CHAPTER NINETEEN
12:35 p.m. West Africa Time (6:35 a.m. Eastern Standard Time)
Camp New Hope
Diffa, Niger
It was like something out of a nightmare.
They had walked through the squalid camp for close to an hour now. They were armed, but they kept their guns out of sight. Here and there, they stopped to chat momentarily with people Dunn seemed to know. The people could speak a version of English, but it was clearly not their first language.
“These people are Kanuri,” Dunn said. “If left to their own devices, they speak either a Kanuri dialect or Hausa, but most people have at least a little English. In the south, everybody speaks it.”
Seen close up, the shelters were primarily patchworks of heavy fabric and animal skins mounted on four-sided skeletons of metal poles. They were about f
