Osama the Gun

by Norman Spinrad

  Allah Himself had intervened to strike down the American bombers with lightning. The atomic bombs had been dropped but He had prevented them from exploding. Caliphate fighters had shot down the Vultures, though never had Caliphate aircraft been seen. Mecca had secretly been equipped with anti-aircraft missiles. Allah had caused Islam to enter the heart of the American President. It was the work of the Madhi. The Hidden Imam had emerged at the eleventh hour.

  It was all desperate magical thinking to explain the inexplicable, but then there was no other explanation for what seemed like salvation by magic, and tense waiting for the nuclear ax to fall had been replaced by guarded relief, relief by confusion, and confusion finally by prayers of thanks.

  The relief I had shared, and the confusion, but I could offer up no prayers of thanks, for I had heard it declared that “I do not like what I cannot understand,” and I certainly could not understand this. That the Americans might refrain from carrying out their threat out of strategic consideration I could well understand, knowing that I would do the same in their place, but that four of their bombers would head for Mecca to do the deed and nothing would happen was an unfathomable mystery.

  It was time for the Hadj to move on to Muzdalifa to gather pebbles with which to stone the Pillars of Satan the day after; past time, for the sun was already down before the confusion surrounding the blessed non-event died down to the point where a few hadjis, then groups, set off through the night, but at length the time-honored procession was underway in full, and I saw nothing else to do but go with it.

  It was a clear black desert night beneath a glorious starry firmament, cooler than the heat of the day, the buzzing of the Falcons overhead was barely noticeable, and they were invisible save when they chanced to pass across the silvery-white disk of the moon, conducive to clear thought and tranquility. How Islam had triumphed, I could not understand, but it seemed that it somehow had, and now it seemed crabbed of spirit not to offer up at least tentative prayers of thanks to Allah, and the bomb in the suitcase began to seem too heavy a weight to bear much further, a power entrusted to me which had happily been made superfluous.

  * * * *

  The Hadj camped for the night within and around Muzdalifa, and I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep almost as soon as I parked the van and turned off the engine, only to be awakened in the bleary light of dawn with a terrible thirst and hunger by the cries and shouts and babbling of thousands upon thousands of anguished voices.

  Dizzy, light-headed, with sparkling motes speckling my vision, I staggered out of the van into total chaos. Though this was the time of the sunrise prayer, hardly anyone was praying. Hadjis were running back and forth, in little circles, shouting at each other, at the sky, at nothing at all, tearing at their hair, beating at their chests with their fists, screaming, ululating, fairly howling with despair.

  But there was no mushroom pillar cloud on the horizon.

  Shakily, my head pounding, I grabbed the first man I could find who seemed capable of coherent speech, an old Bedouin by the look of him, standing silently beside a small clot of men quite in a fury shouting and waving their fists at the Falcons, now all too visible circling above.

  “Sons of dogs!”

  “Infidel bastards!”

  “Camel-fuckers!”

  “What happened?” I shouted.

  “The Americans have dropped atomic bombs on Mecca,” the old man told me.

  I blinked in utter confusion. “But I see no—”

  “They didn’t go off!” shouted one of the men in red-faced fury.

  “Praise be to Allah!” I cried. “But—”

  That one bomb might fail was certainly possible, but all four?

  “Praise be to Allah! Haven’t you heard, you fool?”

  “Heard what?”

  “They weren’t meant to explode—”

  “They were dropped by parachute—”

  “Parachute?”

  “The camel-fucking sons of dogs have taken Mecca hostage!”

  “Hostage?”

  The old Bedouin took me a few steps aside. “They’ve landed four bombs within Mecca. Announced that they will explode if there is any attempt to disarm or even touch them. And should there be any further attempt at a terrorist attack against America or Americans anywhere in the world, a button will be pushed in Washington, and the Holy City, the Ka’aba itself, will be no more.”

  “And how long will this…this hostage situation continue?”

  The old man sighed. When he shrugged, his shoulders remained bent. “This has not been said,” he told me softly. “But since it has not been said, I believe that they must mean it to be…forever.”

  And I understood. The Americans had turned the tactic of the jihadis they called terrorists against us. They had not taken an airplane hostage. They had not taken an embassy full of diplomats hostage. They had not destroyed Mecca as the Twin Towers had been destroyed by heroic Islamic martyrs. They had not destroyed anything. They did not have to. They would now never have to.

  They had taken Mecca hostage. Any attempt to liberate that hostage would destroy it. Anything at all that sufficiently displeased Washington would destroy it. The remaining bombs in the hands of the jihadis had been neutralized. My own bomb was now useless. Terrorism against the Great Satan had been rendered self-defeating, for it might be martyrdom to be rewarded in Paradise to give up one’s one life to wage jihad against the enemy, but who would take it upon his own soul to give up the Holy City and the Ka’aba to strike at America?

  Worse still, the world, even much of Dar al-Islam, would now see the sparing of Mecca as a act of American mercy, and its destruction in retaliation for some terrorist act against the United States by forewarned Muslims as their apostasy and just American vengeance.

  I hated the Great Satan as much as I ever had, but I could not but admire their dark genius. It was something more than their military might and economic power, or even the power over men’s minds of Hollywood, that made the United States the overlord of the planet. Who else could turn the weakness of failure to carry out a terrible threat into such strength? Who else could turn an act of mercy into a weapon more powerful than anything in their nuclear arsenal?

  Chess is supposed to be the national game of the Russians at which they claim to be the masters. But they too had lost when they played it for the world with the Americans.

  The Great Satan had once more won without firing a shot.

  And this time it was checkmate.

  * * * *

  It was also, the bitterest of ironies, the time to gather pebbles with which to stone the Pillars of Satan at Mina, a ritual that the Great Satan had now turned into a perfect gesture of futility. There were plentiful pebbles of all sizes everywhere and larger and more jagged rocks as well, but while it had been the custom to carefully select seven pebbles no larger than a fava bean, I observed many hadjis choosing rocks the size of oranges or even grapefruit, the better to vent their frustrated spleen against pillars of stone in lieu of taking it out on the real thing.

  If anything, I had been cast into a greater fury than most, but I gathered no pebbles or rocks, possessing as I did an atomic bomb which could vaporize those now empty symbols of that which I would destroy, if I wanted to make the greatest futile gesture of all.

  So too did I see no point in going to Mina with the Hadj to even witness such a pathetic demonstration of impotent rage. I had already completed this ritual on my true Hadj, when it held hopeful meaning, and so I determined to part from this Hadj which the Americans had turned into an angry and mournful march of defeat.

  My soul demanded that instead I make my own solitary pilgrimage to the heights west of Mina overlooking the hostage city in the bowl below, to seek some vision that might awaken that which slept with it. Surely if any such vision would come, it would come not in Mina, but upon viewing Mecca as the lost
city it had now become.

  And I realized that I might be setting eyes on it for the very last time, and it could even be that Allah meant them to bear witness, for at any moment, a jihadi might foolishly or madly commit an act that the Americans would deem terrorism against them and it would be gone.

  So as the body of the hadj began to make its way towards Mina with its merely symbolic ammunition, I broke off from it like a severed limb and found a road leading up to another road leading west atop the ridgeline. As I drove along it, I could see the great white tide of hadjis approaching Mina below and behind, like the waves of the sea about to break themselves against an implacable shore.

  But then this vision disappeared around a bend in the road, and I was alone, travelling on high through a treeless wasteland denuded of all life under a brilliant hot sun that bleached the cloudless sky to the near-whiteness of blue-tinted bone. Alone with the silence of Allah and the solitary torment of my solitary thoughts.

  Why had Allah allowed this humiliation of Islam come to pass? This was worse than even the defeat of a final jihad in battle, for now such a Jihad could not even be waged. Was that the Mercy of His Will, that Islam survive as the faith of a people deprived of the warrior’s honor, deprived of the rule over its own land and destiny like the Jews had been for two thousand years?

  I could not believe that Allah willed such a thing. I would not believe in a god who sold the honor, the very soul, of his believers for such a feckless survival. For this would be a god without courage or honor himself. Either that or Allah could not be All-Powerful, a god who could suffer defeat not merely at the hands of a true Devil arising in triumph from the pit of Hell, but who had not even the power to defeat what was after all merely a nation of men who would rule the Earth called the United States.

  I did something I had never done before or conceived of doing. Osama the Gun did the most terrible deed in a life of a man responsible for the deaths of unknown hundreds in the service of a cause that had failed and failed him. I committed blasphemy and apostasy.

  I chastised Allah and I shouted it aloud.

  “I have served your cause faithfully and courageously and honorably, Allah! I have done all I could to surrender to your Will! As millions upon millions of Muslims have done for two thousand years and as we would until the end of time! I demand of You—why have you forsaken us? I, Osama the Gun, who would joyously give up my own life for You and for Islam even if it meant not Paradise as a martyr but to be cast down for an eternity of torment in Hell. I demand an answer of You, not only for myself, but for those millions who would do just the same. Muslims would never forsake You! Why have You forsaken us?”

  There came no answer save the horror that filled my empty soul at my own words.

  “I beg of You,” I implored Allah, “if You will not grant me the mercy of Your Enlightenment, at least let the story of my life not end meaninglessly. Use me, Allah! Wield me! I am Osama Your Gun! That is what You have made me! That is what I have made myself in faithful obedience to Your Will! I am your weapon, Allah! Show me the way! Aim me! Pull the trigger! Let me not have lived and died in vain!”

  And Praise be to Allah, I was forgiven, and this prayer was answered, for I rounded a bend in the road, and there before me was the very vision I had beheld upon passing through the White Light at the end of that long dark tunnel, but transformed so that now I truly understood.

  Below to the east I could see vast sea of whiteness enveloping Mina. That was the Hadj, that was the Umma, that was Islam as it had been been before the border of Kuwait, before the Americans had destroyed its courage with a mere demonstration of its nuclear might. We had been made cowards. We should have pressed on, and if the price had been Mecca, so be it, for if we had paid it then, the Great Satan would not hold it hostage against our honor and courage now.

  Below to the west, huddled in a pit surrounded by mountains, was Mecca, and it was indeed as if the Holy City had already fallen into the Great Satan’s Hell. Only a trickle of traffic remained on the highways leading out of the now-abandoned city. No movement could be detected in its streets. Even the American Falcons had abandoned it, like carrion flies gone from a carcass they had thoroughly picked clean. Here was Kalil’s city of stones and bones. Here was the future ghost city I had envisioned before my eyes in the now.

  Allah need not speak to me. Allah need not send me any other vision. For now I knew His Will. There would no doubt be some thousands of stragglers left in the city, and in times to come, no doubt the Americans would not only allow it to be visited but encourage it, to make it all the better a hostage, and the courageous Faithful would brave it, but so too those merely testing their courage to visit this theme park of what it had been on a dare, this thrill ride of permanently impending nuclear death. In the end, the Americans might even allow infidel tourists, as they did at the monument they had built in New York to their own defeat by the jihadis of bin Laden. After all, there would be even more profit in it.

  This must not happen. This would not happen. Allah did not mean to allow it to happen. I must not allow it to happen. The Hadj was safely at Mina now, futilely performing a ritual meant to exorcise Satan from the lands and soul of men with symbolic weapons of stones. But Allah had given me a mighty weapon of cleansing Light. My prayer had been answered. Allah had aimed Osama His Gun. The terrible task and secret honor of pulling the trigger He had entrusted to my own will become His Own.

  The Hidden Madhi of the Shia would remain hidden forever. For now that Madhi been awakened within me and only I and Allah would ever know. It was enough, for now I understood how the story of my life would end and what it would mean. And so did Allah.

  CHAPTER 46

  I pass a few last vehicles fleeing the city, but the highway into Mecca is utterly empty, and the streets of the city barren of traffic, though I spy a few scuttling figures before I reach Al Masjed Al-Haram Street; the mad, the faithful beyond reason, the misguided holy, perhaps looters whose fear was overcome by their greed. And shop windows are broken and doors smashed open here and there along the thoroughfare leading to the Al-Haram Mosque.

  There is also evidence of looting at the cafes and tea-houses ringing the streets and open areas around the Mosque, but no living soul. The Al-Haram Mosque had never been more beautiful, made so much more achingly so now as I park before the Al Fatah gate and take up the evil weapon, now rendered holy by its purpose, that tears of both sorrow and joy well up in my eyes.

  The interior of the Mosque brings sudden shadowy coolness as I make my way, through what to my eyes becomes the enchanted forest of green pillars, towards what had been the navel of the world, towards the stones that must be gone from the world that the soul of Islam might live.

  The forest of pillars is not quite empty; here and there, in the distance among the pillars, occluded in the shadows, I can make out a few pilgrims at prayer. So be it then, I have killed before in the lesser service of Allah, and if these few must die, so must all men, and what better moment than at prayer, what better death than that of a martyr for Islam, knowingly or not, but known to Allah, and so to be transported at once to Paradise.

  It is then that I decide that I will not set the timer but die with them. For would I not too be transported to Paradise with them by the same burst of nuclear White Light? And if not, should I be cast down into the deepest pit of Hell for the terrible crime I must commit for the greater good, so be that too, if it was Allah’s Will.

  It would be worth it. I am doing this for no reward. I am doing this for Islam. For the world. Perhaps even for America itself. No Muslim will ever believe that it had not been an American bomb which had obliterated the corpse of Mecca. Even the Americans might believe that it must have been a malfunction of one of their warheads. Their hostage in any case will be gone. Islam will rise in outrage. The whole world will turn against them. The American people might themselves awaken in outrage at their own governmen
t for the terrible stain it had inflicted on their nation’s soul. Given the wisdom of time they might even therefore turn to Islam themselves. Of a certainly no earthly power will be able to resort to such a tactic again.

  When I emerge into the great open courtyard I am momentarily blinded by the sun. When my vision clears I am yet within the White Light. There am I. There is the Ka’aba. We are together and alone.

  I approach the cube of black stone draped in whiteness. May Allah forgive me or not, I am moved to make a final solitary tawaf. Seven times I circle the Ka’aba, praying not as the ritual required, or for His Mercy upon my soul, but only that my bomb will explode.

  When I complete my seven-fold circumambulation, I kneel before the Ka’aba and open the suitcase. I set the timer for immediate detonation. I poise the first finger of my right hand above the button. I leaned forward and kiss the black meteorite set in its jeweled ring in the European manner, as the farewell to a beloved that it is.

  “Allahu Akbar,” I pray, “there is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is His Prophet. And Praise and thankfulness unto You, Allah, for allowing Osama to be Your Gun.”

  And bring my finger down.

  Table of Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29