Osama the Gun

by Norman Spinrad

  The pipelines met in a system of wheeled valves leading into and out of a sealed central pumping station that made a steady and low rhythmic sound, not that of a petrol engine and there was no exhaust, so it must be powered by fuel cells or possibly even a nuclear reactor.

  The installation was no more than a dozen feet on a side, but it was defended by an enclosure of double fencing constructed of components identical to those of the much large enclosure around the oil field we had tried to attack.

  There were only four of the aluminum poles needed to generate the laser beam fence, one at each corner of the enclosure, but they had the same clusters of floodlights, strobes, and that terrible sonic weapon at their summits. The inner fence was the same piping capable of inundating the area with poison gas, though here the area to be defended was much smaller. The Americans hadn’t bothered to pave the area between the fences here and there was only a single robot tank on patrol, taking only a minute or so to make its solitary rounds.

  Although I was becoming a bit giddy from lack of sleep, I studied this installation carefully from the cover of the wooded marshland, considering my options, and planning my attack for almost an hour.

  I had to eliminate the robot tank first, for surely the defense system would pass it through the laser fence at the first sign of attack and there was no way I could match my Chinese slide-gun against what it had in those twin turrets. If I took out the robot tank, I wouldn’t have to get inside the laser fence to throw my grenades, but the sirens would go off immediately, the subsonics would be liquefying my bowels, the supersonics would make thought very difficult, and I’d have only two or three minutes before the poison gas reached the outer limit of my possible throwing positions. I had to program my actions beforehand to combat these programmed defenses. I had to make myself into a machine to fight these machines.

  So first two grenades at the tank on fifteen second timers, that should be enough to destroy it. Then the pipeline junction and the pumping station. Break open the main pipeline from the west and the one coming down from the north, so that oil meant to pass through the junction and the pumping station to Port Harcourt would instead fed a growing lake of oil set aflame and, oil being able to float on water, perhaps spread far and wide through these marshlands before the flow feeding it could be shut off.

  I made a sack with the remains of my shirt, tied it around my left shoulder, put twelve grenades in it, palmed the remaining two, timed the turning of the corner by the robot tank, set their electronic timers for fifteen seconds, shouted “Allahu Akbar!” and ran.

  I reached within a yard or so of the laser fence within seconds as the robot tank was turning the corner and coming towards me. It was only a few yards away as I threw the grenade in my right hand at it, flipped the grenade in my left hand to my right, threw that, dropped to the ground and rolled under its fusillade of needles and bullets as my grenades exploded.

  The electronic klaxons started their monstrous wailing as I staggered to my feet, my mind emptied of thought by the supersonic wail, my bowels loosening under the subsonic assault. But I had prepared myself for this, not attempting to control my bowels, nor my thoughts, allowing the actions I had programmed my body to perform beforehand to fill me with themselves.

  The robot tank had not been blown to pieces, but the upper surface with its gun turrets was a mass of jagged metal and lightly steaming white smoke and it was not moving. The inner fence was already pumping out the poisonous greenish-yellow gas and the cloud of it was rolling toward me. I had no more than a minute to destroy whatever I could within the enclosure before it either drove me out of throwing range or killed me.

  I had seven grenades with electronic timers left in my sack. With my brain reeling from the klaxon screeching and my bowels voiding, I became a throwing machine; reach into sack, pick up grenade, activate detonator, throw, reach into sack, pick up grenade, activate detonator, throw, reach into sack, pick up grenade, activate detonator, throw.…

  I must have thrown seven grenades in less than fifteen seconds, for not until I had thrown the last one did the grenades which had stuck to the sealed pumping station, to valves, to pipelines leading into them, begin to explode, one after the other, with almost the rapidity of a machine gun burst, a tremendous train of booms at close range, flying shards of metal, gushers of oil, balls of flame, rising puffs of roiling black smoke, a great noise, but not great enough to drown out the klaxons of the Great Satan. And the linear front of poison gas was reaching the laser fence as it poured toward me.

  I turned and ran.

  I ran back into the swampy woodland until the ceaseless sound became distant enough for me to bear before I turned to look. From where I stood within the trees, all I could see was a pall of oily black smoke rising above a reddish-orange glow, and attenuating tendrils of greenish-yellow fog seeping through the vegetation.

  The sun angle told me where east was, the direction from which the main pipeline pumped the spoils of the oilfields around Warri towards the hopefully destroyed pipeline junction and pumping station. I had five grenades left, the ones with the simple wicks, four to blow open that pipeline, and one to set the oil pouring out of it aflame.

  I couldn’t see the pipeline from where I stood, but using the sun above and the pillar of smoke behind me to orient myself, I proceeded east through the woods and then more open marshland until the sounds of the klaxons had died away into easy bearability, and then simply turned a right angle to the left and proceeded along that line until I encountered the pipeline suspended from low pylons crossing a stretch of largely treeless swamp with sluggish little streams veining it. I knew all too well that it would defend itself from close approach with its killing electrical charge.

  But I didn’t need to approach close enough to adhere a strip of explosive to the metal by hand. All I had to do was stand at a safe distance, four or five meters away, light the wicks of four grenades, and lob them in high arcs so that they would stick to the top of the pipe.

  And so I stood shin deep in swampy muck as close to the pipeline as I dared, lit the wick of a grenade, and lobbed it while the wick had not burned down far. It hit the top of the pipeline at something of an angle, but more or less stuck, the ball of adhesive explosive slowly oozing down the side of the pipe as the wick continued to burn.

  I let the wick of the second grenade burn down further before I tossed it, trying to have all the grenades go off at more or less the same time; I had better luck, it stuck squarely atop the pipe not far from the first. My aim was bad with the third grenade; it bounced low off the side of the pipe, fell to the muddy ground beneath it, but at least its wick continued to burn. The fourth grenade hit the top of the pipe squarely and stuck.

  I quickly retreated to a safe distance as the wicks burned down.

  The fourth grenade, which I had thrown with the shortest wick, exploded first, blowing a gaping hole in the top of the pipe, but nothing came gushing up. Then the first grenade went off, cracking the side of the pipe for almost its entire circumference, and thick black oil came pouring out the bottom of the crack. Then the second grenade exploded atop the pipe, enlarging the hole already there, and the pipe creaked and groaned as its wounded section began collapsing of its own weight and slumping towards the ground.

  Then the third grenade beneath it exploded and the pipeline broke in two.

  I had expected a mighty torrent of oil to come roaring out, but instead there was only a shallow river of oil rising to no more than a quarter of the height of the gap in the pipeline as it poured out into the swamp.

  Perhaps this was normal, perhaps not, but what it meant was that I felt had to wait longer than I had expected to use my last grenade, an hour or more instead of minutes, as the oil continued to flow out of the broken pipeline at this steady but rather stately pace, spreading out on the marshy ground before me to form a pool like a great black ink blot, a pool with tendrils expanding into a
greater pool, and finally something that could be called a proper lake.

  Then I lit the wick of the final grenade, let the wick burn almost all the way down, and tossed it out over the lake of oil.

  Praise be to Allah, He surely must have guided me, for I could not have timed it so perfectly by myself.

  The grenade went off at exactly the moment it touched the surface of the oil igniting a low fountain of flame that almost scorched my eyelids as it spread over the surface of the oil lake back towards the river of oil continuing to pour out of the break in the pipeline.

  I dashed back to observe what would happen from a safe distance as the oil fire reached the mouth of the stream coming out of the broken pipe. The river of oil caught fire itself and became a tongue of flame reaching east back into the pipeline. How far it would reach, I did not know, but I prayed to Allah that He would let it slither back up the pipeline like a serpent of fire all the way to the refinery at Warri.

  But I could stay to watch no more.

  In the distance I began to hear the angry buzzing of a hive of approaching American Falcons.

  I had done everything I could to redeem myself. It was time to make my way north back through the lands of the Biafrans and the no man’s land of the Zone to face the justice of men for the deeds I had done.

  As I disappeared into the swampland with the sounds of the demons of the Great Satan behind me, I prayed to Allah to forgive me if they could not.

  CHAPTER 32

  For the rest of the day, I made my way north through the oil country swampland, with a pillar of black smoke rising into the heavens behind me like an enormous thunderhead cloud that would neither break into thunder, lightning, and downpour nor dissipate, and the furious Falcons of the Great Satan buzzing overhead, circling, swooping low, trying to seek me out.

  But I was one man in a wilderness, and kept to what cover I could find, even when it meant wide detours from my northward path, so the metal demons could never find me, and after night had fallen, the starry skies grew silent, I ate some field rations, and slept for a few hours.

  I awoke in the darkness with the black cloud to the south faintly lit by an orange glow from below, so that it was easy enough to continue on my way north, and I made good progress, so that when the sun rose I had reached drier ground, mixed grassland and copses of trees. I would have expected such land to be more dangerous to cross, but the aerial demons of the Great Satan were nowhere to be seen.

  The black cloud to the south was still visible, and not at all diminished in size from this vantage, meaning that since I had traversed two score kilometers or so, it was be larger now. The oil fire had not only not gone out, it was growing.

  It but slowly dwindled from my view during the next three days as I made my way through the inhabited lands between the oil field country and the Zone, marching steadily through the nights, sleeping through the height of the daylight hours, moving more stealthily during the hours after dawn and before dusk through forests and ravines.

  As I made my way north, from my daylight hiding places, I could see Igbo traffic on the roads moving south; cars, buses, trucks overloaded not only with people, but baggage and even household goods, and there were also people on foot, even with goats and cattle, clearly refugees.

  But from what? There was nothing to the north but the blasted battlefield of the Zone and surely the Nigerian offensive had long since been driven back across the Benué by the Falcons and Vultures, and in any case had been launched far to the east.

  And where were they all going? And why?

  It was stranger still, for the refugees were moving towards what now was clearly revealed as a great oil fire by no means going out or being quenched, for as my distance from it lowered the top of the smoke cloud above towards the horizon day by day, it also spread out wider, so that on the morning of the fourth day, the sun rose through a low black mist that stretched almost all the way across the southern horizon, casting long glorious rays of the deepest orange all along the horizon line.

  Before noon, distance had finally put the the pall of smoke beyond my view, and I was nearing the fringes of the Zone. I had thought to avoid showing myself during the daylight hours on this treeless battlefield plain, waiting until nightfall in the last cover of woodland, moving at night, hiding from the American robot raptors as best I could during the day in one of the many bomb craters.

  But as I reached the Zone with many hours of daylight left, having not heard a single distant engine in the sky for days now, with my field rations all but exhausted as well as my physical strength, I found myself eager to learn the answers to the mystery of their disappearance and the southward flight of the refugees. And while I feared how I would be greeted when I reached the Nigerian side of the river, I could not deny that even immediate summary execution would be just.

  And so as penance, as acceptance of such justice be it the Will of Allah, as a sort of pilgrimage like the hadj itself through a very different kind of desert, of the land, and of the soul, I set out across the Zone in the merciless light of day.

  Nothing happened. I traversed the wasteland alone under an empty sky until the sun set and as far into the night as I could before weariness forced me to eat my final rations and sleep. I arose well before dawn and continued to march northward. Sunrise found me trudging once more through a midden of blasted earth and bleached skeletal remains under a pitiless sun in heavens deserted by any sign of Satan or man. I staggered on all through the day and into the next night growing dizzy with lack of food and fatigue.

  I do not remember falling asleep but I must have, for I was awakened by already bright sunrise lying on open ground staring into the empty eyes of a whitened and cracked open human skull. I leapt to my feet in shock and alarm, my weakened knees gave way, I staggered and fell, then got to my feet more gingerly and trudged onward.

  The heat of the sun in this clime, which had never seemed excessive to a son of the Arabian desert, now scourged me on my hadj across the wasteland towards the river and what awaited me on the farther shore, so that by the time I saw the waters of the Benué in the distance some time after it had passed its zenith, at first I believed it a mirage.

  But it did not shimmer like a desert mirage and rather than fade away or disappear beneath the horizon like a mirage as I approached, the vision grew firmer, clearer, undeniably real. When I reached the river bank I saw no rafts, not a single Zodiac along it waiting to take me across, and the far bank was utterly deserted too.

  No, the far bank was not completely deserted.

  Far to the west, I glimpsed the shape of a tent. There were two banners on flagpoles flanking it. There were two vehicles parked near it. And below on the river some kind of boat.

  I ran, staggered, ran, staggered, and ran some more until I finally stood looking directly across the river at what I had seen from afar. There was a tent. There was a jeep parked behind it and behind that a Nigerian army truck. On the shore was a rowboat with an outboard motor. The tent was indeed flanked by two flagpoles. I could clearly see the banners flying from them. I knew what they were but I did not understand.

  The one on the right was the white crescent on a green field, the flag assigned by General Moustapha to the Ski Mask Jihadis.

  On the flagpole to the left someone made a crude flag with a piece of white cloth and a graffiti-bomb. An eyeless green face and a hand holding the silhouette of an Israeli mini-Uzi. The ensign of Osama the Gun.

  I fired my gun in the air. One, two, three, four men, all in Nigerian army uniforms, emerged from the tent. They all waved excitedly. It was clearly a welcome. Two of them descended to the boat, one started the motor, the other took up a position in the prow, and they came across the river towards me as I scrambled to meet them. The boat and I reached the shore at roughly the same time.

  The soldier in the prow was General Hamza, beaming at me as if I were his long-lost brother
. Lieutenant General Hamza, for now there was a third star on his shoulder.

  “What happened?” was all I could say.

  “The war is over!” Hamza cried. “You’re the hero!”

  “What?”

  “Well not exactly over,” Hamza said as he helped me into the boat, “they’re still negotiating the terms of surrender with the Igbos, but you are the hero of United Nigeria, I’ve got another promotion thanks to you, and the fighting, at least, really is over.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Hamza nodded to the soldier in the rear of the boat, who turned it around. “The Americans are gone,” Hamza told me as we sped back across the river. “Pulled out. Turned tail. The Whales have disappeared with their Falcons and Wasps and Vultures. The Great Satan has abandoned Free New Biafra to its own devices, defeated by the notorious terrorist agent of the Caliphate, Osama the Gun!”

  Hamza laughed good-naturedly at what must have been the utterly dumbfounded look on my face. “It’s quite a long story, Osama,” Hamza said, “and you look like you need some food and strong coffee. If we weren’t both Muslims, I’d say you could use a good stiff drink. Maybe several.”

  * * * *

  The tent had a cot, director’s chairs, a portable toilet, a field stove, a refrigerator, a sergeant to do the cooking and cleaning, another to do the driving and general work, and a lieutenant to preserve General Hamza from the indignity of having to order non-commissioned officers about. He had been waiting for me to return for three days now, or so he told me over Arab-style coffee while his cook prepared a spicy stew of lamb and vegetables and a pot of cassava mush to eat it over.

  “You mean hoping I would…”

  Hamza shrugged. “Call it what you will. I may not be the most devout Muslim in Nigeria, but I could not believe that Allah would allow you to accomplish such a great deed and then allow you to perish.”