Nuruddin Farah - Crossbones

A YANKEES-CAP-AND-RAY-BAN-WEARING BOY OF INDETERMINATE AGEgets out of a car that has just stopped. He climbs out gingerly, like a spider creeping up a crevice. He retrieves a carryall from the trunk of the car without help from the two men sitting in the front. The men are old army hands, and although they haven’t said anything to him, he knows that they do not think highly of him.

The boy slings the carryall over his shoulder, nodding his thanks to the two men in the vehicle. They look away with obvious disdain; they do not wish to acknowledge his gratitude. He smiles with youthful bravado, betraying none of his trepidation. He does not want to fail; he cannot afford to fail. He is aware of the huge difference between martyring oneself and making a blunder of things and getting killed. Of course, he does not wish to die, not unless he has fulfilled his dream.

He is small in stature, huge in ambition. On his first day as a draftee into Shabaab, the instructor, upset with him, had pulled him up by the scruff of his neck, shouting in Somali, “Waxyahow yar!” —“You young thing!” The sobriquet stuck, and he answers to it now. The car reverses and he moves forward on the dirt road, his breathing heavy under the load he carries.

It is hot, and just before noon he meets a woman in a full-body tent going in the opposite direction. The woman takes an interest in him: a small-boned, four-and-a-half-foot-tall figure — a dwarf, she thinks at first — hoisting a carryall bigger and heavier than he is. She watches him as he puts the carryall down on the ground and sighs with relief. She waits for him to remove his sunglasses before she will consider peeling off her face veil or entertaining any question from him.

Deciding to be on an equal footing with him, she takes off her face veil and then crouches close enough to him, looking straight into his eyes in an effort to put him at ease. They exchange standard greetings, she addresses him in the may-peace-be-upon-you Somali greeting, Nabad , and he, in preference, uses the Arabic equivalent: Salaamu Calaykum .

“Can I help you?” she says. “You seem lost.”

He asks her to tell him the way to the qiblah .

She takes her time, wondering if he is one of the young Shabaab mules assigned to do their dirty work. The poor sod must be mistaking the qiblah —the Arabic term for the direction in which a praying Muslim faces — for north, she thinks. She wonders if he is a grown man with the voice of a boy, or a boy in the body of a man. They stand on the dirt road, in East Wardhiigley, a rundown district of Mogadiscio, sizing each other up. The woman, Cambara, is on her way to the Bakhaaraha Market; she needs a few last items for the apartment she is preparing for her guests, Jeebleh and his journalist son-in-law, Malik, arriving on the morrow. Now she lights upon a thought, studying the young thing, that maybe he is passing himself off as someone he is not, just as she puts on the body tent before she leaves the house, as part of her disguise, like a theater prop. Somali women, who never used to wear veils, resorted to them when the strife began, in 1991—a protection from sexual harassment by armed youths. But lately, ever since 2006, when the Union of Islamic Courts took control of Mogadiscio, expanding their rule of Sharia law, veiling has become de rigueur. Women are punished if they appear in trousers or the less restrictive dresses that were common before the civil war.

His hair is the color of ash and is cursed with kinks that no comb can smooth out. From the little she has heard so far, his voice has not broken. Yet his face crawls with the deep furrows she associates with the hardened features of a herdsman from the central region, where all of Somalia’s recent political instabilities have originated. Shabaab, the military wing of the Union of Islamic Courts, has been trying to terrorize the residents of the city into submission, and it appears to have succeeded to a degree. She assumes that he is one of the conscripts charged with “consecrating”—or rather, confiscating — a house in the neighborhood, from which he and his colleagues will launch attacks on their enemy targets. Cambara points south, sending him in the wrong direction, well away from the northeastern part of the city where she lives.

YoungThing lifts his carryall and walks in the direction the woman has shown him. He shifts the burden of his load from one shoulder to the other, breathing loudly through his nose. He plays at being tougher than he is; he tries to tread lightly, even if it is obvious that his attempt is a sham — he can’t take two steps without faltering. Hampered by the weight he has to bear, he can no longer remember the details of the instructions he was given. No doubt he feels lucky to have been chosen for this delicate assignment cloaked in secrecy, his first mission. He will do anything to impress the commanders of the cell of which he is now a bona fide member. This brings a smile to his face, and briefly injects fresh energy into his gait.

He loses his balance just as he recalls picking up the carryall earlier that day. He had been sent to see a heavily bearded man known by the nom de guerre Garweyne — BigBeard. BigBeard manages one of the largest computer shops in the Bakhaaraha Market — a sanctuary from within whose labyrinthine warrens the insurrectionists initiate frequent offensives. The market complex confuses anyone unfamiliar with its numerous dead ends, bounded by shacks and stalls that take half a day to construct and only a couple of hours to dismantle.

In the carryall, BigBeard has put roadside mines, grenades and other explosive devices, small arms meant to make holes in airplane fuselages in the event of an Ethiopian raid, YoungThing assumes. In truth, BigBeard shared little intelligence with him directly, and YoungThing knows that it is not his place to ask questions. He can’t give in to curiosity, since any departure from instructions will earn him severe punishment. YoungThing understands this much: He is the advance member of a commando unit preparing the ground so that Shabaab can respond immediately to an Ethiopian invasion of Mogadiscio. He is an explosives trainee, but his job today is to consecrate a safe house.

There are two men in charge of YoungThing’s unit — a select coterie of fighters sharing a central command. One of the leaders has the nom de guerre Dableh — FootSoldier. At the outbreak of the civil war, he was the commander of the largest weapons stockpile in the country, a colonel in the National Army appointed by Barre, the former dictator, himself. After the civil war began, the colonel changed sides and gave the warlord StrongmanSouth unfettered access to the arms cache, arming his ragtag clan militia and enabling them to run the head of state out of the city. Dableh has survived the civil war and changes in his masters’ fortune. When StrongmanSouth died, he lost no time in switching his allegiance to the Courts, aiding in their final triumph over the warlords, in 2006. Now, a few months on, he is contributing his military expertise to the plan to invade Baidoa, the seat of the weak Transitional Federal Government.

The second man in the command structure is known as Al-Xaqq—“the Truth”—one of the ninety-nine names of Allah. A modest man, Al-Xaqq gives a more temporal meaning to his name and prefers to be addressed as TruthTeller. He is an explosives genius and a member of the high order of the Courts, a learned man, with expertise in people management. He takes pride in his formidable ability to identify potential suicide bombers. Al-Xaqq sleeps and eats with them — at times exacting harsh punishment and ordeals to test their dedication — cementing loyalty before the young men are sent out on their missions. At times, he is the only one privy to the details of a sortie, plotting operations to suit the martyr he has handpicked. A few months ago, after YoungThing failed to make the grade as a suicide bomber, Truth-Teller suggested he train in the explosives trade and seconded him to FootSoldier’s unit.