Hunt the Leopard Read online

  She wondered if the imam who lectured them daily for the past two years was right. Maybe there was an element of evil inherent in modern ways. Maybe Western ideas of personal freedom and self-fulfillment offended the Igbo river goddess Mami Wata, or the God of the Quran.

  Maybe she was wrong to ever think she could be anything other than a country girl, living in a little house in the woods with a rusting corrugated metal roof and no running water, no electricity, no gas, and no telephone. She was part of a family that owned no chrome, glass, or even upholstered furniture, only tables, bed frames, and benches made by her father, brother, and uncles out of wood collected from the local forest. Even their kitchen sat outdoors, under an awning.

  It had been Chichima’s ambition to seek a better, more modern life that had led her to the Government Girls’ School in Yola. Even though she started at fourteen, which was later than most girls, she had risen to the top of her class. Her curiosity had been like an unquenchable thirst. Her favorite subjects: history and English.

  She learned that her people, the Igbo, lived in south-central and southeastern Nigeria on both sides of the Niger River. Starting at the end of the seventeenth century, an Igbo subgroup called the Aro people had formed a confederacy that spread its influence throughout eastern Nigeria and all the way south to the Atlantic Coast. To grow their economic power, Aro business families began exporting palm oil and slaves seized from poorer Igbo tribes. They sold the slaves to traders from Europe, who then exported them to colonies in the Western Hemisphere where the demand for manual labor was high.

  This brutal history made a strong impression on Chichima’s young mind. She tried to see past the horror of slavery to the tremendous impact Igbo culture had made on the United States in jazz, ragtime, various forms of dance, art, and the cultivation of yams and okra—both Igbo staple crops.

  “We are one love, one voice, one heart beating,” went the lyrics to the song by one of her favorite singers, Oona McOuat, who she had originally discovered on YouTube.

  Chichima’s ambition had been to go to the US to study at a university after she earned her high school diploma. Then she would return to her native country and become a teacher, to educate rural girls like herself so they could better understand the world and reach their full potential.

  She had thought of it as a form of cultural-historical retribution. She would be returning significant things that had been taken from her ancestors—dignity, knowledge, and education. She would make her Igbo students strong enough to stand up for themselves and spread a positive influence throughout Nigeria, Africa, and the rest of the world.

  It was a dream that seemed unattainable in her current circumstances, locked inside a shipping container at the base of the Mandara Mountains.

  Just then, the lock rattled and the metal door creaked open.

  Chichima was so weakened in body and spirit that she didn’t respond to the armed men who ordered the girls to line up outside. It was only when Navina pointed to the short man with the crazy eyes and whispered, “It’s the Leopard,” that she realized that maybe something significant was about to happen.

  To the outside world, the man Chichima saw standing outside was Festus Ratty Kumar, first cousin of Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau. To his men and followers he was known as the Leopard, for many reasons. There was the dirty, leopard-patterned bandana he always wore on his head to cover a nasty scar suffered in a knife fight at the age of twelve. There were also his skills: Festus was quick-tongued, quick-footed, and quick-fisted. Like a leopard, he operated on instinct, stalking his prey, attacking it unaware, and destroying it.

  Now he bristled with almost inhuman energy, pacing back and forth in the jungle clearing and ordering his men to load the teenage girls into two trucks that had been stolen hours earlier from a local cement plant.

  Festus Ratty Kumar’s chief aide, a one-eyed northerner named Modu (which meant Mohammed in Kanuri), asked why. Kumar smiled out of the side of his mouth, looked at him askance, and answered, “Opportunity!”

  Modu knew not to expect an explanation. When Kumar decided on a course of action, he did it whether people agreed with him or not. His bold decisiveness had led to many military successes and had attracted loyal recruits from Islamic radicals and criminals in northern Nigeria.

  Ratty Kumar had been a wild, unusual boy from the beginning, born weeks after his father was arrested for stealing government property. He’d shot out of the womb carrying a sword, according to his mother. Possessed a crazy, relentless, uncontrollable energy that no one was able to curb or corral.

  By age two, people in his village outside the northeast city of Maiduguri (capital of the northern Borno State) were already recommending that he be poisoned, drowned, or buried alive.

  His mother and grandfather tried reasoning with the young boy and, when that didn’t work, inflicted various forms of punishment. When his uncle beat him with a stick, Ratty responded by assaulting his older sister and pulling her hair out. When his uncle tied him to a tree outside for a week, Ratty managed to get free and set the house on fire.

  In frustration, his mother went to the local tribal chief and asked, “What makes him like this?”

  “Maybe you’ll never know,” the tribal chief answered. “Maybe you don’t want to. The sky is wide enough for hawks and doves to fly without colliding into one another.”

  No school would have him because he was constantly making trouble and getting in fights. He was nwa nwa—loosely translated: a hell child. By the time Ratty turned ten, his mother remarried and her new husband gave her an ultimatum: Choose between him or me. The other has to leave.

  A week later Ratty’s mother dropped him off at the Christian Alliance Orphanage in Maiduguri. He lasted four months. An energetic, good-natured kid most of the time, he refused to follow rules or standards of good behavior. Had no respect for authority. Nothing—neither kindness and compassion, discipline, or lessons from the Holy Bible—seemed to make the slightest impression.

  One night he was found fornicating in the pantry with a mentally deficient kitchen attendant. A month later he was accused of stealing money. A month after that, he was caught stealing brass religious objects from the chapel and selling them in the market.

  The school’s administrators expelled him.

  If Festus Ratty Kumar felt any remorse, it didn’t show. By age thirteen he was living on the streets of Maiduguri, scrounging for food and money. He used people, stole, lied, and learned that power was more important than money, knowledge, friendship, or sex. He derived his power from his strength, wits, and courage. No one or nothing frightened him—not the authorities, disease, loneliness, or even the wrath of God.

  An unreal energy shone in his eyes, mesmerizing street kids and criminals. Some of them swore that sometimes, when he was excited, a blue light would emit from his hands.

  At fourteen he was arrested for assaulting a girl. A month later he was detained by the police on suspicion of stealing a motorcycle. At sixteen he was sent to prison for possession of a stolen car, raping a girl while his girlfriend watched from the backseat, and then beating the girl and threatening to kill her.

  Local newspapers called him a moral degenerate. Even though the victim refused to testify in court, Ratty was sentenced to nine years of hard labor.

  His criminal activities continued in prison. He quickly developed a network of guards, and outside criminals, who smuggled food, cell phones, computers, DVDs, and drugs into the prison for cash. He even paid off the warden. A year in, he was approached by a recruiter from the Nigerian military who offered to commute his sentence in exchange for joining the infantry. Ratty signed up, and went AWOL two weeks into basic training.

  A month later he was caught, beaten, and thrown back in prison. It was at that point that a visiting teacher and friend of his cousin came to talk to him about the Quran.

  Rain started falling in big drops as the SEALs—minus Tiny Chavez, who had stayed behind because of his bad stomach�
��waited under the lip of a pre-fab aluminum structure that served as the AFSF base control tower. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

  Thunder reminded Crocker of home, and summer nights on the front porch with his parents, sister, and brother.

  He had instructed his men to strip themselves of anything that would identify them as US operators, including blood chits and dog tags. They were dressed in a combination of military fatigues and civilian clothes, armed with weapons borrowed from the Nigerians, mostly German-made MP5 submachine guns and Russian-made AK-47s, and their own SIG Sauer 226 pistols.

  The rhythmic beating of the rain and his own physical exhaustion had lulled Crocker into a rare contemplative state. Like drawing a rainbow in his head, he retraced the arc of his life—son of a Navy veteran, rambunctious kid, gangbanger with the Flat Rats, motocross racer, girl chaser, marathon racer, Navy recruit, corpsman, BUD/S candidate, SEAL Trident recipient, husband, father, member of SEAL Team Two, divorcé, member of SEAL Team Six, long-distance athlete, husband, and divorcé a second time.

  He started to wonder what lay ahead—travel, more marriage, more deployments—when Akil appeared at his right, water from the roof pelting the tops of his Merrell boots.

  Crocker looked at his watch. 0136.

  “What are we waiting for?” He’d forgotten about the boy in the hospital.

  Akil shrugged. “Who knows.”

  He and his men hadn’t seen action since Syria months ago. Crocker was looking forward to the burst of adrenaline, the thrill of unforeseen danger, and the synchronicity of men and machines moving together.

  “What do you make of Lieutenant Peppie’s intel?” Crocker asked.

  “I trust him. He’s a smart man.”

  Crocker was aware that the Nigerian lieutenant in charge of J-2 and Akil had struck up a friendship. What he didn’t know was that Akil had spent the last couple of nights at Peppie’s house, feasting on Peppie’s wife’s food, and discussing the problems with Islam. Akil, though born in Egypt and nominally Muslim, had never stepped into a mosque since immigrating to the US at age seven. He was curious about what a thoughtful, faithful Muslim man like Peppie felt about his religion.

  Peppie had explained that all of the practicing believers he knew thought of their religion as one of love and tolerance. Even Sharia law, he’d said, had been misconstrued by fanatics.

  Sharia, literally translated from Arabic, meant “a path to water where people can drink and seek nourishment.” It wasn’t intended as a set of laws, but rather a guidebook to how to lead a life pleasing to God. It told Muslims how to become better friends, family members, and citizens.

  “Then how does it result in the horror we see carried out in Iraq, in Syria, in the name of Allah?” Akil had asked.

  “Paths can be tricky,” Peppie had answered thoughtfully, “especially when they are meant to lead to God. Just as there are many paths to a well, there are many interpretations of Islamic law, and some paths lead people astray.”

  Crocker saw that the sky ahead had turned a very dark shade of red.

  He turned to Akil and asked, “Where is the rest of the team?”

  “Inside, keeping dry.”

  Crocker looked over his shoulder, through the window of the terminal building. Major Martins was standing and coolly smoking a cigarette in the company of some of his men. He wore a maroon scarf under the collar of his freshly washed jungle fatigues.

  To his way of thinking, the major’s nonchalance wasn’t appropriate, not now, as they were preparing to launch a mission.

  He reentered the tin-roofed shack, took a deep breath, and asked, “We doing this, Major?”

  The major grinned. “When a cow hurries to go to America, it comes back corn beef.”

  Some of the officers around him chuckled. Crocker bit down hard on his annoyance.

  “I’m not familiar with that saying.”

  “It means patience, Mr. Crocker. We’ll be airborne soon.”

  “How soon?”

  “Soon as the crocodiles are operational,” the major answered. “Five minutes, maybe ten.”

  “Crocodiles? What crocodiles?”

  Major Martins pointed outside where two Russian-made Mi-35P helicopters, with green camouflage bodies and noses painted to look like crocodiles, waited on the tarmac.

  “Is there a specific reason why we’re waiting?” asked Crocker, who was starting to boil inside.

  “A minor fuel line problem in Crocodile One. The mechanics are patching it, and will be finished soon.”

  According to Lieutenant Peppie’s informant, the Boko Haram trucks and cars were estimated to reach the Cameroon border by 0300. That gave them about a forty-minute window.

  Around a corner, he saw Mancini and Gator sitting with their boots up on a table as CT adjusted the sights on his borrowed AK-47.

  “We should be moving soon.”

  “Sure, boss,” said CT.

  Gator lifted his MP5 to his shoulder like he was ready for action, grinned, and said, “Laissez les bon temps rouler.”

  Chapter Four

  “I will not suppose that the dealers in slaves are born worse than other men—No; it is the fatality of this mistaken avarice, that it corrupts the milk of human kindness and turns it into gall.”

  —Olaudah Equiano

  At three minutes before two, the SEALs were finally airborne with Major Martins and Lieutenant Peppie accompanying them in Crocodile One. Eight 72 AFSF operators rode in Crocodile Two behind them. CT sat on a bench across from Crocker and Mancini, an AK clenched between his knees and earbuds in to drown out the roar of the twin VK-250 engines.

  Crocker imagined the big former University of Oklahoma wrestler was mentally preparing for the mission ahead. Instead, CT was considering the long and tortured history that had forced his ancestors out of Nigeria and had facilitated his return.

  It was CT’s older sister Alexis, now a high school civics teacher, who had traced their family’s history all the way back to their Igbo forefathers who had toiled on subsistence farms not far from where he was now. And it was she who had urged him to read the book Middle Passage as a teenager. When he found out it was a work of fiction, written by a PhD in philosophy, he threw it aside.

  His middle school English teacher in Compton, California, recommended The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, a memoir, instead. It was written in 1789 after Equiano, who described himself as “neither a saint, or a hero,” merely lucky enough “to be blessed by heaven,” bought his freedom from his Philadelphia merchant owner.

  “Blessed by heaven” to have experienced the horrors of slavery, and to have been one of the few who had escaped them.

  He learned that Equiano came from a village in southeast Nigeria, a district where agriculture was the primary occupation, land was abundant, and people believed in one creator who lived in the sun and governed all of life’s major events. Cleanliness and decency were esteemed, and music and dance celebrations were a weekly occurrence. Equiano had never seen the sea or a white man until age eleven when he and his sister were seized by members of a rival tribe, separated, and sold to European slave traders.

  From Nigeria, he was transported with 244 enslaved Africans to Barbados—the horrific Middle Passage that was the subject of the novel that CT’s sister had urged him to read. From Barbados, Equiano and some of his fellow slaves were shipped to the British colony of Virginia, where he worked in the fields of a plantation and observed many more horrible atrocities: overseers who cut and mangled slaves, and white masters who violated the chastity of the females, some as young as ten years old.

  Equiano was sold several times, renamed Michael, forced to convert to Christianity, beaten, branded, and finally landed in the hands of an American Quaker merchant named Robert King, who was kind, patient, and gave him an opportunity to buy his freedom, which he did. Equiano subsequently moved to England, learned how to play the French horn, joined several debating societies, b
ecame deeply involved in the abolitionist movement, married a white British woman, and fathered two daughters.

  CT had suffered his share of racial indignities, too, most dramatically when he was assaulted and beaten by a group of local toughs in Edmond, Oklahoma, one night while walking his white girlfriend back to campus.

  Still had scar tissue over his left eye and partial deafness in his left ear.

  Like Equiano, he’d moved on and learned that cruelty and bigotry weren’t the provenance of any one race, tribe, or people.

  Interesting how I’m back in Nigeria to complete the circle started by my ancestors, he thought, as he stared at the helicopter floor.

  The Mi-35P helo reeked of fuel. The fuel line was probably still leaking. With “Alfie’s Tune” by the great sax player Sonny Rollins playing through his earbuds, Crocker thought of alerting Major Martins, who was seated behind the pilot, snacking on pistachios. But ruled against that, because he didn’t want to give him an excuse to turn back.

  Wind buffeted the helo sharply left, then right.

  Crocker had been through so many life-threatening situations with Mancini and Akil, he could often read their thoughts. The new guys, Gator, Tiny, and CT, were harder.

  And yet every single SEAL he’d known over the years had overcome intense physical and personal challenges to earn the Trident. Gator, Tiny, and CT were no exception. Like most guys on the teams, they were tough, energetic young men from poor and lower-middle-class backgrounds who had never been described as scholars. In Crocker’s case, he’d barely made it through high school.

  He knew that Gator was the product of a broken family from Concordia Parish, Louisiana. “Miles of rolling flatlands dotted with stinking swamps and populated with obese, drug-addicted white trash,” was the very blunt way he described it. According to the US census, it was the poorest county in the country.