fishermen had begun boarding and seizing the fishing boats of other nations — Kenya and Djibouti, especially — that were entering Somalian waters to fish illegally. With no working government, no coast guard, no navy to keep the poachers out, the fishermen had begun taking matters into their own hands in order to preserve their own livelihoods.
It had not been long before they’d discovered that they could make far more money by capturing foreign cargo ships or the yachts of rich Europeans and holding them for ransom. That was all simply business, and a means for survival. Taha had done quite well for himself and his family by selling information on foreign ship movements to various pirate gangs.
No, the piracy meant nothing. Al-Shabaab, though, had become a monster.
For over a year now, Abdallah and his people had been terrorizing the inhabitants of Hafun and nearby Foar and Jibalei, implementing the shari’a, religious law, with a brutal, insanely self-righteous fervor. Taha knew well that the path of submission to Allah required sacrifice and hardship. Simply attempting to eke out an existence in Puntland required sacrifice on a daily basis.
But this was something more.
Since their arrival last year, al-Shabaab’s clerics had begun enforcing their version of shari’a on the region’s female population — ordering families not to allow their daughters to attend the foreigners’ schools on pain of death, ordering families to have “the cutting” carried out on all of their daughters in accord with ancient tradition, ordering the wearing of scarves and veils as well as the traditional head coverings to comport with
Perhaps the most bewildering of all was the recent ban on bras, seen as “deceptive,” and therefore in violation of Islamic law. Beginning in Mogadishu in 2009, al-Shabaab militia gangs had been rounding up women and inspecting them in the streets. Those found to be wearing a bra were publicly stripped, given twenty lashes, and forced to shake their breasts in front of the militiamen after the whipping.
Women found to be wearing trousers could receive forty lashes, the maximum allowed by shari’a, after being stripped and shamed.
What, Taha wondered, could a just and merciful God possibly care about women’s clothing when the people were starving to death? The local people couldn’t protect themselves, were too poor, too hungry, too demoralized to attempt to flee.
In any case, where could they go?
Even worse was the enforcement of the cutting.
Taha still felt a certain fearful ambiguity about that. The cutting of a girl’s genitals when she approached marriageable age had long been sanctioned by Islamic culture and was common across Muslim Africa. What was not well known, however, was that the cutting was not required by the holy Qur’an; rather, it was an outgrowth of local cultures, something likely practiced here long before the Prophet’s message had come.
The militants like al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam claimed that only a rigid adherence to traditional Sunni values and religious law would save the people in the eyes of Allah — and that included everything from proper modesty to the cutting. Taha, however, had seen enough of the world to know that the
He’d first begun to recognize the importance of those differences in interpretation when his ten-year-old sister had died in agony from an infection two weeks after she’d undergone the cutting.
Even in Egypt, most women still required their daughters to undergo the ordeal. Lately, though, more and more of the people, especially the younger ones, and especially the women, had been saying that perhaps the foreigners were right — that if the cutting was not enjoined by the holy Qur’an, then it was not necessary. They said that education, even of
The outsiders, the militants from the South, carried a different message, and in Taha’s eyes, their message was not religion but an abomination, and Taha was determined to fight them in any way that he could.
Beneath the pile of scrap lumber, he found the radio, carefully swaddled in plastic. The battery was growing weak; he would need to get a new one on his next trip to Addis Ababa, but it should last for the next week or two. He switched the device on, placed the earphones on his head, and picked up the microphone.
“Black Bull, this is Sand Shark,” he said, as he’d been trained. He kept his voice low, because he didn’t want his parents to know. “Black Bull, come in, please …”
16
The man walked up to the airport ticket counter, wheeling a single suitcase. Handing his ticket to the woman behind the computer monitor, he gave her a friendly smile.
“Is it on time?” he asked in Spanish. “The flight out to Madrid?”
She looked up at the big scheduling board overhead. “
“Just one.” He folded up the handle and placed it on the scale platform.
“And did you pack this bag yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Did any person unknown to you give you anything to pack?”
“No.”
“Has your bag been in your possession at all times since arriving at the airport?”
“Yes.”
The woman ran through the usual list of security questions, and the man answered each one. At the end, the woman attached a luggage tag, then hauled the suitcase off the scale and slung it onto the conveyor behind her.
The man watched the bag disappear through a plastic curtain. Security here in La Palma, he knew, was light, the questioning and the checks perfunctory at best. The only flights were island hoppers and a few larger commuter flights to and from the mainland, not the sort of traffic that would interest a politically motivated group like, just for instance, the Jaish-e-Mohammad.
The man had been careful not to fit the typical terrorist profile. He was clean-shaven, wore glasses, and was well dressed, and his papers gave him a Spanish identity. He spoke fluent Spanish, and he’d been rehearsed on current events in Spain — politics and sports especially, just in case someone engaged him in casual conversation.
He looked around the terminal. “Not many people flying today.”
“Oh, this is the slow season, Senor Mendoza,” she told him with a smile. “Not many tourists yet.”
“Tell me … has a colleague of mine checked in yet? A Mr. Carlylse?”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m really not supposed to discuss the affairs of other passengers.”
He gave her his brightest smile. “Of course. But surely you can tell me if he’s on the passenger list. I know he checked out of his hotel room last night. I was supposed to meet him here before the flight.”
“I’m so sorry, sir. Company regulations—”
“Yes, yes. Security. Well … can you tell me, is this the only flight out of La Palma today?”
“Yes, sir. It is.”
“Then he must be on it! Thank you. I’ll find him on the plane.”
“Gate One, sir. Right down there.”
“I see it. Thank you.”
He walked off toward the gate but turned aside to enter the airport’s small boutique area first.
