His hand came up.
I was pissing him off. I needed to wind my neck in.
‘All in good time, Mr Nick. Look more closely.’ He bent from the waist and I followed suit. He pointed. ‘Lower.’ It was definitely a command, not a request. I knelt in the sand. Under the canopy of spikes I could now see curls of razor wire, guarding a profusion of twisted metal shapes. Then I spotted US Army initials, black on dark green.
The carcass of a Black Hawk.
‘Your father …?’
‘My father shot this down. It was the first. My dad is famous.’
He turned and shouted, and one of the lads came running over with an RPG launcher.
‘He used one of these.’ He rested the weapon on his shoulder and pointed it at the sky. ‘My father — a great man.’
I looked back at the wreckage under the cacti. A multi-million-dollar machine, taken out by a $310 kick up the arse.
The Black Hawks had flown low over the city with snipers on board to support the attack on the Olympic Hotel. The intelligence guys had determined that RPGs did not represent any air-defence threat. They thought that if you aimed the weapon into the sky, like Awaale was doing, the back blast would hit the ground and take out the firer — and no way would the clans fire it from a rooftop because they would be spotted immediately and hosed down. But Aidid knew better — and he knew that the best way to hurt the Americans was to shoot down their helicopters. The Black Hawks were like the Apaches in Afghanistan — the symbol of the US’s power and the clans’ helplessness.
Aidid had planned his ambush well. He had smuggled in Islamic fundamentalist soldiers from Sudan who’d fought against Russian Hind gunships in Afghanistan. They showed men like Awaale’s dad how to modify the RPG so they could fire from the street. All they had to do was weld some curved piping on the end to deflect the back blast — adding that extra ten dollars to the original $300 cost.
Something else. RPG grenades burst on impact, so it’s hard to hit a fast-moving target with one. The ‘advisers’ fitted the detonators with timing devices to make them explode in mid-air. That way, they wouldn’t need a direct hit to bring down a Black Hawk. The
The whole operation to capture Aidid from the Olympic Hotel had been supposed to take no more than thirty minutes, a typical enough time for an SF op. Instead, once this Black Hawk had come down, it had spiralled into eighteen hours of urban combat, as US units tried to fight their way in to rescue the crews and shooters. Then another $310 dollars’ worth brought down a second Black Hawk, and the nightmare was complete. Two posthumous Congressional Medals of Honour, the equivalent of our VC, were awarded for that night’s action. Aidid wasn’t touched. It wasn’t until three years later that he was killed in the city during a clan battle.
I stood up and brushed the sand off my hands. ‘Where’s your dad now? Is he still alive?’
‘He’s a taxi driver in Minneapolis.’
‘You went with him?’
He nodded.
Now I knew where the accent came from. The US had stopped their aid to Somalia, but they hadn’t turned their back completely. As the cactus allotment sprouted and grew, the US had opened its borders to refugees, especially the educated or moneyed ones. The vast majority of them joined their mates in Minneapolis. Before long, it was the biggest Somali population on the planet outside Somalia itself. Even Easton couldn’t compete.
I stood there as the RPG was handed back. If Awaale was telling the truth, the guy who took down the first Black Hawk was now driving Americans home from the airport. I guessed his war stories weren’t part of his cabbie chat.
‘Why are you smiling, Mr Nick?’
‘You must be very proud.’
‘Sure I am.’
There were shouts. He looked away sharply. The smile dropped from his face. He shouted back.
‘We have to go, Mr Nick.’
He didn’t wait for my answer. He was already legging it towards the technical. I didn’t need to know what the fuck was going on. All I needed to know was that if he was running, then so was I.
7
The crews were getting sparked up, but it wasn’t because they were scared. It was worse than that. They were almost hyperventilating with excitement.
I heard screams and wails from inside nearby buildings. The people who’d run back into their homes knew what was about to happen.
We jabbed down a series of narrow alleys. He was too busy yelling at his crews to pay any attention to me. None of them was taking cover.
The shadows from our left were lengthening, but I could still just about see what was happening in the gaps between buildings. There was around an hour until last light.
The crews were more sparked up by the minute. They hollered at each other and into their radios and mobiles. Whoever it was they were talking to, it was one big frenzy of
I had to shout over the din: ‘Awaale, what is happening?’
I’d ducked into a doorway on the left-hand side of the alley, for all the protection that was going to give me. I banged my back against a steel door that was well and truly bolted.
Awaale waffled away on his radio on the opposite side of it. He raised a hand to shut me up.
A technical that I hoped was ours stopped two blocks down, at the junction with what was left of a real road. Its gun pointed down the main drag left and started to pump out rounds.
Everybody jumped about and took up very bad fire positions on the crossroads. The whole world went noisy. The crews stuck their weapons round corners and brassed up who knew what. They were spraying half of Mogadishu.
Some of the lads darted across the road, firing from the hip. One tripped, lost a flip-flop, rolled, fired, got up and carried on running. The home team whooped and cheered. One even took a picture with his camera phone. I wondered if it would turn up on Facebook. Another couple of boys got into decent firing positions on the building corner, loosed off a burst each, then stopped and pulled out the Marlboros. They took a few drags, stuck their weapons round the corner again, and had another cabbie.
Fuck knows where the other two technicals had gone. With luck, they’d stayed close. I needed them to get me to wherever Tracy and the others were being held.
A guy with an RPG tube jumped off the back of the technical I could see. He stepped out into the open ground of the junction and fired, then came running back. Everyone else just watched and smoked. Why he couldn’t fire from cover, I wasn’t sure.
I heard a rumble, very close, followed by the rattle of a 12.7. I hoped it was one of ours.
Over to my half-left, a green tracer round bounced off the concrete and spun up into the air. I watched the propellant burn out. They were firing at something, but I didn’t have a clue what. The noise was deafening. Both the technicals opened up again. Another RPG whooshed away.
I ran across to Awaale. ‘We’ve got to go, mate. I’ve got people to see. We can’t make them wait for ever.’
He took no notice. Everyone was gobbing off on the radio, shouting and pointing at everybody else.
The second technical appeared. It drove up the road towards us, inches of clearance each side, braked and reversed back. The lad cracked off with the gun down one of the alleyways. Total fucking chaos. No one in control. Everyone was doing their own thing.
