He’d been living on the streets for three years when a Darood warlord known as Madowbe saw him wrestle a snarling mongrel to the ground and snatch a discarded chicken carcass from its mouth. Madowbe stopped his Cadillac sedan and his two bodyguards hauled the boy into the back seat. The warlord took one look at the boy’s chipped and crooked teeth, and from that day forward, he was known as Yaxaas.

It meant “crocodile.”

The warlord’s men spent a year training the boy to be an enforcer. He was sent to a jungle camp where he learned to fight and to kill. He learned well. Using his bare hands to end a man’s life elicited no more emotion from the thirteen-year-old than changing his shirt.

The warlord realized that the boy’s mind was even tougher and more capable than his body. Yaxaas was given a job collecting protection money from local businesses. His production was exceptional. Shopkeepers and restaurateurs who’d resisted for years quickly submitted—or they found their loved ones kidnapped, tortured, and eventually killed.

Yaxaas climbed swiftly up the clan hierarchy. He spent several years bribing public officials, extorting foreign aid workers, and leading the clan militia. It was a productive and profitable time for the young man. He’d found his calling in the warlord’s organization.

Until the warlord got in his way.

Madowbe had sensed the younger man’s ambition and worked to keep his protégé in check, but in a quiet moment alone, Yaxaas beat his mentor with his fists and didn’t stop until long past the moment of death, until the warlord’s face was unrecognizable.

And Yaxaas became the new Darood warlord.

He gained power and wealth rapidly, and though he’d always resented his nickname, he made it his own. He bought crocodile shoes, crocodile belts, and even a pair of crocodile-skin cowboy boots.

Six years later, he bought a real crocodile.

Fourteen feet long and eleven hundred pounds, with skin like cobblestones and teeth like icicles, the Nile was the largest species of freshwater croc in the world—an apex predator.

And Yaxaas kept it outside his office.

The warlord’s compound filled an entire block in the Yaaqshiid District in eastern Mogadishu and he’d acquired it several years earlier when a missile launched at Ethiopian peacekeepers had slammed into the residential area. The blast destroyed several small homes, killing six and wounding eleven more. Yaxaas evicted the survivors and had the land bulldozed.

From the outside, the cinder-block building looked like a warehouse that one might find in any urban area: surrounded by a high perimeter wall topped with barbed wire, a sturdy steel gate, and several vehicles. But the large courtyard in the center of the square building looked as if it belonged in a Mediterranean palazzo. It held a lush garden with a pond, a dozen different species of ferns, hundreds of Giant Protea flowers.