The Night of the Cobra

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The evening call to prayer sounded from the Arba-Rucun Mosque in Mogadishu, Somalia. The temperature was coming down at the end of an early December day, and the first bright stars penetrated the new blackness of the Indian Ocean sky off the eastern coast of Africa. There was no commercial electricity in the destroyed city, so there was no wash of lights to drown that nightly spangle. A few portable generators buzzed as cook fires were stoked, and shadows moved and gunfire barked and people cried. The despondent residents called it the music of the night.

A large man, more than six feet tall and weighing over two hundred pounds, moved like a bad dream through the opaque northern streets and alleyways of Mogadishu, following a path imprinted on his memory. He was a giant among his people and carried an AK-47 with a thirty-round banana clip strapped across his chest, a razor-sharp machete riding in a canvas scabbard on his back. An old Beretta 92 pistol bulged in the rear of his belt. His real name was Omar Jama, but his vicious and deadly work had earned him the nickname “the Cobra.” Although young, he was the chief bodyguard and assassin for the most feared warlord in town, General Mohammed Farrah Hassan Aidid.

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