With preliminary plans in place, the conversation turned to the camp and the rescue of Helen. This was to be a more difficult task. A compound in Chad, relatively unprotected except for a few guards, centred in the centre of a bustling city, as against an isolated insurgents’ camp with over one hundred armed and violent men.
‘Gentlemen,’ Lt General Abdul Ibrahim said, ‘I’ve asked Major Femi Osuji to join us. He will take full responsibility for our military assistance. Steve, Major Osuji went through the same training school in America where we met.’
‘Major, have you been updated as to the situation?’ asked Steve.
‘I am aware.’ Major Osuji, a career military man, was formal and upright.
‘I believe that the Major is standing on ceremony due to my presence,’ said Abdul. ‘This may be a good time for me to excuse myself. Major Osuji has written authority to override any red tape to secure whatever is required. He is, at this moment, equal in authority to me. I am sure he will use it well.’
‘Thank you. I will,’ the Major replied.
Steve took the opportunity to lighten the mood after Abdul left. ‘I’m Steve and this is Harry.’
‘Please, call me Femi. I apologise for my formality before. Standing before the Chief of Defence Staff, the head of the Nigerian military can be a little intimidating.’
‘He was a captain when I first met him. He’s a regular guy, one of my oldest friends.’
‘Regular, I’m not so sure.’
‘Femi, we need to prepare for the entry into the camp. Do we have a forward operating base?’
‘We’ve secured the airfield at Maiduguri. That’s about two hundred and fifty kilometres from the camp.’
‘‘How well can we conceal our preparations there?’
‘It will not be a problem. Since the attack on the mission, we have cleaned out the area. No one will come near the base. We can fly the aircraft and personnel through a corridor to the south-west.’
‘We need to commence the rescue within four days,’ said Harry. ‘With all the media attention it’s making Boko Haram nervous, and the Sheikh in Chad may attempt to move the other women. There’s always the fear of their upgrading security.’
‘We can be ready. I need to inform my commandos first.’
‘Let’s get them to the airfield first,’ replied Steve. ‘They can be briefed there. We can’t risk any more information leaks.’
‘Fully understood,’ said Femi. ‘I will have my people on base within twenty-four hours. What else do we need?’
‘We have helicopters arranged for the trip to Chad. We just need to make sure they are at the airbase.’
‘I have a logistics manager working on that.’
‘I hope he hasn’t been told anything?’
‘No, he just believes we’re reclaiming the area.’
‘We need at least four helicopters to take our people into the camp once Helen is secured,’ continued Steve. ‘We can use one of those to drop the initial assault team fifty kilometres distant.’
‘Why so far?’
‘We need stealth. We can’t risk the helicopters being seen.’
‘Understood, but we could have gone in closer than fifty kilometres. Thirty would have been fine.’
‘We’ll discuss at Maiduguri.’ Steve believed that a longer distance was ideal, but it would be difficult carrying heavy weapons. It would take close to two days to cover the ground under cover of darkness. Femi may be right, he thought. If they can get closer, then we could bring the date of the rescue forward.
‘The plan needs to include the retrieval of the Nigerian women as well,’ Femi reminded.
‘That precludes gunships coming in once we’ve secured Helen. It will need to be more of a ground battle.’
‘Do you know where the women are in the camp?’ Femi asked.
‘The problem is they could be dispersed.’
‘Then, I will take one hundred commandos and additional helicopters for transportation.’
‘We take Helen first, and then Harry will leave immediately for Chad with ten of your commandos. Is that agreed?’
‘I agree. I am aware of the President’s directive in this matter. My concern is for the Nigerian women as well.’
‘Helicopters need to look as though they are civilian,’ added Steve. ‘You’ll get closer that way. Not the helicopters for Chad, leave them in military markings.’
‘We will ensure the helicopters are suitably camouflaged. I am told that the Nigerian military will receive due credit at the conclusion of this exercise.’
‘The Nigerian military will receive full credit. We prefer not to advertise our exploits too openly. We just want the two women.’
‘I appreciate your expertise in these matters. We will follow your lead and ensure that both of our outcomes are successful.’
‘They will be,’ said Steve. ‘We have done this before. If we work together, success is guaranteed.’
Chapter 23
Pierre Dupré had been the outstanding student of his year. They even spoke of him eclipsing his father, Francoise, Head of Surgery at the Hopital de l’Hotel-Dieu, and widely regarded as one of the best surgeons in France.
‘You’re destined to take my place at the hospital in due course,’ his father would say.
In the eight years it had taken for him to qualify as a doctor, Pierre had surpassed all others. In an intensely fierce programme, where only the top seven to ten percent passed through to the subsequent year, he had constantly been in the top one percent. There was not one subject where he failed to achieve a distinction.
A junior position at his father’s hospital on graduation, he soon gravitated to cancer surgery. His operating skills were superb while his calm and authoritative manner with patients and staff alike garnered respect.
It was only a few months after graduation that he had befriended, bedded, and ultimately married his darling Amelia. A fellow doctor, she was equally destined for greatness and, in time, would become head of staff at a hospital close to Lyon, some distance from Paris.
She had given birth to a son, Charles. He was a healthy, bouncing boy until just after his first birthday when he started to show signs of destructive behaviour.
‘He’s just a baby, he’ll grow out of it,’ Amelia and Pierre both said. It was three months later when they had him diagnosed. They were both doctors and devoted parents. As parents, they wanted to believe his behaviour was normal; as physicians, they knew it wasn’t.
‘He’s bipolar,’ the paediatrician announced. Both were shocked; Amelia was inconsolable.
‘Where did we go wrong?’ she asked Pierre, half-accusing him.
‘It is not my fault,’ he replied.
In the next year or so, with Charles’ condition worsening and Amelia blaming Pierre, the marriage started to crumble. Intimacy with her had been virtually non-existent since that day at the paediatrician’s, and Pierre, a tactile and virile man, was left with no outlet for his needs.
‘I want to be with you, I want to share your bed,’ he would plead.
‘I have no time for such foolishness. There are our careers. There is Charles,’ she would say.
It had never been an overly passionate pairing of two people. They had loved each other fiercely in the year before Charles had come along, but she was a passive lover, whereas he was adventurous, always willing and wanting to experiment. She was basically a once a week, on a Saturday morning lover, while he was ready at anytime and anywhere, wherever and whenever the mood took him.
As infrequent and impassive as she was, she had kept him in check; and, whereas their bedtime activities were not always the most satisfying, he had managed to control his urges outside of marriage. He would see female patients, attractive women in the street, or at the cafe he would frequent during his work days and fantasise about making love to them.
With Amelia’s growing coldness, he could no longer hold back, he needed an outlet. The local prostitutes came to know him wel
l, and he quickly found his need becoming an irrational obsession.
One day, a female patient came to see him. She was in his room at the hospital; young, dark, with a short skirt and skimpy top and high on some recreational drug. She kept slipping into unconsciousness, unaware of her surroundings. How she had managed to find herself with a doctor was not fully understood.
It was then he committed the unforgivable; he took advantage of the situation. He betrayed a sacred trust that exists between patient and doctor. He touched her. At first, on the arm, then the leg, then the breast and then he put his hand between her legs.
What’s the harm? I can claim I was conducting a routine medical inspection, he thought.
The young woman revived and left; he was never sure as to what had been wrong with her, other than the drug she had ingested or inhaled. The indiscretion he had committed thrilled him to a level of ecstasy. It was more exhilarating than any of the romantic moments with Amelia. It far exceeded the laborious labouring on top of a fat, drunken tart down by the Bois de Boulogne.
He knew he had a problem. He had not been the top student at the medical school to not realise that he was debauched, an immoral and wicked person and that he could not stop.
Over the next couple of years, his lust for the prostitutes continued, but his desire to abuse the doctor-patient trust remained paramount. There were a few opportunities; sometimes, a woman would come in delirious, drunk, or full of drugs and he would avail himself. It could only have been eight or ten, and two of them were so far out of it that he had penetrated them. The last one, however, had somehow regained a degree of sanity while he was on top of her and had screamed ‘rape’.
‘You are a depraved and worthless man!’ Amelia screamed as she slammed the door in his face.
‘I have resigned my position at the hospital as a result of your actions,’ his father stated. ‘You are no longer welcome in my house.’
His career was over. Amelia divorced him, and he spent eighteen months behind bars before being released early for good behaviour. The bottle occupied him for a few years, but he was not really a drinker and coupled with the cost of alcohol and Amelia cleaning him out financially after the divorce, he was rendered almost penniless. She had a problem child and the judge had been generous in the extreme towards her. He tried selling insurance but was no salesman; he even tried labouring on a building site, but the other men were uncouth and loud-mouthed.
In time he drifted to the south of the country. He first saw the man lying on the street in Marseille, covered in blood and with his face lying in his own vomit.
‘What has happened? Let me help you,’ said Pierre. Destitute as he was, as dishevelled and unkempt as he appeared, he still retained the vestige of a doctor, a health giver.
‘They threw me out of the bar,’ the man replied.
‘I will get you some medical treatment,’ Pierre said, his licence having been revoked at the time of his conviction for patient violation.
‘Thank you, sir.’
The man, he took to Hopital Edouard Toulouse on Boulevard Danielle Casanova, not far from the docks. There, they sobered him and tended to his wounds. They were not severe, nor life-threatening.
‘You’ll live,’ the doctor said. ‘Just go easy on the wine for a few days.’
Discharged and looking fitter, Pierre’s new friend spoke. ‘I am Captain Alexandre Archambault. I owe you a debt of gratitude.’
‘It is not necessary.’
‘Nonsense, you look as though you could do with a good feed. Let me buy you lunch.’
The two men went to a small eatery not far from the hospital. After a good lunch and a bottle of red wine, they were firm friends. The captain failed to heed the hospital doctor’s warning.
‘You should have listened to the doctor,’ Pierre said.
‘They all say that. I can handle my drink.’
‘That’s not what I saw when I rescued you off the street.’
‘That was bad luck. I had a bet with the captain of another ship that I could down a full bottle of an unpleasant wine before him.’
‘Who won?’
‘I did, of course.’
‘Then why were you out on the street, lying in your own vomit?’
‘I am just a casualty of the love of the fermented grape. Let’s not talk about it anymore. Tell me about your life.’
‘There’s not much to tell.’
‘We are good friends here. I can see that you are an educated man down on his luck. What can I do to help?’
‘I am not sure there is much that you can do. My life has been on a downward spiral for some years. I cannot see how it can be changed.’
‘Do you have any money?’
‘Very little.’
‘Then, I can help. How would you fancy a trip out to sea?’
‘A trip out to sea? Yes, why not?’
‘I have a small boat, a tramp steamer. It moves around the Mediterranean taking cargo here and there. Would you be willing to come onboard and work for me?’
‘I have no experience of boats,’ said Pierre. ‘I may be seasick all the time. But yes, I would be pleased to come and work for you.’
‘Then it is settled. Let’s have another bottle of wine to celebrate.’
He spent two years sailing up and down the Mediterranean with the good captain; it was the first time since those events in Paris that he felt anything close to contentment. At each port, the captain would take off to sample the local wine while Pierre would take a different direction, the route to the nearest brothel. As fate would have it, they had docked in Algiers, the capital of Algeria on the northern coastline of Africa.
A fellow patron made idle conversation while waiting for Maria, a voluptuous and highly in-demand woman from Morocco, at the bordello favoured by sailors and Frenchmen down close to the water’s edge. ‘I’m looking for a partner for my medical practice,’
‘I am a doctor,’ he continued, ‘mainly French expatriates that have retired here, or have been left over from the days when France ruled the country. It’s a cushy number; they prefer a Frenchman to a local with their grubby hands. It’s mainly old people’s diseases and ailments, piles with the men, arthritis and incontinence with the woman. A few tablets, a few kind words, and they pay well enough for my regular visits to the best brothels in Algiers.’
‘Sounds ideal to me,’ said Pierre.
‘Ideal? It’s paradise. Are you interested?’
‘I don’t have much money.’
‘We can figure something out.’
‘Why so generous?’
‘Let’s talk later,’ replied the doctor. ‘Maria’s free and I’m horny.’
Later that night they met, Pierre Dupré, the disbarred doctor, and Docteur Auguste Lefevre.
‘I’ll be honest,’ said Auguste, ‘I’ve got cancer. Two years at most. I don’t want treatment or pity. I just want to go out with a bang. You give me a commission for every patient I send you, and I’ll be happy.’
‘Cancer can be treated,’ Pierre ventured.
‘Prostate, and what use am I afterwards, anyway? They’ll destroy the nerves in my dick. I won’t be able to get an erection. What kind of life is that?’ He shook his head. ‘Anyway, I would need to go to France for the treatment.’
‘Any issue with France?’
‘There’s a little issue back there. She was willing, and I was young and full of hormones. They don’t like it when you do it in your surgery, even if it’s harmless.’
‘Did she make a complaint?’
‘Complaint! Hell, no. She loved it. It was only when the receptionist came in. Silly old bat, I was planning to sack her. If I’d got rid of her a week earlier, I wouldn’t be here now.’
‘What did she do, the silly old bat?’ asked Pierre.
‘Only reported me to the ethics committee. They advised me to go and practice somewhere else.’
‘That was tough.’
‘It’s fine now. I much prefer my life
here, nobody asking too many silly questions. I just wish I had more than a few years. What about you? You must have a tale to tell. You wouldn’t be floating around in a rusty tub if you hadn’t committed some indiscretion, upset the sensibilities of a group of prudish old men.’
‘My story’s similar.’
‘No matter, I don’t need to know. Do you want to work with me?’
‘Yes, I would like that very much.’
In the short period that followed, Auguste went off to the brothel every day. Pierre made the money and joined him as often as he could. Both enjoyed their lives immensely. Auguste lived on for two and a half years more before they wheeled him out to the local Christian cemetery. Never had so many prostitutes gathered over one coffin as on that day.
Pierre continued with the surgery, his manner oozing charm, attracting more clientele than he could manage. His visits to the brothels were severely hampered by the demands of work, and his obsession was not being satisfied. It was at the end of an unusually long week that he received a new and unexpected patient.
‘We found her disorientated on the street,’ the Gendarme said. ‘She is French. We thought you were the best person to bring her to.’
A fresh-faced woman in her mid-twenties, it was clear she had experienced a bad trip with some cheap hashish. According to the passport she was carrying in her trouser pocket, her name was Yvonne. She was also very attractive and almost comatose. He had given her a sedative to calm her symptoms.
No one will know, a little examination can only be beneficial to my diagnosis, he thought.
She was lying on the examination bed in his surgery; he loosened her blouse.
I need to check her heartbeat, he said to himself.
It was then he saw her breasts, firm, proud and succulent. He could not resist; he fondled them warmly. With his blood hot and his erection firm, he loosened the belt on her jeans and eased them down to her ankles. Now, devoid of any restraint, he climbed on top of her.
At the moment of climax, a commotion at the door and in burst Michel, her boyfriend. Tall, strong and muscular, he pulled Pierre off and flung him to the ground. While Michel was temporarily occupied with caring for Yvonne, Pierre made a dash for the door. His worldly possessions amounted to very little and, grabbing his backpack, he rushed down the road. The distraught boyfriend attempted to follow, but he didn’t know the back streets, the alleys of the town, and Pierre quickly shook him off.
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