His smile didn’t fade in the least. “ISWAP, man. Don’t forget what we took from ISWAP.”
I felt a flush of heat as realization dawned on me, then I looked at the other team members to see them nodding as they reached the same conclusion—first Cancer, then Reilly, and finally, even Ian.
Keying my mic, I said, “Duchess, I think we’ve got a plan.”
41
The next morning, Reilly heard the Boko Haram element before he saw them: over the whisper of wind through the tree-covered foothills around him came a low, grumbling snarl that could only be motorcycle engines.
“I’ve got audible,” he whispered.
To Reilly’s left, Ian shifted in his prone position, perching on his elbows to raise binoculars as he replied, “I hear it too. Should have visual any second now.”
The medic did the same, aligning his binoculars as he awaited his first sight of the Boko Haram fighters.
His magnified view was blurred at the edges, the effect of wrapping burlap over the lenses to eliminate the morning sun’s reflection and, consequently, compromising their position. Each strip of burlap had a slit cut in it to allow a reduced field of view, which now spanned a 250-meter path due north.
Reilly tilted his binoculars low, seeing the sharp drop of the ravine to his front before following the view up the opposite side, from landmark to landmark, just as he’d done dozens of times since morning nautical twilight had begun three hours earlier.
First he found the jagged, moss-covered boulder at the base of the ravine. Then he worked his line of sight upward and slightly left until he located the gnarled trunk of a small tree growing from the side of the rock wall, followed by a dark crevice etched in a near-vertical streak near the high ground on the opposite side.
Then his view settled on a narrow wisp of dirt trail emerging from the forest, carving a twisted path before flattening out in a ten-meter stretch as straight as any mountain path could be. The straightaway was almost perfectly aligned with Reilly’s body, both oriented north in a position that he had worked hard to attain. For Boko Haram, it was little more than a flat stretch of trail on their way to the hostage exchange.
But for Reilly and Ian, it was a nearly ideal kill zone.
He held his binoculars steady, listening to the snarl of motorcycle engines grow louder as they approached his field of view.
While the three grids Ian had recovered in Maiduguri gave the team a head start in planning this little excursion, the real key was why those grids had been chosen by Boko Haram in the first place.
And the answer to that, as a cursory examination of satellite imagery revealed, had little to do with the clearings themselves. After all, there were numerous other spots along the eastern edge of Gwoza where helicopters could land just as easily.
But the three grids shared one thing in common: trail access from the mountains.
While an endless spiderweb labyrinth of such trails crisscrossed the cave networks of the Mandara range, they congealed into a very limited number of pathways leading down the final foothills and into Gwoza itself. So while Boko Haram could come from virtually anywhere on the high ground, they would undoubtedly divide along the three single trail stretches leading to the exchange points—and that vital assumption had allowed Reilly’s team to orchestrate a three-way split to cover each in the interests of slaying Usman minutes after the Nigerians freed him.
The first Boko Haram fighter came into view then, a lone rider atop a dusty black dirt bike with his face covered by a balaclava. A slung rifle rested across his torso, and Reilly had no sooner identified it as an AK-47 than the second bike appeared, followed by a third as he began his mental count.
The drivers had rifles slung across their front, angled barrel-down across their chests; several, however, had passengers who kept their weapons pointed upward with one hand, balancing the buttstocks on their hips as the row of motorcycles threaded across the narrow trail. Reilly caught sight of one RPG, then another, and one driver with not one but two rifles slung across his chest.
His passenger, however, had no weapon at all.
Reilly felt his breath hitch as he took in her features—she was blindfolded, her head wrapped in a shawl with traces of straw-colored hair falling out in tangled disarray. Both her upright head and the tight grip of her arms around the driver’s waist indicated she was alive, though as her dirt bike turned north and headed away from Reilly, he could see bloody streaks across the back of her beige shirt. She’d been beaten or whipped or both, and Reilly’s instinct to administer medical treatment was relegated to a dull background noise against the burning desire to annihilate her captors upon their return trip.
As a final dirt bike blocked her from view, Reilly considered that the task of ambushing these men would be as easy as it was gratifying. They’d just ridden past with no thought to tactical spacing—their motorcycles were clustered almost end-to-end as they negotiated the path, a tight formation ripe for the picking.
Except, he thought as they passed out of sight around the next turn, there might be no chance to ambush them at all.
After a pause, Reilly asked, “Was that Hostage Two or Three?”
Ian whispered back, “Hostage Three, and I counted seven men, five bikes. Want me to send it?”
“No,” Reilly said. “I got it.”
Then, keying his radio, he transmitted, “Enemy just passed through Objective North en route to the market. We have PID on Hostage Three, I say again Hostage Three, along with five motorcycles and seven enemy.”
David replied over his earpiece, “Copy all, will relay to Duchess. Be advised, the birds are approximately one minute out.”
It was frustrating not to have eyes-on the landing zones, instead relying on Duchess’s updates for a modicum of information. But they didn’t have the manpower to confirm which trail Usman would be taking back into the mountains, and couldn’t even use Tolu for that vital purpose—in the interests of surviving this thing, they needed the driver staged with the vehicle, ready for a pickup effort that, even if everything went according to plan, would have to occur with every possible urgency.
Reilly could make out the sound of distant rotor blades to his left, the three Nigerian Air Force helicopters ferrying Boko Haram leaders now on final approach to their landing sites in Gwoza. He’d barely detected the noise when Cancer transmitted over the team frequency.
“Exchange element just passed Objective South, they’re continuing toward the secondary school. Eight men, six motorcycles along with Hostage One, I say again, Hostage One.”
That particular designation belonged to the last remaining ExxonMobil oil executive, and Reilly considered that left only a single remaining female at large.