“We could see the al-Shadhili Mosque tomorrow,” Mokhtar suggested. He’d been thinking about it all day. It was the spiritual home of the original Monk of Mokha, Shaykh Ali Ibn Omar Alqurashi al-Shadhili—the man who first brewed coffee, who built the coffee trade.
Andrew looked at Mokhtar like he’d lost his mind. “We’re not going to a mosque tomorrow,” he said. “We’re not on vacation. We’re getting of here.”
—
They woke at sunrise and contacted Mahmoud.
“There’s a problem,” he said, and Mokhtar knew the rest.
Nothing was simple in Yemen. If someone said they could get you on a boat, that was just the beginning of the conversation. It was never as easy as buying a ticket and getting on that boat. Mahmoud was saying there was no fuel and the ship wasn’t leaving that day.
“When is it leaving?” Mokhtar asked.
“Hard to say,” Mahmoud said.
Mokhtar asked Mahmoud about other possibilities. Mahmoud mentioned the outside chance of hiring what he called a viper boat. On it, the trip would take five to six hours to Djibouti, he said. Mokhtar pictured a speedboat, the sort favored by Caribbean drug dealers.
“I’ll look into it,” Mahmoud said.
Mokhtar knew what that meant. He had time.
—
His guide was a local judge and historian, Adel Fadh. Short and middle-aged, with a gentle demeanor, he led Mokhtar into the mosque, a humble structure undergoing significant repairs. They walked under scaffolding as morning light streamed through the high windows. Built to honor Shaykh Ali Ibn Omar Alqurashi al-Shadhili, the mosque retained a vibrating spirituality. Al-Shadhili, a Sufi monk, had gone to Harar, married an Ethiopian woman and brought the coffee plant—which hadn’t been cultivated yet; it was still wild—back to Yemen. Here, in Mokha, he invented the dark brew now known as coffee. Local lore had it that it was al-Shadhili who was responsible for Mokha’s ascendance to the center of the coffee trade. It was he who introduced coffee to traders who came to Mokha, and who extolled its medicinal qualities.
The mosque was over five hundred years old, and had been repaired many times, Adel Fadh explained. But there was so little money to keep it up now. With Mokha so poor, and the country at war, he feared for the future of the mosque and the town.
“We can restore this port to greatness,” Mokhtar said. If he could get out of Yemen alive, and come back someday, he would see to it, he said. He had no idea how he would do it but he felt obligated to give the judge some semblance of hope.
Adel, a guileless man, listened intently, and Mokhtar realized that all the workers in the mosque were listening, too. He spoke about the modern coffee trade, the rise of specialty coffee, the imminent supremacy of Yemeni coffee, how Mokha could thrive again.
Mokhtar’s phone rang. It was Mahmoud. He’d found a boat.
—
At the hotel, it turned out Mahmoud hadn’t found a boat. They drove around the town, asking anyone they met about the possibility of renting a fishing vessel, a Zodiac, anything.
Finally Mahmoud called. He’d found a boat and captain who could make the trip. Ali drove them to the shore. The pilot was a young man, about thirty, and the boat itself was tiny, about fourteen feet long, just a flat-hulled skiff—this was no Viper boat. It turned out Mahmoud had been trying to say fiber boat, not viper boat. Their escape vessel was a sorry thing, low and narrow, with a single sorry Yamaha outboard. It looked like it could be capsized by a tuna.
“We’ll get soaked in that thing,” Andrew noted.
They got back into the truck, looking for tarpaulins. They’d have to wrap the suitcases in the tarps and set them on the bottom of the boat to keep the coffee dry. It was agreed that Ahmed would stay behind and go to the Port Authority to get Mokhtar’s and Andrew’s passports stamped.
They split up. Ali drove them back into town, where Mokhtar and Andrew found a shop that sold tarps. They bought three and turned back to the beach. The truck, though, was low on gas, so they stopped to fill the tank. Sitting in the truck, they heard the rattle of gunfire coming from the waterfront, less than a mile away.
“Call Ahmed,” Mokhtar said.
Andrew called. Ahmed’s phone rang inside the truck. He’d left it behind. Mahmoud’s Ford Taurus appeared. He tore into the parking lot and jumped out. There’d been a gunfight at the Port Authority, he said. He and Ahmed had been getting the passports stamped, when the Houthis started shooting at the Port Authority security officers. Or the security officers started shooting at the Houthis. It was chaos. Mahmoud and Ahmed had gotten separated.
Mokhtar and Andrew were paralyzed. They needed to find Ahmed, but going to the waterfront seemed suicidal. And he wouldn’t be there anymore anyway. He would have fled.
“The hotel,” Mokhtar said.
They were silent in the truck as Ali sped through the wide streets of Mokha. Mokhtar had the distinct feeling that Ahmed was dead. He couldn’t have gotten lucky again. He’d made it through all that mess in Aden but this was one crisis too many.
Andrew saw Mokhtar’s face. “Don’t worry,” he said. “He’s fine.”
They pulled into the hotel and jumped out.
Ahmed was standing in the lobby, unscathed.
“Hey,” he said.
Mokhtar threw his arms around him.
Ahmed laughed. “I’m fine. It was nothing.”
Mokhtar pulled back and looked at him. Minutes before, he’d been sure that Ahmed was gone. Now Ahmed was alive, and he had their passports. When the shooting began, he’d hidden the passports in his shirt and had slipped out of the building and into the parking lot, where he ran through the crossfire until he saw a passing motorcycle. He flagged it down, hopped on and directed the driver to the hotel.
Now he presented the passports to Mokhtar and Andrew as if he’d just performed some rudimentary act of processing. He’d had them stamped before the fighting broke out.
“You better go now,” he said.
They got back into Ali’s truck and made their way to another part of the shore. The skiff they’d hired was far from the fighting. At the beach, they were met by a pair of local police officers whose allegiance—to Houthis or the government—was unclear. Mokhtar pressed a bribe into their hands, and they were free to leave Mokha.
—
When they looked closer at the hired skiff, Andrew and Mokhtar laughed. Andrew had grown up on a lake in Louisiana, and this watercraft was smaller than the boats he’d used to go fishing. Could it really make it across the Red Sea? The man they’d hired to steer it seemed confident enough. He said he’d done it many times.
There was no extra motor. There was one paddle. There were no life vests. They had no idea if there were Saudi ships out there. Or if Saudi planes would attack a craft leaving the port. Or if the American navy was out there and might assume they were terrorists and blow them out of the water. There was also the possibility—probably greater than any other—that the captain would sell them to Somali pirates.
“Time to leave,” Mokhtar said.
They rolled the suitcases in the tarps and set them on the floor of the boat. Between them, they had one hundred kilos of green beans. While the captain was prepping the engine, Mokhtar, Andrew, Ali and Ahmed made a plan for any eventualities.
Mokhtar and Andrew would call Ali and Ahmed when they got to the port of Djibouti, or within twenty-four hours. Before that time, Ali and Ahmed were to stay in Mokha. If Mokhtar and Andrew didn’t call within that time, that meant something had gone wrong, that they’d likely been sold to pirates. In that case, Ali and Ahmed were authorized to kidnap relatives of the captain. It was the Yemeni way.
On the beach, all of this was discussed with a mixture of seriousness and dark humor. Their suitcases lined the boat floor, and everything was ready. All this time, though, as they prepped the boat and discussed eventualities, two small local kids, a boy and a girl, had been hovering. This wasn’t unusual in itself—there were always local kids w
ho took an interest in any vessel leaving the shore—but now these two kids jumped into the boat.
“Who are these kids?” Mokhtar asked the captain.
They were the children of a friend of his, the captain said. He was delivering them to their father in Djibouti. Mokhtar and Andrew briefly debated whether the presence of two children made the trip more perilous or less so.
“Let’s go,” Andrew said.
They said goodbye to Ali and Ahmed. Ali, who had reassured Andrew and Mokhtar with his explanations of collateral and possible retribution for anything that might befall them, now seemed strangely unsure.
“So you’re really going?” he asked.
“We have to get to Seattle,” Andrew said.
“Call from the boat,” Ali said.
They helped the captain push the skiff into shallow water. The captain got in and took his position at the outboard motor.
“You know what? I’ve never been in a boat,” Mokhtar said.
“You’ve never been in a boat like this?” Andrew asked.
“Never been in any boat,” Mokhtar said.
Mokhtar had grown up in San Francisco, surrounded by water—oceans and bays and rivers, estuaries and lakes. He’d spent years in Yemen, a country with a twelve-hundred-mile coast. He’d gone to middle school on Treasure Island, an actual island. But he’d never been on a boat. He’d always wanted to, but the ferries and yachts and sailboats he’d seen throughout his youth seemed part of some unattainable other world.
His first experience with any watercraft was going to be in a tiny skiff leaving Yemen in the middle of a civil war.
He stepped in and they left the shore. They were carrying the first coffee to leave the port of Mokha in eighty years.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
DJIBOUTI WELCOMES YOU
THE WAVES SENT THEM to the floor. They recovered and laughed and braced themselves. The boat, so small and stiff, made every ripple calamitous. They were soaked in minutes. The children were soaked, too. They huddled together in the middle of the boat and said nothing for three hours.
As the shore disappeared behind them, Andrew took a bag of qat out of his backpack.
“Really?” Mokhtar said.
Andrew smiled. Qat would calm them. Qat would make the ride seem routine. They chewed, and the qat brought them to a state of contentment and philosophy, even while the water and wind demanded they yell over the noise. After the first hour, the sea calmed, and the qat kicked in. And because the sun was shining and their trust in the captain was growing with every passing mile, they relaxed into complacency. Mokhtar and Andrew, huddled in the middle of the boat, sitting on their samples, found themselves engaged in a ludicrous string of philosophical conversations, the kinds of things people talk about only while on qat, and maybe only while on the sea, on qat, between a war zone and an unknown coast.
They talked about God, and Mokhtar heard himself say, “If you believe there’s only one path to God, then you’re limiting God,” and thought he was saying something so profound it might forever change their lives. They talked about practical matters, too—about their coffee work, their farms and farmers and plans. Because they felt they were making it safely across the Red Sea, and they knew that hundreds of others wanted to leave Yemen but couldn’t, they conjured a plan where, if they made it to Djibouti safely, they would charter a boat that could hold 250 or so, and they’d ferry Yemenis and Americans and anyone else across the Red Sea, doing the work the U.S. State Department couldn’t or wouldn’t do. They’d call it Operation Arabian Mokha. They were utterly certain this would happen.
—
They made their way south by southwest until they hit the Bab el Mandeb, a narrow strait where the sea bottlenecked between northern Djibouti and southern Yemen. The gulf grew choppy and the wind picked up. They spent an hour wondering how wet they could get and how much water the boat could take, how likely it was their samples would take in at least some of the sea.
But soon the Djiboutian coast came into view, desolate and gray. They hugged the coast for the next few hours as night came on. They passed the occasional fisherman, saw the distant lights of aircraft overhead. Night claimed the sky, and they motored through black water. The first Djiboutian port they encountered was Obock, a tiny town on the easternmost point of the coast, and by no means the place where they intended to disembark. There was no U.S. embassy there, and few if any services. They had no desire to stop.
But the captain was stopping.
“Just a minute,” the captain said.
He had to drop the kids off. Obock was an entry point for Yemeni refugees, he said. There was a United Nations refugee camp nearby. He intended to deposit the kids there, and they’d be on their way.
But this sounded wrong. Mokhtar’s Tenderloin senses were now on high alert. They’d spent five hours growing increasingly complacent about the captain and now there was this. This, a sudden unannounced change of plans, was exactly the kind of thing they’d feared. But the captain’s behavior was so nonchalant that they found themselves allowing him to approach the docks. Mokhtar hoped for a five-minute turnaround: the boy and girl would climb off, the boat would shove off.
He didn’t expect to see anyone in uniform. But now there were two men on the dock, and the captain was throwing them a line.
“What are we doing?” Mokhtar asked the captain.
“Just dropping off the kids,” he said. “Don’t worry.”
Now the men in uniform beckoned Mokhtar and Andrew to disembark.
“Who are these guys?” Andrew muttered.
Mokhtar had no idea. Coast Guard? Local police? They were wearing blue camouflage and carrying German G3 rifles.
“Where are you coming from?” one of the officers asked.
“Yemen,” the captain said.
“And these two?” the officer asked, indicating Mokhtar and Andrew.
The captain told them they were Americans stopping briefly on their way to the capital, where they were expected by the embassy.
Now the officers were very interested.
“You’re different than the ones that came before,” one of them said.
“What do you mean?” Mokhtar asked.
“The Americans that came before you. They had people from the U.S. government pick them up. Why don’t you have anyone here receiving you?”
“Because we’re headed for Djibouti City,” Mokhtar said. “We had no plan to stop in Obock.”
“Come with us,” one of the guards said. “The governor will want to meet you.”
—
Grim possibilities ran through Mokhtar’s mind. Secret prisons. Illegal detentions. This could be a CIA black site. Since 9/11, Djibouti had been a significant U.S. counterterrorism partner. It was the launch point for the drone fleet that routinely bombed Yemen, and terrorism suspects had been detained, interrogated and tortured in Djibouti for years. He was thankful for the presence of Andrew, a white American. They wouldn’t disappear a man like Andrew.
The captain had turned off the engine, and the kids were on the dock, and the Djiboutian men in uniform were welcoming Mokhtar and Andrew with wide smiles.
Mokhtar looked to Andrew. Nothing good could come of this. But because refusing seemed more fraught than accepting the governor’s hospitality, Mokhtar and Andrew allowed themselves to be helped out of the boat, and soon their suitcases were out of the boat, too, and were being opened and inspected.
Suitcases full of small plastic bags. It looked like drugs. Mokhtar and Andrew had to explain their samples, their work in coffee, their schedule, their need to get back in the boat and get going, the conference in Seattle.
But getting there on time now seemed unlikely. They were being detained. Not in a hostile way. Not in a way that felt especially menacing—not yet at least. It was more like the disorganized and irrational detentions common at American airports, the kind of detention that came from the officers feeling they’d been confronted with something beyond thei
r immediate comprehension, something too unusual to simply allow.
—
Mokhtar and Andrew found themselves in the back of an SUV, being driven to what they had been told would be the governor’s home.
“You think that’s where we’re going?” Andrew whispered.
“I don’t know,” Mokhtar said while thinking it was brilliant, really, for the Djiboutians to tell them they were being taken to a governor’s house. The prospect of being honored this way was meant to make them complacent. And where was the captain of their boat now? He was gone. The children were gone. This heightened the likelihood that the captain had somehow arranged their sale or transfer. The kids were a decoy! Mokhtar’s mind was a jumble of dark-hearted possibilities.
The SUV pulled up in front of what looked to be a house. Not a prison. The officers opened the car doors, and Mokhtar and Andrew were led to the front door, where a smiling Djiboutian man wearing khakis and a button-down shirt walked out and greeted them.
“Hello, hello,” he said, then turned to an aide. “Water? Can we get you some water?” he asked, leading them inside.
They accepted warm bottled water. It was easily 110 degrees in Obock, and the humidity was stifling. The governor led them to his office, a spacious wood-paneled room with a view of the sea.
He asked about their trip and their plans, and Mokhtar and Andrew told him how they’d hoped to go straight to the capital, and from there catch the earliest flight to Addis.
“Oh, you won’t make that flight!” the governor said cheerfully.
It was already eight o’clock, and by boat the trip was a few hours, he said. And besides, they had much clarifying to do. The governor would have to talk to the U.S. embassy in the capital and let them know about all this, the unannounced arrival of two Americans in Yemeni dress.
“Spend the night here,” the governor said. “We have a very nice tourist hotel. You’ll stay.”