THERE WAS ANOTHER near miss earlier this morning, not from a bullet but from Nature herself. I was sitting on my bunk after the ritual cold shower and had begun to slip on my work boots. Andrew interrupted my still-unformed thoughts with an announcement that he had asked the pilot of the Cessna Caravan, one of the smaller cargo rotations that occasionally stops here, to drop off a case of beer.
“Well, hot damn!” My boot slipped out of my hands onto the cement floor, and from out of the overturned shoe crawled a three-inch scorpion. Its lethal arrowhead tail, curved back over itself, weaved from side to side, looking like it desperately needed to sink its stinger into some warm meat.
I picked up the other boot and began the swing that would conclude its existence. Pausing in midair, I tossed the boot aside, worked a newspaper under the hapless critter, and flicked it out the broken window.
* * *
For some reason, I feel that this is going to be a very fine day—a day when nothing extraordinary occurs. I go to work, I get a job done, I return, and if Andrew works miracles, we sink into a few cold beers in the evening. I am in a terrific mood.
After climbing into the rig, Harun pushes a tape into the dashboard radio, turns, and offers me a fresh mswaki stick—is this a message? The squeal from the rusted-metal-coated cassette tape combined with the discordant Arabic melody is difficult at this early hour, and Harun, seeing me wince, turns it down to a lesser pain.
Isa has replaced one of the backseat boys, and he sits in silence next to me with the cataleptic immobility of a palace guard, his hands clutching the barrel of his Kalashnikov between his knees. I wonder what has become of the previous guard—this was good money for him. I don’t ask.
We pile out at the warehouses. Isa walks toward the high grass, unzipping his fly, while the others and I head toward the line of rusting shipping containers on the wharf.
My task today is to prepare a jetty at the far end of the port to accommodate my two boats and possibly others that will be flown in. I need wire rope to string tractor tires together for fenders over the pier wall.
At midday, the hard white heat becomes insufferable. Finding shade next to a container, I sit on some cement blocks on the pier and begin to splice the wire. I work alone while Chaco, the silent mobile-crane operator with a round face under an old sweat-stained fedora (I had thought my father, an old “newspaperman,” was the last on earth to wear a fedora), uncoils more cable a few yards away. Isa and the other port security men and a lone guard in the blue pajamas sit nearby, finger-eating bowls of rice. The slow-moving Unicef guard is officially assigned as my personal protector, but past experience has shown that the Unicef boys—unless confronted by unarmed demonstrators—are harmless; they collect their money and disappear at the first sound of someone else’s gunfire.
A large gray trawler, otter doors hanging brokenly over its rusting deck, lists against the dockside in a state of decay. The name on the bow is covered over by a hasty slash of white paint, but her home port, welded on the transom, is clearly visible: Bergen. Why a Norwegian boat has been fishing off this dangerous pirate-infested coast is anybody’s guess.
A coastal tanker, tied up and leaning against the wharf in front of the boat, appears even more derelict. The pier is a buttress, and were it not for its support, the ship would roll over and capsize. It is evident that there has been some effort to change the vessel’s identity. The Somali flag, a white star against a baby blue background, has been freshly painted on the funnel, but the paint job on the rust-streaked black hull has been only partially completed. The painters either ran out of paint, out of money, or out of hope.
“Captain!” one of the guards yells at me. “You sit on mosque! Please, Captain!”
I rise quickly. Their makeshift mosque is merely an outline of cement blocks. I was squatting on the apse that faces north by northeast in the general direction of Mecca.
A little embarrassed, I wander over to the fishing boat, swing my legs over the gunnels onto the deck, and climb the ladder to the bridge. The Unicef guard follows. She was once a fine vessel—Furuno radar, joystick controls, forward-looking fish sonar, weather fax, video screen for deck operations, and GPS.
“Pirate,” the Unicef guard announces.
“This ship, taken by pirates?”
“Some months past.”
The sixteen-hundred-mile shipping route along this coast, the length of the U.S. West Coast, is one of the most active areas in the world for piracy. While the swashbuckling days of Blackbeard, Captain Morgan, and Captain Kidd are legend, piracy is all too real to the hundreds of seafaring men and women who have been injured or have lost their lives in battles with modern-day pirates. Warlords with radar and fast boats lie in wait on the coast and dispatch their militia to ambush passing unsuspecting vessels. Every type of vessel is vulnerable—fishing boats, cargo vessels, even sailboats. Recently a Finnish couple on their sailboat was attacked by gunmen of the Somali Salvation Democratic Front. They were released after ransom was paid, but their proud little boat became the personal yacht of the warlord.
More recently, the International Maritime Bureau of the International Chamber of Commerce, which keeps track of such things, reported one incident in their quarterly assessment of the crime:
Cyprus registered Bulk Carrier M/V Trader. 12:00N, 051:30E, off Socotra Island, Somalia. While underway, four speedboats with four pirates armed with high-powered guns in each boat chased the ship. Despite taking evasive measures, four pirates managed to board forward and attempted to enter accommodation. Crewmembers using fire hoses, rocket flares and iron bars fought the pirates and prevented the pirates from entering accommodation.
This was one of 297 reported pirate attacks in 1997, an increase of 400 percent over the total ten years before.
It is not hard to imagine the fear of these civilian crew members on this fishing boat, armed only with pipe cheaters, wrenches, and a few fire extinguishers as they fought for their lives and their ship. Standing on the bridge of this luckless trawler, I am struck by the similarities—unarmed crew members, unarmed relief workers just doing their jobs, never expecting that their lives are in the hands of madmen; in Somalia, the thugs are the same.
There are two other vessels here in port, both large Arab dhows, traditional cargo vessels that have for centuries traded between the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa. Sailing ships such as these transported the sub-Saharan slaves to the Persian Gulf from ports in Kenya and Tanzania and ran the spice trade from Zanzibar. These dhows, about ninety feet long, have forsaken their beautiful lateen rigs for large high-capacity diesel engines.
Tied to the far end of the wharf, the boats appear oddly distant and remote. Somnambulant crewmen on one boat, dressed in white djellabas that are darkened with soot, stretch out atop leaking sacks of charcoal. The ship represents Kismayo’s primary commerce with the outside world, importing maize meal and flour and returning to Saudi Arabia and other Arab states with charcoal, a fuel vital to Arab cooking. The commerce of Somalia’s “black gold” made from hundred-year-old acacia trees has resulted in nearly complete deforestation of once forest-rich areas along the southern and middle Jubba.
The second dhow, its wood sides painted with fancy Arabic scrollwork in green, red, black, and yellow, is tied even further away. This is no charcoal boat and may well represent a commerce of less legitimacy; it looks sleek, its bow less flared and its deck clear of anything but crew busy off-loading wooden crates about six feet long, eighteen inches high. The crewmen of this boat are dressed in shorts and T-shirts, look younger and more fit, almost military. They work efficiently, using the boom as a crane to lift the crates out of the hold onto the wharf. A few guards stand casually off to the side, smoking, their rifles slung over their shoulders, while an older bearded man in a clean white robe who doesn’t look Somali at all directs the off-loading. I wonder whose militia this is?
Returning to my cable-splicing on the wharf, I feel a wind of commotion behind us. I turn slowly. You learn never to make any sudden movements. Three young gunmen are running toward us, screaming, waving their assault rifles in the air, like the final charge. The port guards jump to their feet and wait for whatever will happen next.
A couple of rifle lengths away, the boys peel off to the right toward the fishing boat. They look like they are just having fun.
The guards drop their bowls with a clatter and order them to stop.
The gunmen jump onto the deck of the fishing boat and laugh obscenities back. One of the guards grabs his Kalashnikov, slams back the cocking spring, and, in hip-shot Rambo fashion, fires into the air. This damn well changes the mood.
The three on the boat stop in their tracks, swing around, and point their guns at us. The young leader, the tallest boy, with a thin black mustache and a pock-dented face, notices me. He smiles—a big, friendly, qat-stained grin, as if he was recognizing an old friend. Stupidly, I find myself smiling back. But there is no friendship in his eyes. His look taunts and it seems now less of a grin than a smirk, a boastful challenge. I try to read his face but I cannot. I do understand his rifle that is pointed in our direction.
I experience an emotional absence, a distance between another gun and me. This is serious but I am not frightened; whether from near burnout from fear past or simply because there are the guards, I stand, watch, wait. I sense more than hear the metallic clacking, a muted sound so far away: Now all the guns are cocked.
A curtain slides in front of me. Instead of the boy’s big gun and his vacuous and stupid expression, there is only the back of a floppy palm-frond hat and a long black neck. Isa has edged in front of me, his rifle pointed at the leader.
He mutters something to me in Somali, but I do not move. Isa growls something angrily that jerks me back to the living, and I find myself backing to the rear of a nearby shipping container. The container—my shield—sits alone on the middle of the wharf, so I can get no further away without exposing myself as a target. I crunch down like a beaten old hunchback, waiting for the gunshots, wondering why that boy was smiling at me.
Rifles on both sides are loaded, cocked, safeties off. There are four guns on our side, three on theirs. None has taken cover; the gunmen face each other at point-blank range. There is no apparent thought of cooling down. These men are ready to kill one another. It is a matter of Somali arrogance. My side certainly will not back down. Their job is to guard the port and they are ready to die doing so.
It becomes very still. Minutes pass. The vindictive sun presses its heat down upon us as condemnation of this face-off between egos. Someone mutters some indecipherable words and slowly, grudgingly, in a posture that can define only defeat, the three young gunmen, winding up to speed, storm past my container, laughing a little too loudly—an ill-concealed effort to hide their wounded pride. But they are still armed. Apparently, nobody disarms anyone here, no matter what the offense.
The Unicef blue pajama, who had disappeared during the confrontation, later explains that the boys were members of the subclan militia that had pirated the boat off the coast. They claimed they had heard someone was trying to steal it, so they came down to investigate. Probably they just wanted to chew some qat aboard the boat on a peaceful afternoon at the port. Isa turns to me and, with a big dark smile, offers me his open palm—the start of a high-five.
A UN rig pulls up to the warehouse, delivering a short, boxy man in full black beard, dark eyes, and a heavy Scottish accent.
“Juliet Bravo?” he asks. “Mike Dunne. I am going to put an HF radio on one of your boats.”
“I’ll be damned. Didn’t think anybody heard me back there. I didn’t think I would ever see the day.”
“Well, they’re not here yet. I want to see what your setup is on the boats and I’ll bring one back from Nairobi in a few days.”
Mike Dunne, a former electronics expert on Amoco’s North Sea oil rigs and just back from Kosovo, where he and others hooked up communications for the UN peacekeeping forces, is eager to get the job done and just as eager to get out of Somalia. “Not many worse places than this,” he says. I shrug, say I wouldn’t know, this is my first relief job. Sitting on the boat while he checks the electrical connections and takes measurements, I tell him of the most recent incident.
“Shite!” He looks at me strangely and I look back, puzzled.
“Almost getting used to seeing a gun pointed at me.”
“You should never get used to it. Are you crazy?”
I am not sure if he is being critical or sympathetic.
“You know, in Kosovo, the WFP has started training to help people cope.”
“Cope? I can cope.”
“How do you know? You haven’t left it yet. We all think we can handle it. If you are one in a million who is not affected by this shite, then you got something missing. No, you wait until you try to return to normal life. It is the withdrawal, mate, going home, trying to pick up where you left off. That is when you see yourself fucked. They say you are on your own in the field, but believe me, you are on your own when you go back home.”
“I’ve never thought about any aftereffects.”
“They get to you.”
“What about yourself?”
“Not anymore. There wasn’t training when I got in. Had to work it out myself. I’m in for the long haul—don’t go home much. Anyway, that training, they call it Re-Entry Syndrome training. Maybe you should see if they got that R-E-S course in Nairobi.”
“Yeah, well, I think I can handle it.”
* * *
On the trip back to the Unicef compound for the evening briefing, I cannot help but wonder whether these incidents, each weighted with such horrific portent, are really very unusual. We have not been here before, I have not been here before, these events never took place before, and yet how could they not? There are always standoffs with guns, always fights, always killing, and relief workers are there, living perhaps the most dangerous lives, and so nothing is unique. We could not have been warned what we would face out here. Perhaps a little better idea of the security situation, a briefing that went beyond crocs and hippos, might not have been amiss. However, had we been told, would we have been more prepared? Would it have made any difference?
The evening briefing covers the same ground: logistics, progress, negotiations, threats, camels for the dead, evacuation. Always evacuation. Is evacuation discussed as commonly wherever relief workers are stationed? I arrive after the others and too late for anyone to care how I spent my day. I was wondering what to report anyway. I don’t really have anything to say, just another day at the docks—no casualties, only one shot fired.
Sierra Sierra makes several references to closing down the airport at 1400 hours tomorrow, and he instructs Alpha Kilo and Happy One: “I want you two to be on the morning flight to Garissa.”
“We don’t have to worry about Juliet Bravo,” Happy One chirps. “He’s got a boat.”
“Huh? Sure I have a boat. What’s this all about?”
“Oh, I guess he hasn’t been briefed,” Chet offers.
“Guess not. What’s going on? We leaving?”
“Bravo Delta and myself will be at the airport negotiating with General Morgan, Major Yeh Yeh, and the others. I don’t think there’s much of a chance we can get this resolved—it got pretty heated this afternoon—but we are going to give it another try.”
“What happened?”
“It is turning to shit, son. The sultan wants more camels and Morgan wants more money for the airport job. So, I’m sending Happy One and Alpha Kilo out on the Caravan flight to Garissa. That’s two less I have to worry about.”
“I really can’t go, Chet,” Happy One complains. “I’ve got to make sure those trucks make it to the refugee camps.”
“Going to pull rank on you this time, Jeri. You do no good to them or to us dead. It was damn close today, and it might be a damn sight worse tomorrow. If we’re lucky we’ll be right back here in the evening in one piece, arranging for deliveries to the camps for the next day.”
Jeri brushes hair off her forehead and sighs. “Yes, I suppose so.”
That little sigh—that brief display of, what, femininity?—shakes the previous image. I still see her with hands on her hips, facing down the guns at the airport: her courage, her arrogance, her strength, larger than life—and dehumanized. She made herself then, a little dangerously perhaps, as impersonal as the gun. Yet she is a woman, quite appealing. Her shiny black hair and her firm mouth, her possibly good body and clear blue eyes—away from the stress of the war zone she is probably more than just attractive. But who could really know? Perhaps it is a comment on the febrile nature of our existence that we appear less human. Genderless. Sexless.
She and I have hardly spoken since that first day by the control tower. She looks up and meets my eyes. There is a sudden softness there. Maybe I just imagine it.
Mwalimo suggests the Hercules remain circling overhead during the meeting.
“Won’t that be a little obvious?” Jeri asks. She is now hard and businesslike. “I don’t know how they’d let us get on an airplane if the talks break down. Probably be held hostage.”
“True. They don’t want us here but they sure in hell won’t let us leave,” Chet says. “I am not sure we could sweet-talk our way onto a plane.
“And you,” he points at me, “you’ll have to ride herd at the port. We’ll keep to our previous schedules. We don’t want it to look like we’re packing. That aerial-survey flight upriver you’re planning in the morning? Go ahead and do it. If you get word of evacuation while you are airborne, then haul your ass up to Kenya. Otherwise, try to keep the flight under an hour, and then I want you back at the port, packed, and—if it comes to that—ready to meet whoever can get out to the pickup point. But, hell, that might not be anybody. In which case, just figure on saving your own butt. And don’t worry, we’ll get an aircraft out there to look for you.”
It is a depressing trip back to our compound. Apparently the beer meant for us was mistakenly delivered to our colleagues in Jamaame, a village on the Jubba. There are little more than fumes remaining in my liter bottle of Kenya Cane. There is, however, dinner of a sort. As consultants on contract, Andrew and I each pay thirty dollars a day for our bunks and a staff, and an additional four or five dollars a day for food. None of which is reimbursed. A local Somali woman sweeps the floor, and we have a cook.
Our chef is a short Arab with orange-hennaed hair, who speaks only Italian and Somali. He walks stiffly with the gait of a marionette, proud in his stained and unwashed white apron. I suspect he is the one who tends to the herb plants along the walkways.
We are served the same provender day after day: goat, grease, and starch. Small pieces of lean, tough meat float in liquid fat. Goat has not got an unpleasant taste; in many parts of Africa it is billed as lamb. Ours is accompanied by potatoes, rice, and spaghetti, all mixed together in the same bowl, half submerged in liquid fat. The potatoes actually float. The sauce for the pasta is canned tomato paste with hot fat stirred in. The vegetables are always the same—limp zucchini and raw onions. Every night we pour the fat into the shrubbery. The shrubs are dying.
Permanent employees of the UN are not allowed onto the streets of Kismayo, and consultants are advised against it. Thus we will never be able to go out to buy our own food, much less check what our cook actually spends on the one meal he prepares. But there is little question that our man pockets most of the food money; when the UN is in town, he also gets rich. That, however, is not the problem. He can take what he wants as long as he feeds us decently. We would pay more.
I start to tell Andrew and Chet about the incident at the port but I find I cannot. Something stops me. Something inside is forcing me to ignore it. I make light of it, joke about pirate boys and swashbuckling buccaneers. Chet observes me with a strange clinical look that makes me feel foolish.
There is some movement in the negotiations in the murder of the pregnant woman. Each Unicef guard claims to have fired into the air, one a burp on automatic and the other a single round. Each denies the killing, but Sierra Sierra says there’s no question of their guilt.
But he’s pleased. The police, appointed lackeys of General Morgan, have discovered that the pregnant woman, interred immediately in the Islamic tradition, had never been autopsied. The documents that alleged she was pregnant were bogus, signed by a member of her family who forged the signature of the attending physician. The doctor says he never saw the papers, never examined the body.
“She wasn’t even a little bit pregnant,” Chet says. “Just another damn scam. They were looking for a few more camels.”
It may not matter that we have discovered the deception. The woman’s family and clan cannot lose face. If we reveal that we found out, it could be too late for evacuation. If we do not reveal the scam, the shooter’s clan will react. We are again smack in the middle of it.