The big-headed cartoon character with the ax blurped in his headset. Dude must be ready to continue his quixotic quest. Akmal followed Michael back into the other room where Nasry checked the game screen before he suspended play in order to take the call from al-Muttaqi.
“You’ve seen the news?” Nasry asked him through his headset.
“Of course,” al-Muttaqi replied in English. “Everyone here is very pleased with the embassy. Are you prepared for the next phase?”
Luggage on the bed had been opened to display the contents of high-tech camera gear. Michael nodded at Akmal—Everything’s good—before he took up the thread of a previous conversation with al-Muttaqi.
“I was talking about the American soldier,” he said, and felt his jaw tighten. “The one Boko Haram picked up.”
“Along with the American oil executive. Yes, I’ve seen it.”
“I want him,” Michael insisted.
“You must avoid distraction,” the Emir admonished. “Dubai is our priority.”
“This will be bigger than that,” Nasry countered, not giving up.
“Dubai first. Then we talk,” al-Muttaqi compromised. And with that his end of the line went dead.
Michael removed his headset.
“What did he say?” Akmal asked.
Michael brought himself back to the present. “He says we’re on.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Abandoned Village, Nigeria
Rip Taggart in the back of the military-style deuce-and-a-half truck sweltering in the heat and dust boiling up from the rutted dirt road bound for—destination unknown. Although the Kevlar plates Keith insisted he use had undoubtedly saved his life, his chest still felt like he had been kicked simultaneously by John Cena and a Missouri mule. Pain stabbed through his body every time the truck hit a bump or he had to cough against dust swirling around him.
Blindfolded by the burlap bag, Taggart held on through the rough ride and depended upon his ears to tell him what might be going on around him. He heard some of the little girls whimpering while Na’omi tried to comfort them. McAlwain, Nick Rogers, and their driver Hakeem remained quiet except for an occasional grunt because of a particularly rough stretch of road.
Apparently the truck was part of a small Boko Haram convoy. Vehicle engines gunned and popped both behind and ahead, punctuated frequently by soldiers cheering and shouting in high spirits over the capture of the young girls. Nothing but horror and abuse awaited Na’omi and her students. Boko Haram had a reputation for rape, plunder, and slavery.
After a passage of time Rip judged to be about an hour, the vehicles slowed and halted with a cacophony of worn brakes. The truck’s tailgate dropped to allow debarkation. By that time, Rip had managed to rid himself of the hood and now got a first look at their destination.
They had stopped in what appeared to be an abandoned village surrounded by jungle growth. It consisted of a couple dozen tin-roofed, wooden, or mud-and-wattle huts long in disrepair. A ragtag collection of guerrilla-type soldiers shouted and thrust their weapons overhead in celebration of a “victory.” They prodded captives from the truck with a generous employment of rifle butts and herded them through a gauntlet of whistling, barking men who were already making selections and offering bids for the teacher and her five little girls. Na’omi could have had no illusions about what lay ahead for them.
Rip observed that the other male captives—McAlwain, Nick, and Hakeem—were still bagged and blinded as they were shoved and pummeled through the mob toward one of the huts. A guard noticed the bag over Taggart’s head was gone. He jabbed a rifle butt into Rip’s belly, doubling him over. Another guard pulled a fresh burlap covering over his face. Blindfolded again, suffering from his injuries, now gasping for breath from the latest assault, Rip realized he had little choice but to bide his time.
A guard named Chido barreled out of one of the huts, raging mad and throwing his considerable weight around. Agitation drove him on a beeline toward the male captives.
“Shin dan wo?” he demanded in Kanuri.
He began ripping off hoods. Terry McAlwain, the mild-appearing grandfatherly sort, blinked in the equatorial sun. Nick Rogers, his features distorted from fright, seemed to be rethinking his public relations career. Hakeem remained bagged and blinded since he was a black African and therefore did not meet the description of who Chido was looking for. Off came Taggart’s hood.
Taggart stared back at a large man whose smooth skin, eyes, and build reminded him of former boxing champ Sugar Ray Robinson.
“Rumma ya shi donyi suro TB ye,” Chido shouted triumphantly to no one in particular.
You see? The one on television!
Rip held his ground with a tight-lipped glare.
“Special soldier,” Chido accused. “More of you come. Come for you.”
Rip’s old combat survival instincts sharpened. His head swiveled as he absorbed his tactical environment. The isolated and abandoned village appeared to have been reoccupied by a horde of brutal terrorists. The best he could determine, his situation added up to one end: He was screwed.
Chido grabbed Taggart by the throat, drove him to his knees, and jammed the muzzle of his AK-47 savagely against Rip’s temple. Taggart stoically accepted the attack. Fuck him. A warrior might not always choose the time and place of his death, but he could choose how he faced it.
He waited for the bullet that would end it. In a strange way, he almost welcomed it. He felt sunshine warm against his face. A breeze ruffled through his hair. He heard a monkey chitter somewhere in the trees.
Suddenly, the demon who killed the man on the truck with a crossbow for attempting to rape Na’omi appeared. He and the one called Chido sounded as if they were quarreling over Rip’s fate.
“He’s dangerous. Highly trained. I should kill him now. It would be better for everyone,” Chido raged.
“You kill him and I don’t get paid. So it’s not better for everyone, is it? We wait for Aabid. He decides,” Quayum the demon argued back.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Abandoned Village, Nigeria
Taggart landed facedown on the hard-packed dirt floor of a hut that had been converted into a holding cell. The door slammed and was padlocked. He couldn’t say much for hospitality and customer service. He sat up and looked around.
Steel rebar driven into the floor in bars divided the 20x20 hut into two separate cages. Dust-speckled sunlight filtered through cracks in the walls and fell in narrow streamers over Na’omi and her girls, who were huddled together behind the bars on one side of the room. McAlwain, Nick, and Hakeem shared the other cage with Taggart. A door in the rebar between the two cells was chained and padlocked.
Rip heard Boko Haram shooters, a rowdy, undisciplined lot, tramping around outside. The only open window in the hut looking out was on the female side of the prison. The window in the back door was boarded up and the door chained and locked.
Nick, the former PR man, was about to lose it. He huddled in one corner trembling uncontrollably and seemingly trying to make himself invisible. That would have been a real feat, considering his size.
“What’s going to happen to us?” he sobbed. “Somebody answer me.”
McAlwain turned away and squeezed his eyes tightly closed. He didn’t want to see the future closing in on him. Not yet. Hakeem squatted and drew stick figures on the dirt floor with his finger. Na’omi was busy with the girls. That left Taggart. Nick pleaded with him for reassurance.
“You’re the security guy. You can do something, right?”
Na’omi overheard him and scoffed. “He is a drunk. He is no help to us.”
McAlwain, the business exec, was the more rational and practical. “Tell it to us straight, Taggart. What are we dealing with here?”
Rip struggled to his feet, favoring his chest. “You don’t want to know,” he said.
That was too much for Nick. “Jesus Christ!” he wailed.
Hakeem was young and skinny with a wide mouth
and eyeglasses, one lens of which had been cracked during his capture. His dark eyes brooded on Na’omi and her students.
“The woman and girls,” he said out of some deep sadness or regret, “they will wish they never lived at all.”
“Ka daina!” Na’omi flared.
She rose from her covey of girls and approached the bars that divided the makeshift lockup.
“Those men outside, they saw you on TV,” she said to Rip. “They said you had special skills—”
He found it painful to meet her eyes. “You were right the first time,” he told her. “I can’t help you.”
With that, Nick emitted a howl of defeat. Taggart was responsible for their security. Nick had looked upon him as their last and only hope.
McAlwain stood up to take charge, like regaining control of a board meeting that had veered off the track.
“Let’s think about this,” he said calmly, stabbing a finger at Taggart. “If he’s on TV, then so are we. They’re probably negotiating our release right now. This is a business deal, that’s all. Selling and buying resources. They have a price they’re asking, right? So my company will pay it. We just have to wait until they do.”
“Who’s going to pay for them?” Na’omi asked, flourishing a hand toward her girls who still clutched one another like a nest of frightened hatchlings.
“My company will pay for all of us,” McAlwain assured her.
“Bullshit!” Rip snorted. “They’re on their own and you know it.”
Na’omi’s voice went stone cold. Her eyes narrowed. “Is that true?” she demanded, daring McAlwain to lie to her.
“No! It’s not true.” But the expression on his face said something different. He turned away from the teacher and glared at Taggart.
“I really need you to be more positive, Taggart.”
“I don’t work for you anymore, Mister McAlwain. What you need isn’t my problem.”
Na’omi gripped the bars with both hands. “I’m not going to let anything else happen to my girls,” she vowed, her voice low and steady and her gaze raking each of the men until it settled on Rip. “And if any of you has a speck of humanity in your heart, neither will you.”
“Lady,” Rip replied, “heart’s got nothing to do with it.”
This woman, Taggart thought to himself, grudgingly, had more balls than most men he knew outside the SEAL Teams. He walked away and collapsed against the outer wall, as far away from her as he could get. A man only had so much in him. When that was gone, nothing remained except a shell.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Nigeria
While the teams had cooled their afterburners at the Command waiting for the call-up, advance parties flew ahead to scout out intel and logistics for the Nigerian op. They had established a forward operating base and staging area just inside the coastal swamps of Nigeria’s Gulf of Guinea by the time designated mission teams arrived. The FOB consisted of a few hastily constructed wooden and canvas buildings enclosed in barbed wire at a secure site deep in the forest. Armed Marine sentries patrolled the perimeter. The site would be erased, sanitized, and allowed to return to its natural state as soon as the mission was completed.
Alex Caulder felt the effects of jet lag and a fast three-hour truck journey in the middle of the night. The sun was not yet fully risen, but it was already as hot as two rats fucking in a wool sock. On his way to make a head call at a primitive slit trench enclosed within stretched-poncho walls, and with no roof to keep out the equatorial sun or vultures, he spotted a pair of suspicious-looking men who appeared from out of the forest and casually sauntered along the outer wire. He wasn’t fooled by the innocent “Who me?” hillbilly garb they wore—colorful dashikis and juju headgear, although they might indeed be innocent locals out scouting their new neighbors. Foreigners sneaking into somebody else’s kraal, arriving hush-hush in the middle of the night, were bound to arouse curiosity. Marine security could take no chances; they routed the pair and escorted them inside the compound where they could be held under guard until the mission ended.
The teams would be out of here for good within a few hours, with nobody the wiser until after the smoke settled. That was the way Six worked.
Caulder finished his business at the head and returned to where Team Leader Graves and a crew from Intelligence had completed a target mock-up on the ground—a duct-taped schematic of a Nigerian oil tanker called Damascus II. Graves’s team and a second Echo team were waiting. Fishbait rolled his eyes at Caulder’s tardiness. Caulder blasted him a one-finger salute. When you gotta go, you gotta go.
Bear got down to business. “Listen up.”
The teams had received briefings and target folders on the flight over. This would be the final go-through before mission launch.
Bear passed out headshot photos of tonight’s target, a professorial-looking African wearing wire-framed glasses. Each man in the two teams was issued a laminated copy attached to a lanyard so he could wear it around his neck for quick reference.
“The HVT is Ebo Buhari,” Graves began. “Been running as a courier between Boko Haram and ISIS the past few months. He knows where Rip is—”
Always the skeptic, Caulder corrected him. “He might know. That’s what Fung says.”
“He knows,” Bear repeated, annoyed. “ISR shows a periodic stationary sentry. Here—”
ISR was an unmanned Predator drone so-called because of its “spy in the sky” clandestine ability in Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance. High-tech saved lives and time in putting together a target folder.
Bear dropped a stone starboard on the schematic tanker to indicate the sentry. He pointed to a couple of boxes that represented the pier to which the ship was tied.
“An irregular roving patrol here,” he went on. “So we don’t use the gunnel. We board at the portside stern instead. Hook and climb two ladders. Own a footprint and secure the deck.”
He jabbed a finger at Caulder with thumb lifted like the hammer of a pistol. He clicked his tongue and let the hammer fall. “Point man, Caulder.”
Caulder sauntered onto the duct-taped outline and assumed his position at the stern open to the bay and opposite the pier. It was his turn to take over the drill.
“Fishbait, your Echo element sets up overwatch and secures the shipboard communications. I take our Delta element down one deck to this area here.”
He moved over to demonstrate. “Knock on some doors. Hope our guy is home.”
Graves motioned for Buddha. “Breacher …”
Ortiz stepped aside in favor of Chase, who would be taking his slot on the team when Buddha moved on and out. Chase took over the demolitions portion of the briefback. He looked confident, like the Ivy Leaguer he had been at Harvard where he served as an assistant professor.
“Based on a sister ship study,” he began, “we focus on cabin doors, take a standard load-out for VBSS—Visit, Board, Search, Seizure. If we have to get through something—a wall, a door—we’ll get through it.”
Graves interrupted. “Why is the New Guy talking?” he demanded of Buddha.
“He’s lead breacher for this operation. I’m assist.”
Bear did a slow burn. “He can learn on another op. You take this, Buddha. Once we have the HVT and the target is secure, we commence search and seizure. Bag everything for Intel. New Guy, that’s your job. Delta and Echo elements link up by the hook point. Then we call in the extract birds.”
“That’s if everything goes as briefed,” Caulder put in. “Which, as we know, it always does.”
Fishbait and Buckley rolled their eyes. Always the sarcastic wiseass. Graves ignored the comment.
“Secondary extract is on the docks,” he said. “If we get lost going in or out …?”
He shrugged. That wasn’t going to happen.
The stage returned to Caulder, who displayed a quarterback-like playbook strapped to his wrist. It contained a complete overlay of the ship’s decks and cabins.
“We use the bulkhe
ad frame numbers, match them to our schematic,” he explained.
“Medical?” Graves prompted.
Buckley took that one. “QRF—Quick Reaction Force—is twenty minutes off objective, so don’t get your ass shot. If you’re a dumbass and do, use your blow-out kit and plug it up and suck it up.”
Bear’s gaze swept his SEALs one by one. The briefback turned sober in the realization that it was going down, and that Rip’s life might well depend on what happened tonight.
“Now that they know who Rip is,” Bear concluded, “there’s no telling what they might do. So we got to get to him before they do.”
He held up the photo of Buhari.
“And this is the guy that gets us there. We get in, get out, ask for forgiveness later. We cannot, we will not, dick it up. Confirm?”
They group-nodded. Bear locked eyes with Buddha. Ortiz nodded again and looked away; he felt like a traitor for letting this be his last mission.
Caulder lightened up the mood with his Dennis the Menace role. “It’s showtime!” he hooted, like he was about to ride the waves at Waikiki.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Lagos, Nigeria
The derelict fishing trawler attracted no attention as it slipped in through the oily night past the brier islands and long sand spits that protected Lagos Harbor from the Atlantic Ocean. Lagos, with a population of about twenty million, was one of the most populated urban areas in the world, not exactly a city but instead an agglomeration of cities, a conurbation. It was also one of the largest and busiest seaports on the African continent, with fishing craft entering and departing the harbor at all hours, day and night.
And filthy. Discarded bottles, cellophane wrappers, cans, dead fish, and other debris in a slick of oil lapped at the prow of the fishing boat as it made its way toward docks stacked with tankers, freighters, liners, other fishing boats, and private craft of all types and sizes and of various national registries.
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