by Jack Mars
She looked at him then, really looked at him, in his crew cut, and his dress shirt, slacks, and crazy John Lennon tie. He was square-jawed and handsome, but not the most handsome man she had ever met. How could he be? She had been a fashion model once upon a time, meeting and mingling with some of the best-looking men on Earth.
Stone was tall and he was fit and strong, but clearly other men were bigger and stronger than he was. He was athletic and he was smart, but other people… she didn’t need to go any further, she got the picture. Stone was remarkable in many ways, but he wasn’t Superman. How did he manage to survive the things that he did?
“I just worry that one day your luck will run out.”
He smiled, and he came to her then. “My luck will never run out,” he said, “and I’ll tell you why. Because it isn’t luck.”
They embraced, and he was nearly a full head taller than her. She slid her arms around his muscular back.
“Anyway, this isn’t really an operation, at least not for me. You heard the generals. We’ve got more than eight hundred military personnel in that area of the world, including at least a hundred special operators. The generals are going to pick the best of the best from the people they have. Those folks are going to get this weapon, whatever it is. My team is just going to dig up information and provide civilian oversight, which is something you say you want. No more surprises. No more units out there stepping all over fragile relationships and running amok. No more bodies coming home from operations no one even knew existed.”
She nodded. “That sounds good. Tell me more.”
He shook his head. “That’s all I know.”
She felt a familiar heat rising in her body now, as she pressed against him. She turned her head up to him and they kissed, long and deep. It was nice.
It was better than nice. It was hot.
She pulled away from him just a bit. Her hand reached up and grabbed him by John Lennon. She pulled on it playfully.
“Say, Agent Stone?” she said.
“Yes?”
“What time is your flight?”
He shrugged. “Whenever my team is ready. Seven o’clock? Eight? The sooner the better, really.”
She pulled on his tie again, harder than before.
“Do you have a little time for a secret closed door meeting with your President?”
He reached up and undid the top button of his shirt. Then he smiled. But his eyes were the eyes of a wolf, a predator, closing in on something tasty to eat.
“I always have time for one of those.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
8:35 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
The Skies Above the Atlantic Ocean
“Are you guys ready for this?” Luke said.
“Born ready,” Ed Newsam said.
“Back in the saddle,” said Mark Swann.
The six-seat Lear jet screamed north and east across the night sky. The jet was dark blue with the Special Response Team seal on the side. Ahead of it was nothing but darkness. Behind it, fading fast into the distance, were the bright twinkling lights of the United States of America. Far below, the ocean was vast, endless, and black. Luke gazed out his window—he couldn’t see anything but a blinking light on the wing.
Inside the plane, Luke and his team easily fell back into old habits—they used the front four passenger seats as their meeting area. They stowed their luggage and their gear in the seats at the back.
Luke glanced around at his team. In the seat next to him sat big Ed Newsam, in khaki cargo pants and a long-sleeved SRT T-shirt. Ed was steely-eyed, huge, as eternal as a mountain, and his job was weapons and tactics. Ed was older now, certainly. There were lines on his face, especially around the eyes, that hadn’t been there before. And his hair wasn’t as jet-black as it used to be—there were a few gray and white strands running around loose in there.
But Ed had been working out recently. People who encountered him in the SRT gym during early mornings said he was hitting the weights like an animal, maybe like nothing they’d ever seen before. And he had changed his diet. He was lighter than he had been in a while, and more defined. To Luke’s mind, Ed might be the fittest he’d ever seen him. That was impressive. His flawless takedown of Mustafa Boudiaf this morning had also been impressive.
Across from Luke and to the left, facing him, was Mark Swann, the former hacker. He had been busted by the FBI long ago, and became a government systems analyst in exchange for leniency. He looked like anything other than a federal agent. His black-framed glasses were Donna Karan. His hair was pulled into a long ponytail. He wore a T-shirt depicting a sepia-toned Teddy Roosevelt holding a bright red can of Coke. He stretched his long legs out into the aisle, an old pair of ripped jeans with a red flannel lining on his skinny legs, with a pair of heavy LL Bean boots as an obstacle for any passersby. His feet were huge.
Swann was more serious now than when Luke met him—being mock-executed and then nearly beheaded as a prisoner of ISIS would do that to a person. The rapid-fire snark and the ironic commentary still found their way out of his mouth from time to time, but much less than in the past. On the one hand, that was sad. On the other hand, the old Swann used to make jokes at wildly inappropriate times. Luke didn’t miss that.
Then there was Trudy Wellington, the science and intel officer. She was dressed casually in jeans, a blue Cape Cod sweater, and fuzzy socks. She had kicked off her boots when they got on the plane. She watched Luke with big eyes. She had hardly spoken since they had taken off from Joint Base Andrews.
Trudy… what went on inside that mind of hers?
“So what’s the plan, Stan?” Mark Swann said.
Luke glanced out his window. The sun was hours behind them now, the day long gone. Hours from now, as they moved further east, the sky would begin to brighten. He checked his watch. In Nigeria, it was already coming up on three in the morning. Watching the clock gave him the sense of events surging out ahead—a familiar feeling, but one of his least favorite aspects of the job. It was a race against time. It was always a race against time, and they were already behind.
The weapon that had been stolen was on the move, heading deeper into northeastern Nigeria, Boko Haram territory, beyond their reach. Or maybe it had left the country. Drones were scouring the skies over Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon. They were watching the Lagos waterfront and the Gulf of Guinea, but by the time this plane had taken off, there was no news, no sighting of anything.
Luke had been awake too long. He had a lot weighing on him—Gunner, Susan, the agency. The ghosts of the past. His mind did not feel particularly sharp.
“I guess that’s what we’re about to find out. Trudy?”
She shrugged, seemed noncommittal. She picked up the iPad from her lap. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to assume no prior knowledge.”
“Sounds all right to me,” Luke said. “Boys?”
“Good,” Swann said.
“Let’s hear it,” Ed said. “Story time.” His body, so quick and strong, had a gift for total relaxation. He eased deep into his seat. If he sank much lower, he might ooze bonelessly onto the floor.
“Boko Haram,” Trudy said, “are as bad as this kind of thing gets. They are like savage comic book villains brought to life.”
* * *
“Civilian massacres are just the start,” she said. “Suicide bombings, mass kidnapping and mass rapes, sexual slavery and human trafficking, not to mention the use of child soldiers—there is almost no limit to what Boko Haram is capable of. Just to touch on that child soldier issue, Boko has an estimated ten thousand fighters, and four thousand of them are thought to be children. The group professes an extreme version of Salafi Islam, with an apocalyptic, end-of-days vision tacked on for good measure, and their stated goal is to institute Sharia law in all of Nigeria.”
Trudy paused. “In the local Hausa dialect, the words Boko Haram mean ‘Western education is forbidden.’ This, combined with the fact that they believe girls shouldn’t be educate
d at all, and should marry beginning at the age of nine, helps to explain their continuing attacks on schools, and abductions of young girls. Since the insurgency became violent in 2009, more than fifty thousand people have been killed, the vast majority of them civilians, and at least three thousand girls and women have been kidnapped, most of whom have never been seen again. More than a hundred more girls were kidnapped a week ago, and their village burned to the ground. Safe to say that Boko Haram has made life a living hell for the people of northeastern Nigeria.”
Luke drifted a bit as Trudy launched into the history of Nigeria and how Boko Haram came to be. He knew this stuff was important, but Luke was tired, going on three hours’ sleep from the night before. He thought about Gunner, and about Susan, and about Becca. He thought about the last time he had visited Sub-Saharan Africa—a highly classified commando airdrop into the Congo to take out the leader of a child army.
Don Morris had been free at that time. In fact, Don Morris had led that drop—this was all before the SRT came into existence. If Luke just closed his eyes, it seemed he could relive that mission. But that would mean he was asleep.
Instead, he focused on Trudy. She sat back in her seat, relaxed in the glow of the tablet in front of her. The lights in the cabin were dimmed. It was like they were all sitting around a campfire.
“Nigeria is split nearly fifty-fifty between Christians and Muslims,” Trudy said. “Historically, people in the south and on the coast had contact with seafaring Europeans, and became Christians. People in the interior—in the north and the extreme northeast where Boko is from—had contact with the Arab world and became Muslims.”
“Two different worlds,” Swann said.
Trudy nodded. “Practically. Nigeria is a wealthy country. It recently passed South Africa as the largest economy in Sub-Saharan Africa. But the wealth is concentrated in the Christian south, especially in Lagos. Nigerians, not to mention people from all over the continent, tend to see Lagos the way Americans once saw New York—if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. Industry, the arts, the glittering nightlife—Lagos is where it’s at.”
“And somehow that money doesn’t find its way to the Muslim north,” Ed said.
Trudy nodded. “Of course not. And even in the north, in what was once the ancient Borno Empire, what wealth and power there is tends to be concentrated in the hands of the dominant Hausa tribe.
“The vast majority of Boko Haram recruits are young men from the Kanuri tribe, with one important distinction. They are the urban underclass, slum dwellers, particularly from the city of Maiduguri in the far northeast, which is where Boko started. They are the bottom of the bottom, with no prospects for the future, and until recently, utterly ignored by the Nigerian state.
“Yes, they kill Hausa and people from other Muslim tribes. Yes, they kill Christians when the opportunity arises. Of course, they kill the police and the military. But included in all the indiscriminate killing, they have also been systematically wiping out the Kanuri upper class—technically, their own people. They also kill rural Kanuris, whose religion is more of a blend of Islam and traditional African religions. Boko is happy to kill anyone whose version of Islam doesn’t dovetail with their own. Since almost no one shares their views, almost everyone is a potential target. As a result, the only people who don’t hate Boko Haram…”
Ed finished her thought for her. “Are the people in Boko Haram.”
Trudy nodded. “Bingo. Which is why, in recent years, they were nearly destroyed by the Nigerian military. Local people won’t protect them. No one wants them there. Their last stronghold is the vast, dense Sambisa Forest. The military made a concerted effort to flush them out beginning in 2015, and announced that they had done so in late 2016. But it wasn’t true. How could it be?”
She scrolled through a couple of items on her screen.
“Sambisa is gigantic, bordering on and spilling deep into Cameroon, as well as Chad. It comes nearly to the border with Niger. It’s almost absurdly hostile terrain—dry, hot, mountainous Sahel forest and savannah, with few roads, grasses six feet high, and woods so dense and overgrown it’s like nighttime in the middle of the day. Poisonous snakes are a constant threat, along with the occasional attacks by swarms of African killer bees.
“There are villages in the forest, but they’re few and far between, and the people are suspicious of outsiders—they hate Boko, but the last thing they’ll do is give information to Nigerian government troops, who themselves have a reputation for systematic human rights violations, including rape, torture, and murder. The only way to dislodge a guerrilla army from that forest would be through a Vietnam War–style defoliation campaign, which in this day and age would cause a worldwide outcry.”
She shook her head. “No, Boko is back in the forest, if they ever left, and once again launching attacks from there. Last week’s kidnappings took place less than five miles from the eastern edge of the forest. They’re in there, and they’re willing to advertise their presence. That suggests to me that they’re confident they’ve regained at least some of their strength.”
“So that’s where the stolen weapon went?” Luke said. “Into the Sambisa Forest?”
He didn’t like the sound of that. It was what everyone in Washington seemed to believe, but he wanted to hear it from Trudy.
Trudy looked at him. “Assuming it got off the ship? Yes, I believe so.”
Now she was playing coy, hedging her bets a little. That wasn’t like her. Why talk about the forest if the weapon was still at the docks?
“Did it get off the ship?” he said. “What’s your gut?” What he could have said was “Earn your keep.”
She stared at him for a long minute. She didn’t consult her tablet—the answer wasn’t in there. And she didn’t look at Swann or Ed, either. Those guys never pressured her for this kind of information. It wasn’t their department. But it was probably the most important question of the night.
“Yes,” she said finally.
“Okay,” Luke said. “Why?”
“Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda are no longer allies. Boko and ISIS are no longer allies. Hard as it may be to fathom, Boko is too extreme even for those guys. Their most recent alliance was with ISIS, and it disintegrated because ISIS commanded them to stop indiscriminately killing Muslim civilians. Boko refused. Al-Qaeda parted ways with them for similar reasons years ago.
“Boko has no allies. If they’ve acquired the weapon, and they’re deliberately keeping it from Al-Qaeda, either for money, to use it in an attack, or just to be a pain in the butt, they can’t leave it at the docks in southern Nigeria. They have no reach there. They can’t protect it. News travels fast, and within a short time, lots of people would know where it was. Boko could try to pay people off, but that wouldn’t last long. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb is considered the wealthiest terrorist organization in the world, and they want their toy back. In Lagos, money talks, and Al-Qaeda could outspend Boko by orders of magnitude. If they want to sell it, or keep it for themselves, Boko would have to move that thing, and fast.”
“Why not send it back out to sea?” Ed said.
Trudy shook her head. “Send it where? Boko is a landlocked movement. It exists nowhere else but northeastern Nigeria, with the occasional incursions into Niger, Chad, and Cameroon. And the Gulf of Guinea is full of pirates. No. They brought it inland, to the one place on Earth they still control.”
She stared directly at Luke again. “If you want that weapon, or whatever it is, you’ll find it in Sambisa Forest. I feel certain of that.”
Luke looked at Ed. Ed shook his head. It was clear he didn’t want to go in that forest any more than Luke did.
“Well, that’s great news,” Ed said.
“What about Al-Qaeda?” Luke said.
* * *
“You all know about Al-Qaeda,” Trudy said. “Luke, you were in Al-Qaeda at one time, were you not?”
Luke shrugged. The ghost of a pained smile passed across his lips.<
br />
“Something like that,” he said. “If you want to think of it that way.”
More than a decade ago, he had infiltrated a small terrorist cell, an offshoot of Al-Qaeda operating in Iraq. The militants thought Luke was an American sympathizer who wanted to join the global jihad. He didn’t like to think of that time in his life—he had been working far outside the bounds of civilization, all by himself, dealing with people who had no sense of normal human decency. In the end he had killed them, all of them, to save the life of an Iraqi doctor and his two small daughters.
Then his cover was blown, and it took a killing spree to get himself and his new charges out of the country alive.
“Well, we’ve all done things we’re not proud of,” Trudy said, still teasing him, but maybe not understanding just how close to home she was hitting.
“Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM for short, is a splinter group and an ally of the larger Al-Qaeda operating in the Middle East, Europe, and the rest of the world. To define our terms, the Maghreb is the northern tier countries of Africa—Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya—basically all of North Africa except Egypt. The area corresponds roughly with the ancient Berber empire, and AQIM’s goal has been to restore the Islamic caliphate in this region.
“The movement was started by battle-hardened Al-Qaeda militants returning to their home countries from the wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Iraq. In Algeria and Tunisia, and to a lesser extent Morocco, they were able to use long-simmering hatred of the French, and Western culture in general, as a recruiting tool. They didn’t get far in Libya until very recently—when Qaddafi was alive, he kept a tight lid on them. In retrospect, we may have done them a favor when we encouraged his overthrow.”
“Blowback will hurt you like that,” Ed said.
