After that realization, Ian was able to instantaneously discern the headers on the pages that followed: the Arabic characters ra dal seen equated to an acronym for RDS, which in context meant Royal Dutch Shell. Likewise, additional photographed pages indicated AGIP, Italy’s Nigerian Agip Oil company, and TPNL, or France’s Total Petroleum Nigeria Limited.
Under each heading was a set of rows discernable as latitude and longitude, some crossed off with a date annotation.
The final page in the ledger bore a header that translated roughly to ‘Iksoon Mubil.
ExxonMobil.
After that singular recognition, Ian assumed a laser focus on the page’s contents.
Once he did so, he understood that his team’s findings went way beyond the one oil company that didn’t have a dedicated page in the current ledger: Gradsek. He already knew they were snatching up market share as other oil companies withdrew from Nigeria, and faking reports of attacks on their own locations—but now he realized Gradsek was actively targeting their competitors, providing Boko Haram with detailed intelligence on the locations of drilling operations and exposed pipelines for tasking to pirate and vigilante groups, all without getting their hands dirty. This went way beyond an economic conspiracy—it was a terrorist one as well, a carefully orchestrated web of strategic targets to guide bombings, illegal siphoning, and even, he realized upon reviewing the ExxonMobil page in the ledger, kidnappings.
A line reading Lagos harbored an additional notation: the Arabic numerals for eleven, the number of hostages captured five days ago, followed by another latitude and longitude. Ian didn’t need to verify this one; it was the camp in the Sambisa Forest, discernable at a glance because it had been crossed off.
But that led him to keep reading, and the instant he saw what came next, Ian felt a rush of euphoria that suddenly justified his team’s every action in Nigeria.
There was a scrawled word in Arabic, which read phonetically as Gwoza—a town just 80 miles southeast of Maiduguri—written not over a single grid location but a trio of them.
The three remaining hostages were being kept at separate locations in Gwoza. Now, Ian had exactly what he’d come for.
He snapped a picture of the page, followed by a close-up of the three grid locations just to be certain. The last thing he noted was a dashed series of numbers he recognized from memory: the phone number of Malu, the Permanent Secretary for Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Petroleum Resources.
Just before he turned the paper to reveal blank pages beyond, Cancer’s voice crackled over his earpiece.
“I hear cop cars—get out of there, now.”
Speaking in a harsh whisper, Worthy called out from the doorway, “You’re done. Let’s move.”
Reilly was midway through firing an AK-47 burst when Cancer’s call came over his team frequency, followed in short order by Ian’s response.
“I’ve got what I need.”
David transmitted, “Angel, you’ve got a thirty-second head start—exfil, exfil, exfil.”
Then, to Reilly, the team leader shouted, “Go!”
Reilly emptied the remainder of his magazine, then stripped the mag and hurled it as far as he could to the left—if nothing else, it would help inflate the perceived number of attackers in the imminent post-battle analysis, which, with a little luck, would only occur after his team reached a position of relative safety.
After reloading, he called out, “Moving,” and waited until David resumed firing to begin his sprint back toward the shed to their south.
He was two steps into his run when David’s fire fell silent, a momentary lapse between bursts that allowed him to hear two shouted words from the security force. And while he couldn’t discern what those words meant, he knew without a doubt that they were spoken in Russian—meaning they’d been fighting Gradsek security men. The Russian oil company had directly outsourced protection to this critical site for Boko Haram’s continued reign of terror.
For Reilly, the knowledge brought with it a surge of validation; he was a medic by trade, and to date he’d never been able to contribute a single facet of information to the team’s intelligence picture. He wanted to inform his team immediately, to shout his discovery to anyone who could hear him.
But first, he had to get out of here alive.
He scrambled behind the shed, resuming a firing position off the left side of the structure and opening fire toward the muzzle flashes still flickering inside the compound.
His shots were as effective as a radio transmission in signaling David to end his current burst of gunfire and bound back toward the medic. The flames licking the box truck and its surrounding vicinity were dying down now, and between automatic bursts Reilly could hear the approaching wail of police sirens—Cancer hadn’t been exaggerating, he thought. By the sound of it, they were only a minute or two away, and Reilly emptied his current magazine as David skidded to a stop beside him.
“Last call,” David shouted, and Reilly stripped his empty magazine, once again hurling it sideways before reloading and firing a final burst.
Leaving his weapon on full automatic, he pulled the sling over his head and dropped his still-smoking AK-47 beside Johnny’s body. David did the same for Walker, and both men transitioned to their suppressed Agency weapons before flipping their night vision devices back over their eyes.
Reilly said, “I should wait until you’re sitting down, but…” He drew a breath. “Those guys were Gradsek.”
“No shit,” the team leader replied angrily, as if that much was so obvious it needn’t be spoken. “I assumed that when the guys who flanked us were white. You good?”
Reilly swallowed. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m good.”
David took up a firing position toward the compound, this time without shooting. This was Reilly’s cue to move, and the medic took off southward, completing the next bound of their dismounted exfil.
Worthy came to a halt at the edge of the building, pausing to look both ways down the street. The police sirens were screaming in now, and the glance to his right revealed the distant gleam of a flickering light bar.
This was do-or-die time, his last chance to cross the street before it was illuminated by the headlights of the first cop car to arrive. He launched into a desperate run, his boots slamming across the dirt road. What he needed now was to immerse himself in darkness, to slip into the shadows between the houses ahead and rely on night vision to escape.
He arrived between buildings, skidding to a stop before pivoting backward to check Ian’s progress.
And while the intelligence operative was running across the road, his body half-lit by the incoming headlights as Worthy searched for any security guards trying to pursue, the sight beyond gave him pause.