Six

by Charles W. Sasser

  Being a convert of Allah did not mean one had to forego privileges and luxuries in the quest for martyrdom. After departing Qatar on Emir al-Muttaqi’s private jet, Michael and his co-conspirator, Akmal Barayev, arrived in Lagos, Nigeria, and checked in at the four-star Lagos International with a beachfront on the Lagos Lagoon. Not far from here in the harbor, Michael now knew, was where American SEALs had kidnapped the ISIS/Boko Haram courier Ebo Buhari, apparently assuming he knew where the criminal Richard Taggart was being held. But Jihad warriors never snitched off their comrades, so that secret was safe.

  The emir had been reluctant in temporarily releasing Michael and Akmal from their immediate obligations, but Michael convinced him the SEAL Taggart could play an important role in the forthcoming action terrorist leaders had in mind. Now, Michael and the despised American who murdered his brother were again on the same continent. In fact, they were in the same nation. Only a few miles of forest and the Boko Haram savages separated them. Taggart would be dealt with in a very short period of time to both Michael’s expectations of revenge and al-Muttaqi’s satisfaction in a major action against the world’s infidels.

  On the morning after his arrival in Lagos, Michael was watching a Pistons basketball game on the hotel TV’s American satellite channel while he waited to be contacted by a source. Akmal quietly entered from the adjacent suite rubbing sleep from his eyes and looking for coffee.

  “First quarter. Two point game,” Michael noted. He was on his feet in front of the TV, focused on the game.

  Akmal ignored the revelation. He wondered about this fixation Americans seemed to have for spectator games.

  “It is time for the Asr prayers,” Akmal informed him. “Will you join us?”

  “In a moment.”

  During the next commercial break—concerning erectile dysfunction; Americans also seemed fixated on that—Michael switched the game to record on DVR and rose to accompany Akmal. It occurred to him that something about Akmal had long puzzled him. Now was as good a time as any to question him about it.

  “What was it, Akmal?” he asked. “What made you leave the Russians, change sides?”

  The fog of some unpleasant memory drew itself over Akmal’s broad face like a caul. For a moment, Michael thought he was not going to answer. His eyes wandered, stared into a bloody past. After a deep, wavering breath, he said, “We raided Alkhan-Yurt.”

  It had been a long time ago, in December 1999 during the Chechen uprising against Russia. Russian troops looted, burned, raped, and massacred civilians in Alkhan-Yurt near the Chechen capital of Grozny. Atrocities continued for more than two weeks. Some of the Russian soldiers were pro-Russian Chechens. Teenager Akmal Barayev was among them.

  “Alkhan-Yurt was my village,” Akmal continued through his pain. “When one or two men resisted, they massacred everyone. My commanding officer shot a twelve-year-old girl. She was bleeding on the ground, but not dead. He ordered me to kill her. I knew her. I knew her family. So I made a deal with God. If I ended her suffering, I would serve Him forever.”

  Before Akmal fully satisfied Michael’s curiosity about how he ended up a Chechen Jihad Mujahideen, one of several “burner” cell phones lined up on the bar buzzed, rescuing Akmal from further torment. Michael picked it up.

  “Yes?”

  He listened, his excitement growing. It was the contact bearing news he had been expecting. He hung up and turned to Akmal. “It’s all arranged,” he said. “The meeting is a go.”

  Akmal nodded woodenly, his thoughts somewhere else. Michael clapped him on the shoulder to bring him around. “Come on, brother. Let’s pray.”

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Abandoned Village, Nigeria

  Quayum with his crossbow and savage countenance resembled some medieval mercenary. He burst into the detention hut and drove Taggart, Na’omi, and the three schoolgirls outside, leaving McAlwain behind, and herded them to the outskirts of the village compound where Aabid and a number of his soldiers gathered around the corpse of Nick Rogers. They stood well back from the body, however, and upwind of the stench. Green blowflies settled in buzzing swarms on the carcass to suck at the glazed open eyes, the blood-dried gunshot entrance wound in Nick’s forehead, and the ragged blowout exit wound that emptied his cranium of a portion of its brain.

  The girls shrank from it in horror and ran to Na’omi, squeezing their eyes tightly shut in hopes that when they opened them again they would be safely at home.

  With morbid humor, Aabid tossed a shovel at Rip’s feet and motioned at the body. “Navy SEAL, you killed this man. Now you bury him.”

  Any other time, he would have either left the body where it fell or dumped it in the forest for the wildlife to consume. Clearly, Aabid was one sick bastard who intended to use the corpse to humiliate, punish, and dominate the SEAL.

  Rip picked up the shovel and balanced it in his hands, weighing its value as a weapon. Aabid’s eyes narrowed and he pointed his rifle at Na’omi.

  “Maybe you bury her too,” he threatened.

  Rip’s eyes bore into those of his enemy. “She had nothing to do with it,” he protested.

  Na’omi was unwilling to let Rip take all the blame for the escape attempt. She gathered her courage and shook her head vigorously. “Richard, you can’t—”

  “Quiet!” Rip snapped. The less Aabid knew of the bond growing between them, the safer she and the girls were.

  The brief exchange along with all that had transpired previously, and their implications, were not lost on Aabid. A cruel sneer crossed his face. He grabbed Na’omi and flung her at Rip’s feet. She half-rose to a sitting position and eyed the Boko Haram leader with intense hatred.

  “Your whore digs with you,” Aabid decreed.

  Having spoken, he turned and stalked off, leaving the boy soldier Felix behind to oversee the distasteful task. A couple of other guards loitered in the shade of nearby trees to back up the boy. Felix assumed the tough, wide-legged stance of his idol. Even the kid’s voice mimicked Aabid’s.

  “Dig!” he commanded.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Virginia Beach

  Alex Caulder hadn’t seen his rebellious fifteen-year-old daughter Dharma since she showed up that day at the beach to consume his lobster thermidor. She had hung around a couple of nights, cramping his style with both Kelly and the waitress from the Gulfstream Diner, before she disappeared again as mysteriously as she arrived. What surprised him when the police telephoned him at the Monster Mash beach was that Dharma gave his name to the police as her contact rather than her mother’s.

  A desk sergeant at the Virginia Beach police station escorted Caulder to an interview room in the Juvenile Division and left him there. The room contained a bare gray metal desk, three stadium chairs, and a poster on the wall of three Teddy Bears sitting on a brick wall. After a few minutes, a clean-cut, spit-and-polish officer in blue, whose name tag identified him as Sergeant Spelke, brought in Dharma. She was all in gothic black as usual—black granny dress, black sandals, hair dyed black with that white skunk stripe through it, and black lipstick again rather than the green from when he saw her last.

  “What took you so long?” she demanded peevishly.

  “Now’s when you tell me why you’re here,” Caulder responded in the same tone.

  She gave him a flippant toss of her head. “Just expressing my First Amendment rights. You know, what you’re fighting for.”

  Sergeant Spelke explained. “She handcuffed herself across the front door of her school. Then assaulted the officer who took off her cuffs.”

  “Was that some kind of protest?” Caulder asked his daughter.

  “Performance art, Alex.”

  Sergeant Spelke elaborated. “Her friend recorded the whole thing on his phone.”

  Stunned, Caulder turned to Dharma. The three of them remained standing looking at each other in the small, bare room. “You wanted to get arrested?”

  Dharma shrugged it off. “We’re already prisone
rs in a system that shuffles us from station to station like rats in a maze. School’s no better than jail. Principal or cop? What’s the difference?”

  The policeman had had enough of this girl’s impudence. “Who the hell talks like that?”

  Inwardly, Caulder smiled. She reminded him of himself when he was that age. The apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree. Bear Graves would probably have referred to the apple tree as a nut tree.

  Caulder had heard enough to get the picture. “Okay, sergeant. What’s the procedure here? I don’t usually have custody over her. I deploy a lot.”

  “Navy?”

  Had Dharma told him that? The sergeant snapped to attention and clicked his heels together smartly. “Marines! Gulf War One. Ooh-rah!”

  “Uh-huh.” Caulder wasn’t impressed. “So what can we do to get her out of here? You know, not put it on her record?”

  Sergeant Spelke thought it over. Dharma plopped down in one of the chairs with her back to both of them.

  “An apology could do the trick,” the sergeant decided.

  Dharma approved. “Good idea. So, apologize.”

  The sergeant scowled at her turned back. “Young lady,” he reprimanded in his sternest voice. “You need to learn to respect authority.”

  The comment delivered in that manner grated against Caulder’s Bohemian nature. Dharma, sensing things going her way, lifted her hands above her head to reveal chafed wrists.

  “Know what?” Caulder said to the cop. “I think she’s right. Her wrists are all scraped. You rough her up?”

  That caught the sergeant off-guard and put him on the defensive. Most parents who came in for their delinquents, especially parents with obnoxious little snots that looked and behaved like this one, didn’t start off by attacking the police.

  “No … uh …” the sergeant stammered, struggling to recover. “The scrapes … That’s from her refusing to let us uncuff her.”

  Caulder’s own rebellious Dennis the Menace kicked in and he pressed the advantage. “Or,” he suggested, “maybe her civil rights were violated. I’ll bring in JAG to represent her. See what they have to say about it.”

  He paused to let the sergeant reconsider; the policeman’s eyes darted about as though he might be thinking of calling for backup.

  “So how do you want to play this?” Caulder asked pointedly.

  It was a bluff, but it worked. Dharma seemed to enjoy Daddy talking up for her. Minutes later, Caulder and his gothic teen waif of a daughter with day pack on her back walked out of the police station together.

  “Why did you give them my number?” he asked as she followed him to his anarchist purple-and-red Bronco with the top sawed off.

  “Erica’s still out of town. Yoga retreat.”

  As permissive as Dharma had been raised, her referring to her parents by their first names nonetheless nettled Caulder a little. If he were honest, however, which he tried to be, he would have to confess that neither he nor his ex-wife had been much good at parenting. He had contributed almost nothing to her upbringing since the divorce. Erica and he probably deserved being called by their first names.

  “So where am I taking you?” he asked.

  She lifted a heavily-painted black brow and glanced at him and then at the Bronco.

  “No!” Caulder objected reflexively. “Not my place.”

  “You signed for me, Alex. You’re the responsible parent.” The incongruous juxtaposition of responsible and parent made her laugh.

  “What’s so funny?”

  She gave him her one-shouldered shrug. “Nothing. I guess I’ll stay with Brad.” She let in a beat before asking innocently, “You know a hospital that has rape kits?”

  “Dharma! Don’t even joke about that.”

  “Or what? You’ll take him out?”

  Caulder stared uneasily at her. Even the thought of Dharma’s staying alone with Erica’s weenie-necked live-in galled him. This incorrigible slip of a girl had a way of getting underneath his skin.

  “Jesus, Alex, I’m just messing with you,” she said, laughing it off. “Don’t try to be a dad all of a sudden.”

  There was no humor in her laughter, however. It was laced with something else, something much more weighty. She stopped laughing. They stood in the middle of the parking lot facing each other until she gestured questioningly at the Bronco. He walked over and opened the door for her to get in.

  “Does this thing even have seat belts?” she cracked.

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Abandoned Village, Nigeria

  A scalding African sun beat down upon the secluded compound, and upon Rip Taggart and Na’omi, who were waist deep in the grave they were being forced to dig for Nick’s burial. Both were sweat-caked with red dirt and exhausted from laboring in the heat of the day. Na’omi’s long hair stuck to her neck and throat, her school blouse that had once been white now a dingy gray-brown and torn from her futile flight with Taggart and the others through the forest.

  Rip’s khakis were likewise stained and tattered. His unshaved face covered some of the sharpness of his features while at the same time emphasizing the hardness in his eyes and the set of his thin lips.

  Felix the boy soldier tied a bandana around his nose and mouth to filter out the stench of Nick’s putrefying body. He proudly brandished a rifle in one hand while with the other he swatted irritably at hordes of flies attracted to Nick’s rotting corpse. He sidled up to the grave in progress. Taggart ignored him.

  “Navy SEAL. How many people you kill?” he asked.

  Rip deliberately tossed a shovelful of dirt toward the kid’s feet, causing him to jump back. Undaunted, Felix returned, eager to prove his valor to the man who seemed to have been so respected that his country might fork over ten million dollars to get him back. He squared his narrow shoulders and slapped the stock of his AK-47 as he had seen Aabid do.

  “I kill seven,” he boasted.

  Rip straightened and looked at him with ill-concealed disdain. “Why?”

  Felix seemed surprised that anyone would question it, especially a US SEAL whom Aabid said had slain many warriors of Allah.

  “Because they are my enemy,” Felix explained as though to someone lame of mind. “And because if you kill someone, you take their spirit and command it by a secret name. More you kill, stronger you become.”

  Rip saw right through him. “You’ve never killed anybody, have you?”

  “I kill seven,” Felix insisted stubbornly, and assumed a heroic pose with his weapon.

  Na’omi shook her head in sorrow. Taggart shook his in disgust. Killing was what jihadist radicalism was all about. Kids much younger than Felix were indoctrinated into the cult of death. Rip had seen boys as young as five, even little girls, strapped into suicide vests and sent out to martyr themselves by blowing up women and other children. Kids of ISIS and the other radical groups were not allowed a childhood. From birth they were considered “warriors for Allah” and therefore conditioned to accept killing and dying in Allah’s name.

  Rip resumed digging. Na’omi reached out and touched his hand. Rip saw the deep sadness in her eyes, for the children of her country and for the country itself. Only the week before she was seized with her children from school, an army of teenage terrorists attacked another school in Gashigar village on the border with Niger. The boys murdered the teachers and took the younger boys and girls. The girls would become sex slaves, the boys would be inculcated as Felix had been into the Allah cult of Jihad.

  The world seemed to be deteriorating into madness. Father Namb’i at Na’omi’s school said the world was living in the last days of Revelation. Jesus would not like what the world had become when He returned.

  Felix and the nearby soldiers under shade trees snapped to attention when Aabid and Quayum walked up to inspect the grave’s progress. Aabid bobbed his head in approval and flicked a hand toward Nick’s fly-covered corpse lying a few feet away.

  “Pick it up,” he ordered Taggart and Na’omi. “Both o
f you.”

  The grave was only about five feet deep, but apparently Aabid had become impatient. Rip lifted himself from the hole and helped Na’omi up beside him. She staggered from heat and exhaustion and clutched him for support. Aabid motioned them toward the body. Na’omi looked about to be sick as the two of them approached the buzzing green clouds of blowflies.

  “Look away, Na’omi,” Rip encouraged.

  Rip waved his way through the flies and took Nick’s head and shoulders to drag the corpse to the hole and save Na’omi from participating. Aabid was not having that. He jabbed his rifle at the teacher and indicated she should help. She convulsed into dry heaves as she took Nick’s legs under her own.

  Rigor had passed, leaving the cadaver fluid-like with skin and flesh beginning to slough off from exposure to the hot sun. Working together, Rip and the teacher half-carried, half-dragged the body to the open grave and tried to lower it gently and respectfully into the ground. It slipped from their grasp, however, and crashed at the bottom in a puff of red dust and body fluids. It was death and burial at its most grotesque.

  Na’omi fell to her knees and retched violently. Rip took a knee next to her and held her as she dry-heaved. Aabid stood above them, laughing sadistically.

  Rip had had enough. He snatched a shovel off the ground and in a sudden rage sprang to his feet with one intent—to kill Aabid before the warlord’s soldiers killed him. But before he could act, Na’omi in a rage of her own charged straight for Aabid and certain execution. Seeing her in peril, Rip dropped his shovel and grabbed Na’omi to hold her back.

  “You will not silence us!” Na’omi screamed as she struggled against Rip’s arms. “You will never silence us.”