Chapter 142

At 1100 I went to the National Security meeting downstairs. I was right - they had a copy of the firefight report we watched last night. The CIA man filed a report detailing what had happened, including the causality report.

Some of the injured lived long enough to tell part of the plans. The Boko-Haram were on their way to the next village - they were going to destroy Gusau. Gusau was a larger village and two units of Boko-Haram were to attack it in ten days.

They were trying to divide Nigeria, Chad and Mali by the use of terrorism, wanting to join it with Niger and North Sudan that they were gaining control of.

The goal was to begin a new Caliphate now that ISIS was finally finished in the Middle East. It was a place for the disillusioned fighters to go and start over. It would give them control all of central Africa, if they could make it work.

It would be millions of square miles protected on the north by the Muslim controlled counties of Libya, Algeria and Egypt - with many sympathetic with their cause or unwilling to voice opposition – and on the east by Mauritania and Morocco.

With Sudan’s access to the Red Sea to smuggle arms from India, Iran, and Pakistan they would have an uncontrolled arms source. There were additional smuggling routes through Cameroon.

But there was a problem now for them to overcome. The three hundred man unit that was to attack from the east was no more - they had been eliminated to the man by Andy’s men.

With half the force now gone I figured they would have to resort to suicide bombings, and raiding parties of the hit and run type. The idea was to drive many people away before an all out assault. They were the old standbys for terrorist groups.

In this part of the world they also liked to ride through villages and rake the huts with automatic weapons fire, just for fun.

The other thing they could do was wait for reinforcements to gather up and arrive. One more thing was to set up ambushes to attack the JBG’s expeditionary force.

I ordered the NSA and CIA to use their satellites and everything available to find the group coming to Gusau from the west.

I called Secretary of State Dick James and told him I wanted a meeting in an hour and to bring his Nigerian experts.

The world doesn’t need another Caliphate - there are still flare ups from the last one.

I walked to the living section where nothing was recorded and called Andy with the JBG phone, filling him in on things he did not know that his group there needed to know.

Andy gave me information that had been collected off the bodies and from the few before they died. The CIA had neglected to tell me several things I was sure they knew.

It was just one more thing that I needed to keep in the back of my mind on everything they said or wanted. Was it the truth, the whole truth - or none of the truth?

Other things were happening this morning. HUD called to say they had been contacted by Oregon Governor Roseberry to set up arrangements for the money and to set up meetings for later in the day. I guess that made their commitment for real.

Now I could turn my attention to Washington. I called General Ingram and Attorney General Dunne to come to my office.

Dick James showed up first. We had a very long talk about the influence of the President on foreign policy and Congress on foreign policy. Then we discussed the difficulties of making the differences work.

The conversation circled around Nigeria, its problems and its wealth. Wealth was one thing Boko-Haram wanted. Nigeria was loaded with wealth of many kinds, oil was one of them and the easiest to turn into quick money.

The other was precious metals; Nigeria had plenty of them. The world wanted them any way they could get them, especially China. China was trying hard and so far Nigeria wanted nothing to do with China.

China was trying to make big inroads in all of Africa. They had built a military base on the Indian Ocean country of Djibouti during the Obama Administration. Obama wanted to be buddies with everybody, especially if they were Muslim or were helping Muslims; they could do no wrong.

He sent billions to Iran for a worthless nuclear treaty. Military supplies air dropped to the Kurds fighting ISIS mysteriously were air dropped miles from where they were supposed to be - the coordinates supplied by the Obama White House.

It was during the Obama administration China was allowed to expand without challenge. They built the base in Djibouti and pumped sand on coral reefs to build bases in the Pacific Ocean on territory claimed by other nations. China claimed almost everything that the South China Sea touched and sovereignty over the sea. When the world courts ruled against them, they ignored the ruling.

China continued to expand untouched, unchallenged during the Obama administration. By the middle of the Trump administration China had built a navy to challenge the US Navy, including four carriers equal to our Nimitz class and Fordson class - all to project its influence and show they could carry the big stick.

The Trump Administration found a way to slow them down by trade tariffs, taking away hundreds of billions in disposable cash, slowing the Chinese economy. The tariffs started moving jobs back to the US and expanding the US economy. In the early 2020’s China’s double digit economic growth collapsed to zero for the first time in twenty five years.

It was forced to use its huge cash reserves to prop up its economy and expansion dreams throughout the second Trump term. President Thomas continued and expanded pressure on China through both his terms but the damage was done. It had footholds in dozens of countries.

China had made loans to countries for infrastructure improvements. With the improvements the host country expected local labor to be used, boosting the area. However, the Chinese companies brought their own equipment with Chinese workers. The result was there was no help to the local economy.

A bridge or road was built but there were still no local jobs in the process to grow the country’s trained workforce and no building skills learned.

It was a loan and China demanded it to be repaid a couple years later. The trade-off was China bartered for natural resources - oil, precious metals, timber and more - for practically nothing, based on world market prices.