Inside, the intruders moved from room to room, opening closet doors, inspecting the dishes in the sink, reading the labels on bottles in the wine cabinet, unaware there was a hidden closet behind the fine wines. They rifled through the mail Nairobi deliberately left on the table. Merk wondered if they would look under the table and find the stack of euros she had taped to the underside. After a few minutes in the kitchen, the intruders fanned out to different rooms. Any thought about Nico and Merk returning to the safe house vanished. As a result, their exit strategy out of Somalia would have to be rerouted. They could no longer go back the way they came to Puntland. There was no going back to the safe house at all.
And that bothered Merk.
“I’m going to drop you off at the beach so I can shadow Nairobi,” Nico said.
“That should work.” Merk gazed out to the slivers of the blue sea blinking between the breaks of the bluffs and rock outcroppings as Nico drove along the coast.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The armed guards wore blue jeans and white tee shirts. Khmer Rouge — like scarves draped their heads, shading their scalps from the intense spring sun.
Their scowls grew sharper; the worry lines cut furrows in their foreheads. They stepped forward to block the entrance to the compound, flanked by crags halfway up the Sheikh Mountain Pass. With a glance, the guards raised AK-47s, aiming them at the windshield of the approaching car. The vehicle skidded to a stop.
Powering down the window, Nairobi stuck out her hand and shook the silver bangles on her wrist, alerting the guard who was behind the wheel. One guard strolled over to the door, his swarthy face crinkled in the arid heat, his eyes bloodshot. He stole a glance at Nairobi’s cleavage, asking whom she wanted to visit. But when she answered, it wasn’t his boss Korfa she asked for, but the hostages of the Blå Himmel and the Shining Sea.
The guard made a face, mulling her unusual request, in light of the slaying of Korfa’s brother Samatar. He looked back at the other guard. After a pause, he nodded at her. As the guard opened the fortified gate, the first guard banged his fist on the car door, asking her in the animal trader dialect of Somaliland’s modern city of Hargeisa, “Did you bring the cloth?”
She lifted up a folded purple cloth with blurred bands of white and violet around the border. Then she held up an old edition of the Qur’an, showing the book’s frayed spine, the pages yellowed with age.
The guard waved Nairobi through. She drove into the compound. Inside the gate, half a dozen teenage pirates carrying Uzis and AK-47s guided her to park under a dead tree, offering no shade from the heat. When Nairobi stepped out, an elder fisherman frisked her. He ran his hands over her thighs, swept them under her crotch, and squeezed her firm butt. She stood still, containing her disgust at being groped. She watched the leering eyes of the boys without complaint as the elder patted her blouse, grazed her ribs, pinched the wires under the bra. The elder removed her sunglasses and checked her eyes. The brightness dilated her pupils; she squinted.
She covered her eyes, scanning a pair of new Audi sports cars parked under a camouflage canopy. They were stored in shade. Caught in the disequilibrium of the light and the news that she had arrived at the funeral of Samatar, Nairobi followed the elder into the dwelling fortified out of a natural cave. The pirate hideout, covered with wadis—sandy rivers — pouring down from the Sheikh Mountains into one of many springs and underground wells in and around the pass, was an ideal place that provided sanctuary to stay out of the prying eyes of US drones, satellites, and spy planes. Because it was located inland, away from the coast, away from any major city, the CIA rarely looked at the greenery and the mountains of western Somaliland. And until a week ago, Nairobi didn’t know of the compound’s existence.
Nairobi had visited Samatar and Korfa plenty of times the past few years, at their home in Puntland, negotiating on a fishing skiff at sea, bartering a deal with the Somalia Coast Guard, making intel drops outside a mosque to win their trust, in another compound, or in a string of huts and safe houses closer to where she lived on the coast.
So the new secret location of Korfa’s hideout gave her pause. It demonstrated how fast the pirates had moved under the twins. They consolidated power, wiped out rivals in the north, and ramped up and executed plans. She also knew how Korfa and Samatar resisted overtures from Yemeni tribesmen, AQAP, and other militant Islamic groups to join and build up radical Islam in their homeland. But their form of Muslim worship was far more nuanced than the male-only, austere practice of the Taliban or the Saudi Arabian-sponsored Sunni Islam Wahhabis schools.
Korfa’s clan mixed religion with African mysticism; trusted their women to carry out segregated but important religious rites, functions, and doctrines. He didn’t like Somali women being covered up, not head to toe. With their burgeoning trade of money-for-hostages and double brass balls, the twin brothers branched out, expanding both their territorial empire and network of foreign sponsors and trade partners. Some even migrated to Nigeria to help ramp up the pirate attacks of Western Africa or support Boko Haram attacks in the north.
Like Alexander the Great, their father’s domain wasn’t big enough to contain their ambition. Now they saw moving beyond Somalia’s borders as the next step in their rise to power. That was the threat that scared the US intelligence agencies the most about Somali and why the Pentagon sent Nico, Merk, and the navy dolphins on the Black Lit to gather intel.
In the main entranceway of the cave, boxes of supplies were stacked to the ceiling. They contained items from dry goods and vacuum-packed food to arms and ammunition. Nairobi sensed Korfa’s men were preparing for something big, that they planned on being holed up for some time — all the supplies told her that. The pirates were ready to go underground, to live in the network of caves in the Sheikh Mountains for months or longer.
Sensing the chess move, Nairobi had mentally prepared for that day to discuss the hostages and how she could become the liaison in the negotiations with the foreign shipowners and insurance companies. But all that changed with the death of Samatar. Korfa was going to honor his brother before any business was going to be conducted, before he launched any plans seeking revenge. The more she thought, the more she realized the hostages were being held at some other location outside the compound in the mountain pass.
The elder led Nairobi into an alcove. It was dimly lit with oil lanterns. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she saw Korfa’s women — a curvy mistress, his graying aunt, and a couple of young female cousins — standing in a burial pit the guards had dug out by hand. The women draped light green cloth on the pit’s walls, chanting prayers in preparing the hole to receive the body.
Nairobi nodded politely, handed the purple cloth to the aunt, and stepped around the pit. At the back of the alcove, she saw Korfa cleaning the body of Samatar. She noticed the gunshot wound had been sewn up and Korfa had worked on preparing the body like a tree, rinsing the flesh of the trunk with holy water, moving down the boughs of the legs, wiping away the blood from the fatal wound, and wiping off Samatar’s arms.