Months ago, when it had first begun, Abdullahi had promised himself he would only keep up the charade for a week. Seven straight days of siphoning five thousand USD from the transactions, and he would end up a very rich man.
Then he had realised the ease with which the process had been carried out, and it dawned on him that no-one gave a shit about a measly five thousand per day in the grand scheme of things.
So he’d continued.
Like clockwork.
The sheer magnitude of the pipeline was an untapped goldmine for lowly dock workers like himself. It had begun with a simple request to the trucking company from an anonymous payphone in the port.
‘Each container is an extra five thousand,’ Abdullahi had said into the receiver. ‘There’s been unexpected costs lately.’
‘Okay,’ came the reply.
A single syllable that had allowed him — just a measly rung in the extra-legal ladder — to tuck nearly four hundred and fifty thousand USD away in his disintegrating shack on the outskirts of Mogadishu.
None of the truckers had cared to enquire any further about the details. He had come to learn that the criminal industry relied implicitly on trust, and if one went snooping around, causing disruption, it spelled disaster. Besides, in an industry that handled close to a hundred million dollars per day across Africa, a measly five thousand increase was barely notable. The truckers showed up with thirty-five thousand each day, and Abdullahi was there to receive it, without fail.
And siphon off his portion.
Now he clambered into a barely functioning, open-topped jeep and fired the engine to life. Before he had put his plan into action, he’d been dead broke. The dock work barely paid enough to feed his wife and child, let alone himself. He had stumbled across the abandoned vehicle whilst hiking to the port one morning, its windscreen shattered and bullet holes riddling the chassis.
A remnant discarded from the Somali Civil War.
The keys had been in the ignition, and it started. Abdullahi had ignored the bloodstains on the seats and set about turning the jeep into a functioning ride. As long as it got him to and fro his intended destination, he didn’t care how bumpy the ride was.
Now, he pulled out of the gravel lot and rumbled onto a potholed trail, making for the distant outskirts of Mogadishu. There he owned a dismal one-room shack in a field choked with weeds and grass. He kept his head down and took care of his family, opting to devote himself to his job instead of aligning with a particular faction of the grisly civil war, a war that had consumed Mogadishu.
The city had devolved into a madhouse.
Sitting on the fresh bills in his back pocket, jolting up and down as the jeep’s tyres battled with the uneven terrain, Abdullahi let his mind wander. He dropped his guard, tuning out the distant reports of gunfire and the groaning of industrial equipment in the port behind him. He thought of the four hundred and fifty thousand stuffed into the back of a rotting cabinet in the corner of his shack.
Enough money to start a new life.
Enough money to flee Somalia for good.
For himself, his wife, and his child.
His thoughts drifted away, contemplating what-ifs, and he didn’t notice the vehicle on his tail until it was far too late.
He pulled into the one-lane driveway to his shack exactly eight minutes after leaving the port.
As soon as he killed the engine he realised something was awry. He couldn’t quite pinpoint the exact nature of the hunch, but it set him on edge, raising the hairs on the back of his neck as he stepped down into the choking dust. The grounds were silent — yet that was nothing out of the ordinary. The front door hung wide open — yet his wife, Hani, often let the shack air when the temperature soared.
But something felt off.
Abdullahi touched a hand instinctively to the empty leather holster at his waist. The Browning Hi-Power he’d picked up last month from an al-Shabaab militant was still in his dresser from the night before. He hadn’t bothered to pick it up on his way out the door this morning, an effect of the unusual drowsiness he’d experienced upon waking.
You fool.
He stood frozen in the centre of the driveway, his gaze wide, his veins pumping, staring like a deer in headlights through the open front door of the shack. The Browning lay within, just a dozen feet away.
He shrugged off a sudden chill and walked straight inside, chalking the hesitation and suspicion up to an active imagination. Cautious, but ultimately misinformed.
Or not.
He stepped into the shack and gazed around at the contents of the room.
There was no sign of his wife and child.
Fear hammered through him, a stark realisation that threatened to buckle his knees and snatch the breath from his lungs. He hyperventilated, sucking in the thick air in great heaving lungfuls.
Without seeing anything to prove it, he knew his entire family were dead.
It was the nature of the world he lived in. A world he had precariously existed in for years without incident, where armed bandits and Islamic militants and trigger-happy soldiers had the ability to strip him or his loved ones of their lives in the blink of an eye for no reason whatsoever. Every day he had lived with the weight of that burden on his shoulders, and it had been one of the main reasons for taking on more risk by siphoning profits off the top of an illegal pipeline. He had wanted out for years, and just as he’d stumbled across the chance, it had all been torn from him…
His eyes welled up as he scrutinised his surroundings. There was no sign of a struggle, but this was Somalia. If his family were not where they were supposed to be, they were as good as dead.
There was no alternative.
He heard the blade whistling through the air behind him a half-second before it punched through the skin across his lower back, rupturing internal organs with a horrific needling sensation. Abdullahi pawed uselessly behind him in a half-hearted attempt to fend off his attacker, but the knife wielder shoved him to the floor with a single push.
He had never felt strength quite like that.
With all the willpower sapping from his limbs, he sprawled out across the musty timber panels, already bleeding profusely. His attacker wrenched the knife out and slammed it home again, but Abdullahi barely felt the second puncture.
His senses were fading into oblivion…
With the last morsel of strength he had left in his body, he lifted his head to watch thickset boots stride across the shack. He picked up the sound of drawers being wrenched free at random, the pace quickening until finally the commotion reached its apex.
Abdullahi heard his attacker let out a low whistle of glee.
The stash.
Four hundred and fifty thousand.
His head drooped back to the floor, sending splinters of timber into his open mouth. He didn’t try to resist. The darkness closed in, encircling his vision.
As he died, he scolded himself for his foolishness. To think that he could have deceived a multi-billion dollar operation so easily should have been a stark warning sign. For months he had told himself there would be a catch, but in the final stretch before he fled the country with his family he had allowed himself to grow reckless, almost believing that his life would have a happy ending.
So much for that.
Abdullahi tasted blood — the wounds in his back had formed a sweeping puddle across the floor upon which he splayed. The warm crimson liquid soaked into his nose and mouth, and he succumbed to unconsciousness about as peacefully as one could.
As he drifted away, he thought of his wife and child.