ALPHA KILO IS to bring in the C-130 and organize the off-loading until 1400 hours, when the meeting with Morgan and the militia begins and the airport is shut down. I’m to hop on the early-morning delivery flight to the distribution center at the Marerey village airstrip on the Jubba—from what I’m told, just a cluster of tents on a dirt stretch in the middle of the floodwaters. Then, unloaded, we are to follow the river and search for a location for my base near Goob Weyn—ideally, an embankment, flat and wide at the top for tents and relief supplies, above a quiet backwater.
We drive to the airport with thoughts of escape very much on our minds, clutching our garbage bags of personal emergency gear—what those in the aid trade call the Quick Run Bag: passport, money, more beans, Snickers bars, GPS, and Jackie’s photo, all that I need and want for escape either by air or by sea. We have accepted the possibility that everything else we brought to Somalia may have to be abandoned.
“It would save a lot of trouble if they just used the Anotov,” Andrew says.
“Why don’t they?”
“Haven’t a clue.” He laughs to himself and shakes his head. “Maybe they don’t trust the Ukrainians. In ’92, the WFP chartered a Russian Anotov to ferry in emergency supplies, but it brought in money and guns to one of the warlords instead. That caused a bit of a flap; the other warlords thought the UN was officially favoring one side over the other. It wasn’t the last time. A few weeks later, another Anotov carrying guns for one of the warlords crashed north of Mog—so much for UN neutrality, eh? Somalis don’t forget these things.”
Beyond the first roadblock of surly riflemen, an old man in djellaba and full white beard is having a tug-of-war with an equally determined unruly camel, which is jerking the Arab back toward the thorn trees on the other side of the road. Barely able to hold on to the reins, the minder swats it angrily with a long reed whip. It looks like a brave act to me—the animal dwarfs him. The camel jerks away; its lofty head held high, its nostrils flared, it high-steps toward the bush with the grace of a Lipizzaner stallion. It appears to change its mind and wanders back toward our car as if curious about its occupants. Harun brakes hard. He dares not hit a camel, dares not get near it in case the animal hits us. Same thing.
The camel stands opposite, looks us over with imperious arrogance, and without warning rears up on its hind legs and aims its forefeet at the windscreen. I am fascinated by the brute power of this beast that rises above us. It is close enough to see the detail of its creamy underbelly—the hairs that are curled and matted in dung. It is a female. Harun backs away just as its hooves glance off the bumper and land where we were only moments ago.
The camel gallops off into the bush, and the Somali shakes his whip at us and shouts Arabic obscenities. Harun inches forward. The animal bursts out of the tall grass and now dashes across our path to the other side of the road, apparently to where it wanted to go in the first place. The Somali gives chase, his long white skirt and his long white beard in pursuit.
Harun steps on the accelerator and roars away from the area, shaking his head in frustration.
We pull up to a high-wing single-engine cargo plane parked close to the warehouse. It apparently has just arrived; the heat from its engine radiates through the cowling in a shimmer of distorted air. A private near-childish excitement builds, then quickly conflates into unexpected dread. I do not like to fly.
It is the first time I have been back to the airport since picking up the boat. It is evident where the Hercules took a bite out of the warehouse; the hole and buckled wall have not been repaired, nor is there an indication that that will happen anytime soon. Nothing else seems to have changed, however. Except now, from the perspective of what seems a lifetime since, the blown-out cement walls and the broken windows are less curiosities than a depressing statement of the futility of our presence. As well as the efforts of anyone to come in the future. This wreckage of cement, glass, steel, and tin underscores a certainty that five or ten years from now, nothing will be any better for the Somalis than it is today.
A number of boxes are piled atop each other nearby, and I do a double-take when I see a large one with my name on it. I cannot deny that Christmas-like anticipation of what might be inside. Hydraulic fluid? GPS? Radios? I rip open the box, and inside, liter bottles of engine oil and—clothesline. I paw through the rope for more but there is nothing else. How can we do the job if we don’t have the equipment? If pilots don’t get what they need, they don’t fly; if they don’t supply me with what I need, why should I be any different?
“Not what you expected?” The pilot has been leaning against a wing strut in the shadows.
“Not exactly. That’s all there is?”
“I suppose so. It’s the load for Kismayo.” I detect a Southern accent. He comes out from under the wing and introduces himself.
“You American?” I ask.
“From Elvis town. Memphis, on the Mississippi. I’ve seen a few floods before, believe me. You American?”
“Yep. And mail. Did you bring any mail?”
“Yeah, in the cockpit.” He reaches in and grabs a few envelopes. “Any of these for you?”
There is nothing. “That’s it?”
“’Fraid so. . . . You know, I don’t mind flying the river—these damn rotations bore the crap out of me.” I hide my disappointment; I can’t imagine the mail from Europe to here in Woop Woop being very reliable.
He looks like he is barely pushing twenty; his cherubic face does not instantly inspire confidence. Apparently anticipating a common thought: “Been flying Somalia ever since UNOSOM. Helped evacuate some of you guys from Mog a few years back. You get airsick?”
“Never have yet.”
“Good.”
Airborne, we fly northwest, looking for the river. The floodwaters stretch from horizon to horizon, and were it not for a few acacia and mango trees, banana stumps and small hummocks that break the surface, it would be impossible to determine its course. The Jubba has become a vast inland sea.
A narrow slice of land ahead rests upon the waters like a floating log. Marerey airfield, once miles from the river, is now in the middle of it. The floodwaters have claimed the northeastern end of the dirt runway, and it appears they will soon swallow it all. Touching down on the airstrip at the water’s edge, the plane taxis to a scattered collection of various-size tents, cots under mosquito nets, mounds of bags of maize meal, flour, and rice, and boxes of high-energy biscuits covered in plastic stacked outside the largest tent. Evidently they are not short on supplies.
Disembarking from the plane in bright sunshine, I look for signs of the disaster, a M*A*S*H sort of clinic, some refugees, frantic activity to help the injured, save the dying. Instead, the place is remarkably serene, tranquil, almost sleepy. We are hailed by a voice from under a thick-leaf umbrella tree on a small island that is surrounded by pools of shallow water and mud. The tree provides some shelter for a large wood table, which supports a high-frequency radio connected to a car battery and solar panel propped against the back of a metal chair. Yusuf, a tall thin man with sharp Nilotic features and erect bearing, removes a pair of headphones and wades through the muck, greeting us halfway.
“You bring boats?” Yusuf, who runs the Somali nongovernmental organization that liaises with the local communities, looks over to the small aircraft. He has a cautious, aristocratic air. His dark, grave eyes do not mask his disappointment.
“Not yet, Yusuf. They’re on their way. Just tarps, Unimix, emergency rations, and blankets.”
“We must have boats,” he says quietly. “Please, you look.” He sweeps his hands toward the water. “Now we use these.”
I don’t see any boats. In the water under the spackled shade of the thorn trees, naked boys sit on thick pieces of Styrofoam, makeshift rafts that are strung together by rope and sticks. Their long, straight push-poles lean against the bushes.
“They don’t look very stable.”
“They are all we have. Insulation from refrigerator containers at the factory.” He points to the remains of the once large and profitable sugar mill—bare steel girders that rise out of the haze in the distance and claw the air like the desperate hand of a drowning man.
“Destroyed by the floods?”
“No, by fighting—I have more than a ton to be delivered.” He gestures toward the crates and sacks of supplies at the river’s edge. “I lost a boy to a crocodile.”
“Jesus. I’ll see what I can do. My boats in Kismayo aren’t doing you any good there.”
“When? Tomorrow? After tomorrow?”
“I have no idea, Yusuf. I have been trying to get them going for days.”
“We do not have much time left.”
“I can see that.”
Back in the aircraft, the Memphis cowboy is in his element. With an empty plane he can play.
“Never airsick, right?” he repeats.
“Nope.”
“Swell. Then we’ll get a real good look at the river.”
We fly at five hundred feet, following what we perceive to be the course of the Jubba. Even from this altitude we can smell the stench that rises from the swamp below, the organic bitterness of methane gas. Scores of settlements are submerged, abandoned, left to the mercy of the flood. Other villages on higher ground are surrounded by stagnant brown water, and it is apparent that the river, still rising, is squeezing out the last of the dry land.
Desperate figures camped on fragile thatched roofs of their mud homes wave trousers, shirts, colorful cloths, anything they can get their hands on to attract our attention. Nearby, white humpback cattle huddle tightly on fragile, soggy islands. There will be no saving them. I push the waypoint button of the plane’s GPS to record the location of the village. Here, finally, some reason, some purpose. My frustration in Kismayo was once self-centered. Today, redirected, it is even more acute, more aggravating. These are people who must have help now. Some of them probably will not be alive at this time tomorrow.
“Croc!” the pilot shouts above the roar of the engine. He points over the starboard side of the nose, pushes the plane into a shallow dive, and levels off just above the water. Slithering across a marshy area is a gnarled gray beast about twenty feet long, its tail scything the surface.
The guns and the threats and the tension of the past few days are fading into another world. Above the drone of the aircraft there is an unusual, merciful, and soothing silence building in my head, a silence I almost feel. Yet the port’s towering container cranes sticking up out of the horizon remind me of what I have to return to.
“I want to check out Goob Weyn and Hum Hum close to the mouth,” I shout.
The pilot nods.
“A couple of passes. And low!”
Thumbs up.
We skim over the trees close enough to see fat, ripening mangoes hanging among the branches.
Goob Weyn, atop a cliff near the mouth, is well above the floodwaters. It appears to be a muddy little settlement of dirt-colored wattle-and-thatch homes with an occasional cement building or two with metal roofs. A single tall spire of a mosque rises above the adobe shacks. Further down the river, just over the nose of the plane, is Hum Hum, a nest of small shacks on the river’s sloping banks. There’s a kink in the river here that forms a bight, a backwater in front of the settlement that looks like a possible delivery base.
A few soldiers look up at us and wave. The pilot dips his wings.
Small popcorn noises crackle over the drone of the engine; they come at once from both outside and inside the plane, like impatient fingers drumming a tabletop.
Off to the right on my side of the river, sparkles of a dozen fireflies light from the wooded banks below.
“They are shooting at us!”
With short jerky movements, I jab in the direction of the muzzle flashes under the mango trees.
The pilot hauls back on the stick with one hand and rams the throttle forward with the other, banks, and heads skyward. His eyes dart from gauge to gauge on the instrument panel.
We’ve been hit. A row of three clean holes the size of nickels appears on the leading edge of the aluminum wing overhead. The back of a passenger seat next to the window explodes in pieces of foam and shredded cloth.
“Damage! What’s the damage!” the pilot yells.
“Shit, I don’t know! They hit us back there. And on the wing.” The pilot cranes his head and looks up at the wing. The aircraft, screaming for altitude, shudders. The stall buzzer begins an insistent steady warning.
“Fucking hell!”
“We going to make it?” I yell.
He turns to me with a look I hope never to see again from anyone else who is in command, a look of desperation that demands some solution. What do I know? I do feel that the aircraft is not entirely under his control. The sudden accelerated ascent seems to be more than the small plane can take.
“Good!” he shouts a few minutes later, leveling off. “We’re out of range. Engine’s okay! Fuel’s okay! They got an aileron. But, hey, buddy! I got control!”
I hold on to the armrest of my seat with a death grip, willing, praying we get back. I hear the muffled voice of the pilot speaking into his mouthpiece to someone at Garissa. The pilot turns to me and tries to grin, tries to calm his terrified passenger. His reassuring demeanor is belied by the drops of sweat that run into his eyes and down his cheeks.
We bounce to a landing at Kismayo and taxi to the terminal. Mwalimo runs out of the building, followed by armed militiamen. “We heard on the radio,” he says, shaking his head in dismay. “What do they say? Any landing you can walk away from . . .”
His good humor is welcome, but I can’t respond. We walk around the plane, assessing the damage. There is a random hole or two underneath the fuselage. There is a hole on the passenger’s side. I look into the cockpit. I see light through the hole from the outside. An inch or two to the left and the bullet would have gone up my backside.
It’s only eight-thirty in the morning.
* * *
Having nearly been shot down has not really affected me, I don’t think. I was not much fond of flying in the first place, sure in hell even less so after this morning. I am desperate to go to the port. There, for some reason, I feel I can return to some stability, something more ordinary. The port is mine. It has become a refuge.
Chaco, the grinning crane operator with his improbable gray felt hat, tries to tell me proudly in a mixture of Somali, Italian, and English that he has fixed his machine. I didn’t know it was broken, but then, it wouldn’t surprise me. There haven’t been spare parts (except for a fan belt or two cannibalized from something else and resold) for anything around here since probably the beginning of the civil war. The two container cranes on the edge of the wharf that I could see from upriver, indispensable for port operations, have hung motionless and disused and frozen with rust for years. The windows of the cabs broken, the air conditioners looted, and the steel cables dangling from above like tears suspended. I don’t see how these good people, dispirited by a generation of war and too much miraa, will ever make it. Chaco has a right to be proud, and with those twinkling eyes I think he looks to me for some praise. I have noticed that this kind of pride is not in short supply. The presence of pride is proof of accomplishment. There is hope.
In my little blue aluminum boat under the broiling sun, I move easily with the motion of the swells, awaiting announcement of the poker game over the handheld radio. I’ve had it—wouldn’t be disappointed if it came within the next five minutes.
Odd. My vision is blurred. It is as if I am dreaming awake. I feel cold and clammy, dizzy. I begin to shake. It is a sort of distant feeling, out of body, feverish, and removed. I am not depressed, not feeling in any way emotional, rather detached—almost dead—with images. I sense a building pressure, a frisson of helplessness. I bury my head in my hands and cry. I vomit through my fingers and I don’t give a fuck.
A faraway voice. “Captain.” One of the militia gunmen is yelling down to me in Somali and asks me, I suppose, if I’m all right. It brings me around. My pride won’t permit this public breakdown. The jetty above is lined with silent dark Somali faces. A face, a gun, a face, a gun.
Dipping a plastic bucket into the sea, I dump it over my head, then sluice down the soiled cockpit of the boat. Leaning against the back bench, I pull my soggy baseball cap over my eyes and try to shut out the world. I am not sure what I see: a baby, a gun, a river, a crocodile, a blinding sun that burns through my closed eyes—all unfocused fast-moving images, each superimposed upon the other; I am looking down a barrel of kaleidoscopic horror. The high-pitched scream in my ears is painful. I am in panic, out of control, no hands on the wheel, no feet on the ground, extracted. A panic I’ve never known.
Somebody takes my hand, holds it tenderly. Harun sits next to me, saying nothing, staring out into the bay. I am furious! I jerk my hand, but he holds on. The sympathy on his craggy pocked face and his broken-tooth smile defeats me. I want to bury my head in his shoulder. I can only offer a weak and embarrassed smile.
“Ah, Captain Diep Maleh,” he says soothingly. “Now you have some problems.”
I sit up, push my hat back. “Small problems,” I manage, withdrawing my hand naturally. He waits for an explanation. “Thank you, Harun. I’m okay.” I cannot meet his eyes and I look back at the bay. His sympathy oppresses. I force myself a new face, a new meaning, and I turn to him, belligerence in my voice: “I don’t have the problems. This godforsaken land has got the problems. Aren’t you tired of all this shit?”
He looks startled, offended, as if I had just displayed appalling bad manners.
“I mean the killing, the dying, the war.”
He softens. “Yes, Captain. Somalia has gone to the end. One day we come back.”
“Fat fucking chance,” I mutter. I look into Harun’s soft and sympathetic eyes; it is not his fault. I see he is waiting, either for a further outburst or a breakdown, I’m not sure which. “Such a fucking waste.”
“Peace must come, Captain. No land live this way forever.”
“I don’t know how you live this way at all. Great place to raise a family. By the way,” I say, finding another topic, “your mother and father—they live with you?”
“Mother and father killed.”
“Oh, shit.” It is hard to run into an answer like this, but Harun says it so matter-of-factly, almost dismissively, that any lingering pain is either long gone or well hidden.
“I live with wife—good wife, good rich wife.” It is a subject change, and I don’t know if it is because the discussion is getting too personal or too complicated but I am grateful for the detour. “Her family has many camels.”
“Here? In Kismayo?”
“Wife in Kismayo, camels in Wajir—Kenya.”
“Is she Kenyan?”
“Oh, no! She is Somali.” I can see that while he speaks he is observing me carefully. I am determined that he should see me as normal. “My wife, she is from Somali land in Kenya.” He pauses, catching a random thought.
“Maybe you come to my home. We have nyama choma—you like nyama choma?”
“Sure.”
“Yes, you come to my home one day soon. Eat with me. Inshah Allah.”
“Yes, I’d like that.”
He holds up a stalk of miraa, selects a tender young leaf with the eye of a connoisseur, and places it reverently into his mouth.
“I like you, Captain.”
I don’t know how to respond.
“You are a friend of Somalia.” He pauses. “Well, you are my friend. But, Captain? So many problems, so many war. Why you here?”
“To bring food to flood victims, Harun.” It’s a mechanical response.
“That is good. Yes, that is good. But why? Why the United Nations again in my country?”
“To help the people.”
“But who asked UN to come to Somalia? We have government now?”
“No, not yet, Harun. I don’t know who asked us to come here. I wonder that myself.”
“One day, Captain, I know. I know you go from us. You never come back.”
He leans back and stretches his arms on either side of the bench and looks up at the building clouds. We may get rain this afternoon. Maybe that will help. He offers me a couple of choice young leaves. My mouth puckers from the bitter taste.
“We have always floods. We have always war. We have always needed food. I am happy you are here,” he says, leaning toward me. “I make money, so I am happy. But I don’t understand, Captain. Why are you here?”
“Goddamn it! I told you, to feed the people.”
“No, Captain.” His tone is now none too friendly. “You—why you here? You have wife. You have children. What you doing in my country?” I sense the guards above watching closely.
I look sharply at this guy; what fucking right has he got to be asking? I see my hostility reflected in his eyes. I run my fingers through my hair and take a deep breath and spit the slurry of leaves overboard. His simple coarse face, his dark eyes—I suddenly feel an affection for the man. He doesn’t need a psychologist to explain things to him, he only wants a straight answer. I take his hand. This gesture seems to soothe him and I watch the fire in his own eyes diminish.
“Harun, I ask myself that. I guess it is in my history to be here. Considering my own past, it doesn’t surprise me.”
I see now that I have lost him—it was a straight question that sought a simple answer.
“You make big money?” he asks.
“I make money, yes.”
There is a moment of silence. He is considering. “Ah,” he says.
“Juliet Bravo! Juliet Bravo! Sierra Sierra.” This is it. I hope this is it. I want to get out of here—take this baby and fly! I look the boat over; it is as ready as I can make it. I grab the radio from my belt.
“Juliet Bravo, back.”
“Yeah, Juliet Bravo. Problem taken care of at this end. You might as well stand down.”