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Chapter 214 Something fishy

Africa Joint Operations Command.

Stuttgart, 5:12 a.m.

Elliott sat at his desk, holding headphones in his left hand and sliding the audio track control bar with his right.

—Channel ID: K2-AF-711.

—File tags: External material, East Africa, source unknown.

The video is playing for thirty-two seconds.

The background is highly cluttered, resulting in a grainy image.

The man holding the torch approached the corpse, raised the flame above the head, and kept shouting something.

Elliott quickly pressed pause and took off his headphones.

—The ending sounds are repeated, the speech rate changes abruptly, and the stress placement is illogical.

—Lack of natural context.

—Suspected to be synthesized or spliced together.

He wrote down his conclusion in his notebook.

Immediately afterwards, rewind eight seconds and play again from the twenty-fourth second.

This time, Elliott closed his eyes and listened carefully.

"Baba wetu" is pronounced with a drawn-out tone, and ".atusamehe sisi" is also used.

(Our Father in Heaven, please forgive our sins)

The chant is in typical Swahili prayer form, with a Kiru Anda accent in the pronunciation.

Unfortunately, the pauses between syllables are not very natural.

Just then, two coughs came from behind.

From a middle-aged man.

Martin, a former Army signalman, worked as an analyst for twenty years after retiring from the military.

He walked over and stood next to Elliott for a few seconds.

"Is this your first time in charge of this?" Martin asked.

"Yes, sir."

"What did you find?" he asked again.

Elliott hesitated slightly before speaking: "The audio tracks are spliced together, there are more than two segments."

"The rhythm is also unnatural, and the accents are off-center, as if they have been stretched."

Martin grunted in response but didn't say anything.

Meanwhile, Elliott continued to offer his assessments, attempting to gain the approval of his seniors:

"Furthermore, the elements appearing in the video are not typical."

“Local armed groups usually use more local terms and mix in tribal names or impromptu expressions, so they are not as ‘neat and orderly’ as they are.”

Martin tilted his head slightly: "Which corpus did you run the comparison test?"

“UN action records, regional contact reports, and several of our own SIGINT translations,” Elliott replied earnestly.

Martin sighed, as if he had heard some expected answer.

"Go check the image data sent back by the frontline civilian support team. The keyword is 'rescue field,' so it should still be in the internal network cache."

Elliott paused for half a second: "Photographs?"

Martin didn't explain, he just patted him on the shoulder and turned to leave.

Elliott lowered his head, moved the cursor to the command bar, and typed the keyword "rescue field".

However, before the Enter key was pressed, a red notification popped up in the upper right corner of the screen.

—J3/OPS - PRIORITY TASKING: Language attribution is required for target engagement verification procedures. Please submit before 07:30.

—Action Officer: Colonel Jeremy Frost
—Note: It has been confirmed that the attack was carried out by the Mudundun 40 faction.

After reading that passage, Eliot unconsciously tapped the edge of the keyboard twice with his knuckles.

The higher-ups had already blamed the plane crash on the rebels.

Now, all that's left is for him to submit the final procedural evidence.

After thinking for a moment, Elliott decided to return to the audio track interface.

At the end of the prayer, someone off-screen shouted:
“Kwa jina la Bwana!”

(In the name of the Lord.)
Elliott sighed, resignedly opened the report template, and filled in the opening section.

But when he got to the conclusion, he hesitated.

Outside the window, the sun rose.

In the name of the Lord.

After struggling for a moment, Elliott got up and went to the outer room.

In the corridor, an officer in combat uniform is standing in front of an electronic bulletin board.

“Is Colonel Jeremy here?” Elliott asked.

The officer turned to look at him: "You're from the language department?"

"Yes."

“He’s over at the operations department.” Elliott quickly arrived at the conference room with the sign “OPS-PREP” on it.

The door was half-open.

The colonel sat in front of his computer and connected to a remote channel.

Several documents bearing the word "NOFORN" were laid out on the table.

After the call ended, the colonel looked up and saw him: "Elliott, come in."

"Yes."

"You haven't finished writing yet?"

"I'm still in the analysis stage."

The colonel sized him up for a few seconds without making a sound.

"We have checked the heat source location, track calculation, and on-site photos."

"Your task is simply to confirm the language."

Eliot nodded: "Yes. But..."

He breathed a sigh of relief and finally voiced his doubts: "The audio may have been spliced together."

Upon hearing this, the colonel did not refute it, but simply pulled out a few color-printed photos and pushed them in front of him.

In the middle, a woman's corpse lay supine on the charred ground.

His face was mutilated by a sharp weapon, leaving only his left cheekbone and half of his lip.

His chest was ripped open, and the words "Mungu yuko pamoja nami" were written crookedly in blood on his exposed skin.

In the corner, there was a pile of heads stacked in front of the wreckage of the wing, with the United Nations logo still faintly discernible in the background.

"What do you think?" the colonel asked.

Elliott didn't say anything.

Do you know who took this picture?

He shook his head.

“The Red Cross relief team in the area,” the colonel said, “passed through an anonymous channel to our contact point in Kisangani, and then into the JOC’s intelligence pool.”

"Now, the State Council demands an explanation."

"The White House has implicitly acknowledged that this was a 'non-state armed attack on civilians' incident—that is, a terrorist attack against American citizens."

"The J-3 has already set up its fire strike window, and the J-5 is also preparing its recommendations. Several chiefs of staff have already signed off on the process."

At this point, the colonel paused for a few seconds, giving Elliott time to think.

So, do you still want to stick to your question?

"."

When Elliott returned to his desk, there were seven minutes left until the deadline.

He sat down and quickly typed out his conclusion:

"Based on a comprehensive assessment of semantic structure, pronunciation features, and regional language usage, this audio track is a mixture of Kiru Anda and Swahili, with typical language variant features of the FVQ-34 region. It is preliminarily determined that it can be attributed to the Mudundu 40 related organization."

Click to send.

Elliott stood up and went to the window.

Outside, it was broad daylight.

A light fog lingered over the outskirts of Stuttgart.

A few crows perched on the flagpole at the entrance of the headquarters.

The headphone cord was still hanging on the corner of the table, and the media player was still stuck on that spell.

“Kwa jina la Bwana.”

"In the name of the Lord."

It sounds very real.

But that was not their language, nor their voice.

Elliott didn't know who was speaking.

But he knew why that sentence appeared in that video.