and Sea Transportation?”
Ahmed Babkir Taha had grown up in Hafun, but he’d moved to Mogadishu as a teenager, gone to work for a well-to-do uncle, and eventually been able to get an education in neighboring Ethiopia, in Addis Ababa. With his uncle’s import-export firm, he’d traveled as far as Cairo and Damascus, attracted the right attention, and finally been appointed as an assistant undersecretary of the Ministry of Ports and Sea Transportation within the Somalian transitional government-in-exile. His position gave him access to important information about what ships and cargos were entering Somalian waters.
That was information for which some groups paid handsomely.
“General Abdallah,” he said, bowing, then awkwardly saluting. “Your Excellency!” He was never quite sure of the proper protocol when dealing with these people … and a mistake, an insult, could be instantly fatal. “Excellent news!” he continued. “A cargo ship will be entering our waters in two days. A Russian ship, the
“And what cargo would that be?” Mohammad Fahiye asked. Fahiye, Taha knew, thought that he was a TFG lackey and did not trust him.
There was some truth in that, of course. Taha
Then again, al-Shabaab was linked with the foreign al-Qaeda.
And in truth, Taha was less a supporter of the TFG than he was an enemy of the fundamentalist Islamic groups like al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam.
“Tell me about this ship,” Abdallah said, his dark eyes glinting in the firelight.
“She is a small and aging freighter, Shanghai to Haifa, with stops in Singapore and Karachi,” Taha said. “Twelve hundred tons. Speed less than twenty knots, a crew of twenty-one. There may be small arms aboard, but the ship otherwise is unarmed.”
“Allah be praised!” Adow said. “This may be what we’ve been looking for, my friends!”
Taha was a devout Sunni Muslim. He believed implicitly in the power, the protection, and the mercy of God.
With that merciful God’s help, he would destroy these monsters.
Taha stood quietly as the pirates discussed the news. Adow, especially, seemed eager to go after the Russian ship, but Abdallah was hanging back, suspicious, perhaps, of such an apparently easy target. The foreign, Western navies had made things far more dangerous at sea lately. But as the earnest discussion continued, it appeared that Abdallah might be growing more interested as well.
“Then this Russian ship with its valuable cargo will be moving up the Red Sea?” Abdallah asked. “There with Allah’s help, we will have her.”
The militia’s leaders burst into cheers and wild cries of
“You can’t stay here,” Lia told the writer as he sat down on her bed. “My people are making arrangements to fly you back to the States.”
“But … I’m not done here.”
“Done with what?”
“My
“Mr. Carlylse, have you heard a word of what I’ve been telling you? The JeM wants you dead!”
“Yes, but why? I’m not a threat to anyone!”
Lia shook her head, exasperated. Carlylse seemed to live in a tightly wrapped little world of his own and had trouble seeing beyond his next deadline.
“Look, just tell me some more about this book of yours, the one about 2012 and the tidal wave.”
Carlylse fished around inside the zippered outer pocket of his suitcase and produced a paperback book. The cover showed the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., beneath ominous black skies, with a gray-green ocean wave towering hundreds of feet above the dome. The title,
“You know about the 2012 prophecies, right?” Carlylse asked her.
“Not much. Something about the ancient Mayans, right?”
“Right. The Mayans had a fantastically accurate calendar. They divided up history into four ages, or ‘Suns,’ each under the light of a different sun god, each one doomed to destruction. We’re in the Fourth Sun, the fourth age, now — and it ends in December of 2012.”
“And you think that an earthquake on La Palma is going to usher in the end of the world?”
“Certainly the end of the world as we know it. This island, this little fragment of lost Atlantis, is a kind of time bomb. When it goes, hundreds of cubic miles of rock will fall into the ocean and raise a tidal wave nine hundred feet high. Six hours later, that wave will start hitting the U.S. East Coast, up in New England, and by that time the waves will be down to a hundred fifty feet high, and they’ll smash over ten miles inland.”
“That doesn’t sound like the end of the whole world.”
“With the United States crippled? Our economy literally washed down the drain? The United States could be reduced to third-worldnation status. The financial collapse would bring down industrial economies all over the world. You’d have the radical Muslims claiming that Allah was ushering in a new age. You’d have hungry populations crossing borders like locust plagues, eating everything in sight. You’d have—”
“I get the picture.” She turned the paperback over, read the backcover blurb, and smiled. “Tell me, Mr. Carlylse, do you actually
“Well,” he said, and he sounded sheepish, “first and foremost, I
Taha returned to his home an hour after meeting with Abdallah and his lieutenants. He was still alive — and all praise to Allah for that small fact — and the al-Shabaab pirates had taken the bait.
It was now out of his hands, and in the hands of Allah the compassionate, the Most High.
Taha’s home was one of the older buildings, a mud-brick dwelling belonging to his father and his uncle. He greeted his father and mother in the front room, then excused himself as quickly as he politely could to go to the room in the back that served as his bedroom when he was in Hafun.
Here, one wall had been partially broken down by the tidal wave and crudely patched over with lumber and sheets of plywood. It was wet and it was drafty, but it served well enough when he wasn’t in Mogadishu or Addis Ababa. He went to the back corner next to the patchwork and began moving aside scraps of wood.
Perhaps, because of what he’d done this evening, Abdallah, Adow, and the rest would soon be gone. He prayed that that would be the case …
Like Taha and the others native to Hafun, Abdallah and his al-Shabaab militiamen were Sunni Muslims, but theirs was a different flavor of the holy faith, a faith largely alien to the fishermen of the northern coast, the region known as Puntland. It had been one thing when Abdallah had arrived with his boat, offering to help the fisherfolk of Hafun. It had been something quite different when Adow and other Sunni clerics with the group had begun imposing their beliefs on the locals.
The fact that Abdallah and his people were pirates meant little. Then inhabitants of Hafun made their meager livings by fishing, and everyone knew that more and more Somalian fishermen had been switching over to more lucrative means of earning an income these past few years. It had started innocently enough when some Somalian
