“They want to know which leader.”
Ian gave an apologetic shrug. “We’re not at liberty to say until the piece is approved for post-production editing. But she hasn’t seen her son in over a decade, and wishes to speak about the evils of Boko Haram. As they know, that’s an important message to get out into the world.”
Upon seeing the crushing disappointment in the hunters’ faces—everyone wanted their fifteen minutes of fame, Reilly thought, even counterterrorism vigilantes—Ian added, “However, we will be passing back this way. Perhaps my assistant could get a contact number, and we could do a short session tomorrow or the next day?”
This seemed to appease the men and boys alike, and Reilly begrudgingly produced a notepad and jotted down the cell number provided by a man holding a single-shot, breech-loaded shotgun that looked like it dated back to the American Civil War.
Ian bid the men good luck and happy hunting, assuring them that he’d reach out. There were sweaty handshakes all around, the hunters seemingly starstruck to meet a reporter team, and both Tolu and David hastily boarded the van.
Reilly cracked a cargo door to allow Ian to slip inside, then waved a final goodbye and climbed back in with the peculiar thought that this entire exchange was inspiring, in a way. The police and military weren’t even out here, and yet this ragtag group of hunters was doing what they could, using weapons that looked like they’d been passed down for a century.
Slamming the door shut behind him, Reilly turned to see Cancer nodding toward the van wall as he asked, “So how’d that go?”
Reilly knelt beside his kit, pulling on his tactical vest as Tolu steered the van back onto the highway and accelerated.
“If they do find Boko Haram,” he said, strapping down his personal kit, “those hunters would be better off using their guns as clubs. Some real archaic shit.”
Then he settled back into his seat, relieved to be back in the air-conditioning as he arranged his HK417 barrel down between his legs. No sooner had he gotten comfortable than he heard David up front, responding to a transmission from Duchess.
After acknowledging the message, David called back to the cargo area.
“Agency has reports of Boko Haram activity about 25 miles up the road. Worthy, can you find some local roads to get us off the highway for a bit?”
Pulling out his Android to access the route planning software, the point man leaned forward in his seat and replied, “On it.”
33
“Turn that fucking rap off,” Cancer hissed.
Tolu almost recoiled at the comment from the only other fan of that particular musical genre. To be fair, the Nigerian driver had been playing his usual soundtrack at a volume level so low that most of the team now regarded it as white noise.
But still, Tolu protested, “My vehicle, my rules—”
“I don’t give a shit whose vehicle it is,” Cancer replied. “Turn it off.”
Tolu complied without further resistance, reducing the sound inside the van to the engine and rumble of tires over the bumpy dirt road.
Cancer knelt at the helm between the cargo area and the cab, peering between the driver and passenger seats to scan out the windshield.
The view beyond the narrow, sandy road was only slightly different in terms of natural terrain from what they’d seen for the past few hours—more wooded areas and scrub brush, to be sure. But the villages they’d passed through were a far cry from the urban sprawl that dotted Highway A3 to their south. Those highway towns were replete with commercial venues for travelers—restaurants, hotels, and retail establishments, however rudimentary—while the small village his team now approached was uncannily similar to the others they’d seen since diverting off their main route.
Sand-colored buildings were just as likely as not to be pockmarked with bullet holes, partially-built walls of cinder block emerging amid the dumping grounds for trash where clusters of long-eared goats fed on whatever they could find. Some of the buildings were homes, and yet people were a rare sight, more often than not scuttling out of view at the sound of the van’s approach as they carried jugs of water or burlap sacks of food.
Where the children were in this early-afternoon hour was a mystery, and that bothered him regardless of the oppressive heat outside. These natives were no strangers to the sun’s effects less than 800 miles north of the equator, and the rarity of his fleeting glimpses of any discernible humanity made him all the more unsettled about the prospect of enemy presence.
David hadn’t said a word to his second-in-command since Cancer had taken up the sole vantage point for cargo area passengers in the media van, seeming assured that if there was a problem, he’d mention it to the team leader at once.
But within thirty seconds of Cancer demanding Tolu turn off the music, David finally looked over and asked, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Cancer replied without breaking his scanning effort beyond the windshield. It was a bald-faced lie, of course, and whether or not David discerned that was anyone’s guess. The one thing Cancer knew for sure was that the signs were all there—a tightening in his throat, a slight constriction in the lungs, the reptilian alertness that took hold in his brain. And the ominous sense that something was going to occur at any moment.
He couldn’t say why to David or anyone else, of course.
Premonition could be a dangerous thing for any soldier, even a covert one. Back when Cancer was cutting his teeth in the profession of arms—how long ago that had been, he thought—he’d gone into some missions with the sense that his own death awaited, and others where he felt an easy victory lay ahead. Rarely, however, did his premonitions have any correlation with what actually occurred; at least until he’d amassed significant experience in combat.
Once warfare became more or less routine for him, well before even his mercenary days, Cancer began to hone an almost frightening instinct that proved accurate more times than not.
The van left the village and entered another swath of rolling scrub brush and low trees, more than enough to conceal an endless number of possible threats to the team. There was limited visibility to their front and none to the windowless rear, leaving Cancer to zero in on the dirt road and its surrounding area with a laser focus, looking for where he’d set up an ambush position if he’d been born in this savanna wasteland and signed up with a terrorist outfit to satiate his need for conflict instead of entering the world in New Jersey and having to join a formal military force to accomplish the same.
His ambush paranoia was reaching a fever pitch as he watched for the spark of muzzle flashes, or the streaking smoke from an incoming rocket. They were six men packed into an unarmored vehicle; they’d be sitting ducks for anyone who wanted to pick them off. Instinct told him something terrible was about to occur—the only question was what.