This time Worthy complied, scrambling into the cab, where he stepped atop the passenger seat and transitioned to a left-handed grip on his rifle so he could lean out the open window while aiming backward.
The van rocked furiously as his teammates piled inside, Cancer shouting from the back, “We’re up!”
“Go,” Worthy said, and Tolu dropped the emergency brake before accelerating down the trail.
Combined with the effect of gravity on the heavy van, this resulted in the vehicle practically catapulting downhill, painfully flinging Worthy’s chest against the window frame as he searched for targets. It wasn’t easy—between the vehicle bouncing over rocks and ruts in the trail and his precarious firing position half-perched on the passenger seat, operating his weapon off-handed was the least of his worries.
He could hear David shouting something in the back, heard unsuppressed gunshots behind them, and knew his team was returning fire through the open cargo doors. But he couldn’t see what they were shooting at until Tolu followed a curve in the trail, allowing Worthy a momentary glimpse of a motorcycle following them down the path. The driver couldn’t shoot but his passenger was making a go of it, crude though the attempt was. With one hand holding onto the driver, he used the other to balance his rifle atop the driver’s shoulder as he took wild shots. This was some real backwoods terrorist effort, Worthy thought, an A+ for enthusiasm but an F for tactical feasibility.
The motorcycle driver was probably deaf by now, and before Worthy could align his sights the man was dead, struck with multiple bullets to the torso before falling over the handlebars as the dirt bike fell to its side and skidded, both riders now rolling into the trees. Another bike swerved around these new obstacles, replacing the first while attempting the same maneuver.
This time Worthy was ready. He ripped three suppressed shots, uncertain of his accuracy as his view jostled violently on the uneven path. Whether by Worthy’s hand or his teammates’, the driver’s head lurched and he toppled backward, dislodging his passenger as the motorcycle continued unimpeded, covering another ten feet before hitting a tree root and crashing into the woods.
Then Tolu called out, “I can see the town.”
Worthy flipped his selector lever to safe and slid back inside the passenger window, carefully angling his rifle into the cab. He announced, “Weapon,” passing his HK416 to Ian in the cargo area and tossing back the two spare magazines. His last glimpse of the cargo area revealed total chaos—Cancer was pulling the rear doors shut while the remaining members feverishly stripped off their tactical kit, preparing to stash the gear and change into civilian clothes. Worthy slid the folding partition shut, encapsulating the rest of his team from outside view as he turned in his seat, facing forward to take in the view of Gwoza.
Mamman hadn’t been kidding when he claimed to have bolstered his defenses: the terrain flattened out to a row of military trucks and armored personnel carriers, their heavy weapons oriented at the van as it barreled out of the mountains and into the low ground.
Worthy flinched in anticipation as the wind howled through his open window—Tolu was speeding them toward a perimeter of soldiers who’d spent the better part of each working day beating back Boko Haram attacks, and so much as one gunshot from a panicked member of the formation would incite the entire line into a free-for-all. Within the next few moments, Worthy saw that his worst fears were coming true.
Automatic gunfire erupted from the Nigerian line, muzzle flashes sparking from heavy machineguns before a truck-mounted launcher emitted a puff of smoke and sent a rocket screaming toward the van. Worthy’s final thought wasn’t of family or even a rapid-fire slideshow of his life to date—instead, he imagined the Nigerian soldiers picking through the van’s charred remains, perplexed to find that several occupants in the back had inexplicably died without pants.
But no bullets shattered the windshield, and the rocket soared just over Worthy’s side of the van; he pulled his torso through the open passenger window, tracing its smoke to the trailhead they’d just departed, where the munition detonated in a fireball amid a cluster of dirt bikes following the van out of the mountains.
Worthy dropped back into his seat just as Tolu steered between two army vehicles, continuing along the dirt path leading into town. The road ahead was blocked by an APC bristling with radio antennas, and a group of three dismounted soldiers signaled them to halt by way of aiming their weapons at Tolu.
The Nigerian driver hit the brakes, decelerating sharply to a full stop as Worthy caught sight of Lieutenant Colonel Mamman beside the APC. He was wearing a flak jacket adorned with pouches below a Kevlar helmet, shouting something into a radio mic whose cord led to the backpack of a kneeling radio operator.
Worthy wrenched his door open, stepping outside the van with his hands raised. He had to buy his team just a little bit of time, perhaps one or two minutes for them to transition themselves and the van’s visible contents to civilian appearance.
Seeing that the nearby soldiers were ignoring the van altogether, their eyes and weapons fixed on the gun battle playing out on the eastern edge of Gwoza, Worthy lowered his hands and strode up to the enormous officer with a scarred cheek who ended his radio transmission to glare at him through dark sunglasses.
“Lieutenant Colonel Mamman,” Worthy began, “I think we’re ready for that military escort out of Gwoza.”
42
Two Days Later
Duchess manipulated the digital map on her computer, panning the view from one side of Africa to the other, then back again. Never before had this God’s-eye view of a single continent made her feel so small, yet she repeated the process in large part because there was nothing else to do.
For once the situation was entirely under control; for once a Project Longwing mission had concluded without risk of political reproach, without some potentially catastrophic fallout that threatened to tank the program and take her career along with it.