis.”
“It is the law in all Muslim lands,” Yoonis informed me.
“That’s not true,” I said. “It’s not the law in Indonesia. Some of them do it, but it’s not the law.”
“You have experienced?” Yoonis said. “Or you have read?”
I smiled. “I have read. But I’ve been there. Indonesians are Sufis, too, you know. Same as Somalis. Most don’t cut their women.”
Yoonis shook his head. “I think this is not true,” he said.
“Do you have a Koran?”
“No.”
“You have to show me the passage where your religion orders Muslims to do this thing.” In fact, some parts of the hadith encourage it, but not the Koran. “It’s a custom from thousands of years ago, Yoonis, from ancient Egypt. Before Islam.” I was agitated now. “If Somalis didn’t cut their women, Somalia would be a happier place.”
My guards wavered; they weren’t sure it wasn’t true. But there was no convincing them.
Once, in another lifetime, I had received a nice pair of sandals from an activist in California who had appreciated a column of mine arguing against “female circumcision.” But around here—where my clever ideas might have made some difference—I had no clout.
At last I retreated to my room. The whole compound at Mohammed’s House had a terrible insect problem. Over my mattress I’d assembled a gauzy mosquito tent, which served as a retreat from all insects, the carnivorous daytime flies as well as mosquitoes at night. The patio conversation about firstborn children made me brood about my bachelor life in Berlin, my own lack of children, and my dad. I sat in the tent and started to scribble.
For thirty years I thought my father had died of a heart attack, and for almost as long I had maintained a wariness of our domestic life in Northridge, our model family, which had not filled him with understanding or joy. Alcohol and pills had eroded both. But before he killed himself, he had started to question why he worked for Lockheed, why he lived in the San Fernando Valley at all. At heart he was a fifties-style dad who liked to camp and fish, an American Romantic about the wilderness, and I remembered sitting with him in his rattling Volkswagen one hot afternoon, waiting for a red light to turn, while he gazed out the windshield through a pair of sunglasses with a look of half-astonished disgust. He took in the vast boulevard, the traffic, maybe the smog in the sky.
At last he looked at me.
“I wonder how much of our lives we waste sitting at stoplights,” he said.
This memory startled me in Somalia. His desolation before he died must have been bottomless. I had pursued a different career because of his disenchantment—I had defined myself against my father to dodge the frustrations and disillusionments that had strained his heart. I preferred cities over suburbs, I liked exotic travel, I tried to avoid most addictive drugs and eat low-cholesterol food. I thought these habits would save me from a death like his. When I learned it wasn’t a heart attack, of course, I still believed—without thinking too hard—that my career choices might keep me from suicide.
The irony appalled me now. I scribbled and scribbled. I wrote that Dad would have opposed my career. He would have hollered and yelled. And here—in a place where I had a strong and relevant opinion about female circumcision—I had no power to change a goddamn thing. But I also noticed that my notebook was becoming an essential refuge at Mohammed’s house. The stress of captivity had turned my mind into a cauldron of contradictory ideas—frustration, self-hatred, surprising impulses to violence—and nothing but the discipline of composition could lead me out of the soup. When I thought about it like that, I could answer the criticisms, in his voice, that rose in my imagination while I sat alone under the mosquito tent, these nightmarish and unanswerable condemnations from beyond the grave. Writing is impractical, selfish, narcissistic, and soft. Maybe; but I had found pleasure in it as a young man because it could reframe a scrambled mind. Good writing could be a release from narcissism, a declaration of independence, a way to order and furnish the mental prison.
You’re not real independent now, are you?
No, Dad, not exactly. Thanks for asking.
On a warm night in February, the men at Mohammed’s House woke me up by the glare of a fluorescent lantern and crammed me into a Land Rover. They bristled with weapons and ammunition. Tahliil drove us out of Hobyo and across the moonlit waste for more than an hour. A strong beam of light flashed across the bush like a beacon, and Tahliil aimed for it until we pulled beside a pair of unknown cars. Yoonis and Tahliil then grasped my elbows and walked me to a cluster of eight or ten Somalis squatting in the dust.
“Hello, Michael,” a plump man said. “My name is Mohamed.”
I wore nothing but thin cotton shorts and a T-shirt. I felt vulnerable and terrified. The boss in the middle, sitting cross-legged, had fat cheeks and a peculiar squint, heavy lidded and insolent. He acted groggy, like a man who needed his khat, and he drew a pall of quiet menace around himself, a fear I could sense from his gunmen. He spoke in a high, almost childish voice.
“We will make a phone call,” he told me, “to someone who can help with your case. You must tell him that I need a letter from President Obama. It must request that I will be the main negotiator for your case, and it must declare me innocent of your kidnapping. It must have an official seal, from the White House.”
“I’ll need your full name,” I said.
“Just tell them Mohamed; that is enough,” he said. “And you must tell them that these pirates want their money right now. It is very important.”
“How much is the demand?” I said.
“Twenty million dollars.”
I felt sick to my stomach. The outrageous demand was still in place. After a month of captivity, nothing had changed.
The boss dialed a private American negotiator on his orange-glowing Samsung. The number placed the negotiator in Washington, D.C., and the voice on the phone was sane and good-humored. It calmed me to hear clarity in my own language after so many weeks of confusion.
“The gentleman who handed you the phone: Is that the first time you’re meeting him?” said the negotiator. “Or you’ve chatted with him before?”
“No, it’s the first time.”
“That’s the main guy in charge, just so you know. That’s Mohamed Garfanji,” he said, and my vision swam—my blood felt just like ice water. Until then Garfanji had been a phantom, a figment of a rumor, and it weakened me to think that I was at his mercy.
“Has he made a demand?” the negotiator asked.
“Yes, he wants twenty million dollars and some kind of form letter from the White House.”
“Signed by Obama!” Garfanji shouted. “It must say I am innocent!”
“He’s asking for twenty million dollars?” the negotiator said, with just a hitch in his professional manner—he sounded surprised.
“Yeah, and a letter from the White House,” I said.
“It must say I am innocent!” Garfanji shouted.
To this demand the negotiator gave a quiet, self-assured laugh.
He’d been contacted through the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, he said. He reassured me that people were trying to help. Then he tried to patch our call through to my mother. “Just bear with me.” I heard a phone ring, and my mother said “Hello?” in the tone of someone who was not, at that moment, dreading a call from Somalia. We’d caught her off guard. By then she had a “command center” established in the dining room—she kept a phone on the table, surrounded by notebooks and coffee mugs and lists of questions to ask. The phone had been souped up with caller ID, “so I would know who was calling me,” she said, and this ever shifting mess remained on the table for most of my captivity.
“Hi, Mom, it’s Mike.”
“Hi, Michael, it’s so good to hear your voice!”
“I’m just calling—uh, to say hello,” I faltered. “And I miss you.”
These phone calls, with their intense pressure and terrible connections, were masterpieces of understatement. Hearing her voice was like hearing music for the first time in weeks. I thought about my family and friends every day, but Mom’s voice brought back the dry heat of Los Angeles and all the changing resonance of the word home, this old carousel of personal scenery, from Northridge to the beach to the sound of German voices in Berlin. My heart unraveled like a film reel.
“Are you healthy?” she said.
“Uh, yes,” I said. “Terrified, but basically in good shape. A little food and a little water every day.”
“After we talked last time,” she said, “we continued to call that number they gave us, but there was never any answer.”
I started to wonder if Garfanji was the same person as Omar, the high-voiced Somali on the bluff. He seemed to be a different man. But in the dark it was hard to tell. After more confused conversation, I worked up my courage to speak German, to test whether Garfanji knew the difference. I babbled about a duffel bag I had left in a Nairobi hotel, containing my U.S. passport and a laptop. “Somebody found the bag,” Mom said in German. “It was transferred to the U.S. embassy.”
“That’s very good,” I said.
So government people were taking care of her. It eased my mind. I could also tell, from Garfanji’s glazed expression, that he wasn’t following our chitchat. I added in German that I had “nothing against” a military raid—“regardless of what the pirates here say.”
“Yes,” Mom said. “Yes. Exactly.”
Most of the time she sounded earnest on the phone, striving to hear my voice or just to understand this freakish situation; but she could also be guarded and veiled. She had a poker hand to play. Now she exposed a tough lack of sentimentality, a seeming indifference to the danger of a rescue. I didn’t mind at all. The pirates’ erratic behavior had steeled us both against the prospect of a raid.
“Time’s off,” Garfanji said. “Come on.”
I finished up and handed him the phone. The call had accomplished nothing. Twenty million dollars was a ridiculous outrage—Garfanji understood that as well as the rest of us. He started to scroll through some files on the phone menu and said, in an apathetic slur, “Your people have killed nine of my people. If they try it with you, we will shoot you.”
“What happened?” I said.
“There was a rescue operation,” he said vaguely.
I wanted to know if the hostages were safe, so I repeated my question from the phone call on the bluff.
“What happened to the hostages?”
“They were both killed.”
My lungs constricted; my chest seemed to squeeze and bleed. Garfanji tapped his screen to open a sound file and tossed his phone in the dust. I didn’t want to hear about dead hostages. But a news clip on Garfanji’s phone explained in clear English that two aid workers held captive in Somalia since the fall of 2011 had been flown by U.S. helicopters, alive, to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti.
My heart thumped with hope.
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” I told Garfanji, and I think no one in that circle of pirates could tell how the phone had made a fool of their boss, by revealing his poor command of English.
My mother and the FBI in California ignored Garfanji’s demand for a letter, but the way he insisted on a pardon from the president, on embossed letterhead, did suggest he was half-insane. “We wondered if he was the same person as Omar,” Mom said later. Garfanji became an inconstant, flickering figure to me. I met Omar in the sunshine on a bluff, Garfanji in the sandy waste under a full moon; and in the panic of a hostage’s mind, maybe one person could seem like two people, and two people could seem like one.
“Mohamed Garfanji”—also known as Mohamed Osman Mohamed—invested in real estate, both in Galmudug and outside Somalia. “He likes to drink, he likes women, and he likes to beat the shit out of people,” a security contractor told me later. “He’s close to the Somali government, and he wants to be in the government, so he puts his men to work as if they were the government.” That meant patrolling the oceans and cultivating a “coast guard” image off Somalia as well as providing security forces for smaller Galmudug towns. He was a Suleiman, not a Sa’ad, but both clans belonged to a larger clan called the Habar Gidir. They could work together. Garfanji kept a private militia in Hobyo, but his pirates tended to be inland bandits and irregular fighters, closer to the violent highwaymen called shifta than to fishermen.
The word shifta derived from another clan, the Mshifta, but referred to “any roaming bandit in the great desert that extended from Somalia to Sudan and took in the whole of northern Kenya,” according to Paul Theroux, who’d met them in southern Ethiopia. Garfanji hired men like that. A number of central-Somali pirates no doubt were former fishermen who needed jobs, but most of the foot soldiers I met came from Galkayo or landlocked nomadic villages. They were children of the desert bush.
One reason piracy spiked in the early 2000s, in fact, was that security forces in Puntland went unpaid—and so many of the gunmen simply turned to different work.
Garfanji also played a social justice game, a Robin Hood gambit for popular support intended to blunt local opposition to his crimes. He paid doctors’ bills in Hobyo. He made generous loans. He offered people jobs. He kept them from starvation. “There are no beggars in Hobyo,” Gerlach told me. “Garfanji is very popular there.”
So from one point of view, Garfanji was a monster. From another, he was a social-minded capitalist working in tough terrain. I didn’t want either manifestation talking on the phone to my mom. But her poise surprised the FBI. Even when a phone call took her by surprise, she snapped to attention. “She amazed all of us,” one agent said later. “It didn’t seem to matter how much stress or anxiety she had—she could switch it on or off. Once she got on the phone, she was totally on point.”
Mom was never aware of Garfanji as an individual boss. The name she heard most often on the phone was “Abdi Yare.”* But several bosses used that nickname, and Mom couldn’t tell which boss was which. During a conference call with three top-ranking pirates, she tried to distinguish each voice, one at a time, without success. “They didn’t want to talk,” she said, except through a translator. “And I was shaking inside. But I figured if I burst out in tears, that wouldn’t work. They had no compassion. So I tried to just keep to the subject, and keep on repeating what I was trying to say. Sometimes I sounded like a broken record.”
She dealt with the stress on the tennis court. Golf had become her retirement game, but somehow tennis felt more satisfying while I was in Somalia. Between ransom calls, she reverted to her more strenuous sport. “I needed something to hit with a racket,” she told me. “And I thought of the ball as Abdi Yare’s head.”
Plane visits over Hobyo became more common after the phone call, and for the next two weeks, at Mohammed’s House, I made a strict habit of unfolding my hand-drawn map in the outhouse and flashing Morse code at the sky. The sound of aircraft tracing a wide arc overhead could lift my mood for hours. Otherwise Mohammed’s prison compound was a tedious and nasty solitary confinement, and in spite of the relative calm I preferred the Italian ruin with Rolly and Marc. I missed Rolly’s conversation; I missed the way he said, “We are prizhonerr,” and explained things to me with one palm open, like an old Frenchman making an appeal.
One afternoon in the first or second week of March, I heard a commotion on the porch and saw a black arm, with a gold wristwatch, point into my room. Ali Duulaay. I sat in the mosquito tent with a notebook and pen. Duulaay wanted to know from the guards why I wasn’t ready to leave. With a wash of dread I tossed my radio and notebooks into a plastic bag, and Duulaay lurched in wearing his rifle. He threatened me with it and shook the curved ribs of the tent. There was no time to grab an important bag of clothes, and I left other things hanging or scattered around the room—towel, toothbrush, leather jacket concealing my LED lighter. Since I was barefoot, I stopped to put on my shoes. Duulaay pinched a slab of flesh in my side and twisted.
“Go, go, go, go,” he said.
A white car waited in the road. I climbed in front, and Duulaay crammed into the rear. Other pirates glared at me from the back seat while we sped off, as if I were the source of their trouble; Duulaay muttered something bitter and slugged me in the head.
Soon another car caught up to us, churning dust. We bounced through the trackless bush, over ridges and rocks, and my head whanged with adrenaline. We arrived at some kind of gully south of Hobyo, another dry riverbed cut into the sand. Somalis piled out of the second car with equipment—pots, mattresses, weapons—and two other hostages made their way toward the wadi. Even at a distance, with blurry eyes, I recognized Rolly and Marc.
The Somalis flopped our mattresses at the foot of a crumbling six-foot bank. A tree with its root system exposed in the wall of dirt stretched up a canopy of leaves. We had to lie beside the roots. Nervous birds fluttered and chirped overhead.
“Ali come get you?” said Rolly.
“Yeah. I didn’t have time to bring my clothes.”
“What you got there?” He nodded at my plastic bag.
“Notebooks. A change of shorts.”
“Marc, also. Ali come in and say, ‘Go, go, go.’ I no listen, I take my time, I duck under Ali’s arm,” he said. “I got all my bags. But Marc have to go without his things.”
“Why do you think we left in such a hurry?” I said.
“I not know.”
The open bush struck me as a good staging area for a SEAL raid, less dangerous than a house with concrete walls. I didn’t mind the prospect of my friends getting rescued, too. But Rolly’s face worked again with nervous anguish, maybe churning through his old, unchanging trenches of thought. At last he made his declaration.
“Now we in the desert,” he said.
A pirate came down to attach a blanket to the thorny tree branches over our head. “No blanket,” I objected, meaning I didn’t want the shade, but he insisted. “Because qorrax,” he said, meaning sun, but I knew very well it wasn’t because of the sun.
Fifteen or twenty minutes later, we saw the glint of an aircraft to the south.
“Is an airplane,” said Rolly.
The Somali hadn’t dangled a blanket on that side, so I mumbled, “It can see all three of us.”
“Is too far, Michael.”
“I doubt that.”
A nearby pirate lit a cigarette, using an LED-equipped lighter, so I bummed a smoke. When he obliged, I palmed the lighter. It would have been appalling manners anywhere else in the world, but the guard just nodded and smiled. There was no shortage of lighters in the camp. Now I had a flashlight again.
Later the pirates delivered thick, sturdy rubber thongs in a plastic package marked made in thailand. These Thai sandals replaced my shoes. We each received a pair, and we quibbled about the colors. Rolly took yellow, Marc took orange, I took light blue.
I explained to the pirates that because of Ali Duulaay, we lacked other important items. Marc had no blanket. I had no coat. “Tonight, cold,” I told them. “Desert, cold.”
“Haa.” Yes.
“Jacket coming?”
“No problem.”
An hour later, I stood up to unhook the blanket from thorns in the tree. The Somalis stared. I handed it to Marc. The guards weren’t about to confiscate the blanket from an old man, so, after a while, a pirate came around to hang a new blanket, a pink one with flowers, to protect us from the “sun.”
“No blanket,” I protested.
“Haa, blanket.”
“Jacket coming?”
“No problem.”
None materialized, so by the end of the day, when sundown had cooled the air, I made the same complaint.
“No jacket. Problem!” I said, and stood up to unhook the pink blanket from the tree. “Tonight, cold!”
Now we had a flashlight, two blankets, and nothing to block the view of another surveillance plane. Rolly found it amusing. But he wiped his anguished face with one hand and said, with as much irony as force of habit, “Not make them angry, Michael . . .”
“Okay, Rolly.” I smiled. “I’ll try.”
We spent most of March in the desert bush: a week under the bird-infested tree, then more time under an arching white thorn bramble, a cluster of bushes so large that Rolly could stand up inside it. We ate car-delivered pasta from plastic sacks and listened to the radio. The white thorns were supposed to shield us from overhead view, but I made a point of flashing the sky with my cigarette lighter in the morning and evening, away from camp, when I went to relieve myself in the weeds. Large planes cruised near us twice a week.
Meanwhile, I scribbled in my notebook. Whenever a guard noticed, I told him that writing helped my wrist heal. Most of the pirates didn’t give a damn, but I felt an instinct to keep the book hidden from Ahmed Dirie.
One afternoon, the fading sunlight in our thorn bramble struck a fat bead of red sap bulging from a branch. I reached up from my mattress to inspect it. I’d never seen such a garnet color seep out of a plant before. These white thornbushes were a source of myrrh resin—they grow across Yemen and Somalia and parts of Ethiopia—so the symbolism was about as subtle as a crucifix on Mexican velvet. But Rolly said, “You know, Michael, in my country, we say when you see thorns, you going to heaven. But when you see flowers, then you going to hell.”
I cleared my throat.
“Well, we haven’t seen a flower in months,” I said. “We must be doing okay.”
“Yes, but . . .” He looked deeply troubled. He had just lost a rosary, a charm he’d rescued from the Aride. “I not know if I believe that now.”
Late one morning, we piled into a pair of cars and drove north for most of the day. Near sundown we found a strange village close to the coast, a near ghost town with widely spaced stone buildings. We parked outside this village, seemingly at random, and Ahmed Dirie climbed out to stand next to our car with his phone in the air, as if to check for signals. He gave me a rotten smile.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“No problem.”
The evening sun cast a sulfurous, green-yellow light. The pirates ordered Rolly out and led him to a distant rise overlooking the ocean, just out of sight, where he had to dial his family in the Seychelles. But something went wrong with the connection. There seemed to be no other point to our endless drive, as if we’d come all the way up here to shake aerial surveillance, to make a phone call to Mahé in signal-free air, without interference from international authorities—only the line was busy.
We continued north while the sun disappeared. In the dark we crossed an expanse of desert on a straight highway made of powdery dust. Nothing seemed to exist in the damnable blackness outside, and we spent almost an hour on the same unbending road. We drifted through the darkness on the soft dust, and the only feature I remember was another Land Rover, silver painted but blank as a shipwreck, rearing into view so fast that our driver had to jerk the steering wheel.
Abandoned. Someone else had tried to cross this desert, and failed.
Late the same night we drove into some hills and found a small cluster of huts. A herding family with curious children had prepared a place for us to sleep. In absolute silence they watched us, these ragged foreign strangers, as well as the glamorous pirates with their guns. A young girl climbed out of a squat hut the size of a doghouse, where we were supposed to sleep, and her innocence, her thirsty curious eyes, broke me open like an egg. Her presence was a stark, astonishing exception to the anger and sarcasm I had felt aimed in my direction for more than two months. The night felt cold, windless, and silent like no part of the world I’d ever seen.
“I been here before,” mumbled Rolly after we settled into the little hut. “They take us here once before.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yah, we come up from Hobyo. While you live in that house.”
“How long?” I said.
“Five, six days, like that. We live in this hut. They make Marc pee in a bottle.”
“Why?”
“They no let him outside.”
We did get to leave the hut for bathroom breaks, but the emptiness of the countryside, whenever I did, alarmed me. The thornbushes grew evenly spaced, brown instead of white, all about three feet high. There were no acacia trees, nothing remarkable besides this single, far-flung breed of vegetation. Dying out here would be like drowning at sea. No one would even notice. We’d ventured beyond any landmarks that could help me orient my mind, and the long detour had frayed my sense of forward motion toward freedom. I just felt whirl and watery fear. I retraced our car trip and tried to fathom how I had arrived at this precise corner of the world, squatting near a thornbush and flashing the sky with my ridiculous LED, through a tube of toilet paper.
On the first evening, I noticed a boy from the nomad family, far off to one side. He’d followed me out here. Was he spying on my Morse-code habits? I put the lighter away, but while I pissed in the weeds, I tried to weigh my ambition to write a unique book about Somalia against the vastation of this place.
You have made a mistake, Boodiin had said. Mistakes are human.
On the second night, I went out to pee and noticed Ahmed Dirie and one other pirate pointing at the sky. One of them said “aeroplane,” and after an hour they gave us an unexpected order to move. If dodging surveillance was the purpose of this detour, it had failed. Drones, or something, had pursued us. The pirates filled our car with mattresses, provisions, and cooking pots. Before we drove off, they searched my belongings. The LED cigarette lighter was in the pocket of my cotton shorts, which they didn’t check. But Ahmed Dirie found my notebook.
“What is this?” he said, flipping through the tightly written pages.
“Practice. For my wrist.”
Abdinasser the Sahib backed me up. He argued my case in Somali. Ahmed Dirie gave me a bitter squint, and rolled up the notebook to keep for himself. Weeks of therapeutic note-taking disappeared into his dusty bag.
“You respect me!” he ordered, and lifted his rifle.
“Oh, sure, boss,” I said.
“You have a flashlight?” he asked in Somali.
Someone translated, and I said no, hoping they wouldn’t search my shorts.
“Do you flash signals at satellites in the sky?” he said.
“No.”
“If you flash signals at the sky, you will go down!” said Ahmed Dirie. He clicked the safety off his rifle and aimed the barrel at my chest. “You—like Michael Jackson,” he said. “Boom. Dead!”
“I understand.”
“You respect me!” he shouted.
“Oh, I respect you, boss.”
“Or BOOM—down!”
“That’s right.”
Reluctantly, to my considerable surprise, he returned the notebook. After nightfall we took off under a fat moon. I recognized some of the silvered landscape and a few turns in the road. We started to speed along the straight, soft highway, and the driver bounced his wheels over stray rocks and jammed them into potholes. At last the abandoned Land Rover loomed up again like a ghost.
Rolly cried, “Oh! Jesus,” and I grimaced. I thought we might flip the car. Instead we slammed into a pothole, and the left front wheel started to knock like a hammer.
Ahmed Dirie told the driver to stop.
“We’re fucked,” I mumbled to Rolly.
“Why you say that?”
They hauled out a jack to lift the car. In the glare of a flashlight, they banged and twisted with hammers and wrenches until someone decided the wheel was fixed. The driver started again at a prudent speed. At last—still nervous about aircraft, I think, but convinced the wheel would hold—he stood on the gas.
It was like floating through darkness again, fishtailing along that soft, ethereal highway with almost no feeling of gravity, not even traction, until the left wheel slammed into another hole and we slid to a stop with the front axle leaning into the dust.
“Oh, Jesus,” Rolly said again.
“Told you we were fucked,” I mumbled.
“What happened?”
“Rolly, we lost a wheel.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
The sheer alarming stupidity of breaking off a wheel in the middle of the desert while running from a plane, or a drone, or nothing at all, made the blood pound and slosh in my head. There had to be a limit to the volume of absurdity we could suffer. But no nightmare dissipated, no director lowered his jib crane to stop the idiotic film, and no American analyst seemed to recognize this car accident as a wide-open chance to rescue three stranded hostages. “There is nothing like isolation in an atmosphere of electric violence for bringing before one’s mind the understanding that the varnish of two thousand years is so thin as to be transparent,” wrote Hanley in Warriors. “It is living in civilization that keeps us civilized. It is very surprising, and alarming at first, how swiftly it vanishes when one is threatened by other men, men of almost mindless resolve.”
The rest of the night was too dumb to explain. But I noticed that living among lunatic people had made me depressed and lunatic, too. Hanley was right: chaos was contagious. Pirates acted like criminals because they belonged to a criminal gang. While we sat in the car and waited for them to solve our asinine situation I considered filching a Kalashnikov and solving it myself. I knew how to fire a weapon, but I wasn’t a gunman, and without glasses I was half-blind. Not a good combination. But idiocy, evil, and entropy fed on themselves like a hurricane over warm water.
We returned to Mussolini’s Farmhouse the next day in another car, and stayed about a week. One evening, I went out to piss on the white rocks and noticed a line of sharp lights on the dusky water. I didn’t mention them afterward to Rolly, because I didn’t know what they were, but the next morning, after he and Marc had traded shifts outside, Rolly said from his mattress, “Big ship, eh?”
“What?”
“Big ship in the water. Must be fifty meters, like that.”
My heart fluttered. “Did it have a flag?”
“I didn’t see no flag.”
I went out to the white rocks myself and saw the vessel in broad daylight—a long, rusted, industrial-looking tub with a white bridge tower. Not a warship, not a freighter.
“Angelo say is from this pirate group,” Rolly said when I returned. “Is hijacked.”
“Oh. Where’s it from?”
“He say China.”
Our relationship with this vessel developed in quick phases. First, we almost ran out of toilet paper. When we harassed Ahmed Dirie for more, he brought a Chinese-printed package of coarse, flat, folded stuff that was like paper towels.
A few days later, I went for a shower in the white stone ruin, shadowed by a tall Somali named Issa. He told me to take a “one-minute” shower, and while I tilted a plastic yellow jerry can full of water over my head, we heard the thump of a helicopter. I squatted behind a window of the ruin and watched. The wasplike helo raced across the ocean and circled the ship. Issa waved me over to a wall, where he stood holding his rifle.
“Get down!”
“What’s the problem?” I said.
“NATO!” said Issa.
NATO was an all-purpose term for him, but NATO warships in fact worked only in the Gulf of Aden. The central Somali coast was monitored by the EU and a U.S.-led naval group. Either way, it was interesting. I took my time hiding behind the broken front wall.
That night the pirates woke up Rolly and me and hustled us into a car. We slept in the bush again, with Ahmed Dirie’s group of guards. Despite the pirates’ efforts to keep us out of sight, we were harassed by aircraft for almost a week. In mid-April—after days of playing tag with surveillance planes in the bush, moving camp almost every night—we packed up in the dark, and someone confiscated my notebook and radio. We drove for an hour and swapped vehicles among chaotic promises of freedom. “Make a good telephone call,” said one guard, obscurely. “Adiga, free!” But there was no phone call. Instead we sped toward the coast, and while I considered how it might feel to see my family and friends again, our driver steered crazily through the quiet houses of Hobyo, past dimly lit businesses and food shacks—where townspeople had gathered for late-night meals—and raced across the curving beach until the Land Rover came to a stop beside the water’s edge.
“What are we doing?” I said.
“Go, go, go, go.”
A skiff had drawn up under the moon. With our Thai sandals in our hands, we waded into lukewarm surf. Pirates hopped in and told me to keep my pink blanket on my head, while the pilot puttered our skiff over crumbling whitewash, then higher swells, and around the seawall of rock, which Hamid, in a different lifetime, had insisted should be a loading pier.
Then the pilot opened his throttle. He pushed us faster over the swells, up and down, causing the hull to slap. The blanket slipped off my head. We spent more and more time in the air between each wave.
“Slow down!” I shouted into the wind.
One pirate motioned as if he expected me to fix my pink head covering. For that I would have to let go of the rail.
“Slow the fuck down!” I shouted.
The guards sat on a relatively stable bulkhead at the rear of the boat. We sat in the bouncing front. As we picked up speed, Rolly shifted his weight off our bulkhead and squatted in the hull, holding the rail with one tight-knuckled hand. He used his knees to absorb the motion of the waves, and I tried to do the same, but we flew over another swell and the boat dropped away from my butt. Our bulkhead floated downward, leaving me in the air. When we came together again, the bulkhead hammered my spine, and pain shot from my tailbone to the base of my skull. I collapsed into the bottom of the skiff. (“I see you go down,” Rolly said later. “You go down like a leaf.”)
The pilot brought his speed under control. I managed to sit up, but my back throbbed. We pulled alongside the ship, and someone hurled a rope. The motion of the rolling hull, together with the waves, bounced our boat like an elevator, and a pirate showed us how to climb up. Rolly did it first, standing on the skiff’s prow until a cutaway section of the gunwale lurched into range. Someone lifted him, he grabbed the gunwale, and a group of Somalis on the ship leaned over to grasp his shoulders and pull him aboard.
I went up the same way. My back hurt, but the feeling of four men lifting me helpfully by the shoulders was a strange distraction. We found ourselves on a square deck lit with sharp white lamps, where dozens of Chinese-looking hostages lay on mats, arranged like dominoes. We had woken them up. The Somalis led us up a set of metal stairs and around to a forward section of the ship, where our two mattresses waited on the upper deck.
“Sleeping, sleeping,” they said.
I certainly wanted to be unconscious. But my sore spine kept me aware of the ocean wind and a large number of spidery, unknown pirate guards. My notebooks and radio were gone. I wondered if the Somalis had moved us here to dodge a raid on land. If so, everything had to reset. Drones would have to find us again. Military plans, if any, would be redrawn. Three wasted months in filthy prison houses and the desert bush had themselves gone to waste. My breathing came fast. I still wanted forward momentum, progress, logic, but instead I felt the edge of an emotional hurricane, the whistle of a gathering panic. Several hours earlier I had indulged fantasies of freedom; now I was injured and stuck on a ship. For the first time in Somalia, but not the last, I considered suicide.
One common story about the trauma of gunfire is that you feel the bullets at first like a spatter of rain. The body registers a brush of metal but recoils from the rest of the damage in a merciful cloud of shock. The burning horror comes later. On the deck of this windblown vessel I think my captivity first started to feel really hopeless. I couldn’t see well in the dark, my back radiated pain, and, with my notebook gone, I wondered how to sort out the confusion in my head. The notes also represented a small pile of work, so my time on land seemed triply wasted. And the confusion of ocean elements didn’t help. I thought our vessel had started to move. Seagulls flapped into the wind under the strong deck lamps, not flying forward but scouting for fish in the artificial light; they seemed to glide and flap next to a sailing ship. I didn’t realize the vessel was straining against its anchor chain in a stiff current. It wavered back and forth in the water, so the moon changed position in the sky, and the flapping of the birds, with the shifting of the moon, gave me the false impression that we were motoring north. This wrong idea infested me with a ferocious despair, and after a long sail to some forsaken part of the Somali coast, I thought, the pirates would no doubt assemble armies of men to defend this vessel of the damned; and it was time, at last, to check out.