by Jack Mars
Camp New Hope
Diffa, Niger
It was like something out of a nightmare.
They had walked through the squalid camp for close to an hour now. They were armed, but they kept their guns out of sight. Here and there, they stopped to chat momentarily with people Dunn seemed to know. The people could speak a version of English, but it was clearly not their first language.
“These people are Kanuri,” Dunn said. “If left to their own devices, they speak either a Kanuri dialect or Hausa, but most people have at least a little English. In the south, everybody speaks it.”
Seen close up, the shelters were primarily patchworks of heavy fabric and animal skins mounted on four-sided skeletons of metal poles. They were about four feet high, and their insides were bare—little more than places for people to crawl into to sleep at night or get out of the blazing sun in the day.
Seen close up, the people stared out of wide, haunted eyes. Many were weak and listless, and lay on their sides inside their shelters. Many seemed like they hadn’t eaten in a long while. Others were just too traumatized to move.
There were missing legs, and missing arms. There were faces with eyes cut out and tongues cut out, faces deeply scarred by knives. There were women and girls who did not speak—they simply stared at something straight ahead, something that wasn’t there. Small children played nearby, ignored by their parents.
“This is when my blood starts to boil,” Dunn said. “And I start thinking about getting back into the forest.”
“I feel it,” Ed said.
The pull was nearly irresistible, and Dunn must have known that. But that wasn’t what they had come here for.
“Up here’s a new section,” Dunn said. “These people got here just the other day. Boko hit their village and abducted their girls out of the local school. You probably read about it in the pages of the New York Times.”
“Yeah,” Luke said. “We were briefed on it before we came.”
Dunn nodded. “It was a bad one. They took about a hundred girls. Killed the teachers, then firebombed everything. Chopped some people up with machetes. To save ammo, I imagine. The village is basically gone. The people walked here from thirty miles away. And that’s it. Where do they go from here?”
The villagers stared and stared. Their eyes were empty. No one was home.
“The damnable thing is I know where they took the girls.”
Luke’s head spun around.
“What?”
Dunn nodded again. “Yeah, man. I know where they are. I’m in contact with one of my buds from Executive Outcomes. English guy, big drinker. He’s got a guy in British intelligence. They watched the whole thing from the sky. Watched the girls get taken into the forest in jeeps and a couple of trucks. He gave me the location of the hideout. I confirmed it all with a Boko guy I caught in the camp here two nights ago. Right before I cut his heart out.”
“Why don’t the British tell somebody?”
“They did. They told the Nigerian government. But everything’s a payoff, and a shakedown, remember? I might have mentioned that before. And everything is diplomatic paralysis—Nigeria is a big country, and important to regional stability. Nobody wants to step on their toes. Meanwhile, the Nigerians don’t want to send their troops in there because somebody will tip off Boko that they’re coming and it’ll be a bloodbath.”
“What don’t you tell someone?” Ed said.
Dunn shrugged. “I told the American commander in Agadez. It’s not his mandate. I get that. You send Special Forces into Nigeria, it’s an invasion, not a rescue mission.”
He paused.
“Also, I just told you.”
“Jesus,” Luke said.
“Wait a minute,” Ed said. “I thought you said you went in there all the time and killed Boko by yourself.”
“I do. But I lie in wait, and I ambush patrols. I slice up stragglers. I shoot guys in the head while they’re taking a piss. Devil take the hindmost. I look for opportunities. If I don’t like what I see, I pass. You get it? But this is different. They’ve got at least thirty guys up there, in a small village they cleared out a while back. That’s where the girls are. I can’t take out thirty guys by myself.”
He raised a finger. “But…”
“The three of us,” Ed said.
“Yeah,” Dunn said. “Maybe. I don’t know. You guys have a reputation that precedes you. It could work. Or we could all get killed. Like I said, I don’t know. I don’t really care. I’d like to go for it, if you want.”
Luke took a deep breath. Ed was falling under this guy’s spell. They were starting to feed off each other. Didn’t Ed remember? They weren’t even sure who this guy was yet. And now Luke was forced to tell them all the reasons this little vigilante fantasy wasn’t going to happen.
Luke was going to be the adult here. He would describe how they were going to stick to the original plan, the one devised in Washington (and the one he had promised Susan they would follow)—locate the missing weapon, stay on this side of the border, send a surgical team in, secure the weapon, get in, get out.
“It’s not gonna happen, guys,” he said.
But just as he spoke, that was when the screaming began.
* * *
Somewhere right nearby, a bomb went off.
The ground shook and Luke was knocked off his feet. His ears were ringing instantly, as behind him red and orange flames reached the sky. It was so close, he didn’t even hear it. People were running now, their faces masks of terror—wild eyes, mouths hanging open in silent screams.
Luke rolled onto his back, drawing his sidearm in the same movement. Whatever it was, it was just one alley away.
He clambered to his feet, Ed and Dunn doing the same. He was just ahead of them, running between the shacks, the ground hard, the sun high and bright. People ran toward him, trying to get away.
He reached the edge of the last shelter in the line, and hung back. He glanced around the corner, where the flames were.
Several shelters were demolished, flattened, flaming pieces of them adrift on the hot breeze. A few were on fire. Body parts were strewn all over the place—legs, arms, a couple of torsos, a man’s head. The man’s eyes and mouth were wide open, as if he had been surprised right before he died. The ground was dark red with blood, spreading out in a splatter pattern, like a Rorschach test question.
Dunn was at Luke’s shoulder.
“A suicide bomber, it has to be,” he said, gasping for air.
He pointed.
“Jesus, there’s another one!”
It was a girl, maybe twelve or thirteen years old. She was thirty yards away, on the other side of the body parts. Her eyes were vacant and dazed. She wore a pretty blue kaftan with geometric patterns on it, circles and squares. Her head was not covered and her hair was cut short. She was barefoot. She wore a wide, thick leather belt around her waist, cinched tight, and secured with straps that also went over her shoulders.
People were screaming. They stood around her in a rough circle, carefully keeping their distance.
“We have to shoot her,” Dunn said. He already had his sidearm out.
Luke put his hand on Dunn’s gun hand and pushed it down.
“Wait,” he said.
Suddenly, a woman ran out of the crowd to the girl.
Someone screamed.
“No!”
The woman hugged the girl. Another person ran to them, a man.
BOOOM!
A jet of blood and flame went in every direction.
Luke ducked behind the shack, hitting the ground again. Ed was there, his hands on his head, his eyes blank, his jaw slack.
“What the hell was that? What the hell was that?”
The shelter they were hiding behind was on fire now. It collapsed, almost falling on top of them. They crawled away from it, moving like snakes across the hot, hard-packed earth. Blood was everywhere. Chunks of human flesh were everywhere.
A man in brown pants,
sandals, and a bloody short-sleeved dress shirt stood in the middle of the road. He was thin and balding. His left arm was gone halfway down his bicep. Whatever was left above it hung in a ragged stump. The big bone jutted out rudely. Blood poured out in freshets, an open fire hydrant of blood.
The man seemed confused. He took a few steps, then sank to his knees. An instant later, he fell sideways.
Luke crawled to him, but the man’s eyes had already set. They were wide open and staring. Luke felt for a pulse at his neck. It was there, but fading, fading…
Gone.
Luke jumped up and ran to the next shack, where Ed and Dunn were on the ground. He tumbled down next to them, then lay still for a moment, doing a body scan in his head. His breath came in harsh rasps.
Had he been hit? No, he didn’t think so. Was there any pain? Anything numb? No, but when he looked down at his uniform, it was soaked in blood. Slowly, his hands roamed his body, looking… for anything.
Nothing. He was all right. His ears were ringing, but he could still hear. He was okay. He took a deep slow breath.
He glanced at the other two. Ed’s eyes were hard and angry. His uniform was dirty, but clean of blood. He looked like he was ready to kill someone. He looked like he was ready to kill everyone.
“Stone, are you hit?” Ed said.
“No.”
“You’re lucky. You’re covered in blood. Other people’s blood.”
Luke nodded. “I know it.”
Luke was in something like shock. In more than twenty years of combat, he had never seen anything like that. He hadn’t even been able to anticipate it—he had watched it unfolding, and didn’t know what he was looking at until it was too late. A little girl, a civilian, a refugee, had just blown herself up, and taken a bunch of adults with her. The horror of it was too much to think about right now. It made no sense.
He looked at Dunn.
Dunn was sitting, his back to the plywood wall of the shack. His knees were up near his chest. His sunglasses were off, and he was crying. Tears streamed down his face, and he rubbed his eyes like a little boy.
Dunn was unhinged. That much was clear. Dunn might well be a liability out here.
“You gotta kill them,” he said to Luke. “Even the little girls. When you see them, you just have to shoot them in the head. It’s your fault, man. You should have let me shoot her.”
“What is going on here?” Luke said.
“Boko,” Dunn said. “When they steal the girls, they rape them, they beat them, they brainwash them. Sometimes they sell them. Sometimes they keep them. And sometimes they send them back as suicide bombers.”
“You mean the girls from last week…” Ed said.
Dunn shook his head. “No. It takes months to screw up a girl so bad that she’ll blow herself up. Those girls from last week are probably okay. I mean they’re hurt, all kinds of terrible things have happened to them by now, but they’re not… they’re not…”
He faltered, shook his head, and stared at the ground. He started crying again. His body shook with the force of his sobs.
“And you know where they are?” Ed said.
Dunn looked up. His eyes were bright red. His cheeks were wet.
“Yeah. I know where they are. Unless they already moved them, I know exactly where they are.”
Ed looked at Luke. He said nothing, but his eyes were full of meaning. There was anger in there, for sure, but these were not the bulging crazyman eyes Ed sometimes got. This was something different. Ed was a war machine, one of the best killers Luke had ever known. But he was also wise, and gentle in his own way, and he loved children. He had two daughters of his own.
Luke nodded. “Okay. Let’s get them.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
7:05 a.m. Eastern Standard Time
The Situation Room
The White House, Washington, DC
The room was abnormally subdued.
Susan walked in carrying her coffee, Kat Lopez with her step for step, three Secret Service agents—a woman and two men—surrounding them in a reverse-pyramid shape. Susan had barely slept, but she felt alert. She might not have slept at all, come to think of it. She wasn’t sure. She seemed to have reached a place where lack of sleep gave her more energy, not less.
She felt optimistic. The heavy paper cup in her hand was her third jolt of coffee in the past half hour, and that was part of it. Stone and his team were on the ground, and that was the other part. Susan wanted to put the problem of this missing weapon to rest.
Then she wanted Stone to come home.
Kurt Kimball was in his usual place at the head of the conference table. He seemed even larger than usual today—like he had somehow grown overnight. His broad chest looked like it wanted to burst out of his pale blue dress shirt. His tie seemed like it was cutting off the blood supply surging through that thick neck of his. His clothes didn’t fit him anymore. If his upper body wasn’t so big, his bald dome would seem like a bobblehead.
But his eyes were sharp as always. He once told Susan that he never slept more than four hours a night, and it was plenty for him. She believed it. He haunted this place like a ghost. No one who had a human need for sleep could be here anywhere near as much as Kurt was.
“Order,” Kurt said, perfectly calm. “Come to order. The President is here.”
It didn’t take much. Everyone was quiet already.
“What do you have for me, Kurt?” Susan said. She slid into her customary chair. The room was packed. Everyone looked bright and crisp. But no one was speaking. Susan glanced around at them. It was almost like everyone here knew something she didn’t know.
“What’s the trouble?”
“I’ve been in touch with Agent Stone’s team,” Kurt said.
“Yes, I know. You told me that an hour ago.”
Kurt nodded. “I spoke with Agent Swann, Stone’s computer systems person, again in the past ten minutes. There’s a problem.”
“Yes?” Susan said.
She felt the floor drop out from under her stomach. It took a sickening plunge. Blood seemed to be rushing to her face. Her entire body went numb. This was the feeling she’d had when she learned her daughter Michaela had been taken by kidnappers. This was the feeling she had never wanted to have again.
Kurt must have seen the look on her face. He raised a hand. “Agent Stone and Agent Newsam are alive.”
A long breath came involuntarily from Susan’s lungs. It almost sounded like she had gasped for air. She glanced around the room. All eyes were on her, thirty sets of eyes. Were they seeing this?
She had nearly passed out a second ago.
“So what is the problem?”
“I’m getting to that. Apparently, when Stone and his team reached Niger, they hit the ground running. Amy, can you give me Diffa, please?”
Kurt’s erstwhile assistant, Amy Pooler, scrolled through a screen on her tablet. Instantly, an aerial satellite map appeared on the large monitor behind Kurt, and on screens everywhere around the room.
The image showed what appeared to be desert, just north of a meandering river, which itself was bordered by a narrow belt of lush greenery on either side.
“The river you see is the border between Niger and Nigeria, Niger to the north, Nigeria to the south. The area of Nigeria is the extreme northeast, where Boko Haram acts with impunity. Amy, give me the camp, please.”
The image zoomed in on an area just north of the river. As the view came closer, a large, rudimentary settlement came into focus. Kurt pointed his laser beam on it.
“What you see is Camp New Hope. It’s a refugee camp for Nigerians displaced by the violence associated with Boko Haram, located on the Niger side of the border, just outside the village of Diffa. The camp is teeming, and is thought to have a population in the hundreds of thousands. It is now many times the size of Diffa, and is becoming increasingly difficult to supply and manage. We understand it is on the verge of a humanitarian crisis. Sanitation, potable water, food, and cross
-border night attacks by Boko Haram militants are all becoming problems.”
Kurt moved the laser to the right of the camp.
“Just to the east, and slightly south, this small settlement is a United States military forward operating base, manned by Army Special Forces, in cooperation with the air force of Niger, who lend helicopter support. It is very close to the border.”
“If Special Forces are stationed there,” Susan said, “why don’t they stop the attacks?”
Haley Lawrence was sitting two people to her right. He was also very large, but in a different way from Kurt. He was tall, and he had gained quite a bit of weight during his time as Secretary of Defense. At one time, he had looked like an oversized tow-headed boy. Now he looked like an oversized blond-haired potato.
“There are sovereignty issues, Susan,” he said. “Those troops are guests of the Nigerien government. Niger is a patchwork of tribes, some of whom are not thrilled to have American troops stationed in their country. It’s better for them to keep a low profile. Also, there are only a handful of troops deployed there, and thousands of Boko Haram in the region just across that river. If our people engaged Boko Haram, they could find themselves in the fight of their lives.”
“Wonderful,” Susan said. “Then why have them there?”
“It’s a chess piece,” Kurt said. “It’s a foothold.”
“Wonderful,” Susan said again. Then she changed the subject to the item highest on her agenda. “What about Stone?”
Kurt nodded. “Agents Stone and Newsam, with their local guide, landed at the forward operating base approximately ninety minutes ago. For reasons unknown, the guide led them on a tour of the refugee camp, a significant departure from the mission as originally planned. While they were onsite, two suicide attacks, bombings, took place in rapid succession, leaving at least nine dead and two dozen wounded.”
“Jesus,” Susan said.
“The attacks had all the earmarks of Boko Haram activity,” Kurt said. “Stone, Newsam, and their guide witnessed the attacks, but were unhurt. However, when I talked to Swann and inquired about Stone’s current whereabouts, as well as the progress of the original mission, Swann said he was not authorized to discuss it.”
