Whatever this did for their morale, what we learned did little for ours. According to most of the ordinary soldiers who had seen their comrades die and risked their own lives, the war was a cynical stalemate that none of the “generals” on any of the three sides had a real plan for winning or even seemed to be trying.
“It’s like a football game that goes on forever with nobody scoring a goal,” a Hausa told me. “Our goal is north of the Benué River east from its junction with the Niger to the Cameroon border. The Americans leave us alone as long as we’re behind it. Their goal is a line east from the Niger River to the border a little north of Onitsha with the oil wells and pipelines behind it, and we can’t get near it. Between is the Zone, that’s the football field, and the Biafrans are the ball that gets kicked back and forth across it. This is time out, man, enjoy it while you can.”
Worse still, at least as far as I was concerned, was what I learned from a darker-skinned and flatter-featured Yoruba.
“So you are a Christian fighting for Islam?”
“That’s what they tell you? We are fighting for Islam and the Biafrans are fighting for Jesus?” He laughed. “The Biafrans are greedy Igbos fighting for the Yankee dollar and the oil that belongs to all of Nigeria. The Nigerian Army is led by the Muslim Hausa officer corps which runs the government too long as the war goes on. We Yorubas are the only true patriots fighting for a United Nigeria. There are hundreds of tribes in this country, and if we let the Igbos get away with seceding, they’ll all try it, and there won’t be any Nigeria, and what’s left will be worse than Somalia. Yorubas fight in this stinking stupid war not only for Nigeria but for what there is of civilized Africa against Igbos who care only about money and Americans who don’t care at all about what happens to a continent of niggers as long as they have the oil. You think this is a Holy War? Wait till you see how holy it isn’t, foolish white boy!”
* * * *
At the end of two weeks, I was summoned to General Moustapha’s headquarters. There were a dozen officers, majors, and two colonels, Hamza not among them, crowded around a map laid out on the big table, presided over by the General, who had not waited for me to arrive to begin what proved to be a battle briefing.
“—as usual,” he was saying as I drew up to the table, “the artillery stops ten kilometers back and begins its barrage to cover the rafts as they cross the Benué, then pulls back when the infantry is across. You form up the usual attack front and advance until you hear the Falcons and the Vultures coming, then disperse the troops as usual to get back to the rafts and across the river.”
“As usual,” a major muttered sardonically.
There was grim laughter.
The General frowned angrily. Then he noticed me.
“Here is someone who will make this sortie something that is not the usual!” he proclaimed. “I give you…Osama the Gun!”
There was silence. I felt the unwanted pressure of all eyes upon me.
“As everyone knows, Captain Osama planned and executed the most brilliant demolition attack on a major city since 9/11,” the General said, his eyes fairly gleaming. “And in Paris, under the long noses of the French!” He laughed with a heartiness that evoked just the opposite in me. “This will be child’s play for Osama the Gun! A piece of pie as the Americans would say.”
He crooked a finger to summon me forward to inspect the map. There were two rivers coming together in a Y-shaped junction. Above were a series of arrows indicating the Nigerian advance. Along the north bank of the river to the east the rafts were indicated. The map went south all the way to the ocean, with a complex web-work of pipelines linking interior oil wells and pumping stations in the lower quarter, and between this and the Benué River, drawings of huts marking towns or villages depending upon their size. The whole thing was covered with terrain markings and contour lines I did not at all understand.
“Simple enough, Captain,” I was told blithely. “Each of your men will be issued an explosive charge. You will remain on the north bank of the Benué until our troops have crossed and are advancing before you cross. The Biafrans will be fleeing and won’t even be there to fire on your rafts. You spread out and advance well behind our lines in perfect safety…”
“Doing what?”
“Doing what you do best, of course, Captain. Blowing things up!”
“What things?”
“Targets of opportunity,” I was told. “Anything and everything. Granaries. Houses. Armories if you can find them. Trucks. The point is to sow terror and, meant as no insult, but you are a terrorist, are you not?”
“I would have thought that the targets would be oil wells and pipelines and such things…” I muttered.
“Excellent!” cried the General. He raked his officers with a disapproving eye. “You see? That’s the spirit! Oil wells by all means, Captain. Pipelines. Pumping stations.”
“The refinery at Warri!” someone suggested, to sarcastic laughter.
“On to Port Harcourt!”
There was even more unpleasant laughter at that.
It would be weeks before I understood just how unpleasant the joke really was.
* * * *
Early next morning, a motley fleet of buses and trucks commandeered from Abuja to augment what regular military transport was available arrived in the encampment, and several thousand Nigerian troops, most of General Moustapha’s division, were loaded aboard them. Twenty trucks were assigned to my jihadis, and I chose to assign them by squads, giving my “sergeants” the only order that I could, which was to try to keep their men together throughout the coming battle, since we were issued no radios.
I decided to go into battle with a squad composed of most of the beurs, some British Pakistanis, Kurds, Albanians, the odd Turk, and a few from the Caliphate, all of whom had either some English or French, and placed it in the command of a man who called himself Kasim who spoke both languages. Kasim was a French beur in his early thirties, but despite the name, it was the failed bank robber Saddam he reminded me of; hard-looking, at ease with a gun in his hands, who his men seemed to regard as a natural caid and who I suspected had also had some sort of career as a professional criminal.
Off we went well before noon, south down a highway through a dry grassy plain dotted with little villages, a long caravan of trucks, buses, a score or so of the trucks towing artillery pieces, half a dozen mobile rocket launchers, with my jihadis bringing up the rear. Villagers flocked to the roadside to see the parade, the adults silent and stony-faced, only the small boys waving their arms and cheering.
A hot sun in a cloudless sky had not passed far beyond its zenith when we reached the bank of a fairly large river flowing slowly through a wide marshy valley between low muddy banks. Hundreds of large rafts were moored along the near bank, no more than logs lashed together, roped to an assortment of powered boats, mere rowboats with large outboard motors, roofed river craft, a few actual military patrol boats.
Across the river, there were earthen breastworks thrown up here and there along the bank, with crumbled gaps between them, behind which cowered a greatly outnumbered force of Biafrans, and a few thousand more spread out well behind these simple fortifications on a plain bare of vegetation that looked as if it had been gone over by bulldozers in preparation for a building project that had long since been cancelled.
As the trucks and buses were being unloaded and the Nigerian troops boarded the rafts, the artillery was pulled back to the edge of my visible horizon, and the Biafrans opened fire. The trucks with my jihadis had been parked well back of the river bank, from which vantage, all I could see was smoke and sparks, and all I heard was a great crackling as of a huge bonfire collapsing into burning flinders.
Then the Nigerian artillery barrage began. There was a distant booming, whooshings overhead like the passage of low-flying jet aircraft, explosions on the far bank of the river, here and there blast
ing holes in the fortifications, but mostly falling on the ruined plain well behind them. Little formations of fire-and-smoke trailing rockets hissed overhead to explode among the Biafrans.
Even from our distance, the noise was horrendous, the far bank was enrobed in jagged white mists like scattered ground fog, and an acrid smell seared the back of my throat and my nostrils. The thought of advancing into such a nightmare seemed to require not only heedless courage but utter stupidity. Most of Kasim’s men clearly were of like mind. Only he regarded what lay before us stone-faced, one hand stroking the explosive charge at his belt, the other holding his Kalashnikov upraised, as if eager to get on with it.
The barrage continued as the boats began towing the loaded barges across the river, the shells and rockets now falling, with a few mis-aimed exceptions, well beyond the fortifications on the bank, already blown to pieces. When the leading barges were about halfway across the river, the Nigerian artillery ceased firing, but the booming and roaring was replaced not by welcome silence but the noise of thousands of automatic weapons firing from the rafts.
This seemed pointless, for the Biafrans had already abandoned the river bank and were fleeing south across the blasted plain. The Nigerian rafts began to gain the far bank and unload, at which point, a Nigerian major ran up and ordered me to load my jihadis on the rafts, and I was no longer an idle spectator.
I gave the order to move forward with a wave of my arm in the air and a pointed finger, and my sergeants trotted their squads toward the waiting rafts, and almost before I had any time to think about it, I was aboard a raft with Kasim and his squad being towed across the river.
By this time there were no Biafrans in sight and the Nigerians had formed up into a long line a dozen ranks deep on the far shore. By the time we were halfway across, the Nigerian front was beginning to advance at a trot into Biafran territory, or the Zone, as they called it. By the time we had scrambled off the rafts and lined up on the shore ourselves, all I saw of the Nigerian troops were the receding backs of the rear ranks as they chased after the Biafrans, shouting, screaming, firing forward.
There I stood with my men awaiting orders, with no one in sight to give me an order.
“Now what, Captain?” Kasim asked me sardonically.
Before me was an empty and lifeless plain dotted with still-smoking craters. There was obviously no danger at all.
“Now we eat a piece of pie,” I said with a shrug.
Kasim looked at me strangely.
I stepped forward, turned to face my men, and gave my first battlefield command.
“Fan out your squads from each other and move forward. Blow up whatever there is to blow and make sure not to catch up to the Nigerians.”
Laughter and snickers.
“If you see Nigerian troops coming back towards you, retreat back towards the river as fast as you can, and try not to let them catch up to you.”
So saying, I motioned for Kasim to follow me with his men, and then Osama the Gun led his jihadis into their first “battle.”
* * * *
We marched forward for a least an hour across a bleak plain churned up with new fuming craters and the scars of older ones where the only signs of life were tufts of struggling grass shoots and rare trees, some ruined hulks, some burned and splintered but hanging on to life, a very few untouched by the destruction, and flocks of vultures and smaller carrion birds circling, dropping down, and squabbling over corpses and raw body parts.
Of these there were, if not an abundance, more than enough to feed the ghoulish scavengers, and bones and skulls long since picked clean and left to the ants and beetles. It was too soon for rotting flesh to stink, but the air did reek with gunpowder and gummy blood, and the sights alone were enough to make several of the men vomit, though I managed to hold my own breakfast.
Further into the Zone, we encountered our first abandoned village, a circle of round mud huts, whose dried brown and crumbling thatched roofs made it plain that its inhabitants had fled long before this latest Nigerian invasion.
Kasim looked at me inquiringly.
“Hardly a useful target,” I told him, “we’ll surely find something better later.”
But we trudged on for another half hour, finding nothing but two more similarly abandoned villages. By this time my other squads were long since out of sight and whatever battle might be going on in front of us was not even audible, so when we came to a third, I shrugged, and unhooked my charge from my belt. “We might as well see if these things work,” I told my men.
They were simple devices, packets of plastic explosive with crude detonators set with a fixed ninety second delay. I moved the men well back, pressed the detonator, tossed the explosive through the open doorway of a hut, and ran.
The device might have been crude, but the explosive charge was more powerful than the Caliphate’s grenades, and the hut was blown into a cloud of flying fragments and shredded thatch, the outer edge of which rained a bit of the debris harmlessly down upon us.
A cheer went up that seemed quite ridiculous under the circumstances.
We pressed onward past two more abandoned villages without indulging in any more such entertainment until we finally came to something of an abandoned town. There was a dirt street, a little post office, what might have once been a small police post, a petrol station with a single pump, a general store, a live-stock pen full of long-dried dung, half a dozen tin-roofed houses.
“We’ll do the post office, the petrol pump, the store, and the police post,” I told my men, “no point in blowing up a field full of old cow shit.”
I assigned the post office to Kasim, the store to a beur named Moussa, the police station to a Pakistani called Reza, and kept the petrol pump for myself. I wanted to test out several techniques, so I ordered Kasim to enter the post office with his charge, press the detonator button and run, Reza to stand back and toss his charge through the open door of the police station, and Moussa to plant his charge against the wall of the store, pulling everyone else further back than I had before.
Each method, tried one by one, worked equally well. The little post office was entirely destroyed and Kasim got away easily, the police post disappeared in a ball of dust and debris, and while Moussa’s charge did not entirely obliterate the store, the building collapsed outward nicely.
Three loud and successful explosions cheered the men as a firework display would excite small boys, and when it was my turn, they were in high good humor. I stood back what I judged much more than a safe distance from the petrol pump though not too far for reasonable accuracy, pressed the detonator button, counted to eighty, and threw the bomb.
My aim was good enough to glance off the top of the pump, but my timing had been a bit too careful, and it clattered to the ground and lay there for several seconds to good-natured jeering. When it went off, an explosion similar to all the others, the petrol pump quite disappeared, but there must have been fuel in the reservoir beneath it, for a moment later there was a second explosion, less powerful but producing a great ball of flame whose heat I could feel even from what I had thought was an unnecessary distance.
A great cheer went up.
“Osama the Gun!” shouted Reza.
“Osama the Gun!”
“We are the Ski Mask Jihadis of Osama the Gun!” cried Moussa.
“Allahu Akbar!”
But as we were congratulating ourselves, there was a sound in the far distance, as of a strange thunderstorm approaching, a continuous chorus of high-pitched rumblings overlapping each other, and punctuated by popping sounds. Looking south towards where the denuded battlefield plain gave way to a horizon-line of scattered stands of trees, I saw hundreds, if not thousands, of explosions like flowers of flame blossoming among them, and circling, swooping, climbing above, clouds of what from this distance looked angry locusts.
“The Americans are coming!” I shou
ted. “Back to the rafts!”
The order was superfluous. We had all seen the video. As I gave it, we were all running north back towards whence we came.
The noise grew louder and louder, became the whooshing of hundreds of jet engines, and the unmistakable sound of distant small explosions. Glancing back, I saw the tiny figures of men emerging from the treeline and scattering across the battle-scarred and coverless plain, and above them, sunlight glinting off the American Falcons, rocket-trails arching downward at the fleeing Nigerians.
We ran and ran and ran until we were wheezing, weak-kneed, and there was nothing for it but to pause for a moment at least to catch our breath.
“Halt!” I shouted, and turned to look back.
Thousands of Nigerians were approaching, scattered all across the battle plain in small groups or singly to avoid presenting good targets as best they could, running towards us, zigging and zagging through a forest of fireballs that appeared in flashes, were gone, reappeared, while above them the robot Falcons of the Great Satan circled and stooped, firing ever more rockets.
It was the single most terrifying sight I had ever seen, and the noise was becoming louder and louder as the slaughter rolled towards us, filling me with mindless fear, so that I had to fight a jihad within myself to even find a moment empty of it within which to think.
“At a trot!” I commanded. “Keep your heads! Keep your breath! We’ll never make it if we try to run all the way!”
I forced my body to be governed by my lungs not my fear, trotting at a pace measured thereby without looking back, though the noise behind grew louder and louder, explosions cracking and booming, rockets whirring through the air, jet engines howling, and then barely audible beneath the deadly orchestra of the Falcons and the rockets and the explosions, shrieks and screams and howls of fear and pain.
We trotted and trotted and trotted, time and distance measurable only by the trembling of my legs, the pangs in my chest, the weakening of my knees, harried across that nightmare plain of ruined earth, dismembered arms and legs, headless corpses and corpseless heads, by the very hounds of hell, the mechanical demons of the Great Satan howling and growling at my stumbling heels.
Osama the Gun Page 21
