“Is that so?” The robed man turned squarely on Koenig, his smile widened.
“Augustine, this is Imam Yusuf Akef, one of our hospital’s administrators. Imam, this is my childhood friend, Augustine Koenig.”
The cop and Imam shook hands.
“I’m so glad to meet a friend of our Doctor Alamoudi,” Yusuf said. “You must be surprised to find that Hatem has grown up to become such a fine doctor.”
“Not at all,” Augustine answered. “He was always the brightest one in our bunch.”
Hatem smiled, a little wanly, thought Koenig.
Yusuf Akef looked down at the photos the men were still holding.
“Your children?”
“Yes,” Hatem answered. “We were showing them off to each other.”
“Yes, yes,” said Yusuf, his eyes still on the small photos. “And who can blame young fathers for such pride. I have five of my own.”
“They’re beautiful, your children,” Hatem said. “I’ve seen them at the Mosque, often.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” Akef said, looking up again. “You have beautiful children as well, brother Hatem and so do you officer Koenig. Your daughter is lovely.”
“Thank you.”
“But all children are lovely, are they not?” Yusuf continued. “They are all blessings and gifts from our most benevolent God, Allah. Blessings and gifts, all of them; but, they are hard work too.”
“Yes,” the two childhood friends agreed.
“Particularly daughters,” the Imam says. “They require a little extra attention if they are to grow into the properly pious women that will make their fathers proud. You both have daughters, so you must know all about it.”
Augustine looked at the Imam for a long moment, wondering what he meant. Akef picked up on his confusion and pointed to a spot on the wall a few feet from them. Koenig turned to see three framed posters. Mounted in the center of the trio, between the government’s Food Pyramid and the yearly reminder to vaccinate for the flu season, the middle poster announced that the city’s new law mandated that all girls be circumcised by age twelve. Augustine was glad he had the back of his head to the Imam. It allowed him to stifle the contempt that contorted his face for an instant. Hatem, however saw the look and the struggle to mask it with a poker face before his old friend Augustine turned back to the Imam.
“Oh, that,” Koenig said flatly behind the thinnest of smiles. He wanted nothing more than to split the Imam’s skull open with his nightstick, kick in his teeth and then empty his clip into what remained of the man’s face, but Augustine still held Elsa’s picture in his hand; and, that alone kept him smiling at the man he had just viciously murdered in his heart.
“Good seeing you again, Hatem,” Koenig said, pumping his old friend’s hand in his. “God bless you and yours, brother.”
“Good seeing you too, Auggie,” Hatem responded, the cowed look in his eyes lifting for a brief moment. “God bless you and your family.”
And with that he turned his back on the men and left the hospital without another look at the Imam.
It was a week before he left the force.
In the years since, the atmosphere in Detroit has grown ever more poisoned, the eyes of both Christian and Muslims ever more cowed. The look he sees in his neighbor’s eyes is one Koenig knows too well. It is the haunting look of defeat he thought he’d seen for the last time when he shook the dust of Iraq off his boots and boarded the C-130 for home.
He never thought he would encounter it in the states, but he did. It is everywhere in Dearborn and Detroit and spreading throughout the nation. Fear and despair cast their ever-growing shadows across the land, closing like two hands around America’s throat, strangling the life out of the country he loves.
Not for much longer, Augustine tells himself, not now that the revolution is launched. The Crusade will put an end to things as they are. And it will be sooner rather than later.
They drive past Kowalski’s Sausage Factory. The building is dark and its windows are boarded up. A score or more figures are gathered beneath it, clustered around four fires burning in oil barrels. The flames throw long, macabre shadows of the huddled bodies against the walls and across the factory’s parking lot. Kowalski’s was shut down in 2015 along with Dave’s Sausage, the Dearborn Sausage Company and a number of smaller outfits when the city became sharia-compliant. Sheik Qassim Abdul Zahra, the man the Detroit Times called the Motor City Mullah, ignored the entreaties of workers at the time and used the newly adopted sharia laws to impose the strictures of Islam’s halal code throughout Detroit and all its suburbs. Overnight, the city’s tradition of sausage making was made illegal by the Muslim dietary code. Pork products disappeared from menus and supermarkets. Thousands of sausage factory workers were added to the ranks of the unemployed in an already depressed economy.
Behind the wheel, Ditka stops singing and shakes his head at the sight. His easy smile disappears. The imposition of halal’s pork-less dietary code was an unforgivable offense to Doug’s appetite and palate. He mutters something about ragheads under his breath and drives on.
Doug Ditka, like Augustine, was once a cop. Ditka left Detroit’s police force at the same time that Koenig left Dearborn’s, the summer of 2016 when their union capitulated to Detroit’s Sharia City Council. Until then they had suffered silently through the quarterly sensitivity classes required of them as police officers, but when weeklong retreats to teach them to live like a Muslim were mandated, many a cop drew the line. Neither Ditka nor Koenig would allow themselves to be made further part of Sheik Zahra’s sharia makeover of their cities. Quitting the jobs they loved was the only protest they and scores of others had recourse to.
The Motor City Mullah was unfazed by the defections or the protests that followed. Though unelected, Sheik Zahra ruled his corner of Michigan through city councils he had, over many years, stacked with loyal devotees. Through them, the man Newsweek dubbed America’s Ayatollah, went on to use the police and fire departments to confiscate church bells, lest their ringing ‘offend Muslim sensibilities’ and to remove crosses from church exteriors, ‘lest their sight dredge up painful memories of the bloody crusades.’
The Christian flight began in earnest then. Those who stayed behind were forced to live in what Islam called dhimmitude, a second class status that not only barred one from positions of power, but also exacted the jizya tax from non-Muslims for the privilege of living in Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam. Women were forced to wear burkas in public and the city’s robust night life disappeared when every bar and club was forced to close. In less than a year the Sheik and sharia shut down Motown and the surrounding areas, clear to Ann Arbor.
Ditka turns the squad car onto Oakwood drive. The Sheik’s crowning achievement, the Ihkwan mega-Mosque, comes into view on the horizon. The sprawling Mosque and Salafi Cultural Center complex was built on the public dime over the testing grounds of the now defunct Ford Motor Company. For Augustine Koenig, there is no more apt a symbol of all that is wrong in the country: a mega-mosque built over the bones of an iconic American company destroyed by its own government. They drive around the sprawling complex taking care not to cross paths with the rent-a-cop patrolling the grounds.
When the guard’s patrol car is at the farthest point from the cultural center, Ditka drives up to its front door. Augustine steps out with his PalmPal in hand. He thumbs an icon and a long string of code appears on the screen. It is a program written to override the building’s security system. It was created by a fellow conspirator Augustine was told ‘was a real cybernetic Houdini working for the Pentagon.’ Koenig holds the small computer close to the keyboard panel on the door and taps the ‘Send’ command. The red light on the panel stops blinking, the green light comes on and the frosted glass door slides open. With the satellites under control of the Crusaders, there is no fear of the security company being alerted to the unauthorized entry.
Augustine turns back towards Ditka and gives him a thumbs-up. Hi
s partner returns the signal and drives away with his lights off. Ditka will not be far, watching and waiting on Augustine’s signal to pick him up. Koenig enters the building and the door slides close behind him. He makes his way through the dark to the elevators. The ‘American Ayatollah’s’ office is on the top floor of the twelve story building. Augustine slips his 45 from its holster and taps the elevator’s call button with the second knuckle of his left forefinger. The mirrored bronze doors in front of him open with a ding!
Koenig slips into the elevator. He taps another icon on his PalmPal and zings another string of code at the panel of clear, plastic, crescent-shaped buttons. The top sliver of a moon glows green with the number 12. A moment later, the elevator lurches upward. The ride up is smooth and silent but for Augustine Koenig’s recitation of Saint Michael’s prayer.
“Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle. Be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May GOD rebuke him, we humbly pray; and do Thou, O Prince of the heavenly host – by the Divine Power of GOD – cast into hell, Satan and all the evil spirits which roam throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.”
Austin, Texas
20:45:33
Paul Trevor is the Republican nominee for the Presidency. Having recently won the party’s nomination, Trevor is home, resting up before launching his national campaign to unseat his rival, William O’Neill. It is a challenge he is looking forward to. Trevor feels he has a better than fair chance of winning. The Democrats are pushing the economy precariously near another collapse and a further financial implosion would be catastrophic, perhaps fatal for the nation. The country is in its tenth straight year of depression. Runaway inflation and a 29% unemployment rate are draining what little life remains in the economy. Trevor never misses an opportunity to point out that the jobless figure is actually closer to 40% when you factor those who stopped looking for a job and settled for living off the ever expanding public dole. Taxes in America are the highest in the world as the government seeks to pay for a growing list of public services. Many fear they will go even higher if President O’Neill agrees to help bail out Western Europe again. The President publicly denies that he will agree to a new round of bail outs for Europe, but Trevor doesn’t believe him. Paul has ads running nation-wide saying so, depicting O’Neill as the UN’s lap dog and ‘yes man.’ The ads remind Americans that foreign troops are, for the first time in the nation’s history, on their soil thanks to William O’Neill’s work at the Department of Peace.
The ads are having their effect, eroding the President’s numbers, but Paul knows that the economy is what really concerns the people. Trevor’s two terms as Governor of Texas has proven to the country that he knows how to generate jobs. The Lone Star State’s unemployment rate is only half that of the nation’s. Sure, his critics say they are mostly minimum wage jobs; but, as he retorted to the MSNBC host who last brought it up, “Those who quibble about the kinds of jobs I have produced, do so in the hopes no one notices they have done nothing but lose us jobs.”
Trevor feels that the economic situation, the unabated scourge of terrorism and the general resentment of the Federal government offers his party its first chance since George W Bush to win the White House. The base is not just excited, they’re angry. They consider themselves cheated by the Alien Resident Enfranchisement Act that robbed them of the last election. In response to the legislation, the registration of voters in the Republican Party is at an all-time high and the GOP, not wanting to waste time or treasure in a protracted primary fight, handed Paul the nomination in record time. Base and party are spoiling for a fight. And so is he. Trevor feels more than up to the task of leading the charge. He has to win the Presidency, Trevor told his hometown paper, because he fears, “The country won’t survive another four years of Democratic party rule.”
When the reporter suggested that he was being dramatic, Paul Trevor insisted that he was “As serious as a heart attack.”
Things will change when he becomes President.
When one of his dinner guests arrived with news of the President’s kidnapping, Paul Trevor realized that change was already afoot. He excused himself from the party and secluded himself in his study. Trevor was disturbed to find that he was cut off from the world. His cell phone’s network and the Internet were down and television could offer him nothing but five hundred channels of static. The situation was intolerable. He sat behind his desk and rocked nervously in the squeaking chair for a while.
At length Paul Trevor decided that he had only one option. He sprung off his chair and got to work!
Trevor’s seventeen year old son, Paul Jr. came up to check on him as he started throwing clothes in a suitcase.
“What are you doing, dad?”
“I’m fixing to go to DC.”
“But they’ve grounded all flights,” his son says. “Uncle Ned just came from the airport where they...”
“I can still drive,” Trevor senior responds. “Why don’t you go pack yourself a bag as well. It’s a long trip. I would love a co-pilot.”
“Sure dad,” his son says after a moment’s hesitation. “If you think it’s important.”
“Someone kidnapped the President, son,” says Paul senior over his shoulder. “And our satellites have been shut down. I just don’t see how it could get any more important.”
Fortuna Mountain Foothills, Arizona
20:22:01
Milagros Delatorre looks south across miles of empty desert. Standing atop the hood of the US Border Patrol Hummer she stares out, silent and still. In the soft focus of her large brown eyes, the horizon becomes a prism for the young woman. At the hazy seam between sand and sky, time and space fold in on themselves. Through the trembling, translucent membrane she sees beyond the horizon before her to a day, ten years past, when she was last in the same lifeless wasteland, staring north through the same shimmering curtain of heat, dust and dying light. Through the veil at the end of the vast and dusty vista, Delatorre looks back through time and into her own eyes, the long ago eyes of a battered and bloodied thirteen year old girl on her knees, swooning on a threadbare line between life and death.
Milagros’ oldest memory is a nightmare. She was born into it in a burst of fear. It began on a crowded, overheated bus stopped on a lonely stretch of dessert road. At first there was a roar of noise, shouting gunmen and passengers screaming and crying. Loud, clapping explosions rattled the air through all the shrieking. And then the pain began. She was pulled by the hair out of her seat, dragged to the door of the bus and tossed outside into a ring of men. They all wore uniforms. And they were all laughing.
There were a handful of other young girls in the circle with her. Milagros can remember every one of them and what they all endured together. Torturous flashbacks of the beatings and gang rape still find themselves into her dreams from time to time. The one memory of that experience that returns nearly nightly, and always vividly, is of kneeling by the side of the road with the other girls, their bodies raw with pain and trembling with terror as the soldiers executed their fellow passengers. One by one, the skulls of the adults were crushed by vicious blows of a mallet and their bodies dumped into the roadside ditch that would become their shared and shallow grave. The hellish scene of twisted limbs, some still twitching with the last protest of life, of bloody, contorted faces and dark, lifeless eyes staring out in all directions was nailed into Milagros’ consciousness, never to be pried loose.
The soldiers who stopped the bus were a band of Los Zetas, vicious killers who began their ruthless climb to power by putting their American, specialforces training to work for Mexican drug cartels in the latter decades of the last century. They terrorized both sides of the border for years, killing indiscriminately in the service of the drug kingpins. They dug their bloodied hands into every illicit operation on the border, including the sex-slave trade into which they sold Milagros and the other girls when they were done with them. All the while they wreaked their terror
on the border, Los Zetas also infiltrated the Mexican military. When the presidents of Mexico and America were instantly incinerated in Panama, Los Zetas sensed and seized their opportunity. In short order the mercenaries wrested control of the military from the generals. They turned it, first on their former masters, and then aimed their expanded military might northward. While the ensuing border war did not win them any American territory, it did solidify their control of Mexico. They were now the nation’s de facto rulers; President Vargas, their most pliant puppet.
The United Nations bases on the border were also under their control. There were six bases, three on the north and three on the south. They were erected in 2016 to secure the UN-brokered cease-fire between Mexico and America. Los Zetas wasted no time bringing them into their sphere of influence with the usual mix of bribes and threats. Through the bases, Los Zetas continued the work of their former masters, pushing drugs, arms, illegal aliens, criminals and terrorists across the border.
Milagros Delatorre raises binoculars to her eyes. Through them, she pierces the horizon and focuses on the UN base shrouded in the haze. There are only a few men walking about the large, fence-enclosed square. There are two sentries atop two thirty-foot towers, one on the northeast corner and the other on the southwest. The blue-helmet on the latter tower is standing still, looking south from his perch. The other smokes a cigarette as he paces the small, twelve foot square of his post. There are two barracks, one each along the south and west fences. They house the fifty soldiers garrisoned at the camp. A vehicle hanger and workshop runs the length of the north side. A two-story, squat and square building erected along the east wall serves as officer’s quarters, mess hall and administrative office. A flag pole rises fifty feet in the air from the center of the compound. The blue and white UN flag flutters weakly in the slight breeze.
In a few hours, Milagros past, present and future will collide at that UN base. In a few hours bright, yellow school buses laden with gifts from Los Zetas to their loyal allies are scheduled to arrive. The buses will be full of children, none beyond their teenage years. They are being sent to entertain the soldiers during their Winter Fest celebration. Delatorre knows what those kids can expect. Milagros had ridden in those very same buses and had like-wise been ‘gifted’ to loyal allies of Los Zetas. She knows the young girls and boys aboard the buses are nothing more than sacrifices, offerings to sate the sexual depravities of the soldiers. Their young bodies and their innocence are to be thrown, like so much meat, for the animals, caged behind the wire fence, to maul.
The House of War: Book One Of : THE OMEGA CRUSADE Page 16