The Delta Solution (2 page)

“
HOO-YAH, INSTRUCTOR MACK!
” roared the class, with one echoing voice.

The words split the dawn air, and the sound reverberated through Mack Bedford’s soul, because they were words he thought for so long that he would never hear.

He stood before them like Alexander the Great inspecting his legions. And then he stepped forward and said quietly, “
Push ’em out
.”

I
T WAS NOT QUITE ON THE SCALE OF THE CHILLING RHYTHMIC WAR chants of the massed Zulus lined along the hills above Rorke’s Drift. But there was menace in the air along one of the world’s longest beaches, where crowds of Somali tribesmen clapped, cheered, and chanted in that uniquely African style of uniform mob excitement.

The sound of high anticipation. The disciplined clapping. The repetitive chorus, echoing out over the turquoise water. The sound of pounding feet and stamping dulled by the sand.

The grim occasion was lessened by the frequent shouts of laughter rising from the crowd. On reflection, it probably sounded more like Kinshasa in distant Zaire on that October night in 1974, when the anthem of the faithful rose to the skies,
ALI, BOMA YE!

That too was somehow joyful but edged with menace. The words meant “Ali, kill him!” which was a bit harsh toward big, affable George Foreman, who landed on his backside in round eight, with the howls of the swaying, chanting mob in his ears . . .
ALI, BOMA YE!

The 1,000-mile long Somali beach was filled with about three hundred people—men, women, and children—gathered beneath a burning East
African sun, all singing and jumping, forming a vast crescent around twelve tall, lean, tribesmen, each with an AK-47 strapped across his back, manhandling a couple of thirty-five-foot-long, scruffy white skiffs into the surf.

The barefoot boat crews all wore cheap shorts and shirts, but there was nothing cheap about their two huge Yamaha engines, 250cc and $15,000 apiece, bolted onto the stern of each of the old skiffs, befitting the equipment of oceangoing bank robbers.

The majority of the crowd had arrived in a convoy of vehicles now parked behind the remote and desolate beach. They were mostly new, 4 × 4 SUVs, but there were a few rough village carts drawn by oxen, which stared blankly at the arid sand dunes.

The wooden skiffs were heavy, the bows up on the beach, the 600-pound engines seaward, and the sweating, heaving crews were hauling ass trying to get them afloat. Every time they heaved in unison, the boat moved a couple of feet, and the crowd let out a deep, rhythmic note that sounded like
WHOMBA!

And their hopes were bound together, the crews working in time to the breathless chant, the spectators willing them to reach sufficiently deep water:
WHOMBA! CLAP-CLAP-CLAP! . . . WHOMBA! CLAP-CLAP-CLAP! HE-E-E-E-Y! WHOMBA!

As far as the eye could see, there was only flat, vacant, hot sand, stretching for miles and miles, north and then south. This was Somalia’s Empty Quarter-on-Sea, without Bedouins or camels.

The Indian Ocean, which washed against its long eastern frontier, was much the same, a vast unbroken seascape of gently breaking surf, lazily rising and crashing down on this African edge of the fourth largest body of water on earth.

On this day it was utterly without activity; unbroken solitude all the way to its great curved horizons. No oceangoing freighters, no Gulf tankers running the oil down the African coast, not even a local ferry. No pleasure boats. No fishermen.

There was but one tiny blot on the surface. About a mile offshore was a dark-red 1,500-ton tuna long-liner. If you could read the faded black letters, she was called
Mombassa
, but there was none of the Indian Ocean’s rich harvest of bluefin tuna on board, nor any deep-sea fishermen
.

The
Mombassa
, stolen a couple of years ago from a Thai fishing fleet,
was crewed strictly by Somali brigands. The gear, stowed both below and on deck, comprised rocket propelled grenades, Type 7 with handheld launchers, RGD-5 military hand grenades, spare AK-47 rifles, dynamite, grappling irons, ropes, and nets. Boarding nets, that is. Not fishing nets.

The four-man crew was awaiting the arrival of the local hit men, the pirates who had terrorized the high seas the past dozen years, growing bolder by the week, as international shipping corporations paid up in exasperation. Millions of dollars were often dropped from fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters in fluorescent orange containers right on the decks of the captured vessels. Tax free.

The tuna boat, stolen, like almost everything else on the Somali coast, ran on a single-shafted diesel turbine, with a good range of more than 2,500 miles at 20 knots.

Her master was Captain Hassan Abdi, a black-eyed former fisherman from Puntland, close to the tip of the Horn of Africa on the Gulf of Aden. Up there, the ocean waters were annually decimated by pollution from industrial dumping by Western corporations. And trying to catch billfish had proved increasingly difficult, not to mention a severe blow to Captain Hassan’s ancient family business, which had been harvesting the warm ocean for approximately 7,000 years.

And once more, the bloodthirsty monster of twenty-first-century capitalism had smashed asunder a historic way of life. The reason was simple: It cost $1,000 per ton to dump hazardous waste off the coast of Europe and only $2.50 per ton off the coast of Somalia.

Which made a perfect, well-reasoned, bottom-line business model for the mighty brains of Harvard, Wharton, Columbia, and the London School of Economics. It was obviously a complete catastrophe for the Hassans and hundreds of families like them.

In the end, the short, burly Somali seaman had given up and joined the pirates, abandoning the billfish for the dollar bills cascading into the pirate ships.

Captain Hassan agreed to come south and work out of the new pirate HQ of Haradheere, a small coastal town north of Mogadishu on this sunbaked coastline, a couple of clicks north of the equator.

Haradheere, a town of three or four thousand souls, is a pirate stronghold. One section on the seaward side stands as the equivalent of Beverly Hills when playactors first started earning fortunes in the 1920s. But
perhaps a better example might be the beautiful white-painted clapboard captains’ houses skirting the cobbled streets of Nantucket off the coast of Cape Cod. These were the custom-built homes of the wealthy whaling captains, men who went down to the sea and sailed great waters.

Little thought is given, of course, to the fact that Somalia is, even without the pirates, probably the most dangerous place in the world, destroyed by a seemingly endless civil war. It is a lawless country where the capital city, Mogadishu, has been effectively levelled. There is no government and no protection for the citizens, who live in fear and terror of tribal warlords, rampant diseases without medicines, and the ever-present threat of starvation in an agricultural desert. Thousands have fled to neighboring Kenya and Ethiopia.

There are only two truly safe enclaves in the entire place. The first is the wide, expansively built quasi-government and political region on the seaward side of Mogadishu, off-limits to the populace but protected by 4,000 soldiers, who form a peacekeeping force. This private army, backed by the UN-sponsored African Union, controls the seaport, the airport, and all main routes into town.

Somalia’s other safe haven is the southeastern corner of Haradheere, world headquarters of the Somali Marines, a highly disciplined pirate organization whose chain of command reaches upward to the dizzying ranks of Fleet Admiral, four-star admiral, vice admiral, and head of financial operations.

All of these ranks square off nicely with that of the late Ugandan dictator and former British Army sergeant Idi Amin, whose normal working rig was the full, heavily medalled dress uniform of a field marshal.

Amin would have enjoyed the luxurious part of Haradheere—big, new opulent houses, heavily guarded and occupied by the new economic elite—men mostly between the ages of twenty and thirty-five, professional pirates who have money, power, new cars, and big guns. They married the most beautiful girls on the entire coastline and dined on grilled fish, roast meat, and freshly made spaghetti. Usually they scorned the traditional native camel and goat meat, preferring instead imported beef and lamb, which was affordable only to them.

Alcohol was plentiful, too plentiful, but it fuelled a prosperous local industry despite the strict Islamic ban that applied to almost everyone in the country. Except them. Nothing applied to the pirates because they
made up their own rules, and they had the money to protect a way of life that grew increasingly lavish with every passing year.

They were able to share the wealth, making deals with the local warlords, which bought them protection from any other authority. They created businesses in the town, designed to cater to their needs. They patronized a local shipyard, which serviced and built their boats.

They handed over substantial sums of money to a local authority which they controlled. This in turn built a hospital in Haradheere and funded doctors and nurses. It also provided the best school in the country with textbooks and teachers shipped in from Nairobi and Addis Ababa.

Haradheere, with its dusty dirt roads, is without doubt East Africa’s boomtown, and at the heart of this prosperous black Wild West, there is a brand new stock exchange, selling shares and bonds in the pirate operations.

The locals refer to it as “a co-operative.” But in every sense, it is a stock exchange. The modern office is situated in the heart of the pirate lair, and all criminal activity perpetrated by the sea gangs is funded from this financial center.

Each and every pirate operation comes through here. Newly formed gangs arrive with their “business plans,” which normally involve a leaky fishing boat and a few lethal weapons that could in the fullness of time kill them all. But if the exchange directors like what they see, they advance cash to the fledgling pirates in the form of a bridging loan.

When the boat is brought up to scratch, and more effective modern weaponry is purchased, the exchange deems the young men in good enough shape to go out and risk their lives trying to capture a ship and its crew in order to demand a multimillion-dollar ransom from the owners. Then the Haradheere Stock Exchange begins to issue shares in the operation. Typical is an issue of 100,000 stocks, priced at $10 each. Anyone can buy shares, and not for just cash. The exchange takes anything that could be useful to the pirates, in the form of equipment and especially weapons. In turn they issue stock to the client who then sits back and waits for a return.

If the ransom comes in hot and heavy, say $5 million, it all goes into the central exchange, and the original loan, plus a low rate of interest, is taken off the top. Very often the value of the stock multiplies five times.

One local lady, a twenty-five-year-old divorcée, came in with a brand-new missile launcher plus two Stinger ground-to-air rockets given to her by her husband in lieu of alimony. Originally stolen from the Russians in
Ethiopia, the rockets were worth $5,000 minimum on the open market. The lady was given five hundred $10 shares, which ultimately traded out, after the operation, at $50 each.

The merry divorcée rolled over her profits into a new operation involving a Greek-owned VLCC (very large crude carrier) and cashed out just before Christmas for $78,000. She subsequently bought a new house and a smart four-wheel-drive automobile, and once more the local Haradheere economy boomed.

Her story is not unusual. The stock exchange stacks away money faster than any bank in Africa, almost all of it in hard cash, delivered by air to the decks of the captured ships.

Every pirate operation on the coastline is backed by the exchange. There are an estimated eighty “maritime corporations” attached to the operation, and twelve of them have pulled off at least one successful hijack. The Somali Marines Inc. is the biggest and the best of them, with probably four or five notches on their AK-47s.

Not all of the shares issued by the exchange make a profit, and from time to time, pirates get shot or killed. But the success rate is so high, and so many people are making good money, that hope springs as eternal as it can get in the sand dunes.

The exchange is open twenty-four hours a day and transactions are conducted through the night, stock certificates issued to the music of the loud SUV horns blaring in the potholed streets outside. The profusion of alcohol has brought an even more lawless edge to nightlife around Haradheere. This is where East Africa’s Wall Street meets the wild rhythms of the tribal hordes in the most dangerous country on earth.

Inevitably, from an operation that risky and that brilliant, there emerges a heavyweight brain who keeps everything moving. In Haradheere he was the thirty-eight-year-old Mohammed Salat, who started in the export business up in the north, shipping agricultural products to Europe.