Our squad was not the first to reach the river. To the east, two squads had already arrived, and the sergeants were arguing with crewmen on the rafts, who seemed loath to allow them to board. To the west, two squads of my jihadis had already boarded and a third was in the process, but the boatmen seemed reluctant to pull the loaded rafts from the shore so far in advance of the Nigerian retreat. More squads of jihadis were arriving up and down the river bank to less than enthusiastic welcomes.
“What now?” demanded Hamid.
I could see that I had foolishly overlooked the appearance our arrival before the main force would make and I could hardly blame the Nigerians on the rafts and boats for taking it for cowardice. Saving the lives of my own men from pointless deaths might have been sound logic, but even I could not mistake it for valor.
But these men were in my charge, the explosions to the south were becoming louder and louder, the American drones were visible now and the trails of their rockets, and the first of the Nigerian troops fleeing before them could be seen at the horizon line running across the plain towards us.
I had to do something, and I had to do it now.
I confronted the Nigerians on the nearest raft. There were only three of them, holding Kalashnikovs and glowering, but not yet pointing them at me.
“We’ve accomplished our mission, which was to destroy what there was to destroy, admittedly not much,” I told them as calmly as I could. “Now it’s your mission to load us on this raft and take us across the river.”
“You leave our soldiers to die because they are only niggers,” one of them shouted at me.
“I didn’t send them in to die,” I told him, again showing no anger, and feeling none. “Your general gave the order, not me. We were ordered to cross this river too. We obeyed. And we were sent in with no communication with any officer higher than myself to tell us when to retreat. at all. Our mission was over. What were we supposed to do?”
“You are cowards!” another shouted in a rage, loudly enough for my men to hear, and pointed his weapon at me. The other two immediately raised their guns. Seeing this, Hamid barked something in Urdu, and a dozen jihadis were training their guns on them.
“Cowards?” I shouted back. “You call us cowards? You know who we are! We are jihadis! We are Holy Warriors of Islam who volunteered to fight here at your side when the whole world had abandoned you. Now you would abandon us? And you call us cowards?”
No one moved no, one said anything. I heard the sounds of the American drones coming closer, fusillades of rocket fire exploding, the cries and shouts of men rushing in a panic towards the river.
I turned and shouted at Hamid. “Order the men to lower their weapons!”
He glowered back at me.
“Do it!”
Hamid said something in Urdu and the jihadis, with obvious reluctance, lowered their weapons.
“Cowards?” I said to the Nigerians, unslinging my Kalashnikov and throwing it onto the raft. “Who are the cowards here? Go ahead and shoot me. Shoot me or load my men on this raft, one thing or the other.”
The Nigerians glared at me for a long moment. I glared back. Then one, followed by the other two, averted the gazes, stared down at the wooden logs of the raft, and lowered their guns. Nothing was said, but one of them silently motioned my men to board the raft.
My men scrambled aboard and the boat pulled away from the shore. Seeing what had played out on our raft, the Nigerians on the rafts allowed the other squads to board.
By the time we had begun to cross the river, Nigerian soldiers were beginning to dash towards the rafts, scores of American Falcons were bombarding them, it was a chaos of explosions, flying earth and bodies, one more catastrophe in the chain of futile slaughters that had gone on since this war began, and seemed like they would go on forever.
The man who had first pointed his weapon at me reached down and picked my own off the deck.
“You are no coward,” he muttered shamefacedly.
“Neither are you,” I said. “Neither are those men,” I told him, pointing at the Nigerian soldiers clambering onto the rafts now in their thousands in panic, driven like beasts before the harrying fire of the Falcons.
“There are the cowards in this war!” I shouted in a fury, pointing skyward at the metallic demons of the Great Satan. “Those evil things kill by the thousands, but they cannot die, for they have never lived! Worse still, those who fly them sit in comfortable chairs staring into video screens and drinking soda thousands of miles away, crushing us without fear or mercy as if we were ants for barrels of oil!”
The soldier’s eyes widened at this tirade. “Who are you?” he asked quite softly.
“My name is Osama,” I told him. “You are holding my gun.”
His eyes widened even further and he handed it to me.
I pointed it at the hated enemy aircraft defiling the heavens but well out of range and held down the trigger until the magazine was empty. “I am Osama the Gun!” I shouted.
It was as if I were back in Mina throwing my futile pebbles at that lifeless and uncaring pillar, at the stone heart of Satan. “Death to the Great Satan!” I howled like an enraged animal. “Allahu Akbar!”
“Allahu Akbar,” said the soldier, more in wonderment than anger. “I will remember this always. I will tell it to my grandchildren. If I live to have any.”
CHAPTER 27
Soon after we arrived back at the division encampment a lieutenant arrived at my tent with an order to accompany him to General Moustapha. I did not imagine that the General wished to congratulate me for my role in the latest failed offensive or what had happened at the rafts.
“Am I under arrest?” I demanded.
The lieutenant shrugged. “The General did not tell me, but this is an order, and if you do not obey it, you will be.”
As I was marched through the camp, the attitude of the Nigerian soldiers was not for the most part what I would have expected. Many of the men waved at me, some even saluted, and there were even a few enthusiastic shouts of “Osama the Gun!” Apparently the story of the manner in which I had gotten my jihadis onto the rafts and how I had howled my rage and fired the Gun of Osama at the American Falcons had been spreading among the troops and was being met with approval.
There was no one in General Moustapha’s headquarters but the General himself and the lieutenant who manned the computer, and no sooner had I come to attention and saluted than the General dismissed him and we were alone.
“You disobeyed orders, Captain,” the General told me coldly, neither offering me a chair, or favoring me with a “stand at ease” order.
I was in as foul a mood.
“What order did I disobey, sir?” I said evenly. “I was ordered to march my men into Biafran territory behind your army to destroy what we could, and then retreat to the rafts when our mission was finished, and I obeyed. Was there another order?”
Had the General been a white man his face would surely have reddened. “And what did your men destroy, Captain Osama?” he growled at me. “I want a full report.”
“Some two dozen abandoned mud huts, two wells, and, I believe, a tire-less truck up on crates,” I told him, which was all that my sergeants had reported to me.
“That is pitiful!”
“Indeed it is, sir. But that was all there was to blow up behind your army’s advance, speaking of pitiful.”
“You dare to question my tactics?” General Moustapha roared.
“Do you not yourself?” I asked him.
A sigh escaped the General’s lips, his shoulders slumped, and for a brief moment he revealed his own despair.
“You want new tactics, do you?” he snapped at me to cover this lapse. “I’ll give you new tactics, Captain! The next time we attack, you will be sent in ahead of the troops. At least that way, they will avoid the sorry spectacle of watching y
our men ferried across the river before them.”
“An excellent idea, sir!” I found myself exclaiming. He might be a General schooled for years in tactics and I only a so-called “captain” who really knew only one, but I was also Osama the Gun, and here that same tactic might serve admirably.
“It is…?” muttered the General, regarding me as if I were either a madman or his salvation.
“Let my jihadis go into Biafran territory days ahead of each attack,” I told him. “In small groups, on boats down the Niger. That way we can penetrate well south of the Zone and blow up real targets in inhabited territory behind the Biafran army and terrorize the Igbos where they live, maybe even wells and pipelines, who knows, we might even reach the refinery at Warri.”
The General waved me to a chair, his anger gone, and regarded me with keen and hopeful interest.
“It worked in Paris, as the world knows,” I told him. “The French were left in a state of fearful dread for days and weeks afterward.”
“But…but you and your men would be trapped far behind enemy lines with no hope of escape when the charges went off.… I admire the bravery of suicide bombers, Captain, but a few such missions, and I would be out of jihadis.”
“Not if we had explosives with timers that could be set to go off days later. We place the charges and set the timers to explode them days after we’ve returned here. We could time the explosives to go off during your offensives, creating the illusion that your forces penetrated much deeper into Biafran territory than they really did. Imagine what that would do to Biafran morale!”
General Moustapha broke into a wide grin. “To say nothing of what it would do for the morale of my own troops!” he exclaimed. He laughed. “You shall have your time-bombs, Captain! This is brilliant! If it succeeds, you will earn a promotion to major.”
And then he looked at me almost as a boy would regard a football star, working up his courage to ask for an autograph. “Praise be to Allah, Colonel Hamza was right, Osama the Gun is a man, not just a legend,” he said, “and I have the luck to command him.”
He reached his hand across the table almost shyly, as if asking for my permission.
“An honor, Captain.”
Mortally embarrassed, I reached out and shook it.
“The honor is mine to serve under your command, sir,” I told him. “As it is the honor of us both to serve the Will of Allah.”
* * * *
Two week later a truck loaded with crates arrived in front of the jihadi encampment soon after the noon prayer, and out of the passenger’s side of the cab stepped Colonel Hamza. Grinning, he saluted me, and before I could return it, he embraced me.
“If your plan works, I will make brigadier!” he fairly burbled.
He leapt up to the bed of the truck and shouted for all the jihadis to gather round. When they had, he tore open a crate and withdrew an explosive packet seemingly no different from the ones we already had, but I was standing behind the truck right below him and could see that the detonator was different.
“Two week timers!” Hamza proclaimed, holding it up.
From another crate, he produced a reel of what looked like a small grayish-white hose. “Adhesive plastic explosive to stick along pipelines and such with the same timers! And there’s more!”
He opened yet another crate, reached inside and pulled out great fistfuls of green cloth things, tossing them over the men like confetti. I caught one. It was a Ski Mask of some feather-light synthetic, minutely perforated, and suitable therefore for this tropical clime.
“And for once Military Intelligence has shown some military intelligence,” he said, opening another crate, and tossing a familiar object down to me.
It was a graffiti-bomb.
“It’s Osama the Gun’s time to throw the bomb!” he proclaimed, jumping down from the truck.
I donned my green hood, and laughing, my men likewise donned the green hoods of the Ski Mask Jihadis, and I led this procession into the main encampment, searching for a suitable target, gathering a parade of Nigerian troops.
There were no large buildings to offer a suitable wall, save perhaps that of General Moustapha’s headquarters, and I was not about smear green paint over that, so I settled for putting the graffiti-bomb in the middle of a large area of clear ground, setting the timer for five minutes, and having my Ski Mask Jihadis form up the crowd of Nigerian soldiers into a wide circle around it.
When the graffiti-bomb went off there was an exuberant cheer.
When the result was seen the cheering was even louder.
There on the sun-baked African earth was a green face, mouthless, and with empty eyes. To the right a green fist held up the green silhouette of an Israeli mini-Uzi. Nothing more. No lettering in Arabic lettering or Roman. Nothing more was needed.
* * * *
Studying the relevant maps and satellite photos, but otherwise left to my own tactical devices, I realized that attacking the Warri refinery, or probably even wells and pipelines, had been a ridiculous boast and grim joke among the Nigerians.
Warri was some two hundred kilometers beyond the southern fringe of the Zone, and well west of the Niger in Yoruba territory, and even if we somehow did destroy the refinery while the Nigerian army was advancing across the Zone, it would be regarded by the Yorubas as an outrage committed by the Hausas.
I needed less ambitious targets east of the Niger and reasonably close to the southern end of the Zone. There wasn’t much available. The major oil fields that weren’t off-shore and the pipeline network that connected them all to the refineries at Warri and Port Harcourt were some hundred and fifty kilometers south of the deepest Nigerian penetration of Biafran territory.
Once again, I was reminded that the only tactic I really knew was the one I had employed with the grenades in Paris, which was to plant the bombs among civilian installations to sow terror amidst the Biafran populace.
With the Zone being occupied by Biafran troops between Nigerian offensives, there was no way to reach the populated areas south of it overland, but we could launch our boats onto the Niger at night above its confluence with the Benué inside territory controlled by the Nigerian Army, plant explosives along the little towns along its eastern bank, and make our way south to Onitsha, a significant city and river port.
I ordered five of my sergeants form their own six man squads and assembled a sixth myself, thirty-six jihadis in all. I requested boats to carry us, and General Moustapha supplied twelve French Zodiacs, inflatable rubber boats, each of them barely large enough to carry all six of us in an emergency. These were usually equipped with outboard petrol engines, but we needed silence and had to settle for much quieter but less powerful fuel cell driven water jets which also had a limited range, so we could only use them escaping upstream again against the current and would have to paddle going downstream.
Two days before we were to depart, Hamza appeared at my tent with a small aluminum case as I was preparing for sleep. “A present for Osama the Gun,” he said with a self-satisfied grin as he opened it, “the Gun of Osama!”
Inside the padded case was an Israeli mini-Uzi slide gun with a steady-cam grip.
Or so it seemed until I picked it up and tried out the steady-cam targeting mechanism. There wasn’t any. If my hand trembled, so did the gun barrel. It wouldn’t lock onto anything.
I looked at Hamza inquiringly. He shrugged.
“It’s a Chinese copy,” he admitted. “It’s a slide gun, but there are no electronics to get broken, and it uses ordinary ammunition. But it looks just like the real thing. Just like the graffiti-bomb silhouette. And that is the point. You are the point, al-Hadj Osama, not the man, but the legend of Osama the Gun and his Ski Mask Jihadis.”
“Just what sort of officer are you, Colonel Hamza?”
Hamza laughed. “Some would say a lucky one,” he told me. “I was a captain an
d tank unit commander until we had no more tanks. I was a major and recruiting officer on the Hadj. When I brought back Osama the Gun, I was promoted to colonel. Now I am the highest ranking officer in the psychological warfare corps. In fact I am the psychological warfare corps. In charge of Osama the Gun and his Ski Mask Jihadis. If that works out, I’ll be a brigadier general.”
“You are now my commanding officer?”
“No, no, Osama, there’s no one over you but General Moustapha, I’m your staff officer.”
“This means what?”
“I’m your liaison with the quartermasters. I got you the charges with the timers your tactics require, the rubber boats—”
“The Ski Masks and graffiti bombs?”
Hamza nodded. “And the other part of my new assignment is to…advise you on…building the legend…”
“Building the legend?”
“Ordinary guerillas blowing a few things up behind Biafran lines would be not much more than a nuisance to them in a war like this, and not even that to the Americans,” Hamza told me. “But Osama the Gun and his Ski Mask Jihadis, who terrorized Paris and all of France, here, there, everywhere, nowhere, moving among them like ghosts, like demons, can be worth more than another division.”
“This is psychological warfare?”
“That’s what the generals back in Abuja like to call it,” said Hamza, “but down here on the ground, it amounts to—”
“Baraka!”
“Exactly! Exactly as I told you on the Hadj, Osama. You and your jihadis are few, the real damage you can do doesn’t amount to much of any real military significance, but the damage you can do to the Biafrans’ baraka can be enormous if they believe that legendary but faceless terrorists are loose among them.”
“The masks…”
Hamza nodded. “Better that they never see you, but if they do, all they should ever be able to see is the face of the Ski Mask Jihadi.”
“And the graffiti bombs to mark our work with the same face…just like Paris…”
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