Scorpion Deception

CHAPTER ONE

Lower Shabelle Region,

Somalia, The Present

“Kata’lahu.” You kill him, Khalaf said to the American in Arabic.

Khalaf stood behind Dowler, his long razor-sharp belawa knife at the British aid worker’s throat. Dowler, on his knees in the sand, hands tied behind him, face pockmarked with cigarette burns, had the dazed look-part fear, part sheer disbelief-that comes in the final seconds when a person realizes he is about to die.

You stupid twit, the American code-named Scorpion thought.

“No. You want him dead, do it yourself,” Scorpion replied in Fusha; standard Arabic.

“Kill him or we kill you,” Khalaf growled, motioning to one of his Al-Shabaab militiamen. The man put the muzzle of his AK-47 to Scorpion’s head, his finger on the trigger.

“I thought we were having shah hawaash,” Scorpion said, implying that they still had unfinished business. He gestured at the spread of tea, bread, and dates on the blanket under the shade of a plastic tarp a few feet away. “The tea is still hot,” he added, reminding Khalaf of the Somali courtesy due a guest.

“Why not?” Khalaf said, kicking Dowler down to the sand.

Khalaf came over and sat on the ground beneath the tarp. Scorpion sat cross-legged at an angle to him, facing two of Khalaf’s militiamen, their faces hidden behind red-checked keffiyeh scarves, fingers on the trigger guards of their AK-47s. Scorpion kept his hand on his leg near the Glock 28 he had in a tear-away ankle holster hidden under his jeans.

They sipped the cardamom and cinnamon flavored tea in thimble-sized metal cups. The day was hot, with only the faintest hint of a breeze stirring dust devils on the savannah; featureless but for the dry thorn scrub and, in the distance, a stunted acacia tree. It hadn’t rained in this part of Somalia in six years.

As was the custom, Scorpion smacked his lips loudly in appreciation.

“You are taking the children to Dadaab?” Khalaf gestured at the Toyota pickup truck crammed with children stacked like cordwood, broiling in the hot African sun. Scorpion had bought the truck in Nairobi only a week earlier, from a dealer on South-B Road, next to the hospital. He had been bringing the children across the border to the refugee camp at Dadaab, in Kenya, when Khalaf’s Al-Shabaab militiamen stopped him at a roadblock.

“Inshallah,” Scorpion said. God willing. “If it is permitted.” Reaching into his backpack, he pulled out a plastic bag bulging with qat. He gestured for them to take it. As soon as he did, he realized it was a mistake. The eyes of the three men stayed riveted on his backpack.

Khalaf looked up at the American, and for a moment the two men studied each other. Sheikh Mukhtar Ali Khalaf was a thin coffee-colored man in his fifties. He wore a ma’awis, a Somali-style sarong, and on his head a koofiyud cap, embroidered, Scorpion noted, with the colors and pattern of a sheikh of the powerful Dubil tribe. He was notorious. Across the Lower Shabelle there were stories of beheadings, torture with power drills, and mass graves. Those who had met Khalaf and lived to tell the tale considered him a homicidal maniac. No doubt Dowler, on his knees in the sand, might have something to say about that.

Khalaf nodded, and soon they were all chewing the mildly narcotic leaves that even more than tea was the Somali national habit. The two men with the AK-47s pulled down the scarves covering their faces and one of them almost smiled. We’re bonding, old buddies, Scorpion thought, chewing the green-tasting leaves like a teenager with a wad of gum.

“The toll for the children is two hundred,” Khalaf said.

“Shillings?” Scorpion asked. Two hundred Somali shillings was about twelve cents American. Not a real number, but a way to start the bargaining.

Khalaf laughed and the soldiers smiled, showing mouths with rotten yellow teeth caked green with chewed qat.

“Two hundred dollars American,” Khalaf said. “Apiece.”

“My elder brother makes a joke.” Scorpion grimaced, doing the arithmetic in his head. Sixteen kids in the truck. All that were still alive out of the twenty-four at the school he had gone into Somalia to get; $3,200. “One hundred,” he said.

“Two,” Khalaf said, impatience in his voice. Scorpion wasn’t sure if it was Khalaf’s craziness, the qat making him more aggressive, or both. But he was right at the edge. “Plus a thousand for you and the truck.”

“I’ll need money to bribe the border guards,” Scorpion said.

“Or I kill you now and take everything in your klee’asa,” Khalaf said, indicating the backpack. Scorpion watched the two men finger the triggers of the AK-47s.

“Maashi. Mafi mushkila.” Okay. No problem, Scorpion agreed, smiling.

Khalaf stood up.

It was just rotten luck he had run into the roadblock on the way from Baidoa to the border, Scorpion thought, getting up. Worse still for Dowler, captured a few days earlier. Dowler had been fool enough to try to bring food supplies to Mogadishu without first bribing the tribal leaders. Now Dowler was a complication. If he tried to save the British aid worker, ten-to-one they’d kill them both. And Scorpion knew if he died, the children would die. Some of them were barely clinging to life as it was.

Time to decide. He took a deep breath, calculating. It would take him 2.5 seconds to pull up his jeans leg and fire the Glock from his calf holster. Plus at least two seconds to deal with Khalaf and one of the soldiers. No good. Even if the remaining soldier’s reaction time was slow, it would take him at most two to three seconds to bring the AK-47 into line and shoot.

It wasn’t going to work.

Still, accuracy wasn’t the AK’s long suit. Despite its small size, the Glock 28 fired a.380 auto bullet with low recoil characteristics. No problem there. He glanced toward the Toyota pickup. It was a good sixty meters away. A decent NCAA running back could do it in under eight seconds. It would take him at least ten or eleven. But what about Dowler? In his condition, how fast could he run? Khalaf had close to a hundred Al-Shabaab soldiers armed to the teeth all around the area.

Don’t be stupid, he told himself. It was Dowler or the children. He couldn’t save both.

If not for Sandrine, he wouldn’t have gone into Somalia in the first place.

Two days earlier. The small boy lay on his side, barely breathing. They were in the hospital tent, crowded with patients, in the Ifo refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya. The Frenchwoman, Dr. Sandrine Delange, checked the boy’s breathing, heartbeat, and temperature, then adjusted the drip feeding into his tiny arm.

“It’s no good. He’ll die today,” she said in English to Scorpion.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Look at his upper arm. Less than 115 millimeters circumference. Smaller than a golf ball. She got him here too late,” indicating the child’s mother, squatting beside the bed, looking up at the white woman doctor. “The child has pneumonia and gastroenteritis brought on by severe malnutrition. It affects the immune system like AIDS. His little body has nothing to fight the infection with.”

She patted the mother’s shoulder. Scorpion couldn’t take his eyes off her. Slim, beautiful, straight chestnut-brown hair carelessly tied back, and almond-shaped eyes, like no one he had ever seen; multicolored, with gold around the pupils, surrounded by emerald green and an outer ring of pure blue. Lion’s eyes, he thought of them, because of the gold.

“How do you do this?” he asked as they walked to the next bed.

“How not?” brushing a wisp of hair out of her eyes. “Besides, there are always others. Thousands. And you, David? What are you running away from?” she asked. Scorpion was using the cover name, David Cheyne, an American from Los Angeles.

“What makes you think I’m running away?” he said, thinking in an odd way that Shaefer, the CIA station chief in Bucharest and his closest friend in U.S. intelligence, had implied the same thing when he had called him from Rome before coming to Africa. He and Shaefer had history together; the only two survivors of a Taliban ambush at FOBE, Forward Operating Base Echo, in North Waziristan.

“Where are you?” Shaefer had asked.

“Not Herzliya,” he said, naming the suburb north of Tel Aviv where the Israeli Mossad had its headquarters, meaning he had decided not to take on the mission the Israelis and the CIA had wanted him to. As an independent operative, a gun for hire, he had the option. But he didn’t want another mission. Not after Ukraine, he thought. “I’m done.”

“It’s not that simple. You can’t just walk away,” Shaefer had said.

“I know,” he said.

“What will you do?”

“Get clean,” he said, ending the call and immediately contacting a private arms dealer he knew in Luxembourg, to make sure he was equipped in case someone came after him in Africa.

“People think they come to Africa to do good. But,” Sandrine, the French woman doctor said, sliding into French, “tout le monde ici est aussi fuyant.” Everyone here is also running away.

She had been surprised that this athletic-looking American with the strange gray eyes, a scar over one of them, spoke French. But then, everything about him was a mystery. He had just suddenly appeared at the camp. When asked, he wouldn’t talk about himself. But the truck and the medicines he had brought with him had been a godsend.

“Including you?” he asked. It was impossible, he told himself. What you’re feeling for her isn’t real. It’s too soon. A rebound after having to leave Iryna behind in Kiev. Except he knew better.

“Of course me. Why do you think I asked?”

A Somali woman in a vivid Van Gogh blue and yellow direh robe came by then and told them about the children trapped and starving in a school across the border in Baidoa.

Later, outside the MPLM tent, passing around what Cowell, the red-headed Scot, said was his last bottle of Glenlivet, Moreau, the handsome French surgeon, a craggy Louis Jourdan with a three-day stubble, had said: “It’s shonde about those kids in Baidoa,” using the Swahili word for shit.

“A few of us could go. Bring them here,” Jennifer, the Canadian nurse, said.

“Don’t be bloody daft,” Cowell said. “There’s fighting all over there. You’d have to go through two sets of front lines. Twice! Going and coming, plus tribal pirates, assorted bandits, and Al-Shabaab all over the fucking place. It’d be bloody suicide.”

“So we do nothing,” Sandrine said, her profile outlined in fire by the last rays of the setting sun.

“Too bloody true. They’re buggered,” Cowell said. “Poor little sods.”

That’s when Scorpion understood why he had come to Africa and what he was going to do. He had skills they didn’t have. Skills honed in his youth in the Arabian desert, in the U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as a highly trained operative in the CIA. After an assassination operation, he had left the CIA to work as a freelance agent known only to certain top echelons within the intelligence community. With a little luck-no, be honest, a lot of luck-he might get through where they couldn’t.

That night, Sandrine came to his tent in the CARE compound. He started to say something, but she put her finger to his lips. She pushed him back on the cot and got on top of him, kissing his face and lips, then working her way down his body, tugging at his undershorts, followed by the brief fumble to put on protection.

It’s impossible, he thought, even as her lips grazed him. He had seen the way the men all looked at her. There was a rumor she had turned down a marriage proposal from one of the richest men in France. Earlier that day, Moreau had caught him looking at her and told him, “Don’t even think about it. Many have tried. She is d’un abord difficile.” Unapproachable.

The feel of her was unbelievable. Smoother than any silk. She was like a drug. The two of them moving together on the creaking cot like the rhythm of the sea.

Afterward, pulling on her clothes in the dark, she said, “Don’t think this means anything, because it doesn’t.”

“Why me?”

“Who should it be? Moreau, who thinks he’s so handsome, and because he doesn’t wear a wedding ring thinks I don’t know he has a wife and two kids in Neuilly-sur-Seine? Or Cowell, who’d fuck a monkey if it would let him? God, men are idiots.”

“True,” he said. “But why me?”

“I know how they look at me. A not-so-bad-looking white woman in Africa. .” She shrugged. “It’s not about me.” Sitting on the edge of the cot, she brushed a lock of hair out of his eyes. “Maybe it’s the scar over your eye. I don’t know.” She stood up. “Don’t ask women to explain themselves. Half the time even we don’t know why we do things.”

“Don’t,” he said.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t bullshit,” he said. “It insults both of us. Just tell me the truth. Why me?”

She looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. She took in his lean, muscled torso, dark bed-tousled hair, the scars on his arms and ribs. His stillness.

“I don’t want this talked about,” she said. “You seem the type who can keep a secret.”

He had to smile to himself. Given that barely six weeks earlier he’d been lying naked and tortured in a freezing cell in Ukraine waiting for them to put a bullet in the back of his head, there was more than a little truth to that.

She turned then stopped as she lifted the tent flap and peered out into the darkness.

“I’ll see you in the morning?” she asked.

“I’ll be gone. I have some things I have to do,” making a mental checklist of what he would need to get through to Baidoa.

“I was right. You are running away,” she said. For an instant her silhouette was framed against the stars, and then she was gone.

“No, walking away,” he said aloud to himself.

But nothing prepared him for Baidoa. There was fighting around the city, which was held by Al-Shabaab of the Mirifle tribe, and he had to bribe his way through two front lines, African Union troops and Al-Shabaab’s, to get into the city. The school was a one-story concrete building on a dirt street in the hilly Isha district, which, like most of the buildings in this part of the city, was shot full of holes, the concrete crumbling like moldy cheese.

Around the building were more than a dozen bodies, women, children, a barefoot soldier, bloated and discolored in the sun. The stench was indescribable. It looked like one of the women had been raped before she was killed, her direh pulled up around her neck, a dried bloodstain between her naked legs splayed wide. Scorpion took a moment and pulled the direh down to cover her.

Inside the school the smell was even worse. Boys from ages three to about ten or eleven lay on the concrete floor in a large room, some stirring, most still. They were pitifully thin, covered with fecal matter, some in pools of diarrhea and urine. Others were clearly dead. The walls were scarred by bullets and political slogans spray-painted in Arabic that read: “Death to the African Union!”

A boy in shorts and bare feet, about ten, came up to him, holding an empty plastic bowl.

“Ma’a,” the boy said. Water.

“I’ll bring some,” Scorpion replied in Arabic. “What’s your name?”

“Ghedi,” the boy said, reaching out to touch the white man’s hand as if to make sure he was real. Several of the other boys started to stir. One crawled toward Scorpion, who went to a hallway that led to a crude kitchen and to the sink. In it, a small lizard the size of his hand, with a flat multispiked tail, scuttled away as he approached. He turned the tap but nothing came out. He felt a tug on his sleeve. The boy, Ghedi, looked up at him.

“Where are the girls?” Scorpion asked.

The boy pointed to a doorway. Scorpion went through the doorway to another room, lit by a ray of sunlight through a hole in the ceiling. It was filled with girls in bright blue direhs, some stretched out and covered in filth, others sitting on the floor. School uniforms, Scorpion thought as they began to crowd around him like chicks around a mother hen.

“Follow me,” he told them, leading them through the boys’ room and outside. Once there, he grabbed two handfuls of plastic water jugs from the truck.

“You mustn’t overfeed starving children. Especially at first,” Sandrine had cautioned him on his first day in the camp in the triage area. “Their metabolic system is broken. Too much protein will damage the liver even more, possibly irreparably. Just a moderate amount of water, preferably with electrolytes, and depending on the size of the child, a single Plumpy’nut bar. Pas plus.” No more. “Just to hold them till we can take care of them.”

He spent the next few hours feeding them and using some of the precious water in the plastic jugs to clean them up as best he could and get them settled on a blanket under a plastic tarp awning tied to four poles he rigged up at the corners of the Toyota truck bed. Out of the twenty-four orphan children, who were supposed to have been trapped in the school, only sixteen were still alive. The boy, Ghedi, helped him organize them, and one of the older girls, a pretty little thing with a shy smile named Nadifa, helped him clean up the girls.

The hell of it was he had almost pulled it off. Just another forty kilometers or so to the crossroads at Bilis Qooqaan and then a straight run on paved road of maybe ninety klicks to the Kenyan border. Except for the lousy luck of the roadblock and that idiot, Dowler, Scorpion thought as he looked into the madness-filled eyes of Sheikh Khalaf.

Khalaf pulled Dowler up by his hair to a kneeling position, the belawa gleaming in the sun. He tossed the knife at Scorpion’s feet.

“Yallah. You do it. Cut his head off,” Khalaf said.

“I’m sure there’s someone who would pay a lot of money for the Eenglizi,” Scorpion said, meaning Dowler. “Let me try.”

“Look at his face. The cigarette marks. The Western media, al Jazeera, would say bad things about us.” Khalaf made a hand gesture like tossing something away that in Somalia means no. “He has to die.”

“Then do it yourself,” Scorpion growled, thinking, Go to hell, you insane son of a bitch.

“No, you do it,” Khalaf said, looking at him strangely. “Unless you want to join him.” The two militiamen shifted their stance, weapons trained on Scorpion. “I take the children. Two of the boys are old enough to be soldiers. The rest. .” He shrugged. “As for the girls, no reason for them to still be virgins before they die.”

He’s lying, Scorpion decided. He’s not going to leave me alive as a witness, or the children, having noted one of the militiamen smiling behind his face scarf. This was just some sadistic game Khalaf was playing.

Scorpion picked the belawa off the ground and put it to Dowler’s throat. He looked at the two militiamen. Which one was slower? The smaller one was working his qat, his cheek bulging like a chipmunk. He’s thinking about something else, Scorpion thought, already moving.

He slashed sideways, whipping the belawa with his wrist, slashing Khalaf’s throat from ear to ear, and without stopping, in a single motion, threw the belawa at the bigger militiaman, the knife embedding deep into his belly. The instant the belawa left his hand, Scorpion dived sideways, pulling at his jeans leg and ripping the Glock from the ankle holster.

The smaller militiaman swung the AK-47 around, but only got two rounds off, missing Scorpion, who fired from the ground, hitting him in the forehead. Scorpion started toward the bigger militiaman, who had pulled the belawa out of his body and was trying to stem the gush of blood with one hand while bringing his AK-47 into firing position with the other. Scorpion shot him in the throat and grabbed the gun.

Then he grabbed Dowler’s arm and pulled him up.

“Run, dammit,” he growled, scooping up his backpack as he yanked Dowler toward the truck, running hard.

Sixty meters.

Dowler stumbled as he tried to keep up. Scorpion spotted about a dozen Al-Shabaab militiamen not far from the truck. They were looking around to see where the shooting had come from.

Fifty meters.

One of the militiamen spotted the two white men running toward the truck and pointed, shouting to the others.

Forty meters.

Dowler was panting heavily, almost falling then catching himself and staggering after Scorpion. Two then three of the militiamen near the road brought their AK-47s into firing position.

Thirty meters.

“I can’t make it,” Dowler panted.

“Fine. I’ll leave you behind,” Scorpion snapped, swinging his AK-47 into shooting position as he ran.

Twenty meters.

Bullets ripped into the sand around them. Scorpion dropped to his knee and fired a burst at the three militiamen, taking them down one-two-three and sending two others scrambling for cover. Pulling at Dowler’s shirt, he ran on toward the Toyota, where one of the older boys peeked over the side of the truck bed, then seeing the running white men, ducked back down.

Ten meters.

A militiaman came around the front of the truck. At a dead run, Scorpion fired a burst from the AK, first missing him, then hitting him in the chest. He flung the cab door open and climbed in, bullets tearing into the metal side of the truck. As he turned the ignition, Dowler, panting heavily, pulled himself into the passenger seat, moving the boy, Ghedi, aside. Dowler pulled the child onto his lap as the truck skidded onto the road.

Scorpion shifted, gunning the accelerator hard as it could go, the noise of the engine drowned by a hail of bullets pinging around the truck or riddling the metal sides, one of them smashing a spiderwebbed hole in the windshield. The speedometer crept up till it hit 135 kilometers per hour; as fast as it would go. The truck rocked and bounced on the uneven road, and he could hear the high-pitched screams of the children as they ping-ponged around in the truck bed.

“Tahrir kala!” Scorpion shouted to them over his shoulder. Hang on! To Dowler: “Are you hit?”

Dowler looked down at his body as if it belonged to someone else. Behind them in the truck side mirrors, racing after them on the road and paralleling them across the dusty savannah, were half a dozen trucks filled with militiamen, all shooting in their direction.

“I’m all right. Who are you?” he said.

“American,” Scorpion said, handing him the AK-47. “Ever use one of these?”

Dowler shook his head.

“Stick it out the window. Hold tight; it kicks. Aim a short burst at one of the trucks. For Chrissakes, try not to shoot one of the kids.”

“I’ll be lucky I don’t shoot myself,” Dowler said, staring at the weapon as if it were something from science fiction.

“Doesn’t matter. It’s just to let them know we’re armed,” Scorpion said, flooring the accelerator as if he could push it through the metal floor, while reaching back with one hand to the compartment behind his seat. Dowler fired a burst from the AK, the rifle rocking up so high from the recoil he nearly put a bullet through the roof. A spray of bullets from a truck racing nearly abreast of them spattered through the cab, one of them barely missing Scorpion’s head. From the back of the truck, he heard a child scream.

Christ! One of them’s been hit, he thought, pulling the FAD assault rifle from the compartment.

“Hold the wheel! Tight!” he shouted to Dowler as he racked the pump action to load a 40mm grenade into the launcher.

“Good Lord!” Dowler exclaimed. “Where’d you get that?”

“Peru,” he said, leaning across Dowler to sight the weapon on the truck as they bounced on the uneven road. The other truck was nearly up to them and less than twenty meters away, militiamen blazing at them on full automatic. He aimed at the driver, squeezed the trigger and ducked back. The other truck exploded in a blast of fire, the hot wind of it knocking them sideways.

Scorpion fought the wheel to regain control. Grabbing Dowler’s hand and slamming it back on the steering wheel, he heaved up as he pumped the grenade launcher and leaned out the driver’s window, facing back. Bullets smashed around him, one of them shattering the side mirror. He fired the grenade at the windshield of the truck closest behind them, only twenty or so meters away, and watched it explode as his own truck swerved, nearly toppling him out. He fired an automatic burst at another truck farther back as it turned off the road to avoid the flames of the exploding truck in front of it.

Pulling himself back into the cab, Scorpion grabbed the wheel from Dowler, who just stared at him.

“Who the bloody hell are you?” he asked.

Scorpion glanced at the remaining side mirror. There was only one truck still behind them on the road and it was at least a couple of hundred meters back. For the moment they were keeping their distance, possibly communicating to others to block the road somewhere up ahead.

He checked the fuel gauge. Less than a quarter of a tank left. He tapped it to make sure it was working. It was a miracle the fuel tank hadn’t been hit, he thought. They still had at least a hundred kilometers to the Kenyan border, maybe more. They hadn’t hit the intersection to the main road at Bilis Qooqaan yet. He tried to calculate fuel. At the speed he was going, figure ten, twelve miles per gallon. It was going to be close. Too close.

The boy, Ghedi, looked wide-eyed at him. Scorpion, thinking he trusted the kid more than Dowler, touched his shoulder and handed him the FAD.

“Ara ko’daisa,” he told the boy. Hold this. Dowler was staring at him too.

“I suppose I should thank you for saving my life,” he said.

Even if they made the border, whatever he had come to Africa for, whatever he might have fantasized about with Sandrine, was over, Scorpion thought. CNN, al Jazeera, and the rest of the media would be over this like flies on garbage. He couldn’t let them put him on television or even know he existed. As soon as he got the children to Dadaab, he’d have to disappear. He wouldn’t even be able to say goodbye. He’d never see her again.

“Shut up,” he told Dowler.

But he was wrong. Something that was happening at that very moment in a leafy neighborhood in a city on another continent was about to change everything, including his decision never to do another mission.