[Rogue Warrior 18] Curse of the Infidel by Richard Marcinko

walls with more holes than bricks. Then came the open pit fires and crowds of women standing and staring, as if they’d just received electroshock therapy and were waiting for the buzz to subside.
    We were headed inland, but our destination was a village named Eyl, some five hundred miles north on the coastline. Eyl has gained some notoriety of late as the supposed capital of the pirate force terrorizing the waters off northeastern Africa. It’s located near the bottom of Puntland, the spear-shaped northern region that includes much of the area used as a base by various pirates. Everyone—except the UN and Foggy Bottom 9 —pretty much considers Puntland a country separate from the rest of Somalia. It has its own lawless government, meaning that it’s basically ruled by its own set of tribal leaders, warlords, and ne’er-do-wells.
    The different categories are significant to actual Somalis. If you’re an outsider, the chaos is pretty much seamless.
    The region itself is your basic desert scrubland, with marginal ability to support agriculture. Drive up the highway from Mogadishu and you’ll see vast rolling hills of gray rocks and tan grit pockmarked with clumps of stunted greenery.
    We drove northwest out of the city, then angled up on a long, straight road that stayed some eighteen or twenty miles from the coast. Taban claimed this was for security, and there was some truth in that—the road along the sea is (slightly) more dangerous. But there was also less chance of running into a government (local, mostly) checkpoint. Given that Taban didn’t like to pay tolls, the route had probably been chosen because it was cheaper as well.
    Dust furled from the Land Rovers in a pair of vertical tornados as we drove. Once outside the city, Taban became talkative again. A few months before my visit, SEAL Team Six had made a rather dramatic rescue of two American hostages in Gadaado—a village in Puntland not all that far from where we were going. Since then, said Taban, his services as a negotiator had been in more demand. He was a rare thing for Somalia, an honest person.
    “Soon, this will all end,” he told me solemnly and with more than a little sadness. “The insurance companies are taking a harder line. The pirates and kidnappers will learn that they will be punished rather than cheered, they will begin to find other work. There will be no more big paydays for them—or for me.”
    “Then what will you do?”
    “I will have my restaurant,” he said brightly. “Tourists will come, and I will be a very rich man.”
    Mogadishu, tourist destination? I’m sure it would rank right up there with Orlando and New York. But I didn’t have it in my heart to step on his dream.
    *   *   *
    We got to Eyl about midafternoon, and drove through the dusty main road at a steady but slow clip—too fast and you were obviously scared, too slow and you were too good a target. Steel-roofed houses were scattered along the scrub almost like a child’s toys left out overnight. Just beyond them were much larger houses with high walls around them to keep the animals in and the riffraff out. The center of town looked like a downtrodden mishmash of one-story buildings dating from the mid-twentieth century. There were maybe two dozen lean-to storefronts, open to the street, and a handful of simple but new brick-block buildings that dwarfed everything around them. Most of these, Taban explained, were restaurants, built for the hostages who were kept here.
    “There must be quite a lot for them to have restaurants,” I said.
    “Two hundred here. But in all this city, there is still only one good place to eat.”
    Pairs of men in light brown khakis sporting AKs stood in front of several of the buildings, but otherwise the main drag looked like any other sleepy town in Africa. In many respects, Puntland was safer than Mogadishu— if you belonged here.
    If not, you were soon either joining the guests at the restaurants, or a permanent