Afua had been young and naive, but still old and wise enough to know right from wrong. Although his family had been very poor, his mother had taught Afua and his siblings the difference between right and wrong. “It is wrong to steal,” she had told them. And Afua thought that made sense, unless you were starving to death. Since his family was always on the verge of starvation, stealing became a way of life. Food could be acquired through work, begging or thievery. But thievery was always easiest, and it certainly was the fastest. Begging took less energy than stealing, and when one lacked food, it took more energy. Then stealing trumped begging. At first, Afua didn’t steal huge amounts, just an apple or a potato. But when he was harvesting the farmer’s crops, Afua would hide food in the jungle. He would then return at night to fill his sacks and drag them to the road headed north. He never told his mother that he had stolen the food. He told her he had worked for it and he had. Just not all of it. A little white lie. Who could it hurt?
He could still remember the day he had met Mohammed Mboso. Afua had been stealing food at the time. He had worked his way to the end of a large cassava field. Afua would periodically look up to see if he was being watched by the farmer or any of the other workers. When the farmer was far enough away, the Nigerian took his huge bag of cassava and emptied it a few steps into the thick jungle. As he was admiring his haul, he was startled by several guns racking shells into their chambers. He looked up to see a group of men brandishing AK-47s. The black guns were all pointed at him. The men were dressed in clothing the color of the jungle, and their faces were obscured by scarves tied behind their heads.
The only man that did not have a gun or a mask smiled at him. Afua did not know what to do so he nervously smiled back at the man.
“Do not be afraid,” he told Afua in his native Ibibio language. “We are not here to hurt you. We are here to help you.”
But the man Afua was looking at was scary looking, and Afua was afraid. He knew about the group known as the Boko Haram. He had never known anyone who belonged to the organization. Considering the number of guns pointed at him, he immediately assumed the man smiling at him was the leader. After all, they certainly wouldn’t have sent this number of officers to arrest him for stealing food. “My name is Mohammed Mboso,” the large man told him, “but everyone calls me Iniabasi.”
Afua nodded his head, smiling graciously back at the dangerous-looking man. In his native Ibibio language, Afua knew the name Iniabasi meant in God's time.
Iniabasi was older and his skin was marbled with large white and pink patches. The man’s hair grew in patches as well. There were crusted areas of curly gray hair that sprouted like tortured weeds from atop his scarred head. Afua had seen black skin badly burnt before, and this man was covered with it. Afua thought he looked like a monster.
The burned man took a moment to look over the pile of cassava Afua had harvested. He looked back up at Afua and asked, “Do you believe in God?”
It was a simple question, but for some reason, Afua felt any answer he offered would be the wrong one, so he said nothing. His mother had raised him as a Christian although most of their neighbors in northern Nigeria were Muslims. Little known fact, but sixty percent of all Nigerians are Christian. But religion didn’t take a front seat to starvation, and religion was not the center of his family’s universe. God had never showed up to their dinner table to bring them a chicken, goat or even a large bag of cassava.
The Boko Haram’s leader didn’t press Afua for an answer to his peculiar question. Instead, he simply changed tactics and asked, “Are you stealing all this for your family?”
Afua’s smile faded, and he nodded his head once.
“I thought so,” Iniabasi said, like he possessed supernatural powers of deduction. “But this is so little. How many mouths do you have to feed?”
Afua’s father had been dead for three years. He had endured the pain of an infected tooth, only to have the infection turn septic and drop him to the dirt weeks later.
Afua counted the people in his family on his hands.
“Eight, including me,” he said.
When the terrorist leader heard the number, he shook his head disapprovingly.
“No, no,” he said adamantly. “This is not enough food for eight people. You need much more. Come with us, and we will give you enough food to feed your family for two weeks.”
Afua looked the man over, trying to decide whether the man was trying to trick him. He knew better than just about anyone you didn’t get something for free. He glanced nervously at the dozen men surrounding him. They had all lowered their weapons.
A few of them had pulled down the scarves from their sweaty faces, either to personalize themselves to Afua, or possibly to breathe easier. Detecting no deceitfulness in Iniabasi’s demeanor, Afua dropped his empty canvas bag to the jungle floor. Iniabasi turned and began walking deeper into the jungle, and Afua fell in line with the other jihadis.
They walked a long, long way on paths in the jungle made by animals. Eventually, they came to a little town that was a large encampment in the middle of the dense forest.
Iniabasi took Afua over to a well and offered his new friend a cool drink of water. Afua drank his fill, returning the ladle back into the wooden bucket.
“You must be hungry,” Iniabasi said to him.
Afua didn’t know if that was a question or a statement. He assumed that most of the people Iniabasi found stealing food were indeed hungry, but he remained silent.
Iniabasi began walking toward a large tent about 100 meters away in a sunlit clearing. Afua followed. When they reached the tent, he held open the tent flap and gestured with his arm for Afua to go inside. The smells were the first thing he noticed, even before his eyes adjusted to the dim light. There was an infusion of aromas in the air from baskets of beans, sesame and maize. There was also a sweetness that hung in the air of cocoa beans, groundnuts, melon and ripe yams. Afua looked around at the piles and piles of food. There were bushels of millet, palm kernels, sorghum and rice. To his left were dozens of 50-gallon drums of palm oil, and to his right were thousands of canned foods. He looked at the pictures of the food on the outside of the cans. Much of it he had never seen before. Next to the cans were bottles of colorful liquids. Some were dark brown, some clear and many were either orange or blue.
Iniabasi was smiling at him.
“You see,” the leader told him, waving his outstretched arms at the stockpile before them. “We have everything your family could ever want.”
Iniabasi walked over to where the bottles of liquid were stacked. He grabbed one of the orange bottles, and using a tool at the end of his keychain, he popped the top. He handed the opened bottle of orange soda to Afua.
The young Nigerian looked apprehensive, so Iniabasi told him, “It’s OK. You will love it. It is called Fanta orange soda.”
Afua put the bottle up to his mouth and took a small sip. His brain almost exploded from the euphoric rush. He had never tasted anything like it before. It was the best thing he had ever eaten or drank. And, just like that, Afua was hooked. He was hooked on the orange soda. Soon he was hooked on the lifestyle of the
modern Nigerian terrorist and all the nastiness that accompanied it. After he finished his soda, Iniabasi had asked him if he believed in Allah.
Sure thing. If it meant Afua could get food for his family and more orange soda, he would believe in anything Iniabasi wanted him to believe in. Allah, Jesus, Buddha. Hell, Afua would believe that Iniabasi himself was a god if it meant more food.
So Afua told Iniabasi he believed in Allah. After that, his life changed. He could provide food for his family. However, the tradeoff was increasingly becoming more violent. Stealing food became kidnapping people. That soon transitioned to torturing those he kidnapped. Eventually that translated to killing them. The final evolution was senseless killing, and Afua was at the forefront of all the action.
Ten years after meeting Iniabasi, Afua moved his entire family to a four-b
edroom apartment in the port city of Lagos, the largest city in Nigeria. Afua praised Allah, prayed regularly, and did Allah’s will. This, in his mind, ensured that his family remained well-fed and well-housed. Now, life was so easy.
*-*-*
As Afua stared at the 9K333 Verba missile in his hands he wondered if, after completing this mission, his life would remain the same. Other than going on missions to expand Allah’s influence into Chad, Niger and Cameroon, he had never been away from his family. Iniabasi had told him that Allah would reward him with his own men and his own territory. Afua would have his own land and be a king in his own region of Nigeria.
Tomorrow, Afua Diambu would embark on a twenty-day boat ride to a country he had never heard of. He was excited, like the day he had tasted his first orange soda. But this was going to be a very different experience. This would involve killing. Afua had become so accustomed to killing that it had become akin to the sin of stealing. In his mind there was little difference between stealing and killing. People had been reduced to nothing more than the bland cassava roots he had pulled from the soil a decade ago. He was so desensitized that he felt no remorse when he took a life. If his mother knew this, she would be very distraught, and she would tell him that killing and stealing was incongruent with Christ’s teachings. But at least she would be lecturing him from her air-conditioned kitchen while cooking a big feast for her extended family.
His mother didn’t know what her son did to put food on the table or what he had done to move his family into better housing. As far as Afua knew, she thought he was working on a farm, but then she also believed that he was still a Christian. She would be happy to know at least one of the two was correct. Diambu still believed in Jesus. Christianity was the only religion he had known during his impressionable childhood years. His mother and the rest of his family still prayed to Jesus. Each time Afua found himself on his prayer mat next to his jihadi brothers, he secretly prayed to Jesus to keep him and his family safe so he could continue to provide for them.
The Muslim stuff that Iniabasi had been cramming down his throat was just gibberish to him. No religion told their followers to kill other people of other religions. It was all a big joke. It was a big farce that allowed Iniabasi’s thugs to do the bad things they did in the name of their God – Allah. Deep down, Afua understood the sinful things he did were wrong. He also knew, as plain as the nose on his face, that he would pay for his sinful actions in Hell. But for the time being, he had successfully moved himself and his family out of their personal “hell” on Earth into an air-conditioned apartment with fully stocked shelves. He had lived in “hell” most his young life, and he was pretty sure he could tough it out in the afterlife.
The big blond Russian man lifted the missile launch tube out of Afua’s hands and started his training with the phrase, “This is the front, and this is the back.” The training got a little more difficult as the arms dealer proceeded to show Afua Diambu how to arm and fire the weapon. Considering how much Afua already knew about all types of deadly weapons, it wasn’t difficult to learn. Put a giant bullet into a giant gun and pull a giant trigger. Nothing to it.
SEA OF JAPAN—ABOARD THE HAIL NUCLEUS
F rom the backseat of the helicopter, Lt. Commander Foster Nolan saw a ship appear on the horizon. As the Seahawk drew within two miles of the Hail Nucleus, backlit by the moonlit sky, the 80,000-ton deadweight cargo vessel looked massive. If not for all the strange cylindrical containers stacked on the ship’s deck like white logs, Nolan thought it resembled a large aircraft carrier like the one he had lifted off from an hour ago.
The lieutenant commander made a note to ask the pilots what those containers held, but his question was answered before the helicopter touched down on the ship’s hydraulic elevator. Staring out the window, and having discarded the blanket the young girl had given him, Nolan saw a symbol clearly stenciled on each containment storage container representing radiation hazard.
The chopper’s thick rubber wheels touched down onto the ship’s hard metal surface and the aircraft came to a stop. Nolan watched patiently as the pilots flipped switches and powered down the big helicopter. The young copilot began reading off a post-flight checklist with the pilot. The large rotor blades above their heads spun slower and slower until the carbon fiber behemoths sagged under their own weight. Before the last revolution had completed, the ship’s massive hydraulic elevator began descending, taking the chopper and its occupants deep within the bowels of the ship. Nolan looked up and saw some sort of door, or metal plate on a thick track being drawn across the opening where they had just landed.
The elevator emitted a high-pitched whine, and the big metal door up top made a metallic bang and then everything became very quiet. Lights inside the ship’s hangar snapped on, flooding the cavernous room with white light. Nolan remained quiet as he watched the pilots complete the last few items on their checklist. Once the final switches had been flipped and the gauges checked, the young girl opened her door on the Sikorsky Seahawk, stepped out and then pulled open the side door for her passenger.
Instinctively, the lieutenant commander placed his hand on his Beretta, its butt end sticking out of a holster on his chest rig. The girl saw him make the move but didn’t react in any manner.
She asked in a tired voice, “Are you going to use that?”
Nolan didn’t know how to respond, so his captor told him, “Good, then leave it alone, or it will be taken away from you. Let’s go,” she said nodding her head toward the other end of the hangar.
The lieutenant commander stepped out of the helicopter and his boots made squishy sounds, as saltwater squeezed out of them onto the painted metal floor. By now, the pilot had exited the aircraft and had walked around to join them. Nolan couldn’t believe the ages of the pilot and copilot. If the girl was no more than 14 years of age, then the male pilot couldn’t be any older than 16, at most. The young man had high school acne, and he looked like he wasn’t old enough to drive a car, let alone pilot a combat helicopter.
Doing his best to balance both tension and relief, tension won with his uncontrolled outburst.
Nolan blurted, “What is this place? Who are you guys? Where are we going?” The psychological imbalance was caused by the unknown factors. But the relief was the thought his captors might be in a hurry so they didn’t miss school recess. He didn’t feel he was in any danger from this pair of Jr. Pilots, so he allowed his hand to fall away from his Beretta and drop to his side.
The pilot and copilot walked through the aircraft hangar, and the lieutenant commander fell in behind them. As they walked, he rubbed the back of his neck. Now that the adrenaline of the ejection and rescue was wearing off, he was beginning to feel pain emanating from various parts of his body. His back was tweaked and, although the dull ache at the base of his neck was tolerable, it hurt more than his back.
As the trio walked toward the end of the hangar, being a man who had loved aircraft his entire life, Nolan found himself quietly admiring the half-dozen helicopters parked in a straight line. Many of the machines were military in design, but looked as though they had been customized for business purposes. Like the Sikorsky Seahawk that had plucked him out of the sea, the choppers had few basic design features which made them amenable for sea rescue. The helicopters didn’t appear to be parked in any order. Nolan recognized the first helicopter they walked past as an AgustaWestland AW101 VVIP. It was a very high-end, twenty million-dollar beauty that, depending on the configuration, could transport up to thirty passengers. And sitting next the AW101 was an immaculate Eurocopter EC 175. It was a passenger-friendly, eight million-dollar jewel. He was accustomed to seeing expensive aircrafts, but not like these. These were privately owned and cost more money than he would ever see in a lifetime. Or maybe even a hundred lifetimes.
The kids ahead of him were now walking faster. He noticed a Sikorsky S-76C. The base model of the chopper was commonly known as the Black Hawk, but this version was white instead of black, and i
t appeared to have leather seats. A Bell 525 Relentless was the next aircraft they passed. It was the top-of-the-line of the Bell business choppers, and Nolan guessed someone would have to lay down a cool fifteen million dollars to take it home. Before they had reached the thick white bulkhead door, they also passed a Sikorsky S-92 VIP Configuration as well as a little Bell 412.
“Do you guys think you spent enough on your helicopters?” Nolan asked the kids. They ignored the jet pilot. The boy spun open the door handle, pulled open the heavy door and then stepped through the oval opening. The girl followed without even looking back to see if the lieutenant commander had followed. Nolan turned and looked at the hangar and its opulent helicopters one last time before turning to step through the doorway.
The group went down one flight of stairs and began walking down a long hallway that had the words DECK 3 imprinted on the wall every fifty feet. They stopped in front of a door that read Conference Room. The girl opened the door and gestured with a wave of her hand for the lieutenant commander to go inside. He did, and he was somewhat alarmed when the door immediately closed. The kids had not accompanied him. However, the room was not empty.
Two men and one woman sat at a banana-shaped, stainless-steel table. Both men looked about the same age, in their early forties, but one was larger than the other. Nolan’s mind turned to threat assessment. Part of that process was to analyze the physical features of those within the room. Since everyone was sitting down, it was impossible to determine the height of the men. However, one of the men was wider in the shoulders and appeared more muscular than the other. Nolan estimated the larger man’s weight at approximately 220 pounds and the other guy at 175 pounds. The larger of the two men wore a green polo shirt. The other man wore a blue T-shirt with a sentence printed on it, “No, I will not fix your computer.” Much like the kids who had plucked Nolan from the ocean, neither of the men appeared to be military.
Hail Warning Page 3