“Which village?” Duchess asked.
Ian appeared beside me, shaking his head to indicate that his search of the cab had yielded nothing of use. We began moving to the next vehicle, an abandoned pickup truck.
“Stand by,” I replied to Duchess, reading off the ten-digit grid from my wrist-mounted GPS. That was the sickest joke of this entire event—the village was so obscure that its name wasn’t even listed on our mission planning software. The only location that would mean anything to the CIA was the alphanumeric grid identifier that I rattled off now, which in their hands probably wouldn’t even help our team, much less the locals. It would be a data point on an intelligence report, perhaps, but nothing more: these kinds of atrocities happened every day in Africa. They had long before we arrived, and would continue long after we’d gone.
We reached the pickup and repeated the procedure, with Ian diving into the cab as I climbed into the back and began rifling through the containers I found—some fuel cans, food provisions, and water jugs. Useless.
I was climbing out of the back when Duchess replied, “Copy all, what’s your current location?”
“Still on scene,” I answered, moving to the final truck. “Treating some casualties before we move out.”
She knew better than to question me on that point—if we were remaining in place after being compromised to the local populace, it was for a damn good reason. Instead, she asked, “How many EKIA?”
“Unsure,” I replied quite honestly, climbing up the rear bumper to find a wooden crate in the back. “Maybe a dozen.”
“Did you say a dozen?”
I flipped open the rusty metal clasps securing the crate lid.
“They were heavily drugged. Probably the easiest firefight we’ll ever have.” I deliberately left out the fact that I’d very nearly been gunned down, escaping death by mere inches only through a combination of a reflexive fall, an untrained opponent, and the fact that Ian had responded more quickly and effectively than I was able to manage under the circumstances. “Will provide further information when able, need to finish site exploitation at this time.”
Then I flung the crate lid open, my heart seizing up at the sight before me—which would very likely be the last thing I saw in this lifetime.
But instead of being killed, I heard Duchess’s monotone reply in my earpiece.
“Understood. Standing by.”
My next breath took considerable effort to summon, and it took the sight of Ian exiting the pickup cab, stuffing a handful of paper flyers in his drop pouch and calling up to me, “Anything?” before I was able to muster a coherent response.
“Yeah,” I said, considering a more detailed explanation and settling for a request instead. “Come up here and take a look at this.”
Ian climbed into the bed, halting abruptly as he took in the crate’s contents.
The pile of homemade body belts with shoulder straps had been crudely sewn with as many pouches as they could accommodate, each pocket bulging with rectangular bricks connected by a leapfrogging assembly of red wires. I didn’t need or want to examine them any more closely to know that the explosives were surrounded by ball bearings, each of which would outdistance the blast to fling an omnidirectional swath of death. They were suicide vests, the calling card of local terrorists the world over, designed to be worn by willing martyrs or, in the case of Boko Haram and ISWAP, young women who’d volunteered for the purpose to escape a lifetime of hunger and sex slavery at the hands of the men who’d captured them.
I transmitted over the team frequency, “Doc, how much more time you need?”
Reilly responded after a brief pause. “I can cut Racegun and Cancer loose, but I’ll need a few minutes to finish up.”
“Copy,” I replied, then keyed my mic again. “Cancer, Racegun, I need you to collect any mass casualty-producing weapons—RPGs, machineguns—so they’re in our hands and not left for the terrorists. As soon as Doc is done, we’re out of here.”
“Got it,” Cancer replied. “Moving.”
Beside me, Ian gestured to the crate and asked, “What about these?”
“It’s too much to blow in place,” I said. “We can’t spare the explosives, and we’d just scatter the vests anyway.”
“So what do you want to do?”
What an excellent question, I thought dryly as I considered our options.
“Probably ten or twelve S-vests here,” I said. “We’re taking them with us—Cancer can defuse them in the van.”
Then I stopped for a moment, scanning the dead terrorists in the street as a new thought occurred to me. I keyed my mic again.
“And let’s bag up two enemy bodies with their personal weapons—they’re going to join us on tonight’s raid.”
36
Worthy analyzed his phone screen from the bouncing rear of the media van, calling forward to the cab after he’d made a reasonable estimation of the distance ahead.
“Take a right at the next intersection, 300 meters ahead. We follow that for another three kilometers, then we’re back on the highway.”
Tolu didn’t respond, either verbally or even with a nod; instead he continued steering the van across the dirt road, his gaze fixed out the windshield. The rumbling of tires across the uneven surface made the driver’s silence all the more unsettling—he hadn’t even turned on his customary rap music, leaving the van interior a more awkward setting than it already was, as if such a thing were possible.
David looked over from the passenger seat and said, “Hey, Mario Andretti—you hear him or what? Right turn ahead.”
“Yes,” Tolu said quietly. “I heard.”
The driver had been uncharacteristically silent since leaving the village, though Worthy was uncertain if that was due to the horrors inflicted by ISWAP, or those inflicted by his own team. After all, narrowly averting an atrocity was one thing. But watching the Agency men you’d been supporting execute an enemy prisoner in cold blood was quite another, and to hear Ian tell it, David hadn’t even bothered to send Tolu around the corner before pulling the trigger.
Then Worthy considered the obvious possibility that with a brother in Boko Haram, Tolu’s ostensible callousness toward terrorists had been shattered at the sight of one dying up close and personal. Particularly, he thought, when the executed man probably had more in common with Tolu’s brother than anyone in the van cared to admit.