In Cold Blood by Mark Dawson Read Free Book Online Page B

most exclusive holiday brochure curled away with the shape of the bay. Beyond that was the town, a series of square white buildings in the familiar Somali fashion. Behind the buildings was desert, everything coloured with burnt reds and oranges.
    Joyce was sitting next to him. His team had thrown their weapons over the side when it was obvious that they were outgunned. That made sense.
    “Do we know where that is?” Joyce asked him.
    “We’ve been heading south west,” Joe said. “There are a few coastal towns like that all the way down to Mogadishu. Hobyo, Haradeere. Barawe. I don’t know enough about them to know which one it might be.”
    “You ever been here before?” Joyce said.
    “You kidding me? No.”
    “I have.”
    “What the hell for?”
    “Old job,” he said vaguely.
    “And?”
    “What’s it like? You don’t want to know. The worst place on earth. The very worst place.”
    The Somalis said very little. Farax had the best English. The others spoke it in a rudimentary fashion, just enough to make themselves understood.
    There was plenty of time for thinking and Joe had spent it trying to work out what was happening to them. Normal procedure would have been to stay onboard the ship until the ransom had been delivered, usually dropped from a plane to land on the deck. The ransom would have been paid. What was twenty or thirty million dollars compared to the value of the cargo, the ship, the crew? But Farax said that he was not interested in money and nothing he had done since had suggested that was untrue. The alternative was unpleasant, and Joe did everything he could to avoid thinking about it until he could not avoid it any longer. He knew about al Shabaab from the newspapers and the television. Somalia had been torn asunder by a brutal civil war that had raged without cessation since the late eighties. The fighting had made it a failed state, a place with no effective government, and into the vacuum had come the terrorists who thrived in lawlessness. Al Qaeda had based their camps here. They had been replaced by al Shabaab, ‘the Party of the Youth’, and they had seized whole towns and held them. Joe didn’t know much more than that, apart from the commentators he had read agreed on one thing: they were worse than al Qaeda.
     
    FARAX HAD been sitting at the stern of the boat for most of the journey. The skipper had reduced their speed as they approached the coast and now they were drawing to a standstill, a sea anchor dropped over the side. Joe watched the young man as he pushed himself upright, stretched his arms, gathered his AK and stepped carefully until he was in front of him. He lowered himself to his haunches and pointed to the town ahead of them.
    “That is Barawe,” he said. “Do you know it, Joe?”
    “I’ve heard of it.”
    “Al Shabaab controls it. It is our town. Look at it.”
    There was a crystal clear lagoon and, beyond it, there were rows of white houses, square and boxy.
    “You will stay here with us.”
    “For how long?”
    “For as long as it takes for our message to be heard.”
    “What message?”
    “Our message of jihad. Your government must listen, captain. You will make them listen.”
    Joe bit the inside of his mouth, unwilling to press for fear of the answers that Farax might provide. He looked at the man: he was young, in his mid-twenties, if Joe had to guess; his skin was clear; his eyes were large, the whites prominent against his very dark skin. He was absently stroking the tips of his fingers against the barrel of his battered old AK.
    “You answer question for me, Joe,” he said.
    “If I can.”
    “You have man with long rifle aboard,” he said, unable to find the word for sniper. “He shoot man and then shoot engine, yes?”
    Joe shook his head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
    “Big gun. Fifty caliber.”
    Joe felt Joyce stiffen next to him.
    He shrugged at the question.
    “You must tell me who did this.”
    “I’m sorry, Farax. We