Osama the Gun

by Norman Spinrad

  “As I understand it, the main thing is supposed to be blowing as many gaps in as many pipelines as possible, setting the oil in them on fire as it spills out, and hoping for the best, isn’t that right?”

  I nodded.

  “Well the Americans can’t protect hundreds of miles of pipelines with those tank things and magic fences and djins whose screams themselves can make you shit in your pants, now can they?”

  “It doesn’t seem possible…” I admitted.

  “So I say we don’t turn tail and run like rabbits until we at least try to do that,” said Salim. “Seems to me we owe at least that much to poor Marwan.…”

  And to however many jihadis might have met the same fate or were about to, not to mention the Nigerian soldiers now dying in far greater numbers to make that original plan, my plan, even possible. Not to try to take out the pipelines would be a betrayal of them all, and surely any squad leader who had survived the same kind of fiasco must feel the same way.

  “We saw a major pipeline not far from here,” I said. “We’ll take it out before sundown, Inshallah.”

  We approached within about fifty yards of the nearby major pipeline running south during the end of the daylight hours, as close as we could get while still remaining within the cover of the woods. The pipeline ran through what once might have been a grain field but which now lay fallow and well-choked with low weeds which might provide cover if needed.

  But it didn’t seem to be protected. The pipeline was about half a meter in diameter and laid in a shallow trench cut in a strip of ground perhaps four meters wide, apparently denuded with a long-lasting pesticide or something worse like a radioactive isotope. There was no fence. There were no poles with lasers. We watched for two hours as the sun went down and no robot tanks or human guards appeared.

  “It’s unguarded,” Salim said after darkness had fallen. “It’s unprotected. This looks easy.”

  “Too easy,” Abdullah said.

  “How could even the Americans guard hundreds of miles of pipeline?” Salim scoffed. He had a point, but on the other hand…

  “Well actually they have, in a way,” I said. “From the air. Neither we nor the Nigerians have ever gotten near the oil field country before, don’t forget. And if it weren’t for the Nigerian army diversion, the skies above this whole territory would be swarming with Falcons. They can’t defend the pipelines on the ground, but they’ve been doing a perfect job of doing it from the air.”

  “Until now.”

  I nodded. “Until now.”

  Regular explosives or impromptu grenades fashioned from globs of the adhesive stuff cut from the reels would not do for a pipeline where we had to blow gaps as long as possible and as many up and down the length as we could. So we cut two meter lengths of the sticky plastic explosive from the reels, slung them over our shoulders, fixed timers to the middle of them, and set them for fifteen minute delays, which would give us plenty of time after we applied them along the length of the pipeline to be well away from the spreading streams of burning oil released when they exploded.

  I ordered Salim to go a hundred yards south and Abdullah a similar distance north, so that we would take out two hundred yards of the pipeline by blowing gaps in it in three places and creating a major conflagration, and I took the middle position from which I could still barely make out how they would be faring.

  We emerged from the margin of the woods together and then spread out to the required distances and began wading through the weeds towards the pipeline. I could barely make out the head and shoulders of Salim far to my right and Abdullah far to my left, which made me doubt that they could see each other.

  I could hear the rustling of creatures in the thick weeds; rodents, lizards, perhaps even snakes, poisonous or hopefully otherwise, but nothing large enough to be seen and therefore not threatening, and in any case fleeing before my passage, and the occasional ground-feeding bird abruptly taking flight.

  I was about to dash across the corridor of lifeless earth through which the trench carrying the pipeline ran when I happened to notice something that brought me up short. The ground itself was utterly devoid of vegetation or any sign of life. But just by where I was about to take my first step onto it, I noticed the desiccated corpse of a small rodent.

  Seeing this, I scanned the nearby stretch of the dead zone more carefully and saw a more freshly dead and rotting bird a yard or so to the right, the skeleton of a small snake nearby to the left, and bits of this and that scattered about here and there.

  Something in the dead zone killed small animals, and so quickly that they died instantly on the spot. No doubt the same something that kept vegetation from growing. A radioactive isotope could not kill so quickly. It must be some very powerful poison that killed on contact with skin or flesh. I must take great care not to touch this ground with anything but the soles of my boots.

  Something about the logic of this still did not seem right, but what it was still eluded me as I took my first step towards the pipeline, placing the sole of my right boot gingerly on the ground about a foot inside the dead zone, and then my—

  —a shrill buzzing sound inside my head—

  —a sharp pain lighting up my whole body like a tree of nerves as if I had touched a live wire or been struck by lightning—

  Blackness.

  Sleep.

  Blackness.

  Lying on my back hearing snuffling guttural sounds, feeling something warm and wet nuzzling my face—

  I snapped my eyes open looking into the yellow eyes of some dog-like animal, lower jaw gaping to expose sharp teeth and lolling tongue, wet nose sniffing speculatively at my throat—

  I screamed and slapped at the jackal with both hands, rolling up into a sitting position. It yipped in surprise, bounding up on all fours, dashed away in fright.

  Towards the pipeline.

  A very loud electrical crackle and sizzle that went on for several seconds through a single howl of canine pain.

  The jackal, for that was what it appeared to have been, lay on its side, fur singed and smoking, less than halfway to the pipeline, and quite thoroughly dead.

  I leapt to my feet in terror and stumbled past the edge of the dead zone into what seemed to be safety. Only then was I able to gather my wits to ponder what had happened.

  The ground might be kept cleared of vegetation by poison but that was not what killed small animals. They were killed by the same electrical charge which merely rendered a large animal such as myself unconscious. Further in, the pipeline was defended by a much more powerful electric field that had instantly killed the jackal.

  Perhaps the weaker outer charge was always active or perhaps there was a separate sensor field that activated it. Either way it served as a dire warning to humans and a sensor that activated the powerful killing charge.

  That was how the Great Satan could protect a complex of hundreds of miles of pipeline.

  No human being could reach any part of it alive.

  Chancing to notice that dead rodent had kept me from trying to charge across the dead zone towards the pipeline. If there was a sensor field that had to activate the outer warning charge, the delay probably would have allowed me to reach the inner killing field before it could have rendered me unconscious and I would now be as dead as the jackal.

  The jackal had been sent by Allah to save my life. The warning charge must deactivate for a time after killing small animals and rendering large ones unconscious or I could not have awoken and the jackal could not have been there nuzzling my face. If it had run back into the woods instead of towards the pipeline I knew that I would have tried to plant my rope of adhesive explosive and likewise surely been killed.

  I gave the most heartfelt prayer of thanks to Allah of my entire life for saving me by the most humble instrumentalities of a dead rat and a jackal He had caused to sacrifice its life to save my
own.

  One or the other might be laid to luck, but surely even an unbeliever could not imagine that two such occurrences, one on the heels of the other, could be anything but the Will of Allah the Merciful!

  But immediately upon expressing my gratitude to Allah for the salvation He had granted me, I cursed myself for such self-centeredness of soul and negligence of the duty of command.

  What of Salim and Abdullah?

  Allah the All Powerful could have performed the same miracle thrice.

  But had He?

  * * * *

  He had not. They were both dead.

  Apparently there was some sort of sensor field to activate the outer shock field, for from the look of his corpse, Abdullah had noticed nothing amiss at the edge of the devegetated zone, and had run about halfway through it before being electrocuted by the killing charge. He lay there on his back with his hair flaking still-smoking ash, the skin of his face blackened, his eyeballs boiled and burst, his distended tongue protruding between cracked lips, a death mask leering up at the heavens from the pit of the Great Satan’s hell. Salim was much the same thing, save that he had died face down, sparing me another vision of the same ghastly thing.

  Sparing me?

  Allah had spared me my life and the sight of the dead face of Salim, but not the vision which tortured my soul with a loathing for the life that He had spared.

  I had sent over two hundred of my own men on what was now revealed to me not only as a suicide mission, but a mission which never could have even succeeded in buying victory or anything else of worth with their wasted lives.

  In my mind’s eye, Abdullah’s death mask became the death mask of that multitude who must be meeting a similar fate—the collective death mask of the Ski Mask Jihadis who had followed Osama the Gun to their pointless destruction. Of the thousands of Nigerian soldiers dying under the rockets and bombs of the Falcons and Vultures to provide the diversion I had insisted was needed just to have this disastrous strategy tried and fail.

  In that darkest of moments I counted my own life as unworthy even of the sacrifice of the carrion-eating scavenger that had saved it.

  “Why me, Allah?” I shouted aloud. “Why was it your Will that I do this terrible thing? And having done it, why is it my life which You have spared and not that of Abdullah or Salim or countless others?”

  There was no answer from Allah save in the questions themselves. Why Allah had brought me to where I was now I could not know. But Allah had chosen to save me from the machineries of the Great Satan now taking so many other lives. Therefore He must have some further purpose for Osama the Gun. And I must find it.

  But what did Allah will me to do now?

  It would not be difficult to do nothing more than make my way stealthily back north to the Zone and across it to accept whatever punishment the Nigerian army command might mete out to the author of this catastrophe, impossible to deny the justice of any such punishment, and dishonorable cowardice to seek to escape it.

  But surely Allah had not sent the jackal to save my life just to have it taken as just punishment. Therefore there must be something that He willed me to do first, else I would already be dead.

  At moments when I had struggled to find the words to move the souls of others, Allah had chosen to speak through me when I had succeeded in emptying a place inside myself for Him to fill. Now I needed Him to speak to me, and that place was already empty of all but the desire to know His Will.

  What do you want me to do? I prayed silently.

  And the answer came from within in the form of a question as well.

  What do you want to do?

  And that question I could easily enough answer with one word.

  Destroy.

  Do what I had sent all those men to die trying to do and do it alone until I too died trying. Destroy the Great Satan entire if I could. Destroy Washington and New York if I could. Destroy the fleet of Whales off Port Harcourt if I could. Kill Americans if I could find any to kill.

  All of which was impossible. So it must be the Will of Allah that, like a single warrior bee defending its nest from a marauding bear, I destroy whatever machineries of the enemy it might be in my puny power to destroy. At least destroy the satanic pipeline that had killed Abdullah and Salim. Destroy as many other pipelines as I could. Destroy oil fields. Destroy until I was either slain or had no further means of destruction.

  But what means of destruction did I have?

  My gun might provide protection if Biafran soldiers happened upon me but it could do no damage to any part of the American oil apparatus. I could not reach a pipeline to stick a long length of explosive to it. I could not get near a field of oil wells. I had one conventional explosive charge with a timer. I could set the timer for 30 seconds, and throw it.

  I ran back to the pipeline with it, another section where there were neither the corpses of Abdullah or Salim which I would not desecrate further, nor that of the jackal which had saved my life. I stood just outside the outer electric shock zone, set the timer, counted to twenty, and threw it.

  The packet was oblong rather than round, it was three times as heavy as a conventional grenade, but it was only about a two meter throw from where I stood to the pipeline, and I had little trouble in hitting it. But the timing could not be precise, and it bounced off the metal pipe, fell heavily into the trench it ran through, and sat there for a few seconds before it exploded.

  It was an explosion of some force that sent a cloud of dust and earth from the bottom of the trench flying, which cleared in a moment to reveal a half-meter long crack in the metal pipe through which black crude was seeping.

  But the explosion hadn’t ignited the oil. Another futile failure!

  I would not let it be so!

  I aimed my gun at the oil pooling at the bottom of the pipe under the crack and held down the trigger until the clip was exhausted, spraying hot bullets into the oil, pinging and sparking off the metal of the pipe, and finally the slowly-growing pool of oil caught fire, low flames dancing over its surface, a mist of black smoke beginning to curl upwards.

  “Allahu Akbar!” I shouted.

  And immediately felt ridiculous. It was a slow leak and a modest oil fire spreading slowly up and down the trench in both directions. More futile still, I had no more such bombs.

  Or did I?

  Actually, I realized, I had something better. I had a reel of the adhesive plastic explosive and a pouch of more timers. I could cut off short lengths and attach timers to make grenades as we had at the oil field where we had never gotten to use them. I could roll the pliable stuff into hand-filling balls more suitable for throwing, and they would have a good chance of sticking to the metal of the pipelines if I could throw them on high gentle arcs.

  I cut the reel of adhesive explosives into lengths and rolled them into fifteen balls of the right size for throwing. I had only nine timers left in the pouch, but I remembered a lesson from the Caliphate spy school on how to improvise a primitive bomb. I fitted the nine electric timer detonators to nine of my improvised grenades, ripped the sleeve off my shirt, cut the cloth into five strips, cannibalized one of the remaining balls of explosive, and made five wicks which I stuck into the remain ones.

  I now had fourteen grenades. What use to make of them? I studied the map I had been given. There was a pipeline junction about fifty kilometers or so south of my position along the pipeline I had just attacked to so little telling effect that seemed to be the most important one in Biafra. There the pipeline from this field and two others, one of them from Warri with its refinery and major oil field to the west, converged on the main line southeast to the refinery and tanker loading terminal at Port Harcourt.

  The Nigerian diversion had drawn away the American robots that would otherwise have been patrolling these skies, we had seen no Biafran troops guarding anything down here in oil country, no doubt
because the Americans had confidence in their automated oil field and pipeline protection defenses.

  But Allah had chosen me to survive attacks on them with knowledge as to how they worked. And now I understood why and therefore His purpose. If I followed this pipeline I could reach that junction in a day and a night, stand well outside the defenses, and simply throw all my grenades where they would be mostly likely to really crack open pipelines, spread proper oil fires through the pipeline trenches towards Warri and Port Harcourt, Inshallah, and if Allah so willed it, even thereby damage a refinery.

  * * * *

  The pipeline I was followed serviced many fields of oil wells, which made it a part of the Biafran countryside of primary interest to the Americans. There were no major towns along the way, and what villages there were seemed to have been deliberately evacuated under orders of the Great Satan whose robotized machineries and guardians had turned it into a dead zone quite different from the blasted earth to the north, a feared habitat of mechanical rather than green-masked demons.

  It might not have been a dangerous passage, but I made it an arduous one, not pausing to sleep for the day and continuing on my sleepless way all through the next night. For while I had no way of knowing what was happening to the Nigerian offensive, it was hard to believe that the Falcons and Vultures were not harrying the survivors back through the Zone by now, if not across the Benué already. American satellites must have picked up some evidence of jihadi attacks on pipelines and oil fields, however futile, if the defenses themselves had not reported them automatically, and it seemed essential to hit such an important target before it could become defended from the air.

  As I drew near the pipeline junction, the terrain became intermittently marshy, and the pipeline I followed was suspended from low pylons over much of it. But it fed into the main east-west pipeline on a sort of higher and firmer island in the swamp chosen for the junction site, or for all I knew constructed for the purpose, but there was marshy woodland so close to it that I could have almost thrown my grenades from cover.