JAKE WAS SEATED alone in a booth at the back of the restaurant, watching a split-screen video feed on his laptop. Not much had changed onscreen since he’d arrived, but the same could not be said for Somalia—the deaths of the two warlords had upended the entire nation’s balance of power.

Infighting among the Darood and the Hawiye had weakened the two clans as competing factions struggled to assert control the only way they knew how—the man with the bandoliers and Badeed’s chief of intelligence were each assassinated by rivals within twenty-four hours—and their deaths had been only the start of the bloodshed.

Foreign and domestic security services leapt into the mix, leveraging the chaos to sow discord among the other warlords. Disinformation campaigns, false-flag operations, and more assassinations led to a period of intense fighting among the minor clan militias. The violence cost them all dearly in men and in weapons, and with Cawar dead, the largest arms trafficker in Africa was no longer able to restock their armories.

Predictably, Islamic terror groups attempted to fill the power vacuum, but AMISOM forces, U.S. special operations personnel, and CIA pursuit teams used the relative peace afforded by the interclan strife to increase operations and kill anyone foolish enough to assume a leadership position.

It had been an inflection point for the nation’s citizens as well. Most Somalis were firm believers in qadar, the Islamic tenet of predestination, and it was that faith—that they were following God’s will—that had allowed them to maintain hope during the humiliation of colonial rule, the bloodshed of civil war, and the hardship of famine. But belief in fate was more than just a salve for adversity. As news spread of the warlords’ deaths and the terrorists’ setbacks, the population—long fearful of retaliation—sensed an opportunity for lasting change. Many cooperated with the security services, and hundreds of extremists were subsequently hunted down and jailed or killed. The Somali people’s willingness to collaborate despite persistent threats of retaliation was yet another example of their almost superhuman resolve to recover from tragedy.

Perhaps, Jake reflected as he took a sip of wine, they’d inherited their resilience from the land. The thunderstorms that had blown through had been the start of a proper rainy season and, within days, grass and wildflower seeds that had lain dormant for years had sprouted and returned life to the barren countryside. Ranchers who’d managed to save a few head of livestock for breeding were once again grazing their animals and restoring the herds that were the bulk of the nation’s food supply and the backbone of its economy.

A sliver of normalcy had returned.