Slowest to react were The Drinkers. Most took twenty-four hours before they began to display symptoms. What began as severe abdominal pain soon gave way to vomiting, diarrhea, and intestinal bleeding, leading the physician to suspect some sort of hybridized hemorrhagic fever, but he never had a chance to confirm his suspicions in a lab, because within forty-eight hours, all of the subjects were dead, including the doctor.

But while the test subjects had died from the effects of the biological weapon, the physician had succumbed to a more immediate fate—a bullet to the back of his head.

FIFTY-FOUR

TWO HUNDRED MILES to the east, the town of Afgooye was situated in the Shebelle River basin. For centuries, the fertile land had attracted the farmers and herders that were the backbone of the nation’s economy. More recently, Afgooye had also become a refuge for those who’d lost their homes, families, or livelihoods because of famine or the civil war. While Somalia had traditionally been a large recipient of foreign assistance, donors tightened their purse strings over the years as they watched most of the aid be siphoned off by a combination of warlords, corrupt politicians, and al-Shabaab. Maybe 10 percent of it actually made it to the people in need.

Tens of thousands of these internally displaced persons were forced to travel, often on foot, along the lonely road west from Mogadishu, in search of a place where they could live in peace and escape the ravages of war.

Makeshift tents, made from plastic tarps and cotton blankets and anything else that might block the sun, had sprung up in fields, along dirt roads, and wherever else the refugees thought they might be able to grow some food. Men with sunken chests and distended bellies hobbled through the Afgooye camp. Women whose depleted bodies had no milk to give cradled their infant children in their arms, watching them suffer, feeling them die, and enduring pain only a mother can know.

Other children, clad in dusty clothes, ambled barefoot through the camp, begging for food from people who had none. A man with hollow cheeks and ribs that nearly burst through his skin lay in a wooden wheelbarrow, waiting to die.

In the eastern section of camp was a well.

It was the main source of drinking water for a quarter of the camp’s sixteen thousand inhabitants. Though it was pumped by hand and of questionable purity, after two years of drought the residents were grateful for anything that might sustain life for just one more day. Nearly a hundred men, women, and children stood in line, buckets in hand, awaiting their turn at the well.

But dehydration and starvation were not the only dangers faced by the camp’s inhabitants.