“As a lion reminds his foes of his unseen presence with his piss.”
* * * *
We were taken by truck to the eastern bank of the Niger well north of its junction with the Benué, arriving at sundown, the Zodiacs were inflated, we boarded, three to a boat, and set off down the river two boats at a time at ten minute intervals in order to spread out in a line miles apart, the better to avoid detection, or if worse came to worse, at least not losing the whole little flotilla at one blow.
My orders were to move at night, planting explosives and graffiti bombs timed to go off during the next offensive along the way—at docks, warehouses, barges, boats, truck parking lots, whatever—but reserving the lion’s share for Onitsha, avoiding anything on the Yoruba side of the Niger, and always staying close to the eastern bank and what cover it might provide.
The Niger was a broad and even sluggish river, but it flowed south towards its delta, the boats weighed very little, and so paddling them was no arduous task. North of the Benué, it flowed through a flat and muddy valley without banks to speak of, rich agricultural land with only scattered lights of habitation, and quite dark so that I soon lost sight of the other ten Zodiacs.
Where the Benué flowed into the Niger, there was a river port of some size called Lokoja, brightly lit by comparison, so that its docks and quays would have presented tempting targets were it not on inviolate Yoruba land on the western side of the Niger. The eastern bank, however, was the northeast corner of the Zone and not a light was to be seen, so we easily enough glided along it into Biafra.
As dawn approached, my two Zodiacs found a muddy little stream leading off a hundred yards or so from the river and dead-ending in a little pool overgrown by a few trees with roots growing up through its waters and forming a canopy of branches above it, a good place to pass the daylight hours.
We faced more or less southeast towards Mecca for the sunrise prayer, ate a cold breakfast, slept, awoke for the noonday prayer, and watched the river traffic from our concealment. There was more of it than I had expected.
The valley of the Niger was still rich farmland here and a source of water for livestock and we were south of the Zone now. Cattle and goats were being watered by herders on both sides of the river. There were small river freighters, tugs pulling and pushing rafts of produce barges, passenger craft moving up and down the river, and isolated little loading docks on both sides. There were even freighters and trains of barges crossing between the banks. And a town on the Biafran bank on the edge of visibility to the south. The Yorubas across the river that formed the western border of Biafra seemed indifferent to the war, carrying on commerce, or at least a brisk smuggling trade, with the Igbos. The whole scene seemed insanely normal.
But well-suited to our purpose.
After nightfall, we moved steathily south along the eastern bank. The cross-river traffic had ceased, the herdsmen were long gone, the river bank deserted except for occasional fishing boats moored to little docks and barges tied up to larger ones with storage sheds where we planted a few charges and graffiti-bombs.
We reached a small town where lights were visible inland, but the docks along the shore were unguarded, not that there was anything more to guard than a few ramshackle sheds and boathouses and empty barges, which we also mined with explosives and graffiti bombs.
We paddled downstream for hours without encountering more than docks and fishing boats and the occasional shed, which received the same treatment.
Finally we came upon a complex of docks and small warehouses half a mile or so south of another town, where several barges laden with grain and something in wooden barrels were moored, as well as a tugboat and a rusty river freighter that might have been a derelict.
There was what appeared to be a guardhouse on the shore overlooking the dock and with the lights on, but the docks were three or four feet above the water which was no more than a foot deep where it lapped the muddy shore, so the barges and boats had to be tied up at the far end of them, out into the channel.
Risky though it might be, this was by far the best target we had seen, the docks provided shadowy cover, so I gave the order for our two Zodiacs to paddle along the boats and barges and plant munitions and graffiti-bombs among them, and we escaped without incident.
We paddled on during the rest of the night through a landscape that seemed entirely deserted, not a town, not a light, not so much as a single dock on the river bank, and when the sun rose, I saw why. Darkness had obscured our entry into the fringes of something that was not quite a lake and not quite a swamp.
Here the Niger flowed through a wide flatland so low that it was inundated by its waters, which created a maze of creeks, side channels, and stagnant pools, a strange sort of delta in the middle of the river rather than at its mouth. Swampland trees like mangroves grew up through the waters atop caverns of roots; singularly, in groves, here and there forming miniature jungles. The boles of dead trees jutted up from pools. Where the marshy ground was above the waterline, it was covered with tall grasses.
The maps and satellite photos had not made the nature of this landscape clear, but what was now abundantly clear was that navigating through it south to where the Niger would narrow into a proper river again in the darkness of the night would be all but impossible. That I spotted crocodiles emerging onto mudflats to sun themselves was no encouragement.
But there was abundant cover amidst the tree roots and tall grass, and we lurked within the cover of the vegetation while I pondered what to do. As the sun rose towards its zenith, I spied a riverboat moving south through the swampland in the distance, and then a string of barges pushed by a tug, a river freighter, more barges.
It took me an hour or more of observing this increasing traffic to realize that it must be proceeding down a main channel, meaning that we could follow it through the swamp, if certainly not join it.
“We keep the river traffic always in sight for guidance,” I ordered, “but keep out of sight under cover at a safe distance, and paddle south through the side channels.”
I wondered whether the other squad leaders would think to do the same thing, or give up and turn back, or attempt a night passage, but once we were on the move, I had more than enough to occupy my thoughts with our own arduous and frustrating passage.
The streams that we followed meandered in curves, in circles, changed directions, dead-ended, so that we were endlessly forced to retrace our course, double back, even lug the Zodiacs across muddy and grassy portages, to keep the boats on the main channel within view while zig-zagging our way south through the maze.
It took all day, and sundown caught us still negotiating the southern fringes of the swampy lake, but at least we could see the Niger becoming a normal river once more to the south of us. Quite exhausted after a night and a day without sleep and our passage through the swamp, we hid within the overarching roots of a grove of trees, and slept through the night well into the next day.
In the afternoon we paddled south to another grove of trees at the very edge of the swampland, from which it would be easy enough to enter the main channel toward Onitsha in twilight. We slept through the rest of the day, stole out of the swamp after the sundown prayer and continued on through the night, hugging the eastern shore of the river.
After several hours, the lights of a city became visible in the distance, but before they resolved into the buildings and dockyards of Onshita, we came to a bridge across the river.
This was not a suspension bridge with massive towers and cables, but a long bridge that crossed the Niger diagonally on pylons, a highway bridge apparently, though it was hard to tell, for though we observed it from afar for at least an hour, there was not the single light of a vehicle traversing it.
Of course not, I finally realized, for this was a bridge from the lands of the Igbo to the lands of the Yoruba; across the wartime frontier between Biafra and United Nigeria.
So we paddled farther south to where the eastern edge of the bridge met the shore, then threaded our way through the pylons under it, affixing charges to a half dozen of them, then turning back before reaching the middle of the river, thus arguably not violating Yoruba territory, and tossing graffiti-bombs up onto the roadbed at intervals on the way back.
When we approached close enough to Onitsha for me to understand what we really confronted, I was glad I had made this decision.
Onitsha was a large and well-lit city whose riverside port facilities presented any number of good targets—docks, river boats, quayside warehouses. But there was no concealing vegetation or any other cover anywhere near them, and from as close as I dared approach, I could make out speed boats patrolling the harbor.
The closest we could get was the far northern outskirts of the city, and I had to settle for secreting explosives and graffiti-bombs beneath a bridge over an outlying canal, by a crumbling out-of-the-way warehouse and what seemed to be some sort of sewage facility at least to judge by the odor.
We then turned back, passed the daylight hours amidst the pylons under the bridge, and expended the rest of our charges mining a few more of them. After nightfall, we made easy progress back to the southern edge of the swampland using the water-jets, and while making our way back through the marshy waste in the same manner as before was again no easy task, at least we didn’t have to paddle.
Under power now, my squad reached the trucks waiting at the rendezvous point above the Benué without problem or incident. So did the Zodiacs of four of the other squads. But the sixth squad was never seen again. Nor did I ever learn what had happened to them.
CHAPTER 28
We were back in camp two days before General Moustapha’s offensive into the Zone, and since there was now no point in sending me and my jihadis to the Benué with his troops, he invited me to witness the battle as he and his senior officers apparently habitually did, as I now learned, from the safety of his headquarters, watching the carnage on television and safely commanding men to their deaths from afar.
I too had commanded men to their deaths, but I had risked my life at their sides, I had known them as brother jihadis in arms, and I felt far more comradeship with those dead martyrs than for these Nigerian officers.
The General’s headquarters had a satellite antenna and half a dozen video monitors—two of them presently tuned to United Nigeria Television in Abuja and TV Biafra in Port Harcourt, two more to CNN and Al Jazeera, and the remaining two, closer to the map table, displaying live combat coverage by Nigerian Army cameramen.
Hamza was there, as well as two other colonels and a half dozen lieutenant colonels relaying orders to the field commanders by cell phone, no one above the rank of major deeming themselves sufficiently expendable to be risking their lives alongside the troops in their latest doomed foray into the Zone. The only officer present who did not outrank me was the lieutenant operating the computer.
The General and his officers huddled over the map table, close by the two monitors displaying live coverage of the troops in the process of crossing the Benué on their rafts and forming up on the other side for their pursuit of the fleeing Biafrans.
Hamza was stalking back and forth between the ranks of monitors showing the network broadcasts like a caged panther, and I was drawn to him, perhaps because we were both anxiously awaiting the results of the clandestine actions taken by the Ski Mask Jihadis days ago, perhaps too because both of us understood that what General Moustapha and his officers were watching and ordering would be no more than one more meaningless slaughter.
What the television networks were showing as I counted down the minutes to the detonation of our clandestine bombs was even more meaningless—United Nigeria Television was broadcasting a dubbed Egyptian comedy film, CNN was covering a press conference by the American Secretary of Agriculture defending the decision to cancel grain export subsidies, Al Jazeera coincidentally was broadcasting a news feature on the disastrous failure of the American wheat and soybean crop, and TV Biafra a bellicose documentary on the mighty robotized forces of its American ally.
It was not the first time I had found myself watching the clock as I awaited the detonations of explosives I had caused to be deployed days previously, but when the grenades went off in Paris, I had seen the explosions from the window of my apartment, and the news coverage had dominated many channels of television.
Now, however, the explosives that were about to detonate were hundreds of kilometers away, and there was no chance that I would see the results with my own eyes. I doubted whether I would know whether our charges had even gone off, let alone see what damage we had done, for none of the news networks and certainly not the Nigerian Army would have a camera anywhere near where they had been sown.
United Nigeria Television finally interrupted its movie for live coverage of the Nigerian offensive into the Zone, but a quick glance over at the military monitors told me that it was taken directly from what from being shot by the army cameramen; Nigerian troops pouring south across the Zone after fleeing Biafrans and disappearing towards the horizon, as seen from the safe side of the river.
“Let’s look at the satellite coverage,” I told Hamza when my watch told me that the charges were about to go off.
We went to the computer. The French had leased the Nigerian military an observation satellite, no doubt paid for by the Caliphate, which allowed control of its cameras from the ground. I ordered the lieutenant operating the computer to center a satellite camera on southern Nigeria and zoom in on the Niger River between Lokoja and Onitsha. At this magnification, the Nigerian troops advancing in a wide front through the Zone were barely discernable as a vague dust cloud flowing south in the upper right hand corner of the screen, but the Biafrans fleeing before them were too scattered to even leave a trace.
I checked my watch for the last time.
As if a distant machine gun fired a few rounds to get the range, bursts and clusters, pinpoints of flame like tiny orange flowers, blossomed up and down the east bank of the Niger between Lokoja and Onitsha, then blackened into little puffs of smoke.
Hamza dashed to the map table and fairly dragged General Moustapha by the sleeve over to the computer screen.
The General glanced at the screen, then at me. I nodded. It was Hamza who spoke.
“Get this on UNT! Do it now!”
If the General took offence at being ordered around by a colonel, he didn’t show it. He dashed back to the map table, picked up a cell phone and barked words I could not quite make out into it in a most authoritative manner.
The officers dashed to the bank of broadcast screens and so did Hamza and I, as United Nigeria Television put on the live satellite image we had just seen on the computer screen, the length of the Niger now dotted with tiny black clouds, and a continuous string of them across the width of the river where the bridge must be.
“Despite fierce opposition by the Igbo mercenary forces of the Americans, the heroic army of United Nigeria has penetrated deeper into rebel territory than ever before,” a bass voice proclaimed proudly.
And then there was the Nigerian general behind the voice; gray-haired, older than General Moustapha, and wearing a uniform festooned with gold braid and medals with four stars on the shoulders. “Scores of major American military facilities down the length of the Niger River all the way to Onitsha and beyond have been destroyed and our victorious troops are advancing towards Owerri. Long live United Nigeria!”
My jaw d
ropped. Hamza’s mouth opened.
Even General Moustapha seemed quite stupefied by this ridiculous and ridiculously blatant falsehood, for while there was no way anyone watching could tell that the string of explosions was the work of the Ski Mask Jihadis, anyone could see that the cloud of dust that was the only evidence of the “advancing victorious troops of United Nigeria” was more than a hundred kilometers north of Onitsha and well east of the Niger and therefore could not have been responsible for any of them.
“That was necessary, of course,” General Moustapha told me somewhat shame-facedly. “But everyone here knows that the credit should be yours, and I shall see to it that the troops know it too.”
“That is very gracious of you, sir,” I replied, gracious enough myself not to point out that this would be unnecessary, since the troops already knew only too well that they had not gotten anywhere near the area of the explosions.
Worse still for the credibility of the Nigerian high command, a few minutes later TV Biafra interrupted its propaganda documentary on the military might of the Great Satan with live coverage of the American reply to the four star general, as the Whales off the shore of Port Harcourt, all six of them, launched not only wave after wave of Falcons, but at least a score of the Vultures with their fearsome fuel-air bombs.
No television channel carried the pictures of the terrible and brutal American retaliation against the hapless Nigerian forces in the Zone, but all of us in General Moustapha’s headquarters could watch it on the computer’s satellite camera coverage.
From orbit, even at full magnification, the American aircraft were invisible as they swept northward towards the dust cloud that was all that marked the presence of thousands of Nigerian soldiers, but their handiwork when they reached it was all too visible.
Thousands of tiny explosions appeared beneath that dusty cloud. It turned northward, fleeing back towards the Benué, and as it did, far larger explosions bloomed within it like miniature red-nuclear mushrooms. The dust cloud began to disintegrate, then dissolve, then disappear entirely, and there was nothing to be seen but the rockets of the Falcons and the fuel-air bombs of the Vultures marching seemingly alone through the Zone all the way to the Benué River.
Osama the Gun Page 24
