“You’ll drive her to the camp. Doctors there can save her life. And call those Kenyan choppers. If she’s stable enough to fly, they need to pick her up. Birgit can’t die. I can’t let her die.”
Justin had seen too many people die on his watch. He had tried to save them all, and sometimes he succeeded. He hoped this would be one of those cases.
Carrie finished cleaning the wound, then placed a few pads over it, leaning with both hands on Birgit’s thigh. “And the mission?” she said. “You’ll go at it alone?”
Justin shrugged. “I have to. We’re so close. And Yusuf has only three guards. I found two boxes full of brand new assault rifles in the jeep. Can you guess their model?”
Carrie did a double take. “They’re not AK-47s, or you wouldn’t ask. So, I’ve have to go with Type 56?”
“The Chinese knockoff of AK-47? No. This is close to home. They’re M16s.”
“Brand new US-made M16s? Where did al-Shabaab get them?”
“Not sure. They attacked a police station, a military base, or a Somali government warehouse somewhere. We should be able to trace their origin.”
Carrie nodded. “All right, so you get to the village, get to Yusuf, and drive out in one piece. Call me if you’ll need an exfil.”
Justin kicked some sand with the tip of his boot. “I’ll hide the jeep outside the village. I’ll either have to come back to it or steal Yusuf’s car. Or get another vehicle from the locals.”
Carrie frowned. “I don’t like the odds,” she said. “No offense, but this is more than even you can chew.”
“I know. And I don’t like it either. But there’s no other way.”
Chapter Ten
Justin and Carrie cleaned the arsenal of M16s and their ammunition, a couple of mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades from the jeep. They retrieved Birgit’s money, removed the militants’ bodies, and scrubbed their blood off the jeep’s seats. They could do nothing about the bullet holes in the windshield, but it was not unusual for Somali cars to have cracked or bullet-shredded windows. If anything, it added a more local feel to Justin’s ride. Along with his blue robe, a jalabiya, he bought in Nairobi, the jeep would allow him to blend in.
Justin eased on the gas pedal as the first mud huts of Barjaare came into view. He was getting closer to the village. He had already seen herdsmen tending goats that looked as scrawny as their owners. They minded their own depressing business, throwing only casual, disinterested glances in his direction. Dead carcasses and piles of garbage became a familiar sight alongside the road.
At the edge of the village, he saw a one-story mud brick building with holes large enough for a small child to run through. Its roof had collapsed and weeds were growing next to the walls. A rusty, broken sign read in large white letters SCHOO, the ‘L’ missing from the word. Justin wondered when and why the village had abandoned it. Perhaps al-Shabaab prohibited the villagers from taking their children to school. Or maybe they were afraid their children would be kidnapped while away from their parents and forced into al-Shabaab’s service. He had read many reports of such occurrences in al-Shabaab-dominated areas.
He left the main road behind and drove to the school. Debris littered the backyard. One of the walls had caved in, creating a large opening. He steered in that direction, negotiating his way through the uneven terrain, and parked his jeep inside the school, away from any curious eyes. He stepped out and took his knapsack from the back of the jeep. Then he slipped his pistol — a newer Russian-made Makarov, retrieved from one of the dead militants in the pickup — and two extra magazines in the right side pocket of his robe and listened.
All he heard was relative silence, pierced by a dog’s yelp, a loud shout in an African dialect he did not understand, and the distant bleating of a goat. Justin glanced at his wristwatch. Still making good time. Yusuf and his guards were expected to arrive at the village before sunset, which was still an hour away. Justin was planning to set up his position at a vantage point across from the doctor’s house and strike as soon as Yusuf got out of his vehicle.
He wore his white and blue headdress and walked toward the village, his knapsack over his left shoulder. He would attract some attention from the locals, and he hoped it would not be the wrong kind of attention.
The first glances came from a group of women in colorful dresses and veils, who were sitting and talking outside a tin-roofed mud house. Their conversation turned hushed as Justin walked on the other side of the road, a few feet away from them. He avoided making direct eye contact, but still glanced in their general direction, paying special attention to the house entrance and a few large rusty barrels stacked along the thatched fence.
A group of children — six in all — ran out from the yard of the next house. They looked malnourished, their bellies swollen, their arms and legs thin as twigs. Justin tried to guess their age, but he found it impossible. They could be five, or seven, or nine. He smiled at them, and greeted them in Arabic. They stared at him, but muttered no words in reply. Justin dipped his left hand in his knapsack and pulled out two granola bars. It was part of his late lunch. He waved them at the boys. One of them — the tallest, who also seemed to be the leader of the gang — reached forward, grabbed the granola bars and broke into a sprint. The others gave chase, their high-pitched shouts filling the village.
Three houses away, Justin spotted two young men preparing firewood out of an acacia tree in their backyard. One of them was swinging a machete; the other was loading the chopped branches into a cart. He passed by without talking to them, and they were too consumed in their work to notice him.
The road curved and became wider, enough for two cars to pass by one another with ease. A bar was straight ahead with a group of men sitting in battered plastic chairs, sipping tea and smoking tobacco on the porch, under the shade of a corrugated tin roof. They laid their gazes upon Justin as soon as he rounded the corner. He smiled, while taking in the entire surroundings. There were eight men, mostly in their late thirties, two or three older, perhaps in their fifties. He could not tell if they were armed, but as he drew nearer he saw an AK lying against the wall by the entrance to the bar. He was sure there had to be more inside the bar and in the nearby houses.
“Salam Alaykum,” Justin greeted them, placing his left hand over his heart.
A couple of the younger men replied with the customary “Alaykum Salam.” The others offered reluctant nods, their cautious eyes measuring up his face, his clothes, his moves.
“My name is Fadil Naeim. I’m a journalist with CairoTV in Egypt,” Justin spoke slowly and softly in Arabic, with a warm, friendly tone in his voice. He smiled as he talked and kept the AK and the bar entrance in his peripheral vision.
His words stirred some emotion among the men. A few shifted in their seats, motioning to the rest and whispering among themselves.
One of the older men, who sported a salt-and-pepper beard, peered at him for a few moments, then asked, “A journalist? You’re lost? Where’s your guide?”
Justin had already thought about various replies to those questions. “Our four-car convoy fell into an ambush. I think… I think in the aftermath I got lost.” He tried to make his words and the tone of his voice come across as unthreatening, yet not make him sound too weak. He did not know if the allegiance of these men lay with al-Shabaab or the Somali government.
The word “ambush” rattled the crowd. Two of the younger men stood up and asked, “What ambush? Where? Who was it?”