Yaxaas’s orders has been explicit—the attack on the Darood garage had to be punished, and punished severely. Masaska had neglected to mention to his boss that the attack on the garage was likely retribution for the attack on the refugee camp in Afgooye, but it would not have mattered.

The woman in the tan hijab saw the man with the mutilated face enter the clinic and fled deeper into the building. She’d just made it through the small lobby when Masaska pulled the pin on a hand grenade and lobbed it inside. The explosion blew out the room’s windows, sending shards of glass hurtling outward through the steel bars that had once seemed to provide so much security.

The clinic was long and narrow, and Masaska and his men flooded through it. Most patients were barely able to move, and the attackers walked calmly through the building, firing blindly down hallways and finishing off the wounded with knives and machetes.

One of the invaders, who possessed a live fragmentation grenade and a poor understanding of chemistry, tossed it into a room filled with oxygen bottles. The ensuing explosion destroyed the concrete wall he was hiding behind—and the three rooms around it—killing him and another attacker and narrowly missing the woman in the tan hijab, who was staggering toward the clinic’s exit.

The Darood hit team reached the far end of the clinic and discovered that more Hawiye security guards had arrived. A second gun battle erupted on the street until Masaska grabbed the woman in the tan hijab around the throat and used her as a human shield until he and his remaining men were safely to their vehicles.

By the time the second pickup truck sped away, forty-eight Hawiye patients, workers, and innocent bystanders had been slaughtered.

Such was the endless cycle of violence among the warlords of Somalia.

SIXTY-THREE

SUNRISE WAS STILL a few hours away when twenty heavily armed men climbed into their vehicles.

Badeed hadn’t sat down, much less slept, since the attack on the clinic. He felt an unfamiliar and distinctly unpleasant emotion, somewhere between guilt at not having killed Masaska when he’d first wanted to and fury toward the animal who’d attacked a refugee camp and a clinic in the same week.

The warlord preferred an informal leadership style, but his vast business holdings, his immense wealth, and the constant and evolving friction with the other parties to the civil war necessitated a disciplined command structure, one with a cadre of senior staff running everything from operations and finance to communications and intelligence.

Each branch was efficient and professional, but it was Badeed’s intelligence arm that lifted his organization above its rivals. Led by a fellow Hawiye clan elder, who was also the number three official at the Somali National Intelligence and Security Agency, the warlord’s intel shop had government-quality resources throughout the country.