BRAVE LOVE i Brave Love BY MATTHEW UZUKWU BRAVE LOVE ii Dedication For EziAda Anne Nkeonye OnyenehoMaduako. BRAVE LOVE iii Copyright © 2022 by Matthew Uzukwu. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form, without written permission from the publisher, except for a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Inquiries should be addressed to: felipublishing@yahoo.com or to uzukwu99@gmail.com Whatsapp Contact: (+12027467297) Matthew Uzukwu is on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. ISBN: 978-0-9637326-1-3 BRAVE LOVE 4 They crept through the bushes quietly to get close to Ahmad and Aisha who were oblivious of the presence of deadly enemies in the forest. They had been confident of being in the clear of danger after several hours on the run and covering several miles. Then shots rang out from nowhere, shattering the stillness of the forest. Ahmad, who walked behind Aisha throughout the trek, dove into her so they would both hit the ground to take cover. The shots missed Ahmad, but Aisha was hit in the left leg. Ahmad returned fire in the direction he thought the shots had come from and hit the assailants. He knew he got them when they moaned from being hit; they had been that close by. Ahmad fired two more rounds, picked up and carried Aisha on his back and ran off. BRAVE LOVE 5 CHAPTER 1 Aisha sat on the dirt forest floor with hundreds of other young women, frightened to no end. Standing over the cowering women were dozens of well armed terrorists who had carried out a major kidnapping at a school hours earlier, and Aisha was among the victims. She thought her chances of surviving the calamity were nil, and the unfortunate and bitter implication of that would be an eternal separation from her beloved family — her parents and two older brothers — and her fiancé, a tall and handsome man named Ahmad. The kidnapping had occurred on a Saturday night, a day before Ahmad was to visit with her at the BRAVE LOVE 6 boarding school where Aisha was in her final year of high school, preparing to sit for her examinations and looking forward to marriage to Ahmad immediately after her graduation from high school. But all of this was now at the back recesses of her mind as she cowered before her kidnappers, her heart racing so fast she felt it would rip out of her chest. The traumatic events of the previous night played in her mind over and over again like a broken record. The terrorists had arrived in several large flat bed trucks and were armed with AK 47 rifles. They had overpowered lightly armed security guards to gain access to the sprawling school compound, where they quickly fanned out to secure two large buildings used as dormitories. The sleeping women, awakened minutes earlier by the sound of gunfire, were captured after the terrorists shot off the doors to the buildings, swarmed inside and ordered the women to the floor. They were then BRAVE LOVE 7 herded out of the compound into the waiting getaway trucks. The terrorists took off, firing wildly into the air to scare their victims and potential rescuers. The daring operation had lasted all of just twenty minutes. The trucks traveled for two hours along an asphalted road before turning onto a lonely dirt road that led to the forest base of the ZOBBO Organization, a home grown movement that had declared a jihad on their sub- Saharan country. The ZOBBO Organization had published its goals and they included the establishment of a theocracy in a country evenly split between Christians and Muslims, the banning of sporting events, and the elimination of cultural manifestations of Western civilization such as rock music, beauty pageants and films. And it intended to achieve these goals through violent means. In the course of several years, the ZOBBO Organization had fought government forces, blew BRAVE LOVE 8 up public buildings and open market places, attacked worshippers in churches and mosques, assassinated public officials, robbed banks to finance its operations, and kidnapped for ransom. The spectacular raid on Aisha’s school was its latest act of infamy in a relentless drive to achieve its utopian goals. The trucks carrying the abducted women kept up a lone bush road deep into the forest. It was still early dawn and there were no military checkpoints on the roads. The getaway had thus been easy for the terrorists. They arrived at a location where the trucks could go no further and the women were ordered to disembark. Birds flew and perched on branches in the intimidating forest of huge trees; squirrels and other little critters scurried around. Aisha had never been inside of a forest before in her 19 years of life on earth. The combination of awe of the forest, the uncertainty of her fate in the hands of her captors, and her BRAVE LOVE 9 sight of the weapons they wielded was overwhelming. She and the rest of the captives hung their heads down and avoided eye contact with the terrorists after their leader, a wiry man who looked anorexic, had commanded them to do so or risked being shot. What Aisha had wished she could do during those moments of tremendous agony was to call Ahmad to apprise him about what had happened, but her cell phone, as were those that belonged to her colleague captives, had been confiscated by the terrorists. Even if she had her phone, there was no chance in hell that she could make the call without being shot. Ahmad would therefore remain oblivious of the life changing event that was happening to her inside the god forsaken forest. Ahmad was actually asleep at the time that the awful kidnapping had taken place. Ahmad lived in a city about four hours away from Ai sha’s BRAVE LOVE 10 school. He was an ex soldier and a businessman who owned three restaurants and a large store that sold expensive Persian rug and household furniture. He had met Aisha during a military deployment in Aisha’s hometown, where terrorists had been engaged in sabotage of civilian infrastructure and attacks on military posts. Aisha’s curves, round face and full chest had attracted his attention when she had walked past his checkpoint en route to a nearby local market. He braced himself to talk to her on her way back. About an hour later, as Aisha approached his location a second time, he was ready. “Hello young lady,” he had greeted her. “Hello,” Aisha greeted back. “I have never seen a girl as beautiful as you are in all my life,” he said to her, trying to charm his way into her heart. Aisha smiled, but kept on walking. By her culture, it would have been considered immodest BRAVE LOVE 11 for her to have stopped to chat with a total male stranger. Ahmad, brought up in this culture as well, understood her demurring and ignoring of his bold move on her. But he resolved not to be discouraged from pursuing her. At twenty five years old, and a sergeant in the military, he had been thinking about marriage. His father had also been putting pressure on him lately to do it. Ahmad’s dad died s ix months after his first encounter with Aisha. He had died suddenly and Ahmad was compelled to truncate his military career to take control of his father’s business es, but before the tragedy, Ahmad did have additional encounters with Aisha at that military checkpoint and he had warmed his way into her heart. After snubbing him a few more times, she had surprised him one day when she stopped to chat with him. She had been impressed with his persistence and thought he could be a serious suitor. She was in her senior year of high school and was culturally BRAVE LOVE 12 ripe for marriage. He proposed to her and she had accepted on the condition that he allowed her to finish her final year of secondary school education. Ahmad lazily got out of bed and went into the bathroom to brush and take a bath. As was his habit, he switched on the television in the living room then kept the door to the bathroom ajar so he could listen to the news while he bathed. He was a few minutes into his bathing when the news anchor alerted her viewers to breaking news, and it was about a daring kidnapping of hundreds of secondary school girls by terrorists. Ahmad turned off the shower for a moment so he could clearly hear the words of the news anchor. Having once served in the military, he had a keen interest in security issues, but nothing prepared him for the jolt he felt when the news anchor provided details of the kidnapping: that it had occurred at the secondary school Aisha attended, and that deadly terrorists had carried out the crime. BRAVE LOVE 13 Ahmad towered up immediately without washing off the soap suds on his body and scooted into the living room to stand directly in front of the television. The news anchor now had a national security analyst on the phone for his perspective on what had just occurred. Ahmad reached out for his phone on the center table. He tapped on Aisha’s number and it rang several times without a response from the other end. He tapped on it again and again with the same outcome — no response from Aisha. At that moment Ahmad assumed the worst. Ahmad’s imagination of awful things being meted out to Aisha and the rest of the abducted unfortunate souls actually played out in real time in the bowels of a forest several hours away. When the news anchor had interrupted regular programming with news of the abductions, the women were at that moment being marched deep into the forest to a hidden and well fortified camp BRAVE LOVE 14 of the terrorists. A large plastic bag held the two hundred phones seized from the women. The phones rang repeatedly presumably from the concerned families of the women. Aisha figured her phone was among the ringing phones, as she suspected that her relatives and fiancé, informed about the catastrophe that had befallen her, were seeking to reach her. The trek had been going on for about an hour and some of the women began to tire, making them to walk slowly to demonstrate that fact. But the terrorists were in no mood to permit their captives a rest. They operated on a clock and appeared determined to get to their camp by a certain time only known to them. They barked at the women to walk quicker. Tijani, the leader of the terrorists, wore a pair of jeans and a soiled green shirt. A bandana was tied around his small head and he wore a face mask. He slung an Ak47 rifle and constantly gave directions to his men in the course of the march, BRAVE LOVE 15 telling them the paths in the forest to avoid, and ordering them to mute all the phones in the bag after he became concerned about the signals betraying their location in the forest. The camp came into view after two hours of trekking in the foreboding forest. It was now full daylight and the sun, a big yellowish ball in the sky, was up in the east. Suddenly, the noise of a war plane streaking through the skies on a bombing run was heard, and Tijani barked orders for everyone to duck behind the trees on both sides of the footpath. There they remained for about an hour before resuming the trek. Aisha and the rest of the captives were not only worried about their fate at the hands of the terrorists, but they were also concerned about being collateral casualties in the war between the national authorities and the terrorists. The bombing which had just occurred portended a dangerous future, and Aisha was so traumatized and hopeless that BRAVE LOVE 16 she contemplated suicide. The first chance she got to be alone in captivity, she decided she was going to take her own life. She thought about her family and Ahmad. She would miss them, particularly Ahmad, whom she looked forward to marrying and starting up a family with, but the foreboding existence that stared her in the face as she walked on tired feet to continual barking by the terrorists was most certainly likely to be Kafkaesque and grossly intolerable. A life with her sweetheart now seemed a long shot from being realized. Ahmad had visited with her two weeks before the kidnapping. They talked on the phone practically every day, and he paid her biweekly visits at the school. During his last visit, he had treated her to a nice dinner at a trendy restaurant. They dined on lamb, rice, stew and ice cream, and had talked about their future together as a married couple. He planned to grow the business he had inherited from his father. She BRAVE LOVE 17 would enroll in the university, and he would support her financially. They would move to Dubai at some point and raise a family there. The business back home would remain, but he would open a new business in Dubai. The future looked bright for Aisha until the unspeakable tragedy that had occurred to her. The country seemed to be awash in crime and the terror activities of the ZOBBO Organization. Many citizens were victims of kidnapping for ransom and sundry criminalities, but nothing on the scale of the mass abductions at the secondary school had ever happened before in the country. Aisha went in and out of suicidal thoughts. She came out of them only when her inner strength willed her to keep her hopes high, perchance the incident would stoke international outrage and spur military action to rescue the captives. Such an operation had risks and the captives could be killed in crossfire. This possibility often cancelled BRAVE LOVE 18 out her hopes as she drifted in and out of suicidal thoughts. Aisha was a mental and psychological wreck by the time the captives reached the camp. BRAVE LOVE 19 CHAPTER 2 Camp Thawra, the Arabic word for revolution, was the main base of the ZOBBO Organization. It was a sprawling piece of real estate consisting of a bunch of buildings of both rectangular cinder block types and mud brick huts. There was a mosque, a court house, arms storage depots, a clinic, and residential huts. A clearing about a mile or so away was the weapons training ground. The ZOBBO Organization typically enslaved captured women, and married them off to its fighters. This was the certain fate of Aisha and her colleagues as they became the newest slave women in the camp. A speech by Sharif, the Chief Commander of the organization, to the newly enslaved was a BRAVE LOVE 20 routine activity. Aisha and her colleagues were marched to a parade ground and ordered to sit on the bare earth. As they did this, a rumble of fighter jets was heard in the distance. The place was clearly unsafe in the open, and Aisha shook with fear. She observed several ZOBBO fighters on the fringes of the camp pointing heavy guns towards the sky. She saw Sharif emerge from a nearby house accompanied by several armed fighters, and they walked towards the women. His authoritarian bearing and all the big guns his party wielded as it approached further alarmed the women, who thought something more sinisterly than they had endured was about to happen to them. Sharif’s guards deployed in a semi circle shape, as he now stood in front of the women and cast a menacing sweeping look from his left to his right a number of times. “Welcome to the pious camp Thawra of