Scorpion Deception

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Dharkenleey,

Mogadishu, Somalia

She was being watched. It was the South African, Van Zyl, a lanky bearded man with blue eyes. He was from UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, at the improvised horror show called Badbaada Camp on the western outskirts of Mogadishu. The Badbaada refugee camp made the one at Dadaab in Kenya seem like the Ritz Carlton. Plastic sheeting was the only shelter, no food or toilet facilities, nothing; just dirt on the wrong side of Dharkenleey Road and a single water faucet for sixty thousand people and hundreds more arriving every day to escape the fighting and starvation in Afgooye and Lower Shabelle. Van Zyl had shown up just three days after she arrived.

She had flown in from Nairobi. Coming in from the airport, Mogadishu was a city of blazing sun and battered white Toyota vans so packed with people that men and boys rode clinging to the outside, standing on rear bumpers as they bounced along the rutted streets; a city of open-air markets selling vegetables, guns, and ammunition; concrete cinder-block buildings, some blasted to ruins by the recent fighting, women in multicolored direhs with children moving among the armed green-bereted African Union troops and Somali government soldiers that were everywhere.

Whenever Van Zyl was around, she sensed his eyes on her. Not the normal way men looked at a woman, particularly if she was reaching or bending over to get something. She was a grown woman and understood that kind of a look. This was different. As if he was watching to see what she would do.

The boy, Ghedi, the one saved by the American she called David Cheyne, even though she knew it wasn’t his real name, noticed it too. When she had come back to Dadaab from Paris, the boy was gone. He disappeared after learning his little sister might still be alive in Mogadishu. God only knew how he’d made it through the war zone, but somehow he was here now, still looking for his sister.

“That mzungu,” Ghedi said, using the Swahili slang word for a white man that he had picked up in Dadaab, “he watch you.”

“Yes,” she nodded, wiping her forehead with her forearm. Under the stretch of plastic tarps that served for a hospital tent, it was unbelievably hot, at least forty-five degrees Celsius. If her patients weren’t already dying, the heat and the flies only compounded the misery. But they never complained. Even though she could do so little for them, they were grateful. They were wonderful, and it was hopeless, and what was she doing here and where was the American and why couldn’t she get him out of her mind?

The Hawiye women in their beautiful direhs and graceful gestures would say she was bewitched. Maybe it was true, she thought. Why else was she here?

“Should I kill him, isuroon?” the boy asked, using the Somali word for a woman deserving of respect, holding up the belawa knife he wore on a leather thong around his neck. He had seen her with the American and had appointed himself her protector till the American returned.

“La,” no, she said, touching his hand with the knife. “Not yet.”

“If you say, I will kill him,” he said, looking at her.

“I know,” she said. “But now you must go. This is for women. A ragol,” a man, “may not be here.”

She felt him leave as she turned back to the patient, a little girl on a shred of blanket on the ground. Small, shriveled with a swollen belly, she looked barely four years old, though her mother said she was seven. The child was severely malnourished and dehydrated. Too malnourished to use an IV, which could overhydrate and kill her. And she was dangerously lethargic. It could be shock or sepsis, she thought, looking at the mother, whose face had so little flesh it was like looking at a skull.

“Voici.” She gestured to the mother, handing her one of the few Baggies of liquid ReSoMal she still had left and showing her how to give it to the girl orally, even as she debated with herself whether to use it or save it for another because this child was so far gone. Except she couldn’t do that, could she? she told herself. She raised the tiny torn direh and then saw it. The gaping bloody wound at the child’s genitals.

“Mada? Mana?” What? Who? she asked the mother, pointing at the wound and using two of the few words of Arabic she knew.

“Digil, Al-Shabaab,” the woman said. Al-Shabaab soldiers from the Digil clan.

It was rape, Sandrine thought, feeling nauseous. The thought of grown men with this tiny child made her try to swallow to keep from throwing up. I can’t do this anymore, she thought, looking at the girl’s wasted body. She took a breath. This petite didn’t do anything to have this happen to her, she thought, pulling out a thermometer strip to take the girl’s temperature: 40.2 degrees Celsius. High fever. Sepsis from the wound. She looked around despairingly. By rights she should order a CBC, start skin tear repair, but the only thing she had-and damn little of it-was penicillin. This wasn’t medicine, it was witch-doctoring!

She took out the ampule, gave her the injection, and bandaged the wound as best she could. The child barely reacted to the needle. She had to get out of here, Sandrine thought. She patted the mother on the arm and ran out into the blazing sun.

Van Zyl, in his ratty Kaizer Chiefs football T-shirt and shorts, was standing there. Not doing anything, just standing there.

“Stop watching me, you bloody son of a bitch!” she screamed at him. “So help me, I’ll have someone shoot you! And do something useful for once! Get the medicines I ordered!”

“Take it easy, bokkie. I’ll catch you later,” he said, holding up his hands in mock surrender and walking away.

She put her hands to her face. She wasn’t helping these people or herself. Why was she here? And an inner voice whispered: Because you know he’ll find you here.

She shook her head. Ce n’est pas moi, she told herself. It’s not me. She went back into the hospital tent. The heat and stench were overpowering.

“Merde,” she said aloud, and went back to work.