CROWN OF ASH

WAR ON THE POLICE

After the night in Magodo, Ola stopped being a boy in the compound and became a weapon in it.

He did not decide this. It happened the way erosion happens, a little each week. At sixteen he was given his own pistol and his own place in the car. At seventeen he was sent to stand at the door when Segun held meetings. The men who had once ruffled his hair now lowered their voices when he entered the room.

The war with the police was the cause of it. Commissioner Adebayo’s death had not ended the matter. It had opened it. The Inspector General in Abuja wanted blood, and he sent a task force of three hundred men, drawn from Lagos, Ogun and the north, to hunt the Demon confraternity down. They called the operation Clean Sweep. Within a week, four Demon safe houses were burning, eleven men were in cells at Panti, and the street was full of rumours that Segun would be dead before Christmas.

“They are coming for us,” Dele said, standing at the window of the war room with his rifle across his shoulder. “Not like before. This time it is a proper war.”

“Then we give them a proper war,” Segun said, quietly.

He spread a map of Ikorodu across the long table, and the men leaned over it, thirty of them, the hard core of the Demon. Ola stood at the end, close to Dele, and listened.

“The task force has one base,” Segun said, tapping a spot near the lagoon. “The old customs warehouse. They park all their vehicles there. They sleep there. They plan there. That is where their power is.”

“Heavy guard,” somebody said.

“Yes. So we won’t attack the base.” Segun looked up. “We will attack the road.”

The task force moved every morning at six, three trucks and two jeeps, along the Lagos road to the checkpoint at Ketu. Segun had known it for a week. The convoy always took the same turn where the road narrowed under an old flyover, because the alternative route was flooded.

“Dele, you take the east side. Ola, you go with Femi and Obi to the drainage. When the first truck passes the flyover, block it. They won’t be able to reverse.”

Ola’s heart gave one hard beat. “Yes, Boss.”

At four the next morning, he lay in the dirt beside a concrete culvert, a rifle across his forearms, cold mud soaking through his shirt. Femi lay on his left, the boy who had once lent him a jacket in the rain. He was nineteen and talked too much. Even now, he whispered.

“You scared?”

“No.”

“Me, I was shaking like a chicken.”

“Then shake quietly.”

Femi grinned in the dark. Ola didn’t. He was counting his breaths, in, out, the way Mr Osagie had taught him. Face like water.

At six the headlights appeared on the road, five pairs of them, bright, jolting, moving fast. The first truck rounded the corner under the flyover. A burning tyre rolled out of the darkness in front of it. The driver swerved, the truck slewed sideways, and the second truck slammed into its rear with a sound like a dropped anvil.

Then the night went white and loud.

Afterwards, Ola could remember only fragments. The muzzle flash from the east side, a line of fire stitched along the side of a jeep. A policeman climbing out of a truck window with blood on his face and a rifle in his hands. The weight of the weapon in his own arms, kicking against his shoulder. A man in a blue uniform who looked directly at him across forty yards of wet ground, and Ola’s finger squeezing, not pulling, between breaths.

The man fell.

Ola did not think. That was what shocked him afterward. There was no moment of weighing, no argument in his head. He simply saw, aimed, and the thing was done, and the next target was already waiting.

It lasted four minutes. When the shooting stopped, there was only the sound of dripping fuel and a policeman crying somewhere in the dark. Dele walked among the wreckage with his rifle at his hip, finishing what needed to be finished. Ola stayed where he was, flat on his belly, listening to Femi retch into the mud beside him.

“That is how it is,” Ola said. His voice sounded strange to him, flat and far away.

“I never thought it would be like this,” Femi gasped.

“Nobody thinks of it.”

They took the vehicles, the rifles, the radios, a crate of ammunition, a canvas bag of cash meant for an informant. They left twenty-three dead on the road and one living policeman, deliberately, with a message tied to his wrist: Clean Sweep don clean itself.

Back at the compound, the men were euphoric. Bottles of Star lager cracked open in the courtyard. Somebody turned up the music. Segun walked through the crowd with his arms open, laughing, embracing each of them, and when he reached Ola, he held the boy’s face between his two hands and kissed him on the forehead.

“Dele tell me,” he said, “say you drop four.”

“Yes, Boss.”

“Four.” Segun’s eyes were bright. “Seventeen years. That is how it started for me too.”

Ola smiled because it was expected of him. But later, when the noise had faded and the courtyard was empty, he sat alone on the edge of the dry fountain and stared at his hands. They were steady. They had not trembled once.

Mama Joke found him there at dawn, holding a cup of tea he had not touched.

“You don’t sleep,” she said.

“I can’t.”

“Because of what you did?”

“Because I don’t feel anything.”

She sat down heavily beside him. For a long moment, she said nothing. Then she took his hand, the one that had held the rifle, and pressed it against her chest.

“It will come,” she said. “The feeling will come back one day. And when it comes, it will come like a flood.”

He did not answer. The sun rose pink over the compound wall, and the pigeons on the garage roof began to coo, and for a little while, in the strange peace after the violence, he let himself believe she was wrong.