Dirty Diamonds Of Boko Haram Part 1 (9 page)

Alex began to talk. He left nothing out, not
even the contents and purpose of the small suitcase he carried.
When he was done, the colonel was silent for a long minute.

“Have you mentioned this to anyone else at
all, apart from me?” asked the colonel finally.

“No, sir. just you”

“Good, let’s keep it that way” said the
colonel and turned to look out the window again.

“You mean you won’t do anything about
this?”

“I didn’t say that” said the older man
without looking at him.

“Then what are you saying, sir? We can’t just
allow that kind of money fall into the hands of those terrorists,
that would be practically sponsoring them. And then there’s El
Soldat who Military Intelligence has been after him for so
long”

The colonel sighed tiredly. “You’ve been away
from the game for too long, lieutenant, and a lot has changed in
that time but not for the better. Firstly, the Army is now battling
a highly tactical and mobilized Boko Haram on every front and they
have our backs to the wall. The kidnapping of those chibok girls
was just the first to attract public attention on a massive scale
and expose our helplessness, there have been so many incidents like
it recently. Those militants have overrun almost every key city and
town in the north-east, occupied the territory and mounted their
wretched flags in plain sight. In Bornu in particular, we only hold
the main city and a few key towns around along with their villages,
but none of them are completely secure. Even as we speak now, the
battle to keep those terrorists at a safe distance from Bama is
being fought and the Army has been losing for a straight two days.
Things are so bad that we’ve lost contact with the troops in
certain areas, and then there’s this talk of a powerful new jamming
equipment Boko Haram is now using to interfere with our
communication signals. These are terrorists that are supposed to
hate technology and they’ve got the best! Lastly, these terrorists
have now gone into the kidnapping business full time. Families of
the rich and powerful are their main targets and they now go out of
their way to launch surprise attacks deep into secure territories
to capture their victims. The average ransom demand per head ranges
from half a million to one million US dollars and several top
politicians have already been hit both here, in Niger republic and
Cameroon, It’s not public knowledge yet but the deputy Prime
Minister of Cameroon had his wife and children kidnapped from his
hometown just last month and the place was nowhere near the
troubled border regions. He had to pay three million US dollars to
get them back. Even our own government has been secretly
negotiating to
buy
peace and the release of the kidnapped
chibok girls. The ransom demand for the girls, all two hundred and
sixteen of them, was initially sixty million US dollars but with
the help of the Chadian president, who is acting as the go between,
the price has been reduced to forty million dollars. The money is
set to be paid directly through the office of the National Security
Adviser” the colonel paused a moment to let that one sink in before
going on. “Your current employer is just one name on a long list of
VIPs paying ransom to those terrorists and the list has grown very
quickly to include both the governors of Bauchi and Kano states who
pay them on a monthly basis to keep away from their territory. We
are trying our very best night and day but there isn’t much the
Army or any other arm of the military can do about anything right
now. Everyone blames the military, but the sad truth which we
cannot voice openly is that we are still waiting on the politicians
to sort themselves out and provide us with the necessary weapons
and equipment needed for us to switch tactics from defensive to
offensive. And while we wait, Boko Haram grows from strength to
strength and continue to commit abominable atrocities never heard
of before, our soldiers and countless numbers of innocent citizens
are being slaughtered on a daily. As long as Alhaji Mustapha Usman
keeps the ransom negotiations and payments for the release of his
niece very quiet, everyone here in Abuja will look the other way.
Even if information of it somehow leaks out, he still won’t be
touched. In fact, the contrary is the case, he will find a lot of
sympathizers among his powerful friends who will only be too
willing to provide him with all the necessary assistance he needs
to bring that girl safely home and unharmed. I suspect that’s how
he came into possession of classified military documents and the
soldiers he’s using. I dare say I could point a few fingers but the
targets are so high up above my pay grade that I’ll most likely get
my fingers chopped off if not my career itself, top brass as I
am”

Alex was quiet a minute as he digested all
the shocking new information. Yes, indeed, he had been away from
the game for too long.

The Colonel was silent too.

“What of El Soldat?” Alex asked quietly.

“You will to have to take him out”

“
Me
?” Alex asked in surprise.

The colonel looked directly at him. “Yes,
you, lieutenant. Seeing as you’re already neck deep in this, is
there a better person for the job?”

“I’m not even military anymore. I don’t
count”

“Once a military man always a military man.
You still and will always count because you were my best man,
that’s until you had the stupidity of beating up your own
commanding officer”

“And I paid the price in full” said Alex
firmly. “I rotted in military prison for a month before they kicked
me out of the Army. I don’t work for you or the Army anymore”

“But you are still a patriot and your county
invested so much in you” countered the Colonel.

Alex sat back and said nothing.

“Lieutenant, do you really know why I came
here personally tonight despite having my hands so full of work, I
can hardly sleep?”

“No, sir”

“I came here for several reasons but most
important of all is that you were my best man and judging by any
standard you still are. When my best man, right out of the blues,
calls another good operative of mine to say he wants to meet
urgently and over an important issue, that raises a red flag that
catches my full attention at once. Captain Akeem had the good sense
to answer all my questions when I interrogated him directly, and
then instead of dispatching some agent to pick you up as I normally
would have done, here I am. And I’m glad I came because you’ve just
handed me a rare opportunity of catching up with the second most
wanted terrorist in this country”

Alex was surprised. “I thought he was number
seven?”

The colonel chuckled. “El Soldat has promoted
himself to second place in just three months” said the colonel.
“Aside from the fact that his private operations within these last
few months have become too devastating not to talk of crippling,
Military Intelligence has finally got confirmation that he and not
Umar, is the liaison between Boko Haram and Islamic State in Libya
with connections in Mali”

Alex suddenly understood a lot of things. “So
he’s the one who’s been running the guns! No wonder they let him
operate so freely”

“Yes, and you of all people should know
exactly how hard it is to get on the man’s trail, so it’s now or
never. El Soldat has to be taken out and under the circumstance you
are the best man for the job”

“I don’t think so, sir. Like I said, I’m not
military anymore so all of this is really none of my business.
Considering how I was treated by you people, I can freely say that
I don’t give a
shit
”

The colonel sighed. “Lieutenant, the doctor
that gave evidence secretly at your court-martial, do you know who
put him up to it?”

“He went forward himself, he was my
doctor”

“You had General Suleman looking to bury you
for putting his son, your
direct
commanding officer, in
hospital with multiple fractures minus one eye. You really think
anyone below full Colonel would have stuck his neck out for your
sake? I had to send people to threaten that doctor in unique ways
before he agreed to speak out”

Alex stared speechless.

The colonel smiled. “I didn’t abandon you
even then like you thought I did. You were my best operative and so
I took the needed time to study you carefully. Yes, I knew you a
lot better than you thought I did. I knew that for you to go
berserk the way you did, there had to be a damn good reason so I
set out to find it and when I did, when I saw the true nature of
it, I made the decision to see you free. That decision was also
made, based on the fact that you were a man of honor and a true
patriot who would always give his best for his country, whether in
or out of the force. I felt you would be of great service someday
and I wasn’t wrong” the Colonel stared at Alex. “Lieutenant, it is
time to repay my belief in you. It is time to repay all the money,
time and trust your country invested in you. Your country needs
your help at this hour”

Alex sighed, the trap had already closed on
him.

“You have other good operative, sir, why not
send them? I’ve been out of training for six whole months. I’m
grossly out of shape”

“You may have been out of training for six
months, Lieutenant, but I’m willing to bet a year’s salary that
with your new multimillion naira contract that is sending you into
a war zone again, you’ve already gone into some form of intensive
training and if Damion here were to take a go at you right now, he
too will end up in a hospital with multiple fractures and he’s one
of my best men even now” the colonel had jerked his head at the man
in the front passenger seat before him.

Alex said nothing as the Colonel stared hard
at him.

“Being out of shape is no excuse when your
country needs you, Lieutenant. If you are not fully fit yet then
one or two energy pills should be of some help, we still have
those”

Alex searched frantically for a means of
escape. “You could just send one or two of the 001 class operatives
to take care of El Soldat”

“Most of them are dead. Zacki, Freshman,
Amedu, Jericho, even you unkillable friend Christian, they are all
dead. We lost them and thirteen good soldiers at a single ambush
during the fall of Gwoza last three month. We sent them after
Abubakar Shekau who was supposed to show up there but never
did”

Alex stared in disbelief. “Where any of them
captured?”

“No, they were all slaughtered like pigs.
They were led right into the ambush by a double agent we thought we
could trust and gunned down by heavy machine-gun fire. There is no
one left with the adequate experience and skills to go after El
Soldat alone, deep in enemy territory like he is. I have already
lost four good men in the last two months just trying. If you do
this, you would definitely be saving a lot lives”

Alex made up his mind at once. “What are your
orders, sir?”

“You will continue working for Alhaji
Mustapha Usman exactly as he hired you to do. Go right ahead with
the ransom negations and payments, we will provide you with the
necessary devices and explosives to turn the briefcase into a bomb
that will explode after the exchange has been made, you know how it
works. Hopefully, El Soldat will open the briefcase a second time
when he back at his base with all his lieutenants within ten feet.
The explosion will wipe them all out at a go and the world will
become a bit safer us all. But if this fails and El Soldat somehow
survives, you will have to go in alone and finish the job”

“How will you know if El Soldat is killed by
the bomb or not?”

“We have an informant among his men. Once
that bomb goes off, we’ll know it within the minute. If it gets
him, we’ll know it too”

Alex was quiet for a minute as he thought
things over quickly.

“I want total immunity and some form of
official recognition” he said finally.

The colonel nodded. “I’ll fix things tonight
so the papers work will all be straightened out by tomorrow
morning”

“I also get to keep all payments and benefits
from my present employer”

“Your money was never an issue”

Alex though quickly some more. “I’ll need a
few items, a light bullet proof vests, up-to-date tactical maps of
the entire region and an H-4 GPS tracker”

“A request for a high-tech tracker without a
corresponding request for a monitoring device” the colonel stared
at Alex. “You never turned in your GX-2, Lieutenant”

The GX-2s was an expensive high-tech device
that passed for an android phone. Originally built by a Japanese
firm to suit the requirements of a big American security outfit,
the Nigerian Military Intelligence had somehow acquired a batch of
half a dozen of the super phones, and then had its engineers first,
modify them, and then replicate them. The modified GX-2s had been
issued to the six topmost operatives of the agency, which included
Alex of course, while the follow-up replicas, the GX-3 and GX-4,
became the standard issue phones. Of course, the original Japanese
built GX-2s were far more superior to the ‘merely adequate’
replicas, Alex knew a good thing when he saw it which was why he
never turned in his own GX-2 for the standard issue as protocol
required. He had simply reported it as ‘
missing in action’
and that had been that. He had only used the GX-2 for four months
before he got kicked out of the army and he kept it afterwards.

But he needed that high-tech tracker now and
only the GX-2 could handle it smoothly as well as perform a lot
more functions that could mean the difference between life and
death where he was going, where they wanted him to go. There was no
need to hide anymore.

“If I make it out alive and with the phone,
you people can have it back” lied Alex effortlessly. Lying very
well, even under extreme torture, was part of his tracings and he
knew dammed well he could get away with it now even if caught “I’ll
also need those energy pills as well”