Deployed (8 page)

Clyde waved that away. “I can’t refuse your grandma anything. I promised your granddaddy I’d help look after her, so that means I’m helping look after you and your young’un too. Let’s get in my truck. I got a couple sodas in the cooler. I bet you could use one about now.”

Driving carefully over the cattle guard at the entrance to the small ranch, Clyde honked the horn a couple times and headed on past the house to the barn in the back.

“I suppose you want the truck in the barn?”

Bekah nodded. “I’ll probably pull the carburetor tonight.”

“Mighty ambitious, aren’t you?”

“It’s not going to fix itself.”

“True enough, and the Good Book always noted that God helps those who helps themselves. Or maybe that was Andy Rooney.”

Bekah smiled a bit, but she couldn’t help thinking that, given everything going on in her life lately, God had been a little shy on the helping-out part. She finished the Coca-Cola Clyde had given her from the cooler between the seats. “Stop for just a second and I’ll open the barn.”

“Yep. It’s a lot easier that way. Won’t have to replace the doors.” Clyde grinned at her, and his good nature was infectious. He brought the truck to a halt and she got out. By that time her granny was standing on the front porch with Travis.

“Hi, Momma!” Travis waved excitedly.

“Hi, Travis.” Bekah set herself and shoved the barn door open, then walked inside and switched on the lights. The stalls were empty at the moment, but tack for horses hung on the walls along with milking stools. A hoist for working on the tractor and the vehicles hung from the ceiling rafters.

Deftly, Clyde slipped the truck into the barn, and they each took a side to unhook the vehicle.

Bekah coiled the chain and put it on the back deck of the tow truck. Then she headed back to her own truck to get her tools and get started.

Clyde wiped his hands on the red rag again. “Your grandma’s got supper waiting.”

“The sooner I get started on this truck, the sooner I’ll have it running again. I need it running.”

“Let me make you a deal. Your grandma invited me to supper tonight too. What say we go eat, and then I’ll come back and help you tear down that carburetor? Four hands work faster than two.”

“Mr. Walters, I already owe you for the tow.”

Clyde waved that away. “No, you don’t. Least I can do for one of our soldiers. And for your grandma. From time to time, she makes a meal and asks me to stop by. I’m getting a home-cooked meal out of this tonight. The way I figure it, I’m coming out ahead. My good fortune. And I like working on cars. Don’t get to do it as much as I used to because everything’s so new and can be cantankerous.”

Grinning in spite of her situation, Bekah held out her hand. “You’ve got a deal.”

“Good. I’ll try not to feel bad what with me getting the better end of things. Let’s get on to the house.”

Bekah led the way across the yard that she had mowed countless times while growing up. She loved the smell of the dark all around her, the way the world was cooling down and the breeze was finally sighing through the trees. Fireflies glimmered in the deep shadows around the yard, and moths bumped the light hanging from the second floor of the old house she’d grown up in.

She was home, and that felt better than it had in a long time.

Travis came running toward her, and she scooped him up in her arms. He hugged her tight. “I thought you were never coming home.”

“Me too.”

Then he looked at her seriously. “Did you break your truck?”

“A little bit.”

“Can you fix it?”

“I can.”

“I’ll help.”

“All right.” Bekah bumped heads with him. In that minute, she didn’t feel all the disappointment and setbacks of the day. She was home and she had her son, and there wasn’t much else she needed. Then she saw the official-looking letter in her granny’s hand.

“This came for you today.” Her granny looked at the letter with displeasure. “I was going to hold it till after supper, but I didn’t figure it would be any more welcome then.” She held the letter out. “And I figured you’d want to know now.”

Bekah took the letter with a mixture of emotions. She didn’t think the Marine Corps could be writing her about the felony charges. That had only been two days ago. They couldn’t find out that fast, could they? And they’d wait until the trial was over before taking any kind of disciplinary action, wouldn’t they?

Of all the military branches, the Marines were strictest about legal infractions and personal backgrounds. Almost anyone could get into the Army, but tattoos—even non-gang-related ones—could keep an applicant out of the Corps. Bekah didn’t know how they would react to the felony charges she had pending.

She shifted Travis to her hip to free up both hands so she could open the letter. When she had it open, she had to turn
slightly to catch the light from the lamp on the house. The letter was simple and direct.

“I’ve been reactivated. My orders are to report to Twentynine Palms in California by the end of next week.”

Travis looked up at her with mournful eyes. “You’re going away, Momma?”

It broke Bekah’s heart to have to tell him, but part of her was thinking about the battle pay and how that money would help straighten out everything at home. “Yeah, baby, I have to go away.”

Travis held her tightly, and she carried him into the house.

8

RAGEH DAUD CREPT
through the jungle, surprised by how much at home he felt. All the years that he’d been away melted, and he became the creature that he had been back then almost as easily as drawing breath. He slid effortlessly through the trees and brush even in the darkness, despite the bruises and pains that still plagued him from the beating he’d received. The AK-47 he carried in his arms felt natural, and it was like he’d found a piece of himself that he had been missing these past ten years.

When he was a child, Daud had lived in ruins outside Mogadishu with his father and the bad men his father had led. His father had never tried to hide his nature or the nature of the men from Daud. They were thieves and killers, men who took what they needed from those who had it.

His father, before he had died from sickness, had been on the cutting edge of the pirates who now worked the Gulf of
Aden and the Indian Ocean. Before his death, his father had even started capturing some of the ships out in the harbor. The work—and all of the men with his father considered the piracy to be work—had kept them alive. And the pay was important to the survival of their families.

In fact, for a time Daud’s father had served with the local coast guard. That was where many of the pirates learned the skills they now used to take the cargo ships. When the jobs they needed went away, they turned to the business that had supported the country hundreds of years ago when their ancestors had plied the seas. Piracy was a very old trade in Somalia.

So was raiding, and that was what Daud and his group were here to do tonight. Returning to the old ways, giving in to the violence that he knew so well, felt right and good. He felt stronger, able to reach out and seize his own fate from the jaws of uncertainty.

But he knew his wife would have been ashamed of him.

She had known nothing of the things he’d done before she met him, and he’d always told her different stories about the scars she discovered on his body. Mogadishu was filled with violence. People were easily in the wrong place at the wrong time. She had believed him without question.

A momentary twinge of guilt over her innocence assailed him as he went forward, but he quickly walled it off with the anger and pain that threatened to consume him over the deaths of his wife and son. Images of Ibrahim’s wide, unseeing eyes haunted Daud’s sleep. He had spent days and nights praying at his son’s bedside, and all of those prayers had gone unanswered.

Now he had no prayers left in him. Only the violence that he was about to unleash.

Voices sounded from up ahead. Men laughed and joked, and the golden glow of a campfire cut through the darkness. Those men had no idea they were being stalked.

The day after the beating he had received in the alley, Daud had lain abed to recover. He’d come a long way on foot to reach Afrah, and that had been draining enough—he’d had to dodge the TFG and AMISOM units struggling to lock down the city so peacekeeping efforts could be made. When the al-Shabaab had pulled out of the city, a power vacuum had been created that the transitional government and the United Nations were struggling to fill. Hundreds of thousands of people had been displaced by the constant warring, and many of them remained scattered in the surrounding countryside. The al-Shabaab held some of them as hostages in order to extort more money and to ensure their own protection from retaliation.

All of those displaced people needed food and water and medicine. Children died every day. The peacekeeping efforts were too little too late, and they did not appear to be growing in number.

God had truly turned his back on Mogadishu.

But Daud had not. When he had buried his beloved wife and child, he understood what he was meant to do. He took a better grip on the assault rifle and peered through the darkness toward the fire as he waved his group to ground.

Afrah, only a few feet away, hunkered down behind a boulder sticking up from the ground that was just large
enough to shield him. Daud thought maybe time had robbed the older man of a step or two, but he moved silently in the shadows, like
Qori ismaris
, the hyena-man who switched between animal and human form.

Daud could remember being fascinated as a child by the old stories that his father and the other men told him. They’d done it to scare him, of course, but he had loved the old tales; he had loved being scared of things that didn’t exist. There were too many real fears in his life, but borrowing nonexistent ones that could be banished at daybreak was another matter. Those make-believe terrors had contributed to his tattered childhood. Those stories had been one of the constants in his life with his father. The other had been learning weapons and small-unit tactics.

Taking cover behind a banana tree, Daud concentrated on the clearing ahead. All of the trees in the area were short and stunted from the drought that had claimed Somalia, but they were big enough and thick enough to hide Daud and his men. The ground was almost as dry as dust, and when the wind picked up, the earth lifted with it and was blown away.

Gone were the pasturelands that had fed the cattle so many Somali people depended on for their livelihood. Only farmlands along the Jubba, the Shebelle, and the other rivers still prospered. However, many rivers were under al-Shabaab control, and the water was auctioned off to those farmers who could pay. People downriver from where the dams were built had to struggle even harder to survive and keep their cattle alive.

Men like Gold Tooth were behind those selfish enterprises.

Daud knew his father might have considered it worthwhile to attack his enemy directly, but it would mean having a much larger force than he presently had. It was one thing to take an area; it was another to hold it. His father had always survived by striking, taking what he wanted, and fading back into the countryside. Daud intended to follow the same plan until his group grew, which would foster new problems. Feeding all of them while on the move would be difficult.

Reaching into his military chest pack, Daud took out a set of binoculars he’d gotten on the black market and focused the lenses on the campsite. With the way various armies—the Russians, the French, the Ethiopians, the British, and the Americans—had come to Somalia to shore up one government after another, getting military surplus was easy. Just costly.

A dozen men sat around the campfire in folding lawn chairs. They kept assault rifles next to them and wore pistols and knives. Many of them chewed
khat
, a native plant that created a state of euphoria. The drug was easier to get than alcohol and wasn’t forbidden by Islam.
Khat
was also being exported to Scandinavia, and the profits funneled back into the pockets of Muslim terrorist groups.

Beyond the men, two jeeps and two four-wheel-drive pickups sat parked in the shadows surrounding the hollow that protected the group from the wind. The scent of braised lamb rode the wind, mixed with herbs. Evidently the men had dined well and were settling in for the night.

That suited Daud. Silently, he put away the binoculars
and rose into a crouch, holding the rifle in both hands as he advanced. Afrah and the four other men with them—three of them men who had accompanied Daud’s father years ago—rose like dark ghosts and followed.

Daud kept putting one foot in front of the other. The al-Shabaab had posted no guards, no lookouts, obviously complacent in their hiding place. A local herdsman who had ventured into Mogadishu looking for food for his family had brought news of Gold Tooth, whose real name was Liban. The herdsman had contacted one of the men Afrah had sent out to find information about the al-Shabaab contingent. In return, the herdsman had received food for his family.

Life was sold cheaply in Mogadishu even after the al-Shabaab had been driven from most of the city.

Fifteen feet out, one of the men got up and wandered outside the firelight, probably to heed nature. Daud froze, but the man saw someone in the brush anyway.

“Look out, my brothers! Look out!” The man scrambled to yank the rifle from over his shoulder and find cover.

Daud stood and fired at once. His bullets caught the man and drove him backward into the flames where his hair caught on fire. The foul odor of burned hair and cooked flesh filled the campsite. The man didn’t move and didn’t make a sound as he burned.

The al-Shabaab terrorists grabbed their weapons, but they were blinded from looking into the campfire and addled by the
khat
. They fired long bursts that cut through the trees over Daud’s head. Daud stayed low and fired at the targets
that presented themselves. The rifle recoiled against his shoulder again and again. He kept moving forward, watching as the bodies of the al-Shabaab hit the ground.

One of the terrorists turned and fled into the trees. Light glinted at the man’s mouth when he shot a frightened glance over his shoulder.

Gold Tooth. Liban.

Daud’s head ached from where Afrah had put in eight stitches to close a cut on his temple. The wound still threatened infection. Other cuts inside his mouth made eating an unpleasant chore, and two of his teeth were loose.

“Afrah.”

The big man glanced at Daud.

“Secure the camp. Kill them all.”

Afrah nodded and surged forward.

Dropping his rifle, Daud took up pursuit of Liban and drew the Tokarev pistol from the holster at his hip. The Russian-made pistol wasn’t as accurate as its American and British counterparts, but it would serve. He ran, and the effort amplified the painful pounding in his head. He guessed that he was at least a decade older than his quarry, but he knew the wilderness better than the other man did.

Liban slipped and fell, narrowly avoiding collisions with trees. Daud gave chase in a distance-eating lope, easily making his way through the stubby trees and scrub brush as if it had been only yesterday and not ten years.

During those ten years, Daud had taken college courses and learned what he needed in order to become a warehouse administrator. He had used some of the money his father had
bequeathed him to buy a modest house and try to live the life he’d thought he wanted instead of the violence he had always known. He’d met a beautiful woman and had a beautiful son. Life had been good.

Until it had all been taken from him. Memories of the bombed-out house skated through his mind as he ran. His rapid inhalations and exhalations sounded like the screams of his son and his wife after the mortar had blown their house to pieces. He had been outside when the explosion had occurred, and that was when he had been wounded with the scars he now carried on his cheek. But those remembered pains were nothing compared to the ones that still writhed through his heart. Soon, though, he knew those sharp aches would dim and die, and he would have nothing except his hate and anger to sustain him.

He came up fast behind Liban, pointed the pistol at him, and thought then of shooting the man point-blank. But that wasn’t how Daud wanted to deliver his message. Liban and his cronies had made everything personal. The al-Shabaab and the TFG had made things personal. The Ethiopians and the Americans and all the other foreigners had made it personal.

Now Daud was going to make his war against them personal. He would live and he would become strong. And they would all pay.

Screaming in fury, giving in to the anger and desire for vengeance that filled him as Liban crested a hill and headed down, Daud topped the hill as well, then hurled himself headlong after the man. Sailing through the air, Daud crashed into Liban and knocked them both sprawling to the ground.

The impact knocked the wind from Daud’s lungs, but he held on to the pistol and rolled. Disoriented by the dark and the brush he landed in, he scrambled for a moment and pulled himself to his feet with the pistol pointed at Liban.

The al-Shabaab man pushed himself to his feet, spotted Daud ahead of him, and immediately reached for the pistol at his belt. Then, seeing that he was already too late, he slowly lifted his hands.

“Don’t shoot me. I beg you.”

Daud’s voice was cold and hard. “You can beg all you wish to, dog. But it will do you no good.”

“I am protected by Haroun.”

“I am hunting this man. Throwing his name at me affords you no protection.”

“He will kill you. He will kill all of you for what you do.”

“Do you know me?”

Liban studied Daud, cocking his head first one way, then the other. But his attention was divided between Daud and the pistol he held. “You’re the man in the alley.”

“I am. And tonight I am your executioner.” Daud squeezed the trigger and the pistol roared. Now that the rifles of his men and the other al-Shabaab had fallen silent, the explosion sounded incredibly loud.

For a moment, Liban stood. Then his legs gave way and his body toppled to the ground. Daud stood above the man, hoping to feel something fill in the awful emptiness that consumed him. But there was nothing. Even the vindication of striking back at a man who had caused him so grievous an injury did not help. Eventually it would, though. He was certain of that.

He knelt and went through the dead man’s pockets, taking money, jewelry, and weapons. Daud reclaimed his hiking boots as well. Afrah found him there in the darkness as he was lacing them up.

“You are well, Rageh?”

“I am. Did we lose anyone?”

“No.” Afrah shook his shaggy head.

“Are the al-Shabaab all dead?”

“Yes. To the last man.”

Daud stood and stomped his feet. He reloaded the pistol, once more filling the magazine. “Did they have much?”

Afrah shrugged. “Food, water, medicine. Some weapons beyond what they carried.” He grinned. “But now we have four more vehicles than we had. From these things, we can grow and become more powerful.”

“All right.” Daud headed up the hill, back toward the terrorist camp.

Walking beside him, Afrah clapped a hand on Daud’s shoulder. “You are as your father was. Aggressive and merciless. He would be proud of the son he sired. And I will follow you as I followed your father.”