Chapter 1051: A Corpse and the Somalis (Patreon)

The group passed beneath the railway bridge to the other side and frowned at the ground covered in chaotic footprints.

Jubal crouched to silently count and identify the tracks, while Hannah went straight to the key detail. “This is them. Look, here’s a small footprint—it must belong to Nicholas, the seven-year-old boy.”

“They came down from that slope and headed west,” Detective Paulino said, sketching a line in the air, pointing in the direction where the tracks vanished.

“Wait.” Old Muto’s face darkened as he raised a hand to stop the team. He turned and shouted something in a local dialect that even Jack couldn’t quite understand.

Three militiamen immediately took up their Type 81 rifles, expressions tense, and advanced in a low, spread formation—one in front, two behind.

“What’s going on?” Aubrey asked, puzzled.

Clay pointed toward a flock of large birds flapping and diving at the forest’s edge. “Other animals are fighting with vultures for food over there. Likely hyenas or cheetahs.”

Everyone quickly grasped what “food” meant in this context. Their expressions turned grim.

Sure enough, ten minutes later, beneath a tree well off the main trail, they found a mutilated corpse.

Muto’s militiamen had just fired a few shots to scare off a pair of cheetahs—one adult, one juvenile—that had been sharing the fresh kill and swatting at vultures in annoyance.

The body’s internal organs had been thoroughly devoured. The arms and thighs had been gnawed down to exposed white bone. The face was even worse—what had once been eyes were now empty, blood-caked sockets. The flesh around the nose and mouth had been completely consumed.

“Jacob Bruce.” Jack fought back the nausea as he pulled a passport from the victim’s pants pocket. Then he used a stick to lift the corpse’s right hand—crushed beneath the body—and snapped a photo of the fingerprint with his phone.

Because the arm had been pinned under the body, it had survived relatively intact. The left arm, however, had been torn off and lay some five or six meters away.

They had no signal here, but they could transmit the fingerprint data later to confirm the identity more formally.

“He was one of the group’s leaders, right?” Jubal flipped through their incomplete list of names.

Clay, nearly as composed as Jack, collected red fabric scraps around the body and pieced them together—half a red T-shirt, the other half still clinging to the mangled torso.

On the shirt’s front was a peace dove clutching an olive branch, encircled by the words “Brunswick Missionary Church” or something similar.

“Something’s off. My boys followed the trail west about two kilometers. There, the footprints got more orderly—lined up like a single file. So why is this body all the way over here?” Old Muto frowned.

He wasn’t trained in forensics, but he was sharp enough to know that finding a lone body so far from the trail was suspicious.

Jack had just finished a quick field exam. “Sorry, the damage is too extensive. I can’t determine cause of death without someone like Dr. Temperance Brennan and her team doing a bone analysis.

But based on bruising on the remaining skin and swelling under the scalp, I’d say he was beaten severely before death. There are defensive wounds on his right forearm.”

“Beaten to death? So can we assume the killer had a specific intent—maybe targeted him personally?” Jubal stroked his chin in thought.

“That’s a fair assumption. The idea that this was meant to intimidate the rest of the captives doesn’t hold. There are only at most four sets of footprints nearby, and this spot is at least a kilometer from the others.

It’s more likely someone deliberately took him here and executed him away from the rest of the group,” Aubrey said from a distance, occasionally glancing up at the vultures still circling above.

“What was the purpose then? Just to destroy the body? If we’d come a day later, wouldn’t we have found nothing but bones?” Hannah asked, though no one responded.

Everyone’s attention had shifted to a tense exchange between Detective Paulino and Old Muto.

“This is a blatant setup. Don’t tell me you can’t see that,” Muto said angrily.

Paulino responded like a man trying to soothe a stubborn elder, “But everyone knows this is their territory. I just think we should ask them—maybe ‘The Lion King’ or his people saw something.”

“‘The Lion King’?” Jack asked in Swahili.

Both men looked surprised to hear Jack speak their language. After exchanging a glance, they ended their spat.

Muto already had a strong impression of Jack, and after a slight pause, he chose to speak openly. “There’s a small Somali rebel unit nearby, resting. But they’re small—too small to pull off a kidnapping of 23 Americans.”

“Can you take us to see them? Maybe, like Detective Paulino said, they witnessed something yesterday morning?” Jubal added, glancing at Paulino and the militiamen combing the area. “If they did take the hostages, I’ll handle negotiations. Violence won’t solve anything.”

“No,” Old Muto shook his head. “Let the young one come with me. Simba and his men are… sensitive.”

Jack initially didn’t understand why going alone with Muto wouldn’t be considered threatening—until they reached the ridge and he saw a flag fluttering on the nearby hilltop: blue background, red star.

He didn’t know much about Somalia, except that both Somalia and Ethiopia had once been Soviet proxies who fought viciously over the Ogaden region.

And, of course, 1993. Mogadishu. Black Hawk Down. SEALs, Delta, and Rangers all bled and failed there.

On the hilltop stood the crumbling remains of a small military post. Only one bunker-like structure was intact. The rest offered little more than windbreaks.

“I thought Somalia’s national flag was blue with a white star,” Jack ventured.

Old Muto replied, seemingly offhandedly, “Because Siad Barre was just a stupid tyrant. He never truly ignited the spark.”

That one sentence spoke volumes—and made it clear to Jack why Old Muto had brought him, the American who happened to sound a bit like a leftist, to meet these people alone.

Somalia, perched at the Horn of Africa, guards the gateway to the Gulf of Aden. Once a regional powerhouse in East Africa, it had played both sides of the Cold War—at one point even fighting Ethiopia over oil-rich Ogaden.

Siad Barre, the man Muto mentioned, was the dictator who ruled Somalia for 22 years. Under him, the country claimed to be a socialist republic until he was overthrown in 1991.

As for modern Somalia—well, there wasn’t much to say. Though its people all call themselves Somali, their nation had devolved into a pirate haven, torn apart by years of tribal warlord infighting.