by Jack Mars
They moved in single file, Dunn in the lead, Ed next, Luke in the rear, each man wearing night vision goggles, the forest around them glowing green. They encountered trails and pathways from time to time, but Dunn ignored them—the trails were booby-trapped. Instead they pushed through dense bush, obstacles slowing them to a crawl.
At one point, Dunn stopped.
He stood completely still for what seemed like a long time. Too long.
Luke and Ed moved forward until they were nearly flanking him. Luke was on Dunn’s right. He tapped Dunn hard on the shoulder.
Dunn turned to him. He let go of a long, slow exhale. The look on his face seemed to suggest pain. Pain yes, but pain mixed with something else—frustration?
With his head and his eyes he gestured down at his right leg.
Luke followed his gaze, then jumped back about four feet. For a moment, his heart galloped in his chest. In the stillness of the forest, he could hear his own heart pounding.
A large snake had wrapped itself around Dunn’s leg. Luke popped his night vision sights up. Instantly the world came into its normal dark focus. The snake was very thick, mostly yellow with shades of dark brown. It was halfway up Dunn’s thigh, slowly undulating its way north toward Dunn’s torso. Its tongue darted in and out.
Luke glanced at the forest floor. The body of the snake extended another ten feet across the ground. It was a BIG snake.
Ed came around Dunn’s side. He peered down at the massive snake. He popped his goggles up.
Dunn took another deep breath. He pointed at Luke. With both hands, he made a sudden grabbing gesture at his own throat and under his chin. Then he moved his hands away from his body.
Luke understood. He didn’t like it, but he understood it.
Dunn pointed at Ed and made a quick slashing gesture across his own throat.
Ed nodded.
Dunn shrugged and shook his head.
Luke looked at Ed. Now Ed shrugged. He pulled a six-inch serrated knife from a sheath on his belt. Normally that knife would look forbidding. Against that snake? Luke didn’t know.
Ed took two steps closer.
Luke got into a crouch. He stuck both hands out, like he was about to catch a ball, or wrestle a grizzly bear. The snake came instantly alert. Its head slithered away from Dunn’s leg a few inches, moving in Luke’s direction. It whipsawed slowly, right to left.
Luke watched it move. Some of these things could go lightning fast when they wanted—faster than the human eye could see.
The trick was to—
The snake’s head darted out, going for a bite.
Luke’s hands closed on it, grabbing at the base of its skull, where the head met the body. He gripped it tight and jammed his thumbs up into the fleshy part under its jaw, forcing it closed. The snake struggled, tried to wrench backward, pulling Luke with it. Luke rode the snake, going with its movements, clasping that jaw shut.
Ed raced in with the knife. He stabbed deeply, then ripped outward. Blood jetted.
The snake went berserk, trying to unravel itself. Ed got the knife under the sudden slack, pressed against Dunn’s leg, then ripped outward again. The snake was cut in half. Immediately Dunn wrenched himself free from the bottom half, yanking the still squirming length of it away from his leg.
Luke put the snake on the ground, still clasping the jaws. He placed a boot on it. Then Ed was there, chopping away at it. He cut it into four squirming segments before Luke dared let go of its head.
He stood up and backed away from it. He was trying to remain quiet, but his lungs were gasping for air. He breathed rapidly through his nose, releasing the air from his mouth, taking gigantic breaths. He waited a moment, letting the adrenaline that had flooded his bloodstream subside.
He looked at Ed. Ed had his hands on his hips, also breathing heavily. The bloody knife was still in one hand. He shook his head.
Luke looked at Dunn. Dunn seemed calm, even relaxed. Luke raised his eyebrows.
What kind of guide lets himself get wrapped up in a snake?
Luke gazed out at the black forest night. They were avoiding the trails because of booby traps? If that’s what was in the bush, how bad could the booby traps really be?
* * *
Another hour passed.
They had climbed a steep hill, and were now walking a narrow ridge line, forest dropping away on either side of them. Trees still grew at this height, and the ground was choked by thick, undulating roots.
A while back, they had stopped for a few moments and each of them dry-swallowed a Dexedrine pill. For Luke, the pill had started kicking in about ten minutes ago. He liked the feeling. He always had.
At first, it was like a strong cup of coffee. The tiredness left over from the long plane ride to Africa, followed by this endless day, faded… then disappeared entirely. In its place came a feeling of optimism, alertness, and then a surge of excitement.
After that, the comparison to coffee no longer applied. The heat stopped bothering him, and he began to sweat profusely, cooling him off. It felt good. His vision became clearer, and his hearing sharper. Minute details in the environment suddenly became apparent—the shadows beneath the trees, the whisper of the underbrush as their pant legs passed through it. Suddenly, he had boundless energy. He would never need to sleep again. He quietly controlled the urge to start running.
Ahead of him, Dunn stopped.
The three men stood completely still, like trees that had been there since before the forest was born. There was no sound. But then… no, there was something.
Dunn raised a fist. A second later, the index finger protruded, pointing ahead and to their right. There was a man over there, perhaps twenty feet away. They had all seen him. He was one shadow among many, in a clearing, standing at the base of a tall tree.
Slowly, with infinite care, Luke dropped his night vision goggles into place. The man was in a crouch, his rifle out in front of him. His eyes were wide. Something had alerted him to their presence. But he couldn’t see them—that much was clear. He swept the gun back and forth in a wide arc, looking for something to shoot.
If he fired that gun…
The man whispered something into the darkness. His voice was hoarse. He spoke a tribal dialect; Luke could not understand the words.
“Tafi daga nan!” it sounded like. “Tafi daga nan!”
A silver glint appeared in Dunn’s hand. An instant later, his arm moved and his wrist flicked, and it was gone. Pattern recognition in Luke brain identified it as it left Dunn’s hand—a throwing star.
Suddenly Luke was running toward the man, his own knife in hand. He reached the man in one second, maybe two.
The star protruded from the right side of the man’s face. It had torn through flesh and penetrated into the bone. The man’s mouth was open wide in a silent scream, one hand hovering near his cheek, not sure what it should do. His other hand still held his rifle. He was suffering his agony in silence, but in one more second…
Luke swiped his knife hard across the man’s throat. A jet of blood pulsed out.
Suddenly Ed was with him. Ed clamped a giant hand over the man’s mouth, held him tight during the body’s last fleeting struggles, and then gently lowered him to the ground. Ed kept the man’s mouth covered until he was gone.
Ed stayed down on his knees for a long moment, still pressing the man’s mouth closed. Luke dropped to one knee, scanning the environment in front of them. Nothing moved in the bush.
Dunn appeared behind them. He joined them both on one knee.
“We’re close,” Dunn said, in a whisper so low it barely made a sound. They were the first words anyone had spoken in over two hours.
They moved on, silent again.
Before long, Luke could spot the glow from torch lights ahead and to the left. The lights were below them—Dunn was taking them in from above. There was a footpath to their left. Someone up ahead was talking.
They stopped. Luke trained his night vision in the direction
of the sound. There were two men, maybe fifty yards away, guarding the approach to the village. The guards were chatting quietly, laughing about something. One of them lit up a cigarette.
Luke could easily shoot them both from here, but it would make noise. Surprise was everything.
Ed pointed back the way they had come and made a looping motion with his arm. He was going to come around the other way. Luke nodded. He patted his own chest, then tapped Ed’s. He made a slashing motion across his own throat. He pointed at Dunn and made a hand motion as if a man was falling.
Ed nodded. A moment later, he was gone.
Luke and Dunn crept forward, low now, as silent as cats.
After a few minutes, Luke saw Ed in the night vision, moving parallel to them. The three of them inched closer and closer, flanking the guards.
The men were thirty yards away, still talking quietly. Now and then, one of them would laugh.
Luke glanced across the footpath. Ed was there, crouched in the bushes on the other side. Luke looked at Dunn.
“You ready?” he mouthed.
Dunn shrugged. Luke made an elaborate hand gesture, as if inviting him on stage. Dunn stood and walked into the middle of the path. He stumbled just as he appeared out of the dense underbrush, put his hands to his throat, and began gasping for air. Compared to the previous stillness, and the low voices of the guards, Dunn sounded very loud.
The guards approached, rifles drawn, walking quickly but warily. They spoke excitedly, but did not shout. Luke jumped up and ran toward them.
He was a second behind Ed. Ed came crashing through the underbrush from the other side and hit the first man chest high. The man was small and sinewy. Ed was enormous. They fell to the ground, Ed on top of his man, stabbing now, arm moving like a piston.
“Hey!” Luke’s man had a chance to say.
Then Luke was behind him. He grabbed the man by the forehead and slashed his knife deep across his throat.
“Huh!” the man said. “Huh!”
Now Luke stabbed him high in the back, going for the heart and lungs. Blood spurted from the man’s throat like a fountain. Suddenly, he fell bonelessly to the ground. Luke crouched with him.
Ed was finishing his man.
Dunn sat up cross-legged.
Luke looked at them both. “Do you think anyone heard that?” he whispered.
Ed was on one knee. He looked up. “We better get off the path.”
Working quickly, they dragged the two bodies into the thick bush. Then they wrapped around to the right. The village was here. It was situated in a bowl at the bottom of the hillside. Luke and his team were about a hundred yards from the village, and thirty yards above it.
About a dozen torches lit up a large clearing. The village itself was twenty or thirty small thatch-roofed wooden huts, surrounding three larger huts, and one very large hut. Each hut was a respectful distance from all the others.
“The small huts would have been where the rank-and-file villagers lived,” Dunn said, speaking low, but not whispering. “Before Boko cleared them out. The middle-sized ones would have been for elders or high-status people. And the big one is for communal gatherings.”
“What’s your guess?” Luke said.
“There are a lot of girls. My guess is most or all of them are being held in the biggest hut. The medium ones are where the gang leaders live. The small ones are for the low men on the totem pole. When someone wants a girl, they go fetch one out of the biggest hut.”
Ed had unslung his M79 from his back. It looked like a large, sawed-off shotgun. He pressed a grenade into the chamber.
“If we knew there was a concentration of leaders in one of those big houses, and no girls, I could take out the whole bunch in one shot, or maybe two. That would give us a head start.”
“I can go down, take a look around,” Dunn said. “If I see a good shot for you, I’ll drop a flare.”
“I’ll go with you,” Luke said.
Dunn smirked. “Why? You don’t trust me?”
“I trust you,” Luke said. “But you might need a second set of eyes. I don’t want any girls killed, if we can avoid it.”
Now Dunn shrugged. “You’re the boss.”
They worked their way down the hillside, keeping low and away from the path. The village was quiet, no one out. The flames from the torches crackled. Luke and Dunn raced quickly between smaller huts. Luke glanced through an open doorway—two bodies moved in the darkness on a narrow mattress.
They reached a larger hut. There were cracks in the wall. He and Dunn peered inside. A group of four men were playing a board game at a table. The board was green, red, yellow, and blue, and the players were rolling a single die in a cup, to see how far they could move their pieces, which looked like chess pawns. A few feet away, another group of four were doing the same thing. Along the edges, other men lay in cots or on the floor, resting with their boots on, their guns by their sides. There were at least fifteen men in the building.
Dunn glanced at Luke. He popped a thumbs-up.
Luke ran on to the largest hut. He crouched low against it and peeked through the cracks. This was the jackpot. The girls were in here—dozens of them lying or sitting on mats on the floor, some in long traditional kaftans, some in tattered remnants of clothing, some naked. A handful of men walked or squatted among them.
He looked back at Dunn. Dunn was watching him.
Luke gave him the double thumbs-up.
Dunn lit the flare and dropped it. Then he took off to the left, running low and fast. The flare glowed red on the ground, sparking and spitting. An instant later, a familiar hollow sound came down the quiet hillside, the innocuous sound of a tennis ball being hit by an aluminum tube.
Doonk!
Here it came, whistling downhill with barely an arc.
Luke hit the ground and covered up.
GA-BOOOOM.
The hut with the men inside blew to pieces, shards of wood flying along with severed limbs. Immediately people were screaming, inside the hut and everywhere else. Luke kept his head down.
Doonk!
Here came another one.
BOOOM.
It hit in the middle of the hut, right where the first had landed. Now there was no hut, just a burning husk. A man stumbled out, his upper body on fire. He was instantly mowed down by gunfire coming from the left. Dunn was there in a shooting crouch, firing on anyone who survived.
Luke rolled over on his back and trained his MP-5 on the door of the largest hut. A man ran out, unslinging his AK-47. Luke shot him.
Another. Luke shot that one, too.
The ones coming out behind caught wise and slunk around to the right of the building, out of Luke’s sightline.
Luke moved along the edge of the hut. Across the way, half a dozen men poured out of the big hut that hadn’t been hit.
Dunn shot them from the left. Luke shot them from the right. The sound was loud, an ugly blat of automatic fire. Two, three, four went down and died. Two escaped and ran for the forest.
Behind Luke, the girls started shrieking from inside the building. He had never heard screams like these. Luke darted to the doorway, hesitated for one second on the threshold, then burst through. He passed into a wide hall, half expecting to take a bullet the instant he appeared. But it was worse than that.
Three men remained in the vast space. Two of them waded among the sea of young girls, hacking at them with machetes. Blood sprayed in the air as the men sliced at arms and necks, girls holding their hands up in a desperate attempt to protect themselves.
Luke paced quickly into the room, looking for a clear shot. A second passed, two, three… there were dead, bloody girls on the ground. There was blood everywhere.
BANG!
The first man fell dead, the front of his head blowing outward in a spray of blood and brain and bone. The second man turned back to look at Luke. He smiled. Then he raised his machete to start the hacking again.
Luke shot him in the face.
/> There was one Boko Haram left alive in the room. He had a torch and was holding it to a corner of the thatch roof, trying to light the building on fire.
“Hey!” Luke shouted. “Drop that torch!”
The guy ignored him, reaching with his torch, trying to make the straw catch.
BANG! Luke shot him through the forearm. The torch fell to the dirt floor, burning harmlessly. The man gripped his shredded forearm. He was young, probably no older than twenty. He turned to Luke, his eyes bright with pain.
“You,” Luke said, “are under arrest.”
* * *
“Do you know who I am?”
Luke stood in one corner of the dirt-floor shack. He and Dunn had three men sitting cross-legged on the floor. Ed was outside with the girls, triaging injuries, trying to keep them calm and corralled in one place until the helicopters got here.
There were a lot of dead Boko out there, but some had escaped into the forest. The security situation was not good. There was no way to set up a perimeter in case of a counterattack. Luke shook his head. All sense of mercy had flown out the window. Those bastards in the big hut had managed to kill seven girls with machetes before Luke could kill them. Why? Because they were cowards who couldn’t hold this village against three men. Because someone had told them: If we get attacked, kill all the girls.
A long sigh escaped him. He had rarely felt such rage before.
He needed to calm down. They had a hundred and six girls with them, living girls, traumatized, in shock, hungry, thirsty, and there was no way to provide them with… much of anything. Luke glanced out the open doorway. Those choppers better get here soon. If Boko came back, they were going to be sitting ducks.
And in the meantime, they also had these prisoners.
The prisoners were skinny, rugged, ragged young men. Their wrists were zip-tied behind their backs. Dunn had cut away their boots and their pants below the knees, and zip-tied their calves together. He had gagged two of the men with their own shirts, but he hadn’t blindfolded any of them.
Dunn crouched near one of them, a guy with a scraggly wisp of beard. He was the one who had tried to set the hut on fire. He was also the only one without a gag in his mouth. He was young and strong, sinewy, but he made no pretense of manliness or courage. He was clearly terrified. His entire body trembled, and his eyes were wild, in pain, desperate for escape. His forearm was ragged, red and ripped apart. It was raw meat. Luke couldn’t be bothered to treat it for him.
