Born of War Read online

  It was the evening prayer. Stewart stopped as the song of words echoed off the rocks. She could hear the call from the village below. Stewart climbed onto a flat rock that let her look out over the valley and beyond.

  She smelled smoke from the other side of the MSF encampment. There were a dozen white rectangular tents all with the markings of Médecins Sans Frontières. Below each sign there was another: a red machine gun in a circle with a line through it. It was meant to signal they were an unarmed encampment. The tents were not in any particular line or row.

  I will remember where everything is. More important, she noted the latrine, which was outside the tent and behind one large rock.

  She followed the smoke to a small campfire where the guard and Dr. DuBose were sitting. They were speaking in the guard’s native tongue.

  “Hello!” She pulled up a campstool near the fire.

  “There is our rookie!”

  DuBose was comfortable in this setting.

  “Hello, Pierre.”

  “Please call me Peter. I did my residency at Presbyterian in New York.”

  “Yes, okay.”

  They had traveled for two days together in an odd combination of small airplanes and Land Rovers but hadn’t had the chance to really talk.

  “Shaata wants you to meet someone. Do you feel up to it?”

  “Sure, I guess so.”

  “We will go meet the village leader.”

  She followed the guide and DuBose down a path to the outskirts of the village where one clay-and-mud structure stood apart from the rest. To the side of the entrance a curtain was drawn over the opening. The guide called out some words and a young villager pulled the curtain aside.

  An old man with a large curved nose, a scarred face, and little hair waved his hand to signal they were allowed to enter.

  “Al-salamu alaykum.”

  The greeting was returned.

  “Wa alaykum s-salam.”

  She saw a group of women in the back of the room, sitting in the darkness. On that nervous edge of not wanting to offend another culture, Stewart pulled her scarf tighter to her face with only her eyes and nose poking through.

  “Don’t worry.” Peter pointed to a spot near the fire where she was to sit down. “He knows you are a Westerner.”

  It was, however, slightly odd that her spot was just behind the inner circle where the men sat cross-legged.

  The village leader began to talk and as he did, Peter started to interpret what he was saying. She looked into the old man’s eyes and watched as he waved the smoke from the fire on occasion. Soon she forgot that Peter was the translator and listened as the old man’s words were quickly interpreted.

  “Have you been to our world before?”

  “No, this is my first time to Ferfer and to Africa.”

  The old man smiled.

  “Good, let me tell you about my people.” The old man lived in a mud-and-clay hut in the center of the village. He enjoyed the chance to tell a stranger the story of his people. His smile, lit by the flicker of the fire, showed a pride that continued the story for thousands of years.

  “We were not always so poor. We were once a people of the sea. Great traders.”

  Stewart twisted her legs so as to be more comfortable.

  “Have you heard of our trades with the Roman Empire?”

  “No.” She knew that Rome touched everything in this part of the world. Its power was absolute and its arm extended across the civilized world.

  “Rome would come to our ports. For a thousand years they would trade with us for the spices that came from India. We brought them over in our little boats.”

  She had known from the stories of the pirates that they would go well beyond the horizon in small boats to take on the giant ships. A boat in the Gulf of Aden was, however, far from the coast of India. India required a crossing of thousands of miles or the following of the coastline for months. The journey would have taken a year to complete.

  “India was the home to colorful cloths and spices.”

  Peter leaned back on his hands as he continued to interpret the man’s words. Occasionally, he would stop and use his hands to try and grasp what the old man was saying. And then he would resume the interpretation.

  “India held the spices but their men were poor sailors.”

  It sounded like cultural pride, but she continued to listen.

  “We would sail to India and buy their spices with gold from the Romans. To this date, the Roman coins have been found in India . . . but Rome was never there.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. But when cinnamon was brought back from India my people told the Romans that it came from the interior of our land. The Romans thought that the cinnamon came from places like this village. They would send out patrols, but they never found anything.” He laughed at the mental image of a Roman patrol centuries ago walking into the village of Ferfer going from house to house. He pointed to the four walls.

  “A Roman came into this house when your Christ walked this earth.”

  Stewart listened intently.

  “But there was no cinnamon. The Romans never solved the mystery. Not one soul here spoke the truth. Everyone kept his or her lips sealed. The cinnamon had come from across the sea.”

  “You mean Somalia sold the cinnamon as their own but none actually came from here?” Stewart asked the question.

  “Yes, that is right. No one knew for centuries.”

  “Wow.” She thought of the scale of the lie.

  “Never underestimate a people’s determination.” DuBose inserted his own comment. “Well, tomorrow you get to see some sick ones. Are you ready to hit the rack?”

  The story had caused her to forget how tired she was.

  “Yes, please. Thank him.”

  “Don’t leave our village,” said the old man. It was a warning. Not so much to scare her as to protect her.

  “No, I won’t.”

  “We are a land of lions and baboons.” He continued to talk.

  “He is right, you know,” DuBose added. “Besides the war, there are other dangers. The ants can cover you in your sleep in a moment. You will see some die just from the ants here.”

  “They told me of some of this.”

  “We are not just dirt and desert.” The old man spoke the words as he waved his hand. “We are also danger.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “He was a member of that church.” The senior FBI agent was sitting in the operation center that had been set up in Atlanta’s regional office.

  “Omar was?” The chief of operations was at the end of the table being briefed in a meeting that included a PowerPoint presentation on the subject. “He killed people he had been to church with?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How did he go from being a perfect student to being a killer?”

  “How do any of them do what they do?”

  The question of the American jihadist was broader than just this one target. There were many such men and more seemed to be showing up each day.

  “He had a tie to Islam from his father. An uncle was in prison in Syria for more than a decade. We know he traveled there on several occasions and spent time with the uncle.”

  “But one person converting an American to be a killer?” It was as if the chief thought that birth in America automatically meant unlimited loyalty to the United States.

  “He was always on the fringes. First, he started to attend a mosque in Mobile and then he returned to Syria. We understand that he tried to leave Syria to head to Yemen when he was in high school.”

  “So where is he now?”

  “Our guess is that he is in North Africa and probably heading to Somalia or Yemen.”

  “Sir, we just got this in.” Another, younger agent brought in several copies of a printout of a Web page. “This is Musa. He is with security for Al Shabaab. They are taking credit for the bombing in Mobile.”

  “So Omar has tagged in with Musa and Al Shab
aab?”

  “It seems so.”

  “How many does that make now from America?”

  “As of 2012, we’ve tracked at least forty,” Smith read from a report.

  “Why?”

  “They see this civil war in Somalia as the holy war. The jihadist believes he will be a martyr if he dies for the cause. It’s an express ticket to heaven.”

  “Where do they get their money from?”

  “Much comes from the Saudis, Iran, some sources in Libya and Egypt. Oh, and Al Shabaab is famous for killing thousands of elephants for the ivory. They don’t mind killing the rangers as well.”

  “Damn. Okay, we need to put him on the Most Wanted list. Very high up. And see if there are any other possibilities of recruits connected to him.”

  “Toronto is the place to watch. It is a community up there.” Agent Smith was summarizing what everyone else thought. “We need to coordinate with Mounties’ intelligence.”

  Omar was in Cairo but they were correct in their guess that he was on the move. He would not be there for long.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “Fartuun!”

  Omar greeted his pregnant wife at the airport in Cairo with a smile and brief hug. Although it had been only a few days since he last saw her, she already seemed more pregnant than he had remembered.

  The wife wanted a baby and a quiet world. But she was a true Muslim and followed her husband’s orders to come to Egypt.

  “Hello, Husband.”

  “I have a room for us with friends.”

  They took several buses to a neighborhood where others from Somalia lived. It was a small community that protected each other from the prying eyes of Egypt’s police. He was in a Muslim world, but still was far from being safe. Egypt’s military considered any outsider to be an instigator and a threat.

  One evening after prayers they took a walk in the market. A café had a television in the corner. It was tuned in to CNN International. In a glance, he recognized a familiar face. He stopped. The television showed a picture from his high school yearbook of both Eddie and himself. He started to laugh.

  “Daphne High School!” He could see himself walking the hallways in his Islamic clothes.

  “Daphne.” He said the word aloud as he looked around at the much different world he was in.

  The other students had worried about football and deer hunting, whereas Omar had worried about the fate of his religion.

  “Allah knows all.”

  Omar stood there and stared at the television even though he could not hear what was being said.

  “My mother,” he spoke to himself.

  “What is it?” his wife asked.

  “Oh, nothing. I must understand that Allah, blessed be the great one, requires much of us.”

  Omar thought back to his trips to Syria and the stories of his uncle. His uncle had spent time in the prisons because of his beliefs.

  “You know, when my uncle was in prison the guards used to beat one prisoner a day.”

  She looked up to her husband as he spoke. They continued to walk through the market heading back towards their apartment.

  “When one prisoner was too sick to survive a beating, my uncle would volunteer to be beaten.” Omar had this crystal perfect vision of what was required of him as a Muslim. The West, with its drugs and barely clad women, had no direction. Omar had become convinced that a sacrifice had to be made and that he was the one to make such a sacrifice.

  “They will remember me in Mobile.”

  “Yes.”

  She knew nothing of Mobile. He could have used the name of any town in America—Dallas or Chicago or Seattle. But to him, being known in Mobile meant much. He didn’t care if he was branded a killer so much as he wanted to be known as a true believer. It was what the mosque thought of their two martyrs that counted. It was what Allah thought that mattered.

  “With time, they will understand that being committed to something such as the path of Allah is far more important than anything they will ever accomplish in their lives.”

  Death was simply a side note.

  “I will get you situated with the other wives.”

  He knew that she had a grandmother still living in Mogadishu and an aunt who lived in Kismayo. It was important to have names when he went through customs. He had to have a purpose for his journey.

  “Do you want to go to your homeland?” he asked. She was born in Somalia, as was her father, her father’s father, and so on for generations.

  She had an immediate answer. “No!”

  He knew that her world had been a simple one. She never lived in an apartment or a house with her own bedroom. His world in Mobile would have shocked her. He was middle class with a father who had a good job as a manager for the electric company and a mother who worked at a day care. A small bedroom just for him in their neighborhood of one-car-garage houses was a concept she couldn’t understand, just like traveling to Somalia was not a part of her world. Her community did not stretch beyond her Somali neighborhood in Toronto. She had spent her entire life in a six-story apartment slum that contained only Somalis. No one in the building except her and one other neighbor spoke English. But her building was a comfortable world.

  It was there in the market that he decided that she needed to return to Canada. The child would be born in that world, as was her wish. Her wishes disrespected him. Under the rule of his new world she would be whipped. In Egypt, it would not happen. If need be, Omar would take another wife in Somalia. But for now, he needed her name and connection to Somalia to complete his jihad.

  “I must leave tomorrow.”

  She had been expecting this.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “The director would like to see you.” The secretary’s message was taped to his chair when he got back from the lab.

  “Damn.” Paul Stewart guessed the call was coming; however, he did not like receiving it. The CDC had its world of politics and its world of scientists. It was no exception to organizations of its size.

  He was happy in his lab worrying about the progression of certain diseases, the reawakening of smallpox and other puzzles needing to be figured out. Politics was not his game and the loss of his wife had made him less tolerant of small talk and egos.

  He put on his lab coat and crossed over to the administration office and the director’s inner sanctum.

  “We are in trouble,” the director said.

  Paul nodded his head.

  “I am on the short list to be gone.”

  Stewart had never had issues with this particular director. Misplacing the vials was a stupid mistake, but with time the odds of making a mistake were against them. There were too many vials and too many experiments that were put on trays or carts or on the move. It was like America’s nuclear missile program. They both played with danger and sometime in the next several hundreds of years the odds would play out.

  “What can I do to help?”

  “They want a well-respected scientist to be the point man on a reworking of our system.”

  Dr. Stewart knew that it meant being on the surface. To find Paul Stewart before this at the CDC would have taken an inside job of espionage. He didn’t appear to the public and, more important, to Congress. There was no upside with this new position.

  But Stewart was the logical choice. He was a leader in his field and was considered the top mind in the study of meningitis in the world.

  He also was famed for being a thorn in the side of the administration for years regarding the lapses he found in the labs.

  “May I think about it?”

  “Of course. Increase in pay and you will probably be sitting in this chair a year or two from now.”

  Stewart wondered how long he could stall the process.

  When he returned to his office there was another note taped to his chair.

  “What now?” He looked at the calendar. He wasn’t sure if it was a Monday or just seemed like one.

  The note asked him to
call his assistant. The young PhD had been recruited from Columbia. It was a job that Stewart had hoped his daughter would have applied for. But she wanted no part of working for her father no matter how much it would have placed her on the cutting edge.

  “What’s up?”

  “You remember that strain of Neisseria meningitidis that was documented some time ago in Afghanistan?” Dr. Chang asked. “It was the one like the hypervirulent strain we found in China some time ago.”

  “Yes.” He knew the specifics far more than he could even hint at. The one in Afghanistan was more aggressive than the one in China. It shared traits with the Ebola virus. It destroyed red blood cells and sent the victim into a state of septic shock in a matter of hours. In the Anhui province of China it had wiped out people like a tidal wave.

  The one from Afghanistan was quicker and deadlier. A mountain cave had been found with virtually no survivors from a specific strain of the bacteria. He knew the strain earmarks. It matched the vial frozen in the refrigerator on the fifth floor of the very building they were in.

  And Stewart also remembered the survivor. The lab had a sample that predated the Afghanistan breakout. It was the creator of the strain of Neisseria meningitidis that killed in Afghanistan. And now its sister had appeared.

  “We had a slide come in from Yemen that looks similar.”

  “Yemen?”

  “Yes, sir, I will send it to you as an attachment.”

  “Thanks.”

  Stewart looked up his directory of the CDC on his computer. There was one person in particular that he was searching for. Enrico Hernandez was a part of the security service at the health organization. Stewart also wanted to see a blood sample from the survivor of that outbreak. Only Hernandez knew how to find William Parker.