Hunt the Leopard

by Don Mann

  He wouldn’t stop until the bodies were piled all the way to the sun, and the oceans turned red with blood.

  This was his mission. It was how he chose to live. He harbored no dreams or illusions of a comfortable life and family. Those were for weak men, who were afraid of death and refused to bow in reverence to God.

  Crocker rode in the passenger seat of the lead Land Cruiser with Moxie at the wheel, Akil on the bench behind him, and another Brit, Rufus, manning the .50-cal in the turret in back. They were in pursuit of the Bokos, who zigzagged through the thick foliage to their left, stopping occasionally to drop and fire. Rufus complained that it was hard to fix a target with the continuing rainfall and darkness.

  The .50-cal reverberated in Crocker’s ears. Concerns swirled through his head, and though his mind and body begged to rest, he was trying to separate the trivial from the most important. First priority was to recover the wounded. Second, to gather his men.

  He’d be more than happy to take out more Boko Haram insurgents if the opportunity presented itself. Punish the bastards. No QRF or medevac was coming. That was clear.

  More incompetence, and lack of will…And politics, maybe…

  He didn’t know. The .50-cal clamored again. Shouts of anguish emerged from the bush.

  “Got one!” Rufus grunted.

  Crocker struggled to make sense of everything that had happened since they’d left the base. The jeep hit a pothole and lurched right.

  Lack of will is a theme here, he thought, trees and shadows flying past. You can’t let religious fanatics and sociopaths hurt good people and get away with it.

  Every time he’d seen that happen, something worse followed. He’d try explaining that to Nigerian military leaders if he got the chance.

  Then he remembered his daughter, Jenny, back in Virginia, and the promise he had made to her to watch her college graduation via Skype. It would be taking place tomorrow. He wanted to, of course, and was supremely proud of her accomplishment, but couldn’t think about that now.

  He had teammates to recover and injured men to attend to. And he only had the foggiest idea of where they were.

  Akil, in the backseat, was trying to reach CT on the radio. “CT…CT, this is Romeo. Can you hear me? CT, CT, can you hear me? Respond!”

  Hearing CT’s name reminded him that they had come by helicopter, and Boko Haram had arrived in jeeps and trucks.

  “They came in trucks…” he said out loud.

  “Who, mate?” Moxie, from East London, asked. “The Bokos?”

  “Yeah. Parked ’em near here, I think.” He was trying to mark time traveled and bends in the road. “A clearing off this path. I’m pretty sure it’s ahead.”

  “How far?” Moxie shouted from behind the wheel.

  “Feels close. That’s probably where they’re headed now.”

  “How many?”

  Trying to focus. “Vehicles? Four or five trucks and jeeps.”

  “Four jeeps, two trucks,” Akil corrected him.

  “What about you Yanks?”

  “What about us?”

  Akil leaned over the seat, and cut in. “We came in a Nigeria military helicopter that crashed about 150 meters to the left. Three casualties…Some wounded.”

  “Wounded…they make it out?” asked Moxie, taking his eyes off the road for a second to glance over his shoulder.

  The vehicle hit a puddle, bounced hard, and sent up a thick stream of water and mud that doused Crocker through the open window.

  Crocker held on, and tried to remember…They had left Gator, CT, and Major Martins hiding near the clearing. They were missing someone…

  Mancini! Fuck…

  He turned back to Akil.

  “Where’s Manny? Where’s Tiny?”

  “Tiny stayed back in Yola.”

  “What about Manny?”

  Akil leaned close so that his face was inches from Crocker’s. “Last time I saw him, he was firing on the other side of the clearing. Covering our asses…The terrorists were chasing him…”

  Big emotions gathered in Crocker’s chest. “We gotta turn back! Our teammate is back there!”

  “Now, mate?”

  “Yeah, now. Turn around!”

  Chichima had remained so still that her body was practically frozen. She’d listened from under the truck as a battle waged in the distance, as things exploded and men shouted, and her friends moaned and wept around her. Now she wanted to yield to the mud, and let the earth take her away to another place. But a part of her resisted and vibrated with a kind of incandescence and buoyancy that filled her entire being.

  God, why won’t you receive me?

  The resistance was like an energy deep inside her telling her to remain alert and listen, and if she did, she would heal and evolve. It spoke in a woman’s voice like her mother’s.

  Heal and evolve to what? I’m practically dead…I have nothing left…

  Her mother had told her about the female energy that was part of Odinani, the source of all things.

  She imagined Odinani speaking to her now, telling her to remain calm. The future would be what Chichima determined it to be. Whether she chose to live in the body her spirit occupied now was unimportant. In this life she had called to herself the experiences that she needed to learn and evolve.

  “Let go, child. Relax…”

  These were ideas expressed by her mother that she had judged as primitive and had rejected. They clashed with the concept of a redeemer God she had embraced as part of Christianity.

  Chichima heard the voice again, gentle and reassuring.

  “Let go, child…Let go of all thoughts and fears…”

  It was easier to do now that she had been stripped of everything—pride, vanity, chastity, and even a sense of identity.

  So she surrendered, and instead of sinking into hopelessness she experienced the buoyancy of something else. A fighting, almost defiant, force that burned deeper than her personality and education.

  It told her that the father spirits had pushed her into the mud, and now it was up to her to fight her way out, resuscitate the female spirit, and restore a balance that could only be reached in the heart.

  She listened as the Boko Haram fighters returned to the clearing. Their agitated voices, and their boots plied the ground. She heard them whisper to one another as they formed some kind of plan. Then she saw one fighter with a long, black beard poke his head under the front truck, heard him cock his weapon, and she intuited what would come next.

  A voice in her head commanded simply, Run!

  She propelled herself on her belly toward the rear of the truck, whispering to her friends along the way. “Follow me, now! Come!”

  Some followed, others didn’t. The guns went off like little explosions. She squirmed under the drive shaft, poked her head out the back, gathered her feet under her, and started hurrying toward the trees. The mud made it impossible to run. She kept pushing. A bullet tore into the flesh of her shoulder, feeling like a dozen hornet stings at once.

  She continued pushing, clawing at the mud with her hand, and reached the trees. Then she tumbled over a fallen stump and hit her head. When she looked up she saw girls gathered around her.

  She distinguished Navina’s voice like a prayer. “Chichima, I’m with you.”

  “Navina, I’ll always be with you, too…”

  Hands helped her up onto her knees. The girls huddled together like one quivering mass.

  All their voices whispered at once: “Are they coming? Have they stopped? Why did they bring us here? Will they make sure we’re all dead?”

  Navina said, “You’re bleeding. I’ll tie my scarf around it to stop the blood. I hate this scarf anyway.”

  She smiled inside.

  “Chichima…”

  “Chichima, is it bad?”

  “Shh!” she said. “They will hear us.”

  Minutes of silence passed and the only sound was their breathing and the beating of their hearts. Then she heard a truck
engine start, tires slipping in the mud and gaining traction, and the truck and the other vehicles departing. Then silence. A long silence like a sigh. The rustling of leaves. The plaintive call of a dove.

  Beside her, Navina whispered, “Did they leave? Did they abandon us in the jungle? I don’t trust my ears anymore…Is that what you heard?”

  “Quiet…It will be okay…”

  Silence returned. The rain and shooting had stopped. The clearing ahead started to lighten. The sun was rising and its light obliterated the darkness like it always did.

  Relief filled Chichima’s chest. “Wait here…”

  Ignoring the pain from her shoulder, she inched forward toward the clearing, hid behind a bush, and looked. The trucks were gone. So were the men. She counted to twenty before she poked her head out and saw tire tracks leading back to the road, and the bodies of half a dozen girls. No men.

  Chichima covered her mouth and stepped back behind the bush, pausing for a moment as her mind bounced back and forth between the polarities of relief and horror. Then turning, she called to the other girls. “Come…The men are gone! The men have left! Come see…”

  Navina was the only one with the courage to join her. She lowered her eyes when she spotted the bodies of their friends.

  “Why?” she whispered.

  Chichima hugged her, and Navina spoke the same sentiment Chichima was experiencing, but couldn’t put into words. “Is it over? Is it really over, Chichima? Will it ever be over?”

  “One day…Yes.”

  They found Mancini near the wreckage of the Ambazonian trucks, covered with scratches and bruises, mumbling to himself. “There was a road…I can’t seem to find it…I turned the corner and got lost…” He was still hugging the AK to his chest.

  Crocker pulled it away. “Easy, big guy…It’s Crocker. You can chill now. We got your back.”

  Manny seemed to be in a mild state of shock, turning this way and that, a confused look in his eyes. “Cherry Lane…Cherry Lane…was here…I saw it…Now it’s gone. How’d that happen?”

  Crocker put his arm around his shoulder. Cherry Lane was the street in Dam Creek where he lived. “It’s okay, Manny. We’ll get you home.”

  “You will?”

  “I promise.”

  “Tonight?”

  “Not tonight, but soon.”

  The scene around them was grim. Smoldering carcasses of trucks. The bodies of twelve men, some burnt, some so torn apart that it was hard to recognize them as human.

  Manny, seated on the running board of one of the Land Cruisers, claimed to have killed six on the embankment, and another three or four as they escaped into the bush.

  “You did good, Manny. You saved our asses,” Crocker said as he helped him up and into the backseat of the truck.

  “I…I gotta call Carmen,” Manny whispered, “let her know I won’t be home for dinner. You see my cell?”

  “No, but it won’t work here anyway, big man. No service.”

  “AT&T sucks…”

  “Sure does…Watch your head.”

  Akil cleared a place for him and handed him an MRE and bottle of water. “Drink up, bad ass…”

  Manny gulped it down and asked for another. He seemed to be suffering from dehydration.

  “Bloody mangle…” Moxie commented as he walked beside Crocker, surveying the damage around the trucks. All that was left of the first three were chassis, melted rims, and empty metal boxes. It appeared as though the BHs had dragged away some of the ammo. Most of them hadn’t gotten very far into the bush thanks to the .50-cals on the Land Cruisers.

  Bodies, discarded rifles, machine guns, and belts of AK rounds lay scattered in a long oval.

  “They Bokos?” Moxie asked, nodding toward the bodies.

  “Some Bokos, some Ambazonians…” muttered Crocker.

  “Strange bedfellows…”

  “Some remaining AK ammo in the last truck,” red-haired Rufus reported.

  “Probably best to light it up.”

  “Let’s wait on that until we find our men…” Crocker remembered CT, Gator, and Major Martins waiting on the west side of the clearing.

  Just twenty seconds later, the second Land Cruiser radioed that they’d located them. Gator was alive but in bad shape, and Major Martins hadn’t made it.

  “I’m real sorry to hear that.”

  “Ironic that his own military never bothered to help him,” groaned Akil.

  “How bad is Gator?” Crocker asked through the radio.

  “He’s in a lot of pain.”

  “You try reaching the TOC in Yola?”

  “They’re not responding.”

  “Fucking cowards…”

  Chapter Twelve

  “He who fears the sun will not become chief.”

  —Ugandan proverb

  S’mores anyone?” Akil asked as new flames rose from the wreckage behind them.

  It wasn’t a joyous time, but Crocker couldn’t help but crack up. It was a way of relieving tension, and soon laughter reverberated throughout Land Cruiser One as it proceeded west on the dirt road—now deep puddles and mud. Then the fireworks started outside, rockets igniting, rounds exploding.

  “East African version of a ten-gun salute,” Akil commented.

  “Not funny,” Crocker said as he reloaded his long gun and pistol. “Major Martins had a wife and family. Stay alert.”

  He imagined how they would react to the news, and wondered whether the Nigerian government would take care of them.

  Moxie and Scott—the drivers of the two Toyota Land Cruisers—arranged to rendezvous at a bend in the road up ahead. And Scott, in Two, reported that it looked like the Bokos had fled.

  “Can you confirm that?” asked Crocker.

  “From the little promontory we’re on now, it looks like two jeeps, two trucks speeding northwest…Maybe fifty meters ahead…Should we make pursuit?”

  “That’s a negative…Gotta get the wounded back to base.” Gator, in truck two, needed a hospital.

  “Copy…”

  Before they left the area, Crocker, in truck one, wanted to inspect the clearing where the Boko Haram vehicles had staged. See if they’d left clues to the location of their hideout or future plans—maybe a laptop, notebook, phones, etc.

  “You sure we have time for this?” Moxie asked as the Land Cruisers continued and the sound of the exploding ordnance faded behind them.

  Crocker held up five fingers. “Five minutes.” Adrenaline coursing through his system again, he told Moxie and the others, “Keep an eye out for stragglers…or surprises.”

  Scanned the rain forest through the bulletproof glass for moving shadows, the flash of a muzzle. Before they reached the rendezvous location, Moxie spotted the top of a vehicle in a clearing to the left and applied the brakes.

  “Ten o’clock!”

  It looked like a tan SML Isuzu transport truck with Pepsi stenciled across the hood. “What the bloody hell is this? Soda delivery out in the sticks?”

  “Stolen, most likely,” replied Crocker.

  “How come Cruiser Two didn’t report this?”

  “Scott is daft. Might have seen it and didn’t think it was important. Probably in a hurry to get home and Skype some chick.”

  “Wait here, and cover,” Crocker said, stepping out. Akil followed.

  They approached carefully, weapons ready, and stopped at the entrance to the clearing. Signaled back to Rufus in the turret. Continued through thick mud sucking at the soles of their boots, scanning left and right, up and down.

  Akil pointed to something ahead—the body of a woman facedown in the mud.

  Crocker’s heart sunk. Steps closer, he leaned in, and saw that she’d been shot multiple times in the back. Took her pulse. Nothing. Followed the same procedure with five other female bodies near the truck. All dead.

  Fucking savages…

  It reminded him of photos of Jonestown after Reverend Jim Jones and his followers drank poisoned Kool-Aid. Add this to
the list of things he’d seen but hoped to forget.

  Akil shook his head. “What a waste…”

  “Disgusting…” Groaned through gritted teeth.

  Crocker assumed these bodies were the remaining kidnapped schoolgirls that Boko Haram was going to use to trade for the arms and weapons. Were there more in the nearby bush? He remembered seeing about a dozen women from the air.

  They did nothing to deserve this.

  It pissed him off that the Nigerian authorities hadn’t done more, or responded quicker. Crocker had a daughter, too. He saw a pink plastic sandal stuck in the mud, watched Akil poke his head in the cab of the truck and come out holding a key and a walkie-talkie.

  Akil held the radio up to Crocker. “Look…”

  Crocker waved his hand up and down to indicate quiet, without knowing why specifically. Either from concern about Boko stragglers hiding in the trees, or out of respect for the dead. It was time to move on.

  As he turned back to the Land Cruiser, he had an eerie feeling he was being watched. Sniffed the air and surveyed the foliage at eleven o’clock. Gestured back to Rufus at the .50-cal to cover and saw him swing the big gun around.

  Froze for twenty seconds and heard nothing. Soon as he took a step, he saw something move in his periphery. Went to one knee and held up a fist to indicate to Akil to stop.

  Shadows shifted and a shape slowly emerged from the foliage. The mud-covered form looked like an apparition. When it reached the sunlight, he recognized it was a woman, half bent over, wearing a dark robe.

  “Careful,” Akil whispered, “she might be wearing an explosive vest.”

  Crocker sensed she wasn’t a threat. Held up a hand to signal her to halt. “Stop right there.”

  The young woman obeyed, and replied in English, “I don’t have a bomb. I don’t have a weapon. I’m a Nigerian student. I was kidnapped by Boko Haram twenty-two months ago. Who are you?”

  “We’re Americans. American soldiers. We’ve come to rescue you. To take you back to your family,” Crocker said. “Are you alone?”

  She looked confused. “Americans?”