by Fritz Galt
He studied the embers of the “flying bombs” and nodded with satisfaction. The planes’ presence within India’s borders would cause Hindu politicians several sleepless nights as they contemplated what they were up against. In effect, the airplanes had served their purpose without ever flying. After all, his goal was fear.
He had learned this lesson by analyzing Osama bin Laden’s way of meting out fear, and for a moment he mused over bin Laden’s trajectory into the firmament of the Islamic imagination.
Osama bin Laden came from a devout and austere Yemenite family living among the newly rich Saudis. The royal family was Bedouin, hunters with no skill at building, so bin Laden’s family became the King’s builders. King Fahd personally gave Osama bin Laden’s father the contracts to restore Mecca and Medina, Islam’s Two Holy Places. The contracts amounted to a cool three billion dollars.
Osama was a millionaire from the day he was born. His affluent father had eleven wives, but his favorite one was a Palestinian, the one he referred to as “the tiny last one.” Of his fifty-two children, the last was his favorite, a son born of this beloved wife. He called the child Osama, from an Arabic expression, meaning “lion,” a hunter, king of the beasts.
In adulthood, Osama grew a scraggly beard like that of a lion. He wore Afghan headgear, spoke softly and was shy in prayer, while a Praetorian Guard of hundreds of fighters from Afghanistan, Egypt and Turkey accompanied him everywhere. He was a financial genius, a talented organizer, and had been the de facto finance minister for the Afghan resistance in their war against the Soviet Union. Gradually, he became the standard-bearer for many of the one-and-a-quarter billion Muslims of the world.
However, Osama bin Laden lived up to his destiny and remained both a builder and a hunter. His reserves, investments and front corporations brimming with tens of millions of dollars, the forty-year-old Saudi Arabian champion of the downtrodden of the Islamic world lived among his fold, under a tree in Afghanistan.
Abu recalled bin Laden once telling CNN, “We are living in dignity and honor for which we thank Allah. Even in the most sacred land on earth, Saudi Arabia, injustice is widespread. It is much better for us to live under a tree here on these mountains than to live in palaces in the most sacred land to Allah, while being subjected to disgrace by not worshipping Him. There is no strength except with Allah.”
Osama bin Laden had already become a hero in the Muslim world long before CNN and the U.S. State Department made him a household name.
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, he had financed the Afghan mujahideen resistance by accumulating an enormous war chest from the Emirs of the Gulf and from Western governments.
He had supplied the Afghan mujahideen with earthmoving equipment to build underground bunkers and mountain tunnels to avoid the Soviet air raids. He had hidden storage places and hospitals, introduced advanced communications equipment and even been handed Stinger missiles by the CIA.
Mujahideen meant literally “fighters of a holy war,” and that was exactly how he and the Afghan freedom fighters saw themselves.
During the bloody war, he had witnessed first hand the vulnerability behind the pride and swagger of the Soviet Union.
With the retreat of the Red Army, the eventual fall of the godless Soviet-backed regime in Kabul and the ultimate demise of the Soviet Union, bin Laden and the mujahideen felt they had destroyed a superpower.
Not only had they vanquished the Soviet Union, but they had destroyed the idea that one country could dominate the economy, politics and religions of other countries. They dispelled the myth of superpowers not only in their own minds, but in the minds of all Muslims.
By 1990, when the Red Army’s troops had marched out of Afghanistan with disgrace on their faces and in their minds, Afghanistan turned from a religious war of liberation into a savage battle between rival mujahideen factions. Osama bin Laden returned to Riyadh, where the Saudi secret service persuaded him to make use of his army of thousands of Arabs who were ready to die for the dictum “There is no God but Allah” at a moment’s notice.
Osama reversed course and returned to the Pakistani border city of Peshawar to turn the religious volunteers at the training camps into urban guerillas and to build al-Qaeda, a logistical network of Muslim fundamentalists. His goal was simple, to create a strike force capable of toppling any government anywhere in the world.
By the time the Gulf War began, only one superpower remained. In haughty arrogance, America along with her agents, in his view, the Jews, dismembered the heads and arms of thousands of innocent children in Lebanon and Palestine. Osama had a new cause: death to America and the Jews.
But bin Laden had grown unhappy with the influence of the West over his native land. Islamic scholars were being arrested on the Arabian Peninsula, people were killed for their beliefs. When the Saudi regime agreed to allow U.S. troops a toehold on the peninsula to fight Saddam Hussein, he petitioned the Saudi government repeatedly to remove the infidels.
Upon the conclusion of the Gulf War, bin Laden continued to chafe at American soldiers’ ongoing presence in Saudi Arabia. The royal palace cancelled his passport, and he departed for Yemen. Later, stripped of his Saudi citizenship, he fled to Sudan, a rogue nation headed by two men: a like-minded fundamentalist teamed up with one of Osama’s former Afghan buddies.
Not long after that, U.S. Marines, who still occupied the country of the Two Holy Places, were neatly bombed out of their café seats and dormitory beds. From his refuge in Khartoum, Sudan, bin Laden claimed no responsibility.
After a slipshod Saudi investigation, prefabricated confessions and a summary trial, four Saudi Shiites were executed. Osama owed thanks to his friends in the Saudi secret police.
Clearly embarrassed, the Saudi royal family, which to Abu’s mind was a mere shadow of the U.S. Government, put pressure on Khartoum to expel bin Laden. Under Saudi assurances of security, he left for Afghanistan. There, the Taliban were in control of Kabul and most of the countryside. Though he was not their direct benefactor during the war for Afghan independence, they welcomed him as one of their own. And in the Afghan tradition, “If you are one of our own, one of our own you will remain.”
Meeting with four “emirs” of the Islamic world, the leaders of the Egyptian, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Maghreb Islamist groups, he established a formidable Islamist front to fight Israel and America. They issued a fatwa to “sell off the blood” of any American, civilian or military. In other words, Osama bin Laden had dared to declare a jihad, a holy war, on the U.S.
With Allah’s grace, in the mountainous tribal land in eastern Afghanistan, slumber and fatigue vanished, and Osama bin Laden reinvigorated the military training camps. With his new mission in life, he organized the training of militant Muslims arriving from all corners of the world. Recruits poured in from the Philippines, Chechnya, Tajikistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Algeria, Egypt and Pakistan. From the high, cold Khowst Mountains, the jihad waged wars from the shanties of Somalia to the subways of Paris to the U.S. Embassies in Western and Northern Africa.
Abu reflected on the tremendous sway and scope of bin Laden’s work. What boosted him back up at every downturn of events?
Osama had changed his views over time. He had adapted to the needs of his people. First, he supported his brothers against the Soviets, then he took arms against any impious Muslim state. Finally, with the fatwa, he had directed his men’s wrath at those who were, in his view, his religion’s primary enemies, the Americans and Jews.
Yet Abu had a scheme that would transcend even Osama’s present jihad and open the door for Allah, The Almighty, to the rest of the world. Abu foresaw and refined on a daily basis his new scheme to overtake the regimes of every non-Islamic nation, beginning with the weak, ungovernable and outrageously overpopulated India.
If he could only get Osama’s ear, even for a brief audience. Perhaps a shared dinner under the stars.
But bin Laden was in hiding, accessible only by mobile satellite phone, livi
ng in one of the bunkers or tunnels his bulldozers, loaders, dump trucks and trench diggers had created for the mujahideen. Until the day they could meet, Abu had resolved to act decisively and on his own.
If he could win India for bin Laden, what next? Dreams began to fill his head. There were the equally vulnerable nations of Southeast Asia, then Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Finally, perhaps China.
But first there was India.
The leaves about him glistened with blood, and the reek of charred flesh burned his nostrils. He realized that he had been staring down for some time at a defiant, severed fist.
He would freshen up at a safe house and leave for the airport before dawn.
Supplied with the photo of a young American woman and a concealed consignment of explosives and firearms, he would take the six a.m. flight from Jammu to Bombay.
Osama bin Laden’s glorious rise to the firmament was only a precursor to his own ascendancy. Abu Khan, the upstart Muslim Indian, would do him one better.
Shortly before midnight, Congressman Fred Butler, from California’s Ninth District on the East Bay, talked excitedly and gestured out the window from his airplane seat. He squeezed his wife’s hand and pointed with a guidebook at the nighttime view of Bombay.
“There she is, Ladies and Gentlemen, Bombay, India,” he announced and slapped the guidebook against his knee. “Nowadays it’s more PC to call Bombay ‘Mumbai,’ named after a major goddess, Mumba. The city has over fifteen million people and thirty thousand wandering cows crammed onto a peninsula the size of Manhattan.”
“Lovely, dear,” Linda Butler said with a sigh.
She had been on shopping expeditions to Asia before. They had taken that same Air Force C-141 jumbo jet to Beirut and Beijing, and they had looted all the major stops along the Silk Road. This was just one more such trip. The ninety-three-foot-long cargo bay, ready to hold over thirty-three tons of furniture and artwork, stood empty and waiting.
How to find room in their house for all the antique Bombay furniture, Kashmir carpets, rosewood elephants and endless yards of cotton fabric she hoped to acquire scarcely bothered her. The possessions were not available to enjoy until the day politics was over, and they found a proper mansion. She and her family had learned to live in poverty while storing up treasures against an uncertain future. After all, unlike a real corporate job, no seat in the U.S. Congress was ever that secure.
Her husband droned on. “The British obtained Bombay from the Portuguese in the 1400s as part of a dowry. Boy, what a steal.”
“Why the name ‘Bombay?’” she wondered aloud.
“Says here it’s an anglicized form of the Portuguese name ‘Bombaim,’ from ‘buan bahia’ meaning “Good Bay.”
“So it has nothing to do with bombs.”
“Apparently not.”
She stared dubiously out the jet’s window. “Honey, did we bring our jungle juice?”
“Hell no. Mosquitoes aren’t a problem this time of year. The monsoon’s passed.”
Seated on the other side of Linda, Keri Butler, their blonde, twenty-one-year-old daughter, showed only amused interest. Her father was such a dork.
Chapter 5
At Dr. Simon Yate’s invitation, Mick Pierce left for dinner at the Pontoon Beach Resort.
In the darkness, he thrashed through tree branches that encroached on the footpath, his leather sandals filling with sand. Cooled by a sea breeze and watered by torrential seasonal rainfall, the island was teeming with life. It supported the world’s most varied tropical fish population, living coral on which the island was built, and a small, colorful rainforest.
The word “atoll” came from the Maldives islanders’ Divehi tongue. And the islands needed their own word, because there was nothing like an atoll. Mick’s island was as curved as the crescent on the white dome of the village mosque. It was a two-mile jungle walk from end to end. And it was no more than thirty yards across at its widest.
The entire nation of the Maldives consisted of over a thousand such sandy reefs created by underwater coral formations. Bushes and mangroves barely gained a toehold on most of these islands, but Mick’s was large and wet enough to support forest life, a resort and boatloads of tourists.
Life on the atoll was polarized by politics and economics into two very different social spheres. The hotel faced the sunset on the western tip while the central and eastern portions of the island supported life that fed off the crumbs left by tourists. To keep their Islamic state pure, the Maldivian government only allowed foreign workers to work at resorts for the infidel tourists. Meanwhile, islanders, laboring beyond the economic sphere of the resort, along with their chickens and goats, inhabited the center spine of the island in a shantytown made of woven palm mats and galvanized tin. Mick and his daughter stayed on the eastern tip, as far away from the artificial tourist retreat as possible.
That evening, Mick had checked with the Maldivian nurse to be sure she had everything she needed to care for Mariah. He had ensured that the spare batteries were fully charged in case the medical ventilator’s generator failed. He had jotted down a phone number where the nurse could reach him. Christ, it was just like leaving a kid with a babysitter.
Then he had donned a casual shirt and slacks and stepped into the hot, humid night. As he ventured down the path, he could still hear the nurse chanting an Islamic prayer for Mariah.
He approached the resort from the rainforest entrance that tourists seldom used. The guard recognized him and offered a smart, British-style salute, with his palm open and parallel to his face.
Mick nodded to the man and strolled into the open-air lobby. He passed the chlorinated pool and found the restaurant.
The single-room restaurant was full of moving shadows. The management didn’t seem to know the difference between “subdued” and “dim” lighting. Low-wattage light bulbs pulsated from a current that was out of phase, creating the unintentional effect of flickering candles.
As he waited for the doctor to arrive, Mick watched children diving into the glowing blue pool.
He sensed a large man approaching from behind. Simon clasped him on the shoulder and eased his paunchy form into a rattan chair opposite him.
“Something on your mind?” Simon asked in his typically gruff voice.
Mick forced a smile, took his eyes off the children, and straightened up. “Someday she’ll be able to play like that.”
“I’m sure she will.”
Mick examined his daughter’s savior. Simon had eliminated the malarial fever and chills that had ravaged her tiny body. Now, if he could only wake her from her coma.
“Gin and tonic, my good man,” Simon ordered from a waiter hovering nearby. “What’s yours?” he asked Mick.
“The same.”
“All right, make it two,” Simon ordered. “And don’t stray too far.”
Simon didn’t look like the medical pioneer that he was, or rather had been.
His eyes were already bloodshot, and he had neglected to shave that day. He wore rubber flip-flops, a loose sweat-stained tank top and shredded plaid shorts, barely satisfying the resort’s dress code. If it weren’t for Simon’s penetrating eyes, Mick would write him off as a drunk.
“Tonic water doesn’t have quinine in it anymore,” Simon said. “And quinine can’t always cure malaria either.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t hurt to cover our bets.”
Simon sat back and studied him.
“Can we lay off the medical talk tonight?” Mick asked.
“Actually, I wasn’t thinking about Mariah’s case,” Simon said. “I was thinking about yours. The burnt-out case.”
Under the doctor’s glare, he felt reduced to a lab rat. “That case is closed,” he said, looking away and trying to find a new subject.
“Yeah, I figured you wouldn’t want to talk much about yourself,” Simon said. “And I suppose you wouldn’t be interested in this.” He pulled a folded newspaper from his back pocket and slapped it on the table f
or Mick to read.
The International Herald Tribune’s main headline read, “U.S. Scientists Confirm Indian H-Bomb Test a Fake.”
Mick leaned back in his chair. His body felt numb.
“Well, I’ll be damned. It was a fake,” he said. “I knew something was wrong with the tests.”
“…and nobody listened to you.”
As Abu turned away from the dismembered Indian soldiers and the smoldering ashes of his former jungle hideout, a dark object suddenly blocked his path. It took a moment to realize that the shadow was a sturdy looking man standing two feet away from him.
Abu caught his breath. The Indians might get him, but not without a fight.
He lifted an elbow and jabbed at the man’s throat. A firm hand caught his arm and blunted the blow.
Abu ducked low to the ground and tried to kick the man’s ribs. Again his thrust was deflected.
Abu spun to his feet in a defensive stance. The man laughed and said in an amused tone, “Put down your heavy weapons.”
Nobody spoke English as perfectly as Indians did, and Abu could trace an accent like a bloodhound tracked down a droplet of blood. But this was no Indian.
“And who might you be?” Abu shot back.
“Who I am doesn’t matter. Someone else wants to see you.”
“Who’s that?”
“Who else?”
Abu straightened up. At full height, he stood a foot taller than the husky intruder. The man’s long black beard indicated a Muslim fundamentalist, and his loose black turban pointed to Afghan influence. Then he recognized the accent. The man was an Arab, perhaps a Saudi. All at once, the answer came to him. “Osama,” he whispered.
The man nodded. “I’ll take you to him.”
Stumbling here and there, Abu followed the surefooted stranger down a path he hadn’t noticed during his two previous weeks living there.
“Ha,” Simon said with a snort. “I knew that that headline would grab you.”