Read Dirty Diamonds Of Boko Haram Part 1 Online

Authors: Eze Eke

Tags: #fiction action adventure, #war against terrorism, #adventure and african villages and cities, #corruption wealth and greed, #esponage bodyguards and mobsters, #family betrayals and blackmail, #history reality and facts, #love romance and sex, #money power and politices, #violence kidnapping and murder

Dirty Diamonds Of Boko Haram Part 1 (2 page)

BOOK: Dirty Diamonds Of Boko Haram Part 1
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Alhaji Usman was a middle aged man of average
build and sound health. He was not an indigene of the village but
had lived there for nearly fifteen years. In the first year when he
had come, he had given the villagers and their revered headman many
gifts and then been allocated the large parcel of land just outside
the village to settle upon as he wished. Alhaji Usman had quickly
brought in building materials along with a large team of skilled
workers, all the way from the city, to build his new house but used
local laborers, even allowed women and children to work and every
family in the village made good money.

Alhaji Usman had completed the building of
his house within six months and the village wasted no time in
relaxing their strict laws which kept strangers from marrying and
taking away their women. Alhaji Usman had been
‘invited’
by
the elders as custom required, to marry from among their women and
he had promptly chosen two of the most beautiful. first a childless
widow and then two years later, a young girl, marring both
according to custom. The women had given him sons and daughters now
and this made him completely accepted by the villagers as one of
their own.

Alhaji Usman’s choice of the widow as a first
wife had, of course, baffled everyone greatly at the time because
the woman was rather old and ‘faulty’ and there had been so many
willing, even more beautiful young girls available for the taking.
The widow had been close to thirty years of age then and considered
barren
because aside from a stillborn child, birthed at the
early stage of her previous marriage, she never conceived again for
her husband in the eleven years that followed until his death the
year before. A lot of people, overlooking the fact that the widow
was a quiet hardworking woman of good nature, had put down Alhaji
Usman’s interests in her as purely sexual because she possessed, in
abundance the kind of spectacular rich figure that was so appealing
to a man; she had the widest hips and buttocks of all the women in
the village except her mother. But they had all soon discovered
though, that Alhaji Usman was a very clever and remarkable man who
never did anything without a very good reason. First, he had gotten
the
barren
woman pregnant in seven months flat, and then the
other reason he had chosen her first soon became all too clear…. he
needed a matured woman to take care of his house.

As the years went by, it had quickly become
very clear to everyone that the big house in the village wasn’t
Alhaji Usman’s only residence on earth. He was hardly ever there.
His two wives and their young children, the servants and two
well-armed security men, they were the ones always there in the big
house and from the very first year the first wife had started
ruling over the entire household with the kind of wisdom and
maturity that never would have been found in a young girl.

As had been the regular pattern for fifteen
long years, every three months or so, Alhaji Usman would come
driving up from the south in an expensive Jeep. For the last three
years now it had been a big black Land Cruiser Jeep with black
windows no one could ever see through, the whole jeep always
covered with dust, his driver and heavily armed bodyguard always
with him. He would stay in the big house for just a week or two
then go driving off again, but this time, up north across the
border into the Niger republic. He would be gone for up to a month,
and then one evening the big Jeep would be seen coming over the
distant hills that were the international borders. It would pick
its way carefully over the rugged terrain as it covered the
distance back to the village, all covered with more dust and
splatters of mud, to vanish into the compound, never to reemerge
until Alhaji Usman was headed back south again.

For three years now, that Jeep had been a
thing of wonder to the villagers who hadn’t quiet seen anything
like it in real life. This Jeep was bigger and better than the
other ones Alhaji Usman had been using in past years. It was
nothing at all like the battered old Honda Jeep that was the pride
of the headman’s first son who lived in the city and often came
home during special holidays, that one made a hideous noise that
scared away even the cattle and it sometimes had to be pushed a
long distance before it would start up. This big Jeep wasn’t like
the merchant’s wagon either, the wagon which came twice a year when
the merchant bought up all the extra grain the village grew. The
big black Jeep was powerful and it was always looking so new
despite all the dust and mud on it. It never spoilt, hardly made
any noise at all and it could go anywhere, even right across the
knee deep muddy stream that appeared in the dry river bed near the
village each time the rains came. But the most fascinating part was
that the big Jeep had an interior that was as chilly as a cold
hammattan morning, and there was a television that showed American
movies even as it moved on like a floating palace. The Imam who was
the only one in the village to have ever taken a ride in the Jeep,
testified endlessly to these things. He was the one who told
everyone the name of the jeep and swore the Alhaji himself had told
him about.

Usually, once back from the north, Alhaji
Usman rarely stayed longer than two weeks before heading on back
south again, but this time he stayed longer and it was bagasse of
the fifteen-year-old Fulani beauty he had just taken as a third
wife.

The girl was the daughter of the village
weaver and getting her had barely cost anything at all. He had paid
just ten thousand naira as bride price on her head, that was less
than forty dollars, an incredible bargain indeed considering her
beauty! The girl was built exactly like he liked his women, tall
and light complexioned with a well-defined curvy figure that was
quite matured for her young age and it would certainly fill out
even more. Alhaji Usman had first seen her just a month ago soon
after he arrived from the south. His hawk eyes had spotted her
walking gracefully across the square with her mother while he was
on one of his rare visits to the village mosque for evening
prayers. Swift inquiries culminated in his taking her as a third
wife a few days later after bribing his way through most of the
time consuming marriage rites, he wasn’t a man to waste time at
all. He, however, hadn’t had the time to enjoy her properly then
because urgent business called and he went rushing up north across
the border, leaving her in the protective custody of his watchful
first wife. But he was back now, enjoying his property to the full
on a regular basis and it was so sweet.

That hot afternoon, as the village lay
deserted and quiet under the appalling heat of the terrible sun,
the big generators at Alhaji Usman’s house could be heard grinding
out power because he was in residence. His two older wives and
their five children were relaxed in the cool comforts of the big
air-conditioned living room, watching a satellite movie on the
large wall-mounted 52-inch flat screen TV but the Alhaji himself
was in his bedroom with the door and windows locked tight, the
air-conditioning on high, keeping the air within almost cold. The
fifty-three-year-old man had his fifteen-year-old new wife pinned
down underneath him on the expensive king-sized bed and was making
love to her with deep powerful thrusts that had the helpless girl
crying quietly with pain.

This had been happening to her for only two
weeks now but already she was planning to kill herself.

Due to the conveniently available
electricity, all the villagers, old and young, men, women and
children, were gathered in the open hall, enjoying a new movie on
the large flat screen television and the big booming speakers
filled the air with digital surround sounds. One of the headman’s
sons played ‘DJ’ and he was as arrogant as they all came, behaving
like the appliances belonged to their father instead of the village
as a whole. The old headman himself and the imam too, were there in
the front row of the gathering, seated in their usual places of
honor with their wives and children around them. The few villagers
that were not there were either sleeping the afternoon away in the
shelter of their homes or attending to important chores.

No one was really watching for trouble from
the outside world and no one expected such a thing. They hadn’t had
any external troubles in the eighty years since some Salidva
tribesmen from the north tried to settle on their lands and steal
their women.

But, that afternoon, trouble came looking for
them.

All of them.

The three vehicles came out of the east in a
cloud of dust.

They came racing across the rough terrain at
speed, keeping in a line, one vehicle behind the other. All three
vehicles were powerful Pickup Jeep trucks and both their cabins and
open backs were packed with armed men. Savage looking men in
military camouflage uniforms and red or camouflage colored masks,
all armed with AK-47 assault rifles, daggers and machetes. The lead
vehicle was a powerful big Ford Pickup Jeep truck with a high
caliber heavy machine gun mounted over the roof of its cabin. The
second vehicle was an Isuzu Pickup Jeep truck also with a mounted
machine gun over the roof of its cabin. Only the last vehicle was
without a mounted machine gun and it was an ancient British Land
Rover Pickup Jeep with a fabricated engine that was quite as good
as its body was very strong. The Land Rover marched the speed of
the other two vehicles without much fuss and it only carried a
slightly lesser load of armed men.

A hundred and fifty yards out form the
village, the three vehicles went through the dry river bed, and
then the Ford swerved sharply to the right, its tires spinning up
sand and dust as it changed direction swiftly and headed directly
for Alhaji Usman’s house. The Isuzu and Land Rover increased speed,
heading for the deserted village.

The headman’s sixth and youngest wife,
Fatima, was a lovely slim girl of seventeen and like everyone else,
she was right there in the hall with her children, watching the
movie. She had been married to her sixty-four-year-old, gray haired
husband for only four years but had already given him two sons. She
had always been his favorite bed warmer of all his four surviving
wives but due to her quarrelsome nature, she was constantly falling
out of favor.

A week ago, she’d had it out with her
superior, the headman’s third wife who was a clean thirty years
older than she was, with two daughters also older than her. Fatima
didn’t care. She had bathed one with boiling hot water and
brandished her knife at the others before her husband came running
to intervene and give her a good beating. The stupid woman and her
good-for-nothing daughters had it coming to them for constantly
looking down on her because she was so young. But she was in her
husband’s house and she would show them she wasn’t to be messed
with. She would show them all that she was a butcher’s daughter,
born and raised!

Her husband had banished her from his sight
and bed but it was only a matter of time before he desired her
again and she would be back in her place. What was eating her up
right now was that due to that banishment she couldn’t sit close to
her husband as usual in the honorary position up front in the hall.
Her enemy, the third wife, was the one sitting on the floor by
their husband while she, Fatima, had to sit far out of his sight,
at the very back of the hall with all the ordinary people! This
hadn’t happened before, not for this long, it was four days now and
the shame was killing her inside

Fatima had created some space for herself,
away from others at the back of the hall and was sitting on the
cement floor with one outstretched leg crossed over the other while
her two sons played happily around her. Her younger son, a toddler,
attempted to crawl quickly away and she turned to catch hold of
him, that was when she saw the vehicles speed into the square. Her
sharp eyes saw the military uniforms and the red masks the men
wore, the guns and machetes they carried, and she instantly
remembered all the horrible tales that had been filtering into the
village about the terrible activities of Islamic fighters around
the great Lake Chad to the east and also to the south of the
state


BOKO HARAM
!” screamed Fatima at the
top of her lungs, her sharp high pitched voice rising easily above
the din of the movie pouring out from the loud speakers. “BOKO
HAAARRAAM!!... BOKO HARAM!!!”

Everyone turned quickly to look at her and
then they looked to where she was pointing.

The two Jeeps tore into the square at speed,
diverging as they closed in swiftly on the hall. They came to a
halt in a cloud of dust and the armed men were leaping down and
moving forward even before the stunned villagers had time to react
or fully understand was going on. There were about twenty of them,
young terrible looking men, armed with rifles and machetes.

Shouting and cursing in Arabic, the armed
terrorists spread out swiftly to contain the villagers as they
tried to scamper away in fear. Several of the terrorists opened
fire on a Christian looking man and two women trying to flee with
three children, cutting them all down with bullets, even the baby
on the back of one of the women weren’t spared.

The terrorists kept shouting angrily and the
terrified villagers, men, women and children, bunched up tightly
into groups in the hall, screaming and covering with fear. Some of
the terrorist were already running around the village, checking the
mud houses and huts. Everyone was rounded up and dragged out into
the square.

Once they had all the villagers gathered up
together in the open hall, the terrorist leader, a hard faced man
of thirty with his red mask down around his neck like a scarf,
barked out orders and his men leaped to obey.

BOOK: Dirty Diamonds Of Boko Haram Part 1
11.33Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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