“Need entry,” he whispered, stepping out of the way to assume a point of aim down the hallway as he and Worthy switched places.
The point man set to work on the lock, a difficult process under the best of circumstances and more so with a lack of ambient light. Ian stared into the abyss of the hallway ahead, a dual row of doorways presenting a tantalizing number of options for intelligence gathering. But given the firefight in progress, he’d only be able to perform a partial search of one room; and his instinctive commitment to the secured door could either result in a total jackpot or a wasted lockpicking effort that expended what little time they had left.
He felt a wrenching tension in his gut as he listened to Worthy manipulating the lock tumblers behind him, small metallic clicks interspersed with a few frustrated grunts. Every second that ticked away seemed to span an eternity—when Ian received the order to flee the building, he’d have to leave whether he obtained anything useful or not. Come on, he thought, come on...and then he heard the clack of the lock disengaging, followed by the door swinging open as Worthy entered to clear the space.
Ian held fast, now the only security standing between him and the corridor, waiting with his rifle poised until Worthy appeared beside him and said, “Go.”
He spun and dashed inside, seeing that he’d chosen wisely: this was certainly a main office of some kind, its lone desk facing the doorway. Ian had the gratifying realization that if the facility had any command post, then this was it.
Worthy retreated inside the doorway and continued pulling security as Ian rounded the desk, lowering his rifle on its sling as he activated the headlamp around his neck before taking a seat in the chair.
He ignored the desktop computer—for once in his intelligence career, he wasn’t interested in digital media. The Agency hackers had already scrubbed all they could of Okafor International’s official and unofficial business records, finding nothing that would suggest illegal activity. It had been much the same with Gradsek, whose only true records of their smuggling activity had been coded, handwritten notes on a whiteboard.
That much was no surprise, at least not to Ian. As intelligence agencies became more sophisticated, criminal and terrorist organizations had managed to survive by taking their communications to decidedly lower-tech measures—prepaid phones rotated out of service every few days, written or memorized messages transported via courier. Ian had no doubt that while there was likely information worth finding here, nothing on the computer had escaped the scrutiny of the Agency’s hackers.
Instead he pulled open the desk drawers from top to bottom. The first held office supplies, with the notable exception of a half-full bottle of vodka. But the second drawer held a stack of ledgers, the hardcovers a uniform shade of light green. Instinct told him that these were the handwritten records of things that couldn’t be documented on digital media, and that a comprehensive search of the stack would reveal illicit activities going back for months if not years.
But he didn’t have the time or, frankly, the interest for a thorough dissection. He withdrew the top ledger in the stack, knowing that if he was right, it would be the most current.
Setting the ledger on the desk, he flipped it open and prepared his phone to photograph it as he visually analyzed the first page.
The contents were in handwritten Arabic—a contradiction of sorts, until Ian considered that it was once the official language of Nigeria. It had influenced several local dialects and was still being spoken in its pure form in some parts of the north, if only as a second or third language. More importantly, if Boko Haram had been augmented with a hardliner from the wider terrorist world to manage some strategic-level imperatives, it was statistically logical that individual would speak Arabic.
Ian photographed the first page, not yet resigning himself to partial failure just because he wasn’t fluent in the language. The important thing was that he knew the alphabet, which allowed him to phonetically pronounce the script—many of the characters were shared with other languages he’d come into contact with over the years, such as Farsi, Dari, Pashtu, and, on their last mission, Uyghur.
Ian scanned the first header from right to left to see if he could decipher it. If it was a true Arabic word, the answer was overwhelmingly likely to be no. But if it was transliteration, the spelling of an English word using the Arabic alphabet, he at least had a shot.
The header line consisted of a scant five characters, which would appear to the average Western eye as a series of squiggles with sets of one to three dots above and below. Ian recognized the characters without issue, piecing together after a half-second’s consideration the phonetic pronunciation of the Arabic characters sheen, ayn, fa, ra, waw, noon. That spelled a combination of SH, F, R, OO or W depending on the usage, and N.
Shifrun?
Beneath that was an extensive list of six-digit numerals, many of which had their rows ticked off. Ian recognized these as latitudes and longitudes of specific grid locations but didn’t yet understand the import.
As far as the header went, there was considerable margin for error. This realization was all the more apparent as he flipped to the second page, snapping a picture before analyzing the top line. The Arabic language denoted short vowels with small dashes above or below the primary letter, a consideration typically omitted by native speakers. That meant he was looking at an indecipherable string of consonant pronunciations, some of which didn’t exist in the English language.
Those differences may not amount to much over the course of a single vowel or two per word, but when you were trying to decipher a written text without context, it was the difference between instant insight and total confusion. Were you looking at the name of a vegetable, an animal, a person? There was no way to tell, and Ian tried to make sense of the characters ta, kaf, seen, alif, kaf, seen, kaf, waw. That was the equivalent of writing the English letters T, A, K, S, K, W.
Trying to account for the unseen short syllables, Ian thought, Taksasku?
The real solution didn’t occur to him until he considered the phonetics when combined with the discovery of Gradsek smuggling in Lagos.
But when the idea took hold, he knew beyond a doubt that he wasn’t wrong. Each successive page confirmed the same, and the previously indecipherable Arabic words now made perfect sense. And the key, as was all too often the case in America’s foreign relations, was oil.
Shifron was Chevron, and Taksaku was Texaco.