Rotten Gods

by Greg Barron

  The sun, radiating off the earth, increases the heat to unbearable levels. Dubai is dotted with these inexplicable bare areas, so much, it seems to Simon, that it looks more like a desert with buildings rather than a city.

  The phone rings. Private. He clamps it to his ear.

  ‘Simon Thompson speaking.’

  ‘Simon. This is Tom Mossel.’

  ‘Excuse me, but am I supposed to know you?’

  ‘I work for the British government. We’ve been trying to track you down …’

  ‘Where is Isabella?’

  ‘You haven’t heard?’

  ‘I’ve heard what happened, but I don’t know if she’s inside or not. She never turned up at the hotel.’

  ‘She’s inside the centre, Simon. Sorry. No one can get in or out. Security have sealed it off for a kilometre or so around the complex.’

  ‘How can you be sure that she’s in there?’

  ‘Believe me. I’m sure.’

  ‘Who the hell are you again?’

  ‘My name is Tom Mossel. I run a Directorate of British Intelligence called the DRFS. We are jointly responsible for security at the conference.’

  Simon frowns, dredging up what he knows of the organisation. From what he can recall the DRFS is some kind of spy agency; it does a pretty good job of keeping out of the public eye, but rumours abound that it is funded by industry levies, and operates what amounts to a private army of Special Forces operatives under the umbrella of MI6.

  ‘Why are you calling me?’

  ‘Your wife has been doing some analytical work for us on the side. We are concerned for her.’

  Simon finds that he has been holding his breath. ‘Where are my girls?’

  A pause. ‘Simon, you’re going to have to be strong here. We think something might have happened.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘We’ve just learned that Isabella spent some time in Nairobi, then Yemen, with a man.’

  ‘That’s the last thing I need to know right now, and it’s none of your business. Or mine.’

  ‘Simon. She was with one of the terrorists now in the centre. The Algerian. One of them.’

  Simon tries to say something, but no sound comes.

  ‘She’s been involved with him.’ A pause. ‘She helped Dr Abukar into the centre and may have brought in the explosive charges.’

  Silence builds like compressed air into a tyre. ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Listen, she checked into the Mercure Hotel in Aden, four nights ago. We have first-hand confirmation that the Algerian was with her for two nights. Staff saw them walking hand in hand on the beach. They kissed. They shared a bed, Simon.’

  ‘Where are the kids?’

  ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘What the hell do you mean?’ Sweat, not just from the heat, begins to trickle down his forehead and sting his eyes. His hand is slippery on the phone.

  ‘The children were in Yemen with her at that stage and then she came on alone. We’re investigating.’

  Fucking hell. It’s not possible. ‘Are you saying the kids have been taken by someone?’

  ‘We don’t know what the hell happened. What hotel are you at?’

  ‘The Towers Rotana.’

  ‘Stay there. I’m sending someone to pick you up. We need to ask you some questions. Don’t move. We’ll find the girls. They are British citizens and we do not abandon British citizens. I won’t let anything happen to them. Fifty men are on it …’

  Down on the kerb an airport shuttle bus has just pulled up. Almost empty. Simon terminates the call and hurries towards it, still gripping his flight bag. He climbs aboard the bus, pays, and settles into the seat.

  As soon as he has done so, he again phones Isabella. The recorded message seems even more impersonal. It takes all his self-control not to smash the useless instrument down on the stainless steel seat frame in front of him.

  Day 1, 16:00

  Al-Muwahhidun burst onto the international scene in the wake of the Egyptian and Syrian revolutions, the death of Osama bin Laden, and the Libyan civil war, with the militarily inexperienced rebels and NATO air power forcing that terrible and bloody endgame, culminating with Muammar Gaddafi being dragged from a sewer pipe, beaten and ultimately shot by a crowd screaming, shooting, and firing into the air.

  One thousand years after al-Muwahhidun’s first conquests, the movement was revived by a Moroccan cleric, Yaqub Yusuf, a pale, bespectacled Moroccan Salafi. Yaqub was just twenty-nine years old when he became a student of Osama bin Laden, spending a month with the Lion Sheikh in his Abbotabad compound before SEAL Team Six arrived in their choppers.

  Osama was then almost sixty years old, yet appeared older. He was very tall, towering six feet five inches from the limewashed floor. Never far from his side was a battered Kalashnikov with a scarred wooden stock. Yaqub knew the folklore; that this was the weapon he took from a Russian infantryman he killed, some thirty-five years earlier.

  Nearby, at all times, stood the bodyguard, whose Tokarev pistol, according to legend, was loaded with just two bullets. These were intended to martyr Osama rather than let him be captured by the kufr. The rumours that followed the Lion Sheikh were many, and Yaqub believed that truth lay behind all of them.

  Yes, he is rich, Yaqub thought to himself, yet he does not flaunt wealth. He has the ears of the world, yet he chooses to speak only when necessary. He is pious, for the singda is plain to see on his forehead. He is a military commander, yet he chooses his battles, knowing that the time has not yet come, that the mujahedin of the world are still building strength and self-belief, that soon the forces of righteousness will no longer be contained …

  Osama touched the crown of Yaqub’s head with the tips of his fingers. ‘My time is passing, Yaqub. The world has changed. Al-Qa’ida is watched and hunted ceaselessly by the security organisations of the world. You and the others must carry on the work.’

  ‘How, sayyid?

  ‘Look to the past. To the time when the ummah conquered Spain and made our empire so strong and rich that the rest of Europe seemed like a pale shadow. Use the weapons of mass communication to teach the ummah to hate the Americans and the West. Use the tools of the enemy. The ummah need to understand that the industrialised West and their greedy corporations will destroy the earth. Climate change, accompanied by lack of food and water, will bring fear to our people. Frightened people hate. Frightened people will fight. Use that fear.’

  Yaqub learned from the Lion Sheikh of the thousand-year-old brotherhood of the al-Muwahhidun, led by the Moroccan Ibn Tumart. Puny in body, and sharp-tongued, Ibn was a cripple with a chip on his shoulder, yet pious in faith. He was destined to influence the world far beyond that of his father, Cheraghchi, lamplighter for the local mosque. He made the hajj to Maccah, when still a youth, and was expelled from the city for trying to instil his own extreme beliefs on the other pilgrims.

  In Baghdad, he fell under the spell of both the learned physician al-Ash’ari and the demented mystic Ghazali. Then, as a young man, under the tutelage of the latter, his zeal and knowledge combined into a new and twisted system of belief, a hatred for the lax and impious practices then common across the Arab world. He came to realise that change was not possible using mere pedagogy and charm. On a dark night outside al-Jisr, he and his mystic teacher used ancient rituals borrowed from the Shia to have dialogue with God. By the end of that night, Ibn believed himself authorised to use any means at his disposal to force others to practise his own rigorous interpretation of the one true religion.

  Attempts to browbeat others into following his methods saw Ibn ejected from town after town across Persia and North Africa. While these setbacks did not deter his efforts, he was forced to return to his own Masmuda people, in the Atlas mountains of Morocco.

  Perversely, his beliefs, while puritanical in the extreme, gave him the justification to publicly rape the sister of a local emir who had dared to set forth in public without a veil. His reputation was growing now
, and even the emir dared not punish him.

  Chief among his followers was the Algerian Abd al-Mu’min al-Kumi, a soldier and statesman, everything Ibn would never be. Together building an army, al-Muwahhidun, as they became known, conquered all of North Africa within thirty years, then most of southern Spain and Portugal.

  In all countries al-Muwahhidun killed or converted Jews and Christians, and forced the most puritanical beliefs on Muslims. The enemies of God, they believed, could be defeated using any means at their disposal: death; trickery; evil. There were no rules in the war against the unbeliever.

  Osama bin Laden reinforced this latter belief: ‘The West will not listen without massive bloodletting. They heed only fear and death. Revive the methods of al-Muwahhidun. Use past and present together as a sword to bring the kufr to their knees.’

  Yaqub left bin Laden’s compound the day before the fatal attack, and when he heard the news of Osama’s martyrdom from a safe house in Islamabad, he wept and swore vengeance, declaring a revival of the cult of al-Muwahhidun, with himself as leader.

  Followers, disoriented by the death of bin Laden, then a string of Islamist leaders, flocked to the cause. Yaqub studied the methods of the superstar Muslim televangelists such as Amr Khaled, Ahmad al-Shugairi and Moez Masoud who were then using mass media to preach a moderate Islam, geared to the modern world, gathering hundreds of millions of followers and partially inspiring the spreading fight for reform and freedom across the Middle East. Yaqub understood Osama’s wisdom in seeking to link modern issues with Salafism and archaic fundamentals.

  The Middle East remained a complicated place. In Egypt, for example, supposedly delivered from tyranny by revolution, the populace found themselves little better off under SCAF, the transitional government. New powers, however, were rising. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the Egyptian revolt was the Muslim Brotherhood, or Ikhwan. The Ikhwan fought for freedom alongside their moderate co-believers, Coptic Christians and the liberal youth who drove the revolution, using social media to coordinate and plan their uprising.

  ‘We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world,’ one Egyptian activist put it.

  With the fall of Hosni Mubarak, however, the once banned Ikhwan became a fully fledged and open political organisation, calling their new legitimate wing the Freedom and Justice Party. They did not seek outright leadership of the country, opting instead for a controlling interest, a force behind the scenes. They sponsored the rise of a new, five-thousand-member Salafi political party, whose leader said, ‘We oppose anything that contradicts Islamic Sharia, even if it is accepted by the majority.’

  Together the Brotherhood and Salafi groups, including the developing al-Muwahhidun, incited violence against the Copts and other Christians, promoting a new era of sectarian unrest. Followers of one god against followers of another. So on and over again.

  Water shortages fuelled conflict, and the still unresolved Palestinian situation remained an open, bleeding sore. Tanks rolled into Gaza. Palestinians responded with suicide bombers and Grad rockets.

  In Africa, desperately poor nations slipped into deep unrest or civil war. South Sudan, formed in 2011, was by 2012 a failed state, fighting seven different militia armies; tribal warfare tearing its social fabric apart. Somalia remained impenetrable and lawless, much of her territory ruled by Shabaab al-Mujahedin and allied Islamist groups. Security issues exacerbated the worst famine in decades, the country’s starving people filing into refugee camps in Mogadishu and over the border into Kenya and Ethiopia.

  Yaqub declared himself the Mahdi reborn. After continuing to inspire followers through modern mass media, he appointed a ten member council, making fear of climate change and starvation caused by the industrial West the centrepoint of this new jihad. As real terrors came — rising sea levels and a procession of natural disasters — the flock grew into a phenomenon of which the spearhead was a couple of thousand freedom fighters backed by five hundred million sympathisers.

  The ummah were all too ready to believe that the West was defiling God’s gift of the bountiful earth with their pollution. The evidence was clear before their eyes.

  The world is not fair became a catchcry shouted on YouTube videos sent viral by Muslims looking for answers. The West grows rich and fat at the expense of our future. Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook sites gathered countless likes and follows.

  At the perfect moment, Yaqub died a martyr also, torn apart by a drone-launched Hellfire missile at a coffee shop in Shabwa, Yemen. His death was applauded by Western leaders and mourned by millions. His funeral, in the Moroccan village of Tahanaout, was filmed in HD video and posted on websites across the world. Fundamentalists from Mogadishu to Sana’a shook their fists and loaded their weapons, one thing on their minds.

  Reprisal.

  Opening the door presents a risk, but an unavoidable one, and just one among many that the planning team had to consider. Another is the sheer number of hostages, increasing the potential for collusion and a concerted attempt on the mujahedin. A third possible danger is the small, armoured glass window on the northern wall, with its view across to the sea. The nearest structure, however, a power station smokestack, is almost a kilometre away, too far for all but specialised small arms fire.

  The transfer of rations is quickly achieved, and the three men wheel their trolleys back through the entrance, risking a wary look behind them as they go. The door closes and the sense of relief among the mujahedin is obvious — smiles and nervous laughter; slinging guns over shoulders; a whispered comment and a brief embrace. Zhyogal struts across to the stacked rations, directing two of the men to open the nearest carton with a knife.

  Zhyogal lifts a shrink-wrapped package: ‘This is a United Nations standard ration pack, referred to by the American enemy as an MRE. It is made by any of three firms in the United States, stockpiled at around five million units. It contains two thousand two hundred calories, and is designed to keep an adult human alive indefinitely. This is less than half the calories greedy Western males consume each day. Inside, you will find crackers, flat bread, a fruit bar, raisins, and a protein ration of meat or beans. In addition, each contains salt, pepper and a paper towel. Each pack must last twenty-four hours.’

  Zhyogal takes in the room with a sweep of his eyes. ‘Eat,’ he cries. ‘Learn what the by-products of imperialism and greed eat to survive — the fortunate ones in the camps, those who do not lie dead on the desert sands of Africa and the Middle East.’

  One of the men kneeling at the dais stands, tall and grey headed, yet handsome for his age. The French President Martin Bourque. ‘That is enough,’ he shouts, ‘enough of your rhetoric and lies. Lay down your weapons and you may survive this day. My country will not deal with terror, a fact you will learn soon enough.’ The bristles of his moustache stand out like quills, and his eyes are rounded, glaring.

  Zhyogal says nothing, but works his way towards the Frenchman, face betraying little, stopping just a few paces away. ‘You have been told to kneel, old man.’

  The French President folds his arms and shakes his head. His suit and tie are still perfectly arranged, a red poppy pinned to his lapel. ‘Kill me if you like, but it will only delay the end for you. You cannot do what you have done and live.’

  Zhyogal moves with the speed and grace of a leopard, gripping the older man’s hair at the back where it is thickest, dragging him down with what must be tremendous strength. The Frenchman attempts to fight back, but his tormentor, having manhandled him down to the carpet, leaves him teetering for a moment then smashes his weapon into the temple. Blood trickles down into his eyes and lips.

  Twice more Zhyogal strikes, once on the point of the chin, once into the eye socket, leaving Bourque on his knees, holding his face with both hands. The mujahedin leader reverses the gun, pointing the muzzle at his victim’s head. ‘Go back to your place or I will shoot you now.’

  At first Bourque ignores the command, but Zhyogal’s
face contorts in fury, again grasping the man’s hair and twisting the gun muzzle into his temple. ‘Move, or you die.’

  The Frenchman half-crawls, half-staggers back to his place in the row.

  ‘Is there anyone else?’ Zhyogal shrieks. ‘Anyone who wishes to prove his courage, and trade insults with me?’

  Silence.

  ‘Then let it be known that cellular telephones, computers and tablets are now outlawed. The mujahedin will move around the room collecting them. Delegates withholding a telephone will be shot.’

  One of the militants empties the contents of a plastic tub onto the floor and Isabella resents even this minor callousness, staring at the scattered documents. The work of hundreds of people, for months.

  Holding the tub, a pair of mujahedin move around the room. Phones, dropped from nervous hands, clatter inside. iPhone. Ubik. Nokia. Samsung. When someone is slow to produce, the collector becomes agitated, shouting and haranguing.

  When the tub pauses in front of Isabella she lifts the tiny Siemens from an inside suit pocket. She hesitates for a moment — deep in her handbag is another, an old iPhone that was once Simon’s, now used by the girls if they travel unaccompanied. It is turned off, but …

  ‘Is that all?’ the man grunts.

  Up close she can smell his body odour, heavy and rank, and the expression on his face frightens her — staring right through her, so that she feels naked and vulnerable. He is a big man, heavy in the face, dark beard curling from his chin.

  His eyes fall on her and he grins lasciviously. Isabella realises that Zhyogal has told the other men what he did to her. Surely couched in religious reasoning about how it was necessary and was therefore not sinful, but yes, he has told them.

  The shuttle bus pulls up outside Dubai International Airport’s Terminal One, and moving in through the doors, Simon studies the latest flight information on the monitors. The quarter-hour journey has given him time to think. He has one lead. Aden, Yemen.