Hunt the Leopard

by Don Mann

  “Mexico, no.…” the jihadist said. “Israeli.”

  It hurt to speak. “Palestinian.”

  Tiny had been inspired by the story of Lieutenant Colonel Nick Rowe, who had been one of thirty-four POWs to escape the Viet Cong. Separated from his fellow Green Berets, he was captured by Viet Cong in the Mekong Delta and held in a three-by-four-by-six-foot bamboo cage. He was interrogated for five years and frequently tortured. So obstinate that his captors referred to him as Mr. Trouble.

  “No, Palestinian. Jewish.”

  “I can’t be, motherfucker. I eat hot dogs.”

  An instructor at his SERE training course had said, “The enemy will force you to make decisions. It’s up to you to decide what is right, and what is wrong.”

  Now the jihadists stood over him and taunted him together. “You Jewish. Jewish…piece of shit.”

  “You need to get your ears checked, boys. Your brains, too.”

  “You funny, Jew.”

  “You’re funny, too.”

  “I laugh a lot when we kill you.”

  When the Viet Cong learned that LTC Rowe was a high-value target, they led him into the jungle to be executed. Rowe overpowered his captors, signaled a passing US helicopter, and escaped.

  “You can laugh all you want, hijos de puta…”—son of a bitch—“But one day you’re going to face someone like me, and it’s not going to be pleasant…And when you meet your maker, whoever that is, he’s gonna look you in the eye and say, ‘fuck you!’”

  The terrorists had left Mancini and the Scandinavian woman against a wall in the hallway with their wrists and ankles bound. And even though blood was streaming from Mancini’s nose into his mouth and he had lost a couple of teeth, he had the presence of mind to try to comfort her, whose ankle had swollen to twice its original size.

  “We’ll get out of this. I’ve been through worse…Where are you from?” he asked, trying to get her mind off the pain.

  She was short, middle aged, and small boned with almost white-blond hair.

  “Are you Swedish?”

  “Norwegian,” the woman responded in a soft voice, craning her neck down the hallway to see if anyone was coming.

  “Flink,” he whispered back—“good”—using one of the dozen Norwegian words he knew. “You have a name?”

  “Berit.”

  She was about to say more when the phone he had borrowed from Jamisen vibrated. He raised his chin to indicate for her to be quiet, then used his wrists to pull the phone out of the back pocket of his shorts, leaned as far right as he could, and used his thumbs to punch in the code as though it was no big deal.

  “Captain?”

  “Mancini, is that you? You sound funny.”

  “Dental issues…sir,” he answered after swallowing the blood in his mouth.

  “I’ll make this quick before we’re cut off. Do you know the whereabouts of, or are you in contact with other members of the team?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Crocker?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know if he’s alive?”

  “Negative.”

  “Okay,” said Sutter. “Here’s the situation as I understand it. The terrorists are in complete control of the base. They’re holding a large number of foreign terrorists. They’ve made a series of demands to the Nigerian government that the government has deemed unacceptable.”

  “Oh…” He heard the footsteps of multiple people approaching and figured that they weren’t bringing good news.

  “No point getting into that now. The terrorists have set a deadline of midnight tomorrow. They’re threatening to blow up the plant and kill the hostages if their demands aren’t met.”

  “Oh.”

  “Mancini, what are your chances of sneaking out of there and finding your way to safety?”

  “Not good, sir.”

  Berit was making noises to indicate that the insurgents were approaching.

  He kept leaning as close as he could to the phone. “We’re talking to the Nigerians and exploring various options. Turn your phone on intermittently. I’ll be in—”

  A boot crashed into the side of his head near his ear, and he immediately lost consciousness.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Knowledge without wisdom is like water in the sand.”

  —African proverb

  Chichima looked down at her newly painted fingernails, then at the brightly colored Swaheelies sandals, and wondered if they belonged to her. A feeling came over her similar to the one she had experienced in the Sambisa—a partial shutdown of her mind and body like most of the lights in the house had been turned off, all the doors locked, and the part of her that vibrated lived hidden in the basement.

  A woman behind the table, with an immaculate blouse and modern black-framed eyeglasses, smiled as she spoke. “We have designed this program specifically to help you catch up with your studies and reunite you with your former classmates.”

  Chichima nodded. She was sitting with three of her former classmates, who had also been kidnapped and later rescued. Today was their first day back in the Government Girls’ School compound after almost two years.

  Instead of being allowed to quietly slip back into their classes and freely wander the campus to get reacquainted with friends, she and her classmates were in a room in the administrative office being counseled by Ms. Lawan and Mr. Obindu from the school, and another man who said he was a local government official.

  Taped to the wall behind their heads were messages that read: Never give up. Believe in yourself. Shine like stars.

  The government official warned the girls not to talk about their time with the militants and not to discuss their experience. He explained that they would all live together in a separate area of the girls’ dormitory away from the other students.

  “Why?” Chichima asked.

  “It’s for your own protection,” he answered. “The other girls will be afraid of you. They might think that you have become attached to your captors.”

  “I think that’s unlikely,” said Chichima, looking to her friends for support.

  The three of them wore shame on their faces and stared at their hands folded in their laps.

  “Or they might worry that your captors will return to look for you, thereby putting them in jeopardy,” continued the government official.

  Chichima felt an impulse to leave the room, but her body didn’t obey.

  Ms. Lawan tried to soften the message, saying, “We know you’ve been traumatized. You were traumatized together; we want you to heal together.”

  “Forget the past and move forward,” advised Mr. Obindu, the assistant director of the school.

  “How?” Chichima asked.

  “Maybe you’re in what we call the red zone now. Maybe you feel sad, and vulnerable, and even fearful. But that will pass with time.”

  Crocker checked his watch. 2214. Then slipped out the rear door of the dining hall dressed head-to-toe in black. Armed with a SOP knife and a Glock 9mm tucked into the waistband of his pants.

  His heart pounding, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the darkness, then hurried along the back of the hall, past the swimming pool, and outdoor rec area, to the six-foot-high brick wall. A sliver of new moon hung in the sky, casting little light as the stars and spectacular Milky Way stretched east to west.

  Catching his breath, he brought his head up and scanned the facility south. Saw artificial lights in the distance, indicating that terrorists were in possession of battery-operated torches or flashlights.

  Otherwise his view of the two three-story expat dorm buildings sixty meters away was blocked by native scrubs and a series of port-a-cabins that Alf Knutsen said served as offices for the plant maintenance staff.

  Saw that the one nearest him, at a thirty-degree angle, had been broken into. Its aluminum front door hung from a top hinge and the windows were shattered.

  Climbed the wall, crouched along the opposite side, then ran to the closest port
-a-cabin. Gave him a clear view of the plaza right and perimeter fence, all the way to the far east side of the front gate in the distance.

  One thing stood out—a series of three barrels hidden behind the lip of the plaza wall and roughly ten meters from the dining hall. He had no doubt they contained explosives and were wired to a remote detonator of some sort.

  From them he gleaned part of the terrorists’ strategy and the reason why they hadn’t probed the dining hall further. The jihadists were guarding the hostages, who were probably located in the expat dorms, and maybe in Company Town and the plant control room to the south. They would detonate the area he was in now in order to deter a possible Nigerian military attack or to press for concessions in any negotiation they were waging with the Nigerian and Gulf authorities.

  Crocker confirmed this when he scurried close to the second port-a-cabin and made out three more barrels clustered and wired together between the second and third cabins. Decided not to try to disable them—one, because it was hard to see; two, because even if he succeeded it would call attention to the fact that there were survivors living near the expat plaza.

  From the back of the third cabin, he had a clear vantage point to the expat dorms and technicals with big guns parked out front. It was alarming to see, because he could only imagine the terror of the hostages inside, juxtaposed ironically with the complete silence and serenity outside. A peace interrupted occasionally by a very gentle hiss of a breeze and the call of some species of night bird.

  Saw gas plumes from the burn-off stacks at the plant flickering in the distance. That indicated, according to Alf Knutsen, that the gas was flowing again—another plus for the terrorists. Meant that they could destroy the entire billion-dollar gas processing plant anytime they wanted.

  Crocker considered turning back at this point. But the more cautious part of his brain lost, as it often did, and he proceeded south down the gentle embankment and up until he was only six or seven meters from the back of the first expat dorm—Building A. It was set back slightly from the second and had three technicals parked in front.

  Lights glowed inside.

  What now?

  Before his reason could stop him, he was running as close to the ground as he could to the back of the building, dark with shadow. He crouched near the side of a stairway and caught his breath.

  Froze when he heard a door open above him. Someone flung out a pail of liquid that splashed on his back and head. Smelled like urine.

  Shook it off and crept around the north side. Stood on his tiptoes to try to peer into a window. Squinted into what appeared to be an office lit by light filtering from an inner room. Through a partially opened door, saw people sitting and lying on the floor with their wrists behind their backs.

  The hostages!

  Had to resist the impulse to hurl himself through the window. Trying to decide on his next move, he was interrupted by the sound of a vehicle approaching, no headlights. Couldn’t tell what direction it was coming from, so he circled quickly to the back and almost ran straight into it. Dove behind the stairway wall where he’d hid before and waited.

  Don’t be stupid…

  Miraculously, no flashlights shined on him or gunfire came his way. Instead, men’s voices came so close they sounded like they were practically on his head. He heard them grunting as they climbed the stairs carrying something. When they disappeared inside, he popped his head up. Saw cases of five-liter water bottles in the open back of a Gulf truck. Also an RPG and several six-inch rockets, and an automatic rifle lying on its side.

  Decided this time that it was too risky to try to enter the dorm. Chose instead to grab the RPG and two of the rockets and run.

  It was a mischievous impulse, and one he hoped he didn’t live to regret.

  Colonel Nwosu was halfway through his third glass of Johnnie Walker Black. It was already midnight, and he was exhausted, and understood that he wasn’t likely to sleep anytime soon. Because as much as he tried to anesthetize his brain with the scotch, the stream of ominous thoughts that ran through it wouldn’t stop.

  He was seated in the Eagle Mobile Military Command Post (EMMCP) parked on the outskirts of the town of Utorogu. It was a specially designed Toyota extended cab pickup with a tent-like extension in back that housed a communication center with the capacity to link all ground, air, and central command assets throughout the country.

  On one of the many monitors, he watched a video feed from a Tsaigumi surveillance drone flying twelve thousand feet over the natural gas plant. Developed by Nigerian Air Force (NAF) engineers in collaboration with UAVision Portugal, the Tsaigumi was a car-sized air vehicle equipped with electro-optic infrared cameras, and to the colonel’s mind an example of Nigerian national vanity. Instead of buying the relatively inexpensive and very effective Israeli-built Aerolight drone, his government had chosen to build its own.

  The problem was that the Tsaigumi was so poorly designed and constructed that it was ineffective, as Colonel Nwosu saw now as the operator tried to zoom the electronic cameras in closer. All they saw on the monitor was an overhead view of the plant from three hundred meters.

  “You can’t zoom in closer?”

  “No, Colonel. The mechanism isn’t working.”

  “Useless,” the colonel muttered under his breath.

  He considered himself a tough, politically savvy man, but now felt alone on an island of responsibility and uncomfortably pressed from four sides—his government, Gulf Oil officials, his own sense of military obligation, and, though he would never admit it to anyone, the spirits of those who had died in the plant already.

  His cousin, the president, had already announced to the world that his government would never negotiate with the group called Written in Blood—which most people believed was a splinter group of Boko Haram. By the military’s count, at least thirty-seven people had died during the gas plant takeover. Many more would perish if the terrorists carried out their pledge to kill the hostages and blow up the plant if their demands weren’t met.

  Gulf Oil–Holland’s Incident Management Team (GH-IMT), led by security operations VP Kenneth Whiteside, continued to communicate with the colonel directly. The company’s decisions, he’d explained, were prioritized by the order of P-E-P—people, environment, and property.

  Via satellite phone, the GH-IMT was in contact with some staff hiding within the complex and was aware that the terrorists had taken the control room and restored the flow of the very volatile natural gas. They were convinced that the terrorists would carry out their threat at the deadline, which was roughly twenty-four hours away.

  Whiteside, on the phone again from South Holland, was asking for an update.

  “I have no new news,” Colonel Nwosu reported. “The situation remains stable.”

  “Stable?” Whiteside asked. “In what way?”

  “There’s no further terrorist activity at the plant. No killing of hostages, no additional destruction of property. We have the plant surrounded so the terrorists can’t escape.”

  Whiteside said, “We have been in direct telephone communications with the terrorist spokesperson inside the plant. He says that their position hasn’t changed, and we believe him. The terrorists will destroy the plant and the people if their demands aren’t met.”

  “You know my government’s position, Mr. Whiteside, and we hope you respect our national sovereignty.”

  “Of course, Colonel. We think there’s maybe room for negotiation. Gulf Oil may be willing to pay some of the one hundred million the terrorists are asking for.”

  “My government won’t accept that.”

  “Then is your government prepared to launch a rescue mission? Because if you are, we obviously know the plant better than anyone and would like to be consulted.”

  “We have no military operations planned at this time.”

  “No? Are you looking at one as a possible contingency?”

  “No, Mr. Whiteside. We are not.”

  At 0105, Crocke
r was trying to keep from blowing up as he sat with Norwegian assistant plant manager Alf Knutsen, a second assistant plant manager, Jeremy Leiter from the UK, and Mark Greenway, the American general manager, in a circle on folding chairs in the expat dining hall. They’d been discussing the situation for almost an hour as Akil guarded the front, and Kazumi and Eito watched the rear door.

  The mood in the room was tense, fueled by frayed nerves and lack of sleep.

  All four men understood that they were basically sandwiched between the terrorists manning the main gate to the north, and what seemed to be the main body of terrorists stationed at the expat dorms around forty meters south.

  Why the jihadists hadn’t returned to the dining hall after their initial assault and recent foray was anyone’s guess. But Crocker pointed out that there was nothing preventing them from doing so again, and all the expats had to mount a defense were two SEALs and two Japanese volunteers armed with automatic weapons and a handful of pistols and mags.

  His assessment was blunt. “If the tangos decide to come at us, we’re fucked. They’ve got explosives rigged outside, rockets, machine guns, and automatic weapons. We have four AKs and one RPG with two rockets. We’ll be wiped out in a matter of minutes.”

  The other major problem was communication. Dining hall phone reception had been extremely weak since last night, and only a handful of those inside had their phones with them. The few they possessed had almost no charge left. Also, wi-fi throughout the camp had been disabled. So they no longer had a dependable way to communicate with anyone inside or outside of the camp.

  In fact, the only secure method of communication with Gulf HQ in South Holland or the outside world was via the satellite phone in the 50 Main office in Company Town on the other end of the complex.

  Company Town was key for another reason—it overlooked the central gas plant and control room. But as Crocker had seen during his recent surveillance, the outlet flames were on, which meant the gas was flowing again. That also indicated the terrorists had taken the critical control room.