Hunt the Leopard Read online

  His dad had picked pecans before running his pickup into a telephone pole one night while drunk on bourbon. His sick, overweight mom wasn’t strong enough to keep a job, much less support a family. He and his younger brother grew up in foster homes.

  CT’s childhood hadn’t been a walk in the park, either. Raised in Compton, California, by his mother and stepfather, he’d never met his biological father. Spent his teenage years trying to dodge the Crip vs. Piru gang violence that gripped his neighborhood. Kept his head down and played sports.

  Tiny Chavez’s skin was lighter than CT’s, but his background was just as difficult. No father, raised by his illiterate mother, who had crossed the border from Mexico while pregnant with his younger brother. Settled in East Texas where she got a job cleaning motel rooms. Tiny admitted that if he hadn’t developed an interest in horses and bull-riding as a teenager, he would have probably ended up dealing drugs and serving time in prison.

  All three men were highly trained now, likable, and positive.

  Crocker reached his right leg across the floor and kicked CT’s boot. “You good?”

  CT nodded and smiled. “Ready, boss. You know it.”

  Farther down the bench, he saw Akil leaning into Lieutenant Peppie—an interesting cultural contrast—burly Egyptian-born former Marine and reed-thin Hausa tribesman, both from the continent of Africa.

  They were huddled over a Garmin GPS mapping device.

  Crocker cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “We close?”

  Akil pointed to the screen on the device and gestured back with a thumbs-up.

  Crocker slid in beside them. “How much farther?”

  “About fifty klicks from the border. That’s Cameroon, there. We’re here…”

  “Where’s the road?” asked Crocker, pointing to the map.

  Peppie shook his head. “No paved road. Only dirt path.”

  Akil gestured to the little square window behind his shoulder. When Crocker looked out, the view was obscured by darkness and clouds.

  He nodded as if to say: Got the message.

  Stepping past legs and weapons, he knelt next to Major Martins, seated behind the pilot and looking at something on his phone. Cupped his mouth to the major’s ears and shouted, “The pilot needs to take this baby down.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  Crocker tried supplementing his words with sign language. “Can’t see anything from this altitude. The pilot needs to descend so we can find the column.”

  The major suddenly looked nervous. “Now?”

  “Yes, now.”

  “Don’t worry. We’ll find it.”

  “We’re not going to see shit unless we get below the clouds.”

  Major Martins leaned forward and said something to the Nigerian pilot, who responded by waving his arms and shouting.

  “What’s the problem?” Crocker asked.

  “He said it’s difficult because of the weather.”

  “Tell him to take it down another fifty meters.”

  “He doesn’t want to.”

  “Order him to, Major. Aren’t you in charge?”

  As they drove deeper into the bush, Chichima’s anxiety grew. She couldn’t tell if the truck she and the other girls were seated in was moving north, south, east, or west. All she knew was that they were all dressed in matching black burqas, and the night was dark and without stars.

  It reminded her of the terrible night two years ago when she, Navina, and other girls from her school had been carried away in a truck like this one. It started, she remembered, when she was seated under the light from the porch, her hair recently braided, rereading Things Fall Apart by the great Igbo author Chinua Achebe, who wrote about the clash between traditional Igbo culture and the influences of European colonization, a theme that resonated deeply in her soul.

  She remembered how strongly she had identified with the book’s protagonist Okonkwo, who rejected everything about his traditional Igbo father. Considered him backward, poor, cowardly, lazy, and interested in music and idle conversation. In the book, Okonkwo consciously made an effort to be different, and succeeded in becoming hardworking, productive, wealthy, and stoic. So stoic, in fact, that he rejected anything he regarded as soft and trivial, including music.

  Chichima didn’t think she could ever be as extreme as Okonkwo, but she did want to improve herself, her people, and her country. She focused so hard on schoolwork that behind her back classmates called her ITK (which stood for “I too know”) and meant over-serious student. She’d rather be called ITK than an almy (lazy person), or ajebutter (spoiled rich kid).

  In the book, Okonkwo said, “If a child washed his hands, he could eat with kings.”

  Back then Chichima believed that one day she would eat with kings, too, and make her parents proud. She believed as Okonkwo did that the sun shined equally on those who stood before it and those who knelt under it.

  Where is it now?

  As she read that night two years ago, she heard loud voices from the direction of the front gate. They didn’t alarm her at first. The local Igbo guards were often loud and demonstrative. But when the arguing continued, she put down the book and listened. Then she heard what she first thought were firecrackers.

  She figured thieves or other undesirables had tried to gain entry to the school compound and were being chased away by the guards—a group of cocky guys who sometimes called her “Ching Chong” because of her wide, round face and droopy eyelids. She returned to the book.

  Perhaps down in his heart Okonkwo was not a cruel man. But his whole life was dominated by fear, the fear of failure and of weakness.

  The passage troubled her, and when she looked up, she saw two bearded men watching her. They seemed to have appeared out of nowhere dressed in military uniforms with turbans on their heads and guns slung over their shoulders.

  One of them asked in Igbo in a nonthreatening tone of voice, “You a student?”

  “Yes, I am. What do you want?”

  “How many girls are inside?”

  She’d never seen soldiers wearing turbans on their heads. “Why do you want to know?” she asked back.

  The man’s expression turned ominous. “If you know what is best for you, tell them to come outside and wait,” he threatened.

  “Why?”

  “Just do as you’re told so we don’t have to make you an example.”

  Example of what? she was about to ask. She stopped herself. The men meant business.

  She put down the book, retreated inside, and joined a group of other girls gathered at the front window. Some were already sobbing and fearing the worst. Chichima scolded them for being weak.

  “Instead of standing here, let’s call Mr. Obindu,” she said. Mr. Obindu was the school’s assistant director.

  “We did already. He’s not answering.”

  “Then I’ll call the police.”

  Five minutes passed and no policemen showed up, and the armed men entered the dormitory with guns drawn. There were six of them this time and some spoke Kanuri, which was alarming in itself because it was the language of the north.

  The armed men roused the girls who were sleeping, and led them all outside where six more armed men were waiting. Approximately forty girls huddled together. The men refused to answer the schoolgirls’ questions.

  Chichima’s best friend Navina whispered, “They are Boko Haram…”

  Chichima had heard about the Islamic terrorists from the north province of Borno, but wasn’t aware that they traveled this far south. She knew they had a reputation for targeting government officials for assassination.

  “What do they want with our school?” she whispered back.

  “Maybe they’re looking for money…”

  In Chichima’s mind there was a reason for everything. She had seven thousand naira (the equivalent of twenty US dollars) that her mother had given her hidden in a shoe under her bed. She was planning to use it to buy a new skirt and blouse.

&n
bsp; Should I offer it to them now, or should I keep quiet?

  A second later the armed men were pressing the girls into a tight circle. It became so tight that Chichima had trouble breathing. A girl next to her fainted.

  She and Navina knelt to help the girl up when she heard gunshots from beyond the ridge. Someone whispered, “That’s coming from the boys’ school across the road…They’re shooting the boys…They’ll kill us, too!”

  It seemed unthinkable.

  Why would these men, whoever they were, shoot the schoolboys? Why would they harm students? Most of us come from humble backgrounds. We aren’t political, and are divided between Christians and Muslims, and different ethnic groups.

  The whole situation didn’t make sense to her. The shooting continued. As she imagined the terror the boy students must have been feeling, she started to feel light-headed. This wasn’t what she expected would happen at a place where people acquired learning and wisdom. This wasn’t how people were supposed to act.

  She wanted to reason with the armed men, to explain to them that they were good, studious young women, but didn’t know where to start. The armed men backed up a long truck and started to load the girls inside like cattle.

  Where are the police? Why is no one stopping them?

  The beatings, she remembered, started that night, inflicted with rifle butts on those who tried to escape. Girls screamed and bled. Others fainted and groaned in horror.

  That truck wasn’t big enough to accommodate all the girls. Still the men pushed and shoved them until the girls were sitting on each other’s laps.

  “Where are they taking us?” one very young one asked.

  “Why are they taking us?”

  The truck bounced and rattled out the front gate and entered the bush. It was a dark, moonless night. Some desperate girls jumped from the back of the truck and were shot. Chichima heard them call to their mothers in agony. Girls prayed silently. Navina wept.

  She wasn’t the same open, innocent, hopeful schoolgirl anymore. None of them were. Not after the beatings, rapes, indoctrination into Islam, and forced marriages.

  She had wanted to be the strong, rational one like Okonkwo in Things Fall Apart. She wanted to challenge the armed men with arguments and logic. But how could she when she was constantly being pulled further into the dark unknown, like she was now? Pulled into the world of these strange, cruel men who didn’t seem to care that the girls came from good families and had studied hard to be admitted to the Government Girls’ School.

  What was even more incredible to her was that no one stopped them. Three or four times in two years, she had heard helicopters overhead, but they had always passed like clouds.

  Things like this aren’t supposed to happen, she repeated to herself, resolving that she shouldn’t expect anything different now, even though she imagined she heard the sound of a helicopter in the distance.

  Or maybe it was her imagination, or a cruel trick her mind was playing on itself. She glanced up at the other girls, who sat numbly.

  What new horror lies ahead? Chichima asked herself. Where are they taking us now?

  Chapter Five

  “Pretend you are dead and you will see who really loves you.”

  —African proverb

  Festus Ratty Kumar sat proudly in the lead jeep, sipping from the bottle of purple drank (codeine cough syrup mixed with grape soda) clutched between his knees, certain that guns and supplies he had ordered from Russian arms dealer Victor Balt were up ahead, and convinced that his legend and influence would soon grow stronger.

  So much had changed in five years. He remembered that he had been skeptical when his cousin and Imam Bello had first come to visit him in prison. Talk of the holy spirit and the messenger of God seemed like a lot of yahoo to him then. But the concept of a group of outcast rebels bringing society to its knees had a certain appeal.

  So he listened over those next several weeks as Imam Bello explained the history of the Boko Haram movement, which he said dated back to the Sokoto Caliphate that ruled northern Nigeria, Niger, and southern Cameroon, and its resistance to British colonial control at the beginning of the twentieth century.

  Kumar had never heard of any of it before. He learned that starting in 2002, an English-speaking Kanuri tribesman from Yorbe state named Ustaz Mohammed Yusuf, who had studied theology at the University of Medina in Saudi Arabia, founded a sect called Jama’atu Ahlis Sunna Lidda’awati wal-Jihad, which translated from Arabic meant “People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.”

  In the city of Maiduguri where Festus Ratty Kumar had grown up, Yusuf built a religious complex and school that attracted poor families from across Nigeria and neighboring countries. The center’s political goal was to establish an Islamist state patterned on Taliban rule in Afghanistan. Coinciding with the rise of Islamic radicalism through the Middle East and Africa, the center became a recruiting ground for jihadists, who denounced the secularism and corruption of the Nigerian government.

  Mohammed Yusuf’s hundreds of followers, called Yusuffiya, consisted largely of impoverished northern Islamic students and clerics. Economic disparities between the country’s north and south continued to draw recruits. Despite its vast wealth in natural resources, Nigeria had one of the world’s poorest populations, particularly in the north where over seventy percent of the people lived in poverty and earned less than a dollar a day.

  Before 2009, the group that became known as Boko Haram did not aim to violently overthrow the government. Instead Mohammed Yusuf criticized northern Muslims for participating in what he saw as an illegitimate, non-Islamic state, and Muslim leaders for taking bribes from the government in return for preaching compliance.

  After years of tension and a series of minor incidents, things exploded in July 2009 when a group of Yusuffiya were stopped by police in the city of Maiduguri as they were on the way to the cemetery to bury a comrade. The officers demanded that the young men comply with a law requiring motorcycle passengers to wear helmets. The young men refused, and in the confrontation that followed, several were shot and wounded by police.

  The Yusuffiya responded with violence, breaking into a prison, and attacking government buildings and police stations. Fighting quickly spread across five northern states.

  The response from the federal government was severe. Federal soldiers were filmed summarily executing suspected militants in the streets. They stormed the group’s mosque and school complex and took Yusuf into custody. Hours later he was killed. Yusuf’s deputy and Ratty’s cousin Abubakar Shekau was also shot by security forces and declared dead.

  In total, more than a thousand people died in the fighting. Boko Haram was banned by the government, its mosques demolished, and its surviving members scattered and went underground.

  Months later, Abubakar Shekau reappeared, saying that he had been in the mouth of the crocodile and was coming back to kill it under Allah’s protection. Soon after that, he asked Festus Ratty to join the cause, form his own unit, and forge his own path.

  His message: “A person knowing of the truth or the will of God does not need to believe in it. You are free to kill anything that God commands you to kill.”

  For five years now, since Abubakar Shekau had paid off officials and facilitated Festus Ratty Kumar’s release from prison, Kumar had spread fear throughout northern and eastern Nigeria—killing Christians and government workers, blowing up churches and government buildings, and attacking school officials.

  The idea of kidnapping schoolgirls had been suggested to him by the voice of Allah one night as he lay on a blanket in the Sambisa looking at the stars. His battle cry was spray-painted on walls throughout hamlets and villages throughout eastern and northern Nigeria: “I kill anything that God commands me to kill! I am God’s Leopard!”

  He and his men moved like leopards by night, attacking targets without warning. Sometimes they traveled by truck, sometimes they commandeered motorcycles. Often they seemed to app
ear out of nowhere dressed as policemen or soldiers.

  Igbo people thought of him as the living embodiment of Ekwensu, the god of trickery and chaos. His companion was Death. The power of his rage was suffocating darkness that overwhelmed and destroyed everything in its path. It sucked all happiness and hope out of any living soul who opposed him.

  By 2015, after one year under Ratty’s military command, Boko Haram had the distinction of being the world’s deadliest terrorist group, responsible for killing nearly seven thousand people, even more than ISIS had in Iraq and Syria. The terror they spread had forced approximately two million Nigerians to flee their homes.

  Festus Ratty Kumar chose to believe what his cousin Abubakar Shekau had told him—that attacking civilians, killing unbelievers, beheading teachers, thieves, and homosexuals, and kidnapping schoolgirls were justified in the name of jihad.

  Crocker rode in a helicopter approximately twenty kilometers west-southwest of the Boko Haram column. Leaning over Major Martins’s shoulder, who was seated in front of him, he shouted, “Tell the pilot to take it even lower!”

  Martins was speaking into a radio on his lap. Turned back to Crocker.

  “I’m not sure that’s safe.”

  “Look at the altimeter. We’re at 308 meters. That’s at least 200 meters over the tree line.”

  “The terrain isn’t flat.”

  “According to my GPS, it’s slightly hilly. There’s room to take it down.”

  “Ill-advised.”

  Crocker pointed past him through to the darkness outside the bubble windshield. “Major, the point is, we still can’t see shit.”

  “Okay, another fifty meters.”

  “One hundred, and tell the pilot to flip on the headlights.”

  The pilot didn’t seem happy with the order, but complied. Now they were flying about seventy meters above the tree line. Dense foliage rose thirty meters. A dirt road, consisting of two muddy tire tracks, slowly became visible through the mist.