War Lord

Twenty-six

I arrived in Dar es Salaam a little after three p.m. two and a half days later, a delay in Rio plus the various flights and long layovers, especially in Jo’burg, chewing through more than the expected thirty-six hours. In fact, if I’d still been listening to the ticking clock mentioned in the ransom note that arrived with the amputated hand, there’d be only around four and a half days left on it before kaboom time, and maybe a lot less depending on which time-zone calculations Randy had used.

The arrivals hall at Julius Nyerere International Airport was new, but the AC was down and it was hot, airless, bustling and smelled of dust and sweaty armpit. I joined the impatient queue for a visa and paid the required hundred and fifty bucks to get it. Out in the hall I chose a hotel called the Southern Sun off an ad on the back of a luggage trolley, then walked through a gauntlet of people who were keen to sell me their local knowledge, like where to find a cabstand. This turned out to be the front entrance, where a motley collection of vehicles were lined up. The drivers sitting in them flashed their lights to attract attention. I strolled over.

‘Taxi?’ asked a driver, leaning across the front seat of an old Renault. He was at the head of the queue, but I pulled the rusting rear door open and got in anyway.

The driver was a tall thin man of black and Indian descent, aged in his mid-twenties. He wore sandals, loose black cotton pants and an off-white shirt. Thick, round-rimmed glasses magnified his dark eyes. There wasn’t a lot of room in the vehicle, front or back, and his legs were up around his armpits, reminding me of all the time I’d just spent in economy. Music blared from the radio, a kind of African hip-hop I wasn’t familiar with. ‘You know the Southern Sun?’ I asked him.

He pulled into the departing traffic on the wrong side of the road, until I realized that’s the side they drive on here, like they do in Britain and Australia.

‘The Southern Sun. Yes, yes, that will be fifty dollar.’

‘Turn your meter on.’

‘No meter. No meter in Dar es Salaam. Taxi from airport to city is fifty dollar. Special fare.’

Specially steep. The city was barely eight klicks from the airport.

‘How long you staying? You need a car? You must hire me, ha ha. You are Westerner. If you don’t take taxi, other taxi will follow you until you take one.’

Interesting sales pitch. He laughed as he talked, either the nervous type or he found the fact that I seemed prepared to even consider paying his price hugely amusing.

‘Five hours is one hundred fifty US dollars,’ he continued and again followed it with a laugh. ‘This very good price.’

‘Sounds like highway robbery to me,’ I said even though compared to the run to my hotel it seemed reasonable enough.

‘Okay. I make it one hundred. We have a deal, ha ha?’

‘I’m here for the sights.’ In fact, I wasn’t exactly sure what I expected to see in Dar es Salaam, let alone where to start looking for it. Gamal Abdul-Jabbar caught a plane here. A von Weiss G5 possibly piloted by LeDuc had lodged a flight plan to this city. And Shilling had said that Dar had been spoken about by von Weiss. Was there something of specific interest here? Or was it just a stop-off to somewhere else — Somalia, perhaps, to meet up with pirate boss Mohammed Ali-Bakr al Mohammed?

‘You want to see the sights?’ he asked. ‘Then you need a guide also. I am driver and guide, two people in one. For two people you must pay one hundred fifty dollar. Ha ha ha. Plus fare from airport to hotel is two hundred dollar. Okay? Deal? What you like to see? We have many wonderful things in Dar. Beautiful beaches, beautiful churches. If you like, I take you to—’

‘I’ll make it an even five hundred bucks if you get me a boat — something small, quiet and fast.’ Both Abdul-Jabbar and Ali-Bakr al Mohammed were pirates. Pirates were interested in ships, and Dar es Salaam, according to the information emailed to me by Delaney, was the last stop for seaborne cargo bound for Mogadishu, Somalia’s friendly capital seven hundred or so miles up the African coast.

He mulled over my offer for a few seconds. ‘Taxi with driver and guide and boat for five hundred dollar. Yes, I can do.’

‘Included in the deal is a handgun and spare rounds of ammo. I’m not fussy — Glock, Tokarev, Makarov — whatever you can get.’

‘Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.’ The driver’s eyes darted from the road to the rear-view mirror to the road to the mirror. Fair to say I had the guy’s full attention.

‘What’s your name?’ I asked him. Those eyes of his continued to dart. ‘Your name,’ I repeated. ‘You got one?’

‘Fakim,’ he said. ‘It is Fakim.’

After that, the conversation pretty much dried up, so I did a little of that sightseeing out the window to get some idea of the lay of the land. We were moving through a light industrial slum, the kind that gloms onto most airport access roads. On the left, the buildings were built low and cheap and mostly of the warehouse type; on the right, homes and shops. Every home had a shop out front, and every shop a home behind or on top of it. There seemed to be kids roaming around all over the place. Listless dogs were everywhere, the air hot and steamy. And as the road was unsealed, it was dusty, too — the exposed earth rusty orange in color. So far, Dar reminded me of Kigali, which reminded me of the Congo, a place I was keen to forget.

Things became more strictly residential once we turned off the main road, the homes gray and slapped together and tightly packed like they were bundled for recycling. Ahead, a car had driven nose-first into a pothole the size of a bomb crater and steam gushed from under its hood, the dazed driver wandering around with a hand to his bloody forehead.

‘How far is the Southern Sun from the port?’ I asked.

‘Not far. Two, three kilometer.’

After passing the oil refinery and the railway sidings, I caught a glimpse of the docks. Ships of various sizes were tied up to a long pier running the length of the near shoreline: a container ship, a vehicle transporter, a grain ship and a couple of tankers. More merchant vessels were moored out in the middle of the harbor. Several beat-up fishing boats chugged back and forth. They didn’t seem particularly seaworthy, though seaworthiness was something I didn’t know much about. For all I knew they fished as far up as the Gulf of Aden and out to the east toward the Seychelles and Maldives. Small outrigger-style canoes also drifted along, limp triangular sails attempting to catch the exhausted breeze.

Fakim hooked into a turn away from the water, taking us toward the ritzy end of town where, it seemed, the folks could afford some greenery. Not long after, he pulled into the forecourt of the Southern Sun and stopped at the front stairs. A guy in hotel uniform approached the car but I waved him away.

‘So what do you say, Fakim?’ I said, flattening a ball of notes extracted from my pocket. Two hundred dollars was all the US cash I had on me. ‘Two hundred now, another two hundred when you pick me up later and take me to the boat, and the balance when I get the gun.’ I held the greenbacks toward him. He stared at the wad, wanting it but reluctant, seeing the strings attached. ‘I know what you’re thinking — that you could always just take this two hundred and drive away, but there’s more where this comes from, so much more.’

‘Money for gun — extra.’

‘How much extra?’

‘Not much.’

We were getting beyond my cash reserves and my preparedness to haggle. ‘Okay — my final offer: four hundred for you, a hundred for the boat and a hundred for the gun. Six hundred in total. If you can get the gun and boat for less, you make more profit. If the boat and the gun are no good, you get nothing. Take it or leave it.’

Fakim glanced out the window at the surroundings, considering the deal. ‘Okay,’ he said finally, taking the two hundred and putting it in his top pocket. ‘I do this and you still owe me four hundred.’

‘And you still owe me a boat and a handgun with spare ammo.’

‘Yes, okay. We go to Magogoni Street.’

‘What’s Magogoni Street?’

‘Where boat lives. It’s near. I will come back at four o’clock. That is good time, ha ha?’

Suited me. ‘See you then,’ I said. The risk was that laughing boy here would keep on driving, but I had a feeling he’d be back. Money didn’t look like it was all that easy to come by in this town. Tourists were walking wallets, even the seemingly violent ones like me.

‘What is your name, sir?’ he asked.

‘Vin.’

‘Yes, Mr Vin. Ha ha.’

Right.

Though I hadn’t booked, I got a room at the Sun easy enough, the occupancy low if the empty reception area was anything to go by. The four-star hotel was furnished in a great-white-hunter-swaps-elephant-gun-for-Nikon kind of way, with pictures of the big game found in Tanzania replacing the stuffed trophies that would’ve graced the walls of a place like this not so long ago.

On the way to my room, I stopped at an ATM to get some cash, and then called into the business center. I fired up a Hewlett-Packard, opened Google Earth, and five minutes later had a bird’s-eye view of the Dar es Salaam harbor which, from a couple of thousand feet up, reminded me of a pancreas, or maybe a stomach. On the day the satellite passed overhead, the ships attached to the buoys out in the harbor channel were a couple of what appeared to be naval frigates. A little digging around on the CIA site confirmed that the US Navy visited Dar on a regular basis, particularly since the formation of Task Force 151, the multination naval effort to stamp out piracy in the region. Maybe what I was looking at here were US Navy vessels. I dug around a little more. The carrier Enterprise and the cruiser Leyte Gulf had recently joined the task force. Serious firepower.

Settling into the room, I unpacked my toothbrush, took a shower and sent my dirty clothes to the laundry. Call me strange but I prefer to shoot people in clean undershorts. Next I took a short nap to nip the jet lag in the bud, and woke at three fifty-five p.m., the phone on the bedside table ringing. Answering it, I was told by the concierge that my driver was in the foyer.

‘Hey, Fakim,’ I said as I walked up behind him. ‘You came back.’

‘Yes. Ha ha ha. Please,’ he said and led the way to the Renault parked in the forecourt.

‘How’d you make out with those items we talked about?’ I asked.

‘Yes, Magogoni Street. We go see man now.’

After a slow mile and a half crawling through narrow backstreets that reeked increasingly of burned trash and excrement, we exited suburbia at a place where a dozen fishing boats with broken keels were pulled up on a white-sand beach. Men were working on the boats, nets and other gear. Fakim rolled down his window and talked briefly to one mahogany-colored old guy hobbling beside the road on a crutch fashioned from driftwood, dressed in raggedy knee-length pants and a faded pink Pepsi-Cola t-shirt. He had one leg, one eye, three teeth and a voice that sounded like it was being passed through a cheese grater. All the guy needed was a parrot. He pointed toward the beach and drew a map in the air while he talked in, I guessed, Swahili. Fakim drove on a little way and parked near a yard of rusting cars and other relics.

‘Please, you follow, Mr Vin,’ Fakim said getting out.

We went down to the boats lined up on the beach, the sand a minefield of human turds and gobs of soiled newspaper. Plastic bags, bottles and paper rolled in the gentle wavelets flopping onto the shore, the air thick with top notes of shit, diesel, fish and rotting wood. Fakim stopped to speak with an old Arab sitting smoking a fat hand-rolled cigarette in the shade of one of the boats, who pointed at another man sitting farther down the beach.

‘That man there, he owns boat,’ Fakim explained.

The boat owner stood up as we approached: lean, black and short, a cigarette stitched to his lower lip, and ancient threadbare shorts and undershirt hanging off his body. He’d been sharpening a long curved blade on a whetstone. He waved the blade around, exchanged some kind of local greeting with Fakim, and the two men went into an intense negotiation. The breeze shifted and essence of unwashed body hit my nose and made my eyes water. When the dialogue ended, the guy beamed a cigarette-stained grin and Fakim laughed his nervous laugh.

‘He agrees to the price,’ Fakim announced. ‘One hundred US dollars. You pay now.’

‘What am I paying for, exactly?’

‘You can use boat for twenty-four hours. If you break the boat, you must get him new one. Also, he will kill my parents if we do not return it. Ha ha.’

As Fakim was saying this, the boat owner went over to a patched canvas tarpaulin and pulled it back on a beaten-up single-hulled boat with a gleaming new fifty-horsepower Honda outboard motor hanging off the back.

‘You like the boat, Mr Vin?’ Fakim asked.

‘Perfect.’

‘You want to use now?’

There was still maybe an hour till the sun snuffed itself out in the smoke haze hanging around above the horizon. ‘Sure, why not,’ I said, and sealed the deal with a hundred in tattered notes, which I passed to the owner. He grinned broadly and said something that was either ‘Thank you’ or ‘Sucker, this baby’s not even mine’. I figured a receipt was out of the question.

He then went back to the boat, ratcheted up the hull with a car jack, placed two wheels under the rear of the boat, pulled the jack, lifted the bow and hauled the ensemble to the water’s edge. Jumping in, he pumped fuel from the tank and started the motor with the press of a button. He then motioned me over and introduced me to the systems, all controlled from a small command station toward the front of the boat. A Mercedes-Benz three-pointed star was glued into the steering wheel boss.

Fakim stepped awkwardly into the back of the boat and fell onto the bench seat.

‘What are you doing?’ I asked him.

‘I am coming.’

I’d figured that much without his assistance. ‘Yeah, but why?’

‘My parents would wish it.’

Obviously, trust was yet to blossom between us.

‘What about the gun?’ I inquired.

‘Later for gun.’

The old guy gave us a push off and I opened the throttle. The bow came up steeply as the prop bit and then settled down, the four-stroke motor barely murmuring. I steered us out into the center of the pancreas and turned inland. The ships moored out in the channel were a good place to start looking. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for exactly, but I was certain I’d recognize it when I saw it. The first of the ships in the queue was a red and black oil tanker. No one was visible walking about on deck that I could see, though there were high-powered lights already lit up along the hull and superstructure. They were aimed down toward the waterline. I took us around the ship’s stern and read the name, Morning Star, registered in Panama. No sign of life back here either.

Next in line, three hundred yards behind, was a compact container ship. It was painted off-white, rust breaking through the skin like a spreading cancer. I steered toward it, carving a white trench in the warm green harbor waters. Its name was Sun Trader, registered out of Liberia. Like the Morning Star, Sun Trader also seemed deserted, though lights were on in some of the small windows puncturing its superstructure. A third ship completed the queue, some kind of general bulk carrier. It was low in the water, suggesting its holds were full. A man was standing on the bow, smoking a cigarette. Fakim waved at him. No acknowledgment. I motored down the side of the ship painted dark blue and got a look at the stern — African Spirit, Liberia. It was an old-style bulk carrier, the type you didn’t see so much pulling into Western ports these days, a couple of cranes on it, presumably between the holds. Nothing more to see here; I steered toward the pier where there were other ships to inspect, the vehicle carrier from South Korea and so forth.

After checking them out, all seemed to be more or less ghost ships with virtually zero human activity on board. What was there to do on a modern ship when it was sitting on a mooring anyway? The harbor tour continued. I took us farther inland where the water turned black and individual rainbow slicks of oil merged into one continuous blanket that reflected the dying light. Over the city, the twilight sky was filling with the smoke of a hundred thousand cooking fires, all fuelled by trash if the smell was anything to go by.

I’d been wrong and there was nothing of any interest to see out on the water after all. Spinning the Mercedes wheel, we scribed a tight one-eighty and headed back to the beach. By now the sun was below the horizon. With daylight largely gone, the lights on the ships had some authority, burning bright to discourage the approach of unwelcome guests. It was the same out in the channel, where the ships were lit up like exercise yards. There was one exception to this, the African Spirit at the back of the line, which was no more than a vague gray shadow.

Keeping a hundred yards or so from the line of moored ships as we headed back, I glanced idly up at the darkened African Spirit as we motored by. And that’s when I caught sight of the thing I knew would be significant when I saw it. A surge of adrenalin punched my heart rate into triple figures. I turned away to avoid attracting suspicion and looked ahead to the steel cliff that was the next ship in the row rising out of the black water. What I’d seen up on the deck of the African Spirit was a guy with an assault rifle dangling carelessly in his hand, a light-enhancing device propped up on his forehead. Everyday garden-variety pirates would probably have assault weapons, but I doubted they’d be equipped with NVGs. No, the guys guarding this ship were special. All of which meant one thing — I was gonna need that handgun.

A few minutes later I drove the runabout up onto the sand. Fakim fetched the wheels and helped me beach it high and dry. We threw the tarp over it and I ducked back under to retrieve the ignition key. There were another twenty-three hours of ownership with my name on them and, given the security bond Fakim had put up, it was only fair not to make the thing too easy to steal. The boat owner materialized out of the night and I put the key in his gnarled hand.

‘Tomorrow, tomorrow,’ he said when I told him thanks.

‘What if I need it sooner?’ I asked.

Fakim exchanged a few words with the guy and said, ‘You come back any time. He will be here. He guards the boat.’

‘Now let’s go get a gun,’ I told Fakim as we walked up the beach.

‘No. Later for gun.’

‘So you keep saying.’

‘First we must eat.’

Food. Did I have time for that? The guard I saw on the African Spirit with the NVGs didn’t look particularly alert, but there’d be others. It’d be pointless and dangerous trying to get aboard before fatigue set in among the watch. I had a few hours to kill. And, now that Fakim mentioned it, I was hungry for the first time since my brush with snake venom, though the smells I was coming to associate with Dar weren’t exactly making me salivate for the local cuisine.

We passed by two men barbecuing the small carcass of some unidentified hairy animal over a smoking fire set in a cut-down fifty-five-gallon drum.

‘I don’t suppose you got Burger King in town?’ I asked.

‘Ha ha ha,’ he replied.

‘What makes you think I’m joking?’ I said.

Fakim drove through narrow backstreets for a while, the unsealed roads choked with people and street animals, and eventually pulled into an open square, folks milling around, some moving to the beat of blaring music, hawkers selling food out of portable stalls. I settled for Fakim’s recommendation — chicken à la newspaper. At least, I think it was chicken. I unwrapped the newsprint. The sinewy carcass was covered in hot spices and peppers, served with some boiled stringy vegetable matter, and was a little hard to positively identify. I was thinking squirrel. Somehow Fakim managed to get his hands on a couple of chilled Cokes.

The chicken tasted like something else that tasted like chicken. Like squirrel maybe. I left most of the greenery and the Coke was, well, Coke. We were done by nine forty-five and went back to his car.

‘Okay, now the gun,’ I told him as we got in.

‘Yes, Mr Vin, the time is good for gun,’ he replied.

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that — maybe it was just his English — but I let it go. We drove for another twenty minutes or so, into another part of town more decrepit than the last, if that were possible. Fakim eventually pulled over in a street that was part residential, part warehouse. No kids running about here, and there were no hawker stalls, no music, no dogs, and only a trickle of light from a window here and there. Fakim turned to me and said, ‘Gun is down there.’ He pointed to a nearby narrow pathway completely engulfed in shadow.

‘Down there,’ I said.

‘Yes.’

‘Now, money please?’

‘What?’

‘You have paid two hundred dollar of the four hundred dollar for car, for driver, for guide. You now pay two hundred dollar you owe me for boat, and also a hundred dollar for gun.’

‘So what do I get for this hundred dollars?’

‘I show you where gun is.’

‘And it’s up to me to go and get it?’

‘Yes, yes.’

The guy had an interesting business model. ‘So the gun is down that darkened alley somewhere, and you want me to give you the money for it now.’

‘Yes, the gun is down there. You pay me. All three hundred dollar, please.’

This deal didn’t add up in all the ways that counted, but mostly because he wanted the balance of the cash now in case I didn’t make it back outta there alive.

‘Ha ha ha.’

‘I’ll give you a hundred dollars now and another two hundred when I return with the gun.’

He looked at me hard, no doubt weighing the odds of my return.

I told him my problem. ‘Once I pay you, what’s to stop you driving off the second I get out of the car?’

‘Oh no, no, no, Mr Vin!’ he said.

Yeah, right. ‘A hundred now, two hundred later. That’s the only deal on the table.’

He exchanged his look of injustice for a frown of surly defeat. ‘Okay… deal.’

There was a length of broom handle on the floorboards beside him. ‘I’m gonna borrow your nightstick.’ I motioned at it. ‘It’s in the fine print.’

‘You pay me first, please.’

On the whole, it was an interesting lesson in economics Dar-style. I counted out the hundred dollars, swatted them into his open hand and he passed me the broom handle.

Fakim wasn’t to know that I was cleaned out, cash-wise. I’d have to figure something out on that later. I left the car and walked across the road to the alley, the stick in my left hand held behind my leg. I stood at the entrance to the black hole that was the alleyway, off to one side so as not to be silhouetted, and waited a minute or two for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. The air stank of old ammonia — dog, cat and human piss. What the hell was I walking into? The faintest glimmer of mustard-colored light beckoned from down the far end of the black hole. I moved toward it, breathing hard, broken masonry and glass underfoot, along with plastic bags, plastic bottles and bottle tops, paper and stinking, sucking mud. The alley went through a kink and then another kink and broadened into a small square, an open sewer running through the middle of it. Ahead, against the far wall, three males and a female. Two of the males were chatting, smoking, leaning against a beat-up Toyota van with its parking lights on. The female had her skirt hitched up around her waist. She was presenting her huge dimply rear end to guy number three, a runt behind her whose sweat pants were around his skinny knees. He was jigging back and forth like a ferret in heat as he screwed her. The woman was grappling with a column of masonry to keep her balance while she looked back over her shoulder, smiling and murmuring encouragement.

‘Excuse me,’ I said to the two smokers, finger raised, lost tourist-style. ‘Can you fellas point me in the direction of the nearest automatic teller machine?’

The men stared at me open-mouthed the way a prospector might regard a gold nugget that had just fallen out of the sky and landed at his feet.

‘Hey!’ one of them shouted at me after a protracted second or two, once they realized this gold nugget was no apparition. He reached into the front of his pants, pulled out a massive nickel-plated pistol that still managed to flash in the dimness, and skipped across the square toward me with his buddy a few steps behind, the weapon pointing in my general direction like an artillery piece. I was actually relieved to see this move on their part because it meant that the moment of maximum danger had passed. If I were them, I’d have dropped me first and asked questions later.

When the guy in front came within range, I swatted the weapon aside with the hidden broomstick, then followed through with an elbow to the side of his face, and finished off the ensemble move with the broomhandle, a smack down low that took his legs out from under him. One, two, three. He went down on his back with a thud, the mud settling under him with a farting sound. His buddy put the brakes on and pulled a knife, so I bent down and picked up the gun, which made him back up, spin around and run for the nearest exit. The hooker was also running, having reorganized her clothing. She vaulted the open sewer with the grace of a hippo and disappeared into a doorway. Ferret guy was following his buddy, trying to run with his pants still around his knees.

I regarded the man at my feet. He was in his early twenties, maybe a hundred and thirty underfed pounds that were a mixture of black and Arab. His clothes, if they weren’t Chinese rip-offs, were expensive — Everlast-branded sweat pants, Lonsdale t-shirt, Adidas high-tops. His mouth was opening and closing like a beached fish. He was winded, finding it difficult to fill his lungs. I crouched beside him, patted him down and found a wallet — empty — a switchblade, a handful of candies wrapped in plastic, seven hand-cut dum-dum bullets and a snub-nosed .38 revolver with a half dozen layers of duct tape wound around its handle. I checked the cylinder. No empty chambers. Up for inspection next, the nickel-plated job. It looked new. It was a heavy hitter, a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle. A useful weapon as long as you didn’t have to hold it extended for any length of time, a real hand cannon. Removing the magazine revealed two rounds with a third in the chamber. I sniffed the barrel. It had been fired fairly recently. Being shot by a .44 slug was just a little worse than hitting the sidewalk after stepping off a twenty-story building. I relieved the guy of the handguns and ammo and left him with his other possessions.

‘Two guns for price of one. I should ask for double,’ said Fakim, shaking his head when I climbed into the passenger seat and showed him the weapons. ‘So, where you go now? Back to hotel?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Take me to the most expensive brothel in town.’