Word: harcourts
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...HEART OF A DOG by Mikhail Bulgakov. 146 pages. Harcourt, Brace & World...
...months, Nigeria's federal government had been trying to take Port Harcourt, and getting nowhere. When it sent boats in from the southwest, they got lost in the mosquito-infested mangrove swamps. To seal off the southeast, the Biafrans pumped a continuous stream of crude oil into the Bonny channel and set it permanently ablaze. To guard against aerial attacks, they mounted heavy artillery atop the city's tallest buildings, and drove barbed stakes into open fields as protection against paratroopers. They even put nozzles on oil pipelines, converting them into instant flamethrowers. As a result, the Nigerian...
...within shelling distance of their target. Setting up headquarters with his 105-mm.-howitzer battery in a suburban Anglican churchyard, Colonel Benjamin Adekunle, head of Nigeria's 3rd Marine Commando Division ("The Scorpions"), took full charge of the attack, code-naming his immediate area "Hell Sector," the Port Harcourt airport "Iron Sector" and the main area of town "Hate Sector." As federal howitzer, mortar and artillery shells began pounding the fringes of the city at three-minute intervals, young Ibo tribesmen dressed in clean white shirts and ties slapped "Anti-Panic Squad" signs on their cars and drove through...
...airport and moved into parts of the city, great, 1,000-ft. pillars of black smoke angled into the sky from pipelines and oil and gas wells set ablaze by the retreating Ibos. At week's end, Biafran soldiers were still holding out in some sections of Port Harcourt, and the prospect was for long-drawn-out fighting. But the superior federal firepower seemed certain to prevail eventually, and then Port Harcourt would join the long string of Ibo ghost towns now occupied by the Lagos government...
...their once proud nation, Africa's most populous. Unfortunately, Nigeria is only partly a nation; it is, in fact, an arbitrary conglomeration of hostile tribes. The Ibos are motivated by a principle, too: self-preservation. As the Oxford-educated Ojukwu told his people after the fall of Port Harcourt: "We shall all have to return to our villages and homes, if necessary behind enemy lines, and torment and harass the federal troops at every turn; we are fighting this dreadful war not for conquest but survival...