roaring in pitches as they bounced over the heavy waves.
As Stratton looked further along the coastline, he counted three large commercial ships in a line, anchored a short distance apart and quite close to the shore. The seabed evidently fell steeply away from the beach.
The coastline curved sharply beyond the last of the three ships in the shape of a hook, turning back on itself to form a kind of cul-de-sac. It came to a point where it doubled back again to continue its course. The bows of the largest ship, a merchantman as long as a football field, were almost inside the entrance to the cul-de-sac that acted like a sea mole, providing a level of protection from the heavier seas coming down the coast.
When the pirate mother craft was a few hundred metres from the stern of the nearest anchored cargo vessel, it turned to head directly towards the beach. A stone’s throw from the sand the engines went into full and noisy reverse to bring it to a halt. A couple of anchors were tossed over the side to prevent the waves from pushing the boat up on to the beach.
Stratton studied the cargo ships. They looked like they had been abandoned. So they were more than likely hijacked vessels. The town didn’t look equipped to handle any kind of heavy cargo, that was for sure.
He wondered where the crews were and suspected he might soon be joining them.
4
A Somali hauled Stratton, Hopper and Sabarak in a line along the side of the deck to a waiting skiff. They climbed over the side, their hands still tied, and down a ladder to the small boat where they sat opposite armed guards. The skiff’s pilot, an old man with greying head hair and beard, hardly looked at them. He had done this a thousand times.
The waves dumped heavily on to the sandy beach but the old pilot displayed a high level of skill and experience to take the little craft over the crest of a large wave and to a fairly smooth stop in the returning frothy surf. The water had looked dark and murky from the pirate boat but along the beach it was transparent.
Stratton stepped into the water expecting it to be warm to match the air and dusty surroundings but it was cool and fresh as it flooded his loose laceless boots, which he almost left behind in the sand as he walked up the steep incline.
The beach was littered in trash of all kinds. Mostly modern trash. Plastic bottles and cartons, pieces of old timber, wrappings, chunks of moulded polystyrene of the type used for packing electronic goods. The high-tide mark was a dark oil stain that ran the length of the beach.
They walked up the coarse, steep sand. It went from soft to compacted and near enough flat in about forty paces, halfway to the beachfront houses. The Somali guard halted them.
Stepping on land immediately altered Stratton’s attitude towards escaping. He felt infused with a sense of opportunity. On the vessel he had been trapped, confined. It was no longer a case of if he would try to escape, but when. He considered the broader strokes at first, dividing his options between land, air or back to the sea. The latter was the more obvious choice. All he had to do was acquire a boat and sail it due north. Escaping across country would be more difficult. The only safe haven he could think of was Mogadishu. The United Nations had several bases in the capital but Stratton didn’t know the locations of any outside of it. And Mogadishu was a long way south, close to Kenya. That put it at many hundreds of miles. Through hostile tribal areas where the locals would likely try to kill him as a matter of course. As for the air option, he had no knowledge of Somali airfields. But it wouldn’t help that much if he did: he had no real idea where he was save on the north coast of Somalia, which was as long as the southern coast of Yemen at around six hundred miles.
A group of children ran from between a row of mud houses to see the new arrivals. They came at Stratton and Hopper from all angles but were driven back by the guards. In front of Stratton, Lotto looked proud of his catch as he arrived on the beach and marched up the soft sand at their head and on to the firm packed hinterland and towards the town. The prisoners were pushed to follow him as a part of the display. The people of the town clearly revered him.
Everything about the place had a dilapidated and uncared for look about it. The beachfront homes were set back about a hundred metres from the surf. About a mile beyond the town the land rose up to a line of dark hills, running across them a prominent cliff edge like a faultline, a yellow ridge that became orange and brown as it angled up the peaks. They looked barren and dry and scorched by the heat of the sun. Everywhere Stratton looked the ground was hard, like it had been hammered solid and covered in dust.
The town was no better than the beach. The longer he looked at the houses the worse they got. All but a few were made of mud. The rest were of brick or both, constructed poorly with levels and angles clearly guessed at rather than measured. Trash everywhere. Not the kind of trash one would expect to find in a poor, isolated African village not all that far from the stone age. Modern cardboard packing, plastic wrapping, moulded polystyrene. For centuries the town had relied on the sea to provide everything it needed to sustain life. And it still did but there was a new kind of life support. Fishermen had become pirates. The backward, isolated and impoverished town was overflowing with the finest detritus of the developed world. A new washing machine being used as an outside table since there was no electricity or piped water for it to function as it was designed. One house had a collection of flatscreen televisions stacked outside its front door, just discarded – superfluous to requirements as there was no signal. A group of men were unloading boxes from a mule-drawn cart and taking them into a house. As Stratton watched he could see they contained brand-new laptop computers.
Each habitat was a standalone dwelling with gaps between them wide enough to drive a truck through. The Somalis led Stratton and the others along a wide, deeply rutted track through the town. The main thoroughfare. Stalls lined the route in places, offering a morsel of local vegetables, all dry and withered.
The local people stared at the two white men as they marched up the incline of the road. They had seen such people before but any newcomer was still a curiosity in their lives. A Suburban rumbled past, the fat black man behind the wheel wearing a tailored jacket and sunglasses. He glanced at the prisoners and gave a nod to Lotto as he drove past.
A quarter of the way into the town the pirate captain brought the cortege to a halt and had a word with a couple of lethargic armed men standing at the entrance to a street. When Lotto continued away up the main thoroughfare, Stratton and the others were pulled down the side street.
Up ahead, a group of scruffily clothed armed men loitered, mostly sitting and smoking between the houses, a couple of them dozing. As Stratton and the others reached them, the guards that had been dozing came to life to inspect the new arrivals. The escort guards spoke to them while Stratton, Hopper and Sabarak stood in the street under the hot sun and waited.
Lotto suddenly arrived from a side street and went to the door to one of the nearby huts and opened it. It was dark inside but Stratton could make out several grimy faces looking up towards the door. Lotto looked in on the hut, stood for a few seconds. Then he pulled the door closed, crossed to the hut opposite, opened the door to that one and looked inside. Then he said something over his shoulder and the Somali guards shoved the three prisoners over to the hut. Lotto indicated for them to go inside.
The room was about six metres square, its floor of dirt. It stank of sweat. There were no furnishings of any kind. About a dozen men were sat on the ground with their backs to the walls. They took up a third of the wall space. There were a couple of buckets in the centre of the floor full of water, a cup beside each.
The men looked up at them. They were grimy and miserable wretches, their boots also without laces, their hands tied with either string or heavy fishing line. ‘Sit,’ the pirate captain ordered. It was the first word of English he had spoken and it sounded odd coming from his lips.
Stratton and Hopper claimed an empty section of wall together. Sabarak selected an isolated corner on the opposite side of the room.
‘You try escape, we break your legs,’ Lotto said in a slow, deliberate tone. His English had a heavy accent but otherwise it was clear. ‘We get same money for you if you are broken or not.’ He grinned. ‘No escape. Nowhere to go. But very tiring to look for you.’
The pirate captain looked along the line of prisoners and stopped at one. He walked over to the prisoner, whose head was lowered, the face hidden by long, dirty black hair. Lotto kicked the prisoner’s outstretched foot with his own but the prisoner didn’t move, as if aware but refusing to look up. Lotto grinned and leaned down to say something that Stratton was unable to hear. He chuckled at the lack of response, straightened up and went to the door.
