Nigeria Meltdown

by Don Pendleton

  The way in which the general’s clammy hand limply grasped his, and the shifting of his gaze away from direct contact, told the solider all he needed to know.

  Boarding the plane and strapping himself in, the big American gazed around at the men he would fight alongside. All of them had the blank and bland expression of men going into the unknown. If any of them were a traitor—surely at least one had to be—then they were masking it well.

  As the plane rumbled down the runway and took off, Bolan shot a last look at his men. Not all would be coming back. Which one?

  He leaned back in his seat; he would find out soon enough. Meantime, he wondered how his other team was faring.

  * * *

  “I TELL YOU, my friend, it will be better for you not to come,” Ekwense said in an exasperated, exhausted tone.

  “I will see this through. We are in this together, yes?” Buchi grumbled as he hobbled across the street to the car. Ekwense followed him, shaking his head.

  “You will get an infection in the forest, and that will kill you and do the Brotherhood’s work for them. Who will look after your wife and children then?”

  “Ken will do that,” Achuaba replied from inside the car. “He is very good with that sort of thing, you know.”

  “Shut up, you fool,” Ken growled. He leaned over so that he could see Buchi through the car window. “Listen, he is right. You would help us best—help yourself, too—if you stay here and keep your ears and eyes open. I am sorry to be harsh, but you are crippled right now, and you may slow us down. I don’t want to die because you are slow.”

  Kanu and Samuel had come from Ekwense’s house and across the road to where the battered cab was parked.

  “Why not shout and let everyone know our business,” Samuel muttered savagely. “We will not need to be having this argument if you are any louder. We won’t get out of Lagos, let alone get to Yobe.”

  “He is right,” Ekwense added, doing his best to moderate his tone. “Come on, man, don’t be stupid. We don’t have the time...”

  Buchi looked around them. Although it was still early, the street was far from empty, and already they had attracted some attention from those too eager to listen in on someone else’s fight.

  ‘Okay,” he said sullenly, “but I would like to be part of this—”

  “You already are, man. We would not have transport without you,” Samuel said softly, clapping him on the back.

  The five men crammed themselves into the battered cab and set off for an airfield on the far side of the city, leaving their wounded companion to watch them go. They made their way through the center of the city, which was already at the start of its workday. The roads were crowded with cars and bikes weaving precariously around one another and those pedestrians who braved the dusty roads. Storefronts were open, and trade was already taking place among those on their way to work and those already working. The noise of the city was building toward its midday crescendo, even though that was over four hours away.

  Ekwense drove them in silence, each of the five lost in his own thoughts. They had families that they did not wish to leave behind. At the same time, from the moment that the man Ehurie had become a part of their lives, they had no choice but to continue, that they might protect those families. It would have been easy for them to curse Ekwense, and particularly the American Matt Cooper, for getting them involved. Yet he had only been the catalyst for a fight that had been brewing and festering below the surface of everyday life for some time.

  They were still silent when they arrived at the small airfield on the opposite side of Lagos from where the military airfield and the civilian airport were based. This was unlike either of them: a wire fence enclosed the area where a single runway strip was laid down, with four small hangars and one shack that served as a control room. The notion that anyone would file a flight plan here was laughed at, and the radio in the control room was used less for discussion between ground and air than cell phones.

  When they parked and left the cab in the shelter of a hangar that had one prop plane inside, with an engineer who paid them no attention as he delved into its workings, they made their way to the shack. They were greeted by an old man with an eye patch and a gut that protruded over his jeans.

  “I know you,” he said simply. “Buchi’s boys. Where is he?”

  “Hurt,” Samuel replied. “Not badly, but enough. You know what we want?”

  The old man hawked a glob of phlegm and nodded slowly. “Sure. Don’t know why—” He raised a hand to stop Ekwense as he was about to speak. “Best if I don’t know. I know he can fly, but are any of you useful?”

  “I can fly. Military service,” Ken stated.

  The old man looked him up and down with no little skepticism. “I’ll believe you. You bring it back in one piece, I’ll believe you.”

  “Has he paid you?” Samuel asked bluntly.

  The old man nodded. “Come with me.”

  He led them across the airfield toward one of the hangars on the far side, away from where they had left the cab. When they got close, the old man jogged ahead and pulled back the hangar door, revealing an old Huey, its paintwork chipped away to reveal some rust and covered in part by a botched spray job that failed to cover its old registration number.

  “Shit, man, we won’t get far in this thing,” Achuaba exploded. “What are you trying to do to us?”

  “Wait, wait...” Ekwense moved forward and took a look at the engine. If it was the work of the same engineer who had ignored them on their arrival, then his attention to details explained everything. The engine was immaculate.

  “It looks like shit, sure,” the old man said with a chuckle. “But that doesn’t mean it moves like shit.”

  “It could be good disguise,” Ekwense agreed. “You use this bird a lot? I mean, is it known?”

  “Not how you mean. But we use it a lot for transporting cargo, mostly legal. Those who would be bothered are used to seeing it, which is why Buchi wanted it. He’s flown for me a lot,” the old man added with a grin that told a story of its own.

  “It’s big,” Samuel said, walking around it. “There’s only five of us. Do we need something this size?”

  “Used to take fourteen people when I found it,” the old man said. “Come and look.”

  He hauled himself up into the belly of the chopper and beckoned them to follow. Once inside, they saw that the body of the chopper had been hollowed out and refitted so that it could take cargo of any kind. Webbing on the sides allowed for support, and there were only four seats other than the two in the pilots’ cockpit. On the floor, secured to the webbing, were fuel drums and unmarked wooden and metal crates.

  The old man went over to them, slapping them in turn as he spoke. “You got fuel, enough here to prevent you from having to make regular landings. You just need to find somewhere quiet and do your thing. And these are the weapons that Buchi asked for. We’ve got AK-47s and ammo, but don’t ask me where I got them. We got some pangas and combat knives, and some machetes for the bush or anybody in the way in the bush.” He laughed, which mutated into a hacking cough. “We also got some grenades for you. Explosive and smoke, and some Russian nerve gas shit that came from Belize. I don’t know what it does, I just took it in part payment. I wouldn’t use that unless you had to, if I was you.”

  “We’ll remember that,” Samuel muttered. “Now, if everything is ready, we have no time to waste.”

  The old man nodded and jumped down from the chopper. While Ekwense and Ken settled themselves in the pilot seats, Samuel secured the hatch and joined Kanu and Achuaba in the uncomfortable bucket seats that had replaced the originals.

  “Man, I swear I will have a broken back by the time we get to Yobe,” Achuaba grumbled.

  “Man, if that is all you have to worry about, we will be lucky,” Samuel replied.


  The old man opened the hangar doors fully to allow Ken to lift off a bit to taxi the chopper into the open. The owner stood back as it passed him and watched as it struggled fitfully to lift into the air. He sucked in his breath as it rose then dipped, and nodded appreciatively as it steadied and began to rise in the air, turning to move northward. Ken had been rusty but had soon picked up his old training.

  As the old man grunted and turned back to the shack, dismissing them from his mind now that they were no longer his responsibility, the men in the chopper felt their guts heave and not just from the changes in pressure.

  They were now airborne and taking Matt Cooper—and by extension, themselves—to their destinies.

  There was no turning back. They were on a collision course with the Brotherhood of the Eagle.

  Chapter Ten

  While he sat in the troop transport for the long and uncomfortable flight, Bolan considered what trekking through the Yobe region would actually be like. One thing for sure: it would differ considerably from the kind of action they would have had to undertake if they had attacked the training camp advocated by Oboko.

  The land down in the southeast, near the border with Cameroon, was dense rain forest. To hack through that in search of a camp that could be easily hidden beneath the dense canopy of foliage would give an enemy ample opportunity to pick off the opposition at will. Oboko would have liked that: to deflect away from the real target and make it easy to dispose of his—and the Brotherhood’s—enemy.

  Up in the Yobe region, however, it was a far different matter. The savanna terrain in this area, which took them toward the edge of the Sahara, was completely different. Here the plains were covered in tall grass that could easily obscure a party on the ground but would make it easier to pick out anything from the air. The tall trees were occasionally in clumps but were scattered across the sometimes arid plain. In these areas, it was possible to hide and camouflage activity. Accessing them would be hard, but the truth was that the nature of the topography immediately cut down the potential search areas.

  In the south, GPS and cell phone signals were disrupted by the overhanging forest and the nature of the terrain. Up here, the plains were plateaus that rode high, making it easier to get the necessary signals.

  Bolan was thinking of keeping contact with Stony Man and also with his shadow team. For the former, it was vital that he keep some kind of communications channel open so that, even if he did not make it back, there was still some way of passing on intel. For the latter, the men in whom he put his trust were only recently known to him, and although that had not given him any issues with how much faith he could put in them, it had also not given him the time to make sure that they were well equipped. Their ordnance was not a concern. He knew them well enough to figure they could lay hands on that.

  No, the thing that really concerned him was a line of communication between him and the shadow team. All he had was the cell phone Ekwense had given him. It was serviceable, but not high-tech. Reliant on an ordinary network, he had no option but to hope Nigeria’s system was up to speed and that the nature of the landscape would help him with any coverage.

  Bolan knew he could trust Ekwense and his friends. That wasn’t the issue. What he didn’t know was how easy it would be to contact them and keep them within range. Or, indeed, to warn them of any dangers that may be directed their way, should they be discovered.

  He returned his thoughts to the team given to him as the plane circled to land on the barren airstrip bisecting a run-down military air base in Yobe State. The men with him were unknown quantities. He could not afford to trust them, yet neither could he show any signs of suspecting treachery. It would be a thin line.

  The plane circled and was guided in by a man on the ground. A few soldiers ran along the strip, clearing and sweeping rock as the troop transport made its last approach. The landing was bumpy and uncomfortable, the hard, dry ground unyielding. There were yells of complaint from his men, and some airsickness, as the motion and rough landing churned guts. Bolan watched them, adept at holding down his own lurching stomach. He’d endured dozens of such landings.

  The doors opened, and the heat hit them as soon as they dismounted. Drier than in Lagos, it was intense under the early afternoon sun. Looking around the parched strip and the spare grasses that feebly attempted to sprout on the air-base grounds, Bolan realized that to even fashion any kind of rough strip in an area like this was fighting against all odds.

  In those few moments, he got an impression of how physically draining the trek toward their target area would be.

  A man whose uniform was immaculately pressed—unlike the others he could see—yet was covered in a layer of dust like everyone else, came up to him, saluting smartly.

  “Captain Ernest Shonekan at your service, sir,” he said in a clipped British.

  “Major Matt Cooper, Captain,” Bolan greeted him. “Do we have somewhere my men can get a little downtime before we start off? I think the flight and the landing were a little rough.”

  Shonekan nodded. “We are small and shamefully ignored by our superiors, but we do have food and some beds we can give you for the night. If you are not under pressures of time, I would suggest rest and a sunrise start to defeat the heat.”

  “That sounds like a good idea, Captain,” he agreed, before directing his men to follow Shonekan’s direction.

  Having seen his men settled in to the Spartan quarters that the air base supplied, Bolan found himself seated in a shack apart from the rest of the base, drinking rice wine while Shonekan played Vaughan Williams on an MP3 player that looked incongruous among the simple 1970s furnishings of the captain’s quarters.

  “You are wondering why I have this and speak this way, out here,” the captain asked with a wry smile, noting Bolan’s questioning gaze. “It may seem a trifle bizarre, but my father was in the service before me, and his training was over forty years ago, in the immediate post-Colonial era. He served under military men who stayed on, and their ways were better than those of the fools who replaced them. I saw this, even as a boy, and I prefer to follow those ways. I would choose to be eccentric than corrupt, though unfortunately this is probably why I am posted here, rather than in a city.”

  “It’s a little out of the way,” Bolan stated.

  Shonekan laughed. “A very British grasp of understatement for an American, Major. If I may turn the tables and be American blunt with you—why the hell are you here? My orders inform me that you are in search of an Islamic terrorist cell. That, sir, is horseshit.”

  “You think?” Bolan asked, amused. “What makes you say that?”

  The captain shrugged. “There are no terrorists in this region. It is true that we have a larger population of Muslim than Christian in this area, but to suggest that this means they are all arming for insurrection is scaremongering. Boko Haram sticks to Borno State. Yobe is one of the least populated areas of Nigeria. There is a reason for this. It is hard living here. You only have to look at the state of this base to understand that. I am here because I do not fit with the military as it is now. I had no sympathy for the regime of my namesake, though I suspect being confused with him in files may have saved me a few times from my own views.”

  “Which side of the fence do you come down on?” Bolan queried. “Africa is being swept by a hard-line tide. I know. I was in Syria and Libya in recent times.”

  “I am not surprised by that,” Shonekan said reflectively. “It would be one reason for your presence, but—”

  “But you have reasons for thinking otherwise?”

  “Major, I am no fool, but I truly believe that many in Lagos are. And those who are not have their own reasons for whatever actions they take. Down there, they view as a potential enemy any who do not speak Yoruba or have at least one sister in the Cameroon. I have been here too long. Those few who do eke out a l
iving among us may not share the religion of the south, and they may speak Hausa, which makes them unintelligible to those arrogant fools who will not learn it, but they are too busy trying to farm this shithouse land to bother with guns.”

  At length, Bolan said, ‘That’s a fair summation, Captain. And you are correct. I am not here chasing ghosts. I am chasing a real enemy.”

  Shonekan looked thoughtful. “I am not privy to the knowledge of my fellow soldiers who live in Lagos and pretend they know about the northern regions. If they are sending you here after the enemy that they only pretend to oppose, then they will be sending you to the wrong place—”

  “They’re here. Maybe not on the map reference I’m given, but they are here,” Bolan interrupted.

  “I have heard things, but they are circumspect with all. You are to be thrown to the lions, then?”

  “I am. My official sources tell me that the Muslim hard-liners have been infiltrated, and this would enable my enemy to live in peace.”

  “My enemy, too, Major. And there are no real hard-liners as you call them. Not here. It is all smoke and mirrors. I can tell you that much.”

  Shonekan beckoned Bolan to the table that stood in one corner. There was a tablet on the polished wood, and the captain booted up, clicking on a map of the region from his files.

  “You see that we are here,” he said, indicating an area in the state. “All this area—” he circled for a distance of roughly six miles “—is clear. What references have you been given?”

  Bolan indicated an area within the circle. “I’m told that they are around here. That doesn’t tie in with your intel.”

  “Indeed it does not. That is an area of savanna grass. Only a fool would set up base there. Only a fool would go to the middle of nowhere to be ambushed. And you are no fool.”

  “I try not to be,” Bolan murmured. “Where would you base yourself?”