Читать книгу Insurrection - Don Pendleton - Страница 7

PROLOGUE

A disconcerting premonition of impending doom fell over Bishop Joshua Adewale like a cloak as his name was announced over the loudspeaker. He rose from his seat amid the applause all around him. The sinking feeling that had appeared so suddenly in his chest now dropped to his stomach. The anxiety intensified even further, making his legs feel as if they were filled with wet concrete that was one step away from setting.

Adewale walked down the aisle to the stage and mounted the steps. He stopped behind the pulpit, then turned to face the congregation.

The bishop took a deep breath as he looked out over the sea of faces that made up the Catholic Bishops Conference of Nigeria. Even now, as the gathering applauded, he realized his emotions were in conflict. He was delighted—and somewhat nostalgic—to have been invited back from New York to address the conference at this seminary where he had studied so many years ago. In the country of his birth. But at the same time, he couldn’t shake that sense of foreboding.

There had been rumors of an Islamic extremist attack planned against the conference attendees. And in Nigeria, Islamic-based terror almost always meant Boko Haram.

Adewale squeezed his fingers even tighter on the wooden podium as he cleared his throat. He knew in his heart that if he died this very second he would be on the fast train to meet Christ. Yet a small amount of the fear of death remained.

“My brothers,” he said into the microphone in front of him, “it is an honor to—”

Adewale never finished the sentence.

The bomb shook the chapel as if hurricanes were assaulting it from all four sides. Bricks flew out of the walls like missiles, several finding human targets at the same time as a section of the roof blew down and fell in a huge chunk on one section of the pews. The screaming men in those pews disappeared in a cloud of plaster and splintered wood.

Amid the shock of noise, Adewale felt helpless as debris continued to fly. The roiling smoke overtook him on the stage. It was only then that he realized he was no longer behind the pulpit. The blast had thrown him to the floor on his side. The pulpit was no longer in sight. It had been uprooted by the blast and sent sailing somewhere out over the congregation.

Through the dust Adewale could make out dozens of other bishops whose black cassocks were now dingy gray. Those who were still mobile were scrambling toward the aisles. Many of the wooden pews had been blown from the bolts fastening them to the floor, and jagged pieces of wood and steel acted as shrapnel, slicing through flesh in the panic.

For a moment Adewale lay frozen in surprise. Then pain seared through his left forearm and he looked down to see that something had cut deeply into him just below his elbow. But the dust was so thick, he couldn’t identify the object.

His eyes burning, Adewale clamped his right hand over the wound in his left arm, and the bleeding slowed slightly.

Through openings in the thick dust clouds the bishop could see human remains—a few bodies, others blown to pieces. The few who had been spared serious injury helped others down the aisles.

Still stunned from the blast, as well as the horror before him, Adewale realize what was in his forearm: a small metal hinge—undoubtedly from the pulpit.

The bishop rose to his knees. “No! Don’t leave!” he yelled. Under the current conditions they were safest right where they were, inside the ruins of the building.

He knew what awaited any bishops who made it outside.

Adewale tried to shout again, but when he drew in a breath he was choked by the dust. He fell back to his hands and knees, as the panicked clergymen surged forward.

Someone at the front of the stampede of men finally got the door open and the bishops who had survived the explosion began fleeing into the sunlight. Adewale reached the door just in time to see Boko Haram terrorists surround the clergymen, their razor-sharp machetes gleaming in the sunlight.

Then what was left of the chapel roof behind him collapsed, and something struck the back of his head.

As his eyelids fluttered shut, Bishop Joshua Adewale knew he would be spared.

There was something he still had to do.

* * *

SIX BLOCKS FROM the main chapel of Saints Peter and Paul Seminary, Fazel Hayat sat cross-legged on top of the tin roof of a mud-and-plaster house. A pair of Steiner 10x50 power binoculars were pressed to his forehead. They had provided a close-up view of the explosion in the chapel, and now did the same for the machete slaughter.

Hayat couldn’t help but smile. Dhul Agbede’s improvised explosive device had worked perfectly. But then the man’s weaponry always did. Hayat’s right-hand man, and Boko Haram’s top assault expert, knew more about weapons than anyone else in their network.

Hayat glanced to his side, where his second-in-command now sat quietly. For a moment, he wondered just how much Dhul’s given names might have influenced his interests and studies as he’d grown up. Dhul Fiqar meant “name of the Prophet’s sword” in the Yoruba tongue, and the man’s last name, Agbede, translated roughly as “blacksmith.” Dhul was a blacksmith by trade, and in addition to the elaborate gold-inlaid and ivory-handled machetes both he and Hayat wore in the sashes around their waists, he had forged the more rustic, yet equally deadly blades the Boko men in the distance now used to eliminate the Catholic bishops who had survived the bomb inside the chapel.

Hayat kept the binoculars close to his face, but watched Dhul in his peripheral vision.

The man’s eyes betrayed no emotion of any kind. The fact was, they were a dull black, and reminded Hayat of a shark. The Boko Haram leader shook his head. He had seen Dhul construct bombs and then put them in place with a completely deadpan expression on his face. He had seen him kill innumerable Christians and Jews with his gold-inlaid, nickel-finished machete. Deadpan again.

Hayat wondered if the fact that the man never showed any outward emotion might be because he felt no emotions. If that was the case, it meant he was truly a psychopath.

The Boko Haram leader shrugged and turned his attention back to the slaughter going on at the seminary. It mattered little if Dhul was a sociopath. If so, he was certainly a useful one.

Hayat watched as two of the remaining bishops attempted to get away. A pair of his Bokos went to work, hacking them down. A heavyset clergyman had picked up a loose wooden plank with nails extending from one end. Grasping it with both hands, he swung it at one of his assailants. The Boko parried the spiked weapon of opportunity, then swung his machete in a reverse stroke. The overweight bishop fell to his knees, gripping his slashed neck. Fazel Hayat watched as his head threatened to separate from the rest of his body. But with his left hand clutching his throat and the fingers of his right encircling the large crucifix suspended around his neck, the heavy man hit the ground dead, but still in one piece.

The Boko who had killed him went back to the bishop he had been working on.

The discrepancy brought a shrug to Hayat’s shoulders. Men—even trained men such as his Boko Haram army—often reacted strangely in battle.

A second later, the entire building came crashing down behind the pile of dead bodies. The blood-splattered Boko Haram fighters stepped back when stone and scraps of wood flew through the air as if a second explosion had taken place. Dust rose as if a million hookahs were blasting their smoke toward the sky. Then the Bokos made their way through the killing field, clutching their blood-drenched machetes as they searched for any remaining life. Each time one of the men on the ground twitched— either as a last sign of life or in an involuntary muscle spasm after death—one or more machetes slashed downward, putting an end to the movement.

In all but one of them.

Suddenly rising from a pile of bodies, a bishop wearing a cassock more gray with dust than black climbed to his feet and began stumbling away. It was the bishop from America, Joshua Adewale. He walked directly past several of Hayat’s men, who appeared not to notice his presence.

A cold chill twisted down Hayat’s nape and along his spine to his lower back. What he was seeing was impossible. It was unnatural. It could not have been happening. He had personally witnessed a huge concrete block strike this man in the back of the head. It should not only have rendered him unconscious, it should have killed him.

He turned toward his second-in-command. “Dhul,” he said quietly, “did you see that?”

“Did I see what?”

“That bishop. The one who just stood up and walked away.”

“I saw it,” Agbede said. “He was lucky. But do not worry. We will get him soon, somewhere else.”

“Then it was not my imagination?”

“Not unless it was my imagination, too.”

“It was the American, Adewale,” Hayat said. “The one who was scheduled to speak first.” He let his binoculars fall for a moment, resting his eyes. “He was holding his arm. It appeared he was injured.”

“He was lucky,” Agbede repeated.

Hayat watched the gray-black, ghostlike figure as it stumbled on, growing smaller and smaller, walking away from the chapel. The phrase “It was more than luck” fluttered through his brain, but the thought was disturbing, and he repressed it.