Though the attack left him forever scarred and with a limp, its timing was fortuitous. Badeed used his convalescent time to think about his business, and he quickly realized that the five to ten thousand dollars that he was making from stealing portable electronics and the crews’ personal possessions were never going to make him rich. He started running his pirate gang from shore, using the proceeds from each mission to fund three more.

Soon his crews were launching high-speed skiffs from eighty-foot motherships and using rocket-propelled grenades to attack armed and fast-moving ships. But Badeed’s teams were no longer robbing the ships’ crews; the pirates were bringing them back to shore, to his hometown of Kitadra, a Hawiye clan stronghold.

With white sand beaches, turquoise waters, and palm trees overhanging the ocean, the tropical beach community would have made a popular port of call for cruise ships, but the men Badeed brought to Kitadra were far from tourists. They were hostages. Ransom payments were demanded from shipowners, insurance companies, family members, and anyone else who had an interest in the survival of the captives. Some of the men were held for weeks and some were held for years. Many died waiting for money that never came.

But it made Badeed a millionaire many times over.

He became chief elder of the Hawiye clan.

And he raised an army.

With the unemployment rate in Somalia above 50 percent, thousands of Hawiye clansmen joined up for little more than a meal, a gun, and a mat on which to sleep. From former military officers to boys too young to shave, Badeed’s fighting force took shape. He struck at the hearts of his rivals, quickly defeating all of the other warlords.

Except one.

—

LIKE MOST SOMALIS, Yaxaas was tall and lean, and his shoes were covered with dust from the dirt streets, but unlike most Somalis, his shoes were made from crocodile skin, and he owned the streets.

His father had been a high official in Siad Barre’s regime but had resisted Barre’s growing embrace of Islamic socialism. He didn’t approve of the socialists’ flawed economic policies, their fundamentalist religious beliefs, or their overbearing Soviet masters.

He was executed soon after they took power.

On the day he learned of his father’s death, the boy’s mother revealed that his former nanny, a Bantu slave girl who’d been sold to his grandfather many years earlier, was his natural mother. The boy was cast out—no longer welcome in the family home.

He was nine years old.

The filthy alleys of Mogadishu were far from the socialist workers’ paradise envisioned by Barre, and the boy was soon reduced to fighting stray dogs for scraps of fetid garbage.