CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
1:57 p.m. West Africa Time (7:57 a.m. Eastern Standard Time)
Forward Operating Base (FOB) Desert Lion
Diffa, Niger
The afternoon sun beat down.
Luke, Ed, and Paul Dunn were staying out of its way. They were on the top level of the base, surrounded by sand bags, and in the shade offered by a green canvas awning. Stone had taken a cold bucket shower, and the guys here had lent him a tan camo uniform that wasn’t drenched in blood.
Until a moment ago, the three of them had been hunched over a laptop perched on a flimsy card table, looking at satellite maps of Sambisa Forest, along with real-time high-altitude drone footage Swann was taking of the village where Dunn thought the girls were. The place was little more than a clearing, with a collection of thatched roof hut
