Born of War (10 page)

“Y
ou are crazy.” Peter DuBose listened to Karen Stewart's argument that the village needed help; that otherwise an epidemic of meningitis would spread across both Somalia and Ethiopia.

“We need to see what's going on.” Karen Stewart had dumped everything out of her backpack and was picking out the most important items she needed. First, she was filling it up with several bottles of water. And then she was packing the bottles of antibiotics that they had.

“If you are right, and it is meningitis, those pills will not do much good.”

“You are right.” She hesitated. “But they may help stop it for the children not yet sick.”

Karen started toward the tent opening.

“Wait, let me talk to Mataa and figure out what is going on here.”

Stewart put her pack down on the end of the cot. She opened up a bottle of water and leaned against the tent pole. She watched as DuBose, the old man, and Mataa held a confab just outside. DuBose was waving his hands. He often spoke with his hands as much as with words. The old man pointed to the east. Mataa was shaking his head as the conversation continued.

Finally, DuBose turned back to the tent.

“Okay
,
he says the village is on the road to Beledweyne. We can follow the river. But if we have to cross the Shebelle, I told him that we are turning back. I will not let you go on any other condition.”

“Okay.” She knew that the river could be both deadly and unpredictable.

“Plus, he says it can't be more than a couple of miles.”

“We can get there and see how things look.”

“Do you have masks and gloves? We aren't going into this mess without some protection.”

Stewart had forgotten to pack those things.

“I will get them from the supply tent.”

“We aren't going to be gone for very long.”

“I understand.” She knew that he was ultimately in charge of the encampment. He had veto power over any decision she made.

The four followed the road past the village and headed east into the desert. The road from Ferfer was just north of the river and paralleled the Shebelle for the entire hike. At least on the map it was supposed to parallel the riverbed.

It was a sunny day and they moved quickly. A white man and a white woman looked odd as they followed the two from the village of Ferfer. They left their guard back at the encampment on the theory that his one weapon would do little good if they ran into anything dangerous. They trusted the village leader and his instinct.

“We need to get there quickly and get out.” DuBose was insistent.

“This will only be an assessment so that we can call in and advise them of the situation.”

“Yes.” She didn't argue.

 

 

After less than two hours, they crossed over a rise and came down to the small village of mud huts. Two goats stood guard as they approached. There was no other movement.

“Do you have the masks?”

“Yes.” She swung her backpack off, placing it on top of a rock just off the road, opened the pack, and pulled out several gloves and masks. The old man particularly looked odd as she showed him how to place the mask over his mouth and nose. At first, he laughed, resisted, and then finally put the mask on. He refused the gloves and after some effort she gave up. He had been exposed to the boy for some time by now. His body had weathered years of exposures to micro creatures of all kinds. His face was pockmarked with his survival of smallpox or other diseases, and he had slept his entire life without a net. His risk was low.

As they entered the first hut she became covered with flies. The dead were in fetal positions in the corners of the huts. The children were still in the grasp of their mothers' arms, and one child had been suckling her mother's breast as both died.

They moved from hut to hut, finding more dead.

After leaving the last hut, they moved back to the west and the rock that she had used as a table for her backpack. She pulled off the mask, took out a bottle of water, and washed her hands. She then poured the water over DuBose's hands, Mataa's hands, and, with his great reluctance, the old man's hands. He stared at her as if the Westerner didn't appreciate the value of clear water. His water had been tainted with the red dust.

“They can't even be buried.” DuBose looked back towards the village as he spoke.

“The contamination will probably not be a problem.” Stewart rationalized that death stopped the spread of coughing, sneezing, and the disease.

“The scavengers will clean this out by sunup.” DuBose pulled off the gloves and tossed them into the desert. “We need to get back.”

As they crossed the rise heading back to the east, the old man stopped. Stewart was looking down at her boots and barely thinking of anything other than putting one foot in front of the other. She looked up to see her three companions standing perfectly still.

A pickup truck was in the middle of the road. Several men with black keffiyehs wrapped around their heads, wearing loose, green military fatigues and holding AK-47 machine guns, were standing in front of the truck pointing their weapons at the four hikers.

Karen Stewart had been introduced to Al Shabaab.

T
he following morning the tarp was removed again from the truck behind the lodge. William Parker pulled out the key from underneath the brush guard, started the engine, and turned on the radio. He pulled the truck around to the river side of the farmhouse so as to lessen the static, and scanned until he heard an AM newscast.

“. . . a YouTube video has been released by the Al Qaeda–affiliated terrorist group in Somalia that calls itself Al Shabaab . . .” Parker turned up the sound to listen to the report. “An American by the name of Omar Fazul appears on the video claiming credit for the school bombing in Mobile, Alabama. He has been listed by the FBI as a person of interest.” Parker looked at the time on the truck's dashboard.

He decided to take another trip. His wallet with the Phillip Berks license was inside the house.

I don't need another call to the Gunny.
The trip to Mobile and the arrest had been more action than both he and Gunny had seen for some time.

The cabin was painfully silent. He walked up the knotted, lacquered pine stairs that she once jumped two steps at a time. He hadn't slept in the master bedroom for over a year now. He didn't care if he ever slept in there again. The door remained closed.

Parker stopped at the door for a moment. He put his hand on the wood. His thought that the roof could have fallen in wasn't without merit. An old woman had owned and lived on the property before he bought it.

On his first visit to the cabin, Parker had called out her name several times before he noticed movement. He'd known her cousin, and this common link allowed a conversation to ensue. The cousin had been a Marine who had been killed in the Beirut bombing. Parker had met the young Marine years ago and told her that he remembered him. Parker had attended the funeral as an escort officer. He was a young captain at the time and, being from the same town, was assigned the duty. It was a responsibility that was far more difficult than any combat tour.

She'd invited him into the main room. There they talked of her cousin and the history of her land. She had twisted hands gnarled by years of untreated arthritis.

As he sat there, he looked around the main room to see the door to the kitchen and another to her bedroom open. The third door was closed.

After some conversation, she brought up the fact that she had thought of selling her land.

“It can be done.” He had known of the property for a long time. Once, years ago, he had hunted on the ridgeline that intersected with the river. No one knew that the clearing on top of the hill had a view for miles in all directions.

“You want something to drink?” she asked.

“Yes, I would like that.”

He sat down on a bench that she had on the front porch. She returned with a plastic cup full of ice and sweet tea.

“Here you go.”

“Thank you.”

They returned to conversation about the land.

“But I need to stay here.”

“What if you sell me the land and you live in this cabin as long as you want?”

“Yeah, but I got to be buried here, too. My family is here.” A small clearing was near the cabin with nothing more than large granite rocks marking the several generations that preceded her. They were lined up in a rough row with weeds as high as the rocks. In the midst of the weeds, each marker was surrounded by a tangle of roses. Antique roses that went back decades, they were considered nearly indestructible. They marked her family's place on the land. It was her tribe.

“Sure, absolutely.”

They concluded the conversation and, at the end, she gave him a quick walk around the house without opening the last door. Parker pointed to it.

“I don't want to pry, but the last door?”

“Oh, nothing.” She pushed the door open with her shoulder. Some time ago the roof had fallen in. It was easier to just shut the door, she'd said.

“Yeah,” he thought now, as he passed the master bedroom. “It can be easier to just shut the door.”

Parker now used the last bedroom at the end of the hall. It had a window looking out to the front of the farmhouse and another to the side. It was as close as any room came to being an outpost. From this upstairs room he could hear and see anyone who approached. He grabbed the fake license and left the cabin.

He pulled the truck out of the gravel road from his farm and headed north. In less than two hours, he took the exit near where the SunTrust Bank branch was that he so often used. This time he didn't stop at the bank but continued on to the next stop.

He pulled into a parking lot near a brown and yellow brick one-story building and parked the truck. Parker passed under the entrance sign. He had been there enough times before that the woman recognized him but didn't specifically recall his name. But he had a confident smile that he knew she always reacted to.

“Hello.”

“Yes, sir. Good to see you. Can I help?”

“Your computer room?”

“We just added some new Macs. They're upstairs in the old place.”

Parker hadn't been back to the library in nearly a year. It was a safe place, far from his farm, where he could research the world with virtually no backwash. He pulled up the Internet to immediately see the news stories on the bombing from Mobile. He was curious about the bomber.

The room was empty, so he pulled up Omar's first YouTube video and watched the man with a beard and checkered black-and-white turban talk with glee of how the bombing had occurred. Every sentence had tagged onto it his request for blessings of Allah. The video told of Eddie, who was assured of seeing the face of Allah.

Parker pulled up Somalia and studied Al Shabaab. It was a gang that thought of itself as a tribe. The country was a mass of feuding tribes such as the Harti and Ma-reexaan, among many others. Parker looked carefully at the background of Omar's video.

“His first mistake.” The background showed a building and palm trees. Intelligence would scan every detail and soon figure out exactly where the video was taken.

There were also banana trees lined up in a manner that suggested they had all been planted. The growth of the trees suggested a certain time period. The crumbled wall was another clue.

He would be correct. And with a river, the possible locations would be reduced again. He could cross-check Al Shabaab with its strongholds. There would be few that would be on a river. The process of elimination had begun.

“God, this place should be red with blood.” The Land of Punt went back over 11,000 years. Cave paintings had been dated as far back as 9,000 years before Christ. It had a continuous history of bloodshed for power. Brothers killing brothers for the throne.

The Marines will never be finished with war,
he thought as he went through the news stories for hours. He read of a MSOT raid into the Kenyan village of Wajir, near its border with Somalia. The Special Operations Team had flown through the night, hit the target, and pulled out without casualties. They recovered over a hundred pounds of plastic explosives.

Parker continued to read without stopping. Marines were in Gabon and Uganda. The continent was on fire.

“Excuse me, but we have to close.”

Parker looked up to see the librarian standing at the doorway to the computer room.

“Oh, I am sorry.” He glanced at the row of windows on the other side of the room to see that it was dark outside.

“Do you need to finish up anything?”

He remembered her from the first time he had wandered into the branch of the Fulton County Library after his first visit to the bank just down the street. She showed a kind heart. He remembered the photograph of her daughter on her desk just behind the counter. It was a college graduation picture.

Parker always scanned for details. It had saved his life in an operation more than once. He realized now that the use of the same library had been a mistake. He had become conscious of the trail he left, like every human being leaves a trail, like Omar left a trail, and how someone searching would ask her of the stranger who used the library. She would take the person to the computer and, with that, they would know what was in William Parker's mind.

“No, thanks.”

She would only see him once again.