“And how do you proposed to do that?” asked Gregory.
“By a flanking maneuver, Captain,” Hamza told him. “Have a nice nap in the back, and I’ll have us there in half an hour, you will see.”
Gregory shrugged. “Fair is fair, I suppose,” he said, and climbed up onto the back platform.
I was about to do the same when Hamza laid a hand on my shoulder. “Ride up front with me, young Osama, and learn a military tactic that you will some day find useful.”
“I don’t plan on a military career,” I told him, already becoming uneasy.
“Ah, but what you will learn will be of value even if just on the roads of a country like France, for instance, even in the streets of a great city such as…Paris.”
I did not like the sound of that at all, and the bland smile on his face masking something cunning in his eyes did little to reassure me, but refusing such a seemingly innocent favor seemed worse than accepting it.
The entrances to the highways were already backed up for miles, but Hamza nodded as if he had expected this, and he drove off the access road and out into the open desert. He then pushed the accelerator pedal straight to the floorboard and we sped off in a cloud of dust and small stones with the engine roaring, parallel to the highway and Hamza shouting in gleeful abandon.
It was a mad, jolting ride, more exhilarating than terrifying, but it didn’t last for long. The highway beside us was already becoming a traffic jam thanks to the snarl of confusion caused by vehicles pushing onto it from access roads, but the Hummer soon left it behind and reached a point near the front of the procession where the buses and cars and trucks had some room between and were moving freely if not at our breakneck speed.
This was a limited access highway, but the barrier was no more than a concrete lip a few inches high, and Hamza, driving cast-off American military transport, paid it no heed. Without slowing down, he raced alongside the highway until he found a perilously small gap between two buses, pressed his palm to the klaxon, and bounced the Hummer up over the lip and onto the roadbed with no more than a grind and screech of metal beneath us, and we were on our way down the highway.
“Not cricket, perhaps,” Hamza admitted, “but then this is not a sporting event.” Nevertheless, he wove in and out of traffic, proceeding at a much faster pace than anything else on the road, as if that was just what he was taking it for.
“I will be honest with you, young Osama,” he said as we drove along, “I wanted you here for more than the ride. Your words back there were most impressive. If they were sincere I am prepared to offer you the best chance there is in this world to serve the Will of Allah with deeds.”
I liked what he was saying more that the way he was saying it, for it suddenly made him sound like something other than simply “Sergeant Hamza,” revealing that identity as pretense.
But who was I, of all people, to take offense at that?
“I spoke from the heart,” I told him.
“You spoke like a jihadi, or at least like a man who might wish to become one. Have you ever thought about it?”
“What boy growing up in the Caliphate has not?” I replied guardedly. Only a fool could fail to see what “offer” was coming.
“There is only one jihad in all the world now being fought against the Great Satan…”
“In Nigeria…”
“In Nigeria. But the Nigerian army stands alone against the Americans. In Afghanistan, in Iraq, where Muslims confronted the Great Satan in defense of their own Islamic soil, jihadis flocked in from all over to fight by their side. In Nigeria, we are reinforced by no such jihadis. No Afghans. No Pakistanis. No Arabs. No…Muslim brothers from beyond Africa…”
“You are saying this is because you are black?”
Hamza shrugged without taking his hands off the wheel, in fact swerving the Hummer around a bus in the gathering darkness as he did so. “Many believe this. Many believe that Muslims or not, we are regarded by our lighter-skinned Muslims brothers as what Captain Mohammed calls niggers.”
“You believe this?”
“I tell you only what I know. I know more of our troops than not believe it. I know that this drains our baraka. Worse, I know that this shames Islam, in our eyes, and even in the eyes of our infidel enemies.”
“In the eyes of the Biafrans, who are not Muslims at all?”
Hamza nodded. “They are black like us, told that they are fighting as Christian Soldiers, and while they see the black warriors of Islam fighting alone, they see the Americans supporting the black soldiers of Christianity with their terrible might even if they will not send their men to die for the cause. You can see how this shames Islam in the eyes of Christian Africans, can you not? You can see how it makes it easier for the Americans to convince them not only that they are fighting for more than oil, but that the one true God is on their side, not ours.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked, though I believed I already understood.
“Because I tell you something I do not tell the others, young fellow. There is at least a chance to turn this war around.”
“But you said you saw no path to victory.…”
“The others would not have understood. I believe you might. It is a matter for…young men. A matter of baraka.”
“Baraka?”
“The Nigerian Army fighting alone for our country can never defeat the Great Satan. But the Americans fight for the oil alone, and they have neither the courage nor the will to send their young men to die for that. Their Biafran Christian Soldiers may be a rabble, but they fight to hold their own soil. If they give up the fight, the American rulers will stand alone revealed as naked colonialist imperialists, the Great Satan even in the eyes of their own countrymen, and in the end, as in Viet Nam, the people of America will not accept that dishonor. So we must deprive them of their Biafran allies.”
“I…I think I understand…but you slaughter them at will and still you have not done it.…”
“Because as Nigerian Muslims fighting alone we do not have the baraka to destroy theirs. They see us as Muslims abandoned by our white brothers because we are black, and so by who we believe is our one true god. But with the Americans behind them, they believe that their one true god is on their side. This is the source of their baraka.”
It was fully dark now. All the vehicle lights were on, the glow along the strand of this modern highway blinding me to the desert stars. The lights of Muzdalifa appeared in the distance before me. I was in the Caliphate on Hadj. There were ten hadjis on the truckbed behind us. Yet inside the cab I felt that I was in a jungle clearing, trapped with some military shaman speaking of warfare in a magical language I could not quite understand.
Hamza never took his eyes off the road, but he seemed to sense this. “This is an African war, “ he told me. “To gain the baraka we need to win it, we must have jihadis from all of Dar al-Islam fighting beside their black Muslim brothers. That would be the greatest baraka of all, the baraka of Allah, they would see us as an army of lions and hide in their burrows like mice.”
“The Jihad proclaimed by the Caliph in deeds not empty words!”
“And a true Holy War, for if Nigeria is dismembered for its oil by the Great Satan, in the eyes of the world, in the hearts of Dar al-Islam, in the hearts of you and I, Osama, it will be Islam itself which has been defeated.”
“You are asking me to fight for Nigeria?”
“I am asking you to fight in Nigeria for Islam as a true jihadi…Al Hadj Osama, as I suspect you may have fought elsewhere before.”
I understood that this was so. I was being called to defend not Nigeria, but the honor of Islam and therefore that of Allah Himself, as the Caliphate would not. Who could refuse such a summons?
But…
“What do you mean by fighting elsewhere before?”
We were approaching Muzdalifa now, th
e traffic around us was thickening, though still not heavy enough to prevent Hamza’s higher speed weaving, but he slowed the Hummer down and took a place within it, as if he had more to say, and did not want to lose our privacy until he had said it.
“Truth between us, in the name of Allah,” he told me. “I am not Sergeant Hamza, I am Major Hamza, and I am here as the leader of a mission to recruit jihadis, not to face the terrible robots of the Great Satan, but only the weak flesh-and-blood Biafrans, draining their baraka by fighting them as guerillas within their own territory, here, there, everywhere and nowhere like Al Qaeda, like the Viet Cong, so that you will fill them with the fear of faceless demons, like the Ski Mask Jihadis of Osama the Gun.”
My heart had been set afire, but now it became a frozen stone. Surely he could not know. Surely those last words were mere chance. But just as surely was not what men see as chance Allah working His Will in the world? For to the All-Knowing and All-Powerful such a thing as chance could not exist.
I did not know what to say. All I could manage was an indignation I did not at all feel.
“You come here on the Hadj under cover of a lie!”
“And you are guilty of no falsehood?” Hamza said knowingly. “A student in a Caliphate translator school with thousands of euros in his possession? A Caliphate school which happens to have an otherwise illegal satellite dish so that you can cover the mistake of knowing that Osama the Gun was betrayed by a bank robber under torture by claiming you learned it on French television? I do not know who you really are, but I do know that a Caliphate language school would never be allowed access to French television, and that is enough for me to know that you cannot be who you say you are. And a man who hides himself must escaping from someone or something. Or travelling in secret towards something he must attain.”
I could not speak. Muzdalifa and the end of this journey through the darkness was now short minutes away. Was it shame? Was it fear? What was I ashamed of? What did I fear?
“Fear not, young man,” Hamza told me, as if, like the shaman he seemed to have become, he could read my thoughts better than I myself. “The French have their Foreign Legion and we will have ours. No questions asked of your past. Not of who you are or what you have done. The only question is what you will become.”
Hamza took his eyes off the road to regard me for a long moment. “But we are hadjis together,” he said, “and one hadji to another, man to man, I swear upon the name of Allah that I will reveal it to no man, I have told you my secret, will you not tell me yours? Why are you here on the Hadj under cover of a lie?”
Because I feared capture by the Caliphate? Because I had killed more men than I knew? These things were true, but Major Hamza had no reason to betray me and every reason not to, and he was a soldier who no doubt had killed more men than I. Surely I should not fear the Will of Allah which had brought me to this moment of truth? Perhaps I did. But surely I should not.
I took my Koran from my suitcase and placed my hand upon it. “This I swear is true on the Holy Koran,” I told him.
“There is no need for that,” Hamza said dismissively.
“But there is, Major Hamza. Otherwise you will not believe me.”
A great weight lifted off my soul as I said it, such as a Catholic might feel in the confessional, such as a timorous lover must feel in finally baring the secret of his heart. Such as the Muslim that I was felt in fully surrendering at last to the Will of Allah, surrendering to knowing what he was, and thus to what he must once more become.
“I am Osama the Gun.”
CHAPTER 23
By the time I had proclaimed my true identity to Hamza, we were entering the campgrounds on the outskirts of Muzdalifa, he became lost in his own thoughts, I in mine, our privacy was coming to an end, and we spoke no more until after prayers the next morning during our gathering of stones.
There was a tent city in the campgrounds, but we had neglected to reserve a tent, and all of us slept together beside the Hummer under the stars. The ground was lumpy, but the air was balmy, my decision to go to war seemed to have already been made, it left me more at peace than at any time I could remember since I had been a boy, and I slept the sound sleep of the innocent child that I was not.
After morning prayers, we set out to gather stones, or rather pebbles, for tradition dictated that they be no larger than a fava bean. These were to be found everywhere in general and no where in particular, our party split up into twos and threes, and Hamza contrived to take me along with him, to “gather our ammunition,” as he put it.
“You are truly Osama the Gun?” were the first words he spoke to me when we were alone together on a low hillock among scores of hadjis rummaging through the gravel on its sparsely vegetated slopes. “You will forgive me for finding such good fortune hard to believe, oath on the Koran or not.”
“Since the police of Europe are out to arrest Osama the Gun, and the Caliphate has disowned him and would probably feel more secure if he were not alive to be caught and questioned, and since you were ready to recruit me before I told you, what would I gain by telling you such a thing as a lie?”
Hamza nodded. He picked up a pebble, inspected it with exaggerated care. “It is just that such good fortune in the midst of so much bad is difficult to believe. It is as if this rock I picked up by chance out of thousands were a nugget of gold.”
“Am I really so golden?” I said with a little laugh.
Hamza pocketed his peddle. “You do not know what a treasure you are, young…Osama?” he said.
“A fugitive from both the French and the Caliphate?”
“Being hunted by both the hounds of the infidels and the jackals of the Caliphate who have left us to fight alone only makes your baraka all the greater, Osama the Gun!” he told me excitedly. “That you bring the Ski Mask Jihadis of Osama the Gun to the aid of Nigeria is a prize beyond measure! The truest jihadis of all, denied by the Caliphate after having brought Paris to its knees. Our Ski Mask Jihadis!”
I picked up a single pebble. “But I am alone,” I reminded him.
Hamza laughed. “In Nigeria, you will not be alone. You will be commissioned a captain in the Nigerian army, with the salary that goes with it, and given command of the jihadis we are gathering here, several hundred men, I promise you this.”
He picked up another pebble, tossed it into the air, and pocketed it without looking. “For this, I will be made a colonel!” he cried. “Brigadier is not out of the question!”
Though it would have been impossible for dreams of glory not to have danced in my head, yet I also blanched at his words. Captain in the Nigerian Army? Command of hundreds of men? I felt myself a fraud. What had I ever commanded but the planting of graffiti bombs by some score beurs and mimicking my single successful tactic against my own will with grenades?
“I have no military training,” I confessed. “I am not fit for such command.”
“No false modesty, Osama the Gun,” Hamza told me airily. “Your tactics in Paris were brilliant, an inspiration to us all even from afar. Believe me, we have generals who have never led such a successful action, all too many of them, whose baraka next to yours is a fart in the wind.”
Still I hesitated. For here on the Hadj I had met my first American. Who had been a Captain in their Air Force and proud of it. Yet I could not convince myself that Gregory Mohammed was an evil man. He had told me, and others had confirmed, that America had fought for the lives of Muslims. He was an American soldier but he was also a Muslim. A hadji.
I knew I could not kill this servant of the Great Satan who I knew. Was it then right to kill what might be many such men whose faces I would never know? If I could not hate this American, how could I hate a country that produced such men?
This I could not ask of Major Hamza, for surely he would give me a soldier’s answer. And this was the Hadj. The answer I found myself requiring was not a soldier’
s answer, or that of an imam, or that of the Caliph. I sought an answer from Allah Himself speaking directly to my own heart.
“Well, what do you say, Osama the Gun?” Hamza asked.
“You will have my answer when the Hadj is over,” I told him.
When I, Inshallah, have been granted mine.
* * * *
The next morning, the Hadj in its millions, armed with more millions of stones, made its way to Mina. The mood was different from what it had been before, a certain gaiety, an excitement expressed in the stride of those afoot, in the babbling music of millions of voices, in the language of bodies, in the exuberant driving styles, as if this were a vast crowd converging on a stadium for a championship football match, reverent in its way to be sure, but somehow what the French called “sportif.”
Vehicles must be parked in a field some two miles from the Jamarat, where, so it was said, Abraham had had his confrontation with Satan, and all hadjis had to proceed there as equals afoot, enhancing the strange feeling of spectators approaching a sporting event, made even more so as we neared the Jamarat, for all the world indeed appearing as an enormous stadium shaded from the sun by a roof, and reached by a ground-level roadway but also an overhead ramp.
There were Caliphate troops stationed at the entrances to the Jamarat to regulate the flow of hajis in and out in order to prevent a deadly crush within, but even so the walkways leading up to them were an utterly packed chaos of jostling bodies, waving arms, shouting, chanting, ululating, in which everyone became an isolated cell in a body of seething flesh, and those in our company quickly became lost from each other within it.
But Hamza held onto my ihram like a cat determined to not lose his grasp on the mouse he has captured, and we finally entered the Jamarat stuck tightly together.
If the walkways leading into the Jamarat were jam-packed chaos, inside it was total pandemonium, a huge space in which nothing was to be seen but the three stone pillars standing above a sea of white-robed people hurling a continuous rain of pebbles at them from close up, from the middle ground, from hopeless distances, all jostling, pushing, elbowing to get within range, and nothing else could be heard over the continuous thunderous roar of their combined voices echoing under the roof enclosing it.
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