Fog of War (Justin Hall # 3) (15 page)

All he heard was relative silence, pierced by a dog’s yelp, a loud shout in an African dialect he did not understand, and the distant bleating of a goat. Justin glanced at his wristwatch.
Still making good time.
Yusuf and his guards were expected to arrive at the village before sunset, which was still an hour away. Justin was planning to set up his position at a vantage point across from the doctor’s house and strike as soon as Yusuf got out of his vehicle.

He wore his white and blue headdress and walked toward the village, his knapsack over his left shoulder. He would attract some attention from the locals, and he hoped it would not be the wrong kind of attention.

The first glances came from a group of women in colorful dresses and veils, who were sitting and talking outside a tin-roofed mud house. Their conversation turned hushed as Justin walked on the other side of the road, a few feet away from them. He avoided making direct eye contact, but still glanced in their general direction, paying special attention to the house entrance and a few large rusty barrels stacked along the thatched fence.

A group of children—six in all—ran out from the yard of the next house. They looked malnourished, their bellies swollen, their arms and legs thin as twigs. Justin tried to guess their age, but he found it impossible. They could be five, or seven, or nine. He smiled at them, and greeted them in Arabic. They stared at him, but muttered no words in reply. Justin dipped his left hand in his knapsack and pulled out two granola bars. It was part of his late lunch. He waved them at the boys. One of them—the tallest, who also seemed to be the leader of the gang—reached forward, grabbed the granola bars and broke into a sprint. The others gave chase, their high-pitched shouts filling the village.

Three houses away, Justin spotted two young men preparing firewood out of an acacia tree in their backyard. One of them was swinging a machete; the other was loading the chopped branches into a cart. He passed by without talking to them, and they were too consumed in their work to notice him.

The road curved and became wider, enough for two cars to pass by one another with ease. A bar was straight ahead with a group of men sitting in battered plastic chairs, sipping tea and smoking tobacco on the porch, under the shade of a corrugated tin roof. They laid their gazes upon Justin as soon as he rounded the corner. He smiled, while taking in the entire surroundings. There were eight men, mostly in their late thirties, two or three older, perhaps in their fifties. He could not tell if they were armed, but as he drew nearer he saw an AK lying against the wall by the entrance to the bar. He was sure there had to be more inside the bar and in the nearby houses.

“Salam Alaykum,” Justin greeted them, placing his left hand over his heart.

A couple of the younger men replied with the customary “Alaykum Salam.” The others offered reluctant nods, their cautious eyes measuring up his face, his clothes, his moves.

“My name is Fadil Naeim. I’m a journalist with CairoTV in Egypt,” Justin spoke slowly and softly in Arabic, with a warm, friendly tone in his voice. He smiled as he talked and kept the AK and the bar entrance in his peripheral vision.

His words stirred some emotion among the men. A few shifted in their seats, motioning to the rest and whispering among themselves.

One of the older men, who sported a salt-and-pepper beard, peered at him for a few moments, then asked, “A journalist? You’re lost? Where’s your guide?”

Justin had already thought about various replies to those questions. “Our four-car convoy fell into an ambush. I think . . . I think in the aftermath I got lost.” He tried to make his words and the tone of his voice come across as unthreatening, yet not make him sound too weak. He did not know if the allegiance of these men lay with al-Shabaab or the Somali government.

The word “ambush” rattled the crowd. Two of the younger men stood up and asked, “What ambush? Where? Who was it?”

The old man kept his piercing eyes on Justin, as if determining if he was telling the truth.

“I don’t know who they were. Masked men in camouflage clothes, with large guns. They probably wanted to kidnap us and hold us for ransom. Our security guards returned fire. It was about an hour south. Who controls that area?”

His question brought about an uneasy silence. The old man took a deep breath. “Some troubled and foolish young men have turned to guns to escape poverty,” he said in a gloomy voice. “They are very dangerous and brutal, and you’re lucky to have made it out alive.”

“Where’s the rest of your convoy?” asked one of the younger men.

Justin had a ready answer. “They drove in the other direction. The gunmen gave chase.”

He paused for a second, scanning their faces. They seemed to have bought his story.

“How safe is the village?” he asked. Birgit had said there were no al-Shabaab fighters, but Justin wanted to double-check her information.

“They don’t control our homes or our lives,” the old man answered, his head gesturing toward the AK. “They tried once or twice, but we held them back. The government is strong. We are strong.”

Justin nodded. The old man was not exactly lying, but still not telling the whole truth. The Somali’s government authority was very weak, with stories of soldiers defecting to al-Shabaab's forces reported almost on a daily basis. Tribes and clans ruled the villages as they had done for centuries, surviving by siding with the stronger warriors at any given time.

“Sit down and enjoy a cup of tea,” the other old man said, motioning toward an empty seat to his right. “It will help you.”

“Thank you.”

His seat faced the bar’s entrance and the direction of the road from where Justin had arrived. His back was exposed, but he accepted the offer, not wanting to refuse the old men in front of everyone. He also accepted a mug of
shah,
the sweet tea, one of the younger men brought to his table. He took a few sips, enjoying the taste and the silence. A soft breeze flapped his headdress. It was a few degrees cooler in the shade.

“Is there a doctor here?” Justin asked in a casual tone. The satellite photos of the village and of the doctor’s house were in his knapsack by his feet. He had studied them and knew how to get there, but he was looking for a polite way out of this tea break.

“Why, you’re wounded?” asked the old man who had invited him for tea.

“No, but something I ate is turning my stomach upside down.”

“We have no doctors here,” said the old man who had done most of the talking. “The closest one is about an hour north.”

Are you sure?
Justin wanted to ask, but held his tongue. “No doctors?” he asked, scratching his chin. “I was told by our guides you had a good doctor.”

“We did once. But he died five years ago,” replied the old man.

A couple of the younger men nodded.

Justin frowned. They had no reason to lie to him about a doctor, so it had to be that he was given bad intelligence. He hated bad intelligence.
Did they send me to the wrong village? Where is Yusuf? What else is wrong with this intel?

“Thanks for the tea and the hospitality,” he said, standing and picking up his knapsack. “I have to head back. How do I get to El Wak?”

Before anyone could give him directions, the roar of a loud car engine echoed from the road behind him. Justin turned to see a gray pickup truck drawing near. The silhouettes of four men were visible, standing behind two heavy machine guns, one mounted next to the cab, the other to the back. Another vehicle resembling a jeep was visible through the thinning cloud of red dust.

“Al-Shabaab, that’s al-Shabaab!” shouted one of the younger men.

Everyone scattered toward the bar and the house next to it, jumping over the chairs and tossing the tea mugs in the rush.

So much for being strong and holding them back,
Justin thought. He marched toward the next house. Its thatched fence had an open gate.

The pickup came to an abrupt stop. The vehicle jerked forward, its breaks squealing in protest. Two gunmen jumped off the back, swinging AKs and forming a security perimeter.

Justin slipped inside the gate and observed them through the fence. The gunmen’s arrival and their moves had caught him by surprise. He thought al-Shabaab was a ragtag group of fighters, but these men acted like well-trained soldiers.
Perhaps they’re government’s forces?
The jeep’s features were now clear. It was a military jeep, like the ones used by the Somali army and the African Union Mission in Somalia, the UN-backed peacekeeping force in the country.
What’s AMISOM doing here?

The driver’s door and the back door of the jeep opened at the same time. Justin fixed his eyes on the passenger, a man wearing a beige jalabiya and a white prayer cap. The man’s face was imprinted on his memory. He recognized him as Hassan Khalif Yusuf. The man who was in possession of the leaked information. The man who wanted him dead.

It was payback time.

Justin pulled out his pistol, cocked it, and stepped out onto the dirt road. He took fast, long steps along the fence, keeping the pistol close to his side, his eyes on his target. Yusuf was walking in front of his jeep, heading toward the house to his right, followed by his driver. One of the gunmen noticed Justin and made a stop gesture with his hand. Justin ignored him. Before the gunman could lift his assault rifle, Justin aimed his pistol and pulled the trigger. The bullet struck the gunman on his neck and he fell, hitting the side of the pickup.

The other gunman opened fire. Justin dove, rolling on the ground. Bullets hit far and wide, and he was able to squeeze off another shot. It did not find its target, but it was enough to send the gunman ducking for cover behind the pickup. Justin ran bent at the waist and slid behind the wall of the nearest house just as the heavy machine gun mounted on the truck’s cab began its deafening drum. Justin slithered toward the back of the house, dragging his knapsack behind him. The machine gun bullets blew holes the size of basketballs around him. Sprays of dried mud covered his neck. Wood splinters stung the sides of his face. A couple of bullets ricocheted off the walls, striking close to his feet. The back door of the house was four feet away. Three seconds later, he crawled inside it.

The house was small, dim, and empty. Justin stayed away from the front and side walls still receiving the fierce pounding of the machine gun and climbed a staircase at the back of the house. He pushed open the small wooden door and crouched on the roof. He could not see the road below, so he moved closer to the crumbled wall surrounding the roof. Now he had a great vantage point. Justin peered through one of the bullet holes in the pockmarked wall and confirmed the position of his targets. He dropped to one knee, raised his head over the wall, and picked off the gunman behind the thundering machine gun with two clean shots. He planted two bullets in the head and the body of the other gunman, who was just swinging his weapon in Justin’s direction.

A bullet grazed his left forearm. Justin cursed and fell back on the roof. He looked at his bleeding arm as other bullets slammed against the wall. One of the gunmen was returning fire with his AK, judging by the sound of the gun. Justin retreated to the other side of the roof, toward the back of the house, away from incoming bullets and waited for a break in the volley. His chance came a few moments later, when the gunman stopped shooting. Justin stole a quick peek, less than half a second long, but enough to spot the gunman lying on the ground by the pickup’s hood. He popped up and fired the last three rounds in his pistol in a quick burst. The first one missed, but the second and the third pierced two holes in the gunman’s back.

Everything went quiet for a moment. Justin’s eyes followed a stream of dust along the road going toward the south. Yusuf’s jeep was no longer in front of the house. Justin rushed down the staircase, replacing the empty magazine in his pistol with a fresh one.

As he stepped out back onto the road, he heard loud shouts coming from one of the houses across from the bar. He swung his gun toward the noise. Heavy footsteps followed, and three young men hurried outside. The same ones who were having tea and smoking at the bar a few minutes ago. Two were carrying AKs. The third held a rocket-propelled grenade launcher over his shoulder.

“Drop the guns,” Justin shouted at them. “Drop them.”

The young men froze as they found themselves staring at Justin’s gun.

“We want to help,” said the one with the RPG. “To fight al-Shabaab.”

Kind of late for that,
Justin thought, but realized he needed a driver if he was to give chase. “Can you drive?” he asked the young man with the RPG.

“Of course I can.” He sounded slightly offended by the question.

“Good. You’ll drive the ‘technical.’ And you,” Justin said to one of the men with an AK, “You’re in charge of the gun in the back. I got the one in the front. Let’s go.”

The two young men nodded and hurried toward the pickup.

“What about me?” asked the third young man.

Justin looked at him. He was barely a teen, but his eyes sparkled with the joy of revenge. And he was holding his AK with both hands, ready to let out a volley of bullets. “Get in the passenger’s seat. When we get closer, you’ll shoot.”

“I can do that,” the young man replied, then ran to the pickup.

Justin scanned the area around him, full of newly-arrived villagers. He saw the two old men and nodded at them. They were standing next to the closest house to the bar. One of them—the one who had offered him tea—called out to him, “You said you were a journalist.”

And you said you were strong and held back al-Shabaab.
It was the first reply that came to Justin’s mind. Instead, he said, “I
am
a journalist. This is my hobby, my pastime.”

The old man grinned. “You’re very good at it.
Alhumdulilah.
”

I don’t know if I’ll praise God for this bloodbath,
Justin thought, as the young men threw the bodies of the two gunmen off the truck.
But I’ll thank Him for keeping me alive through the shootout.