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  His legs carried him across the dusty PT grinder to the old concrete structure where his DEVGRU Black Cell team had set up: Akil (navigator), Mancini (second in command and weapons), Rufus “Tiny” Chavez (explosives), CT (comms), and newcomer Gator (sniper) who was temporarily taking Rip’s place while he recovered from injuries sustained during their last deployment. Crocker was the team leader and primary corpsman or medic.

  Soon as he walked in the door, and the breeze from the overhead fan hit his skin, he saw that all of the men were awake even though it was an hour past midnight. This surprised him, because they had to be up at 0500 for an hour of PT before sunrise, then chow, showers, and the start of training at 0730. And Tiny, who hadn’t been feeling well, liked to sleep.

  “What’s going on?” Crocker asked.

  He blinked, and Tiny Chavez was in his face. He’d abandoned his game of Overlook, a multiplayer game that one could play as a detective robot trying to find and destroy normal robots, or an overseer seeking and eliminating defective robots.

  Their teammates called him Tiny because of his massive arms and shoulders, the right one displaying a colorful tat of Jesus. He wore baggy shorts and a Gold’s Gym T-shirt and vibrated with nervous energy. His dark hair was clipped close to his skull.

  “How’s the boy?” Tiny asked in his incongruous high-pitched voice.

  “Lost a lot of blood, but I think he’ll live. They locate the shooter?”

  “No, but they just handed us a can of snakes.”

  Tiny’s nostrils flared and his mouth twisted right, typically a sign he was upset. He was a skilled, soft-spoken operator with a little crazy in his eyes.

  “What’s that mean?”

  A quick glance around the rectangular room showed CT on a bunk peering into his laptop and Akil listening to music. Both had buds in their ears. Gator and Mancini were missing.

  “Where are Gator and Manny?” asked Crocker, blinking, then staring at his bunk as though it was some kind of siren calling him to sleep.

  “That’s what I was about to tell you about,” Tiny answered.

  “Tell me. What happened?”

  Tiny’s head was still halfway in the gothic landscape of Overlook tower, where the action had taken place tonight.

  “What happened is…this—”

  Akil cut him off. The big Egyptian-American former Marine saw Crocker standing on the tile floor near the doorway and removed the buds from his ears.

  “Yo, boss, something big is going down. Major Wally’s looking for you.”

  Tiny protested, “That’s rude, dude. I was talking.”

  “I’m talking now, bro.”

  Major Walfor “Wally” Martins was their primary liaison with the Nigerian 72 Special Forces battalion they’d come to help train.

  “What’s Major Martins want?” asked Crocker, crossing to his bunk, sitting, and unlacing his Saucony running shoes. They were spotted with blood.

  “Yo, boss…Didn’t say. But Paige Spiranac, the golf goddess I told you about? The one I’m gonna marry. She’s got a rad spread in the latest Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition.”

  Crocker turned to Chavez, who stood fuming. “Tiny…You were saying?”

  Tiny, visibly pissed, turned to Akil and growled, “No way Paige Spir-ass, or whatever the hell her name is, is gonna want any part of your hairy Egyptian ass.”

  That got a chuckle from CT. “You got that right!”

  Tiny hitched up his shorts and addressed Crocker. “You know that Nigerian J-2 guy Gator’s been working with?” J-2 was intel.

  “Uh…Lieutenant Peppie, yeah…”

  “You know how they’ve been developing, organizing, and assessing intel from various local sources?”

  Crocker’s head hurt. “Yeah, yeah. So?”

  “Well, tonight they were going over some scenarios together and this local farmer comes in with intel about some Boko Haram troop movement near the Cameroon border.”

  “Wait a minute…This happened while I was gone?”

  “While you were at the hospital, right. And when he hears the intel, Gator’s antenna goes straight up, like never happens with Akil’s dick.”

  “The fuck it doesn’t!”

  “Stop horsing around.”

  Tiny continued. “Boss, Lieutenant Peppie was real reluctant to take it to 72 HQ because of what he says are politics. Everything with the brigade is politics, politics…Besides, it’s Saturday night, and a bunch of the command guys are in town attending someone’s bachelor party. And he’s like, afraid to interrupt.”

  Typical Tiny, Crocker thought, takes half an hour to get to the point. “So?”

  “So, Gator…You know Gator when he locks his teeth on something…He practically drags Lieutenant Peppie over to the 72 HQ. And when they present the intel to the duty officer, a Captain Mobido, or Mopito, or whatever, he like waves them away like he can’t be bothered. And you don’t do that with Gator.”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “Because now that whacked-out Cajun gets up in the captain’s face, and tells him he’s a disgrace to his uniform and like a thousand other insults.”

  Crocker groans. “No…”

  “Reads him the riot act, and calls him a coo-yawn.”

  “What’s a coo-yawn?” Crocker asked.

  “It’s Cajun,” Akil cut in. “Roughly translated means something like ‘dumb fucking asshole.’”

  “Great.”

  “The captain took it as a racial slur.”

  “Shit.”

  “Got hysterical and shoved Gator. Gator smacked the captain a couple times, then backed off.”

  “Fuck…”

  “Of course the Nigerian captain runs straight to Major Wally. And now the whole Nigerian command is up in arms.”

  “Just what we need…” Crocker rubbed his face to get the blood moving. Last thing he wanted was to deal with shit like this now. But he had no choice.

  “Where’s Gator?” Crocker asked.

  “Manny took him out to blow off steam.”

  “Where?”

  Tiny turned to Akil, who turned to CT, who shrugged. “Beats me…”

  “Get ’em both back here! Now.”

  Crocker started relacing his running shoes. Considered changing out of his soiled shorts and the medical tunic he’d borrowed, but decided not to bother.

  “I’m going to talk to Major Martin. The rest of you coo-yawns go find Gator.”

  “Okay, boss.”

  As he walked beside Akil to 72 AFSF HQ, Crocker noticed a wind had started up, indicating that the weather was changing. The air revived him. He tried to remember what he had learned about Boko Haram from the CIA official who had briefed them before they left ST-6 headquarters in Virginia.

  Boko Haram was a radical Islamist terrorist group that had wreaked havoc through northern and eastern Nigeria, seizing big parcels of territory, massacring entire villages, killing more than twenty thousand civilians, and creating millions more refugees.

  Their name, literally translated, meant “western education is forbidden,” which is why they aimed their savage brand of religious fundamentalism on teachers, schools, and schoolchildren—brutally slaughtering the boys and their teachers, and kidnapping the girls to turn them into concubines and slaves.

  Much akin to ISIS in the Middle East, Boko Haram’s goal was to install an Islamic state in western Africa based on Sharia law. The analyst who had briefed Crocker also said that despite their religious beliefs they earned money from drug and human trafficking.

  Nice guys…

  Akil stopped when they got within a hundred feet of the concrete building. “Boss, there’s another part of this that bothers me.”

  Crocker was so tired he wasn’t sure his brain could absorb new information. “What?”

  “Our mission is to train, advise, and support, right? But we’ve spent the last two weeks running exercises, and haven’t done shit to take the fight to the Boko bad guys.”

  “You sayi
ng the Nigerian military isn’t doing its job?”

  Akil grinned. “Now Gator gets a report of some Boko Haram movement near the border, and the AFSF guys are too busy being insulted to see the bigger picture. That seem upside down to you?”

  Crocker was trying to remember the rules of engagement (ROEs) of their JCET (Joint Combined Exchange Training). If he recalled correctly, the SEALs were allowed to accompany the Nigerians on live missions in an advisory capacity, and shoot back at the enemy if they took fire.

  “The thing is, boss, we need to tread carefully.”

  It was strange to hear a warning of restraint from the usually uber-aggressive Akil.

  “Why’s that?”

  “Lieutenant Peppie told me something the other day that might be pertinent.”

  “Pertinent? I’m impressed.”

  “The current president of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, is a former military strongman who describes himself as a converted democrat, and previously supported the implementation of Muslim Sharia law throughout the country. Pertinent, right?”

  “Interesting.”

  “Now he denies he ever had a Muslim radical agenda, but some local dudes, including Lieutenant Peppie, still question his sympathy for Boko Haram.”

  Major Martins sat at the wooden conference table, cleaning the meat off chicken bones in the remains of a cassava leaf stew at 0026 hours. 72 AFSF had received intel from a local source about a column of Boko Haram cars and trucks moving toward the border. Rumor was they were about to engage in some kind of exchange of weapons. The sources were “moderately reliable” according to the major. But given sensitive relations between Nigeria and Cameroon to the east, he informed Crocker that military and civilian leaders in the Nigerian capital of Abuja weren’t inclined to act.

  “I don’t understand. Why’s that?” Crocker asked. Bureaucratic bullshit irritated him wherever it reared its ugly head—as in the States, so as in Nigeria. He wasn’t oriented toward concerns about image, or professional standing, or stepping on people’s toes. You saw a problem, you found the best way to solve it, and you acted to the best of your abilities.

  “Political difficulties,” the major answered. The problem now: in order to prevent any possible incident between the two countries, the Nigerian government had closed the border two weeks ago, stranding hundreds of traders and travelers, including a group of tourists from Argentina, of all places.

  Crocker wanted to ask what the hell South American tourists were doing in a war zone. But he nixed that. He was more curious to learn about the political beef between Cameroon and Nigeria.

  He said instead: “Major, I realize our job here is to advise, train, and lend tactical support. But this intel, if it’s reliable, I think it begs us to bend the rules a little, and at least find out what Boko is up to.”

  “You’re a bender of rules, sir?” Major Martins was a thick-chested man with a round, friendly face, whose dark skin had been scarred by childhood smallpox. As an officer, he outranked Crocker, who was a chief warrant officer. He had no business calling Crocker “sir.”

  Crocker couldn’t help being put off by the major’s flippant attitude about what he perceived as a highly actionable situation. But he also understood that the cultural and historical gap between them was immense, that his knowledge of local politics was limited, and that he and his men hadn’t come to Nigeria to stir up trouble, but to help and win hearts and minds.

  “The way I look at it, Major,” Crocker started, “rules are meant to be adaptable to circumstances.” He was being about as diplomatic as he could manage given his state of exhaustion. “What we’re talking about here are extraordinary circumstances that could yield very negative results.”

  Martins was a good smiler. He smiled again. “I’m a sensible man, Mr. Crocker. I like my position. My family enjoys the comforts it brings them. We have a saying in my country: A man who sells eggs should not start a fight in a market.”

  Major Martin, like many Nigerians, had a habit of communicating with proverbs.

  Crocker answered politely, saying, “We’re not selling eggs, sir. We’re trying to eradicate Boko Haram.”

  Other officers in 72 AFSF sat at the long table listening, drinking tea and sodas, and reading comics and newspapers with no sense of urgency as Crocker spoke from his feet.

  “It seems to me that if you really want to drive the enemy out of eastern and northern Nigeria, the last thing you want to see happen is for them to acquire more arms.”

  Martins looked up from the stew and waved. “Sit down, Mr. Crocker. Have a cup of tea, or a soda. What you say is, of course, correct. When a ripe fruit sees an honest man, it drops.”

  As Crocker looked for a place at the table, the lights went out, which happened often in this part of Nigeria. Nobody made a sound. Instead, one of the junior officers switched on a battery-operated lamp, and two other men went outside to start a gasoline generator. The screen door banged behind them.

  Crocker’s eyes adjusted to the shadows, and Akil whispered in his ear, “Did he just call you a ripe fruit?”

  “I hope not.”

  An aide said something to Major Wally Martins. Then the officer looked up at Crocker and nodded. “Our politicians go to London, for their education, to Paris for their holidays, to Dubai for shopping. The only time they come to Nigeria is to be buried. Does that make this a cemetery?”

  Other officers at the table laughed.

  What the fuck does that mean?

  Crocker was tired. It was their country and their fight. But he hated seeing the bad guys advance or gain advantage, and reminded himself that it usually didn’t turn out well. In the late ’90s the US let al-Qaeda bomb two of its embassies in Africa and didn’t respond. Then they let them get away with bombing the USS Cole in Yemen and killing seventeen sailors. Didn’t do shit, and how did that turn out?

  He was working up a head of steam…He didn’t want to see more children buried after a terrorist bombing, or hear about more girls being raped and kidnapped. Not while he was here and could do something to prevent it from happening.

  He chose his words carefully so as not to insult their hosts. “Major, do you remember telling me that money and weapons help the rebels attract recruits, or would you rather I keep my opinions to myself?”

  Major Martins smiled again, showing off a row of brilliant white teeth. “Yes, I said that, and yes, it is a wise observation.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Mr. Crocker, you’re an experienced soldier who has fought all over the world, and I respect that. But we’re dealing with a case of what we call aproko.”

  “What’s aproko?”

  “Rumors, sir. Gossip.”

  “The intel comes from your source. People you pay for information.”

  “Lieutenant Peppie is an ambitious man.”

  Crocker wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything. He asked, “What would you say, Major, are the odds these rumors are true?”

  “Fifty-fifty,” Major Wally Martins answered.

  “So what do we risk, Major, by checking them out? By trying to reach the column and seeing what Boko Haram is up to, and possibly intercepting them if they are picking up a shipment of weapons and ammo?”

  Major Martins pushed his chair away from the table and rubbed his belly. “You make a very reasonable argument, Mr. Crocker. The roaring lion kills no prey. I can’t argue with that.”

  Chapter Three

  “The skin of a leopard is beautiful, but not its heart.”

  —Nigerian proverb

  Yesterday had been Chichima Okore’s eighteenth birthday, but she had kept that information to herself. Today she couldn’t shake the heavy sadness that wanted to pull her into the ground—a state she tried to hide from the seven other girls of her approximate age with whom she shared a rusting shipping container hidden somewhere in the Sambisa Forest.

  Chichima had vowed from the start of this ordeal to be the strong one, the one who would record everything
and never lose faith.

  But now, after almost two years in captivity, she couldn’t hold back her frustration. She couldn’t ignore the stench and degradation that wore down her spirit. Sitting on the edge of the moldy mattress, she lowered her face into her hands and wept.

  Through her tears, she said, “So much time has passed…My friends and family have forgotten me…I’m afraid I’m becoming a stranger to myself…”

  The other girls were too numb to notice her distress. The lone exception was her gaunt friend Navina, who sat beside her, took her hand, and implored softly, “Really, deep down, nothing has changed, Chichima…The ones you love are still the ones you love. The fox still drinks from the river…”

  “I’m eighteen,” Chichima replied. “I’m already an old woman inside…”

  “Don’t think like that.”

  “Where are our countrymen, our friends, our parents? Where are they, Navina?”

  Chichima’s name meant “sweet and precious” in Igbo. Today, her dreams, her childhood in the small farming hamlet of Malabu, even her identity felt like a distant memory. That carefree life amid the bush and surrounding rivers—monkeys chattering, hornbills cawing, the incessant buzzing of cicadas and crickets, playing with her brother, younger sisters, and cousins, helping her mother, and dreaming of one day moving to the city of Lagos and leading a modern life, had dissolved into the air.

  Before she had turned six and started attending school, her father, a mechanic, was the only person in the family who could read or write. When her mother or one of her aunts wanted to communicate with family members up north, they would dictate to him what they wanted to say and he would write it down. He was also the only family member who spoke English, learned while he worked for a trucking company in the city of Jalingo. The rest of them communicated in Igbo, the language of their ancestors, which seemed to spring directly from the earth. Today Chichima wished she’d never learned English, or watched the Nollywood movies that depicted life in the cities of Lagos and Abuja, where her favorite actresses Damilola Adegbite and Venita Akpofure were glamorous women driving their own cars and living in houses with tile floors, air conditioning, and sleek leather-covered furniture.