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  Abiola did not reply. His icy gaze shot through the general, making him shiver in response.

  Oboko knew that he had said too much. He had been walking on eggshells for a long time, and when you were as fat in the mouth as in the body, that was not an easy thing to do. He had failed. He had gotten the information that Abiola had required, but he had done it the old-fashioned way. It was the only way he knew.

  The Brotherhood of the Eagle was a crock of bird shit as far as he was concerned. Whatever lofty aims they had, it was still about graft and violence. That was the only way to fight your way up. To pretend you were anything else afterward would fool no one. Except, perhaps, yourself? This was what Milton was doing; it was maybe what the leader was doing. Since that revelation, Oboko had been unable to think of the Brotherhood in the same way.

  It was all deception—of yourself, of other people—and it would only end in disaster. This was Oboko’s sole consolation as he sadly came to terms with his own destiny.

  “You are right, Milton,” he said mildly. “I do not understand. I think you are the moron, not me. I may be base and coarse to you, but I am honest about these things. I do not dress up what I do in stupid words. I do what I think people want from me, what they ask from me. It is an honest exchange. I do not understand if what you ask is not always what you want.”

  “You are very talkative all of a sudden, Franklin. Do you think this will save you?” Abiola asked.

  Oboko shook his head, a hollow laugh bursting through pursed lips. “Of course it will not. It will not even buy me time.”

  “You do not want to fight me to save your worthless skin?”

  Oboko chuckled. “Why? You have men outside the door. I would have thirty seconds more of life.”

  “You would have the satisfaction of taking me with you,” Abiola said.

  “You are not worth it,” Oboko said with a sneer.

  The general stood motionless, resigned to his fate and just wanting it to end swiftly, as Abiola pulled his pistol from the holster at his waist and leveled it so that the barrel was directed between the general’s eyes. Refusing to blink, Oboko met Abiola’s gaze as the major started to squeeze the trigger. With his last moments, Oboko thought not of his wife, neither of Abby whose young body he would not taste a second time. Rather, he thought of the American. The general had been scared of him when they had first met, realizing that here was an opponent of greater worth than any he had ever met. If there was anyone who could stop these fools, it would be him.

  With his final thoughts, Oboko hoped this would be the case. He finally blinked at the muzzle-flash and deafening explosion within the room.

  Blinked, but did not close his eyes again.

  The echo died away in the room, leaving a buzzing in Abiola’s ears. He calmly reholstered his pistol and looked coldly on the corpse of Franklin Oboko. The general had fallen back as the shot took him cleanly between the eyes, knocking into one of the chairs and pushing it back against a wall that was now stained by his own blood and brain matter, from the larger exit wound. He had soiled himself in death and that along with the cordite and the stench of blood made Abiola feel a little queasy. He nodded to himself and left the room. In passing, he ordered the guard outside to have the room cleaned and the corpse disposed of.

  Breathing easier now, Abiola made his way up to his office, where he checked on the progress that had been made during the course of the day. Through the lines of communication, word had filtered back that the Brotherhood of the Eagle had prepared for tomorrow’s coup. Those in their departments, regiments and precincts who were not with them would be disarmed and disabled on the following day, giving them the chance to join the revolution or face death. Action would take place in both Lagos and Abuja.

  Everything was going to plan. The major left his office and took the elevator up two floors to where the leader of the Brotherhood had his own office. Abiola entered the outer office without knocking and nodded at the secretary as he passed. She looked up, acknowledged him and made no effort to stop him.

  He entered the inner office without asking permission. His leader was seated behind his desk, in conversation with a civil servant who had a buff file and a tablet in front of him. They were discussing a problem of budget within the department, and as Abiola entered, his leader looked up with a relief that could only come from an excuse to leave behind complex and dull figures.

  “You have news for me?” He noted the look Abiola gave the civil servant and added, “Daniel is one of us, Milton. You may speak in front of him.”

  Abiola nodded and delivered a concise report while both men listened intently. When he had finished, the civil servant Daniel closed his file and spoke to his superior. “I will go and make ready in my own department, sir. This—” he tapped the file “—is of no importance. It can wait.”

  When he had departed, the old man behind the desk rose and stretched. For the first time in a long time, his grave expression broke into something approaching a smile.

  “They will not dismiss and patronize me anymore, Milton,” Wilson Oruma said. “They will pay the price for underestimating me for so long.”

  * * *

  UNDERESTIMATING THE ENEMY was something that Ehurie was only too well aware that he had done up to now. He had assumed that the American would be trusting, not that he would arrange backup of his own. That had to be why he had been able to defeat two detachments with such ease. The Brotherhood commander had faith in his men that they would be able to tackle the enemy with ease now that they had the full facts.

  With this in mind he had sent men to cover both areas where the forest could be accessed by truck. He was sure that the American would put speed over subterfuge, and that in order to do this he would have to use captured transport, limiting his points of access.

  Seated in his treetop office, he brooded on what had happened so far as he sent out his men. He had to keep some back for defense of the base, but he had every intention of hitting hard and fast, taking the enemy down as soon as they hit the trees. Ideally, he would have liked to capture the American and his Lagos boys and make them pay slowly and painfully, but with the coup on the cusp, this was the time to put his own feelings to one side. It was not something that Ehurie had ever done before and was testament to his fear of the leadership of the Brotherhood as much as his loyalty.

  His men were in constant contact with him by radio, and he followed their progress eagerly. As the truck approached and was fired on, veering across the track until it plowed into the trees, his heart soared. The fools had played straight into his hands, not thinking he would have time to marshal his sources, and that he would be fooled by their pathetic attempts at deception. Just because a man could speak Hausa fluently did not mean that his voice could not be identified.

  Ehurie was full of his own satisfaction when the report came through that the truck had been empty. That drained the elation from him like the punctured tires on that very truck. He had been trapped by his own hubris. Just as he had thought his mansion impregnable until the American and his Lagos team had marched in, so he had assumed the same of the forest.

  He was blinded by his pride, but was not so stupid that he did not realize quickly what the American’s tactics were.

  “Move out, sector the forest along the line and search. They have set up a decoy, and we have been taken in. I want them dead. Now,” he snapped.

  Having given the order, the shaved-headed commander ran his hands over his smooth skull and considered whether he should report this to Abiola. Like most men who dealt with the major, he had the uneasy feeling that Abiola looked on him in the same way that he would look at a cockroach and was almost willing him to fail so that he had an excuse to crush him. For that reason, he decided that he should wait until the outcome of this action to make a report. Anything in the interim could only stain his reputation and add unne
cessary pressure.

  Ehurie left his place behind the desk and quickly descended to the forest floor. All the treetop buildings were empty; all men deployed and in position. Those who were guarding the base itself were either in their secured positions or within the confines of the base floor, where the remaining vehicles and the ordnance were located.

  “You, you, here,” Ehurie barked, beckoning two men. As they jogged to him on the double, he continued, “Secure the buildings and vehicles. Send word to the outposts. The American and his men are through the outer defenses. We are after them, but there are no guarantees. We are close, and we cannot let things slip now, for the sake of the Brotherhood. We have a man in their party, but we cannot guarantee that he will be able to stop them.”

  “How do we identify him so that we do not kill one of our own?” one of the men asked.

  Ehurie snorted. “Kill them all. He knows the risks he takes, and he knows that if he is caught in a cross fire, he dies for the greater glory of the Brotherhood.”

  For a moment, the two men facing him said nothing. Like all those with allegiance to the Brotherhood, they knew that their individual lives were of no importance against the greater good of the organization. But to hear it stated so bluntly, and to know that they had to kill one of their own in the fight to come, was a sobering realization.

  “What are you waiting for?” Ehurie growled, dismissing them.

  As they turned and jogged back to their tasks, the commander climbed back up to his aerie. Once there he settled back behind his desk, picking up the communications transmitter and snapping out a demand for updates. He listened as each detail returned to him. The burning truck had been left, and the soldiers had started their search. The terrain was thick and dense, with clusters of trees leaving knotted roots that were treacherous underfoot, disguised as they were by moss and grass. Their progress was of necessity slow.

  Ehurie was frustrated by this lack of success; yet if there was any consolation to be taken, it was in the fact that his men were slow, yet knew the terrain well. The intruders would be even slower. They would be more liable to give away their position, where his men would be harder for the enemy to detect.

  All of those factors should have helped reassure him that his men would be able to root out the American and his Lagos team and dispose of any threat they offered before they reached base. It was regrettable that military men should also perish, but that was their problem. All but one of them were not allied to the Brotherhood and so would have been under guard by tomorrow in any case. As for the man who was a brother and who had so far not fulfilled his task, that was his own fault, no one else’s.

  Ehurie had always dealt with everything in his life head-on and hand to hand. He ran his criminal businesses personally, making fear of his own iron will a weapon that he used often. In the same way, the membership of the Brotherhood of the Eagle had seen that hands-on approach, and he had risen swiftly through the ranks as his blend of pragmatism and violence had proved effective. So it pained him—almost physically, if the ache in his gut was anything to go by—that he was forced to sit there, manning the comm link, while others blundered and screwed up in the field.

  So when the message came through, it was too much for him to resist. A detail on the eastern sector of the forest reported signs of movement a few hundred meters from where they were searching.

  The commander sat forward, barely daring to breathe while he listened for progress. Word came through in that way: literally one word at a time, as his men closed silently on the suspected enemy position.

  Ehurie knew where they were. He could not resist being in at the kill. He barked an order for the detail leader to keep him informed and grabbed a handset, tuning it so that he could receive directly from the communications center. He descended rapidly from the treetop building, rushing to the ordnance hut to equip himself with more than the small arms he carried as a matter of course. As he went, he issued an order to the duty guard to cover the command of base until he returned.

  He grabbed an AK-47, a MAC-10, some ammunition and a web belt loaded with fragmentation and explosive grenades. He fumbled as he fitted it, the adrenaline pumping through him. Was it a sense of purpose or just revenge? Maybe both. He only knew that he had to be in on the kill.

  That explained the sense of exhilaration that flowed through him when he heard that the detail was firing on the enemy party and had the men pinned down. It explained the order that would later seem to be so self-destructive.

  “I want all details to that point. We take them down. Take them down hard,” he snarled into his radio as he plunged into the forest, forgetting that he needed to retain the detachment of a commanding officer, knowing only that he scented blood.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Dirt and grass kicked up around Bolan’s head, small stones flying through the air around him along with chippings from larger rocks that whined as they were caught by the random fire. He was still alive, still unharmed. He hadn’t heard any cries that made him think that others of his team were dead.

  It was spray’n’pray time. The Brotherhood fighters knew roughly where his men were located, and although they had pinned them down, they had no real notion of where they were within this area.

  So there was hope. All he needed was something to break the cycle that they were trapped in. Bolan had to take a chance.

  Still keeping his head down, and painfully aware that their limited choice of firepower kept his options narrowed, the big American removed a grenade from his web belt. He pulled the pin and scrambled to his knees just long enough to arm the bomb and toss it toward the area where the gunfire originated before dropping back down to cover.

  He counted silently and equalized his jaw for any pressure in the relatively enclosed outdoor space as the grenade went off. The floor of the forest shook under the impact while earth, grass, rock and wood poured over them. Any screams of pain or death were lost in the all-encompassing roar of the blast, but the sudden cessation of gunfire in the aftermath told its own story.

  With caution, Bolan raised his head and scrambled into a crouch. Hunkered down, he could see his men, with equal caution, rising from their own positions. Smoke and dust drifted across the space between them as the debris from the blast settled, and through the curtain, Bolan beckoned his men.

  As they advanced, weapons raised, alert for any movement, it was the silence around them that was the most awe inspiring. It was as though a cone of silence had descended over this section of the forest, birds and animals gone or in hiding, and men either unconscious or dead.

  A few yards from where they had been hiding, in the direction of the blast, they came across the division of men—eight in all—who had pinned them down. Six were dead, of which half of them had been shredded by shrapnel. Two were left alive. Both had been rendered unconscious but were now showing signs of coming round.

  Bolan took one of them and shook him roughly to wake him. The man’s eyes opened, but they lacked focus.

  “How many of you are there?” he growled in a low voice. From the way the man looked, he wasn’t seriously expecting a reply. He was right; he didn’t get one. He let the enemy fighter drop back to the ground.

  “Which way?” he snapped.

  Ekwense indicated the signs of a path that the opposition had hacked through the undergrowth. “We’d better get going, Cooper,” he said. “There will be more.”

  “Yeah, but how many?” Bolan wondered out loud. Being outnumbered in unfamiliar terrain, he would have preferred to have known the odds. Still, he trusted his men.

  What happened behind him made him question that. He heard a gurgling sound and turned to see that Saro Wiwa had cut the throat of the man he had questioned and was in the act of disposing of the other live soldier. The heavyset military man stopped midstroke on seeing Bolan stare.

  “Leave
no one. We cannot risk them tracking us.”

  Bolan was never comfortable with such reasoning, but it was too late to question now; that could come later. He nodded and indicated that they move, not trusting himself to say anything.

  Bolan’s party moved into the dark recesses of the forest without looking back, leaving the carnage behind them, in search of their target.

  * * *

  WHEN EHURIE CAUGHT up with his men, he knew what he would find. He had followed the sound of gunfire and then taken cover when the explosion sounded. In the sudden silence that followed, he had a sinking feeling in his gut. One that was only confirmed when he reached the site of the blast, where the other detail he had dispatched had also just arrived.

  “How can the American outsmart us so easily?” he berated them, his anger sparking in all directions. “This is our land. We know this forest. We must defeat him and his traitors.”

  “Sir, they must go that way,” one of his men said, almost too scared to speak in the face of Ehurie’s anger.

  “Why?” the commander barked.

  “There is no other trail,” he answered in a tremulous voice.

  Ehurie grunted and nodded. “Then we go. Find them. Kill them.”

  He pushed ahead of his detail and took point as he plunged into the undergrowth with little pretense at delicacy. The American’s men would know he was in pursuit. Let them sweat. He would go through them no matter what they threw at him.

  * * *

  KEN WAS AT the rear of the party, and was the first to hear their pursuers crashing through the undergrowth. He whispered to Emecheta, just ahead of him, to wait and listen. The military man passed the message down the line until it reached Bolan. Like all his men, he paused to hear the approaching soldiers and gauged their distance.

  “Take cover. We’ll ambush them. Victor, move on and make it look like we’re still ahead.”