The point man was only half-joking. Even with the driver and passenger windows rolled down and wind whipping through the cargo area, the smell of paint fumes was enough to make Ian loopy.
Their weapons were already painted mottled tan and brown as a matter of standard practice. But the rucksacks and tactical vests had to be modified on the fly, every exposed surface spray-painted with grass and leaf patterns as Worthy used paper overlays to complete the effect, consulting images of the Sambisa Forest that he’d prepared prior to their departure.
Sitting next to Ian, Cancer replied, “And you better hurry up and finish so that all has time to dry, otherwise they’re going to smell us coming a mile away.”
“Yeah,” Reilly added. “Besides, if you could sew, you wouldn’t be on spray paint duty in the first place.”
Worthy completed another pass of spray paint over a rucksack, then peeled his patterned cutout off the surface.
“How would I know how to sew? How do any of you?”
Reilly shrugged. “I’m a medic, bro. Stitches.”
Cancer spoke without looking up. “Sniper. Not my first time making a ghillie suit.”
This left Worthy to cast an accusatory glance to Ian. “What about you? Lots of sewing required in the intelligence business?”
“High school,” Ian explained, completing his stitches on the fishing net and applying a few dollops of shoe glue to seal them in place. “The redheaded twins in my class took Home Ec.”
Worthy was quiet for a moment before calling up to the cab.
“David?”
In the passenger seat, the team leader was balancing a laptop over his thighs, using satellite imagery to plot their infiltration corridor based on the information Duchess had sent.
He said, “Don’t interrupt me, I’m planning.” Then, looking back at the cargo area, he admitted, “But I can’t sew worth a shit.”
“See?” Worthy said. “And this seems excessive, is all.”
Ian reached for a handful of burlap fibers from the box at his feet, then girth-hitched the mass around the strips of fishing net that now dangled from the fatigue jacket. He’d never considered the particulars of how snipers built the ghillie suits that made them look like piles of leaf litter, and was somewhat mortified when Cancer matter-of-factly explained that unweaving individual strands of burlap was standard procedure—which, after an hour of practice, made Ian desperately regret not simply buying a suit in the States for this eventuality.
Responding to Worthy, Cancer said, “We’ll be on target for at least 24 hours. At a minimum we’ll be in close proximity to Boko Haram in broad daylight, and that’s even if none of them manage to step on us in the course of their security patrols. You want to take your chances with the camouflage pattern on our fatigues, be my guest.”
Reilly grabbed a pile of burlap strands and added, “If the Sambisa Forest is as badass as Ian says, odds are we’ll be found and killed either way.”
Ian completed another girth hitch of fibers around the fishing net, ensuring it overlapped the one beneath it before commenting, “After two hours of nonstop rap, I can’t say the prospect bothers me as much as it normally would.”
Cancer raised his voice and declared, “This is Wu-Tang Clan, you cultural swine. And rap is an art form, na so, Tolu?”
Tolu shouted back in pidgin, “Make you no vex me! Best music in the world. Talk smack in my van, I go land you slap.”
Cancer cut his eyes to Ian and said menacingly, “That means he’ll slap you, Ian.”
“Yeah, I got that,” Ian replied, continuing to work on the fatigue jacket. “Thanks for the translation.”
Reilly looked at Ian and asked, “You think the hostages will be there?”
Ian shook his head slightly. “I have no way of knowing how Duchess got that location, or how reliable her source was. But even she said it’s thin. If it’s a dry hole—which it probably will be—then our team is irrelevant because the JSOC hordes are probably descending on Nigeria as we speak.”
Looking up from the ghillie-suit-in-progress, he concluded, “And I can tell you one thing for certain: if the hostages don’t end up at that exact grid, we’ll never find them. The forest is massive, and if Boko Haram was able to hide a few hundred kidnapped schoolgirls there, they’ll have no problem making a half dozen hostages disappear.”
11
Worthy rounded a tree, attempting to pick up his bearing when he spotted a patch of bushes rising to knee height, appearing almost black in his night vision. In any other forest, he’d push through them without a second thought.
But these particular plants had razor-sharp thorns nearly an inch in length, a lesson he’d learned the hard way shortly after Tolu dropped them off at the outskirts of the Sambisa Forest. After lacerating his calves and spending precious minutes trying to disentangle his fatigue pants, Worthy had avoided these dark patches like the plague.
He diverted to the right, straying farther off course in an attempt to make headway toward their objective. It hadn’t taken long to realize that thorn bushes were only half the battle—the Sambisa held open clearings at fairly regular intervals, and anything easily trafficable to his team was equally so to the hordes of Boko Haram fighters swarming across this swath of forest that had somehow risen out of the otherwise arid savanna in northern Nigeria.
So Worthy drifted farther east, leading his team through a grove of low trees whose canopies interlocked to obscure the sky almost completely. That was what made this forest such a refuge for terrorists—impervious to satellites and aerial surveillance, Boko Haram could easily hide an army in the Sambisa, and that’s exactly what they did. So far Worthy’s duties as point man had allowed him to detect three separate encampments whose fires provided the only early warning that he needed to change course immediately. His normal vigilance had transcended to a hyper-alert state as he scanned the vegetation ahead, fearful of treading near a more disciplined enemy camp whose occupants didn’t have a bonfire burning at this hour of night.
He was halfway through the grove of trees, circumnavigating the thorn bushes to his left, when he heard something arguably worse.
A chorus of eerie, high-pitched chuckles punctuated by nasal screeches reverberated in waves to his front.
“Hyenas again,” he transmitted in a whisper. “Ten o’clock.”
A charging lion, Worthy thought, would be an easy day by comparison—see the animal, shoot the animal. But if a clan of twenty or thirty hyenas surrounded his team, their suppressors would do little to discourage an attack. They’d heard the hyenas at several points so far, but had yet to actually see any of the slimy creatures, which, to Worthy, made the situation worse.
David replied over his earpiece, “If they haven’t tried to eat us yet, they’re not going to. Besides, the only thing our weapons can’t handle is an elephant.”
Continuing to move, Worthy keyed his mic and said, “No elephants out here.”