“Not camps,” Worthy clarified. “I mean, how many internally displaced people here?”
Ian responded before David could. “Ten thousand in Gwoza. But if you’re asking about Nigeria overall, it’s three million.”
“All from terrorism?” Worthy asked.
“Terrorism, warlords, tyrannical governments—the lines blur here as much as they do in the Middle East.”
Worthy fell silent at that. Suddenly Project Longwing didn’t seem like nearly enough—more evil was perpetuated by madmen and lunatics than the sum total of civilized militaries could stop, too many tyrants to kill. And rather than growing more troubled by that realization, Worthy instead felt a redoubling of his determination to see Usman dead before his team left Nigeria.
David announced, “Emir’s Palace is up ahead. Tolu, take a left at the T-intersection and then the next right. Two minutes out from the objective.”
Worthy looked at the compound to the left, a two-story building with arched doorways and a long balcony beneath minarets. Compared to everything else they’d seen in Gwoza, it was a pinnacle of luxury.
Reilly said, “Pretty nice digs. All you have to do is become the emir?”
“Yeah,” Ian answered, “that’s a dicey career choice, though. Boko Haram assassinated the last one shortly before they invaded. And the current emir can’t set foot outside Gwoza without a target on his back.”
A series of turns took them through a residential area and a patchwork of storage units before the road emerged onto a sandy patch of ground, flat as a pool table for five hundred meters before reaching the base of the mountain.
The road ran abreast of the clearing, leading southeast along the periphery of town. As the team scanned the area, Cancer asked, “So where the fuck is it?”
David hesitated before replying, “Two hundred, 250 meters to our ten o’clock.”
“Strike two.” Worthy shook his head. “Not only are the hostages not there, but there’s no place for Boko Haram to put them even if they wanted to.”
Ian’s confidence sounded dashed as he muttered, “There’s still one more grid to go.”
Ian fell into his seat in the back of the van, mind swirling as David gave Tolu his next instructions: back into town, south along the main road, and then thread a course east to the third and final objective.
Retrieving his Android phone, Ian hastily scanned the screen. The grids near the market and palace had been exactly as they appeared on the satellite imagery, and he examined the final one in the hopes of finding some new detail. After all, his theory that the grids represented hostage locations was only as good as the existence of a place to keep them. While Gwoza was certainly an ingenious and unlikely location to relocate captured Americans, if the final grid yielded nothing more than the first two, then he had no alternate explanation, no secondary theory that would give his team any hope of effecting a rescue.
The third location was the southernmost of the trio, this one in a clearing a few hundred meters south of a secondary school. He struggled to make any sense out of this—he’d been expecting to note some suspicious structure in the grid vicinities, if not one that had eluded their outdated satellite imagery altogether.
He considered the possibility of a coded offset—some uniform metric such as 300 meters due west of the provided grids, a master key that only a few in Boko Haram’s leadership would know. But he sensed in his heart that wasn’t the case; he’d held the Maiduguri ledger in his hands, photographed every page. It was debatably the most compartmentalized record that Boko Haram possessed, tucked away in the confines of a secure shell company. If the answer was anywhere, it was within those pages. Yet Ian had analyzed every scrap of intel on the drive to Gwoza, and he knew that Duchess’s staff of analysts was doing the same back at the Agency. If they hadn’t found anything that would help his team by now, it was unlikely they would.
Besides, he thought, there was an elegant uniformity to the pattern: each location was on the east side of town, in a field at the base of the Mandara Mountains. Not only could that not be accidental, it indicated a level of premeditation whose purpose Ian simply couldn’t decipher at present.
But until they got eyes on the final location, all hope wasn’t lost.
Keeping his phone in hand, Ian rose from his seat and resumed his position beside Cancer, Worthy, and Reilly. The view had shifted dramatically in the past few minutes; instead of a bustling population center packed with civilians carrying out their normal pattern of life in the only military-controlled bastion of safety within a hundred miles in any direction, the van now traveled down an empty street. The area appeared abandoned not only by the town’s many residents but by any form of life whatsoever.
A row of buildings extended to their left, the doorways empty, rooflines scorched with black soot—evidence of the devastation that Boko Haram had inflicted when they controlled the town. Piles of sheet metal were scattered in the street, and Tolu steered around a long line of burned-out vehicle carcasses: cars, vans, and commuter buses, all set aflame long ago in what would become their final resting place. The largest building on the street was reduced to rubble, its roof caved in atop the few remaining support beams. On the walls around them were uncountable bullet holes.
David asked, “What the hell happened here?”
Checking his phone imagery, Ian confirmed their location and then said, “This is ground zero of the Boko Haram invasion. They came disguised as soldiers, marshalled the villagers here, and then massacred three hundred. The ones who fled the village ran into an outer cordon where they were gunned down, and whoever survived was subjugated to systematic rape and executions until the army finally got here.”
Reilly asked, “Seven months later?”
“Yeah.” Ian nodded. “More or less.”
The occupants of the van remained silent after that, save David giving Tolu periodic directions on where to turn as they threaded their way toward the secondary school. Ian saw the Mandara Mountains looming over the rooftops ahead, an ominous reminder of where Boko Haram had fled to and from where they would return.
He felt an odd, simmering suspicion at the thought, some detail that remained beyond his grasp. Whether it was part of his omnipresent second-guessing of the tactical situation or some clue that he should be picking up on, he couldn’t tell—but the sensation was quickly swept aside as they approached their third and final grid.
David said, “Government Day Secondary School is coming up on our left. The grid is two hundred meters south of the campus.”