Pirate - Duncan Falconer [24]
The beach was littered in trash of all kinds. Mostly modern trash. Plastic bottles and cartons, pieces of old timber, wrappings, chunks of moulded polystyrene of the type used for packing electronic goods. The high-tide mark was a dark oil stain that ran the length of the beach.
They walked up the coarse, steep sand. It went from soft to compacted and near enough flat in about forty paces, halfway to the beachfront houses. The Somali guard halted them.
Stepping on land immediately altered Stratton’s attitude towards escaping. He felt infused with a sense of opportunity. On the vessel he had been trapped, confined. It was no longer a case of if he would try to escape, but when. He considered the broader strokes at first, dividing his options between land, air or back to the sea. The latter was the more obvious choice. All he had to do was acquire a boat and sail it due north. Escaping across country would be more difficult. The only safe haven he could think of was Mogadishu. The United Nations had several bases in the capital but Stratton didn’t know the locations of any outside of it. And Mogadishu was a long way south, close to Kenya. That put it at many hundreds of miles. Through hostile tribal areas where the locals would likely try to kill him as a matter of course. As for the air option, he had no knowledge of Somali airfields. But it wouldn’t help that much if he did: he had no real idea where he was save on the north coast of Somalia, which was as long as the southern coast of Yemen at around six hundred miles.
A group of children ran from between a row of mud houses to see the new arrivals. They came at Stratton and Hopper from all angles but were driven back by the guards. In front of Stratton, Lotto looked proud of his catch as he arrived on the beach and marched up the soft sand at their head and on to the firm packed hinterland and towards the town. The prisoners were pushed to follow him as a part of the display. The people of the town clearly revered him.
Everything about the place had a dilapidated and uncared for look about it. The beachfront homes were set back about a hundred metres from the surf. About a mile beyond the town the land rose up to a line of dark hills, running across them a prominent cliff edge like a faultline, a yellow ridge that became orange and brown as it angled up the peaks. They looked barren and dry and scorched by the heat of the sun. Everywhere Stratton looked the ground was hard, like it had been hammered solid and covered in dust.
The town was no better than the beach. The longer he looked at the houses the worse they got. All but a few were made of mud. The rest were of brick or both, constructed poorly with levels and angles clearly guessed at rather than measured. Trash everywhere. Not the kind of trash one would expect to find in a poor, isolated African village not all that far from the stone age. Modern cardboard packing, plastic wrapping, moulded polystyrene. For centuries the town had relied on the sea to provide everything it needed to sustain life. And it still did but there was a new kind of life support. Fishermen had become pirates. The backward, isolated and impoverished town was overflowing with the finest detritus of the developed world. A new washing machine being used as an outside table since there was no electricity or piped water for it to function as it was designed. One house had a collection of flatscreen televisions stacked outside its front door, just discarded – superfluous to requirements as there was no signal. A group of men were unloading boxes from a mule-drawn cart and taking them into a house. As Stratton watched he could see they contained brand-new laptop computers.
Each habitat was a standalone dwelling with gaps between them wide enough to drive a truck through. The Somalis led Stratton and the others along a wide, deeply rutted track through the town. The main thoroughfare. Stalls lined the route in places, offering a morsel of local