Six

by Charles W. Sasser

  Aabid seemed amused by the drama. A cold smile escaped from deep inside his dark and dangerous innards. He had apparently planned for even more drama, for as soon as he whistled sharply through his two fingers, soldiers poised to receive the signal dragged Terry McAlwain from the detention hut and dumped him unceremoniously next to Nick’s grave. The poor man floundered about in the dirt mumbling incoherently from fever and starvation.

  “No!” Na’omi cried. “Terry—!”

  Aabid addressed McAlwain, although the oil exec appeared incapable of either understanding or responding. “Your government refused to pay,” he growled. “All this money for oil, no money for you.”

  It occurred to Rip that if SyncoPetro declined to pay for McAlwain, in accordance with a no-ransom, no-tribute policy the United States established as far back as the war on the Barbary Pirates, why should the US be inclined to pay for him?

  Rip attempted to reason with Aabid. “He’s been through enough. Just let him go. You don’t need them, any of them. You just need me.”

  Aabid nodded and seemed to consider it. “Yes. He has suffered enough. And he is worthless.”

  His eyes shifted toward Felix, who stood nearby at semi-attention with his rifle at order arms.

  “Felix!”

  The boy sprang to like a well-trained dog and trotted up to his commander. Aabid gestured toward McAlwain. “Kill him.”

  Felix hesitated, his eyes widening.

  “Kill him now!”

  Felix licked his lips. He was obviously no accomplished killer, no matter how he bragged about it. His eyes connected with Rip’s.

  “Don’t do it, Felix,” Rip implored, trying to get through to the boy. “Look at his face. You’ll never forget it, I promise you. It’s not what you think it is.”

  The muscles in Felix’s little-boy face slackened and began to twitch and jerk. He seemed to be at war within himself—the dark side of Jihad arrayed against what remained of his childhood humanity. Aabid stood silently and watched him until the boy stepped forward with his rifle and looked down upon the gray-haired man squirming mindlessly about on the ground. He lifted his rifle to take aim.

  McAlwain regained some awareness at the end. He sat up and caught his balance. “It was my grandson’s birthday,” he blubbered. “He was fourteen years old—”

  The report of a single rifle shot reverberated through the forest and into the village. McAlwain tumbled into the grave on top of his former PR man. Na’omi sobbed into her hands. Screaming from the schoolgirls watching from the window of the detention hut pierced every corner of the BH compound. Aabid favored Taggart with one of his evil smiles, as though gloating in triumph over the making of another young warrior for Allah.

  And Felix flashed the SEAL a defiant look from the dark side from which there could be no return.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Virginia Beach

  Lena Graves wanted another baby, needed it to fill the void in her heart over the loss of Sarah. While Graves ached to please her, he felt conflicted and overwhelmed by the diagnosis that his insufficient manhood was at fault. He was also dealing with the matter of Rip Taggart’s kidnapping in Africa and the moral responsibility that he and his team assumed in effecting Rip’s rescue, no matter what it took, what they had to do, or where they had to go. He felt personally responsible in a way no woman could understand. Taggart would still have been with the team and never been kidnapped had it not been for events that began that night in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province.

  On Sunday morning, Joe and Lena Graves drove to church in awkward silence and occupied their usual pews. They sat silent and still, not touching, as Pastor Adams wearing his vestments and clutching his Bible took the pulpit. He was a small, devout, balding man in his fifties. It was he who had delivered the final services for Sarah.

  Graves only half-listened to the sermon. Instead, he sifted through his troubles until something in Pastor Adams’s message caught his attention: “So the Lord said, ‘I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds, and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them… .’”

  Graves stiffened, stricken by the words, his heart racing as though they were directed at him.

  “But let’s take a moment to remember who was spared,” Pastor Adams continued. “Noah. The righteous man, blameless among his people. God would allow his line to continue …”

  Graves could not have explained to anyone exactly what in the sermon impacted him so viscerally. He couldn’t even explain it to himself. All he knew was that Pastor Adams had triggered an avalanche of questions within his soul. His chin dropped to his chest and he covered his face with his big hands. Lena looked at him in curious alarm.

  After services during congregational cookies and coffee time in the sunshine on the front lawn, Graves made an opportunity to talk to the minister while Lena mingled with church friends. She watched him from the corner of her eye, wondering.

  “That was a powerful sermon, Pastor,” Graves opened.

  “I’m glad you thought so, Joe.”

  The pastor studied Graves during a moment’s pause. Joe seemed troubled. It was common knowledge in church that Joe Graves was a navy SEAL whose work was otherwise classified. For days now in this navy community, Richard Taggart’s kidnapping had occupied front pages and the nightly newscasts. People talked of little else. NAS Oceana had been a hive of activity for days. Even the secretary of Defense had flown in for a briefing with base commanders.

  Now, when Joe Graves seemed disinclined to pursue his uncharacteristic approach, Pastor Adams thought to get around to what troubled him by bringing up the topic that must concern every military man to some degree.

  “We’re praying for the SEAL and those poor girls,” he probed gently. “Only God knows the ordeal they must be going through. Did you know him?”

  “I’d heard of him,” Graves replied, avoiding a direct answer because of security issues. “We all had. And we’re praying for the girls too. So …”

  He fumbled for the right words to express dormant feelings and thoughts aroused by the sermon. “So … God punished everyone—for what certain people did?”

  “Yes. It’s an important message. Sins have consequences. Sometimes even deeper than we can imagine.”

  Pastor Adams’s kindly eyes regarded the big SEAL with compassion and understanding. It was difficult for men like Graves, warriors, to express their inner emotions, even to themselves, much less to someone else. Graves solved the conundrum by speaking in generalities.

  “Then it’s possible God would …” He faltered, tried again. “… that God would punish a child … for what her father—?”

  “For what her father …?” the minister prompted.

  Graves lifted his head to the bright morning sky, as though God might be watching. “If her father … committed a big enough sin …?”

  His soul-searching stalled when Lena walked up, concealing her concern for him with a smile. “Your sermon was excellent, Pastor. As usual.”

  “Thank you. Joe and I were just discussing it.”

  Graves pasted on a smile of his own. The moment had passed. “Well, we should go, Pastor. Thank you.”

  Pastor Adams released them with, “See you next Sunday.” Perhaps there would be another time.

  Joe and Lena walked away, their awkwardness with each other broken by the unexpected buzz of his cell phone. Numbers appeared on the view screen: 999999.

  “Command,” Graves acknowledged. “Could be about Rip.”

  She nodded without comment. This call always seemed to interrupt at inconvenient moments. Graves shifted his feet and looked away. “Lena …?”

  He embraced her suddenly, fiercely. “I love you.”

  “I love you too.”

  But she sounded distant, a response by rote, her eyes squeezed shut while a mixture of emotions—anger, love, hurt—surged through her breast.

  “
We need to talk, Joseph.”

  “Okay,” he conceded. “I know.”

  Lena waited for him to go on. Instead, he seemed to withdraw to another planet from which he became unreachable. After a moment, she sighed with deep sadness. Now was not the right time.

  “You’d better go, Joseph.”

  He looked at her, nodded, and walked away.

  Commander Atkins and Lieutenant Fung were prepared to brief DEVGRU SEALs when Graves, still in his go-to-church attire, arrived and took a seat in the front row with Caulder, Ortiz, Chase, Buckley, and Khan. They looked expectantly to their squadron commander. Something must have come down the pipe about Rip. Lieutenant Fung confirmed it.

  “Employees at a refinery in our search sector confirmed suspicious Boko Haram activity nearby,” she said, tapping a pointer on her boot while Commander Atkins stood by, “Through an Agency asset, we identified an abandoned village which we believe may be where the hostages are being held.”

  She snapped her clicker. An ISR drone image appeared on the big screen. Once again it revealed dense forest. She zoomed in on barely visible fragments of structure among the trees. “Here’s a live feed from the ISR platform,” she said.

  “The asset can positively identify?” Buddha Ortiz asked.

  “No. He would have risked tipping off BH if he got too close. But he observed activity consistent with a hostage compound—round-the-clock sentries along the perimeter, vehicles transporting in food and supplies.”

  Commander Atkins stepped forward. “Command agrees it’s enough to warrant forward staging in the area,” he announced. “We’ve secured a safe house ten klicks from the target. The Agency will arrange ground transportation to the ORP. It’s too dense for vertical insertion. And it could endanger the hostages if they heard you coming.”

  He swept Graves’s team in the front row with a flinty gaze. “Wheels up in an hour,” he said.

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Abandoned Village, Nigeria

  Aabid had been a fool to assume the US government would pay a ten million dollar ransom for the return of a hostage. Paying for the return of hostages encouraged more taking of hostages. Aabid had Terry McAlwain executed when he accepted this essential fact. Then why, Taggart pondered, was he being kept alive? Was it something personal with the warlord?

  Barefooted, stripped down to his khaki trousers, and on his knees, Taggart utilized a shovel to pound another crude iron nail spike into the connecting crossbeam of a crude ten-foot-tall wooden cross Aabid had him constructing in the village square near the detention hut. It was the same shovel he used earlier to bury Nick and McAlwain in their common grave. Armed guards, including Felix, kept watch from the shade of nearby huts.

  Steel on steel rang through the dilapidated shacks and shanties. Aabid possessed a depraved sense of humor and irony. He had had his men deliver the two pieces of timber to the square, then brought Taggart out at gunpoint and explained what he wanted done. It was only fitting, he sneered, that since Christ had suffered on the cross for the sins of the world that Taggart should suffer likewise—and that he should do so in full view of his African whore and the little whorelets who had betrayed Allah by converting to Christianity.

  Carrying a machete, Aabid swaggered from his HQ building to inspect Rip’s work and toss another nail into the dirt. He pushed it toward Rip with the point of his machete.

  “Another, Navy SEAL. It must hold you through the night.”

  Rip considered the nail. It was approximately six inches long, the length of a blade. Aabid tapped the earth with his machete. My knife is bigger than your knife.

  Rip hammered the new nail into the cross. Survive and wait until the right opportunity. Na’omi and the girls watched from the narrow window of the holding cell. Rip heard Esther sobbing her little heart out.

  “Mighty American SEAL, look at you,” Aabid taunted.

  He turned to face the prison hut and the faces in the window. “Now you know who has the power,” he mocked. “The infidels cannot protect you. America cannot protect you. You …” He pointed his machete at Rip kneeling and working on the cross. “This … God cannot protect you.”

  Still wearing his evil smile, he paraded to the holding cell. A guard unlocked the door and Aabid pushed it open with his machete and stepped inside. Na’omi jumped back from the window. Her students flocked to her, their frightened eyes fixed on Aabid. Aabid jabbed his big knife through the rebar at Esther.

  “Tell me,” he demanded. “Who can protect you?”

  Esther trembled at Na’omi’s feet. “Leave her alone!” Na’omi flared.

  Aabid sniggered and rattled his machete against the bars. “Say it!” he insisted of the little girl. “Who can protect you?”

  Esther was too terrified to speak.

  “Who?” Aabid thundered.

  “You,” Esther managed meekly.

  Aabid smiled again and left the hut. Outside, he ordered, “Put him on the cross.”

  Several soldiers wrestled Rip into submission and spread him onto the cross where it lay on the ground. They tied his bare wrists and ankles to it with lengths of coarse hemp rope whose fibers tore into his skin as the knots tightened.

  “Stop it!” Na’omi cried out from her cell window.

  Aabid ignored her. “Careful. He’s valuable,” he directed his soldiers. Aabid’s fighters hoisted the cross upright with Rip tethered to it, his arms outstretched on the crossbeam, his wrists and ankles bearing his full weight. The ropes cut deep into his flesh. The pain was so excruciating that it felt like his limbs were being severed from his body. Still, he refused Aabid the satisfaction of seeing him suffer. He glared into Aabid’s eyes during the entire procedure, his expression carefully controlled to reflect not pain but the contempt he felt for the terrorist leader.

  Soldiers dropped the base of the cross into a hole prepared for it and tamped it upright in place. Body weight on Rip’s outstretched arms and shoulders threatened to tear them loose from their joint sockets. His breathing sounded like a blacksmith’s bellows. Blood streamed from his wrists and splattered droplets into the earth. Thus, half-naked, Taggart sagged on the cross, suffering as Jesus must have suffered two millennia ago. That was the example Aabid intended in his mockery of the infidels and their pathetic God.

  Na’omi found it impossible to turn away from the lurid spectacle, as though in watching she might in some way share his anguish. Her eyes welled with tears as she held her little girls tightly around her.

  From across the square, Aabid confronted Na’omi at her window. “How do you like your messiah now?” he jeered.

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Nigeria

  Michael Nasry’s partner-comrade, the Chechen Akmal Barayev, arranged a rendezvous with four Chechen Islamic fighters at a private airstrip in the forest on the outskirts of Lagos. Michael and Akmal, driving a blue rented SUV, arrived as the sun peeked across the top of the jungle canopy. The landowner was a scrawny Nigerian with smallpox scars on his face and a game leg he collected in action against infidels in Algeria. Various Islamic groups paid him to keep and protect the airfield as a conduit for fighters and arms into Nigeria.

  As they waited for the aircraft, Michael read a piece from the Washington Times he had picked up at a newsstand before leaving Qatar. To him, the US, albeit his native land, was a shitbag country on the decline—and it was losing its own declared War on Terror. He chuckled with morbid delight over a quote from the US director of the National Counterterrorism Center, who testified before Congress that the world’s army of terrorists was “broader, wider and deeper than at any point since 9/11. It is our judgment that their capacity to carry out attacks abroad and around the world, including in the United States, has not thus far been significantly diminished.”

  No shit, Dick Tracy.

  The plane landed on time and discharged four of the toughest-looking hombres Michael had encountered. They looked perfectly capable. They were not especially big men, but they bore scars
and the steely gazes of men who had seen things. They looked Asian-European and wore semi-uniforms of digital cammie and bush hats. Better yet, they brought their own weapons—holstered handguns, AK-47s, and even grenades. After all, airfields like this one did not bother with customs officials.

  Akmal had known them from Chechnya and the fighting there. He assured Michael they were trustworthy and capable of handling any transactions with Boko Haram that Michael might have in mind. Few even in the Islamic community trusted the volatile and impulsive BH cells that sprang up all across northern Africa from Nigeria to Somalia and Kenya, and who specialized in kidnappings and extortion.

  Michael, Akmal, and the four armed Chechens piled into the rented SUV and made their way south and east until Akmal, behind the wheel, pulled into a primitive roadside fruit and vegetable market and makeshift café, the appointed site for the rendezvous with Boko Haram agents. Michael and Akmal entered the café while two of the Chechens wandered the open market as roving security and the other two stood watch near the parked SUV. A curious Nigerian with a machete eyed the foreigners and chopped off the end of a coconut.

  The bare-floored café contained a few homemade chairs and several crude tables with uncovered surfaces. A flyspecked window overlooked the unpaved road that ran past. The sweating tea vendor wore a stained apron over his bare chest. Michael looked him over distastefully and ordered cups of tea. Excited and on edge, he leaned back in his wooden chair facing the door. One leg jiggled nervously.

  Akmal sat across the table from him. Out of nowhere, perhaps inspired by the arrival of the Chechens, Michael said to him, “I’ve been thinking about the girl in your village. What was her name?”

  Akmal’s visage hardened. It had been years ago, but he was unlikely ever to forget the little girl bleeding out on the ground and his promise to God when he put her out of her misery.

  “Layla,” he replied, barely above a whisper.

  “Layla. And did you avenge her?”

  Akmal looked away, his features frozen. “I castrated my commanding officer and slit his throat. Then I left for the mountains.”