The Road to Hell by Michael Maren

There was no one.
    Some years earlier, someone had described the Mogadishu airport to Cassidy as being like carnivale in Rio, except there’s nothing to drink and there’s no parade, just mass chaos. He remembered that now as the crowds and confusion thickened around him and sweat began to run down his forehead and into his eyes.
    Inside the terminal the Cassidys struggled to produce passports. The baby stirred in his mother’s arms. Cassidy kept looking for help but there was none.
    â€œ
Subax wanaagsan
,” he said, remembering a bit of Somali. Good morning. The official was unimpressed. Another family of foreigners coming; and this one is alone.
    Vultures instinctively know how to work airports. Customs officials pounce like moonies or Hare Krishnas, delighted to find these people so close to the edge of despair and so ready to obey orders.
    Tone held the baby while Chris wrestled with the luggage. Then a voice called out: “Chris.” Cassidy looked up and saw a Somali he recognized from his days at USAID. The man waved and smiled, but Chris couldn’t remember his name. Ali or Abdi or something. It didn’t matter. The man was still working for USAID, fixing things at the airport. The Cassidys were rescued.
    C assidy was already disappointed in his new employer. He was no cowboy Peace Corps volunteer any more. He’d done that. He’d slept in sand crawling with scorpions. This time he had come with his family. His family. The concept was new to him, but he reveled in it. He was a man with his family. One kid now but Chris had plans for more kids, as many as he could have. His wife never expressed an opinion on this. But Cassidy was a man with traditional—some would say regressive—family values. He was the man. He would make the decisions and he would take care of the family as best he could. For now, Save the Children would have to help him. He had uprooted his family because the agency had said they needed someone like him to run an agricultural project for refugees from Ethiopia. They were being resettled on an irrigation project on the coast south of Mogadishu, in Qorioley. Cassidy had gone to Cal Poly and studied production agriculture. He’d gone to the Nobel Institute and the University of Oslo in Norway to study socialist development strategies. He was convinced that Somalia was a socialist state struggling to cope with Western capitalist developmentstrategies. He’d done every damn thing he could. He was state of the art. He was a professional man with a family, and he expected to be treated like one. And he was prepared to take the project on, grow food, turn the refugees into highly productive farmers. That’s what he was hired to do. They’d flown him all the way over here, but it was only luck that had gotten him through the trial of the airport. What other unexpected things awaited him?
    A fter Oslo, Cassidy had returned to Cal Poly to teach and to look at other career options. There was plenty of work in Somalia, and Cassidy could afford to be choosy. The U.S. government had offered him a position in Erigavo, northern Somalia, but there was rebel activity in that area, making it an unsuitable place to raise his young family. Then Save the Children called.
    â€œI was a sucker,” Cassidy says about his decision to work for Save the Children. “Save the Children. What more could a bleeding heart liberal religious person want? I thought that the agency stood for promoting the health development and welfare of children. I bought that one hook, line, and sinker. I didn’t realize it was a fucking government contracting business, you know, a bunch of cutthroat back-stabbing, selfish, greedy sons of bitches living off the fat of the establishment on the east coast of the U.S.”
    In May 1985, with his pregnant wife in California, he went to Westport, Connecticut, for three days of interviews. “They had an agriculture office and had