Sword of Allah

by David Rollins

  Rahim pressed the needle to his skin and watched it penetrate with a feeling of erotic detachment, like a voyeur at a peepshow. The stallion was his final love and this would be the final act of lovemaking. He pressed down on the plunger and watched the ejaculation depart from the cylinder. He felt it surge through his system, up his arm, through his shoulder and heart, pumping up through his neck. The drug stormed his brain and slammed the door on all pain, both physical and mental, and when Rahim opened his eyes again, he had that feeling of déjà vu.

  It was the smell, that familiar smell. It rose into his nostrils and he vomited. He’d been placed on a mountain of bodies the collective stench of which was unbearable. His eyes gradually gained their focus, as did his mind. The grey walls of the city rose from the silt plain before him. Men dressed in animal skins and leather raced about on horseback. Something was up.

  Another pile of bodies was being heaped on the ground beside him, brought by a steady stream of carts from the encampment beyond. There was a distinctive rumble. Rahim turned his head slightly to see what was making the sound and the reality of the situation suddenly became apparent. The trebuchet was wheeled to the raised earthworks in front of Rahim by a team of soldiers and horses, and Rahim began to cry. Other trebuchets were being positioned so that a line of them formed a crescent beyond the walls of the city. Rahim knew this place all too well: Caffa. The trebuchets were positioned and engineers secured their wheels with chocks and stakes driven into the muddy earth. Rahim tried to change the view and, with it, his part in this play, but for some reason he was unable to do so. He was no longer in control of his dreaming. Frighteningly, it was in control of him.

  The engineers turned the large spoked wheels that brought the massive arms of the trebuchets back to their stops. There was a moment of consideration as the machines were sighted to the city’s battlements. And then the loading of the ammunition began as the machines were heaped with flesh infected by the swelling disease. Most were dead but some, like Rahim, were still alive, unable to protest loudly enough that they still drew breath. A parade of generals trotted down the line, the Khan amongst them. Behind the Khan and his council rode a man on a lame mount. The man looked familiar. It was himself. But how could that be? Rahim wondered.

  The Khan said something to one of the men with him and the response was a clear note blown on a ram’s horn hung around his neck. A mighty crash thundered in front of Rahim as the trebuchet’s arm swung through its movement and slammed into its stop. A tangle of arms and legs flew into the sky. The knot separated into individual men tumbling and spinning slowly as they reached the top of the parabola and began to fall. The elevation on the catapult servicing the mountain of bodies on which Rahim was dumped had been short and its load smashed against the grey parapets, the bodies falling to the ground like dolls thrown by angry children.

  A rousing cheer went up from the thousands of the Khan’s men who’d come to watch the spectacle, thrilled to have the boredom of the siege broken by something so novel.

  The weight was lifted from his back and suddenly Rahim was dragged off the mountain of corpses. He was thrown into the cup on the end of the trebuchet’s arm, his nose and mouth pressed hard against the suppurating black swelling on another man’s neck. An instant later, there was a sickening acceleration and then…silence. Rahim opened his eyes and watched the earth drop away and he could see the entire line of catapults and the sea of tents that stretched away into the distance. He spun slowly in the air, weightless for an instant, before beginning the fall. He watched with morbid interest as time slowed with the approaching grey stonework of the city’s inner walls. There was fascination on the faces of the people of Caffa, almost wonderment at this rain of people. Was this some extraordinary new way of storming the city? Were these Mongols fools? The answers were, of course, yes to the first and no to the second. Rahim’s head drove down onto stone steps, cracking as an egg might, spilling its red and grey yoke.

  Rahim saw this in the brief instant before death ended for all time his ability to observe anything.

  Duat heard the news on the radio first, the short-wave signal swinging in and out of reception, but what he heard quickened his pulse. Babu Islam…VX…weapon of mass destruction…Jakarta or Darwin… He confirmed it on the Internet and then on satellite television. There was mass hysteria at Jakarta’s railway stations and surrounding airports as people climbed over each other to leave the city. There had been shootings and riots, and one 747 had exploded when a man, maddened at having been denied a seat on a plane out of the city, had somehow managed to drive a van onto the apron and crashed it into the jumbo as it refuelled. The United States donated two hundred thousand NBC suits to the city – all the spares they had – a number totally inadequate to protect the population. There had been many casualties and deaths at one dispersion centre when stocks of the protective suits had run out.

  Duat shrugged off any responsibility for the victims of the violence. The Prophet is preferable for the believers even to their own selves. The quote from the Qur’an came back to him easily. The people of Jakarta, if they truly loved Mohammed, should rejoice. They had been granted the opportunity to give their lives for the creation of a state dedicated to Allah’s greater glory. There were similar reports from Australia of death and mayhem evoked by the prospect of a VX attack on Darwin. And that was certainly good news.

  But how, he wondered, did the authorities know that Babu Islam possessed VX and the drone? What else did they know that they were keeping to themselves? Did they know the location of the encampment? The time to act was now, and not just because the security of the group’s plans might possibly be in the process of breaking down. Several men and women had recently died of the mysterious disease. Many more were sick. Rahim, the only man in the encampment with even rudimentary medical knowledge, had himself died of a heroin overdose. And now Hitu Hendra was seriously ill and the whole plan was at risk of unravelling. The encampment would have to be abandoned and the sooner the better. He walked to Hendra’s hut and found the man sitting in the shade of a tree, sweat pouring from skin turned the grey of rotting meat. A foul stench rose from him.

  ‘I am sorry for the smell, Emir,’ he said when he saw Duat’s hand cover his nose. ‘I no longer have the energy to keep myself clean.’

  ‘Can I help you up, Hitu?’ asked Duat, deeply concerned for the success of his plans when he saw the man’s deteriorating condition.

  ‘Yes. If I sit down too long I fall sleep and then the nightmares come.’

  That frightened Duat, for he too had started having the most frightful dreams, something others had complained of as the sickness overcame them, and he was also finding it increasingly difficult to keep food down.

  Duat held Hendra under an arm and helped him to his feet. He was light and his skin felt waxy, turning blue with bruising under his fingers as he watched. ‘The weapon must be launched against the infidels now, Hitu. We have no time left.’

  Hendra managed a nod. The pressure of Duat’s fingers hurt his skin, but without the support to help him stand he knew he would collapse. ‘The weather is improving,’ he said. Duat noticed that a stack of printed meteorological reports was wedged under his other arm. ‘I believe the conditions we want will be with us the day after tomorrow. Allahu Akbar.’

  ‘Allahu Akbar,’ said Duat, lifting a ladle from a bucket of water to the man’s lips. God is great.

  Nam Sa River, Myanmar

  The US Blackhawk, cleared through Thai airspace, landed Warrant Officer Tom Wilkes and Lance Corporal Gary Ellis on a remote hilltop just inside the northern Thai border with Myanmar. Monroe had wanted to ‘tag along’, but Wilkes had vetoed it. Their partnership in Israel was a temporary one and Wilkes was no longer seconded to the CIA. This particular leg of the mission required stealth, something that seemed to go against the American’s grain. Commander Niven had shrugged when Monroe had complained. ‘Sorry, but the call is Warrant Officer Wilkes’s,’ he’d said. Monroe w
as pissed about it but Wilkes was sure the friendship would survive.

  Wilkes and Ellis crossed into Myanmar just after sunset, when the air had cooled appreciably and smelled of rain and composting humus, of decay and regeneration. They made good time to the planned observation point twenty-five klicks inside Myanmar, because most of it’d been spent on the back of an elephant, the animal’s swaying flanks rustling the grasses and leaves with a slow four/four beat.

  ‘American, American,’ the old elephant handler had said when Wilkes and Ellis bailed him up a handful of klicks into their trek. After his initial surprise at seeing two heavily armed soldiers from the West, the man had smiled with a mouth full of glistening black teeth and said, ‘Rocky, Rocky,’ and jabbed and hooked at the air. American? Well, it was close enough so Wilkes let it pass and, besides, he’d be paying with US dollars, the universal lubricant. He brought out a fistful of greenbacks and struck a deal on the spot.

  There was not much to do on the elephant and it gave Wilkes time to reflect. Despite everything going on, his mind kept wandering back to Annabelle. He still couldn’t understand how they’d managed to hit the wall so hard. They’d talked a couple of times on the phone but the conversations had been strained. She’d moved to Sydney and, as usual, he was somewhere he couldn’t reveal. The fact that Belle was in Sydney was good, and bad. Townsville wasn’t under threat but, probably irrationally, he felt better about her being further away from Darwin.

  Wilkes and Ellis arrived within two kilometres of the observation hill with time to spare. Their handler readily accepted an additional cash bonus, and somehow Wilkes managed to convey that there’d be more to come if he could keep the pachyderm’s motor running and take them back to the border before sunrise.

  The night swallowed the elephant as it turned noisily, snorting through its trunk, and headed back down the trail, the handler waving at the soldiers and tapping the beast’s ears with a stick. Wilkes and Ellis both verified the time. The moon would rise above the hills at 0446, so there were plenty of hours of complete darkness to use as cover as they completed their tasks. Wilkes heard a coughing sound carried on the faint breeze. ‘Tiger,’ he said just above a whisper.

  ‘I know,’ said Ellis, who had a brief flash of himself hanging helplessly from the mouth of a large cat as it trotted proudly off to its cubs, and he shuddered. Eating a bullet was one thing, becoming an animal’s dinner was something else entirely, and he gave the pistol grip of his silenced M4 an involuntary squeeze to reassure himself.

  Wilkes picked up on Ellis’s nervousness. ‘It’d be more scared of you than you are of it,’ he said.

  ‘I doubt it, boss,’ said Ellis smiling, his teeth almost fluorescent against his painted, camouflaged skin. He adjusted the NVG’s harness over his head, tightening it, and switched on the unit’s remote light source. One eye filled with green daylight, the jungle trail ahead now clearly illuminated and defined.

  ‘Let’s move,’ said Wilkes.

  Ellis nodded.

  They made their way cautiously to the ridgeline, listening for human sounds. The hills were densely covered in vegetation. They climbed the face of a lone hill too steep and rocky for the jungle to get a footing. Once climbed, the vantage point offered a clear line of sight across the valley. Wilkes breathed in the still night air and considered the changing role of Special Forces. Spotting for laser-guided munitions had become their raison d’être. In World War II, a commando had had to physically attach explosives to the target, set the fuse and, once the thing had gone off, try to get as far away as possible before the enemy found him and fried his arse. It hadn’t changed much in Wilkes’s father’s day, a lance corporal in the SAS in Vietnam. Those men set the benchmark. They were masters of stealth, bushcraft and evasion. They had to be. Just as in World War II, they had to snuggle up to the target, blow it up and then vamoose through territory the enemy knew intimately.

  The laser had changed all that. It created a hot spot that could be projected on a target up to four kilometres away. The explosive charge, instead of being affixed by a soldier, was dropped from an aircraft. A sensor in the nose of the bomb locked onto the hot spot and, in the majority of cases, bingo, scratched the target. The soldier still had to hightail it out after the damage was done because the laser had to paint the target right up until the ordnance did the job, but at least he had a head start. That was Gulf War I technology.

  The ground-based laser target designator, and other systems like it, advanced the game even further. Satellites orbiting miles overhead were now in the loop, guiding the explosives package to the target. This allowed the user to slip in and out quietly, and be back in the Jason recliner rocker watching telly when things went boom.

  ‘Boss?’

  ‘Sorry, mate. Daydreaming,’ said Wilkes.

  Ellis took up a position on an overhang above and behind Wilkes and kept his senses honed, a round up the spout of his M4. Wilkes removed the GLTD from his pack and mated it with the tripod. He switched the power on and adjusted the legs of the tripod until the digital readout confirmed that the system was level. The GLTD illuminated the field of view in the familiar bright green of light enhancement. Wilkes centred the green dot on the intended target and confirmed the fact with the touch of a pad. This activated the device’s sensitive laser, which measured and recorded the target’s elevation, latitude and longitude to within fractions of seconds. He touched another pad, saving the information for later transmission. Finally, he used the GLTD to take an infrared image of the target, also for transmission. Wilkes signalled to Ellis that he was done, and then quickly dismantled and repacked the GLTD. Wilkes climbed up to Ellis and gave the signal to move. ‘The place is deserted,’ said Ellis.

  ‘Local festival,’ Wilkes said.

  ‘I hope for their sake they don’t return to work early.’

  They quietly retraced their steps down the ridge and crossed the valley, where Wilkes made two more recordings on the GLTD.

  An hour later, they were back on top of the elephant heading south, parting the jungle like a blunt-nosed barge through water, the musty smell of the animal’s hide mingling with the tang of sweat-soaked leather and the handler’s body odour.

  Manila, Philippines

  Yet another four-way videoconference was underway between Skye Reinhardt and her bureau chief, that ambitious bitch Ferallo in Australia, and the D-G himself in Langley. So far, all they’d done was confiscate her passport, but Skye knew it was just the beginning. The CIA was considering what to do with her, and it was not an organisation known for its understanding and sympathy towards employees with questionable allegiances.

  ‘Sir,’ she said, addressing the video image transmitted from Langley, Virginia, ‘as soon as Jeff confessed to me what he was up to, I came forward. Till then, I had nothing but suspicions.’

  ‘But you saw him with two known terrorists – you said you recognised them – so it was more than just suspicions,’ said Ferallo. ‘And what did you talk about for the two and a half months that you were seeing him?’

  Reinhardt was getting tired of the same questions over and over, and she was especially tired of Ferallo. Maybe a frank admission would get the woman off her back. ‘Who talked? Mostly, we fucked,’ she said.

  ‘So what you’re saying is that you put your sex drive ahead of your country,’ Ferallo countered coolly.

  ‘Okay, let’s go over what he told you, Ms Reinhardt,’ said the D-G, scowling impatiently, the interplay between Ferallo and Reinhardt clearly giving him the shits. ‘I’ll just remind you that you have not been charged. Whether we do so or not depends on your cooperation.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ said Skye meekly.

  ‘Now, again please, Ms Reinhardt, tell us what you know about Jeff Kalas.’

  Skye sucked in a breath and tried not to let it sound like exasperation. ‘We met at a hotel, the Manila Diamond. I recognised the two men he was sitting with. They left, and I decided to, well, get to know Jeff. Why? Because I’m CIA
and I was Johnny on the spot.’

  Ferallo rolled her eyes. Intelligence work was not a place for romantics looking for adventure. How the hell did the psychs let this girl through? she wondered.

  ‘We quickly settled into a relationship. He often flew to Manila and we’d go out. I always tried to steer the conversation round to his job, what he did to earn all the cash he was continually splashing about. All he’d say was that he was in money, as in finance,’ Reinhardt said, using her fingers to indicate that this was a quote. ‘I swear that’s all he said until last week. Then it all came out. He told me he’d left his wife, wanted to live with me, and that he worked for two men who made a lot of money in Australia. And he admitted that he thought it was probably by selling drugs. He was helping them get that money out of the country. He’d buy diamonds legally – uncut ones from Western Australia, like the one I’ve handed over to you,’ she said, raising her eyebrows to indicate her bureau chief sitting next to her. ‘Jeff told me it was a short-term operation. He hoped to export close to two hundred million dollars’ worth of these diamonds within three months and that would be the end of it. He said the job was around half done. The whole operation was possible, he said, because by the time the tax department in Australia woke up to themselves, both the money and Jeff would be offshore and gone for good.’

  The Manila bureau chief, Gia Ferallo and the head of the CIA in Langley all nodded. At the fifth or six telling, Reinhardt’s story hadn’t changed one iota.

  Diamonds to the value of five million dollars had been recovered from Kalas, who’d caved in to questioning even before real pressure had been applied. The scam was sweet and simple. He bought a shelf company, opened a bank account and immediately started depositing large amounts of cash and withdrawing similarly large amounts through company cheques made out to reputable diamond wholesalers. As the deposited amounts were over ten thousand dollars – well over, in fact – by law the bank would have to report these transactions to the Australian Tax Office. The ATO, in turn, would query them as a matter of protocol when Kalas’s company lodged its first quarterly Business Activity Statement. Only that statement would never be made. The penny would drop eventually at the ATO that something was seriously wrong. But by then the horse, known as Jeff Kalas, would have bolted.