Sword of Allah

by David Rollins

  The US Army corporal grumbled as he hosed away the puddle of urine the prisoner had left behind. ‘Fuckin’ motherfuckers all do it.’

  ‘Did you see those two lieutenant colonels?’ asked Monroe, ignoring the enlisted man.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Wilkes, rubbing the top of his head. He’d noticed and taken an instant dislike to them.

  ‘Those guys must have been what, mid thirties?’

  ‘Yeah. One of them still had nappy rash.’

  ‘No one gets to be a lieutenant colonel that young.’

  ‘Not unless you have a very particular expertise,’ said Wilkes.

  Atticus nodded.

  Kadar Al-Jahani had moved without resistance. He knew full well where he was. No one told him that escape was utterly pointless. He could figure that one out for himself. Where could he possibly have escaped to? In his more lucid moments, he remembered passing through countless gates, through tunnels of razor wire, eventually arriving at a bunker. No one spoke to him. They had unchained him at gunpoint. Next they shaved his head and beard, and drenched him in delousing chemicals that made him gag and vomit. They then strip-searched him brutally, leaving his anus bleeding, and dressed him in red – the colour of flayed skin.

  He warned himself that pain and suffering would be his only companions for the foreseeable future. He worried that he would not be up to the task of locking his precious knowledge deep within. Keeping it to himself would be a last revenge, a final great victory. Physical pain was something he’d experienced many times through his life, but it occurred to him that pain had always come to him by accident. Now it would be administered by practised, enthusiastic hands.

  Kadar Al-Jahani sat slumped in the chair he’d been strapped to, in a room painted brilliant white. Overhead, halogen lights blazed down. Kadar Al-Jahani again dared to close his eyes and shut out the present, if only for a moment. Electric shocks jammed into his body, pulsing through him like a thousand glass needles breaking off under his skin. His jaw clamped down on his tongue, biting off the tip, and his mouth filled with blood. He opened his eyes and the electricity instantly stopped. Soon, he knew, his lids would close again and nothing he could do would prevent them.

  Central Intelligence Agency, Australia bureau, US Embassy, Canberra

  The report came to Ferallo over the intranet, the secure feed. Originally written in Hebrew, it had gone through CIA translators in Tel Aviv and the Shin Bet had costamped the translation, meaning they were okay with its accuracy. She flicked through it first with her finger on the ‘page down’ key, stopping occasionally for more detail. But the more she took in, the more Ferallo became both intrigued and disturbed, emotions that seemed to the assistant deputy director to go hand in hand too often in this business. She decided to print it off, all one hundred and sixty-seven pages. It was the IDF report from the operation Atticus and Tom Wilkes had recently been involved in. Too many Israeli soldiers had died, and Atticus was lucky not to have been counted amongst them. According to the report, Atticus had Tom to thank for that.

  The IDF wrap-up included a detailed coronial report and identified by their remains the men Kadar Al-Jahani had been meeting with. They were mostly members of Hamas and Hezbollah, along with several others the Israelis believed to be financiers. Their various names were provided in the report, as were photographs. They looked familiar. Ferallo sat back and stared at the photos, and wondered why. And then she realised. She called up on screen the photographs taken at Kadar’s meeting with several unknowns in Rome. Yep, it was the same men. So they were financiers. Ferallo was fleetingly annoyed that their identities and involvement in the scheme of things had only come to light by their deaths. Terrorists with money. Rarely was there a more lethal combination. Money gave terrorists the financial freedom to recruit, train, plot and scheme. The template example was 9/11. Sure, the men who took the planes in that instance did so with threedollar box cutters, but it took millions to put them in those aircraft at the right time with the right skills, in a coordinated attack timed to perfection. The collective intuition was that Kadar Al-Jahani and his South East Asian connection, Duat, were up to something major. Now, as far as Ferallo was concerned, it was fact. And yes, the bombing of the embassy was just the entree. Still the big question remained: what?

  Flores, Indonesia

  Hendra and Duat stood on the beach in silence with their binoculars trained on the horizon. The moment of truth for Hendra’s latest guidance system had nearly arrived. This time, Hendra was sure of the test’s outcome, but he didn’t want to think that, much less say it out loud, for fear of casting bad fortune upon it. The test bed, a commercially made powered glider, had a wingspan of five metres. It had been modified extensively, of course, to accept the guidance and flight management systems and a larger fuel tank, and the sheer size of the thing would make it easy to spot once it cleared the horizon.

  But as with all Hendra’s test flights, there were many components under scrutiny, and the failure of any one could spell disaster. And disaster was now the outcome he most expected after so many failures. Electronic music behind him distracted him and shifted his thoughts. The young boy he’d caught playing with the computer toy had become his assistant. His name was Unang.

  The youngster had been standing beside Duat and Hendra with his hand sheltering his eyes, watching the horizon for movement. But after a time, Unang had given up through boredom, and was sitting under a tree with a new Nintendo Gameboy, one of the hundred Hendra had bought. Duat had earlier been annoyed by the device, believing that it was frivolous. But then Hendra had spoken up both for Unang’s surprising talents and for the quite extraordinary qualities of the games platform itself, and Duat had eventually stopped slapping the boy around the head.

  From the first, Hendra could see that there was something extraordinary about the CPU powering the toy. A little investigation on the Internet proved how right he was. The Z80 processor inside the Gameboy was indeed special, and now it formed the heart of his latest attempt at a workable guidance system.

  Hendra was staring so hard at the horizon, trying to penetrate the perpetual haze that blurred the line between sea and sky, that he was developing a headache, a solid pounding at the back of his head. He could sense Duat beside him, and felt the man’s growing anger and disappointment as the seconds ticked by. Everything Babu Islam had planned was resting on his shoulders and again Hendra cursed himself quietly for making rash promises. He glanced at his watch. The drone was late, but only by a minute. Three minutes was the cut-off. Two minutes of sweating remained. Hendra chewed on a fingernail, ripping it off painfully at the quick. A few bars of inane music chirped electronically behind him. ‘Turn that off,’ he snapped at Unang.

  It will work, it will work…be patient. Hendra again examined the intricacies of the new guidance system in his head in an attempt to isolate anything he might have overlooked. He’d discovered that the Z80 CPU had been around for a very long time – twenty-five years – and was the basis for many amateur robots. It was also, apparently, very easy to program, something of purely academic interest to Hendra because computer programming, he decided, was beyond him. But not, it seemed, beyond Unang. Hendra had been following the instructions conveniently set out on the website for programming the chip, but making little headway. Then Unang arrived, inquisitive. He watched over Hendra’s shoulder for a time and then said, ‘You’re doing it wrong, Hitu. You are repeating every command. The language is self-documenting. I’ll show you.’ Hendra stood back and watched mesmerised as the boy went to work.

  Finally, the day had arrived for the over-the-horizon test. Hendra had nervously invited Duat to witness it. A buzz had gone through the encampment, largely because of Unang’s involvement in the project, and a sizeable audience had grown on the beach to watch it. The drone took off uneventfully under remote control, whereupon Hendra switched it over to fully automated flight. It climbed to fifty feet, banked gently and tracked down the beach, turned again and flew over the encam
pment before changing course again and flying out to sea, all as preprogrammed. There was nothing more to watch for forty minutes. The test drone disappeared into the mist and all the spectators drifted away. Except Duat. The Emir stood rooted to the spot, his toes occasionally digging into the sand, silently watching the horizon through his binoculars. These were the moments when Hendra realised how important his work was to Babu Islam, and he desperately wanted it to succeed.

  But perhaps, again, it would not succeed today.

  Hendra’s watch gave him the bad news as the second hand swept around the top of the dial and, simultaneously, a little stopwatch alarm sounded. Time was up and there was no sign of the drone. Another failure, and Hendra realised he’d have been more surprised if the test had been a success.

  And then a smudge of smoke appeared on the horizon in exactly the spot where the drone should have appeared. ‘Do you see that, Hendra? There, on the horizon.’

  Unang joined them, searching the horizon, his interest rekindled.

  ‘Yes, I see it,’ Hendra said, squinting through his binoculars, unable to keep the excitement out of his voice. While he looked at the light grey stain that marked the transition from sea to sky, willing the VHF receiver to begin squawking with the signal sent from the UAV, a wheelhouse climbed above the rim of the world and sat beneath the smudge. Hendra’s spirits fell. It was a fishing trawler.

  ‘Hendra, I’ll need twenty men. Armed,’ said Duat quietly, without taking his eyes from the binoculars.

  Hendra’s excitement turned to fear as the reality of Duat’s order reached the part of his brain not involved in his project. Duat’s gaze remained riveted on the approaching fishing boat as Hendra turned and ran back along the beach towards the encampment. Boats were not an unusual sight on the Java Sea, Duat told himself, but one heading directly towards them was. He willed it to veer away but it kept coming.

  Hendra returned quickly, a ragtag platoon of men in his wake armed with an assortment of weapons from assault rifles and RPGs to machetes.

  Through his binoculars, Duat saw that several men toting submachine guns had assembled on the trawler’s foredeck. It was cutting through the water fast, much faster than any fishing boat Duat had ever seen, white foam tumbling from its high bow. And then the national flag of Myanmar appeared on the boat’s radio mast and a wave of relief flooded through him. ‘Friends,’ Duat called out suddenly, waving an arm high above his head, lowering the binoculars, ‘you are welcome.’

  The men on the beach reacted swiftly to the change in Duat’s attitude. They lowered their weapons and became an instant and enthusiastic welcoming committee, waving boisterously.

  The trawler surged forward briefly on its own stern wave as the throttles were cut. It coasted into the small bay and dropped anchor. A small dinghy was lowered and three men climbed in, two of them heavily armed and obviously bodyguards for the third. Moments later, the dinghy’s keel carved a groove in the sand and a weatherbeaten man of around sixty hopped nimbly ashore. ‘Where is Duat?’ he said in halting English.

  Duat walked forward from amongst his men and held out his hand in welcome.

  Within half an hour, exactly two hundred kilos of heroin number four – the injectable variety – was ferried off the trawler and stacked neatly on a tarpaulin spread on the sand. It was the balance of what Duat had bought. Each brick, packed in red greaseproof paper stamped with the White Stallion logo, weighed exactly one and a half kilos. Together, the bricks represented exactly forty million US dollars. Duat did the sums in his head and the figures made him giddy. The street value in Australia was around one point two million dollars per kilo. This small stack would generate around two hundred and forty million dollars’ worth of income. Add the income already earned from the fifty kilos previously received and distributed – all up three hundred million dollars!

  Duat still found it difficult to believe Babu Islam’s potential income. Once various middlemen, officials and retailers took their respective cuts, it would fall to around two hundred and thirty million – a clear profit of one hundred and eighty million Australian dollars. Duat shook his head in awe.

  ‘Where is Abd’al Rahim?’ said Duat, glancing around. ‘You,’ he said, pointing at one of his men. ‘Give this to Rahim and tell him we need it tested.’ Duat tossed him one of the red bricks and the man ducked away instantly. Duat realised there was little he could do if the general had delivered merchandise below the quality promised and previously received but, at the very least, he needed to reassure himself.

  Rahim lay in bed and cursed the arrival of yet another day. His joints ached and his bowels rumbled. Sleep had been impossible, for no sooner did he lie down than he would need to run to the toilet, sometimes to vomit but mostly to sit. His head throbbed with an ache that felt like his brain had been thrashed by an eggbeater. Lately, his skin had begun to bruise easily and large crimson stains resulted from even the lightest pressure. Soon, Rahim knew, the real pain would begin as his internal organs shut down. He hoped he had enough time left to finish his important work here before death took him gratefully to Allah and to paradise.

  Rahim watched as his assistant moved around the room, sweeping away the dust, humming. Her name was Etti. She had worked at the blood bank in Jakarta. She did not have the kind of medical knowledge he had hoped for, but she had a little useful experience and she would have to do. Lately, Etti and her cat had begun to share his bed to keep him warm. He remembered a time when he would not have been able to lie beside a woman without taking her, the demands of manhood overcoming all reason, but those days were long gone. The warmth she gave was almost motherly and he lay in her arms limp, without ardour, reassured by the simple presence and comfort of another human being. He had banished the cat, however. It made him sneeze. Cats were truly disgusting animals.

  ‘Doctor, doctor!’ The young man burst into Rahim’s quarters without knocking. He held the package high. Rahim, lying on his cot dozing, opened his eyes slowly and waited till they focused before speaking. Rahim was no doctor of medicine, but lately the men had come to call him that because it was he who set their broken limbs and bound their sprains. Duat’s recruits were getting younger every day, he decided.

  ‘Emir wants you to test this,’ he said, panting. Emir – leader – was what the men called Duat. Rahim wondered what ‘this’ was. He reached down beside the cot and felt around on the wood-slatted floor for his spectacles. He put them on while still horizontal, refusing to be rushed. ‘What is it?’ asked Rahim as his assistant relieved the young man of the red package and brought it over to him. Etti shrugged, as did the courier.

  A surge of excitement filled Rahim when it came into his hands. Many kilos of this had already passed through the encampment and he had been extremely annoyed when none had been kept for camp use – his use. Rahim had been waiting for this moment. He had tried opium to relieve the pain, but it made him sick and unable to work, and work was his sole release, but this…Rahim knew what it was instantly: heroin. Properly administered, he could use it to function without suffering, for he knew that the alkaloid in his hands was the finest pain relief known to man.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course,’ said Rahim, ‘test it.’ In the excitement of the moment, he had forgotten exactly how to perform such a test. He placed the package on the workbench that occupied two sides of his abode and considered it for a moment, searching his memory. The full chemical description for heroin was diacetylmorphine, formed when acetic anhydride reacted with morphine hydrochloride. That much he knew. He sliced one corner of the package with a knife and chipped off a corner of the brick. The powder was white with not a trace of yellow, suggesting that it was reasonably pure. But how pure? ‘I will need ten minutes,’ Rahim grumbled.

  The young man nodded and disappeared as Rahim sifted through his small library. He found what he was looking for after a few minutes and left the book open on the bench so that he could refer to it. He broke off a larger chunk of heroin, weighed it, then chipped awa
y smaller pieces until he was satisfied with its weight. As the book instructed, he dropped it into a solution of ethyl alcohol, ether and hydrochloric acid. The beaker was placed over a low flame and more acid added until the chip had dissolved. Rahim then smeared a drop of the solution on clear glass and allowed it to evaporate. Within a couple of minutes, all that remained was the residue. It was totally clear. Rahim looked up. The young man had returned and was picking up various bits of equipment then putting them down, bored and impatient. ‘Tell Emir, ninety-nine percent pure,’ said Rahim.

  The young man turned and ran out the door, keen to deliver the good news.

  ‘Rest now, Abd’al,’ said Etti, hands on her broad hips. ‘You do not look well.’

  ‘I’ll do what I choose, woman. Have you checked the swine this morning?’ he asked, unable to take his eyes off the white powder on the workbench.

  ‘No, Abd’al. Too many distractions.’

  ‘Well, don’t let me keep you from your duties,’ said Rahim as he poured the test solution into a heavy-duty yellow plastic barrel stencilled with distinctive interlocking circles, the international symbol for biological hazard.

  ‘You must rest, Abd’al. You will kill yourself one day,’ grumbled Etti, annoyed by his dismissive attitude more than anything else.

  ‘May Allah let that day be soon,’ he said, hunting through the medical supplies, searching for a hypodermic syringe.

  The messenger ran back to the water. The gathering on the beach was now very large, with nearly everyone from the encampment congregated there. The kitchen had fed the largely Thai crew with nasi goreng and most of the men were now smoking, enjoying the local kretek cigarettes, and the sweet smell of cloves laced the gentle sea breeze.