Reilly shifted to look through the van’s windshield, taking in his first impressions of the town as Tolu steered them deeper into a population center that was, by all appearances, fairly banal.
He saw buildings that were both well-kept and dilapidated, men pushing carts, and women with their hair covered by colorful shawls. As with Lagos, car horns were a constant; but they covered ground quickly, easily maintaining cruising speed down the center of the road while flanked by bicyclists. Reilly examined one of the riders closely—a man in his twenties with bags of rice strapped three high on the back of his bike, pedaling as casually as if he were in a peaceful suburb.
He saw no sense of paralyzing fear among the citizens, and upon hearing music from a clearing ahead, he looked out to see two rows of dancers facing each other. Women in flowing black robes spun before a row of men in light blue uniforms with red skullcaps who responded with a series of synchronized foot movements, some West African form of square dancing unfolding before a crowd that clapped in rhythm with the squawking horns played by a nearby quartet.
He asked no one in particular, “This whole place seems a little too...I don’t know, peaceful.”
“Don’t be fooled,” Ian assured him, craning his neck to take in the view. “Not so long ago, Boko Haram turned this entire town into a slaughterhouse.”
Before Reilly could reply, David issued his next command to Tolu as he angled a small video camera over the dash to analyze at a later time.
“Left turn in one block.”
Reilly decided not to offer any more idle observations. Ian, Worthy, and Cancer were crowded around him, each man vying for a firsthand view through the windshield.
Dusty streets were lined with telephone poles and roadside shops with English signs, a detail that surprised Reilly. While English was Nigeria’s official language, many of the rural areas relied on a combination of the hundreds of local dialects to communicate.
If Lagos was Times Square and Maiduguri was Compton, then Gwoza seemed something akin to Omaha, Nebraska—a nondescript, peaceful town that seemed like the last place on earth they’d find a bloodthirsty gang of terrorists holding American hostages at gunpoint.
Yet there was no mistaking the three grids that Ian had uncovered—if none of the other locations in that ledger had been elaborately coded, and the Agency confirmed they hadn’t, then neither had these. At any rate, they’d find out soon enough. The team was rapidly approaching the first location, which overhead imagery indicated to be the northernmost of the trio, located just outside a marketplace at the base of the mountains.
Like the other two points, the grid was located in a small field at the eastern fringes of Gwoza. Not a building, but a clear patch of ground. That minor wrinkle didn’t seem to unnerve anyone else on the team, and Reilly had dismissively listened to various explanations ranging from GPS margin of error, to possible buildings being erected since the satellite imagery was obtained, to Boko Haram hedging their bets in case they needed to quickly exfil the hostages east into the mountains.
To Reilly, however, the real answer was far simpler than that—he harbored a deep suspicion that his team was in the process of reconnoitering three dry holes.
This assumption was based, in large part, on Duchess’s response to his team leader’s request for approval in a reconnaissance effort. Her reply didn’t take long, which couldn’t possibly be a good thing. They were approved to move into Gwoza, but there were some steadfast rules that they couldn’t waiver from in the least. Do not get close. Conduct a very loose reconnaissance while remaining in the flow of traffic. Do nothing that would spook the captors. And above all, do not get caught.
Part of Duchess’s approval was that she wanted some further confirmation of enemy presence before focusing JSOC elements on the town. To Reilly, that wasn’t a good sign—if the Agency was as confident in this new intel as Ian was, they wouldn’t allow his team anywhere near those grids.
Instead, they’d send in the ISA guys, for whom things like locating hostages using the full gamut of intelligence measures was a bread-and-butter mission tasking.
David said, “Left turn up here—guys, we’re coming up on the market. The grid will be less than a hundred meters off our right side. Thirty seconds out.”
Once Tolu made the turn, Reilly saw that twenty of those thirty seconds would be redundant.
He could clearly see the area David had indicated, could easily orient himself based off of the overhead imagery. Beyond a cluster of small buildings at the southern edge of the clearing was a perfectly flat patch of dirt, barren of any life or buildings until a row of trees that preceded the rocky slope of the Mandara Mountains.
He heard Cancer mutter beside him, “There’s no way. Nothing there, not even a spider hole.”
David said nothing, continuing to film the scene as they passed. Reilly looked to the others for some reaction, but the only one to speak was Ian, sounding cautiously optimistic despite what should have been a devastating blow to his assessment of the hostages being here.
“Maybe the grids were just options, and all three Americans are being held at one of the others. Let’s go to the palace.”
Worthy felt his shoulders sag as they passed the market objective, which was about as promising as a chastity belt and twice as confusing.
But David reacted without loss of enthusiasm, instructing Tolu, “Left turn at the next intersection and get us back to the road at the center of town. I want to take it south and thread our way back in to minimize our exposure time by the objectives.”
Worthy didn’t know what to make of the fact that the first grid had been exactly as it appeared on the overhead imagery—namely, an open field—but he knew it couldn’t possibly be good. Boko Haram had gone to great lengths to conceal those locations from being intercepted, going so far as to handwrite them in a secured facility for, presumably, later transmission over a series of burner phones if not an actual courier. So if the hostages weren’t here in Gwoza, then where were they?
The next sight only deepened his sense of despair—a city of white tents erected inside a chain link fence, one of the camps for those displaced by terrorist violence in Nigeria.
Long rows of people were standing along the fence—hundreds of men, women, and children filing slowly forward, clutching plastic plates and bowls as they proceeded toward a daily ration of rice being scooped out of vats by aid workers. The children in particular stared at the van as it passed, their eyes not desperate and pleading but merely curious, no different than Worthy’s own nieces and nephews back in the States.
David said, “That’s the Wukani Camp on the right.”
Worthy asked, “How many are there?”
“Four.”