Andrew Kaplan: Scorpion Deception

When Shlomo saw him standing all alone in the terminal, in shorts and a T-shirt, holding nothing but the papers they had given him, he knelt and put his hands on the boy’s shoulders.

“You’re in Israel,” he said in Farsi. “You’re safe now.”

For the first time since he had watched his parents murdered in Isfahan, the boy spoke.

“I don’t want to be safe,” he said.

Lower Shabelle Region,

Somalia, The Present

“Kata’lahu.” You kill him, Khalaf said to the American in Arabic.

Khalaf stood behind Dowler, his long razor-sharp belawa knife at the British aid worker’s throat. Dowler, on his knees in the sand, hands tied behind him, face pockmarked with cigarette burns, had the dazed look-part fear, part sheer disbelief-that comes in the final seconds when a person realizes he is about to die.

You stupid twit, the American code-named Scorpion thought.

“No. You want him dead, do it yourself,” Scorpion replied in Fusha; standard Arabic.

“Kill him or we kill you,” Khalaf growled, motioning to one of his Al-Shabaab militiamen. The man put the muzzle of his AK-47 to Scorpion’s head, his finger on the trigger.

“I thought we were having shah hawaash ,” Scorpion said, implying that they still had unfinished business. He gestured at the spread of tea, bread, and dates on the blanket under the shade of a plastic tarp a few feet away. “The tea is still hot,” he added, reminding Khalaf of the Somali courtesy due a guest.

“Why not?” Khalaf said, kicking Dowler down to the sand.

Khalaf came over and sat on the ground beneath the tarp. Scorpion sat cross-legged at an angle to him, facing two of Khalaf’s militiamen, their faces hidden behind red-checked keffiyeh scarves, fingers on the trigger guards of their AK-47s. Scorpion kept his hand on his leg near the Glock 28 he had in a tear-away ankle holster hidden under his jeans.

They sipped the cardamom and cinnamon flavored tea in thimble-sized metal cups. The day was hot, with only the faintest hint of a breeze stirring dust devils on the savannah; featureless but for the dry thorn scrub and, in the distance, a stunted acacia tree. It hadn’t rained in this part of Somalia in six years.

As was the custom, Scorpion smacked his lips loudly in appreciation.

“You are taking the children to Dadaab?” Khalaf gestured at the Toyota pickup truck crammed with children stacked like cordwood, broiling in the hot African sun. Scorpion had bought the truck in Nairobi only a week earlier, from a dealer on South-B Road, next to the hospital. He had been bringing the children across the border to the refugee camp at Dadaab, in Kenya, when Khalaf’s Al-Shabaab militiamen stopped him at a roadblock.

“ Inshallah ,” Scorpion said. God willing. “If it is permitted.” Reaching into his backpack, he pulled out a plastic bag bulging with qat . He gestured for them to take it. As soon as he did, he realized it was a mistake. The eyes of the three men stayed riveted on his backpack.

Khalaf looked up at the American, and for a moment the two men studied each other. Sheikh Mukhtar Ali Khalaf was a thin coffee-colored man in his fifties. He wore a ma’awis , a Somali-style sarong, and on his head a koofiyud cap, embroidered, Scorpion noted, with the colors and pattern of a sheikh of the powerful Dubil tribe. He was notorious. Across the Lower Shabelle there were stories of beheadings, torture with power drills, and mass graves. Those who had met Khalaf and lived to tell the tale considered him a homicidal maniac. No doubt Dowler, on his knees in the sand, might have something to say about that.

Khalaf nodded, and soon they were all chewing the mildly narcotic leaves that even more than tea was the Somali national habit. The two men with the AK-47s pulled down the scarves covering their faces and one of them almost smiled. We’re bonding, old buddies, Scorpion thought, chewing the green-tasting leaves like a teenager with a wad of gum.

“The toll for the children is two hundred,” Khalaf said.

“Shillings?” Scorpion asked. Two hundred Somali shillings was about twelve cents American. Not a real number, but a way to start the bargaining.

Khalaf laughed and the soldiers smiled, showing mouths with rotten yellow teeth caked green with chewed qat .

“Two hundred dollars American,” Khalaf said. “Apiece.”

“My elder brother makes a joke.” Scorpion grimaced, doing the arithmetic in his head. Sixteen kids in the truck. All that were still alive out of the twenty-four at the school he had gone into Somalia to get; $3,200. “One hundred,” he said.

“Two,” Khalaf said, impatience in his voice. Scorpion wasn’t sure if it was Khalaf’s craziness, the qat making him more aggressive, or both. But he was right at the edge. “Plus a thousand for you and the truck.”

“I’ll need money to bribe the border guards,” Scorpion said.

“Or I kill you now and take everything in your klee’asa ,” Khalaf said, indicating the backpack. Scorpion watched the two men finger the triggers of the AK-47s.

“Maashi. Mafi mushkila.” Okay. No problem, Scorpion agreed, smiling.

Khalaf stood up.

It was just rotten luck he had run into the roadblock on the way from Baidoa to the border, Scorpion thought, getting up. Worse still for Dowler, captured a few days earlier. Dowler had been fool enough to try to bring food supplies to Mogadishu without first bribing the tribal leaders. Now Dowler was a complication. If he tried to save the British aid worker, ten-to-one they’d kill them both. And Scorpion knew if he died, the children would die. Some of them were barely clinging to life as it was.

Time to decide. He took a deep breath, calculating. It would take him 2.5 seconds to pull up his jeans leg and fire the Glock from his calf holster. Plus at least two seconds to deal with Khalaf and one of the soldiers. No good. Even if the remaining soldier’s reaction time was slow, it would take him at most two to three seconds to bring the AK-47 into line and shoot.

It wasn’t going to work.

Still, accuracy wasn’t the AK’s long suit. Despite its small size, the Glock 28 fired a.380 auto bullet with low recoil characteristics. No problem there. He glanced toward the Toyota pickup. It was a good sixty meters away. A decent NCAA running back could do it in under eight seconds. It would take him at least ten or eleven. But what about Dowler? In his condition, how fast could he run? Khalaf had close to a hundred Al-Shabaab soldiers armed to the teeth all around the area.

Don’t be stupid, he told himself. It was Dowler or the children. He couldn’t save both.

If not for Sandrine, he wouldn’t have gone into Somalia in the first place.

Two days earlier. The small boy lay on his side, barely breathing. They were in the hospital tent, crowded with patients, in the Ifo refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya. The Frenchwoman, Dr. Sandrine Delange, checked the boy’s breathing, heartbeat, and temperature, then adjusted the drip feeding into his tiny arm.

“It’s no good. He’ll die today,” she said in English to Scorpion.

“Are you sure?” he asked.

“Look at his upper arm. Less than 115 millimeters circumference. Smaller than a golf ball. She got him here too late,” indicating the child’s mother, squatting beside the bed, looking up at the white woman doctor. “The child has pneumonia and gastroenteritis brought on by severe malnutrition. It affects the immune system like AIDS. His little body has nothing to fight the infection with.”

She patted the mother’s shoulder. Scorpion couldn’t take his eyes off her. Slim, beautiful, straight chestnut-brown hair carelessly tied back, and almond-shaped eyes, like no one he had ever seen; multicolored, with gold around the pupils, surrounded by emerald green and an outer ring of pure blue. Lion’s eyes, he thought of them, because of the gold.