Lined along the gunwales of the barges, the Hangarihi had watched the laborious effort as if it were a relaxing diversion, smoking and drinking whiskey from tin flasks, the tips of their cigarettes glowing like orange fireflies in the night. They had offered no assistance after their cargo had been unlashed from its pallets, and the commander and his men had expected nothing else from them. In delivering his plunder without delay, their leader had stuck to his end of the bargain when he could have simply made off with the loot, using the raid on the yacht of Hassan al-Saduq as justification to go into hiding. That alone had earned him a large quantum of respect. With its easily defended coves and grottos, the Somali coast was a rabbit warren where he could have laid low indefinitely…not that it would have been his single best recourse. In the pirate boom-towns that were the underpinnings of the country’s new economy, Nicolas Barre would be treated as a king in his stronghold, and the people there would go to any lengths to shelter and protect them from legal authorities or any other threats.
The commander heard the growl of powerful engines coming to life, twisted the cap back onto his canteen with long, graceful fingers as he saw his chief lieutenant, Mabuir, striding toward him from the line of HETs. Although Mabuir had not shied from assisting in the off-load, it did not escape the commander’s notice that he looked crisp in his beret and field uniform. A great deal had changed about his fighters since the events at Camp Hadith-or the best of them, at any rate.
The reason was no mystery, and the commander credited himself for recognizing that the first step in preparing his force for what lay ahead would be to alter its composition. He had winnowed out the incorrigible brutes, the ones who were addicted to the adrenal highs of unbridled destruction and its spoils…who knew only the way of the gang and were incapable of restraint and strict obedience to his authority. Although the rest had lost none of their ferocity, it was as if their basest urges had been expunged, seared away in the cauldron of that blood-soaked raid. The commander himself had no qualms about what he had done in retrospect, and would have been surprised if any of his followers, to a man, recalled their actions that night with the faintest tinge of regret…not the killing, not the burning, not what they had done to the young American woman. But he managed to instill them with a discipline and purpose that went beyond the primal lust for combat, a sense of larger mission, which would be imperative for all that was to occur next. His goal, his driving motivation, was to reclaim for Africa what was African-its very lifeblood, a source of unsurpassed power that outsiders had drawn from its sand through conquest and subjugation and had used to further their own global dominance.
The Americans, the Russians, and recently the Chinese…their empires had risen as those on this continent had fallen into stagnation and decay. Risen to unthinkable heights on their broken souls and spines. But the reality they took for granted was about to be struck by the thunder and lightning of change, the geopolitical puzzle they had pieced together swept from the table at which they sat, its pieces scattered helter-skelter around them. With the commander leading a charge none of them could foresee, a new Pan-Africanism would be born.
Oil-it was the lifeblood of the earth, pulsing through the heart and veins of every contemporary superpower. Control its flow and you controlled them. Control them and you quite simply became supreme.
Some called him the Exile, and he did not object to that term in the least-in fact, its sublime irony amused him. When in times past had the visionary achieved recognition before the products of his imagination, his revolutionary dreams and ambitions, were actualized?
Simon Nusairi felt as if the entire arcing trajectory of his life-the fall from privilege to ignominy and disgrace for his refusal to accept complacency, his family’s rejection and ultimate denial of his rightful heritage, his embracing the role of pariah and outcast as a form of liberation, and finally his regenesis as a master gamesman and warrior-had been preparation for the great redemptive achievement that lay ahead of him.
He would soon shake the world in his fist. Grab it by the throat and shake it. And he would not release it from his choke hold until they acquiesced to his demands…
“Sir, we are ready to get under way on your orders,” Mabuir said, tearing him from his thoughts.
The commander nodded, glanced at the tarpaulin-covered equipment. “Give everything a last inspection… I want to be doubly certain the tanks and helicopters are well secured for the trip. The tarps as well. Everything. It’s best we take precautions now to avoid delays than have to proceed in fits and starts.”
Mabuir gave a brisk military salute. Nusairi gave no outward display of satisfaction, but for him it was yet another affirmative sign that the ragtag band of fighters he’d pieced together had been tightened into a legitimate armed force. He returned his lieutenant’s gesture and then reached into his field jacket for his satellite phone.
“Hello?” On the first ring.
Nusairi gave a thin smile. The leader of the so-called Darfur People’s Army was another of those in for a surprise. There would soon be no more room for his breed of minor insurgents; they would fall into step or else. But that was still something for the future.
“Ishmael,” he said. “I take it you have been waiting for my call.”
“Yes,” Mirghani said. “How could it be otherwise?”
“And the American?”
“He has retired to my guest room. Whether he sleeps or not is another story. But I confess to envying how he manages to be calm under most circumstances…or act as if he is, at any rate.”
“Well, he has substantial cause to relax,” Nusairi said.
“The shipment came as arranged?”
“Precisely.” Nusairi was gazing at the assembly of transport vehicles. “It is already aboard our trucks and set to move west over the border.”
“This is the most encouraging word I could have gotten tonight, my friend,” Mirghani said, breathing an audible sigh of relief. “After the news from Cameroon several days ago…”
“Put it out of your mind,” Nusairi said. “It was of trifling consequence in the broader scheme of things.” He paused in thought. “I would recommend that you knock on the American’s door and pass on your recovered optimism. It’s my expectation that he will in turn want to convey it to his puppeteer in the United States.”
Mirghani’s chuckle was slightly uncomfortable. “I don’t believe he would appreciate your characterization of him…or the one to whom he answers.”
“It makes no difference,” Nusairi said. “For all his bluster, he is a hand puppet to be waggled on his master’s fingers. A pawn who does as he is told. Let him reassure the one who makes him twitch and jerk that we are on course.”
“I will update him immediately,” Mirghani said. “ Allah ma’ak, may God be with you on your journey.”
Nusairi pocketed the phone without a word of farewell. Mirghani was a fool. Another narrow-minded separatist warlord, one of dozens used to firing potshots at Omar Bashir and one another while crouched out of sight behind rocks or inside burrows. If the opportunity arose, he would resort to licking the soles of Western boots in exchange for a fiefdom through which he could parade at will, lording over his flatterers and subjects, strutting about like a peacock with his tail feathers outspread for their admiration.
Grunting to himself, Nusairi walked toward the convoy, gave it a quick once-over, then climbed into the passenger seat of the second truck and radioed the order to move.
A minute later its oversized wheels began to roll.
Playing with her sat phone to kill time aboard the cramped, grimy train from the railway junction at Atbara to Port Sudan, Abby Liu had found a Google search result that read, “The Road from Wadi Halfa to Khartoum.” When she’d clicked on the link, she’d come upon a color photograph of a young man standing thigh-deep in an infinite vista of powdery gray sand, a set of barely distinguishable tire treads running between him and the camera lens. Besides the blue screen of sky overhead, and those old, faded tracks, nothing disturbed the barrenness of the near or far horizons.