Nightfall In Mogadishu
by
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Hot air poured into the 737. Susan Chen stepped out of the plane, blinking in the blinding sunshine. The ground below was dotted with pools of water, which she knew were only mirages since Mogadishu hadn’t seen a drop of rain for the last five months. For as far as she could see, the world was blanketed with dust and sand. From the airport tower to the grove of palm trees and the dour-faced soldiers at the bottom of the steps, everything was crayoned in earth tones. Soldiers were everywhere, heavily armed and surly looking. A group had cordoned off a path leading to a bungalow at the end of the tarmac. The passengers walked along the prescribed trail, and when a European woman broke off to wave at someone outside the fence, an irate soldier yelled at her to get back into the fold. The woman complied, for nobody was going to argue with a man brandishing an AK-47. The passengers plodded silently with their hand-carried luggage, the crunch of coarse sand the only sound. No wonder tourism never flourished here, Susan thought. Inside the building, the arrivals milled around like a herd of bewildered cattle in a pen. A variety of tongues asked the same questions, but there was no one to answer them. The rickety fan on the ceiling swirled in a drunken stagger. It was doing its best, but the heat of more than a hundred bodies was fast increasing the temperature. Minutes went by; most of the passengers stayed calm, shifting their weights from one leg to the other and sweating a great deal. They looked as if they’d gone through this before. Patience, Susan had been told, was the foremost quality for working in the Third World. Her life had never reeled in such fast-forward speed as in the past two weeks. Only Monday before last, she’d been a personnel officer at the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington. Her task that day had been to prepare an announcement on a staff member’s death. "It is with much regret that we inform you that Andrew Barnett, the Bank’s resident representative in Somalia, has passed away unexpectedly in his home in Mogadishu." Having been instructed by her supervisor not to divulge anything more, she’d moved on to a long and glowing eulogy of the forty-year-old Englishman. Hardly had the memo gone out when she got the phone call. Spring had come; it was time for the mole to crawl out of its hole. The briefing had taken place at a safe house on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, in the heart of hunting country where gunshots were part and parcel of bucolic life. After a round of target practice, her boss had appeared. Alex Papadopoulos, a stubby, dark-eyed Greek American, was her commanding officer at the CIA. "May I introduce you to Andrew Barnett," Alex said, displaying an eight-by-eleven portrait of the back of a naked torso. "See anything?" the chief asked, offering it up for closer scrutiny. "There’s a little incision here," Susan pointed to the dab just below the hairline. "Neat, isn’t it? Just a smidgen of blood. He’s always been known to be tidy." "Who?" "This is the signature of a killer called Hamid, an Afghan guerrilla trained by us. There aren’t many people in the world that can kill like that. Neat, isn’t it?" Alex repeated with admiration, baring the gap between his two front teeth. "He was just a kid when his village was wiped out by Soviet missiles. His entire family was killed. He was away tending sheep or goats or whatever when it happened. After that, the mujahideen adopted him. Then when we got involved, he was one of the commandos sent to us for special training. He was only fifteen at the time, but already a seasoned fighter. Fast, precise, and quiet as a cat, he had all the qualities of an assassin. He mastered the techniques in no time and became a member of a small team assigned to knock off officials of the puppet government. You know how he does this?" The chief pointed to the dab of blood in the picture. Susan shook her head. "Let me show you," he said and straightened to his full height, all five-foot-four of him. "He comes up from behind you and cuts off the wind in your trachea." He clinched his own with two fingers. "His other hand is holding a chisel, knife, or anything sharp. With surgical precision, he inserts the chisel between two vertebrae and cuts your spinal cord. You drop dead without a squeak." "Pretty good," Susan said tentatively. "You know what they practiced on? Goats. It’s actually a very humane way of slaughtering animals, which is how it’s done in some countries. Here, feel the bump on the base of your neck." His short, hairy arm twisted back in search of his own. "That’s the seventh vertebra, the last in the cervical column. Just below it is a big gap. If you insert a chisel right in that crack, it would penetrate as easily as cutting cheese."
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About the Book
We remember images of the dead body of an American marine dragged around the streets of Mogadishu. We remember the firefight with a Somali warlord that claimed the lives of eighteen Americans. But do we know what happened in Somalia, what caused the government to collapse, and why the U.S. government had to send in troops? Nightfall in Mogadishu tells the story of Somalia in a page-turning thriller. It portrays the pressures that have built up to the final explosion and cleverly weaves in pieces of history on the horn of Africa: the Somali nomadic lifestyle, colonial occupation and subsequent independence, and the rise of its dictator, Siad Barre, whose tactic of "divide and conquer" pushes already fractious clans into headlong collision. Nightfall in Mogadishu also tells about the World Bank’s influence on the country and how the culture of aid dependence, nurtured by western countries to keep Somalia on their side of the Cold War, has fed a corrupt system. Instead of helping the country, donor funds have been misused to intensify the conflicts. The story begins with the murder of the World Bank’s representative in Somalia. Susan Chen, an undercover CIA agent is sent to replace him. Her job is to ferret out the murderer and stop the terror he wreaks on the donor community. With the help of two Somalis she befriends, she unravels the conspiracy behind a series of murders of expatriate aid workers. But the ultimate goal of her assignment, saving the government from collapse, proves to be an impossible mission.
About the Author
Veronica Li has worked as the World Bank’s loan officer for Somalia in the 1980’s. The novel, Nightfall in Mogadishu, was inspired by her visits to Somalia before it fell into anarchy. During her thirteen-year career in the Bank, her assignments also took her to other parts of Africa as well as Asia. She is now retired and fictionalizing her travel adventures. Before joining the Bank, she was a journalist for the French news agency, Agence France-Presse, and later the Asian Wall Street Journal.