And Into the Fire

by Robert Gleason

  “I hate creeps like that who piss on those of us who fought, when they have no idea what it’s like. When I came back from Desert Storm, I got treated the same way. Man, you should never feel bad—not even for one second—about your service. I don’t care what you did. Drinks are on us tonight. You’re with friends now.”

  Unfortunately, Elias did not feel friendly. As the night progressed, he got unfriendlier and unfriendler. As he later explained to Mazini, “You know the worst part is that when I got home, my mother confided to me that my real father had been an Iraqi. She had conceived me during a secret adulterous fling. My legal father—her husband—never guessed, and she tried to keep it a secret. He had just died though, so she didn’t have to hide it from him anymore.

  “She told me she was opposed to me going to Iraq because I might end up killing some of my own flesh and blood. Sam, I killed so many hajjis over there that I probably did. Whatever the case, that’s how I feel.”

  “It just takes time,” Sam said. “You’ll get past that.”

  “Not really. Truth is I don’t see any point to even living. I got me some serious ordnance at home in my safe. My favorite is the Barrett M82 .50 caliber. It’s an antitransport weapon. I’m thinking about going home, putting that barrel in my mouth, and springing the trigger. Maybe with my big toe, like Hemingway did. Or strapping on a half dozen grenades and yanking the pin. Then it’s ‘adios, motherfuckers!’ No shit. I don’t see any reason not to.”

  “I can give you a reason,” Sam said without missing a beat. “The guys you ought to kill are the ones who sent you overseas to waste strangers you had no grievance with and who wished you no harm. Elias, you have to turn your hostility away from the innocent—including yourself—and turn it toward those who have hurt you and those around you.”

  Mazini’s words shook Elias to his soul.

  “But how?” he asked.

  “If you’re really interested, I can help you on that front. It’ll take balls though—more than you can imagine—but then I suppose those are something you have plenty of.”

  The truth was, Elias didn’t. When his tour ended and he was taking the long ride back to the Baghdad airport, his personnel carrier hit an improvised explosive device (IED). The blast had robbed him of cojones, after which the marines cashiered him and he took a job working security at the Hudson River Nuclear Power Station for $18.50 an hour and no benefits.

  He planned to apprise Mazini of that fact in a few nights.

  But not now.

  That night they got bombed instead. Elias was never a good drunk, and on that occasion he was a maniac. A couple more shots and he turned to the vets, who were setting them up, and said, “You want to know something? I loved the Iraqi people a hell of a lot more than I love these imbeciles here. Allah never sent me ten thousand miles to kill strangers who meant me no harm. Mohammed never ordered me to shoot women and children. I want to take up arms against the sons of bitches who sent me over there. I want to kill a bunch of those assholes in Washington. In fact, I’ve had enough of killing brown-skinned people for Christ, Mom’s apple pie and the American flag.” Pausing, Elias took a deep breath and roared: “I want to start … acing assholes for Allah and killing cocksuckers for the Prophet!… All those idiots who sent me over there to murder all those innocent Iraqis? I want to empty a whole trainload of whip-ass on those imbeciles.” Then he thundered, “So when I come back and I see a shrink about my PTSD, instead of helping me, he takes away my Valium and replaces it with lithium, telling me I’m not only castrated, I’m bipolar. Bi-fucking-polar? Lithium? Lithium? Lithium’s for sissy bitches and sissy creeps. They canned my ass, threw me out of the service for bi-fucking-polar disorder and no-fucking-balls, then took my sniper rifle away, and why—?

  “Why—?

  “Because I was a bipolar castrato? No, they then told me it was because I was also a bipolar castrato-psychopath!!!”

  “Psychopath?”

  “Yeah, Sam, that’s right. They said, ‘Only a psychopath could kill as many A-rabs as you blew away and laugh about it afterward.’”

  Standing up, Elias bent over backward and shook his pelvis at the two vets, like a drunken, demented stripper. “Bite on this, assholes!” he roared at the top of his lungs.

  All hell suddenly busted loose—a real broken-bottle barroom brawl with stools, teeth, and glasses flying. Unfortunately for the regulars, Elias was a lifelong martial arts student. Nor was Mazini any slouch. The two of them took some lumps, but Elias broke one man’s nose, shattered three teeth, and blackened at least two eyes, and Mazini landed an assortment of crotch kicks and karate chops.

  Elias’s outburst would have been the end of his job at the plant. The company was very strict about personnel losing it in bars. But Mazini covered everyone’s expenses and bills and settled all the complaints out of court, so there were no charges. The payoffs and legal fees cost him a small fortune, but he never asked Elias for a dime. He only wanted one favor in return.

  “I checked your record online. Elias, you have a big-time drinking problem, and you’ve had a lot of drunk and disorderly charges in your past. When you drink hard liquor, you not only pick fights and scream obscenities at strangers, you’re a menace to everything around you. You’re filled with hate and rage over Iraq, and that I understand. Believe it or not, you can do something about that, and I can help you. But not if you hammer down all that hard liquor. You have to promise me, no more hard booze.”

  Elias had made that promise, and three years later, he had still been good to his word.

  * * *

  He’d gotten so absorbed in his reminiscences and in fieldstripping, cleaning, and reassembling his weapons, he’d lost track of time.

  Hell, the sun’s even coming up.

  God, Elias felt good. The day of reckoning was indeed at hand. It seemed like he’d waited his whole life for it to come.

  He was settling up for the Iraq War once and for all—for what it had done to him, to his family, and not least of all to his virility.

  Payback’s a bitch, and I’m finally getting mine.

  The bill had, at last, come due, and the deal was going down.

  3

  “You should never pity the truly stupid.”

  —General Jari ibn Hamza

  The Saudi ambassador to the U.S., Shaiq ibn Ishaq, sat at his desk. His private security team had just swept the room for bugs and left. Shaiq finally reached General Jari. They were on encrypted phones, talking on a scrambled, dedicated line; therefore, they could speak freely.

  “So we’re fine with the CIA director—President Caldwell, too,” General Jari said. “But we still have those two women on our trail.”

  “Do they have evidence of what we’re doing?” Shaiq asked.

  “The CIA agent, Elena,” General Jari said, “she used to run the Pakistan desk. She probably knows more about your dealings with us than you know yourself.”

  “And who knows which way she’s going to jump?” Shaiq asked.

  “If she somehow learned what we’re doing and got it to Caldwell, can you imagine his reaction?” the general asked.

  “Intemperate,” Shaiq said.

  “To say the least,” General Jari said. “And Conrad?”

  “His paranoia is already on terminal alert.”

  “He’d go into anaphylactic shock,” the general said.

  “Then keep an adrenaline syringe handy,” Shaiq said. “As long as those two women are alive, they could destroy everything we’ve worked for.”

  “And if Conrad and President Caldwell find out about our coming attacks?” General Jari asked.

  “We’ll lie to them, of course,” Shaiq suggested.

  “They’ll eat it up,” the general said. “They love lies.”

  “Their lives are built on lies,” Shaiq said.

  “And they positively eat betrayal,” the general said. “Illusions are all America has,” he continued. “It’s the only thing holding their ignorant world
together.”

  “Still, we can’t let them find out what we’re doing,” Shaiq said.

  “True, though my reading on President Caldwell is that if push came to shove, he’d let us set those nukes off.”

  “If it were a choice between having us expose his illegal offshore tax havens and having us incinerate a few U.S. cities,” Shaiq agreed, “he’d let their cities fry.”

  The general laughed long and hard over the phone. “Ah, my friend, you restoreth my soul. Caldwell and Conrad really are that dumb, aren’t they?”

  “What choice do they have? We’ve got them between the hammer and the anvil.”

  “With the clock running out,” General Jari said.

  “If they didn’t so richly deserve it, I’d almost feel sorry for them.”

  “You should never pity the truly stupid.”

  “The suicidally stupid,” Shaiq said.

  “Too stupid to live,” General Jari said.

  “Not even when they go down—go down hard?” Shaiq asked.

  “Think of it as evolution in action,” the general said. “By destroying them, we strengthen the species.”

  “Then we kill them all?” Shaiq asked.

  “We rid the earth of their shadows,” Jari said.

  “Yes, but it’s a shame about the Agency bitch,” Shaiq said.

  “Why?” the general asked. “She’s been trying to destroy us for years.”

  “I know, but—”

  “But what?” General Jari asked.

  “She has the most outrageously arrogant derriere I’ve ever seen on a woman,” Shaiq said, shaking his head sadly.

  Again, the general howled hilariously. “Thanks so much. It was a joy talking to you.”

  “Always,” Shaiq said.

  “We’ve waited a long time for this moment.”

  “Over fourteen hundred years,” Shaiq said.

  “Just so,” the general agreed.

  “Then Maa Shaa Allah.” As Allah has willed.

  “Ya Allah.” Oh Allah.

  4

  The American infidels’ Day of Reckoning was finally at hand.

  —Sam Mazini

  That night Sam returned from the casino $1,133 richer but sick at heart. He’d played the role of a corrupt infidel for so long—drinking, doping, whoring, gambling, cracking filthy jokes, and attending Mass like a pious Roman Catholic—it had become a way of life. True, it was a ruse, sanctioned by fatwa and designed to deflect suspicion away from his jihadist mission, but still he should have felt some remorse over his decade of irredeemable, irremediable sin.

  But he didn’t. Nor did he feel the sacred rage of this holy cause smoldering in his soul. Yes, he would kill many infidels when he melted down the Hudson River Nuclear Power Station, but he would not do it with hatred in his heart. In truth, he did not revile those around him. He’d lived too long among them for that. Nor did he love those for whom he would commit these acts.

  His feelings brought to mind a poem he’d once read by a poet named Yeats titled “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” Part of it went:

  I know that I shall meet my fate,

  Somewhere among the clouds above;

  Those that I fight I do not hate,

  Those that I guard I do not love …

  Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,

  Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,

  A lonely impulse of delight

  Drove to this tumult in the clouds;

  I balanced all, brought all to mind,

  The years to come seemed waste of breath,

  A waste of breath the years behind

  In balance with this life, this death.

  Was that true of him? If so, what had driven him down this road toward the most horrendous martyrdom in history? It had not been fanaticism or even religiosity. He had never burned with jihadist fever. At the madrassa, he had not been the most committed, most devout student. He was recruited and taken to Purdue University, the engineering college in the States, because the tests indicated he had an unusually retentive memory, a talent for languages, and an aptitude for mathematics. Also, during the martial arts training, his instructors noted that he exhibited exceptional ruthlessness.

  Nowhere had he tested high for piety.

  In plain truth, he was like the poem’s Irish airman: those he fought he did not hate, and those he guarded he did not love.

  So why was he doing it?

  Sam, aka Saif, did not know.

  In times of stress, he liked to lock himself in his bedroom, turn off the lights, and pray, hoping against hope for some epiphany from Allah that would convince him he was on the right path. Now more than ever, he needed a sign. In nothing but a white robe, he turned off the bedroom lights, dropped to his knees, and began fingering his subha prayer beads.

  Prayer beads had been used in Catholic, Hindu, Persian, Buddhist, and Islamic religions for over a thousand years, and before that the faithful had used their fingertips and knuckles. A mnemonic device, the subha beads assisted the righteous in the counting of their invocations, in the alleviation of stress, or, as the name subha implied, “in the glorification of Allah.”

  The beads themselves were most often made of glass or plastic, the connecting cord of nylon or cotton string. Sam’s beads were shiny obsidian spheres, and the cord was finely strung silk. The necklace was composed of ninety-nine beads, divided by thin white ivory disks. A larger leader-bead signified the first recitation, and a tassel represented the finish.

  Sam’s traditional prayer was the dhikr, the rote recitation of Allah’s ninety-nine names. Tonight, however, he chose to offer up the subha itself, the prayerful exultation of God. Beginning with thirty-three incantations of “Subhannallah” (Praise be to Allah), he followed those with thirty-three reiterations of “Alhamdillah” (Glory be to Allah), finishing with thirty-three recitations of “Allahu Akbar” (Allah is great).

  Sam chose the dhikr because it was ordered by Mohammed himself in the holy hadith, in which he urged his daughter, Fatima, to remember Allah by invoking these prayers. If she did so, Mohammed told her she would have “all her sins forgiven, even if they were as vast as the froth on the sea’s face.”

  When Sam finished his ninety-ninth prayer, he removed his white robe and took the small leather box out from under his bed. In it was an assortment of whips. He took out the black leather cat-o’-nine-tails, the one with hooked steel tips. He then began the flagellation ceremony, slowly, brutally flogging his back till blood flowed and tears ran down his cheeks.

  He had so much to atone for: drunkenness, drugging, philandering, gambling, blaspheming Allah’s name. Of course, he knew why he did it—to protect the secrecy of his mission—so his base behavior was pardonable.

  But the pleasure he took in his debaucheries and his indifference to his sins could never be forgiven.

  He looked forward to dying for Allah.

  He accelerated his flogging, accelerating it, accelerating it—

  Until—

  Until—

  In a moment of unbearable anguish and agony, it came to him—the revelation he’d been looking for but never received. First he heard it: a basso profundo voice, booming out of the heavens like a thunderclap:

  “DIE!!!”

  Then he saw it—brighter than ten thousand suns, more ear-shattering than a supernova detonating in its death throes, more horrific than hell itself, hotter than all the fires of the inferno rolled up into one. Its blast wave slammed into his tortured soul like a stellar tsunami, like a comet stopped—so hard the End Time had to be at hand. He could sense Allah was calling him, promising that the American infidels’ Day of Reckoning was finally at hand.

  Swept away by the epiphany’s juggernaut power, by a force he could neither fathom nor resist, by an arousal so overwhelmingly libidinous, he—

  He—

  He—

  He—

  He climaxed violently, his whole being plummeting-spiraling into a bottomless abyss of i
llimitable oblivion. When he came to and his vision returned, he was staring at a billion-trillion blindingly bright, giant red stars, all in the midst of their supernova death throes, a hell-hot universe of everlasting pain and infinite annihilation.

  Then Sam’s consciousness faded again, flickered once, twice, three times, and was gone.

  PART XIII

  Feel the flash.

  Now the blast.

  Now the bomb.

  Hiroshima’s gone …

  —Sister Cassandra, “Hiroshima Girl”

  1

  Their scars, their bars,

  Their hell, their jail?

  Who wants their bloody arms,

  Their crucifixion nails?

  —Sister Cassandra, “Hiroshima Girl”

  Elias could not believe the Day of Reckoning was so close. One of the only things that calmed his nerves was listening to Sister Cassandra and her band, the End Time. They were the patron poets of a new musical genre currently sweeping the world, apocalyptic rock. He picked up the remote and hit his DVD player. He always kept his DVD of “Sister Cassandra Live” in it. She had performed a three-hour show in Madison Square Garden featuring her greatest hits, and her music company had recorded it live. Elias must have watched it a thousand times.

  “Some of you want to know what the end is going to be like,” Cassandra said to her faithful followers as she stepped out onto the stage.

  Their ovation was an apocalypse all by itself.

  “You have heard my revelations. But don’t take my visions as gospel. It’s all happened before: the pica-flash, the fireball’s rise, the blast wave, the firestorms, the black rain, the rivers of blood and fire.

  “Scroll back—1945. Hiroshima. Can you dig it, amigos?”

  Her band, the End Time, gave Cassandra her opening organ chords, and in a rasping Janis Joplin contralto, she began to sing.

  See the bird in the sky

  In the sky so blue.

  Do you ever wonder why,

  As she slowly glides by,

  She’s in love with you.