Ismail
The Indian Ocean
09°04´45˝S, 56°52´34˝E
November 8, 2011
The cargo ship was a gray ghost on the western horizon, a smudge of coal against the backdrop of the pre-dawn sky. Ismail looked across the tropical sea draped with the shadows of twilight and clutched the stock of his AK-47. The wood was clammy in his hands, the metal barrel sweating in the warm, salt-laden air, but he had no doubt that it would work. The Soviet-era carbine—a throwback to the days of Siad Barre and the Somali National Army—was as trusty as an old camel.
He sat in the bow of the second skiff as it raced across the dark water. His ears were full of sound—the roar of the large outboard engine, the bone-jarring percussion of the bow as it leapt the waves, the wind moaning like a herd of cattle disturbed from sleep. They were eight miles from the ship and closing fast, their speed just under twenty-seven knots. The Omani
dooni
, or dhow, they had lived on for the past three weeks was miles behind them, its painted hull no longer visible.
He felt the twist of nerves in his gut along with the gnawing void of hunger. For two days he had eaten only bread and rice. The goat meat they had brought from the village—a gift from the clan elders, most of whom had a financial stake in the mission—had run out. There were nineteen men aboard the dhow: fourteen Somalis and five Omani fishermen who were both hostages and indentured servants—essentially a charter crew acting under duress. They would be released as soon as their “passengers” caught a ship, but not before.
Ismail looked into the faces of his companions, gauging their commitment, their willingness to risk life and limb in service of the mission. He was one of twelve attackers—six in each skiff. All were armed with vintage Kalashnikovs and motivated by a singular desire: to take something valuable from a world that had given them nothing. Their commander went by the nickname Gedef, or “mask” in Somali. His story was famous among the crew. He was a veteran of the Central Regional Coast Guard, formed in 2003 by the world’s most notorious pirate kingpin, Mohamed Abdi Hassan, or “Afweyne.” On Gedef’s first mission in command, he had brought back an extraordinary prize—a Saudi oil tanker carrying over $100 million in light sweet crude. Yet of the $3.3 million ransom paid by the ship’s owners, he had received only $46,000 and a Land Cruiser. He had left Afweyne in contempt and formed his own gang, obtaining financing from his father and other relatives in Somalia and the diaspora. Since then, he had hijacked two more vessels, one of which—a Singaporean freighter—had netted a $2.3 million ransom. The second—a Malaysian container ship—was currently at anchor near Ceel-Huur while the negotiators in Hobyo and London haggled over the price.
Ismail caught Gedef’s eye across the twenty-foot gap between the skiffs. The commander’s expression was as fierce as it was emotionless, like a bird of prey. Physically, he and Ismail looked nothing alike. Gedef was relatively short and muscular with a countenance as arid as the desert of Galmudug where he was born. Ismail, meanwhile, was tall and athletic with a face that combined his father’s penetrating gaze with his mother’s clear skin and symmetrical beauty. Psychologically, however, they might have been brothers. Though separated in age by over a decade—Gedef was thirty-one; Ismail twenty—both had fought in the Somali civil war and turned to piracy as a way out. They were thinkers and men of action, desiring peace but wielding the sword to achieve it on their own terms.
Ismail was Gedef’s second-in-command, trusted for his fearlessness and valued for his command of spoken English. He had been the first attacker to board the Malaysian cargo ship, the first to commandeer the bridge and subdue the terrified Chinese crew while calming their nerves with fluent reassurances. Gedef called him “Afyareh,” or “agile mouth.” It was Gedef’s intention—expressed the night before they left Hobyo—to give Ismail command of his crew. If the current mission went well, Gedef intended to retire from the piracy business, build a sturdy house near the sea, chew
qat
—a leafy narcotic shrub—and have many wives and children.
Ismail watched the sky brighten in the east. The sun would rise in ten minutes, about the same time the two skiffs would appear on the cargo ship’s radar. They had been trailing the vessel all night on AIS—the radio-powered identification system that ships use in international waters—and they had timed the attack precisely. They would ride in on the scythe of light, and if they were lucky, they would be aboard the ship and in control of the crew within half an hour. After that, it would take them about two and a half days to deliver their prey to the Somali coast. They were deep in the Indian Ocean, on the far side of the Seychelles—an unconventional hunting ground but safer than the navy-patrolled Gulf of Aden or the Arabian Sea in cyclone season.
Closing his eyes, Ismail mouthed two lines from the
Fatiha
, the opening sura of the Quran, in Arabic. It was the first prayer his father had taught him when he was a child, before the advent of madness and murder, before the Shabaab—the militant Arab–Somali Islamist group turned cult of blood—had stolen his life and much of his soul. Notwithstanding the gun in his hands and the nature of his mission, he didn’t speak the words ironically. Instead, he turned them into a prayer of preemptive repentance.
“
Bismallah-ir-Rahman ar-Raheem
. . . In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful. You alone do we worship, and you alone do we ask for help. I take refuge in Allah. I seek forgiveness from Allah. Glorified is my Lord, the Highest. Amen.”
The sun appeared suddenly, as it does close to the equator, turning night into day and lighting up the cargo ship like a torch. It was a mammoth vessel, with a towering white superstructure and a hull the color of red clay weighed down by hundreds of containers, stacked six and seven high from stem to stern. Ismail picked up his binoculars and surveyed the fantail. The ship was the MV
Jade Dolphin
, from Mumbai, India. The Indians were notorious among the Somali gangs for their hatred of piracy, but their dollars were as green as any other nation. They would surrender, and they would pay. The law of the sea was the law of war—he who has the gun is king.
Ismail watched for the inevitable turn that would signal the ship’s crew had spotted them. As the seconds passed, he grew puzzled. The skiffs were only three minutes out—about one and a half nautical miles—yet the
Jade Dolphin
had yet to conduct any evasive maneuvers. Its speed and course were constant. No water hoses had been turned on, no alarm triggered. There were two explanations: either the ship had a prehistoric radar system that couldn’t detect the skiffs against the clutter of the sea, or the watch officers weren’t paying attention. Ismail smiled thinly.
They’re making it easy for us
.
He glanced across the water as Gedef’s skiff broke away. Their strategy was simple. They would approach the ship like the pincers of a scorpion. Gedef’s team would fire warning shots at the bridge, and Ismail’s team would board the ship just forward of the stern. Ismail and two other attackers would make for the bridge while the rest of his men located the crew. For being the first to board, Ismail would receive triple the
sami
, or ransom share, of the other attackers, except for Gedef, who would take half of the gross to cover expenses and pay himself and his investors.
When the skiffs were less than a mile out, the
Jade Dolphin
finally sounded the alarm. In seconds, the ship accelerated and made a hard turn to starboard, then back to port, churning its wake into waves. This attempt at evasion came far too late. The skiffs fanned out to avoid the chop and zeroed in on the
Jade Dolphin
’s stern, racing across the sea like bull sharks moving in for the kill.
The Somalis drew their guns and aimed them at the tower. Through the binoculars, Ismail saw movement on the bridge—black shadows of men scurrying and gesticulating. Adrenaline surged through his body as he readied himself for the attack. He pictured his sister then, as she was in the world before—the delicate oval of her face, framed by an embroidered
hijab
, or headscarf, her small nose and lips and wide eyes that glowed when she smiled. Yasmin, innocent as a flower. She was his pole star, his secret reservoir of courage. Gedef knew nothing of her existence, nothing of Ismail’s true motivation, or the lengths to which he would go to set her free.
Suddenly, gunfire erupted from Gedef’s skiff—the signature
rat-tat-tat
of the AK-47 known in warzones the world over. One burst, then two and three, all directed at the bridge. As Ismail watched, the
Jade Dolphin
’s crew dropped out of sight. Then something happened that took him completely by surprise: he heard the high-pitched crack of a rifle. Then another.
He jerked the binoculars toward Gedef’s skiff and terror seized him. One of the attackers was slumped over the gunwale, his arm dragging in the water; another was holding his bloody chest. Gedef was shouting at his cowering crew, as he fired back at the tower. Then he, too, took a bullet in the thigh. His leg collapsed beneath him, and his gun fell overboard, disappearing into the sea.
At that instant, Ismail knew what he had to do. He dropped the binoculars and took the tiller from the terrified helmsman. His men were screaming at him to break off the attack, their dark faces tortured with fear, but he had no interest in their cowardice. He had heard only one rifle, which meant there was a single shooter. He was good, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once. If Ismail could get aboard, he could flush him out. He had done it before on the streets of Mogadishu.
He opened the throttle to the max and pointed the skiff at the fantail of the
Jade Dolphin
. The huge ship loomed above them like a castle of hardened steel. Ismail focused on the open windows in the vertical stern. They were at main deck level, thirty feet off the water, but they were accessible. The hook ladder his crew carried had been engineered precisely for this purpose.
He heard more rifle shots and glanced toward Gedef’s skiff, one hundred yards away. His eyes widened as his brain registered the spectacle. Gedef was crouched in the center of the boat, balancing a rocket-propelled grenade launcher on his shoulder. It was the most powerful weapon in their arsenal, but it was meant only to cement the threat, not to be used against a ship. Ismail waved his arm wildly, trying to catch Gedef’s attention before he turned an act of piracy into an attempted murder.
What happened next shook Ismail to the core. Gedef raised the RPG launcher toward the
Jade Dolphin
and pulled the trigger. As the shell launched, its back-blast ignited the skiff’s engine and the engine became a bomb. The explosion was so violent that it sent flames high into the sky and flipped the skiff like it was a toy. The waves quickly encircled the broken hull and dragged it under. It sank in less than a minute, leaving behind a scatter of bodies and an oil slick that continued to burn.
In the wake of the blast, Ismail sat paralyzed while his skiff drifted to a stop, bobbing idly in the
Jade Dolphin
’s wake. He didn’t process the shouts of the men around him. He didn’t notice the container ship slipping away. He was in Mogadishu again, crouched behind an overturned jeep on Maka al Mukarama Road, Yusuf huddled beside him, crying. Bullets were flying around, some ricocheting off the jeep, others burying themselves in the house behind them. Men were shrieking in Somali, some injured, some dying, as the government tanks made their advance. Then came the explosion and the black void of unconsciousness. His eyes blinked and he saw the blood again, felt its viscous stickiness on his skin. He heard the shriek escape from his lips—
—and returned to the present just as suddenly. His men were yelling his name.
“Afyareh! Afyareh! What are we going to do?”
They were staring at him, terrified. Guray, aged twenty-four, an illiterate goatherd from the interior whose only talent was wielding a gun; Dhuuban, aged nineteen, the runt of his seven siblings, scarecrow-thin, and desperate to prove himself to his father; Osman, aged twenty-five, headstrong and juvenile, a fisherman with a sixth-grade education; Liban, aged twenty, the trustworthy son of a camel broker, and Ismail’s right-hand man; and finally, Sondare, an introspective boy of seventeen whose mother sold
qat
to feed his five brothers while his father wasted her earnings on his new wife. Without Gedef, they were like orphaned children. They needed someone to lead them.
“We’ll search for the living,” Ismail said, speaking with a voice of authority. It was the only gift the Shabaab had given him—he knew how to command.
He took the tiller in hand and piloted the skiff to the site of the wreck. His men plugged their noses against the stench of burning oil and pointed out the bodies. They found three of them quickly, floating facedown on the water. All were dead, riddled with shrapnel. The fourth they found in a haze of pink some distance away. He was missing half a leg. The sight was so grotesque that Sondare turned away and Dhuuban retched over the side. The rest shouted Gedef’s name and that of his cousin, Mas, into the vastness of sky and sea, but no reply came.
“They’re dead,” Liban said in a voice tinged with shock. “We have to find the dhow.”
“No,” Osman replied fiercely. “We can’t leave them.”