DELTA STATE, NIGERIA
THURSDAY, 11:50 A.M. WEST AFRICA TIME (6:50 A.M. EST)
Big Sammie sat on point. From the very front of the boat’s bow, he scouted the shoreline for police, the waterways for military patrols, the sky for surveillance drones. The boat’s pilot, who insisted on the nom de guerre Captain Wayne Rooney, banked sharply to the west. Sammie gripped the gunwale with one hand and his AK-47 with the other. The engine roared and the boat raced down one of the endless creeks that formed the impenetrable maze of the Niger Delta.
Big Sammie had small aspirations. He was a tiny boy, a runt among seven brothers and sisters, who originally just wanted to be a fisherman like his father and his grandfather. He dreamed of growing up to have a wife, maybe two wives if he was lucky, surrounded by big pots of food and lots of children. Sammie wanted to live the life he was born into, in the village along the creek, surrounded by family and the comfortable fate of his ancestors. Every weekday Sammie attended the Precious Child Primary School, learning how to read and write, to add and subtract, studying the basics of tropical agriculture.
On Sundays, Sammie liked to show off his education, reading aloud from the Bible, praying with his grandmother at the local branch of the Holy Church of Eternal Prosperity. One beautiful Sunday the week before Easter, a large box arrived from a church in Texas filled with stuffed animals. Sammie was given the honor of distributing the toys to the village children, keeping only a single small pink rabbit for himself.
The village’s house of worship was a basic structure of concrete walls and an asbestos roof, built with donations from some faraway place that Sammie didn’t know. The centerpiece of the church, a life-sized Jesus on a cross, was a gift from Eternal Prosperity’s world headquarters in Lagos. Sammie had seen on television pictures of the glass-and-steel structure that could seat two thousand parishioners. Maybe one day he would be able to visit church headquarters and read aloud on the big stage. Perhaps one day he’d even be on television.
At that time Sammie was focused on a more near-term goal. He read his prayers, he sang enthusiastically alongside his grandmother and his siblings, all to get ready for the day when the church leader, Pastor Emmanuel, the founder of the Holy Church of Eternal Prosperity, would come to visit his village. Sammie practiced and sang. His grandmother donated a few spare naira into the church collection plate every Sunday, for improvements to the church and to pay for preparations for the big visit. The anticipation of Pastor Emmanuel’s arrival, all the way from the big city of Lagos—an ambassador for Jesus Christ himself, from the heavens, coming to bless Sammie’s little village—was exhilarating. Sammie hoped and prayed that Pastor Emmanuel would bless him, too.
Until Sammie’s entire world came crashing down. It began with an explosion at an oil pipeline, not far upriver. The sky turned black and blocked out the sun. Within hours the fishing grounds were flooded with thick, oily poison. Sammie and his grandmother rushed to the church to alert the authorities of the disaster, to ask for food, to seek help. But the church was locked.
It would be days before the news trickled back to Sammie’s village that Pastor Emmanuel had been arrested, his private airplane and antique Rolls-Royce collection confiscated, his bank accounts in Geneva and London frozen, his luxury villas in Lagos, Abuja, and Monaco seized by the authorities. The Holy Church of Eternal Prosperity, it turned out, had been built on thousands, perhaps millions, of people handing over a few naira to support a lavish lifestyle of one man.
Angry men in the village wanted to launch a protest against the church and the oil company. But the elders decided on a more cautious approach. A delegation from the village traveled by bus to the state capital at Asaba to plead for help. After waiting patiently for three days in the capital, they finally met with the assistant to the governor, whom they begged to approach the foreign oil company operating in the area. Their demands: Clean up the spill, pay restitution to those who lost their livelihoods, hire more local men for security, and make improvements to the church. The list of demands was politely accepted and the delegation returned to the village.
That’s when the answer arrived. The army swept into Sammie’s village, kicking in doors, searching for “troublemakers,” rounding up any able-bodied male. The Holy Church of Eternal Prosperity was burned to the ground. The only item Sammie had left from the church was his pink rabbit.
Sammie was thirteen. That’s when, for the first time, he saw the world for what it was. And that’s when he met a new friend who helped him to become big.
—
Now fifteen and many more years wiser, Big Sammie sat in the open bow of Captain Wayne Rooney’s boat, feeling the roar of the outboard engines in his bones, the wind rippling through his mask, the cold steel of the automatic rifle in his hands. On a lanyard around his neck, he hung the pink stuffed rabbit. It may have looked out of place on a heavily armed rebel fighter, but the toy had become part of Big Sammie’s persona.
The boat hugged another sharp corner and came upon a waiting Nigerian navy vessel. The twenty-five-foot American Defender Class response boat looked like an oversized Zodiac, with NNS Abiku stenciled in white on the gray foam collar.
Big Sammie heart jumped. He raised his AK and aimed, just as he had been trained, directly at the tallest skull in the boat’s wheelhouse. He was never told the nature of their mission that day; he didn’t know if this was a real Nigerian naval boat or a counterfeit. He learned to never assume who was friend and who was enemy.
Big Sammie fingered the trigger, narrowed his aim, and tried to slow his breathing.
Captain Wayne Rooney didn’t appear surprised. He slowed the engine to a crawl and circled the naval vessel. A man in civilian clothes, jeans, and a crisp white button-down oxford held up his hands and waved to them. The captain gestured to Big Sammie to throw a line to the man and lash the two boats together.
“Twelve o’clock. Right on time. High noon,” said the mysterious man.
The captain accepted a suitcase from the man with a grunt. The man flipped open a cell phone, spoke a few words, then nodded. Captain Wayne Rooney released the line, the engines thundered, and Big Sammie with his pink rabbit sped away, back into the creeks.