His hesitation wasn’t based on uncertainty—the man would be spilling his guts in no time flat, he was sure—but out of fear for what was about to transpire here. If his long history with the team leader was any indication, then this interrogation was going to get ugly fast.
Tolu asked, “What are you going to do?”
“I’ll show you,” David replied, flipping the captive around to face him.
Then, without a word, David belted him across the face with a hard right cross, causing him to drop in place before he drove a wild kick into his ribs.
Ian grabbed David by the shoulder, intending to halt the attack only to receive a curious glance from his team leader, who said, “You’re playing good cop. Did I mention that?”
Ian fell to his knees beside the captive, rifling through his pockets and coming up with a handful of flyers printed on strips of paper. The text appeared to be Arabic, though Ian only needed a hasty phonetic reading of the header line before understanding the significance.
He held up the papers to David and said bitterly, “Now we know why Duchess missed this. They’re not Boko Haram, they’re ISWAP—Islamic State West Africa Province.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me,” David replied angrily. “This is the group that split from Boko Haram?”
“Yeah.”
“So they have no idea where in the fuck the hostages are.”
“None at all.”
David responded by kicking the man again, this time across the cheekbone—the restrained captive grunted in pain, spitting a dark stream of blood into the dirt. The team leader’s anger wasn’t entirely misplaced, Ian thought; at best, the team had ended an attack against civilians, somewhat miraculously without taking any casualties themselves. That reality was doubly unlikely given David’s close call with the final enemy fighter, and Ian suspected that if David were capable of any compassion under the circumstances, his near-death experience had removed it entirely.
But the irrefutable fact that there was no strategic intel to gain didn’t stop David from yelling at Tolu, “Tell him he cooperates or I turn him over to the villagers, and they’ll do worse things than I could dream of.”
Tolu hesitated before translating the statement, which caused the man to curl into the fetal position, sobbing as he delivered a lengthy reply in the local dialect.
The driver said, “He was taken from his village at the age of eight. Says they gave him alcohol, drugs, and blindfolded him. Put a rifle in his hands and told him to pull the trigger. They removed the blindfold, and his best friend was dead at his feet. He begs mercy.”
Ian was moved almost to tears by the admission—which, by his extensive research into the systematics of African warfare, was nothing less than the complete truth. In the Congo, after all, warring factions did far worse to the child soldiers they forced into slavery.
David, however, was unmoved.
Ian had known the man for years, throughout circumstances that far preceded their Agency affiliation, and saw not the slightest indication of sympathy in David’s face as he replied, “I’ll be sure to shed a tear for him later. Right now, I want to hear anything he knows about an ISWAP or Boko Haram presence between here and Maiduguri.”
Tolu relayed the inquiry and listened to the response. “He does not know. His men came from a camp to the north, far from the highway.”
Ian closed his eyes and pinched his fingertips against the bridge of his nose—he had no doubt the man was telling the truth, and that alone sealed his fate.
Advancing a step toward David, Ian said, “Come on, man, please…”
“Please? Please? You see what they did to these people?” David drew his pistol. “He wants mercy? This is mercy.”
Then he dropped to his knees before the flex-cuffed prisoner, driving the muzzle of his pistol into the man’s right eye as his captive cried out in protest.
David spoke in a low voice. “Believe me, this is better than you deserve.”
He pulled the trigger as the man’s head rocked against the ground, one eye transformed into a gaping entry wound as a pool of blood and brain matter began to spread at the base of his skull, soaking through the arid Nigerian dirt.
I stood and holstered my pistol, turning to see Tolu looking like I’d just shot his puppy instead of a terrorist. No matter, he’d get over it in time—or not, I thought. At the moment, I didn’t particularly give a shit either way.
Grabbing him by the sleeve, I gave my next order.
“Go back inside the mosque and find the village elder. Tell him we’re foreign military looking for the US hostages, and find out if they know where they might be located. They won’t, but you’re going to ask anyway. Once we’re gone, his people need to load up the dead terrorists in an ISWAP truck and get rid of it.”
Tolu looked at me resentfully—what a joke, I thought. This guy spent all day listening to musicians rap about shooting people, and the sight of a single execution hurt his feelings. Giving his arm a shake, I asked, “You got it?”
He pulled his arm from my grasp, giving me a curt nod before departing.
Then I glanced at Ian, who looked only slightly more composed than our driver. At least the intelligence operative knew the score, whether he agreed with it or not. We weren’t taking prisoners, and the very act of treating casualties could turn out to be a lethal decision if an ISWAP counterattack managed to arrive before we pulled out. Not only did we have no perimeter security, but we couldn’t even establish it without pulling team members out of the casualty collection point. Short of abandoning the wounded altogether, the best thing we could do was to leave this village as quickly as possible.
I told Ian, “Keep the ISWAP propaganda, and let’s get these trucks searched.”
Then I stepped into the dirt road and jogged east, past the abandoned motorcycles on my way to the first truck belonging to the now-deceased enemy force.
As I moved, I transmitted over the command frequency, “Raptor Nine One, Suicide Actual.”
I wasn’t keen on reporting this incident at all, but now that the cat was out of the bag, it was unavoidable. We’d just shot up a significant terrorist element, and the odds of Duchess finding out from some intel report correlated with our route was too great for me to ignore. So I decided to provide a quick update—after all, she couldn’t order me to abort the assault if she only found out about it after the fact.
Duchess spoke from the far side of the world, her voice grainy over the satellite connection.
“Suicide Actual, send your traffic.”
By then I was closing with a covered flatbed truck, pointing at Ian to search the cab before I visually cleared the cargo area before climbing into the back.
“Our adjusted route took us past an ISWAP village raid-in-progress. We conducted a hasty assault, assess we killed all the enemy but the entire village has seen us in action. Told them we were foreign military searching for the hostages, over.”
The back of the cargo truck was empty aside from some foldout benches—this must have been the dedicated prisoner transport vehicle. I lowered myself to a crouch at the rear before leaping back into the street.