The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue

“Calm down,” I advised. “You could be a rich widow.”

“I don’t want to be a rich widow,” she replied.

I thought that was rather touching. There are quite a few women on planet Earth who would do the trade. But that did not solve my problem. I was in the last stages of the research for the last novel I intend to write. It already had a title, The Kill List, after a document that really exists and in which are written the names, continuously updated, of all the terrorists the United States intends to “terminate” without benefit of the habitual formalities.

The usual travels had taken me around the “official” tour of agencies, ministries, technical establishments, weapons stores, and a score of experts in their various fields. That was all in note form. But there is one thing that is too often missing.

As a reader, I am disagreeably picky. When reading about a place in someone else’s work, I cannot avoid a nagging question: Has he actually been there? There is a reason.

Reading about a place is one thing, going there is another. A personal visit, it is my long-held view, reveals a whole range of discoveries that is not available from reading research, and certainly miles more than is on the Internet. The next best thing, if a personal visit is not feasible, is spending hours with someone who knows the place intimately.

When I needed to describe Iraq under Saddam Hussein for The Fist of God, I was advised that if I slipped in, the dictator’s secret police would take about an hour to work out who I was, what I was doing, and that it was not going to be complimentary to the tyrant. The occasional risk is tolerable, but suicide is just stupid. So for Iraq I relied on a score of people who had lived, worked, and traveled there for years.

But this was going to be different. I had tried academic sources, including the Internet and passages from other fiction writers, and it was clear none of them had been near the ravaged city that had to occupy a whole chapter in The Kill List. Not many people had been to Mogadishu, the notional capital of the permanently-at-war Somalia.

The country appeared to be pirates in the north, Al-Shabaab terrorists in the south, and a capital under siege in the middle. And my wife had a point. Seventy-four is getting on a bit for bullet dodging. One slows up. So we agreed on a compromise. She would not blast it all over the Internet in her e-mails about lunch and I would go in with a bodyguard for the first time ever.

Through a few contacts, I got in touch with a specialist agency run by Rob Andrew out of Nairobi. He agreed to lend me Dom, who had escorted whiteys in there before and brought them out again. Dom was British, ex–Special Forces, knew the terrain, and was steady as a rock if things got lively.

There was one airline servicing Mogadishu, or “Mog,” as everyone called it. Turkish Airlines ran a flight out of Istanbul, with a stopover at Djibouti (formerly French Somaliland, still run by the French with a huge American air base), a stopover at Mog, and a final leg to Nairobi. Then a turnaround and back. Passengers could get on and off at Mog. Dom agreed to be there to meet me on the tarmac. It was a night flight arriving at dawn, already blazing hot at seven thirty a.m., and there he was.

He saw me through the formalities of passport control and customs, with the usual gratuities to the unpaid officials and outside in the shade explained to me the local layout.

Mog has two quite different zones: the inner zone, and the city zone. The former is hemmed in by sandbag blast walls, razor wire, guarded gates, and an entire garrison of soldiers from AMISOM—the African Union Mission in Somalia. These are almost all Burundians and Ugandans. They are armed to the teeth, but have taken casualties that would cause government-toppling scandals in a European country, but are shrugged off in Africa.

Colloquially, the inner zone is known as the Bancroft Camp, or the Camp. It encloses the entire airport, all the (not many) embassies, the HQ of the African military mission, and the living quarters of everyone else who is not Somali. These include mercenaries, bodyguards, technical aides, and relief workers—in a word, the whites.

Separate at one end of the single runway is the highly secretive American embassy, also walled, with its huge CIA mission, suspected UAV drones, and a training school for young Somalis destined, hopefully, to become US agents when they qualify. The point is, no one can pretend to be a Somali who is not a born Somali, so no one can infiltrate “the bad guys” except a Somali.

Somewhere in the undergrowth, there is a British embassy pretending not to be. And right in the heart of the Camp is the cluster of lodgings, bars, and mess halls where the non-military, non-diplomatic whites hang out. The hutments are converted steel sea containers, the bar chairs are plastic rejects, the beer supplies are constant (the place would be in revolt without them), and the atmosphere is raucous. Dom and I spent a few hours there and then, in our rented jeep, headed out of the guarded gate and into town. What I needed, I had explained, was to spend time in the Mog City that my Mossad agent in the novel would be visiting on a covert mission.

Our Somali driver weaved his way through the donkeys, camels, and ubiquitous pickup trucks, known as “technicals,” and deep into the heart of Somali Mogadishu. We finally arrived at a side street and, driving up it, found a sealed gate. Dom exercised his linguistic magic, and it slowly opened to reveal a courtyard, into which we drove as the gate closed behind u

s. We had arrived at the Peace Hotel, charmingly named as it was in a war zone.

The AMISOM troops attempt to hold the outer perimeter of the capital city, while beyond their ring of garrison strongpoints the country belongs to Al-Shabaab, who attack fairly regularly. That is where the casualties occur. But many jihadist fanatics are also inside the cordon. That apart, there are the gangs. There are no police—the life span would be too short. As Dom explained to me after we checked in, “It’s not so much that they want to kill you, though the fanatics might. The danger is kidnap. Most of these people are living on a dollar a day, if that. With your face, you are two million dollars on the hoof. So a snatch is what I am here to prevent.”

Thus reassured, we dumped our luggage in the pretty spartan rooms and headed back out to explore the real Mog. I had just two days, then the Turkish airliner would come in from Nairobi at dawn of the third day to head north to Istanbul—hopefully with me on board.

And the two-day tour was really fascinating. We had the jeep with its Somali driver, and behind us a second jeep with four Ugandans. They were happy to be earning enough to go home at the end of their contract of service with enough to become wealthy in their villages, with wives and cattle as befitted their new status.

I had noticed that Dom was carrying something metallic under his left armpit and was confident he knew exactly how to use it. The Ugandans had rifles, though I was not quite so confident of their expertise.

Dom took us to the principal mosque, untouched by shot or shell despite twenty years of civil war that had reduced most of the once-handsome Italian-designed colonial city to rubble. We saw just one of the sixteen pitiful refugee camps, where the destitute and homeless lived in urine-wet squalor beneath tarpaulins and sacks; the old fishing port; and the Portuguese quarter.

At one point, we found the crossroads where the U.S. helicopter in the film Black Hawk Down was grounded and besieged by the fighters of the warlord Aideed. Eighteen Rangers died there, so it seemed the decent thing to stand and say the Lord’s Prayer for them. Until the growing crowd became rather disagreeable and Dom thought it wise to move on.

That first night we were sitting in the hotel window, relishing our camel stew, when something red and feathery drifted past the window. I remarked that it seemed odd that someone was celebrating with fireworks. Dom looked at me pityingly and said, “Tracer.”

Then I recalled that with tracer fire only about one bullet in six or seven is illuminated. The rest you cannot see. Fortunately, these rounds were going left to right and not straight at the glass.

Nevertheless, I fingered my lucky bullet, worn on a gold chain round my neck. It passed through my hair one day in Biafra and lodged in the doorpost behind me. After the firefight, I dug it out, brought it back to London, and had it mounted on a chain. Though not particularly superstitious, I adopted the habit of wearing it around my neck if going into any “rough” environment.

Before bed, I tried to shower off, but the tap had the strength and capacity of a urinating rabbit, so I settled for a bowl and a scrap of towel.

We checked out the next morning, spent part of the day completing our tour of Mog City, and withdrew to the ramparts of Bancroft Camp. There at least we could check into a steel container, enjoy a few beers, and be free of camel stew. Or it might have been goat, but it was rich and sustaining. We still settled for imported steak.

The next morning Dom saw me back through the airport formalities and onto the Turkish airliner. He later found his way back to his family in Nairobi on a small chartered flight.