Sometimes the perspective is with Dara, sometimes with others, including Billy and Jama. A nasty piece of work, he goes on a killing spree before vying with Billy Wynn, lunatic billionaire and collector of supermodels, in a race to blow up the tanker. It's all fairly immaterial as Jama soon escapes. In a convoy of Toyotas, with Idris and Harry wearing matching white suits and their prisoners in black hoods, various deals are mooted. Once James Russell, he came to fundamentalism via the Nation of Islam and a spell in prison. Qasi al-Salah is a veteran bomber, scourge of the US embassies in east Africa in 1998, while Jama Raisuli is a former American gang member. Unwittingly, Idris and Ari have snared a serious pair of operators. Together with his sometime friend and intermediary, the "Brit Sheikh" Ari Ahmed Bakar, aka Harry Baker, he cooks up a plan to deliver the al-Qaida men to the US embassy in Djibouti by car, to collect prize money from the Rewards for Justice programme. They get themselves invited to a goat-on-a-spit feast at the pirate village of Eyl, while Idris wonders what to do. "She said, 'They sound angry, don't they?' 'Pissed off,' Xavier said, 'haulin ass for these African muggers.'" Now it's standing off the Somali coast.ĭara and Xavier, snooping around, are buzzed by Idris's motorised skiffs. Except that, uh-oh, he's hijacked a ship on which jihadists have planted explosives. "Some like it jihad," he quips, shrugging. Being half drunk to hijack a ship and earn a hundred thousand dollars, often dropped from a plane." He has no truck with fundamentalist Islam. There are some superb characters here, especially Idris, the happy-go-lucky pirate king.
When they hire a trawler with a pretty orange trim ("Lookin gay don't mean she ain't seaworthy," says Xavier), the two must live together at close quarters, watching each other's backs as they deal with a plot to blow up a tanker full of liquefied natural gas on its way to the US. Xavier, at 72 twice Dara's age, is an ex-merchant navy sailor, tough as they come. Those who know Africa well will actually feel fewer discomfiting moments than when reading ostensibly realist novels such as Norman Rush's Mating.įresh from the killing fields of Bosnia and post-Katrina New Orleans, Dara wants to make a documentary called Djibouti, switching between the magnificently seedy Horn of Africa port, where pirates come to spend their loot, and the coves and inlets at points south from which their powerboats sally forth. Dubbed "a Middle East western on water", Djibouti is well researched and not as improbable as it might seem. Everything is set fair for a hilarious and fearlessly un-PC account of the war on terror.
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