Eight hours after the depot, the place still smelled of diesel, dust and blood.

The sun was already up, hard and yellow. Heat pressed down relentlessly on the corrugated roof. Ikenga stepped out of the lead Hilux and stood in silence.

The bodies of his men had been laid side by side near the loading bay.

Not neatly. Not ceremonially. Just in the practical order men used when there were too many dead and not enough time to pretend otherwise. Some were covered with tarpaulin to the chest. Some were not. Boots jutted at odd angles. Hands black with dried blood and raffia dust.

Ikenga counted them once with his eyes.

Then he turned away.

Death had not left with them.

It still clung to the concrete. To the gate pillar scarred by bullets. To the blackened stain near the kernel-press corridor. To the rear lane where Charlie team had gone down. The water tank still carried the thin nick of rounds that had cut one of his men down as he turned.

Ikenga walked the ground slowly.

At the rear gate, he stopped and looked out beyond the lane. He looked further to the feeder roads and beyond those to the loose belt of semi-rural spread. Here, a hunted man could disappear into movement or be swallowed by bush.

“He did not run blind,” he said.

Nobody replied.

They knew better.

Ikenga crouched at the threshold and studied the dirt beyond the concrete lip. Tyre impressions. Boot marks. Faint dog prints in dry soil. Old now. Useless for tracking. Useful for something else.

Confirmation.

Ogun had left under pressure, yes. But not in panic.

Ikenga stood up. He walked back to the bonnet of the Hilux. There, a folded survey map lay pinned beneath a pistol magazine. Uyo bleeding outward toward Etinan. Feeder roads. Gutters. Filling stations. Half-built shops. Church compounds. Mechanic sheds. Culverts. Red-earth shoulders. Low morning commerce thickening by the hour.

He flattened the map with one palm.

“Most men run into darkness,” he said. “They think silence means safety.”

One of the operators nodded. “Night gives concealment.”

“For the watcher too,” Ikenga said. “Thin traffic. Few witnesses. Every bike remembered. Every parked car suspicious.”

His finger traced east, then south-east, along a mixed corridor where the city frayed into scrub, compounds and roadside trade.

“Daylight is better, because he can hide in the bustling chaos.”

He tapped once.

“If I were tired, moving with Sanusi and the dog, expecting my search to widen by nightfall, I would choose a belt like this. Enough human movement to blend. Enough side roads to break surveillance. Enough drainage and half-finished structures to step off the road, disappear for ten minutes and emerge elsewhere.”

He paused.

“And because I would choose it, Ogun may assume that I know he would choose it.”

The men listened.

That was the difference. Ikenga was not selecting the corridor because it was merely good ground. He was selecting it because it was the route a disciplined operator would pick when he wanted both concealment and options. Ogun knew he would think that way. But even then, only a handful of routes offered the same mix of cover, civilian clutter and controlled exits.

This one was the best.

Ikenga began placing teams.

No uniforms. No cordon to announce itself. No checkpoint theatrics.

Comms only. Observe. Report. Keep distance. Do not be seen.

By late morning, the first return came in.

A roadside kiosk owner had seen a man in a dusty blue shirt buying bottled water and glucose biscuits. Large dog with him. Calm animal. Did not bark.

Ikenga marked the location.

Twenty minutes later, a second report.

Someone had seen a similar dog lying near an unfinished block structure further along the belt. He was less certain about the men. One had been seated. Another might have been inside the shade, or maybe deeper back. The boy was not sure. What he remembered clearly was the dog watching the road without moving.

Ikenga marked that too.

Now a pattern was beginning to press against the map.

Not proof.

Pressure.

Then came the third return.

A woman selling roasted corn near a crooked church sign said a man in blue with a large dog drinking from a cut plastic bowl near a culvert just off the same corridor. She thought there had been another man back from the road in shade, resting.

Ikenga shut the map.

That was enough.

“Move.”

The convoy split at once. One vehicle ahead. Another lagging far behind. Ikenga rode in the second Hilux, window down, his carbine locked and loaded.

The city loosened around them.

Concrete gave way to red shoulders, low walls, stubborn weeds, cassava plots, zinc bukas not yet open, mechanic yards. White goats bleating close by. Somewhere far off, a generator coughed into life.

Ikenga watched everything.

A man carrying a basin of cement on his head. A danfo too far from its normal route. A woman rinsing plastic bowls by a tap.

A German Shepherd would stand out here. So would a man trying too hard not to.

The first team checked the church road. Nothing.

The second swept the block building. Empty.

Ikenga felt irritation stir, then settle flat.

Not panic. Adjustment.

Ogun would not remain where he had first been seen. The value of sightings was never in the location. It was in the line they drew.

He sent the front vehicle toward the next bend near the culvert. He instructed them to hold short, watch first, and move second.

The rider’s voice came back low.

“Possible visual. Blue shirt near culvert wall. Dog dey beside am.”

Ikenga leaned forward. “Second man?”

“I no see am.”

Distance began to close.

He ordered the rear vehicle off the road. No bunching. No obvious encirclement. He wanted the gap alive until he put his own hand around its throat.

The comms hissed again.

A half-breath. A scrape. Then a click.

Silence.

Not static.

A keyed mic. Briefly opened, then taken.

Ikenga’s expression did not change, but his eyes hardened. One of the forward crew had been touched. Quietly.

He stepped out before the Hilux had fully settled.

The heat and humidity slapped his face.

Ahead, under the culvert shade, sat a man in a blue shirt. Makx lay beside him, head on paws, still as carved stone.

Ikenga raised a hand. His men froze.

Too still.

That was what struck him first.

No children lingering. No roadside gossip slowing to stare. No passing bike easing down out of curiosity. Even the dog’s stillness was wrong. Not tired. Waiting.

Ikenga’s gaze shifted left.

A shallow rise. Dry grass. A broken drainage spine running parallel to the road before vanishing into scrub. Good flank ground. Better firing ground. Better still for a man who had already moved unseen through worse.

He understood two more things at once.

The team ahead had not gone silent by accident.

His men who had pushed into the drainage line had gone too deep.

They would not be returning. Ogun had strewn through them with cold efficiency. The dawn swallowed their silence.

The seated figure by the culvert shifted.

Not Ogun.

Sanusi.

Dusty blue shirt. Calm face. Tired eyes.

Makx lifted her head beside him and fixed on Ikenga, not the road.

Then the voice came from the left rise, quiet, controlled, and close enough to make movement a mistake.

“You thought I was trying to leave.”

Ikenga went still.

He knew the voice at once.

“OW-T!”

Invisible. Elevated. In control.

Sanusi did not stand. He only looked at Ikenga with the settled calm of a man watching a trap close exactly as intended.

The pieces locked together in one brutal instant.

The blue shirt.

The dog seen and seen again.

The pauses beside ordinary people long enough to be remembered.

The corridor that any intelligent hunter would pick because any intelligent fugitive would use it.

Not an escape.

A trail.

Fed into his own intelligence web.

Built to feel discovered.

Ikenga had not uncovered Ogun’s exfil route.

He had followed a trail laid for him.

Sanusi spoke with calm measure.

“So, you’re the Circle’s attack dog.”

Ikenga’s hand twitched once on his carbine.

Ogun’s voice dropped again, colder now.

“No.”

He let the word hang for a beat.

“He’s no dog, he’s a puppet.”

Ikenga’s heart kicked hard against his chest, fury tightening every muscle, yet not a trace of it reached his eyes.

Everything seemed constricted around him.

The culvert. The rise. The dead comms. The drainage line. The missing men. The hidden angles. OW-T’s bait.

Ikenga saw it clearly at last.

He had spent the morning tightening a noose.

He just had not realised whose neck was inside it.