He’d been thrown from his bike and was rising from the ground, one arm greased with blood. I brought my sights to bear and opened fire, loosing three suppressed shots as he darted downhill and vanished in the trees to my west.
Pushing myself upright, I broke into a run in a race to pursue him, cutting left alongside the trail, outrunning the screams from the kill zone before entering the cluster of trees where Usman had disappeared. Threading my way between the trees as fast as I could move, I keyed my mic to transmit as I heard the first explosion from Objective South.
At the first sounds of an approaching motorbike, Worthy heard Cancer whisper beside him, “Get set.”
Both men assumed their firing positions then, popping up over an oblong clump of earth and rock they’d selected for the best possible cover and concealment. For Cancer, the effort was as simple as setting his sniper bipod atop the mound, then dropping forward on the slope as he writhed into a stable shooting posture.
For Worthy, however, the process was considerably more involved: first he had to adjust the rifle slung on his back, then hoist the RPG-7 onto his shoulder and crouch near the top of the slope with the heavy rocket launcher precariously balanced. He probed the ground with his knees, searching for patches of dirt free of sharp rocks before glancing to his side.
A second RPG-7 launcher rested there—once the ambush kicked off, there would be no time to reload—and he verified its position a final time before taking in the view before him.
The slope rambled downhill for four hundred meters, then flattened out to reveal a long stretch of winding trail that faded away at a narrow angle from the two shooters. The angle meant that the targets would be approaching almost head-on, which was great for the purposes of accuracy; likewise, the sparse vegetation between them and the kill zone ensured that their visibility would be clear enough to positively identify which Boko Haram leader was on his way uphill.
But both factors had their drawbacks: visibility worked both ways, and it wasn’t inconceivable that an alert motorcycle passenger looking in the right direction could identify a rocket launcher perched atop the otherwise formless shape of a ghillie suit. And the sparse brush extended for a full twenty meters of rockfall behind them before a stand of trees would provide sufficient cover for a running escape from Objective South.
Since the trees didn’t afford a clear line of sight to the center of the kill zone, the two men had settled on the only compromise they could. After Cancer delivered his fatal shot against the Boko Haram leader, he’d have to take off running while Worthy covered his movement with the rockets. After that, Worthy would likely be pinned down at the initial firing point until Cancer was able to get a sufficient vantage point over the kill zone’s eastern edge; then, he could deliver effective fire to cover the point man’s retreat.
“I’m set,” he said to Cancer, adjusting his grasp on the twin pistol grips of his rocket launcher. As the motorcycles continued to approach, Worthy aligned the RPG scope to his eye and angled it toward the farthest visible reaches of the trail.
The crosshairs were misaligned, skewed ever so slightly off center and rotated clockwise, in a way that made Worthy doubt the precision of his shots. That was fine with him—this wasn’t a precision weapon. Each rocket impact would inflict high explosives and shrapnel in a blast powerful enough to kill anyone within a 23-meter radius—at least, if they worked as advertised.
The first dirt bike came into view, the driver’s gaze fixed on the trail before him. At the sight of a passenger atop the second motorcycle, Worthy feared he’d be seen at once, ghillie suit or no—but the man wasn’t looking uphill, instead scanning the opposite side of the trail with his rifle propped upward.
The third and fourth bikes had a single rider, while the fifth was operated by a man in a blue jumpsuit, a rifle slung across his torso. It was Salafi, Worthy recognized at a glance, Usman’s predecessor in Boko Haram’s command structure before he was captured by the Nigerian military eight months ago.
Neither Worthy nor Cancer said a word as they heard the first rattle of machinegun fire to the north, followed almost immediately by a second burst, then a third, as Worthy watched the Boko Haram convoy’s reaction to this new development.
Salafi began shouting over the sound of the bike engines, and his order culminated in the best possible outcome as far as Worthy and Cancer were concerned—the convoy sped forward, plunging into the kill zone at an oblique angle to their firing position.
Then an enormous blast rocked the earth to the north: David firing his payload of interconnected suicide vests, putting these bastards on the receiving end of the same IED tactic they so loved employing against Nigeria’s military and civilians alike.
The riders didn’t break stride, continuing up the slope in an effort to outrun the danger. At this angle, it didn’t matter; they were only making themselves a bigger target.
With the echo of the blast still rolling over the hills and the dirt bike engines closing the distance, Worthy never heard Cancer’s suppressed shot.
Instead he saw the newly released leader’s blue shirtfront flash red from the sniper round before he fell forward, twisting the handlebars sideways and crashing his bike. The motorcycle behind him was skidding to a halt just short of impact as Worthy squeezed the trigger on his RPG-7.
His optic flashed white with smoke, the launcher becoming light in his grasp before he tossed it aside.
It hadn’t made landfall before the streaking, hissing rocket found its mark, exploding in a fireball ten feet in front of the downed bike. The blast preceded an angry cloud of black smoke that cleared to reveal a smoldering mass of motorcycles and human bodies—the latter third of the convoy was fairly well obliterated as the survivors ahead of it dumped their bikes in the trail and scrambled for cover behind the trees while trying to locate the source of the shot.
Cancer was gone, racing toward the trees with his sniper rifle in hand as Worthy shouldered his second rocket launcher, searching for the remaining fighters through its scope as two radio transmissions crackled over his earpiece.
First was Reilly, panting with exertion as he triumphantly announced, “Objective North is finished, we’re moving to linkup. I got Usman.”
Then, as Worthy’s sights settled just behind a cluster of fighters taking cover behind a boulder, David responded breathlessly.
“No, you didn’t.”
Worthy squeezed the trigger, listening to the deafening pop of the RPG before he dropped the launcher and reached for his rifle. The rocket screamed over the boulder and struck the trail on the far side, erupting in a blast of high explosive and shrapnel.
He grabbed his HK416 and was crawling sideways behind cover as he heard the first pop shots of return fire, followed by Reilly’s stunned voice over the team frequency.
“Yeah, I did.”