Nigeria Meltdown

by Don Pendleton

  Abby shook her head but could not look at the general as he left her.

  Outside he wiped the sweat from his forehead and heaved himself into the back of the sedan, barking an order at his driver to return to headquarters.

  He had satisfied the government. He had satisfied his Brotherhood paymasters. And now he had satisfied himself, with the promise of more to come.

  Life was good. What could possibly go wrong?

  Chapter Three

  Adam Mars-Jones left the chamber and walked back to his office deep in thought. It had been a vigorous debate, the deep divisions caused by religious and tribal rivalries in the region making for entrenched viewpoints that had baffled the South American and European delegates.

  He had been appointed America’s delegate to the UN group because of his family background—his parents were of Nigerian and Cameroon origins, though he had been born in San Francisco—and because of the work he had undertaken in the two countries since joining the UN after graduation. It had to be said that even he found the intransigence of some parties both frustrating and confusing.

  As he walked through the antechamber to his office, his secretary caught the glower on his face and elected to wait until he was behind closed doors before letting him know about the request.

  “What the hell could he want?” Mars-Jones growled when informed via the intercom. “I’m not really in the mood—”

  “He was most insistent about its importance,” she told him. “Most insistent,” she repeated.

  Mars-Jones sighed. “Okay, try to set it up for me, will you? I’ll get my own coffee while you do it.” He hated Skype conversations at the best of times, the lag in some of the relay meaning that he could easily misjudge someone’s mood. He also had a thing about technology and didn’t even have an MP3 player, though he was loathe to admit that in front of anyone. He was happier with his secretary setting up the call for him.

  By the time he had downed one cup of coffee and poured another to take back to his desk, his monitor showed the Skype conference call in setup. Within a few seconds, Dr. Celestine N’Joffi’s face appeared on the screen.

  Mars-Jones’s mild displeasure and irritation vanished as he caught the Cameroonian’s expression. “Celestine, this must be important,” he said without preamble.

  “It is,” N’Joffi replied earnestly. He could see on his laptop that Mars-Jones looked tired and distracted. “This may not be a good time for you—”

  “It isn’t, if I’m honest. I would have rescheduled or put you off if you hadn’t been so insistent to my secretary. But now that I can see you—”

  “Good. I would not risk such a communication, with no security, unless it was a matter of time.”

  Mars-Jones leaned forward. It was a long way from his air-conditioned office in New York to the sweltering heat of a Cameroon village, but his attention was so intent that he might as well have been in the same room. He listened in silence while N’Joffi briefly outlined the situation as it stood in the jungle along the border.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” Mars-Jones interjected, “but what is the Brotherhood of the Eagle, and why—”

  “Haven’t you heard anything about the Brotherhood in the U.S.?” N’Joffi asked, taken aback.

  When Mars-Jones shook his head, N’Joffi laughed harshly. “The government and military do not want this getting out, but it is growing and for the most part from within. Let me tell you something—the way that the Muslims in the north have taken hold is causing a backlash that the Brotherhood of the Eagle is taking advantage of. I do not care about Islam as long as it does not care about me. They are mostly like that, but in the south, the people do not think of that. They go to church, and they do not think of God. They only think about the gap between Christians and Muslims. They are scared, and they respond to anyone who says they are Christian and will drive out unbelievers.

  “They recruit and brainwash, then they go out and kill for control, cash and food. And they are growing in power. They have men inside the military and the government, and this is what keeps the noise down.”

  “Okay, let’s leave the religion out of this,” Mars-Jones said carefully.

  N’Joffi glared at him. “I know why you say that, and you are right in America, but not here.”

  Mars-Jones nodded. “I get it. What exactly is it that makes you call me now?”

  “You know where I am. We have had a large amount of paramilitary activity as the Brotherhood tries to come into this country. It has been of some concern, and once the Cameroon regime get nervous, then I think the world will hear a loud noise. Two days ago I was on patrol...”

  Settling into his story, now more concise as he had to relay facts and not explain that which, to his frustration, he felt Mars-Jones should know, N’Joffi told of discovering Yobo, taking him back to the village and tending him until he died.

  “Before he passed, while he still had strength, he made me record all that he had discovered. It needs action, and you are the only man I can think of. I will play it for you now, but I have already compressed the file and sent it to you by email so that you have a copy. First, I had to speak to you, to impress its importance on you. Please, listen...”

  Mars-Jones agreed and sat in silence while N’Joffi held up his cell phone to the webcam on the laptop and played back Joseph Yobo’s statement. He could see the Cameroonian’s eyes well up as he heard his dead friend’s voice again.

  When the recording had finished, N’Joffi switched off his cell phone and set it in front of him. He stared into the webcam, momentarily unable to speak. Finally, he said, “Joseph Yobo was a good man. He undertook a mission in good faith, for the right reasons, and was treated like a goat tethered for a lion. He deserved better. The people of these lands deserve better. I know that you have contacts. Perhaps it is time for you to use them.”

  Mars-Jones was silent for a moment then he nodded decisively.

  “Celestine, my old friend, I know just the man. Believe me, this will be sorted, no matter the cost.”

  * * *

  WHEN OBOKO GOT to the barracks, he walked across the parade ground to his office with a sense of satisfaction that caused a lascivious grin to spread across his face as he recalled the previous hour. He had time to reflect on his conquest, as the military headquarters on the edge of Lagos was a large barracks, housing several troop divisions as well as administrative buildings, and the largest drill and parade ground in the region. It was an active base, and although Oboko also had an office in the defense office located in the center of the city, he found that the bureaucrats and desk soldiers who manned the building were more circumspect and also more cunning that he was. Oboko had too much he wanted kept dark to risk falling into their hands.

  The general crashed open the door of his office, allowed himself a full-throated chuckle as he recalled Abby’s face and pulled open a drawer of the nearby filing cabinet. He removed a bottle of cane rum brewed in an illegal still in the barracks and took a slug straight from the bottle before slamming it back into the drawer.

  Then he turned toward his desk and realized he was not alone.

  “You are a satisfied man, Oboko,” his unwelcome visitor said in a menacingly quiet undertone.

  “Milton! I was not expecting you,” Oboko blustered. “Did you arrange this with my adjutant? That man is a fool—”

  “Shut up, Franklin,” Major Milton Abiola whispered in the same tone. He was seated behind Oboko’s desk, and he gestured with the swish cane he held that the general take the subordinate position. As their military rank and standing mattered little when the two men were in private, Oboko did as he was told without any dissent.

  “Why have you come to see me?” Oboko asked in a small, scared voice.

  “You have good reason to speak like that,” Abiola replied. His face was dark with an
ger, the scars on his cheeks more livid, making his face immobile but only accentuating the anger that burned in his eyes. “Joseph Yobo—”

  “Has been dealt with. You know that the men—”

  “They say. I know nothing for certain, and this worries me. I want his body, so that I can see with my own eyes that he is really dead.”

  “It is done. Look, let me show you.” Oboko hefted his bulk out of the chair. It was old, unsteady and designed to make whoever sat in it facing the general feel uneasy. It was certainly working on the general himself right now. He came around so that he was standing over Abiola. Cursing, he tried to get his PC working, banging the mouse down and swearing under his breath when the machine froze. Abiola watched him with a sneer curling on his lip.

  “Look, you see? It is done,” Oboko finally said triumphantly when he managed to get the technology to obey him. Opening his email, he clicked on one with an attachment: a piece of video ran, showing two men in camouflage clothing kneeling by a body that had been mauled, but was still readily identifiable as that of Yobo. “We finished him.”

  “You finished him and then let the jackal eat him before taking pictures?” Abiola scoffed.

  “There was an unfortunate incident,” Oboko spluttered. “In the forest there was confusion, and some of the men fired on others by mistake. The men with Yobo were killed, and it took some time—”

  “You are a fool, and you think I am as stupid as you?” Abiola asked softly. “You do not know for certain what happened any more than I do. That is an unsafe region for us. If the Cameroon government gets to know what we are doing before we have sweetened them—”

  “No one knows anything,” Oboko said, panicked and hurried. He held up his hands. “I have this film, sent anonymously to me, which I will show my superior officer as proof that our mission to infiltrate the Brotherhood was not a success. It is regrettable, but—”

  Abiola pushed back his chair and rose. He was several inches shorter than the general and about eighty pounds lighter, being a lean and muscular man, but even so he had a bearing that made the general quail and shrink before him.

  “You are more than a fool. We cannot let the world see what we are doing. We cannot let our government see—at least, not those we do not already own. Let me tell you something, Franklin. When I was a boy, my father told me tales about Biafra, and how the government crushed the people and made them conform. The world protested, but we starved them until they were forced to give in. We showed them no mercy, because they were the start of a domino crash that would have seen good Christian men fall beneath the Communist heel.” He brought the swish cane down on the desk with a loud crack that made Oboko wince.

  “If we do not act now, generations later, the same will happen in the northern regions, but it will be the Islamist heel, not that of the godless, that will seek to crush us. Forty years ago we had only a few to crush. Now they are sweeping across the continent. They must be stopped.”

  Milton Abiola had the faraway look in his eye of a zealot. Franklin Oboko was more concerned with the smaller things. What he had done with Abby and the bottle in the filing cabinet: those things would not be so easy with another kind of regime.

  “Joseph Yobo was a good spy. Better than I thought, or I would not have picked him. But even the best spy has to tell someone his secrets, and Yobo was dead before he had chance, Milton. Trust me.”

  * * *

  BENJAMIN WILLIAMS WAS a man who remembered Biafra but for very different reasons than Milton Abiola’s. He was a man who sweated as heavily as Franklin Oboko, but again for a very different reason. As a young man, Williams had been a Nigerian soldier who had fought in the Biafran war, and the memory of those bowel-shattering days when he did not know if each second would be his last had never left him.

  Fear and caution had dogged his every move since then, and this was why he was one of the most moderate of politicians on the African continent. Fear was what made him sweat now, as he sat before Adam Mars-Jones—who was familiar to him—and the heavyset American—who was unfamiliar to him. Even in the dark blue suit, he may well have looked like an administrator, but his bearing spoke of a past that was anything but deskbound.

  “Adam, you are a good man, but you know that there are certain things within my country that must remain here. We are not in a stable position, and any upset could cause a ripple that—”

  “Sir,” the heavyset man said, leaning forward as he interjected, “I will be blunt with you, if I may. Mr. Mars-Jones is acquainted with me, and he knows the kind of matters that pass through my hands. He has some knowledge of your country and has briefed me as much as possible. I am aware of the restrictions under which you may operate, but at the same time, would urge you to speak freely within these walls, so that we may find a strategy to help you and your government—or at least, those elements of it with which you, and we, may be in sympathy.”

  Williams blew his nose loudly then mopped at his forehead with the same handkerchief. He studied both men hard before beginning.

  “You know, since the British gave us independence, we have struggled with what they left behind. We have three types of law in the land. One based on what they left us, one based on our forefathers and one which has come in with the advent of Islam. I have no beef with Muslims. I will live alongside them as long as they do not bear us ill will. But adding their law to those we already have...it causes confusion, my friend, and that is what we have. But there is more. The British administrators given to us by the empire were lazy and greedy men, and they did everything according to what they could make from it. Very well, that was their choice. But the trouble has come since they left, because those they taught to run our administration—their administration—also learned their ways, and over the generations we have grown lazy and used to those ways.”

  “You mean that you run your country on corruption and money?” The American shrugged. “Most countries run that way to a greater or lesser extent.”

  Williams smiled sadly. “Not like Nigeria, my friend. It is a joke in some countries and even among my own countrymen. They are right, sadly. But this is a problem, as it is easy to buy silence and a blind eye. Simple, too, to keep things quiet that you would not want known.”

  “The Brotherhood of the Eagle,” Mars-Jones said. “I have played for Mr. Brognola the recording sent to me, just as I have played it to you.”

  Williams shook his head. “It saddens me, but it does not surprise me.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that you didn’t know about this?” the big Fed asked, genuinely surprised. There was something about Williams’s tone of resignation that shocked him. “You’re an ambassador—surely you’re in touch with what happens in your own country?”

  “Is anyone who spends so long away?” Williams countered. “Especially if you want to continue... Does that not give you a kind of distance?”

  Brognola shrugged. “I guess. What do you know?”

  “I know that there are many in my government who are scared of Islam, and what the wave of insurrection across the Arab lands and down the African continent could mean. I know there are many who are scared because they are Christian, and they fear the ones they think of as godless. I know there are many who feel that it is time that the Yoruba speakers and their beliefs took the control they have long believed their right. And I know that many of the people in these groups are the same men. But they have learned to keep their views to themselves. They meet in secret and make their plans. Some of them have decided to go further, and they wish to make these plans real.”

  “This is what the Brotherhood is?” Brognola prompted.

  “In part. The British gave us many things, including their wonderful freemasonry. In my country, it has become debased, and the fact that it is secret and with rituals fits very well with many of our traditions. I know that the Brotherhood of the Eagle has ad
opted many of its methods to ensure that those who join are sworn to secrecy on pain of death and know that this would be the case. They hide themselves and know only by secret signs who their fellows may be. If you do not know the signs, then you cannot tell.”

  “Will you help me get inside the government and inside the Brotherhood?” Brognola asked.

  “How? How can I do that when I do not know who is one of them and who is not?” Williams asked, shrugging helplessly.

  “Do you have one man who you can trust implicitly who is in a position of some power?” the big Fed asked.

  Williams did not hesitate. “I have one man. Only one man. But I would trust him with my life. I have in the past, and I am still here.”

  Brognola grinned. “I’ll take your word on that, sir. As long as you have one, that’s all I need. One man is all it will take, on both sides,” he added, leaving Williams and Mars-Jones looking a little puzzled. “Trust me.”

  * * *

  THE FIRST BUILDING was empty. The advance party had laid motion detectors there, when the patrols had passed. Symons and Prentiss were back with the team now, activating the tech so that they could keep track. If anyone tried to access the building during maneuvers, then they would automatically be informed.

  Three hundred yards from the first building lay the second and third. Like the first, they were made of adobe and rock, hewn directly from the ground and fashioned into a dwelling, just as buildings like them had been for thousands of years.

  The Taliban hadn’t existed thousands of years ago; it had been a little more peaceful then. Now the insurgents were driving forward and taking territory while the UN forces had to withdraw. As the so-called rebels drove on, they were subjecting the populations they overran to their own version of justice.

  Mack Bolan, aka the Executioner, couldn’t remember ever reading the parts of a holy book that said you stoned people to death for dancing or gathering together. That wasn’t freedom by anyone’s definition. That was why the UN was here, to stop it from happening.