“Without the protection of the American Air Force, the Army of United Nigeria would march through Biafra to the sea in a week,” I told them.
“We all know that!” growled a colonel.
General Moustapha silenced him with a scowl.
“And without fuel that air force cannot fly. And most of it has been coming from only two sources—”
“The Caliphate and Biafra…” General Moustapha muttered. And then his eyes lit up as he understood. “And now only one!”
I nodded. “And now only one.”
“You are suggesting…?” General Moustapha let the unspoken hang, yet his demeanor told me that he understood what must be done, the great danger and the great glory of it, but was presently too overwhelmed by its magnitude to give it voice.
And wished me to do it for him.
So I did.
“I will lead all my jihadis through the Zone and into the countryside to the south hiding by day and stealing forward at night, bypassing town and villages, infiltrating as far south as possible towards the oil fields for four days or perhaps five…and then…”
“And then?” asked General Moustapha.
I had seen the maps.
“We can’t reach the offshore wells or facilities, but there’s a junction of two main pipelines southwest of Owen, one servicing the major oil field nearby and another running west through another all the way across the Niger to the refinery at Warri, and they converge on a pipeline to Port Harcourt itself. I’ve got over two hundred men, they disperse into five man squads, and mine these pipelines up and down their lengths, and time the charges to go off at once. All we have to do is destroy them so thoroughly that they cannot be rebuilt for months. Done right, Inshallah, the long trails of burning oil might even ignite the wells. Then the Great Satan dies of thirst, and the war is over.”
“Ingenious,” scoffed a colonel. “Too bad it’s impossible. You are forgetting that these pipelines and oil fields are exactly why the Americans are in Biafra in the first place and they protect the whole area themselves, not the Biafrans. Even a suicide mission would never get near them.” He laughed sarcastically. “The suicide would succeed but the mission would fail.”
“Not if the American aircraft were all occupied elsewhere.”
“Elsewhere? All of them?”
“All five front line divisions of the Nigerian army redeploy to the far east bank of the Benué where the river bends north towards the Cameroon border at Yola, and as my jihadis cross the Zone, the whole army charges south, remaining inside Nigeria but staying close to the border, making for the port of Calabar, as if hoping to take or destroy it and then advance west along the coast towards Port Harcourt itself.…”
“Madness!”
“A bloodbath!”
“The Falcons and Vultures would cut us to pieces!”
“We wouldn’t get a quarter of the way to Calabar,” a colonel said. “The Americans would throw everything they have at us if they thought we were trying that.…”
“Exactly,” I said.
“It could work.…” General Moustapha said softly. “It probably would work…but the casualties…”
“Would be terrible,” I admitted. “Perhaps even almost as great as the casualties already suffered in your endless and futile forays across the Benué. But what your troops would buy with their lives this time would be final victory.”
There was a total silence. All present realized that their war could indeed now be won but at terrible cost. No further objection was voiced. But no one seemed to be able to be the first to voice assent. And no one seemed to grasp the full meaning of such a victory.
I must make at least General Moustapha understand. Either Allah chose to speak through me at moments such as this, or it was a skill one might learn to summon up when required as with swimming or riding a bicycle, or as the Sufi dervishes might have it, that Allah would enter if you emptied a place inside yourself for Him to fill.
So I did, and He had.
“Not merely final victory over Biafra. The Nigerian Army will achieve what was thought the impossible, it will not only defeat the United States itself, it will assure that the Great Satan can never again rise from the ashes of that defeat.”
“You are talking about the Jihad…” an officer said softly.
“Speaking as a Muslim…” whispered another.
“As a Hadji,” said Hamza. And I saw that even he was regarding me as if I were the Madhi he had once half-seriously chided me for playing. It was both exhilarating and terrifying to see others regard you thusly, to see in their eyes a reflection of yourself you fear to believe you could ever fulfill.
“I am a Muslim, and so are you all, or have you forgotten?” I told them. “I have chosen to be a jihadi, and so now may you. It is the Holy War that is ours to be won together if you do. All the men you lead to their deaths it will be martyrs whom Allah will richly reward in Paradise. You will all become heroes of Islam. Nigeria will take its place in the Caliphate not as nation of African inferiors but as the destroyer of the Great Satan and the savior of Islam, the hero nation of the Jihad.”
I locked eyes with General Moustapha.
“And the general who convinces the high command to do this will become the hero of United Nigeria and therefore of all the Islamic lands of Africa beyond,” I told him. “The black Muslim hero of a heroic black Muslim nation who could lead all the Islamic lands of Africa into the Caliphate as an equal…and perhaps even something more.…”
General Moustapha laughed softly, but in his eyes there was a dreamy something else as he studied his men, under a spell that a word could make his.
“It would very dangerous to put it that way to men who…presently have more stars on their shoulders than myself,” he said. “But if I told them it was the inspiration and idea of the legendary Osama the Gun, who no few of the more devout have come to believe might even be the Madhi.…”
“And volunteered to take field command yourself, General,” said an officer.
General Moustapha nodded. “They might approve…it would be a great risk, the end of my career if we failed, or…”
In that moment Allah filled me with a Holy Warrior’s peace. His peace. All my life this had been a moment waiting to arrive.
“Surely there must be a Koran here,” I said.
General Moustapha himself went to a chest and produced one. I laid my right hand upon it as I once had in a storeroom in St. Denis in equally personally dangerous but far less widely fateful circumstances.
“Tell them Osama the Gun has sworn this oath upon the Koran,” I said. “In seven days hence I will lead my few jihadis through the Zone and towards these so-called impossible targets not looking back to see whether their army of scores of thousands plays their part as heroes or as cowards, whether our Nigerian brothers are with us or whether we die as martyrs for Islam alone.”
CHAPTER 31
Each squad was assigned its own stretch of pipeline, and in some cases a nearby field of oil wells and each man had both a reel of adhesive explosive for pipelines and an ordinary charge for targets of opportunity. Being led on a mission by Osama the Gun had long since come to be seen as an honor by Ski Mask Jihadis, so I chose my own squad at random from the dwindling pool of jihadis who had never had the privilege before.
The rafts drawn by the fleet of motorized boats being occupied far to the east preparing to ferry five divisions of troops across the Benué, we rowed across the river in rubber Zodiacs forty or so, making the crossing at night.
My squad consisted of a tough old Yemeni tribesman named Salim who wore the required ceremonial dagger and had somehow managed to procure a supply of qat to chew on; Marwan, a middle-aged Palestinian taciturn about his past; and the devout Abdullah, from a wealthy Caliphate family, a jihadi as he had been a hadji for the purest of purposes, about my own age. O
ur inflatable flotilla crossed without incident, and when we were across, the squads dispersed to make their way across the Zone.
By design, we had no radios or cell phones, since we were all to act independently and any chatter among us would only serve to give away our movements and locations to any listening ear. Nor did I want General Moustapha or any of the other division commanders to have a means of learning of my own fate or myself any means of monitoring what might befall the Nigerian troops on their advance down along the Cameroon border toward the port of Calabar which they would surely never reach. I felt they and I both had a need not to know.
If I was slain and it became known, the only useful purpose served would be that of the enemy and if the Nigerian offensive stalled or was prematurely broken or for some reason never even began, my courage and that of my men would certainly not be enhanced by knowing such dire news.
We penetrated deep into the Zone before stopping for a meal and sleep without encountering a living being or a robot djin, and though I had no way of knowing I doubted whether any other squad did either. When the sun rose in the morning, I beheld not merely blasted and cratered earth denuded of all but the blackened splintered remains of trees, but with shoots of new grass, green mold on the scatterings of bones, pools of odorous stagnant water in the craters; an old and abandoned battlefield in the early stages of reconquest by nature, and made to seem all the more empty for it.
We scurried uneasily south across this wasteland, not wanting to spend another night here, and by sundown we had reached the fringes of the inhabited area, which we entered under cover of night, kept moving through woods and fields and ravines, past fortified towns and villages, and did not sleep until morning, passing the daylight hours in the bush, as were usual Ski Mask Jihadi penetration tactics.
But now we planted no bombs as we moved through the night, nor the night after that, and the next, and we made good speed and easy progress past towns and villages guarded by Biafran troops, penetrating far deeper into Biafra than any Ski Mask Jihadis had before, through bush and fields utterly deserted at night for fear of green-faced demons, but othewise seemingly untouched by war.
We reached the margin of a stand of woods in the hour before dawn, heard a rhythmic pumping sound in the distance, and in a field beyond could just make out the black silhouttes of oil well pumping arms moving slowly up and down like robot elephants at a water hole dipping their trunks.
When the sun rose I beheld a landscape that did not seem of this world.
There were two dozen or more oil wells within an area about a hundred yards on a side. They were connected by a maze of piping to a single trunkline that led to a major pipeline in the distance running roughly south. There was a strange fence enclosing the wells, a single line of something metal on uprights without so much as rolls of razor wire beneath it, so that it seemed one might simply roll under it to reach the wells.
The field around the seemingly inadequately fenced-in oil wells had been denuded of all vegetation and covered with blacktop paving for a distance of perhaps fifty yards. Ten meter aluminum poles surrounded this bizarre parking lot at twenty yard intervals. There were clusters of floodlights and what looked like loudspeakers at their crowns. Barely visible red laser beams connected them at head, stomach, and knee level to form a fence of light and there were all sorts of unknown apparatus festooning each of them as well.
There was not a human being to be seen, but the movements of the wellhead pumping arms were not the only things in motion. Between the interior fence and the outer fence of laser light were treaded vehicles like tanks but no bigger than very large dogs, far too small to hold a driver, with flat turrets fore and aft bristling with what appeared to be gun muzzles all the way around. There were eight of the things, two patrolling each side of the “parking lot” and doing so at perhaps fifty kilometers an hour from opposite directions, back and forth, back and forth.
“How are we to attack this?” groaned Marwan.
“We shouldn’t even try,” said Salim.
Although there was no human to be seen, it was impossible to know who or what might be lurking in the woodlands surrounding this apparently completely robotized installation, so I decided to wait for nightfall before doing anything. We slept through the day with one of us always on watch, which gave me all too much time to ponder the situation.
No Ski Mask Jihadi squad had reached a target of such importance since coming to this country. And many of the other squads must be encountering the same sort of thing, or something even more lucrative, for this did not rate as a major oil field, and if this was how the Americans protected a field of a mere two dozen wells, it must be a model of how they protected all of them.
This was a dismaying revelation. If this oil field could not be successfully attacked, then none of them could be. I had to try to come up with a successful tactic, and pray to Allah that other squad leaders would do the same elsewhere.
Using delayed timers was out of the question. There was no way to steal past these defenses, plant charges, and depart undetected. We had to penetrate them somehow, blow up the wells, and flee before any reinforcement, human or otherwise, could arrive.
First we had to get past the laser fence. If we took out one pole, we would create a gap to pass through. We had plenty of the adhesive explosive on the reels and many detonators, and so we could simply cut off lengths and turn them into simple grenades, that much did not seem so difficult. Getting past the robot tanks was a harder problem, not the least because of the unknowns and unknowables.
I watched the demonic things for hours and they followed the same invariable pattern, a pair of them criss-crossing each other as they patrolled each side of the enclosure at the same rapid speed, so that each completed a leg of the pattern within four minutes before reversing. Meaning that one of them would be opposite any gap created in the laser fence within two minutes. What kind of weapons did those turrets hold? Could the robot tanks break pattern? Were there human operators somewhere as with the Falcons and the Vultures? Did they have some sort of machine intelligence? To what degree?
There was no way of knowing. The only certainty was that we would have to take out at least two of them to reach the inner fence. And that final barrier seemed too easy to penetrate for the ease thereof to be credible.
It was close to being a suicide mission, but we had to try. I reminded myself that thousands of Nigerian soldiers would be sacrificing their own lives to give us and other jihadi squads like us the chance to do so.
We prepared our impromptu grenades and waited for nightfall. No lights came on when it was finally dark, but the three red lines of laser light stretching from pole to pole became more brightly visible. Were they powerful killer beams or merely sensors?
The point was not to find out.
I waited until the robot tanks were each at the far end of their patrol patterns, then with a sticky grenade in either hand and Marwan, Salim, and Abdullah prone several yards behind me, I quickly crawled on knees and elbows up to the target pole, stuck my grenades to the pole, one at the base, the other at shoulder height, set the timers for four minutes so that the robots would be at the far ends of their pattern again when they went off, and retreated.
We raised up into crouches, ready to run forward when the laser fence went down, unslung our guns, and prepared one grenade each to hurl at the robot tanks if need be.
Everything seemed to happen all at once, though it reality it must have taken at least a full minute.
The grenades went off with metallic clangs in cloud of smoke and aluminum shards.
The pole fell in two pieces.
The red lines of laser light that had connected it to the poles on its left and right disappeared and we charged forward.
Flashing strobes and floodlights went on atop every remaining pole and there began an enormously loud electronic wailing up and down many octaves, from an ina
udible bass that attacked the intestines and had me beshitting my pants to a supersonic screech that made coherent thought impossible.
The robot tanks at either end of their runs turned, doubled their speed, converged towards us as we staggered a foot or two past the gap in the laser fence, firing bullets and clouds of needles.
Jets on the seemingly harmless inner fence began to spray some dense greenish-yellow vapor.
I gave no order. I could not even think. I fled fast as I could run, and didn’t even look back until I was well within the woods. Even at this distance, the electronic ululating of the terrible satanic sirens still roiled the gut, pained the eardrums, and made speech impossible.
Marwan lay supine on the blacktop in a slowly growing pool of blood, his neck a bloody wreck, his head at an impossible angle. One of the robot tanks was back in its regular patrol pattern. The other paced back and forth along the gap in the laser fence. A thick bank of evil-looking and no doubt poisonous yellowish-green fog was spreading out from the inner fence across the entire width of the blacktop.
Salim, Abdullah, and I gaped woodenly at each other, panting.
The sirens stopped but the floodlights remained on and the strobes continued to flash.
The Great Satan had brought its technological version of Hell to the Earth to guard the life’s blood of its demonic machineries.
* * * *
We found a stream and cleaned ourselves and our clothing as best we could, after which we held council about what to do next. There was no question of attempting to attack another oil field. They were impregnable fortresses satanically animated by circuits and machinery that gave them implacable wills of their own and clearly could not be defeated. I shuddered to think how many jihadi squads might even now be discovering what we were so naively up against and suffering the same fate or worse.
Abdullah was terrified, as any reasonable man had a right to be, and wanted to make our way back to the Zone and safety, but Salim pointed out that the oil fields had not been the plan’s primary targets in the first place.
Osama the Gun Page 28