Andrew Kaplan - Scorpion Deception

The farmer spoke to his wife. She shouted at him. As she was shouting, Scorpion took out his pistol and fired three shots straight up through the roof. The woman stopped shouting.

“Berid!” Go away! Scorpion shouted, motioning with his head for Ghanbari to help him get them out of the house. “Get out! Now!”

The farmer and his wife glared at them, but gathered up the children.

“Come back in twenty-four hours. Not sooner,” Scorpion said, shoving them out of the house. They piled into an old Nissan pickup truck, the entire family, muttering and throwing him the evil eye, two of the children clinging to their mother’s skirts. Ghanbari spoke to them for a moment and then they were bouncing away down the road in the truck, leaving behind a cloud of dust and diesel fumes.

Ghanbari came back into the house.

“Was that necessary?” he asked, coming over to Scorpion.

“You probably just saved their lives,” Scorpion said.

“What if they call the police?”

“They won’t.”

Ghanbari shook his head.

“How can you be so sure?”

“They’d have to give the money to the police and it would mysteriously disappear. Then, three months, six months, a year from now, PJAK would deal with the husband. No Kurd will help them. They’ll end up begging in the streets. They know that. They’ll argue, they’ll hate me, but they won’t go to the Persian police. Not Kurds.”

“I’ll make some chai . You know, I’m not sure I like you any-” Ghanbari started to say. Before he could finish, Scorpion smashed his pistol against the side of Ghanbari’s head. As Ghanbari staggered, Scorpion grabbed Ghanbari’s pistol out of his holster and kicked his legs out from under him. Ghanbari crashed to the floor. He started to crawl on his hands and knees, then stopped as Scorpion cocked and aimed his pistol at him.

“Let’s talk about the Gardener,” Scorpion said.

Dagmada Yaaqshid,

Mogadishu, Somalia

The car bomb exploded just after one in the afternoon outside a hotel on Jidka Sodonka Road favored by foreign aid workers and freelance journalists working on the cheap. Somali government troops first on the scene brought the wounded-there were scores of wounded and dead-to Medina Hospital. Government troops surrounded the warren of narrow twisting alleys of the nearby Dagmada Yaaqshid neighborhood, but as soon as they tried to move in, they were fired upon and forced to pull back. No way to avoid ambushes and heavy casualties in those cramped narrow streets. As the hospitals filled up, they began bringing some of the wounded to the makeshift hospital tent at the Badbaada refugee camp.

Sandrine was directing her cadre of helpers, a half-dozen Somali women refugees and one male, to make cots ready for the wounded when Ghedi pulled her outside. A boy she had never seen before, about Ghedi’s age, was standing there, hatless in the blazing sun.

“This is Labaan, isuroon ,” Ghedi said. “He has news.”

“Salaam aleikem,” Sandrine said to the boy, who didn’t respond, only looked at her. She turned to Ghedi. “We have wounded coming. I don’t have time.”

The boy said something to Ghedi in Somali.

“Labaan say al Qaeda is coming. He says they want my sister back. He says we must run away now,” Ghedi said.

“How soon?” she asked, squinting at the boy in the sun. Ghedi translated.

The boy showed her his arm and pants. There was blood on his sleeve and pants but no wound.

“Achi,” Labaan said.

“His brother,” Ghedi said. “They killed him. We must go now.”

“The one in the House of Flowers? With the orange hair? He’s dead?”

Ghedi nodded.

“What about the children, the little girls, in the house?”

Ghedi asked Labaan, who answered.

“He says al Qaeda will be here in ten minutes. He doesn’t know about the girls, but he wants to come with us. He says they will kill him. Where do we go, isuroon ?” Ghedi asked.

“The airport,” she said. “Get Van Zyl and your sister. Bring everything you can carry, especially your papers, and meet me back here in one minute. Run!”

She ran to her tent, grabbed her passport, wallet, and money, Medecins Pour le Monde paperwork, and the papers she’d arranged for Ghedi, though she had nothing for his sister, and ran back to the hospital tent, her heart pounding. People were coming in, carrying wounded men, women, and children on doors, blankets, and other makeshift stretchers. Some were missing limbs; nearly all were bleeding and in various stages of shock. The tent began to fill, everyone shouting, the wounded groaning and a woman in a purple direh screaming. Ghedi, carrying a sack in one hand and holding his sister, Amina, with the other hand, rushed in, followed by Van Zyl and Labaan.

“I bloody warned you, didn’t I?” Van Zyl said. He was going to say more but there was shouting outside, screams, and then at least twenty armed Somali men rushed in carrying a wounded Somali. Van Zyl started to step in front of Sandrine and one of the Somali men clubbed him to the ground with an M4 carbine. Another Somali, a tall bearded man with one eye milky-white, wearing a ma’awis and an imaamad shawl over his left shoulder, fired a burst from a submachine up into the air.

The tent fell silent, except for the groans of the wounded. The man with the white eye-cataract, she thought automatically-and the submachine gun looked at Sandrine. His face was hard, set. She tried to swallow and couldn’t.

“You are the one they call ‘doctor woman’?” he said in English.

“I’m Dr. Delange, yes,” her throat so dry the words barely came.

“My brother,” gesturing at the wounded man they’d brought in with them and put on a cot. “The car bomb. You fix him.”

She tried to take a deep breath and couldn’t. She couldn’t breathe or move. He stared at her with his good eye.

“What are you waiting for? You’re a doctor. He’s dying. Fix him!”

“Yes,” she said, and ran over to the cot. The man on the cot was in his twenties. There was blood on his chest and sleeve and he was gasping for air. Bleeding, possible pneumothorax, she thought, rubbing her hands with Purell, because there was precious little running water, and pulling on latex gloves. One of her assistants, Nadifa, handed her shears and turned away. It was not fitting for a Somali woman to see a grown man undressed. The man with the white eye, who appeared to be the leader, and several more of his men crowded around as Sandrine began to cut off the wounded man’s shirt.

“Have you come to kill us?” she asked.

“What are you talking about, doctor woman?” the leader said.

“Al Qaeda is coming to kill us.”

“I hooyadaa was the mothers of al Qaeda,” the leader growled. “Let them come. We’ll see who kills who. Why do they want to kill you?”

She motioned with her head at Ghedi and Amina.

“I took the girl from the House of Flowers so she would not be a whore. She is still innocent.”

“Give the girl back,” the man said, making the twisting gesture with his hand that in Somalia meant no or get rid of it. “No one dies.”

The man on the cot gasped, his breathing rapid, shallow, fighting for air. She could see the wound in the chest. About three centimeters. A metal fragment had probably punctured the lung, blood bubbling pink out of the wound. The big gash in his arm was rhythmically spurting blood. An artery. She straightened up.

“Another minute or two, your brother will die. But I won’t help him unless you help me first.”

“Fix him now, doctor woman,” the leader said, putting the muzzle of the submachine gun against her head. “Or I kill you and give the children and anyone else they want to al Qaeda.”