The first scream was so loud and full of agony...it was the type of scream coming from a human under excruciating pain from something close or worse than torture...a scream that could only be from a human facing a real death not even a threat of it....the scream came from one of the female’s barracks...soon after, hundreds more screams and wailing filled the air in the entire camp...
The enemy had started its attacks from the lady’s barracks...but wait, why would they start there yet the actual combatants and the real threats were the men and their residences were far apart? There was no time to answer this question and the only thing to urgently address was to find the actual location of the regulars and the ncios... we therefore abandoned the idea of all of us from the cells ground going to the drill ground and instead some of us go to the ladies barracks to counter the offensive...
About half of the colleagues separated and headed to the southern side of the camp...where the female barracks were located...and their immediate mission was to rescue the ladies, subdue the afandes and deliver the ladies to the POS (point of safety, along the fence line facing the KA ammunition)... for the rest of us that remained we headed for the drill ground....
as we were doing all this since the great capture of the cells and as we matched to the drill grounds we had forgotten one small detail which nobody under the circumstances gave thought to...that our hands were empty with no weapon...it was very interesting to note that we had prepared for war without really knowing what we would fight with and there was no time to figure out where they would come from...we held on to our match along the tarmacked road and hoped that we would make it to the drill ground before any attack, after all we needed to fight...that was wishful thinking...
A couple of steps ahead and we could see the edges of the drill ground and the podium (jukwaa) where the big boys used to sit during the passing out parades...the staff canteen was to the left and was surrounded with overgrown bourganvillea plant, but the villae along the road leading to it was very well trimmed....right behind the canteen were the staff houses for the commadant Solomon, his deputy Ngumi and Assistant Osole...next to the staff canteen was the administration block, but this block was fairly close to the road...on the right hand side of the road were other blocks which were used as barracks by the regular officers who did not participate in the training of the kurutus...in between these blocks was a dark patch extending about 80 metres as the place was not very well lit...
The screams in the female’s barracks were intensifying and seemed like they were drifting towards the nearby bushes and along the road towards the drill ground...it was not hard to note that the screams were made by ladies who were terribly scared, thoroughly scared and running for their dear lives...how tormenting it was for the matching soldiers!!!!
Just then.....there was a pandemonium at the back of the lot followed by guys shouting...”comrades watch out!”...two colleagues had been downed...the afandes had struck!!! The attacking party was composed of about 10 afandes...but again why would they send only ten afandes to about a hundred charged comrades??...no immediate answer to the question as we had an object and we were not really far from accomplishing it...
as all the attention was directed towards the direction of the commotion and with 3 colleagues and the 10 afandes down nobody noticed as a contingent of about 100 afandes approached from different directions of the dark alleys and stood just a couple of metres from our group, as if waiting for an instruction or a command...what followed was a full scale conflict and bloodletting, never seen before in NYS institutions, that was going to last the rest of the night and remain fresh in our memories for the rest of our lives....
...besides, the presence of a safe alone does not signify that there is money inside...