Hail Warning

Two Years Ago Lagos, Nigeria

Mohammed Mboso had been in many life-threatening situations. Long before he had become the leader of the Boko Haram, Mohammed had taken an active role in many armed confrontations where bullets had been flying in all directions. He had been shot once in the shoulder and another time through his leg. The terrorist leader had still considered himself lucky. Most of the men who had joined the terrorist organization around the same time as Mboso were now dead. Their bullet entries and exit points had been much more sensitive than his own.

Mboso had been held, not once, but twice as a prisoner, once by the puppet government of Nigeria, and once by a rogue local militia. Both of those organizations had discovered it was not a great idea to incarcerate the head of a radicalized jihadi terrorist group. In both instances, a rescue party had been assembled. He had been freed to resume his command of the Boko Haram. Those who had imprisoned him paid for that mistake with their lives. In some instances, so did the lives of their families. Considering the horrid backlash, the leaders of the new Nigerian government had not been motivated to pursue Mboso’s incarceration.

Bullets hadn’t killed Mboso. Although he had been stabbed a few times, once by one of his own men who wanted to take charge, the steel that had pierced his skin, his lung and his abdomen had not taken his life.

On another occasion, he had been too close to a napalm explosion. The flame that licked out in all directions had fried his face, arms and the back of his neck. It had burnt his long beard into nothing but a fuzz which he had wiped away with a single stroke of his blistering hand. Badly scarred for life, lighter patches of pink derma covered his face and arms. But just like the napalm explosion, he had recovered from that as well.

Bullets hadn’t killed Mboso. Knives hadn’t killed Mboso. The great American Satan with their fire-breathing jets had not killed Mboso. Allah had chosen to keep Iniabasi on the earth to do his good work.

None of the methods of dying that were commonplace in his profession had taken him out. Instead, he found himself slowly dying from an incursion into his body that was not manmade or put there by hostile intent. No, the thing that was

eating him from the inside out was a parasite of some type. It had started a few weeks after he sent his soldier, Diambu from Nigeria, to shoot down the airplane in Venezuela. He had developed diarrhea which had never fully abated. His stomach continually felt nauseous. Initially, he thought he had food poisoning that was taking a long time to subside. Then he considered the possibility he was being poisoned by one of his men. For a time, he had become very careful about what he ate. The terrorist leader had created a ritual where he would have more than one of his men taste test his food. He made a habit of switching meals with one of his men at random. But this security measure had no effect on his health, and he had continued to deteriorate.

The day he was watching the video footage of United 1045’s wreckage on CNN was the best he had felt in months. He celebrated by opening a very old and rare bottle of wine, although his religion didn’t permit drinking. Soon after drinking most of the bottle, his God rewarded him with 24 hours of vomiting. So much for breaking Allah’s rules.

Not long after the downing of the commercial jet, the pain and aching in his muscles and joints began in earnest. They were minor annoyances at first. But the weeks that followed afforded him little sleep, and he had more difficulty getting out of bed in the morning. Fatigue, exhaustion, depression, and feelings of apathy enveloped the aging jihadi. He was distressed during a time when he should have been rejoicing having scored a blow against the evilest creatures, Satan-like, of the world.

The black pigmentation of his skin lightened, becoming opaquer, while at the same time his weight began to drop. The veins under the skin bulged, creating a tangle of thick strings that wrapped around the old man like a spider web. Ten pounds vanished, then twenty, followed by another quick ten pounds. No amount of food seemed to satisfy his aging body. It was seemingly under attack from within.

Not being a man who liked doctors or was accustomed to seeing any sort of physician on a regular basis, Mboso put off seeing a doctor. He believed Allah would reward him for his service and heal him. As he found himself unable to eat and was now obscenely malnourished, at the request of his men, the head of the Boko Haram finally decided to go to the local hospital in Lagos.

It is estimated there are more than six million species of parasitic specimens in the world. The tests at the hospital could only screen out a fraction of the internal invaders that were eating Mboso alive, but none of those parasites were discovered inside the man. Mboso’s condition was so alarming he was kept at the hospital. They took samples of his stool, blood, and skin. These samples were sent to labs around the world. An intravenous line was stuck into a plump vein on his right arm. To keep him alive, a feeding tube had been inserted down his throat and into his stomach.

As Afua and the Obanos were on their return voyage from the Caribbean, the leader of the Boko Haram died in the hospital from a massive heart attack. It was an overt reaction from the toll the parasite had taken on his body.

Weeks later, Mohammad Mboso, fondly known to his men simply as Iniabasi, was collected from the morgue by his faithful followers within the Boko Haram, and they buried him in his beloved African jungle.

As the Nigerian Princess crossed the Atlantic, the tests from the labs around the world began arriving back at the hospital. Tens of thousands of parasitic species had been ruled out, specifically parasitic species with the potential of killing a healthy man. But, in the end, the exact parasite that had killed a person the rest of the world considered a parasite was never found.