The Night Ranger

5

LOWER JUBA REGION, SOMALIA,

NEAR THE KENYA/SOMALIA BORDER

Little Wizard knew about the hostages. Four wazungu and a fat Kenyan. They were over the border in Ijara District, north and east of Ijara town. Of course Little Wizard knew. He knew everything that happened in the lawless zone where Somalia met Kenya.

Little Wizard was twenty years old. He’d been born Gutaale Muhammad, but no one called him that. Not since a firefight four years before in Mogadishu. Gutaale was at the point, leading a half-dozen other teenage soldiers. He was a scrap of a boy, wiry and strong, with light brown skin and tightly curled hair. They walked around a corner, past a burned-out building that had been a guesthouse for aid workers decades before, in happier times. Gutaale looked up to see a boy even younger than he was leaning out a second-floor window twenty meters away. The boy swung an AK out the window, shooting wildly. Not a boy, then. An enemy soldier. Gutaale was about to fire back when all the air went out of him. Like he’d fallen from the top of a high tree. A killing shot. He doubled over, went to his hands and knees. Blood trickled from his stomach, just below his ribs. A wrecked pickup truck lay five meters away. He dragged himself to it and lay halfway under it in dust and mud.

He closed his eyes and listened to the pops of AK fire. Then the unmistakable whoosh of a rocket-propelled grenade. An explosion shook the truck above him, followed by a high-pitched scream. Waaberi, Gutaale’s best friend, always carried an RPG. Gutaale’s killer would die with him. The thought pleased him.

The shooting and shouting went on awhile. Gutaale didn’t much care. He closed his eyes and listened. The noise seemed to be a long way off. Finally it stopped. His friends would surely come for him now.

“Move on,” yelled Samatar, their nineteen-year-old commander.

“Gutaale,” Waaberi said.

“We can’t help him now. He’s gone. On the way back.”

Their feet crunched as they walked past the truck. They turned a corner and the shooting started again, single shots at first, then longer bursts. Gutaale lay in the dust and waited. No doctors or hospitals for him, not even the room at the back of the mosque that served as an infirmary for wounded fighters. A few minutes more passed. The shooting moved away. And Gutaale realized something strange. He felt stronger.

He crawled from under the truck, forced himself to his hands and knees. He raised his head over the side of the pickup. He was alone. Smoke billowed from the second-floor window where the boy who shot him had stood. Gutaale stumbled across the road and hid behind a pair of rusted oil drums. He breathed deep, feeling the burn in his belly. The bullet hole glowed pink in his brown-black skin. He reached down for it, pushed the tip of his finger inside. As gently as if he were touching a woman. Still too hard. The muscles around the wound pulled back and the pain spiraled inside him. Foolish. He reached behind his back, found the exit wound just above his hip, the skin around it slick and wet. He put his fingers to it, careful this time. He found a trickle of blood, nothing more. Like water from the dried-out wells in Bay Region. He wasn’t sure how, but he sensed that the bullet had gone through him without hitting anything important. Not the heart or the lung or the other parts whose names he didn’t know.

He would have to get the wounds stitched up. He would have to take the money hidden in his shoes to buy the special cream that kept them from getting infected. But he was sure he wouldn’t die. When boys were dying, their eyes rolled up. They soiled themselves and screamed. They couldn’t talk or stand. The fear settled into their eyes and then it left and then they died. Not everyone who died had all those things, but everyone had some. He had none. He was going to live.

The bullet had come and his body had rejected it, pushed it aside. Like he was metal and it was flesh instead of the other way around. Gutaale remembered a movie called Terminator about a man who was a robot. But he wasn’t a robot. He was hungry and thirsty like other boys. He wanted women like other boys. So he was better than a robot, he was a man with a robot’s strength. He was a wizard. He brought his fingers to his lips and kissed them and tasted his wizard blood.

A minute later, his friends came back around the corner, their heads hanging. Gutaale wondered if they were sad, sad he’d died. He ducked behind the oil drums and waited. They could have spotted him, but they were looking for a corpse, not a living boy. Not a wizard.

“Gutaale,” Waaberi said.

“His own doing,” Samatar said. “He danced around, dared them to shoot. Like no one could hurt him.”

The wizard—for Gutaale already thought of himself that way—didn’t remember dancing or daring anyone. No matter. Samatar was more right than he knew. No one can hurt me.

“He fought the best of all of us,” Waaberi said.

Behind the drums, the wizard smiled. His truest friend. Waaberi would be his lieutenant, now and forever.

Waaberi squatted, looked under the pickup. “Here, wasn’t it?” He waved the others over. “He’s gone.”

“It’s not possible.” Samatar knelt beside Waaberi. “Damn him. I wanted his shoes.”

“See the blood. Someone took his body already.”

The wizard stood from behind the oil drums. “I did, my brothers. I took my body.” They turned to him, and he saw awe in their eyes. And fear. “I took it and gave it back to myself.”

War and famine had killed most of Mogadishu’s birds. Not the gulls. They went to the sea when the streets exploded. One was circling over the street. It offered its ugly cry, caw-caw, caw-caw. It circled down, landed on the drum beside the wizard. Caw-caw! Caw-caw!

One by one, the other boys came to him, touched his wounds like disciples. Samatar hung back. “You were lucky. Nothing more.” He looked at the others. “He was lucky. Sometimes people are lucky.” His voice trembled. “Or a djinn.”

The wizard didn’t argue. He looked at Waaberi, sure Waaberi would know what to do. “If you don’t believe, then go,” Waaberi said. “Leave us.” He lifted his rifle. The others followed. And Samatar ran.

—

From then on, the men on that patrol called Gutaale Little Wizard. A month later, he and the others left Mogadishu for Lower Juba, the region in southwestern Somalia where he’d grown up. Only a line on a map split Lower Juba from Garissa and Ijara districts in Kenya. The region had two distinct climates. Near the coast, breezes from the Indian Ocean brought humidity and heavy seasonal rains. Creeks fed mangrove forests and swamps filled with giant black centipedes and snakes like the green mamba. The centipedes were ugly but harmless. The mamba was a skinny, beautiful creature whose fangs held venom that paralyzed in minutes and killed in hours. The swamps couldn’t be farmed or ranched, and almost no one lived in them. Luckily, they didn’t go on forever. Around forty kilometers inland, the ocean lost its influence. The wet breezes ended, and the creeks and swamps vanished.

But the dry region was only slightly more hospitable. Farming was nearly impossible, and even the deepest wells couldn’t be trusted. Even before the drought and war, the region had been sparsely settled, with a handful of villages scattered across thousands of square miles. Now most of its inhabitants had fled for Dadaab. The rest had clustered into the few villages with reliable water. Little Wizard and his men faced no resistance when they moved into an abandoned village called Bora. At first they survived by smuggling sugar into Kenya. Kenyans loved sugar, but the Kenyan government taxed it heavily, creating an opening for smugglers. Wealthy Somalis bought sugar by the ton in Dubai and shipped it to Mogadishu and Kismaayo. From there, militias trucked it across Somalia and into Kenya. Crossing was easy. For long stretches, the border wasn’t even fenced. The Kenyan police rarely operated in the area. If they had to approach Somalia—if, say, a light plane crashed near the border and they were ordered to recover the pilot’s body—they traveled in packs of a dozen or more officers from their headquarters on the coast. Otherwise, they avoided traveling within thirty kilometers of Somalia. They knew the militias outgunned them, and they feared being kidnapped.

Little Wizard used his sugar-smuggling profits to build a small but potent militia. On missions, his soldiers wore white T-shirts and kerchiefs to hide their faces. Villagers called them the White Men. Besides smuggling, they survived by charging aid convoys to pass through the region and collecting protection money from villages.

The White Men had about sixty-five soldiers. They could have had more. Every day, hungry men and boys trudged across the north part of Lower Juba on their way to the refugee centers in Kenya. More than a few had tried to join. But Little Wizard preferred a small force. His men could break camp in hours. They could live for months on food and water that a larger force would exhaust in weeks. Still, they had the firepower they needed to block humanitarian convoys and extract what Wizard called a toll, five percent of the food the trucks carried.

Little Wizard sometimes wondered whether the people sending the food understood that militias like his took most of it. Only a little reached the refugee camps in Bay Region. Even there the armed men who lived in the camps took most of the rest. Did these foreigners know that their plastic sacks of grain and sugar fed—literally—the war and the soldiers who fought it? If they knew, why did they keep sending the trucks?

—

When the Kenyan army invaded Somalia, Little Wizard knew he’d been wise to keep his force small. The Kenyans said they’d come for al-Shabaab, but they didn’t care that groups like his didn’t support Shabaab. Because Somalia had no central government, villages banded together to defend themselves. Some paid taxes to Shabaab. Others formed self-defense groups to keep raiders at bay. Villages too weak or too poor to protect themselves were overrun.

Shabaab flourished in the chaos, becoming the strongest and largest of the militias. But Shabaab didn’t truly govern Somalia any more than anyone else. Outside its base towns, it had only provisional control. It lacked the firepower to stamp out groups like the White Men. And Little Wizard wanted nothing to do with Shabaab. He was Muslim, but not like them. As far as he was concerned, a man’s prayers were his own business. The Shabaab fighters were fanatics who would have stoned Wizard to death as a heretic for his name alone.

But the Kenyans seemed to think that any armed group in Somalia was an ally of Shaabab. And they had tanks and planes, weapons the Somali irregulars couldn’t match. Little Wizard didn’t try to face the Kenyans. He ordered his men to pick up and melt south into the swamps, letting the soldiers roll past, into Shabaab’s heartland. As far as he was concerned, every Shabaab fighter the Kenyans killed was one fewer for him to worry about.

The Kenyans had pulled out of Somalia a couple months before, after killing hundreds of Shabaab fighters. Shabaab still had plenty of men in other regions, but it basically no longer existed in Lower Juba. Wizard relaxed, figuring he’d escaped his biggest threat.

He knew now he’d made a mistake. Three weeks before, Awaale, the leader of a militia called the Dita Boys, asked him to meet. Little Wizard didn’t want to go. He had nothing to say to Awaale. As far as he was concerned, the Dita Boys were undisciplined at best, vicious killers at worst.

On the surface, the Ditas and the White Men had a lot in common. Both would trash wells of villages that refused to pay protection. And, yes, the White Men killed villagers who fought them. But Little Wizard had strict rules for his men. A year before, he’d caught a new recruit raping a six-year-old girl. Wizard and Waaberi tied the rapist to a tree and beat him until his face looked like a melon that a truck had run over. Then Wizard ordered his men to come round.

“This is what we do to men who fuck children.” Wizard pulled the knife strapped to his calf, a weapon made for murder with a black plastic handle and serrated blade. He sliced off the rapist’s clothes and took the man’s limp, blood-spattered penis in his left hand as he raised the knife with his right.

“Please,” the rapist said, the words barely audible through his split lips. “Anything else.”

“Your choice.” Wizard plunged the knife into the man’s stomach. The man’s shoulders lifted in shock. For a moment, before the pain took over, his eyes widened and he raised his ruined face. Then he grunted, tried to scream. Wizard pulled the 9-millimeter pistol he carried in place of an AK, put it to the man’s head, pulled the trigger. The man’s brains moistened the tree behind him.

Wizard turned, faced his men.

“I have told you before. This one didn’t understand. We don’t rape. We don’t steal. We take what we need, what I say we need, and no more. We are soldiers. We are an army. You want to be a beast, fight for someone else. Not for Wizard.”

He pulled the knife from the rapist’s belly, sliced open the rope, left the corpse on the ground with its guts hanging out. There were no more rapes.

—

The Dita Boys were different. Little Wizard knew what they did to refugees they caught crossing their territory. Especially women. He wished he could turn down the meeting. But he had to know what Awaale wanted. They agreed to meet in neutral territory, a watering hole on the edge of a village called Buscbusc, the strongest town left in all of Lower Juba. It had a sixty-man self-defense force. The militias left it alone.

Little Wizard arrived two hours early with fifteen of his best men. They convoyed in two pickup trucks with .50-caliber machine guns mounted in their beds and two armored Range Rovers. The armed pickups, called “technicals,” were the most common fighting vehicle in Somalia. The Rovers were more unusual, stolen from a UN lot in Mogadishu. They were Wizard’s only indulgence. He’d spent $180,000 on them, half his profits of the last two years. They had run-flat tires, bulletproof windows, thick steel plates in the doors. They’d stop anything up to a machine gun round, maybe even a rocket-propelled grenade if it didn’t hit a window. Wizard was unduly proud of them. When they needed repair, he brought in parts from Kenya. Being chosen to ride in a Rover was a mark of pride among the White Men.

The watering hole at Buscbusc consisted of four deep wells surrounded by a rock wall to keep animals or children from wandering in. Little Wizard put the pickups against the east wall, where their machine guns would have a clear field of fire. He put one Rover at the break in the wall that served as the watering hole’s vehicle entrance. He stayed in the other Rover, next to the second well. He expected Awaale to bring more than fifteen men and he wanted to be ready.

The meeting was supposed to happen at eleven a.m. The Dita Boys arrived at noon, their pickup trucks blasting rap. When he heard them coming, Wizard stepped out of the Rover and stuffed a wad of miraa leaves—the stimulant that many Somali men chewed—in his mouth. His bodyguard, Ali, followed.

The faintly sour taste of the miraa filled Wizard’s mouth. He felt the leaves lift him, sharpen his focus. His men hid their faces behind their white kerchiefs and tucked in their white T-shirts. Every boy who joined him got three kerchiefs and three T-shirts and had to be sure at least one was always perfectly clean. Wizard was the only fighter not in white. He wore a black shirt and black pants and no kerchief. The White Men might not be the biggest militia in Somalia, but they were the coolest. They didn’t need Pit Bull or T-Pain to prove it.

The Dita pickups rolled up. Wizard counted eight, five with .50-calibers. Forty men, maybe more. Ali put a hand on his shoulder. Wizard brushed it off. He didn’t fear these men. He walked to the Rover that blocked the gap in the wall, jumped on its hood. The diesel engine vibrated underneath his shoes. Three of his men tried to stand beside him. He waved them back, and they got low behind the hood, covering him with their AKs. Good.

His enemy had the numbers but not the tactical advantage. The Ditas were stupid, and they had stupidly lined their pickup trucks along the wall rather than clustering around the Rover. They were piling out of the trucks, but only the ones nearby had a clear shot. Wizard was less exposed than he seemed. But only a little, and not for long. He would have to control the moment.

“Awaale!”

Awaale stepped out of the nearest pickup. He was tall and broad and wore camouflage fatigues with the sleeves rolled up to show his big arms. The Dita Boys liked camo, but only a few had full uniforms. The rest made do with pants or T-shirts in mismatched patterns. Wizard had given his militia simple white shirts precisely to avoid this problem. Awaale’s uniform had four silver stars on the shoulders. With his thick gold necklace and mirrored sunglasses, he could have passed for an old-school African dictator.

“You scared of me, Awaale.” Wizard rested his hand on his 9-millimeter. Awaale raised his palms to the sky: What, me worry? Both playing to the fighters around them.

“You not scared, why you bring so many men?”

“Because I have so many. Don’t know even what to do with them. And all them want to see you. The famous Little Chicken. Cluck cluck.”

Wizard edged his pistol halfway from his holster. “Say it again.”

He found himself looking at a forest of AKs. Awaale tapped his chest, his big arms glistening. “I say what I like.”

“You called this parley. I came. You not scared—” Wizard pointed at the Rover. “We take a drive and talk, you and me only. Otherwise, let’s get to it. Three seconds to choose.”

“No need to count.” Awaale raised his hands, gave Wizard two big thumbs-up. “Show me your fine Rover.”

—

Wizard jumped off the Rover as Awaale stepped away from his men. They slid inside the SUV, Wizard driving.

“Nice,” Awaale said. “Still smells new-like.” He took a wad of miraa from his pocket. Wizard touched his arm. “Not inside. Leather seats and all that.”

“Serious.”

“Serious.”

“I like this vehicle, Wizard. You know I do. But it just a car.”

Wizard ignored this heresy. He drove west, toward the border, on a dirt path that even the most optimistic mapmaker wouldn’t have called a road. Both men still wore their sunglasses. One of Awaale’s technicals trailed them. Wizard waited for Awaale to speak.

“You know we got to talk,” Awaale finally said.

“Talk, then.” Wizard hated the way Awaale said “you know” with every sentence.

“Shabaab, you know they’re gone.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Juba open. Me and you come together, it’s ours to take.”

Awaale slipped off his glasses. Wizard followed. Down to it now.

“Plenty much room,” Wizard said. “We do our business, you do yours.”

“What I’m telling you, you know it can’t be that way no more. With you, without you, I’m taking over. Bring your men in, you can be my number-one commander.”

“You mean I give you my men and you tell me what to do?”

“I mean you my big lieutenant.”

“Too much miraa, Awaale. Make you crazy.”

“How many men you have? Sixty? Seventy? I have two hundred, and more every day.”

Awaale was lying. He didn’t have but 140 fighters, and they weren’t nearly as good as Wizard’s. But Wizard knew better than to argue. Arguing showed weakness. He contented himself with saying, “One of my men is worth five of yours.”

“Two hundred. It’s true. I got backing now.”

“From who.”

“People in Eastleigh. They see this chance. You don’t believe me, come to my camp, count my men yourself.”

Wizard stopped the Rover. “I come to your camp, I’ll leave a hole in your head.”

Awaale slipped on his sunglasses. “Then nothing else to say.”

They didn’t speak on the way back. Wizard wondered if Awaale might try to ambush him and his men when they returned. But he found that during the drive, Ali had moved the other Rover and the technicals outside the watering hole, making an attack impossible. Smart man. Wizard stopped the Rover beside Ali.

“Out.”

“You won’t drive me back to my men? Thought you were a wizard. No one touch you. Your men may believe that nonsense, but I don’t, and I see you don’t either.”

“Out. Now.”

Awaale offered Wizard a mock salute. “See you soon, Wizard.”

—

Back at camp, Wizard told his men to be ready, that Awaale could attack at any time. But he knew that in Awaale’s position, he’d wait. He’d add more fighters while letting the White Men exhaust themselves with overnight watches.

That night Wizard ordered a feast. He told his men the meal was a reward for their hard work. In fact, he wanted an excuse to slaughter the camp’s animals. The herd wasn’t much, a few bad-tempered goats and a dozen stringy hens. But if the White Men had to flee, they would leave the animals behind, and Wizard didn’t plan to let the Dita Boys have them. A handful of younger boys protested. Wizard realized too late that they liked taking care of the goats and especially the chickens. He let them keep three hens and two goats. He wondered if he should put off the culling entirely, but reversing the order would seem strange to his men.

So they ate well that night, too well, and it was with a full belly that Wizard called Waaberi into his hut for a meeting. From the footlocker by his bed, he unearthed the bottle of Johnny Walker Blue he had bought after his first successful smuggling run. Muslims weren’t supposed to drink, but Wizard didn’t much care. He poured them both a glass. Not too much. They needed clear heads tonight. Somewhere in the vast emptiness to the west, a hyena howled. A few seconds later, another answered. Then a third. The hyenas roamed all over East Africa, and they weren’t afraid of war. They liked it. War left them meals.

“Take a drink and I tell you about the meet,” Wizard said. He handed Waaberi a glass. Waaberi sipped carefully and listened. He knew his place. He didn’t interrupt.

“You told him no,” he said when Wizard finished.

“Of course no. Wants our men. We link with him, won’t be a month before he slit my throat, and yours, too. You know he don’t want a wizard around.”

“You think he told true, about having two hundred? No brag?”

“I think. He had swagger, like he only needs one leg to walk. Told me to come by his camp if I didn’t believe.”

“Must have happened sudden or we would have heard.”

“Said he getting money from Eastleigh. Someone fronting cash to pay new boys, give them guns, feed them. Even so, we can hold off two hundred. Those Dita Boys can’t fight.”

“But in three months, what if he have three hundred, four hundred?”

“What I’m thinking too, Waaberi. Plenty boys out there.”

“So we bring in new boys, too.”

“Could be.” Wizard had enough extra weapons for another fifty men, and he could buy more. But recruiting might be tricky. Awaale’s camp was closer to the main refugee routes, and Wizard guessed he was paying bonuses to anyone who joined. Plus adding men too fast had its own risks. Wizard knew the names of every one of his fighters. Every one of them had heard his story, seen his scars up close. They believed in him. He didn’t want to risk that bond for a bunch of half-trained boys who might run if the Ditas attacked. “We can add ten or fifteen quick, but after that I don’t know.”

Again the hyenas howled, closer now. Wizard drank his Johnny Walker in one gulp and felt it glow inside him. He refilled his glass. He’d never had more than a single drink before.

“What about we talk to the villages? Everyone know we fairer than Awaale or anyone. They help us, we have plenty power.”

Wizard wasn’t so sure the villages would take sides. No doubt Awaale had spread the word that any village that supported the White Men would face payback after the Dita Boys won. The local elders didn’t like Awaale. But they feared him even more.

“This my fault, Waaberi.”

“Not so.”

“Just so. Should have seen it, built us up. Should have known Shabaab gets weak, someone else going to try to get strong. How it is. Any weakness and the hyenas jump.”

“You fix it, Wizard.”

“I will. Always. Sentries posted?”

“You know it.”

“In the morning, I’ll talk to the villages.”

—

But the elders put him off everywhere he went. They were polite. Some even friendly. They agreed when he told them they’d be sorry if Awaale took control. But not one would pledge support, not even weapons. Such important decisions had to be made carefully, they said. They had to talk over the situation. Like they ran provinces instead of villages with fifty families. Like they couldn’t gather around and choose a side in five minutes. He knew what they were doing, but he couldn’t argue.

The days ticked by. The sun rose at six a.m. and set at six p.m., as it always did on the fattest part of the globe. Twelve hours of day, twelve hours of night. The White Men added a few soldiers and buried their weapons reserve south of their main camp. Wizard knew he had to do more. The scouts he sent to the Dita Boys camp told him that Awaale was adding soldiers every day. In a month he’d have an overwhelming advantage. Then the White Men would have to run. Or die.

Yet Wizard felt paralyzed. He couldn’t imagine crossing to the camps in Dadaab. Giving up his home and his Rovers and his men. For how would their faith in him survive such cowardice? He thought of attacking the Dita Boys, trying to catch them in the night. Spiking into their camp and killing Awaale and his top men. But the White Men would be hitting a force more than three times their size. They would need perfect surprise to win. And Wizard’s scouts said that Awaale had his own sentries outside his camp. Wizard wished for the weapons the Americans had, their planes and helicopters. Even a few old Kenyan tanks. Instead he had his Rovers.

—

Then he heard about the hostages. An idea crept on him, quiet and deadly as a mamba. He would be taking a big chance. The hostages were across the border. Wizard didn’t know how many men held them. He couldn’t be sure how he’d collect the ransom. He would make himself a target for the Americans. In normal times he would have dismissed the idea.

But these times weren’t normal. He fell asleep every night wondering whether he’d wake to rap blasting from fifty Dita Boys technicals. He needed money. Money to make the villages choose his side. Money for seasoned fighters, not raw recruits. These hostages were young and American. They had to be worth millions of dollars. Enough money to change the balance of power in Lower Juba. Enough for him to destroy Awaale.

So, really, he had no choice. No choice but to hope his magic was even more powerful over the next days than it had been that morning in Mogadishu.