by Don Mann
“You sure about that?”
“One of them saw my red hair, and ran after me and bashed me in the head! So, yes!”
Mancini wrapped an extra towel around the man’s head, grabbed his shorts and shirt, and started looking for a means of escape. Behind them stood a sauna and shower; neither had a window or offered a route out of the building. Exiting into the hallway would put them in the path of the terrorists.
“You know another way out?” Manny asked, trying to override the panic signals from the lizard part of his brain.
The freaked-out men shook their heads.
His mind was operating at warp speed now, quickly calculating that the three of them had no way of overpowering or fighting their way past even two armed soldiers. Turned to the lockers, which were too narrow to accommodate a small person.
One of the men said, “The only thing to do is give ourselves up. Beg for mercy.”
“Not happening,” Mancini responded, as he stood on a bench and climbed up to a four-foot space between the tops of the lockers and the ceiling. “Follow me…”
From there, he removed a panel of the white foam ceiling. Looked toward the wall and saw an aluminum ventilation tube wide enough to accommodate a large human being. Pulled away the curved L section that connected to an exhaust vent in the ceiling, and pushed it out of the way.
Now with access to the vent, he crouched down and offered his hand to the Asian man. “Come!” he whispered. “Come quick!”
“I’ll never fit…”
“The fuck you won’t! You’ll see…” Manny pulled him up and helped him into the vent. He reached down for the red-haired man, who was shaking from head to toe, coaxed him up, held him, pushed up and in.
The sound of men at the door, conferring in a foreign language. He hoisted himself up and climbed into the vent as boots entered the small room.
Shit!
He’d left his shorts and tee on the bench, and his cellphone in his room. More importantly, he hadn’t replaced the ceiling tile. Reaching down to do that now, he nearly lost his balance.
AQIM leader Umar Amine and his men had crashed through the unguarded side gate and quickly overrun the LN dormitories. Many of the 138 Nigerians housed there in two buildings—one for men, one for women—worked as chefs, cleaners, and restaurant workers and were employed by a local subsidiary of the French catering firm CIS.
The terrorists went room to room through the men’s dorm hunting for expats. When the locals learned that, they secretly texted warnings to their foreign friends in other sections of the compound. In fact so many texts were being sent back and forth between people in different parts of the compound that the local network became oversaturated and shut down.
One of the cooks ran to the female dorm and alerted the women that the terrorists were coming to inspect their rooms. Suspecting they were Boko Haram, many of the women tied scarves over their heads to try to pass as Muslims.
Ultimately, Umar Amine and his men found no foreigners. So they herded all the Nigerians in the lobby of the men’s dormitory, where tall, bearded Umar Amine stood on a table, quieted the assemblage, and announced, “We have nothing against you Nigerians. You can take your things and leave out the side gate.”
Somewhere in the confusion, someone had handed Crocker an AK and two extra twelve-round mags, which he’d stuffed in the waistband of his black pants, along with the Glock he took earlier. The terrorists seemed to have moved their attention to the expat dorms farther south. He’d spent the last ten minutes with other volunteers retrieving wounded men and women from the plaza and carrying them to a makeshift triage center that had been set up in the kitchen behind the dining hall.
It was grisly, bloody work as many of them had been shot in the head. Others had tried to scale the three-meter-high security fence topped with rolls of barbed wire, and gotten stuck, and had to be helped down.
The kitchen was a mess of blood and organs, nurses and medical volunteers trying to do the best they could with very limited resources. There was no one in charge. Men and women shouted back and forth, and others were on phones and radios in an adjoining room, trying to alert Nigerian officials and Gulf headquarters. That room, a pantry area, had been turned into a de facto emergency operations center.
Occasionally one of the people in the pantry would stick his or her head in the kitchen and shout an update.
“Colonel Nwosu is sending a squad of soldiers!”
“Gulf headquarters says we shouldn’t resist. It’s a hostage situation. As soon as we identify the leader or spokesperson, we’re to put him in touch with them!”
Crocker ignored most of what he heard. Certain things were clear: the terrorists were gunning down innocent, unarmed people, and targeting foreigners. The Utorogu plant security team had been overwhelmed and most of them were either dead or had disappeared into the night. As far as Crocker knew all Brits in charge had perished.
It was a desperate situation. Literally nothing and no one stood between the surviving expats and the heavily armed terrorists. And the two dozen or so expats that remained in the dining hall didn’t have the resources to organize any sort of defense.
All Crocker could do now was what he had been doing—trying to rescue as many of the wounded as possible, and hope that some sort of rescue force arrived before the terrorists returned.
He took a second to wonder about Zoe, then the lights came on. A Moroccan man who was one of the plant’s Electrical and Instrumentation Atex engineers explained that the previous blackout had been caused by a bullet that hit a high voltage transformer. Now a backup generator had automatically kicked in, but only had sufficient fuel to last for several hours unless the tank was refilled via fuel truck, which wasn’t likely to happen.
Male and female managers in the crowded pantry debated whether it was better to disable the electricity again. A moot point, in Crocker’s mind, because the sun would rise in a few hours.
He was trying to sort through the chaos, and painfully aware that he wasn’t in touch with any of his teammates. It didn’t help that he’d left his phone behind in expat dorm Building A, which was probably inaccessible now.
This time when Crocker went outside to look for more wounded, lights lit up the perimeter fence and plaza, and at least in this northeast section of the complex the situation appeared stable. He saw no terrorists or technicals nearby.
He found a Nigerian man in a white shirt and black pants slumped behind the front tire of a bullet-riddled Gulf truck. The man had been shot in the stomach and teetered on the edge of consciousness.
Looking north, he saw several militant trucks parked in front of a building seventy meters away. He assumed it was one of the expat dorms, but wasn’t sure.
“What’s your name?” Crocker asked the wounded man.
Instead of answering, he pointed to his throat.
Crocker turned the man’s head sideways and used his fingers to empty blood out of his mouth.
“My name’s Uzoma,” he moaned.
“You’ve worked here long?”
“Two years…Food service, sir…”
“You from near here?” Crocker asked. Hearing the sound of helicopters in the distance, he gathered the man in his arms.
“I love…my family…”
“Of course…”
“My wife and baby girl…”
Crocker hurried around the corner and turned to maneuver Uzoma headfirst through the open door. When the light from inside hit the man’s face, he saw that his eyes had rolled back into his head.
“Uzoma, stay with me…Help is near.”
Set him on one of the aluminum food counters, and tapped the shoulder of an Indian man wearing a surgical mask and a blue polo splotched with blood.
Said, “Doc, this one is critical.”
“I’m not a doctor. I’m a dentist,” the man whispered back. Without saying another word, he leaned over Uzoma and went to work, inserting a tube into his throat to help him breathe.
/> Crocker, light-headed from dehydration, grabbed a water bottle off one of the counters and drained it as a very tall, blond-haired man hurried in from the other room.
Seeing the AK slung over Crocker’s shoulder, he leaned into him and asked, “You with security?”
“Not officially, but what do you need?”
“We have a situation,” the man spoke with a Scandinavian accent. “Very critical…The terrorists have taken three of my engineers and are attempting to restart the plant. We need to stop them…My name is Alf Knutsen, I’m one of the operation managers. We also need to get members of the JOC and the GM over to the 50 Main office so they can communicate with HQ.”
Crocker didn’t know what JOC, GM, or 50 Main stood for. “I thought your guys were talking to your headquarters already.”
“Cell reception is bad…Terrible, really…The important thing we need to establish is whether the gas is flowing into the plant.”
“How do you determine whether the gas is flowing?”
“From the gas burn-off stacks. If they’re burning the gas is on.”
“I’ll check.”
Out of the corner of his eye Crocker saw the dentist cover Uzoma with a long sheet of waxed paper.
Damn…
Chapter Eighteen
“Character is like pregnancy. It cannot
be hidden forever.”
—African proverb
Tiny’s face, arms, and chest pulsed with pain from the beating he’d taken. He looked through the swollen slits around his eyes to the very energetic man at the front of the room delivering an impassioned harangue in a language he couldn’t understand.
He made out certain familiar words like “United States” and “crusaders,” and kept thinking of his wife, two-year-old son, and infant daughter in Virginia and what he would need to do to see them again. Despite their arguments over his long deployments and his wife, Eleena’s, infidelities, she was the person closest to his heart.
They had traveled a long road together, from the church mixer where they had met in El Paso twelve years ago when he was a nineteen-year-old world top-fifty ranked bull rider with a promising career and she was an undocumented Mexican immigrant working as a receptionist for the customer management company Alorica. In quick succession he had suffered a serious accident, his mother died, and he spent all his savings on doctor bills. Eleena stuck with him through his long recovery, his joining the Navy, and going through BUD/S.
He’d bid goodbye to her three weeks ago, knowing that their marriage was in trouble. She hugged him, wished him well, then returned to the sofa with their two-year-old son and five-month-old daughter and continued watching Stranger Things, her favorite TV show.
Tiny admitted he wasn’t clear about a lot of things. He didn’t know the identity of his father, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to identify as Mexican-American or Hispanic. He’d chosen a career that brought him face-to-face with violence and tragedy, but cried openly at funerals and teared up when watching romantic movies.
The thing he was most certain of as he sat on the linoleum floor with a C4-packed suicide ring around his neck wired to a remote detonator was how much he loved Eleena and wanted to see her again.
The ambulance was driving with its headlights off, Akil at the wheel, a Colt AR-15 assault rifle in his lap, speeding toward the expat plaza and specifically the expat dining hall where he’d last seen Crocker, Tiny, and Mancini. He spotted more technicals parked in front of two buildings ahead and to his right.
Saliha sat beside him with her eyes closed.
He touched her shoulder and pointed. “What’s that?”
“Those are the expat dorms.”
“Is there any other route to the dining hall?”
“Not without exiting the compound and circling around to the front gate,” she answered.
“That will take us longer, right?”
“Yeah, yeah. Of course.” Seeing armed men dressed like soldiers standing outside the expat dorms, which they were fast approaching, she grabbed his shoulder, and shouted, “We’d better stop!”
Akil pushed the accelerator to the floor. “I can’t do that.”
Saliha looked at him like he was crazy. “Why not?”
They were within twenty-three meters of the dorm now, and the speedometer had crept past a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour (approximately ninety-three miles per hour). With one hand on the steering wheel, Akil checked to make sure the mag was locked tight into the AR-15 firing chamber and the safety was disengaged.
He handed it to Saliha. “Take this.”
“What am I supposed to do with it?”
He calmly lowered the passenger-side window. “If they start firing at us, shoot back.”
“Me?!” she screamed. “Are you out of your mind?”
“Maybe! Just squeeze the trigger.”
Festus Ratty Kumar was almost delirious with excitement. His men had taken the entire north end of the complex, from the main gate to the security office, expat dining hall, expat dorms, and expat recreation center. He had personally gunned down more than a dozen foreign workers, and his men had killed scores more. Currently, they held twenty-six foreigners hostage in the expat dorm, and hoped to find more.
The violence had unleashed a dark energy inside of him, but the complexity of the operation confused him. From his perspective, he had inflicted the revenge he wanted, and now he could inflict more, and then end it.
Standing outside the front entrance of the expat dorm, his aides Modu and Banjoko were trying to talk him out of executing the foreign hostages and blowing up the building.
“My brothers in Allah, if God wants the infidels to be executed,” Ratty shouted, pacing back and forth and waving his arms like Mick Jagger, “the infidels will be executed!”
“Commander, we have been victorious,” Modu said, trying to calm him down and listen to reason. “We can’t act without conferring with Sheikh Umar Amine first.”
“Why? Where is he? We’re invincible now. This is the moment of victory! What are we waiting for?”
“But we agreed to a common strategy, Commander,” Banjoko argued. “We gave our word to use the hostages as leverage.”
Ratty continued pacing, squeezing the sides of his head. “It is wrong to wait. This is not what Allah wants…I know…It only gives the infidels time…Time to plan…and get inside our heads…where they don’t belong.”
“The sheikh is coming…Look.” Modu pointed south, in the direction of the FN center and gas plant, and Festus Ratty stopped pacing and focused on a vehicle speeding toward them. He couldn’t remember what kind of vehicle Umar Amine had arrived in.
“This is Amine?” he asked.
The vehicle was traveling through a dark section of the compound and its headlights were off. Modu tried the radio, but Umar Amine didn’t respond.
He was trying Amine’s top aide, Abu Abbas, when Banjoko interrupted him by shouting and pointing at the sky to the north. “Look, look! A helicopter!”
“A helicopter?” Festus Ratty asked. Things were happening too fast for his brain to process. The operation was too complicated.
He and Modu tore their eyes off the approaching vehicle and turned their focus to the night sky in the opposite direction, and watched with growing concern as the outline of a South Africa–made Rooivalk attack helicopter traveling low to the ground came into view.
Festus Ratty shouted at his gunners in the back of the technicals to fix the aircraft in their sights and prepare to fire.
The helo, known as a Red Kestrel and based on the French-made Aérospatiale SA 330 Puma, zoomed in sixty meters off the ground and engaged its twin 20mm canons.
Festus Ratty knelt behind a column in front of Building A and shouted into his handheld radio, “Open fire!” The DShKs (Dushkas) and Browning M2s (Ma Deuces) started up and the tremendous noise they made obliterated every other sound.
He didn’t notice Banjoko pointing to a second Rooivalk swooping in from th
e west, cannons booming and catching the BK gunners off guard. Men shouted and ran for cover. Festus Ratty aimed his AK-47 and yelled, “We’re invincible! They can’t stop us! Shoot the evil robots out of the sky!”
Akil drove pedal to metal as Saliha lowered her head behind the dashboard and prayed out loud, “In the name of Allah, the Gracious, the Merciful, I seek refuge—”
“Do it silently!” Akil shouted. “You’re making me nervous!”
Saliha continued the prayer in her head even though she hadn’t stepped inside a mosque in five years. Petitioning for intervention from a celestial power seemed like the only option left.
Akil’s eyes remained locked on the road ahead. He was aware that the Ford E350 ambulance was moving too fast for him to take any kind of evasive action without losing control. He quickly calculated that the critical window lay a few seconds ahead when the ambulance passed within fifteen meters of the technicals parked outside the building to the right.
He coaxed the van-shaped vehicle to pick up speed, even though the engine had maxed out at 167 kilometers per hour.
Akil lived for moments like this. He noticed something moving toward them in the night sky. Thought it was a reflection at first. Then saw the outline of a strange-looking attack helicopter swoop low until it was directly in front of them.
Seemed to be headed straight for the windshield.
“Hello, motherfucker!” Akil exclaimed. “What planet are you from?”
A second later the helo’s twin cannons lit up. Rat-t-t-t-t-—Spitting out rounds so fast it was impossible to mark the space between them.
“Hold on to your nuts!!!”
Twenty-mm rounds tore a diagonal line across the hood. Whap-whap-whap-whap!
Saliha screamed, and Akil locked his eyes on the asphalt ahead, willing the ambulance forward, aware of the helicopter and big guns engaging one another in his periphery. Thought he saw another helo swoop in and he felt the ambulance losing power. Saw steam rise from the hood.
