“Am I under arrest?” I demanded.
“We are not the police.”
“Then—”
“We know who you are, Osama the Gun.”
I felt a pang of fear, but it quickly passed, as I saw that the man, hard-eyed though he was, regarded me with an intensity out of place on the face of an arresting officer, an admiration, a respect, uncomfortably close to awe.
“And who are you?”
“Military Intelligence. We have need of you, Osama the Gun.”
“What need?”
“That is something I do not have the security clearance to have been told.” He smiled at me, and his awe was quite open, and there was a certain envy behind it. “But surely a mission that requires Osama the Gun must be one of great importance. It is an honor to meet you.”
I obeyed his order and dressed quickly in a state of excited curiosity, suddenly feeling more fully alive than I had in weeks. I was piled into a car, blindfolded, and driven somewhere in the desert outside the city to a waiting military helicopter, where the blindfold was removed, and, along with the leader of the men who had come to fetch me, flown low across the desert under a starry moonless night.
He never told me his name and we spoke little during about an hour’s noisy and rattling flight. When I managed to ask him how Military Intelligence had found me, he told me that, after all, I had gone to France as a government agent, received grenades and graffiti bombs there as leader of the Ski Mask Jihadis, re-entered the Caliphate, gained exit to fight in Nigeria, returned to the Caliphate, and checked into two hotels, all on the same passport.
That much should have been obvious to me all along, and what it meant was a revelation that made me feel something of a fool; if I had ever been the target of Caliphate assassins, which now seemed doubtful, they could not have been Military Intelligence, and some faction there at least had been protecting me all along.
After an hour or so, I was blindfolded again. The flight continued for about another ten minutes, then the helicopter landed, and I was led by the hand for a few yards, then into a elevator which seemed to descend to some depth, led out of the elevator, and left standing there blindly for a few minutes longer before the blindfold was removed.
I was in a corridor with several ordinary doors along its length and a heavy steel one flanked by soldiers armed with machine-pistols at the far end. My minder went through one of the lesser doors, emerged a moment later with a green Ski Mask, put it on my head, ushered me to the steel door, and then departed. One of the soldiers opened the door, I stepped through it, and the door was dogged shut behind me.
I found myself inside a windowless concrete bunker. There were a half dozen soldiers in Military Intelligence uniforms standing guard over what seemed to be nothing more than a dozen suitcases looking as if they had seen much wear. There were eleven men in civilian clothing and a man in the uniform of a Military Intelligence general.
All of them wore the green ski mask.
The general saluted me before I could salute him.
“Jihadis,” he barked, “this is Osama the Gun!”
For a moment there was nothing but silence.
“You are wondering why you have been brought here,” the general said. It was not a question.
He walked over to the pile of suitcases, picked one up, and brought it over for my inspection. From his posture, it seemed to be rather heavier than it should have been. He handed it to me. Indeed it was, it must have weighed twenty kilos.
“This is why you are here,” he told me. “Open it,” he ordered.
I put the suitcase down, kneeled over it, and opened it. The lid was lined with thick dull gray metal foil. The contents were enclosed in the same stuff. All that protruded was a small keyboard with numbers and a red button that I recognized as some sort of detonator.
“Do you know what this is?” said the general.
I was beginning to believe that I did, and the slow realization filled me with both licentious excitement and disbelieving dread.
“This is an atomic bomb!” the general proclaimed as if he were introducing a famous cinema star or a head of state. Or the Prophet himself.
“These are all atomic bombs,” he said, gesturing at the rest of the suitcases. “Low-yield devices, perhaps fifty kilotons, no more, but suitable for our purpose.”
“And…and what purpose might that be…?” I stammered numbly.
“The purpose of Osama bin Laden,” he told me, and the eyes behind the mask burned like smoldering coals. “The purpose of the Sons of Osama. You know that purpose better than any man here, do you not, for you served that purpose fully and faithfully in France and Nigeria, Osama the Gun. The bringing about of a true and faithful Caliphate that will rule the world in the name of Allah.”
“And you believe you know how this may be done?”
“I know how it must be done!” the general proclaimed fiercely. “The only way it can be done! The way of Osama bin Laden and the Sons of Osama, and your way, Osama the Gun. The Great Satan has never been afraid to call it by its true name—terrorism! In any war, those who strike the greater terror in the heart of their enemy will be victorious. Bin Laden struck fear into the hearts of the Americans and so caused them to fear for their lives more than those willing to die for Islam feared for theirs. The Sons of Osama, once they had the Pakistani nuclear arsenal, made the Americans fear destruction of their cities more than the loss of control of the oil of Saudi Arabia. The Americans are willing to kill for their evil cause but not to die for it. And so what they fear most is those who have no fear at all to die for theirs. Jihadis. Holy Warriors of Islam who do not fear the martyr’s death but embrace it.”
These words certainly rang true in my heart but events had taught me otherwise.
Jihadis fought without fear. The Americans fought as cowards.
“It is true that jihadis fight without fear and the Americans fight as cowards,” I told the general. “Yet the cowardly Americans have won here.”
“Battles but not the war!” he fairly shouted. “And these they won only because the Caliph and the Council were themselves cowards! Had they done what the true jihadis they executed demanded and threatened to use their nuclear weapons to destroy the Crusader fleet if it were not withdrawn—”
“The Americans would have called their bluff!”
“And if it had not been a bluff? If we had carried out the great deed?”
“The Americans would have destroyed Mecca. And perhaps much more.”
The general’s voice became calmer and colder and his words reminded me that the fiery-eyed man behind the mask had, after all, risen to that high rank as an intelligence officer.
“Would they?” he said insinuatingly. “Would not the fear of losing millions of their own people in New York and Washington and Los Angeles have stayed their hand? And another fear peculiar to these people, the fear of being hated by the world, for the Americans are a people who long to be loved more than to be feared. And if they overcame those fears, retaliating for our strike against a purely military target consisting mostly of robots with the destruction of a Holy City and tens of thousands of civilian lives, and brought about a nuclear holocaust, they would became a hated pariah people until the end of time.…”
My mind told me that there was cold hard sense in this since these words mirrored my very own thoughts.
But…
I did not utter the word, but the general seemed to see it in my eyes.
“It is simple,” he said. “The Americans fight for oil and so their courage is limited. We fight for Islam and Allah and so our courage is unbounded because ours is the ultimate cause. We would gladly die for it, we would do any deed to bring our victory about. They know they would not. And if we make the Americans understand this truth, they will fear us far more than we fear them, and that victory will be assured.”
And this undeniable truth finally awoke my Holy Warrior’s sleeping passion.
“Allahu Akbar, you are right!” I declared whole-heartedly. “But how?”
“With these!” the general declared, gesturing at the suitcase bombs once more. And then he half-turned to likewise indicate the silently standing men wearing the face of Osama the Gun. The face that once more became also my own.
“These men are all volunteers,” he said. “Jihadis. Suicide bombers willing to die for the Caliphate and Islam at your command.”
“At my command?”
“You are Osama the Gun, you were the face of Islam in France, you were the hero of Islam in Nigeria who the Americans most feared, yours was the face of thousands of jihadis marching through the desert to the border of Kuwait,” the general told me, and I blushed beneath my mask to hear such words, and even more so the soft and almost worshipful voice in which they were uttered.
“You were the inspiration of the men who were executed, you are the inspiration of these men who volunteered to be your Ski Mask Jihadis,” the general went on, “and you are mine.”
And he turned to these men and raised his fist in the air.
“Osama the Gun!” he shouted.
“Osama the Gun!” they roared.
My eyes filled with tears. I was as a man reborn. The Madhi that had slept within me had been awakened by beholding it awake in them. I felt the power of the Will of Allah once more moving through me. Into my hands had been placed the greatest power on Earth, the power of the atomic bomb, and in my mind’s eye I saw it transformed into the great White Light, the greatest weapon of the forces of satanic darkness purified into the Sword of Allah.
Yet those hands trembled at the weight of it, at the thought of wielding it, and my spine grew cold with the fear of such responsibility. Confusion roiled my mind, for I had no idea of what the general, these jihadis, Allah Himself, were really asking me to do.
“But what orders would you have me give?” I asked the general plaintively. “How am I to use these men and these bombs to serve our cause?”
“That is for you to say, Osama the Gun,” the general replied in a voice at least as plaintive as mine. “Against the oil fields and facilities, as you did in Nigeria? Perhaps we might airdrop jihadis into Mexico and Canada to steal across the borders into American cities? Or make an example of the perfidious Kuwaitis?”
The man had no more tactical plan than did I! Suddenly the whole thing had taken on the air of a farce. But the suitcase bombs were no farce. These brave jihadis had not volunteered to be players in a farce. Clueless though this general and Military Intelligence behind him might be, they too were in courageous and holy earnest. And so was I. And there was no one else to rescue this mission from the ridiculous.
I stepped forward to address Ski Mask Jihadis for one last time. The general retreated into their ranks. Under the circumstances, it had never been easier to empty my mind of all thought to open a void for Allah to fill and speak from, for while the Madhi within me might be awake, I had no thoughts of my own and no words with which to frame them at all.
And the White Light entered into me and I into it, the blinding light of the power of the atom become the illuminating White Light of Allah, and the words came pouring forth.
“Yes, it is Osama the Gun who speaks to you, the man who was behind the mask you all wear. But that man has said before, and he says it again now, that all who would wear this mask into battle are Osama the Gun. I am Osama the Gun. You are Osama the Gun, each one of you alone, and all of us together. We are Osama the Gun!”
There was silence. No one moved. The very motes of dust seemed frozen in the air.
“We are equals in the eyes of Allah. And so I will not tell you what to do with the power placed in your hands, for I do not even yet know what I will do with the power Allah has placed in mine. And so my only order is this: take these bombs and go where you will. Await the order not of Osama the Gun or any man but that of Allah. Empty yourselves of your own will and await His command. Look within, surrender to His Will, awaken to His Will, and when you know what to do, you will know that the order is His. There is no god but Allah, and as Mohammed was His Prophet, so will you all be His Guns.”
There was a long moment of silence. As all of us were masked none of us knew with what emotion any of us had greeted these words.
It was the general who broke the silence.
“Allahu Akbar!” he shouted. “Osama the Gun!”
“Osama the Gun!” the jihadis responded.
And so did I.
For as they saluted me so did I salute them.
We all saluted the Madhi within us.
The Madhi revealed by the mask of Osama the Gun.
CHAPTER 44
And so as the time of the Hadj grew near, I found myself with the power to destroy a city in a suitcase in the closet of my hotel room in Mecca without at all knowing what I could accomplish with it, and there were eleven other men scattered about out there somewhere no doubt wondering the same thing.
Or so I hoped. There was an aphorism attributed to another terrorist force, the Irish Republican Army, or perhaps put abroad against them by their British enemies: “Now is the time for a futile gesture.”
The opportunities for futile atomic gestures by jihadis whose frustrated impatience outran their strategic sense abounded; take a bomb out in a small boat and try to take out the submerged American Whales, attempt to enter Canada or Mexico and steal across the long borders into the United States itself, explode an atomic bomb in Kuwait or another of the renegade former Caliphate provinces, destroy a major oil field.
But none of these actions, save the destruction of an American city, which seemed impossible to achieve, or anything else I could imagine, seemed capable of provoking the Americans to a retaliation that would rouse the ire and courage of all of Dar al-Islam to wage fearless Holy War against the Great Satan and turn the United States into a pariah nation in the eyes of the rest of the world.
And so I obeyed by own council to remain calm and patient and hoped that the others would do the same, awaiting a vision, a revelation, anything, that would show me the way to use the power that Allah had entrusted to my hands.
In the meantime, the remains of the Caliphate and the Holy City of Mecca were preparing for the Hadj in the grimmest circumstances in the history of Islam. Pilgrims began arriving at the Jeddah airport and the coastal ports, but though the Americans did nothing to hinder their entry and even withdrew their Falcon patrols from the skies over the oil facilities, there were understandably far fewer than normal, the early estimate being that the final count would be far less than a million.
Workers began erecting the tent city on the heights between the lip of the bowl in which Mecca nestled and Mina. Troops re-entered Mecca in modest numbers to keep order, though without tanks, armored personnel carriers, or water cannons. Streets and buildings were freshly cleaned. Those of the populace who had left but would be engaged in lucrative commerce when the hadjis poured in returned to the tea houses, cafes, restaurants, and shops. Hotel room rates were raised in hopeful anticipation, even that of my own formerly cheap room. On the surface, Mecca returned to a semblance of preparation for its timeless holy mission as host of the Hadj.
Crowds of early arrivers in their umrahs trooped down Masjed Al-Haram Street from the monorail station to perform their tawaf, and the hadjis in their white robes began to dominate the streets, the tea houses and cafes, the restaurants, the mosques, like the first flights of migratory birds flocking to a lake.
But the feeling of joyous anticipation was missing, the sense of arrival at a long journey’s triumphal end, the peaceful and solemn immersion in the communal whole. There was too much contentious babble on the streets, too much pushing and shoving, too much serious haggling in the souks.
It was almost as I had feared, and Mecca had be
come a kind of theme park of itself, indeed something even worse, for the atmosphere was not that of a city thronged with boorish but happy tourists that I knew from summertime Paris, but more like that of what the Temple Mount in Jerusalem must have been like thronged with Muslims determined to show their defiance by carrying out the ritual of Friday prayers at the Dome of the Rock under the Israeli guns.
* * * *
Then, as the tide of incoming hadjis was reaching its attenuated full force, the worst happened. I was finishing my lunch in a small restaurant when several hadjis burst in, their ihrams in disarray, their faces contorted with fear, waving their arms and babbling in terrorized voices.
“—bomb—”
“—oil field—”
“—the Americans—”
“—go off—”
There was immediate tumult and confusion as everyone leapt up from their tables to surround these birds of ill-omen, myself included.
“—an atomic bomb—”
“—the Caliphate is under nuclear attack?”
“—where—”
“—no—”
Fearful and yet hopeful at the same time, I shoved my way through the crush and grabbed one of these frantic messengers by the drape of his ihram. “Silence!” I roared. “Let this one man speak!”
The room fell silent. The man I held caught his breath and composed his scattered thoughts.
“Someone was caught with an atomic bomb in a suitcase—”
“—it didn’t go off?—”
“—near an oilfield—”
“—by the Americans—”
“—dead—”
“—alive—”
“All I know is that someone was caught with a suitcase bomb somewhere near an oilfield…” The man shrugged. “It didn’t go off, or he was caught before he could detonate it…” He shrugged again. “Dead…? Alive…? the Americans…? We heard it on the street, that’s all we know.”
There was no television set in the restaurant, which emptied out immediately, as everyone rushed out to find one. There was utter pandemonium in the streets, people dashing every which way, heedlessly knocking into each other, shoving their way into any cafe, restaurant, tea-house, shop where a television set might be found, or trying to reach their own homes through a city that had become clogged with a continuous frantic mob.
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