Free Deployed by Mel Odom Page A

felt stronger, able to reach out and seize his own fate from the jaws of uncertainty.
    But he knew his wife would have been ashamed of him.
    She had known nothing of the things he’d done before she met him, and he’d always told her different stories about the scars she discovered on his body. Mogadishu was filled with violence. People were easily in the wrong place at the wrong time. She had believed him without question.
    A momentary twinge of guilt over her innocence assailed him as he went forward, but he quickly walled it off with the anger and pain that threatened to consume him over the deaths of his wife and son. Images of Ibrahim’s wide, unseeing eyes haunted Daud’s sleep. He had spent days and nights praying at his son’s bedside, and all of those prayers had gone unanswered.
    Now he had no prayers left in him. Only the violence that he was about to unleash.
    Voices sounded from up ahead. Men laughed and joked, and the golden glow of a campfire cut through the darkness. Those men had no idea they were being stalked.
    The day after the beating he had received in the alley, Daud had lain abed to recover. He’d come a long way on foot to reach Afrah, and that had been draining enough—he’d had to dodge the TFG and AMISOM units struggling to lock down the city so peacekeeping efforts could be made. When the al-Shabaab had pulled out of the city, a power vacuum had been created that the transitional government and the United Nations were struggling to fill. Hundreds of thousands of people had been displaced by the constant warring, and many of them remained scattered in the surrounding countryside. The al-Shabaab held some of them as hostages in order to extort more money and to ensure their own protection from retaliation.
    All of those displaced people needed food and water and medicine. Children died every day. The peacekeeping efforts were too little too late, and they did not appear to be growing in number.
    God had truly turned his back on Mogadishu.
    But Daud had not. When he had buried his beloved wife and child, he understood what he was meant to do. He took a better grip on the assault rifle and peered through the darkness toward the fire as he waved his group to ground.
    Afrah, only a few feet away, hunkered down behind a boulder sticking up from the ground that was just largeenough to shield him. Daud thought maybe time had robbed the older man of a step or two, but he moved silently in the shadows, like Qori ismaris , the hyena-man who switched between animal and human form.
    Daud could remember being fascinated as a child by the old stories that his father and the other men told him. They’d done it to scare him, of course, but he had loved the old tales; he had loved being scared of things that didn’t exist. There were too many real fears in his life, but borrowing nonexistent ones that could be banished at daybreak was another matter. Those make-believe terrors had contributed to his tattered childhood. Those stories had been one of the constants in his life with his father. The other had been learning weapons and small-unit tactics.
    Taking cover behind a banana tree, Daud concentrated on the clearing ahead. All of the trees in the area were short and stunted from the drought that had claimed Somalia, but they were big enough and thick enough to hide Daud and his men. The ground was almost as dry as dust, and when the wind picked up, the earth lifted with it and was blown away.
    Gone were the pasturelands that had fed the cattle so many Somali people depended on for their livelihood. Only farmlands along the Jubba, the Shebelle, and the other rivers still prospered. However, many rivers were under al-Shabaab control, and the water was auctioned off to those farmers who could pay. People downriver from where the dams were built had to struggle even harder to survive and keep their cattle alive.
    Men like Gold Tooth were behind those selfish enterprises.
    Daud knew his father might have