They’re kids, man. Never seen a fucking war. They don’t even know how to grow shit, let alone fight. I’m fucking glad I’m out of there.’

The rant was just fine. But he’d taken both hands off the stick to add emphasis. At least this particular time he kept one finger fucking about with the instruments.

Joe was heading towards sixty, and small — about five foot five — but with hands that were far too big for the rest of him. Too many years in the sun had given his face crevasses wherever there should have been creases. The chest hair that poked out from the top of his green polo shirt was grey, but the hair on top of his head was jet black. It matched the Ray-Ban Aviators he wore to protect his eyes from the glare bouncing down onto the ocean and back up again.

Malindi is on the Kenyan coast. Europeans used to flock there for their holidays until a couple of years ago, when inter-ethnic violence left a hundred people dead just down the road in Mombasa. Now the hotels were empty, and only people like Joe lived there.

His hands came off the stick again. ‘Yeah, man, fuck, I wish I’d left Zim years ago.’

It was the third time he’d said that in the last hour and ten minutes. His wife had wanted to stay, even when Mugabe’s heavies were beating up the owners of neighbouring farms. Her roots were in the old Rhodesia. She was fourth-generation white African. Then one day last year Joe had gone away on a work trip and come back to find her dead. It wasn’t murder. She’d died of some disease I’d never even heard of. Either that, or Joe had made it up.

He’d finally left the wreckage of Zim, but only with what he stood up in. Life in Kenya was hard to start with, he said, but he was a happy bunny these days. He was one of the vanilla guerrillas, ex-pat white lads who shagged the locals for the price of a beer and something to eat. And going by the condition of the aircraft, his bar tab was bigger than his maintenance bill.

Joe finally got both hands back on the stick and had a look round to make sure there were no other aircraft in the sky. At least that bit seemed professional. Taking off from Malindi, we’d taxied down the apron, but hadn’t paused at the runway. There was no revving of engines or testing of flaps or any of that shit. He didn’t even appear to consider wind direction. As soon as he was on the strip he just got us the fuck into the air without looking back.

‘You been to Mogadishu many times, Joe?’

‘Too many. But never in the city, man. I leave you kidnap guys to do that shit. I stay on the pan and don’t leave the aircraft. The flip-flops there, they’d pull it apart in an hour.’ He leant across to me as if he was about to shout, which he didn’t need to because of the intercom. ‘You’re a fucking madman. Why don’t you take a weapon?’ His left hand tapped the AK sticking up between our seats, on top of the emergency box that contained distress flares and all that sort of shit. ‘Buy mine, man. Three hundred dollars. A fucking bargain, man.’

I laughed. ‘It doesn’t work like that. I can’t go in there mob-handed. I’m supposed to be the nice guy in the middle.’

That was all Joe knew about me. I was just another negotiator he was taking in to rescue yet another hostage. Frank had organized him. Frank had also promised to send some guys with money. They’d be waiting in Nairobi once I’d contacted the clan or sub-clan, whoever the fuck they were, and struck the deal. The money would be handed over anywhere I needed it to be. The clans had people in Nairobi. It could be handed over there, or brought to Mogadishu. Wherever, it didn’t matter to me.

Joe was well into war-story mode. ‘Last year I picked up some Canadian woman. She couldn’t even drink water, man. She was broken. Her hands never stopped shaking. They fucked her up big-time.’ He grimaced. ‘Fucking flip-flops, man. They’re animals. If they don’t have anyone else to fight, they fight each other. They just love to fight. It’s the clan system. They’re fucking mad.’

He eased the stick forward a bit and we were buffeted about as the white sand below us got closer. The ocean was gleaming teal. Breakers formed white crests parallel to the shore.

‘Do you know the flip-flops? Do you know the clans, man?’

‘I know a bit.’

‘They got this saying, man.’ His right hand went up into the space between his head and the screen so his fingers could make quote marks. ‘My full brother and me against my father. My father’s household against my uncle’s household …’ He turned to me and shook his head. ‘Our two households against the rest of my kin. My kin against my clan. My clan against other clans. And my nation against the world.’

He laughed to himself. ‘It’s like the fucking Sopranos, but with these fucking things.’ He tapped the mag of the AK. ‘Go on — two hundred and seventy-five bucks, man.’

‘I wouldn’t even know how to use it.’

He looked ahead. We descended more. He laughed. His left hand waved me off. The crevasses around his cheeks dis appeared behind the sun-gigs. ‘Fuck off, man. I’ve seen enough of you guys coming in and out of Nairobi. Don’t give me that shit.’

Joe had picked me up in Nairobi. We’d headed east back to Malindi, refuelled, then chucked a left at the coast and headed up towards Mogadishu. He didn’t know who I was going in to meet; who I was going in to pick up. And he didn’t want to know. That was fine by me.

I reached for the stainless-steel Thermos and unscrewed the top. The coffee was instant, condensed-milky and sweet. I poured a cup and offered it to Joe. He shook his head. He was talking to somebody on the radio and concentrating on the approach.

I rested the cup on my chest while the Cessna shuddered. I closed my eyes, trying to get a little rest. It had been a busy couple of days and the next few were probably going to be worse. I took a sip of coffee as soon as things calmed down again.

It was the second day of Allied air ops over Libya. I’d called Anna from Nairobi to let her know what was going on, and to check she was all right. Everywhere had been bombarded. Syria had been sparking up. I was expecting her to say she wanted to stay on even longer and take in Damascus.

2

The aircraft took another pounding from the wind and Joe sparked up in my headphones. ‘It’s like a fucking cesspit, man. Look at it.’

I opened my eyes. To the left was desert. To the right was ocean, gleaming in the sunlight. It could have come from a faraway holiday brochure. Unfortunately, stuck between the water and the sand, there were the ruins of Mogadishu. The city looked like a massive black scorch mark. A haze of smog hovered above it.

The airport was at the southern end of the city. The runway was parallel to the sea and almost in it. As we came down through the heat haze I could see that the buildings were all low level, with roofs of Mediterranean tile and rusted tin. Only the mosques seemed taller. Mogadishu, Joe said: the world capital of things-gone-to-rat- shit.

Joe punched a few buttons and flicked a few switches in response to the waffle from the tower. Not that he seemed to be listening. ‘Over a million fucking people, man, and every one of them kicking the shit out of each other. Did you know the Brits and Italians ran this place? It was supposed to be beautiful, man. Guys in Malindi remember when it was paradise.’

The area beyond the runway couldn’t have been called heavenly. The crumbling grey remains of a concrete pier jutted out into the sea. Ships were anchored behind it for protection. Rusting hulks stuck out of the beach like rotten teeth. Further inland, a shanty town had sprung up. It looked like the world’s biggest scrapyard, but not just for the steel.

The aircraft veered left and right as Joe sorted himself out for the landing. Surf broke on beaches that were covered with shit. It reminded me of the ones in Libya. The sea might look inviting but this was no holiday destination. The shoreline was there to launch boats from, but that was it.

I knew a bit about Somalia’s history. I knew it had got its independence from Italy in 1960. Power was transferred from the Italian administrators and it became the Somali Republic. There was a lot of socialism going on in Africa in the 1960s. The continent was a proxy area for the Cold War. East and West fought each other for domination. The Soviet Union already had a foothold in the Somali Army, and became the dominant foreign influence

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