thousand people, a base camp to start construction,” Klaussen said. “Generators, drilling equipment, all of it.” There were plans for a fish-processing factory, an airstrip, housing, and an onsite mosque for workers—Le Roux even supplied a detailed schematic for constructing a desalination plant and then piping the water inland to Galkayo.

But reality in Somalia tended to defy hypothetical plans con- cocted abroad. When Klaussen turned his attention to building out the coastal site, he discovered that what looked like a three-hour trip on a map was in fact a seven-hour axle-breaking drive on des- ert roads. The shoreline property they’d purchased for the fish- processing facility was a wreck, and the structures had to be taken down to the foundation. As soon as they broke ground, they dis- covered that the whole area sat on a bed of spongy, porous rock. To build a factory and worker housing on top of it—much less an airstrip that wouldn’t collapse under the weight of Le Roux’s Rus- sian cargo planes—would require feats of engineering difficult even in a developed country. The whole project would cost more, and take longer, than Le Roux had conceived.

Klaussen also discovered that Le Roux’s plans for a water pipe- line were grandiose at best, madness at worst. “It’s not just, okay, we’re going to build a pipeline. Who’s going to protect that pipe- line? It’s three hundred kilometers! You’ve got to have patrols be- cause al-Shabaab wants to fuck you and they are going to come and poison your water. Or steal it. You’ve got to take all that into consideration.” Le Roux might be a genius, Klaussen thought, but he wasn’t on the ground, and the previous employees he’d sent to be his eyes and ears had been buffoons.

Even with hundreds of local fighters now in their employ, the security situation remained precarious. Klaussen approved the purchase of a ZU-23 antiaircraft gun, with a range of a mile and a half and bullets with explosive tips, and mounted it on the back of a pickup truck. With al-Shabaab ramping up its attacks outside of Galkayo, the local paramilitary group aligned with Le Roux’s op- eration, Ahlu Sunna Waljama’a, was desperate for more arms to