The Mirage

by Matt Ruff

  “I go back and forth on that,” Captain Lawrence said. “Days that I’m feeling sorry for myself, I think God’s punishing me. Most days, though, I figure I got what I asked for. What fun would it be to change the world if you didn’t remember what you changed it from?”

  “And Saddam? How did you become his guest?”

  “After I realized I couldn’t go back home—that there was no home for me to go back to—I decided I might as well make myself useful.”

  “You tried to kill him?”

  The captain nodded. “Seemed only right, seeing as he’s supposed to be dead. But Qusay was in charge of the Guard that night and they caught me coming in. When Saddam figured out what I was, he decided to add me to his collection.”

  A squad of Republican Guards ran through Nebuchadnezzar’s chamber and charged down the hall towards the mansion’s front door. Most of the gunfire seemed to be coming from the front of the estate. Mustafa kept hoping that the attackers would announce themselves as ABI, but he knew it was too soon for them to have gotten here.

  “So what about you?” the captain said. “You’re a cop again, obviously. But what kind?”

  “Homeland Security.”

  Another nod. “Federal law enforcement—above Saddam. So you got your wish, too.”

  “No,” Mustafa said pointedly, “I didn’t.” But then after a moment, he added: “It’s not a bad life, though. And most of the problems with it are at least of my own making, not someone else’s.”

  All the power in the house suddenly went out. The side room was plunged into darkness, but Nebuchadnezzar’s chamber remained dimly illuminated by the apocalyptic orange glow coming through the windows in the dome.

  “All right,” Amal said, looking out through the archway. “If we’re going to move, I’d say this is the time.”

  “Go straight across, to that other opening over there,” Mustafa said pointing. “I remember I passed a stairwell on the way to Saddam’s office.”

  They were halfway across the chamber when Uday Hussein and a squad of Guardsmen emerged from the very archway they were headed towards. Both parties stopped short and for an instant just stared. Then one of the Guards started to raise his assault rifle and Amal opened fire with hers, killing that Guard and the man behind him. Then everyone was firing, and moving—diving towards the chamber’s most obvious source of cover. Uday and the two remaining Guardsmen ended up on one side of the Nebuchadnezzar statue; Amal, Mustafa, Samir, and Captain Lawrence ended up on the other.

  Amal sat with her back against the statue’s base and fitted a fresh clip into her rifle. “Uday Hussein!” she called out. “We are federal agents! Throw down your weapons and put your hands up!”

  Uday laughed. “Is that you, Amal bint Shamal? You want us to surrender? Very well, come over here and show us your ass, and maybe we’ll think about it!”

  Captain Lawrence rose to a crouch and prepared to make an end run around Nebuchadnezzar. But Mustafa, looking up at the statue, suddenly recalled something; he put a hand on the captain’s forearm to restrain him and then leaned over to whisper in Amal’s ear.

  “Bint Shamal!” Uday crowed. “Daughter of a dead fool, who thought he could stand against a king! Yes, come here, and when I’m done playing with you I’ll send you to join him!”

  “You are wrong, Uday,” Amal replied. “My father was a hero, and even in death he is worth ten of your father—and a hundred of you. As for your father’s kingship, I am afraid it is hollow.” She stood up, pointed the rifle at the front of Nebuchadnezzar’s right ankle, and pulled the trigger. The bullet punched straight through the thin tin shell and came out the other side, striking Uday in the back. As he pitched forward, the Guardsmen tried to scramble up and defend themselves, but Amal kept firing, placing her shots at even intervals, and they never even made it all the way to their feet.

  Out in the storm, the soldiers of Al Qaeda fought the men of the Republican Guard. The Guard had greater numbers, but Al Qaeda had the element of surprise. Before the main assault commenced, small groups of commandos had snuck over the wall to set up ambush positions on the grounds. The commandos were equipped with thermal imagers that could pick out warm bodies at a distance, even through swirling sand. This gave them a significant tactical advantage over the Guardsmen, many of whom didn’t even bother to don goggles before rushing out of the mansion. The first wave of defenders to respond to the explosion at the gate ran blindly into the ambush and were slaughtered to the last man. A second wave tried to advance more cautiously, but this just gave the commandos more time to aim, and soon enough this second group of Guardsmen had all been killed as well.

  There was a lull in the firefight while the Qaeda commandos waited to see whether the Guard would try a third sally. But the Guard had belatedly learned their lesson, and after a moment the commandos picked up and began advancing on the mansion.

  By this time Qusay Hussein had taken a squad of men to an upstairs dining room that overlooked the front of the estate. Qusay set up a sniper rifle with a thermal sight at one window and had the Guardsmen with their AK-47s take position at the others. He let the commandos get close to the house, then ordered his men to fire first. Once they had the commandos’ attention, he opened up with the sniper rifle, shifting aim quickly between the glowing man-shaped targets his sight revealed to him. Several rooms away, another squad commanded by Qusay’s father began firing as well. In the first few seconds a dozen commandos were killed or wounded, but the Qaeda men didn’t panic; the survivors quickly found cover and returned fire.

  One of Qusay’s men stood exposed too long at a window; an incoming round shattered his collarbone. As he fell back screaming another Guard turned to look at him and took two bullets in the side of the head. Qusay ducked down to avoid a hail of bullets directed at his window. Cupping a hand over his ear so he could hear over the screams of the wounded man and the whine of incoming rounds, he listened to radio reports from elsewhere on the estate. The river house had been hit by a rocket or possibly a suicide bomber and was on fire; most of the Guards there were dead and the rest were trapped by the flames. The squads Qusay had dispatched to the rear of the mansion said that they, too, were taking fire, and one team reported hearing shots inside the house.

  “Oh God save me!” cried the wounded Guardsman, and Qusay barked, “Shut him up!” at no one in particular. Then he raised his head above the windowsill, took aim, and shot a Qaeda commando who was crouching behind a palm tree. He tracked right with the sniper rifle and spied another commando, down on one knee with a long tube balanced on his shoulder. There was a bright flash in the thermal sight and a rocket streaked towards the house, blasting away the front doors and killing several Guards in the grand entrance hall; Qusay heard their dying screams over the radio.

  He shot the rocketeer, ducked down, counted three, popped up again, and tracked left to where another commando was kneeling. Qusay never saw this second rocketeer; all he saw was the rocket, which appeared in his gun sight as a black circle ringed with fire, that rapidly grew larger.

  Several times, as they listened to the sounds of the battle, the two Republican Guardsmen in the old prayer room had exchanged glances, communicating without speaking. Now, as the rocket barrage shook the mansion, they looked at one another again and came to a wordless decision.

  “Hey!” Tariq Aziz said. “Where are you going? Saddam told you to stay here!” But the two didn’t even glance back as they fled into the hall.

  “Shall I quote you another psalm?” asked the jinn. “The twenty-third perhaps?”

  Aziz paced the room, coming to his own decision. “Quote it to yourself,” he said finally, and headed for the door. But before he could escape, an armed party burst in.

  “Hello, Mr. Aziz,” Amal said. “Doing a little frontline reporting?”

  Mustafa and Captain Lawrence pushed past the terrified news publisher and ran over to the jinn. The iron bands that held him in the chair were secured with modern steel padlock
s. Mustafa asked Aziz: “Do you have the keys for these?”

  “What?” Tariq Aziz said. “Certainly not! I have nothing to do with this! Nothing at all!”

  “We’ll have to smash them off,” Lawrence said.

  “Don’t bother,” the jinn said. “There isn’t time.”

  Outside, down the hallway, a voice bellowed in terror: “GOD IS GREAT! . . . GOD IS GREAT! . . . GOD IS GREAT!” There was a blood-curdling scream that cut off abruptly.

  “Oh God, let me out of here!” Tariq Aziz cried. Ignoring the rifle Amal had pointed at him, he darted through the open doorway.

  “Let him go,” Mustafa said, before Amal could chase after him. “Samir, shut and lock that door.”

  The jinn flashed a mischievous smile at Captain Lawrence. “So. How are you enjoying your wish?”

  “You already know the answer to that,” Lawrence said. “I’ve learned my lesson. I’m willing to take it back, if that’s what you’re offering.”

  Mustafa, watching Samir bolt the door, spun around at this. “Wait just a minute,” he said.

  “Yes,” Amal said. “Hold on.”

  “Seriously, dude,” said Samir. “That’s what Osama bin Laden wants.”

  “Maybe it’s what God wants, too,” Lawrence suggested. “Put things back the way they were. The way they’re naturally supposed to be.”

  “Supposed to be?” Mustafa said. “And you say you’ve learned your lesson, have you?”

  The jinn was laughing. “Arabia in a state of nature, untouched by the dreams of the West. Now that would be an alternate reality . . . Alas, I can’t oblige you. That doorway is shut and cannot be gone back through.”

  “All right then,” Lawrence said. He placed the butt of his shotgun against one of the padlocks. “I’ll have you out of this in a minute . . .”

  But the jinn shook his head. “I already told you. It’s too late.”

  Sand flew through a gaping hole in the wall of a formal bedroom, dusting the corpses of Guardsmen whose flesh had been torn by rocket fragments. The bedding had been ripped by shrapnel as well, and the mattress ticking was on fire, though the sand had begun to smother the flames.

  The lid of a large hardwood chest opposite the bed creaked open and Saddam Hussein peeped out. When he was sure he could hear no more incoming missiles, he shoved the lid up all the way and half crawled, half rolled out of the chest, the slipped disk in his back making him groan. He grabbed a rifle off one of the dead Guardsmen and used it as a crutch to get to his feet.

  He limped into the hall, limped to the dining room where Qusay had been stationed. What Saddam saw, looking in through the shattered doorway, made him groan again.

  He shook it off. The jinn, he thought. The jinn could fix this. The creature claimed to be a Muslim: Very well, he would throw himself on its mercy, say whatever it took to get it to protect him. Then later, once he was safe, he would find a way to bend it truly to his will, and undo this nightmare.

  But first he had to get back to it. He continued along the hall, not just limping but lurching, and alert to every sound. Al Qaeda was definitely inside the house now—he could hear running, shouting, and sporadic gunfire as they encountered remnants of the Republican Guard—but it sounded as if they were still on the ground floor. It wouldn’t take them long to find their way upstairs, though, and he knew they would never stop searching until they found him.

  He came to the gallery overlooking Nebuchadnezzar’s chamber. He heard movement below and tried to slip by unnoticed, but then a voice with a Gulf accent said, “I think it is the older son.” Saddam stepped to the balustrade and looked down. Two commandos stood next to a body on the chamber floor. One of them was shining a flashlight on the corpse’s face.

  “Uday!” Saddam cried. The commandos looked up and he shot them both. The flashlight, now blood-spattered, rolled to a stop beside Uday’s head and continued to illuminate his features like some ghastly spotlight. “Uday,” Saddam said. “Wait there. Wait there. I will fix this . . .”

  He turned to go to the prayer room and a rifle butt swung out of the shadows, catching him squarely in the face. He spun around, fell against the balustrade, and dropped his own gun over the rail. Another blow hit him in the lower back, fracturing vertebrae. Saddam fell to his knees, insensate with pain.

  A rough hand gripped the top of his head and another grabbed the back of his collar. His attacker asked a question. “You,” Saddam hissed, disdain breaking through his agony as he recognized that voice. “You go to hell! You can’t have it—it’s mine! I am a king! A king, you understand? You’re not even a dog’s asshole!”

  The grip on his collar tightened. As he was lifted up he tried to fight, but the blow to his spine had robbed him of his strength and he could only flail and curse. He tipped forward over the rail, the tightness at his throat and the drop below triggering an awful sense of déjà vu, and he began to cry out, affirming God’s greatness—a last desperate plea for salvation to which the answer was no.

  Then the world turned upside down and he was falling. He landed with a great thud and a crack, and for a moment the whole house fell silent. Osama bin Laden leaned on the balustrade, looking down, the orange light gathered in his eyes making him appear like a demon.

  A voice echoed from the hall beyond the gallery: “Oh God, let me out of here!” Bin Laden moved towards the voice, reaching the hall in time to see the narrowing wedge of torchlight as Samir swung the prayer room door closed. Bin Laden stood listening—to the door bolt sliding home, to Tariq Aziz’s receding footsteps, and to the soft whisper of his own intuition.

  He slung his rifle and reached into his robe, pulling out a canvas satchel. He set the fuse as he was walking down the hall.

  The jinn said to Samir: “You should come away from there.”

  “Why?” Samir said. But he backed away from the door and stood with the others by the magic circle.

  Captain Lawrence was hammering at the padlock, which stubbornly refused to break. Mustafa had gone behind the chair to examine the window shutters. “I wonder if we can climb down from here.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” the jinn said.

  An explosion blew the door apart. Hunks of splintered wood and metal came flying across the chamber and were met by a whirl of air that also extinguished most of the torches. When Mustafa regained his senses, he was slumped against the wall beside the window. Except for the ringing in his ears he wasn’t in any discomfort and didn’t seem to be wounded, but he couldn’t move.

  Osama bin Laden came through the doorway cradling his AK-47. He spotted Amal lying facedown in the shadows, but the jinn said, “Leave her be, brother. I am the one you want.”

  Bin Laden came forward and stood in the same spot Saddam Hussein had occupied not long before. He didn’t make a wish or say anything at all, just stared at the jinn with a mixture of curiosity and malice.

  The jinn gazed back calmly into the face of death. “There are among us some that are righteous,” he said. “And some the contrary . . . Peace be unto you, brother.”

  Bin Laden pulled the trigger. The jinn bled like a man, and he suffered like one, too—as the first bullets entered his body, he opened his mouth in a gasp and his arms and legs jerked helplessly against the bands that held them. Bin Laden continued firing until the gun’s clip was empty. By then the jinn’s limbs were still and his head lolled forward on his neck.

  Mustafa found he could move again. He tried to stand, but vertigo hit him and he fell back with a groan. Bin Laden turned towards the sound and the two of them locked eyes a moment, the senator trying to decide whether Mustafa was worth reloading for. “God willing,” Mustafa said, and Bin Laden with an imperious tilt of the head turned and walked out of the room.

  Mustafa slid sideways until he came to rest on the floor with his cheek on a fine layer of sand. From this position he saw the brass jinni bottle, discarded and forgotten beside the body of Saddam’s sorcerer. He watched the play of the flickering light on its
curved surface, felt the world turn beneath him. Then the wind of the storm, rising to a hurricane fury, tore the shutters from the window and blasted into the chamber, snuffing out the last of the torches.

  At that same moment, three thousand kilometers to the west in Tripoli, Wajid Jamil was demoing a software update for his Uncle Muammar. The virtual globe Al Ard—Earth—was one of the Libyan governor’s favorite computer programs, and since its introduction he’d made numerous suggestions for improvements. The number-one item on Gaddafi’s wish list—real-time updating of Al Ard’s satellite imagery—remained technically infeasible in a nonmilitary application, but Wajid had done what he could to make the program feel “live” in other ways.

  The new feature presently being demonstrated pulled in data from weather stations around the world and projected it onto the globe, refreshing every fifteen seconds. Wajid had zoomed in on the northeastern UAS so that his Uncle could watch the sandstorm as it spread across Iraq towards the Kuwait and Arabia state lines. Gaddafi was fascinated, almost hypnotized—when Wajid tried to move on to the next phase of the demo, which involved highway traffic data, the governor asked if they could please stick with the weather a bit longer.

  “Of course,” Wajid said, eager to please as always.

  But as luck would have it, at the very next refresh the program hit a glitch: The yellow-crosshatch graphic that represented the sandstorm increased dramatically in size, expanding hundreds of kilometers in all directions. Al Gaddafi jerked his head back, blinking as though the computer monitor had poked him in the eyes. Wajid looked over at his main tech support guy, who winced in embarrassment and bent closer to another screen displaying raw code.

  At the next refresh, the sandstorm expanded again. It covered the entire Gulf Peninsula now, as well as Persia, Turkey, and the Caucasus all the way north to Chechnya. Gaddafi chuckled, having regained his composure. “Global warming,” he quipped.

  “Yeah, this is still a beta,” said Wajid.