Osama the Gun

by Norman Spinrad

  “If they defy the Will of Allah according to Osama the Gun, you will be dead.”

  “If so, it is meant to be,” I told him, but then, less loftily, “but why would they? What is to be lost, after all, by sending us graffiti-bombs with timers?”

  “You didn’t tell your…troops that weapons too would be forthcoming, did you?” Ali demanded.

  “I let them believe what they wanted to believe,” I admitted uncomfortably.

  “Including that the Caliphate would shut off the oil to France somewhere down the road?”

  “I made no mention of that,” I told him truthfully.

  “But you didn’t tell them it would never happen, now did you?”

  “This is what you believe?”

  Ali collapsed into a chair. He took another drink. He sighed. “Don’t you follow the news? Not one hint by the Caliphate of an oil boycott of France. Instead, they’re screaming just as loudly against the oppression of the Turks in Germany, which is really nothing compared to what’s happening to Arabs here.”

  “I don’t understand. What does it mean?”

  Ali shrugged. “All I can imagine is that they’re somehow trying to use this situation to suck Turkey into the Caliphate again, and Kurdistan and maybe even Albania and Kosovo with it, protection from the infidels, and all that ridiculous nonsense. It’s never worked, and it never will, the Turks have too cozy an economic relationship with the European Union, Muslims or not. The only thing I know for a certainty is that sixty million Frenchmen are not going to take France into the Caliphate under any circumstances, and there isn’t enough hashish in all the world to make the Caliphate Council believe that they would…meaning…”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning they know they can’t win here, so why would they try? Why would they piss off the French government that’s supplying arms to the Nigerian Muslims to fight the Americans in Biafra and throw away billions in oil revenues in the bad bargain?”

  “But you will transmit my request for the graffiti-bomb timers?”

  Ali downed the rest of his whiskey. “Look,” he said softly, “I shouldn’t be saying this, it could be my head if it’s ever found out, but I like you, and I don’t like stupidity, so if you leave France tomorrow and disappear somewhere I have a great need not to know, this conversation never happened.”

  I was touched by this display of courage from a man who I had thought had none, but I shook my head. “I can’t do that,” I told him. “I swore an oath, and with my hand on the Koran.”

  Ali sighed. “I suppose I can understand that, my young friend,” he told me. “And if I understand it, I must admire it, must I not? I must even be shamed. But that doesn’t keep me from being convinced that you’re out of your mind to risk your life for something like this.”

  “Jihadis have risked as much for Islam on fields of battle since the first Crusaders marched against us. Hundreds of suicide bombers have willingly given their lives for the cause. There would have been no victory of 9/11 without such willing sacrifice.”

  Ali regarded me as an errant father might his warrior son. “You really are a Holy Warrior, aren’t you?” he whispered in the closest thing to a tone of awe I had ever heard from this man.

  “As Allah has chosen me to be, as how I pray he will allow me to remain, Inshallah.”

  “You shame me, Osama, you really do.”

  I found it in me to laugh gently. “If I can shame the likes of you, Ali, surely I can shame the Caliphate Council.…”

  Ali laughed with me. “Who is the more shameless, myself or our peerless leaders? Now there would be a wager I wouldn’t want to make were I you.”

  “You’re a better man that you want to believe you are, Ali.”

  “And you’re a bigger fool.”

  “We are all in the hands of Allah, you, and I, and the Caliph himself, are we not?” I told him. “And if we believe we are acting as fools, what are we saying of Him?”

  CHAPTER 13

  Nothing happened for three weeks. In the absence of further Ski Mask Jihadi actions, the police harassment of beurs died down to a higher level of the usual, the graffiti was cleaned off most of the buildings and not renewed, the press coverage died away, and the Ski Mask Jihadis seemed to be in the process of becoming forgotten.

  There was nothing forthcoming from the Caliphate on Ali’s report on my insubordinate promise, and little further public statements on behalf of the French Arabs, righteous indignation being diverted onto the perfidy and atrocities of the American Crusaders supporting the Christian uprising against the Muslim government of Nigeria in the oil provinces of “New Biafra,” and the secularist government of Turkey accused the Caliphate of meddling in its internal affairs.

  I kept to my Montmarte apartment, unwilling to confront what had become the followers of Osama the Gun without the Caliph’s timer-equipped graffiti bombs for fear of the demand that I fulfill the oath I had taken in the event of failure, waiting for the Caliphate to either fulfill my promise or force me to take my own life.

  I prayed to Allah that the devices from the Caliphate be sent or that He at least grant me the courage to preserve my honor if I must fulfill that vow, and attempted to address my ignorance of the true state of the world outside its borders upon which my own personal fate now revolved.

  The internet abounded with more information than I could digest, all the more so because so much of it was contradictory and therefore little more reliable than what I had learned in the madrass.

  The Caliphate had not expanded its borders in decades. Iran had refused to join because it was jealous of its own oil resources, or because it had been rejected by the Sunni Caliphate because of the hatred between Shiites and Sunnis that went back to the death of Ali. Muslim Turkey remained outside because it was bought off by the European Union, or because of American pressure, or because of the secularist ideology forced upon it a century ago by someone called Ataturk. Albania and Kosovo were geographically isolated or dependent upon European Union subsidies, Bosnia was a mongrel state, Kurdistan was a puppet of the Americans or a protectorate of the Turks. The Caliphate had no black African provinces save Somalia and Sudan because Arabs had been slavers, or because the Caliphate did not want its culture polluted by “nigger” states despite its public position to the contrary.

  Only one thing stood out clearly and I confined myself to prayerfully meditating upon that alone as befitted a jihadi.

  There were only two powers that towered above this bickering schoolyard chaos—the force of Satan and the force of Allah. The United States and Islam.

  The Great Satan had such overwhelming military superiority that it could crush the armies of the rest of the world entire should they ever unite against it. Its economic power was so overwhelming that should the rest of the world rise against that, it would find itself self-impoverished. The Caliphate relied on America for half its food. Its films and television and web sites were the so-called globalized popular culture nor had my own boyhood been immune from its seductions.

  That was why America was Great.

  America was the overgrown child of the European Crusaders who had long ago sought to conquer the lands of Islam for infidel Christianity, but at least they had served their false god after their deluded fashion, proclaiming that they were his “Christian Soldiers.” But the Americans were forever declaring that God was on their side in support of their immoral depredations.

  That was why America was the Great Satan.

  Allah the All-Knowing must have dictated the Koran to Mohammed with foreknowledge that reached down the centuries to the advent of this champion of Satan upon His Earth, for now nothing remained on the Earth that could stand against it but Islam.

  For if Satan had granted America the rich farmlands that produced the grain that the lands of Islam needed, Allah had granted the central lands of Islam the very oil th
at America needed to fuel its satanic machineries. And if the Prince of Liars had masked himself to delude the Americans that he was the god that served their predatory worldly will, Allah had revealed Himself to Mohammed that all might know that surrender to His Will was both the purpose of all mankind and its salvation. For who could doubt that His Will could be other than the triumph of His Faithful, who could therefore doubt that those who surrendered to the beneficent Will of the All-Powerful must not in the end prevail?

  The Christians awaited their Battle of Armageddon.

  Islam was already waging its Jihad.

  Might not they be one and the same?

  Finally Ali arrived at my apartment with a dazed and bemused countenance.

  “The graffiti bombs are on the way,” he told me. “It would appear that you shamed the shameless into it.”

  “Praise be to Allah!” I exclaimed in enormous relief.

  “Praise be to Osama the Gun as well,” Ali said dryly. “It appears that Allah protects his madmen and innocents.”

  “We are all in His hands.…”

  “Be that as it may, the Caliphate has taken great pains to keep its hands off the goods. Nothing has been smuggled into Europe. The graffiti-bombs were ordered in Amsterdam and programmed by illegals from Indonesia, the timers came from a German firm which supplies such things to microwave oven factories, and they were put together in Slovenia, all within the borders of the European Union to avoid customs inspections, and about to be shipped to Paris in cartons as the usual novelty shop items in a single truck. All that remains is for you to find a place to receive them.”

  “Easy enough,” I told him. “There’s a storeroom in St. Denis that will hold them all.”

  I gave him the address, called Kasim-Pierre and told him to meet me at a cafe we knew, and gave him the welcome news. “I’ll call you when I know when the shipment is to arrive. Have as many men waiting as you can to carry them away. We want to disperse them as widely as possible as quickly as possible.”

  On the day appointed, the caids had gathered some half a hundred men in the storeroom waiting fretfully, so fretfully that when the truck finally arrived, we all poured down into the street to unload it, and with much excitement thirty cartons were haphazardly stowed in the storeroom in no more than ten minutes.

  When we began to tear them open, we found that each contained a hundred graffiti-bombs, three thousand in all, more than we could have ever expected, and bought from a microwave oven supplier or not, the timers could be set to go off over a full week’s range.

  The tactical import of this did not occur to me while the graffiti-bombs were quickly loaded into sacks to be further dispersed a dozen or so at a time to Ski Mask Jihadis and small boys eager to play their parts in the adventure, but there then followed a long discussion threatening to degenerate into an argument as to how to deploy them.

  A few hundred at a time over an extended period? All at once at the same hour on the same day to maximize the shock? It went on to the point of contentious confusion before an idea finally took shape in my mind that I believed would resolve it.

  “We’ll detonate a thousand bombs a day timed to the six o’clock rush-hour when the traffic is thickest and the streets and the Metro are at their most crowded, with a day in between so that the cleaning process is well underway before the next assault, giving the press and the news channels time to make the most of it.”

  When the argument seemed about to continue, I held up my hand for silence. “But we’ll sow all the graffiti bombs the first day with the timers set to detonate at the same hour, but a thousand at a time every other day.…”

  When I saw the confusion on their faces, I explained the subtlety of the tactic. “The flics will be all over after the first day’s attack, stopping and searching, arresting people at random, trying to assure that it can’t happen again. And when it does anyway, twice over, it will seem like magic, as if the work of the hand of Allah Himself alone, for no human hand will be caught doing it.”

  This was met with enthusiastic agreement, and at 5:45 on the day appointed for the first assault, I took an outdoor seat at a cafe at the end of the Boulevard Montparnasse overlooking the complex traffic circle where it joined the Rue de Rennes before a major shopping mall and the tall hoarding of a large film theater advertising a sex comedy. From there, by craning my neck, I could also glimpse some of the scene down the Boulevard itself, lined with theaters and restaurants and cafes, its wide sidewalks thronged with people at this hour. I ordered a coffee and sipped at it as the minutes counted down to six o’clock.

  More or less on the hour, more or less at once, several graffiti-bombs detonated around the traffic circle. The poster for the sex comedy was over-written with the giant green empty-eyed visage of the Ski Mask Jihadi and the words “Allah the All-Seeing Is Watching You!” Three more such emblems appeared on the high facade of the shopping mall. I could barely make out another on the lower stories of the nearby Tour Montparnasse. Smaller green masks scrawled themselves on several of the cafes and restaurants across the circle, one splattering itself half on the windows and half on the diners at the outdoor tables. A graffiti-bomb went off in the midst of the traffic, splattering green paint over cars and buses.

  There was pandemonium but little anger or fear in the first moments, and much laughter, as the crowds on the streets gaped and stared, and traffic ground to a halt. But there was a large Metro station under the traffic circle with many exits, and when people started pouring out of them cursing and fuming and splattered with green paint, amusement turned to anger, and anger forced a more attentive look at the message of the apparitions, which turned the mood to a fear that had people rushing away in a rude melee in all directions. Traffic snarled. Horns sounded an ear-splitting chorus, along with the sounds of sirens trying to make their way to the scene and getting nowhere.

  I left sufficient coins to pay for my coffee and shoved and elbowed my way through the panicked and roiling crowd along the Boulevard Montparnasse towards the nearby Vavin Metro station. The Ski Mask Jihadi leered down threateningly from theater hoardings, glared out from the windows of the Cafe Coupole, the Select, the Dom, the sides of parked cars, buses caught in the immobile traffic.

  The Vavin Metro station was all but empty when I reached it. The Ski Mask Jihadi commanded the curved roof of the tunnel and three of the advertising posters. When the train arrived, there he was on the side of the third car. The train itself was eerily empty for this rush hour as I took the Metro back to my apartment. It was necessary to change trains at Montparnasse and again at Duroc to reach the Place Clichy station; Montparnasse was a major hub with a maze of tunnels and the Ski Mask Jihadi was everywhere, egging on the panicked commuters.

  There was only one green ski mask in evidence at the smaller Duroc station, but the Place Clichy station was another major hub, and the station was full of them, and when I emerged onto the Place Clichy, it was a scene of angry and dangerous chaos.

  Here there was the largest film theater hoarding in Paris, displaying posters for half a dozen films, smeared with several crazily overlapping green faces. The windows of two of the major tourist-spot brasseries had been graffiti-bombed, likewise a department store, the facade of a lycee, the statue in the middle of the traffic circle. Traffic was utterly gridlocked far down the converging avenues.

  The Place Clichy had been a venue where “les Parisiens,” tourists, and denizens of the Green Zones had once freely mingled, and while beurs had been less in evidence over the past weeks, still they were here, and there were shoving matches and outright fist-fights in the crowds, bottles and beer cans and random debris thrown through random windows, squads of riot police trying none too successfully to intervene with batons and plastic shields.

  Keeping my head down, I managed to slither my way through the fray, cross the bridge over the old Cemetery Montmarte, and reach my apartment, to do what most o
f Paris must be doing by now, watch what was happening to the City of Light from the safety of television.

  The left upright of the Arc de Triomphe smeared with the right half of the huge face of the Ski Mask Jihadi, and “Allah the All-Knowing Is Watching You” across the top. Incoherent green paint low on the girders of the north pillar of the Eiffel Tower. The Ski Mask Jihadi perfectly placed on the statue-festooned façade of Notre Dame. The Hotel Ritz and the Crillion likewise grafittied. No less than three looking down on the Seine from the curved face of Trocadero. The Ski Mask Jihadi lit from within on a glass triangle of the Louvre Pyramid. La Defense. Sacré Cœur. All up and down the Champs Élysée.

  The news coverage delivered flat and superfluous description of what the screen was showing, along with the mandatory outrage, patriotic appeals for courageous calm, traffic reports, and rumors, but sometimes delivered through choked-back laughter. Commentators strove to deliver political analysis of what had happened.

  “Paris has seen nothing like this since the student riots of 1968 which ended overthrowing the Fourth Republic,” one analyst declared on one of the so-called round tables while images of grafittied Paris danced in the background behind them.

  “This is the work of Arab terrorists, not students,” another told her, “the same ones who desecrated Notre Dame—”

  “—terrorists with a sense of humor—”

  “The same terrorists who killed two delivery guards and shot up a police car, you think that’s funny?”

  “We must address the grievances of the Arabs!”

  “Round them all up and ship them back to Algeria!”

  At that moment, Allah caused the glowering green face of the Ski Mask Jihadi to fill the entire screen behind this jabbering panel of unworthy worthies.

  The words were there for all watching to see, and they spoke the meaning plain.

  “Allah the All-Knowing Is Watching You.”

  Jihad had arrived in France.