The Night Ranger

Little Wizard was twenty years old. He’d been born Gutaale Muhammad, but no one called him that. Not since a firefight four years before in Mogadishu. Gutaale was at the point, leading a half-dozen other teenage soldiers. He was a scrap of a boy, wiry and strong, with light brown skin and tightly curled hair. They walked around a corner, past a burned-out building that had been a guesthouse for aid workers decades before, in happier times. Gutaale looked up to see a boy even younger than he was leaning out a second-floor window twenty meters away. The boy swung an AK out the window, shooting wildly. Not a boy, then. An enemy soldier. Gutaale was about to fire back when all the air went out of him. Like he’d fallen from the top of a high tree. A killing shot. He doubled over, went to his hands and knees. Blood trickled from his stomach, just below his ribs. A wrecked pickup truck lay five meters away. He dragged himself to it and lay halfway under it in dust and mud.

He closed his eyes and listened to the pops of AK fire. Then the unmistakable whoosh of a rocket-propelled grenade. An explosion shook the truck above him, followed by a high-pitched scream. Waaberi, Gutaale’s best friend, always carried an RPG. Gutaale’s killer would die with him. The thought pleased him.

The shooting and shouting went on awhile. Gutaale didn’t much care. He closed his eyes and listened. The noise seemed to be a long way off. Finally it stopped. His friends would surely come for him now.

“Move on,” yelled Samatar, their nineteen-year-old commander.

“Gutaale,” Waaberi said.

“We can’t help him now. He’s gone. On the way back.”

Their feet crunched as they walked past the truck. They turned a corner and the shooting started again, single shots at first, then longer bursts. Gutaale lay in the dust and waited. No doctors or hospitals for him, not even the room at the back of the mosque that served as an infirmary for wounded fighters. A few minutes more passed. The shooting moved away. And Gutaale realized something strange. He felt stronger.

He crawled from under the truck, forced himself to his hands and knees. He raised his head over the side of the pickup. He was alone. Smoke billowed from the second-floor window where the boy who shot him had stood. Gutaale stumbled across the road and hid behind a pair of rusted oil drums. He breathed deep, feeling the burn in his belly. The bullet hole glowed pink in his brown-black skin. He reached down for it, pushed the tip of his finger inside. As gently as if he were touching a woman. Still too hard. The muscles around the wound pulled back and the pain spiraled inside him. Foolish. He reached behind his back, found the exit wound just above his hip, the skin around it slick and wet. He put his fingers to it, careful this time. He found a trickle of blood, nothing more. Like water from the dried-out wells in Bay Region. He wasn’t sure how, but he sensed that the bullet had gone through him without hitting anything important. Not the heart or the lung or the other parts whose names he didn’t know.

He would have to get the wounds stitched up. He would have to take the money hidden in his shoes to buy the special cream that kept them from getting infected. But he was sure he wouldn’t die. When boys were dying, their eyes rolled up. They soiled themselves and screamed. They couldn’t talk or stand. The fear settled into their eyes and then it left and then they died. Not everyone who died had all those things, but everyone had some. He had none. He was going to live.

The bullet had come and his body had rejected it, pushed it aside. Like he was metal and it was flesh instead of the other way around. Gutaale remembered a movie called Terminator about a man who was a robot. But he wasn’t a robot. He was hungry and thirsty like other boys. He wanted women like other boys. So he was better than a robot, he was a man with a robot’s strength. He was a wizard. He brought his fingers to his lips and kissed them and tasted his wizard blood.

A minute later, his friends came back around the corner, their heads hanging. Gutaale wondered if they were sad, sad he’d died. He ducked behind the oil drums and waited. They could have spotted him, but they were looking for a corpse, not a living boy. Not a wizard.

“Gutaale,” Waaberi said.

“His own doing,” Samatar said. “He danced around, dared them to shoot. Like no one could hurt him.”

The wizard—for Gutaale already thought of himself that way—didn’t remember dancing or daring anyone. No matter. Samatar was more right than he knew. No one can hurt me.

“He fought the best of all of us,” Waaberi said.

Behind the drums, the wizard smiled. His truest friend. Waaberi would be his lieutenant, now and forever.

Waaberi squatted, looked under the pickup. “Here, wasn’t it?” He waved the others over. “He’s gone.”

“It’s not possible.” Samatar knelt beside Waaberi. “Damn him. I wanted his shoes.”

“See the blood. Someone took his body already.”

The wizard stood from behind the oil drums. “I did, my brothers. I took my body.” They turned to him, and he saw awe in their eyes. And fear. “I took it and gave it back to myself.”

War and famine had killed most of Mogadishu’s birds. Not the gulls. They went to the sea when the streets exploded. One was circling over the street. It offered its ugly cry, caw-caw, caw-caw. It circled down, landed on the drum beside the wizard. Caw-caw! Caw-caw!

One by one, the other boys came to him, touched his wounds like disciples. Samatar hung back. “You were lucky. Nothing more.” He looked at the others. “He was lucky. Sometimes people are lucky.” His voice trembled. “Or a djinn.”

The wizard didn’t argue. He looked at Waaberi, sure Waaberi would know what to do. “If you don’t believe, then go,” Waaberi said. “Leave us.” He lifted his rifle. The others followed. And Samatar ran.

—

From then on, the men on that patrol called Gutaale Little Wizard. A month later, he and the others left Mogadishu for Lower Juba, the region in southwestern Somalia where he’d grown up. Only a line on a map split Lower Juba from Garissa and Ijara districts in Kenya. The region had two distinct climates. Near the coast, breezes from the Indian Ocean brought humidity and heavy seasonal rains. Creeks fed mangrove forests and swamps filled with giant black centipedes and snakes like the green mamba. The centipedes were ugly but harmless. The mamba was a skinny, beautiful creature whose fangs held venom that paralyzed in minutes and killed in hours. The swamps couldn’t be farmed or ranched, and almost no one lived in them. Luckily, they didn’t go on forever. Around forty kilometers inland, the ocean lost its influence. The wet breezes ended, and the creeks and swamps vanished.

But the dry region was only slightly more hospitable. Farming was nearly impossible, and even the deepest wells couldn’t be trusted. Even before the drought and war, the region had been sparsely settled, with a handful of villages scattered across thousands of square miles. Now most of its inhabitants had fled for Dadaab. The rest had clustered into the few villages with reliable water. Little Wizard and his men faced no resistance when they moved into an abandoned village called Bora. At first they survived by smuggling sugar into Kenya. Kenyans loved sugar, but the Kenyan government taxed it heavily, creating an opening for smugglers. Wealthy Somalis bought sugar by the ton in Dubai and shipped it to Mogadishu and Kismaayo. From there, militias trucked it across Somalia and into Kenya. Crossing was easy. For long stretches, the border wasn’t even fenced. The Kenyan police rarely operated in the area. If they had to approach Somalia—if, say, a light plane crashed near the border and they were ordered to recover the pilot’s body—they traveled in packs of a dozen or more officers from their headquarters on the coast. Otherwise, they avoided traveling within thirty kilometers of Somalia. They knew the militias outgunned them, and they feared being kidnapped.

Little Wizard used his sugar-smuggling profits to build a small but potent militia. On missions, his soldiers wore white T-shirts and kerchiefs to hide their faces. Villagers called them the White Men. Besides smuggling, they survived by charging aid convoys to pass through the region and collecting protection money from villages.

The White Men had about sixty-five soldiers. They could have had more. Every day, hungry men and boys trudged across the north part of Lower Juba on their way to the refugee centers in Kenya. More than a few had tried to join. But Little Wizard preferred a small force. His men could break camp in hours. They could live for months on food and water that a larger force would exhaust in weeks. Still, they had the firepower they needed to block humanitarian convoys and extract what Wizard called a toll, five percent of the food the trucks carried.

Little Wizard sometimes wondered whether the people sending the food understood that militias like his took most of it. Only a little reached the refugee camps in Bay Region. Even there the armed men who lived in the camps took most of the rest. Did these foreigners know that their plastic sacks of grain and sugar fed—literally—the war and the soldiers who fought it? If they knew, why did they keep sending the trucks?

—

When the Kenyan army invaded Somalia, Little Wizard knew he’d been wise to keep his force small. The