Bloodbath

by David Alexander

  It was from this jar that Bashar was plucking tasty morsels with a pair of tweezers when the bomb-maker had come in.

  "You see," Bashar went on, speaking toward the tank as if Dalkimoni were not even in his presence, "the defeated fish must either find a way to regain their balls or suffer annihilation. The only way for a fish to achieve this transformation is to fight. Thus, the fish are constantly at war with each other. They live out their lives in a state of perpetual combat."

  Bashar had dropped another few wriggling bugs into the tank, smiling as the fish jostled and pushed each other aside, struggling to be the first to snap up the life-giving morsels. The bomb-maker realized that Bashar was deliberately withholding most of the contents of the insect jar, forcing the Siamese fish to crowd one another so that the less aggressive ones would end up starving to death.

  Finally, Bashar turned to face the bomb-maker. In his eyes Dalkimoni saw the same strange fire that he had witnessed in a rare interview with the Rais (a word of Urdu derivation variously meaning president or Supreme Leader, and in the Mozafferreddin years, a combination of both). One day soon, Bashar would assume the mantle of his patron and engenderer. Whether he would last very long was an open question.

  Unknown assailants had already voted against his stewardship by attempting to shoot his car out from under him, landing him in the hospital for months. Bashar, Dalkimoni reflected, might well prove even more ruthless than even the long-dead master of cunning and treachery, Saddam; but he was far less popular and perhaps less cunning. Still, time would tell the tale.

  Screwing the cap back on the jar and laying the tweezers atop the lid, Bashar stepped away from the tank and went to his cigar humidor. As if by magic, a lackey appeared and snipped the end off the cigar, lighting up his master, and then vanishing into a side room.

  Concentrating on his cigar and still completely failing to acknowledge the presence of the bomb-maker by so much as a single glance in his direction, Bashar issued his last proclamations on the subject of Siamese fighting fish.

  "There is a lesson here. An important one. We must always fight and we must always prevail. We must never tire, lest we should lose our balls. For if we should lose our balls, we shall no longer be men, and then we shall inevitably lose our lives as well."

  "You are truly wise, Excellency," the bomb-maker had then replied, and after a respectful pause, added, "Have you perchance reviewed the plan I presented?"

  Bashar replied that he had, and that it had gained his approval.

  "You may proceed," he told Dalkimoni, continuing not to look in his direction. But added, "You have left out the traitor Farouk Al-Kaukji. The Rais himself has asked that something be done about this poisonous little toad."

  "Don't worry about Farouk." Dalkimoni now spoke confidently, for he had already made ironclad arrangements to deal harshly with the traitor. "You may assure the Rais that he shall be taken care of quite soon."

  "You meant immediately, did you not?" Bashar asked.

  "Yes, Excellency. Of course. Immediately. Do not fear. It shall be done. Immediately."

  "Good. I had not doubted this."

  Bashar had then left the office without uttering another word, leaving the bomb-maker standing by himself just inside the open door inhaling a sour cloud of second-hand cigar smoke.

  Dalkimoni now understood that he was dismissed. He too left the building for his villa.

  ▪▪▪▪▪▪

  Back in Berlin, Farouk Al-Kaukji had been released by the German cops due to pressure from above. The federal government did not relish the dirt that a trial would dredge up.

  Germany's notorious scandal sheets and tabloid television media would have a field day -- Der Stern, he'd already learned, was already working on a cover story -- and some of the displaced muck would certainly wind up covering a few powerful men in the Bundestag who had strong business and political ties to Tehran. This could not be permitted to happen.

  With charges against him dropped, Farouk Al-Kaukji disappeared immediately. He was spirited through various safe houses to Frankfurt, where another air-freight escape was being prepared by a surviving cell of the terrorist underground.

  "Go with Allah," Farid Housek -- who had been released on bail -- bid him, hugging and kissing Al-Kaukji as he eased himself into a shipping container similar to the one in which his leader had fled Germany. "For those among the holy shall be blessed with everlasting grace."

  Al-Kaukji kissed and hugged his cousin in return, then checked his oxygen supply and the seals on the pressurized interior lining and made sure that the freight module's interior light worked.

  Everything seemed in order. The container might have been cramped, but he had been supplied with all the comforts of home for his journey. There was a pocket-sized edition of the Q'uran, plenty of snack food and canned soda, his iPad full of American porn, even some old Playboys and a bottle in which to take a leak when it became necessary.

  There was also a roll of toilet paper, but he didn't see what it would be for, unless for wiping his dick if he got too carried away from watching all the fucking and sucking. Al-Kaukji tried to make himself as comfortable as possible. After all, for the next fifteen hours or so, this crate would be his home.

  Two hours later, the crate was being forklift-loaded onto the baggage compartment of Brussels Airlines flight number 787, Frankfurt-Tehran.

  At the same time, a passenger named Sadoon Daher, a Cairo college student, bid so-long to his new girlfriend, Ulrike. She'd met him on the Ku'damm and had proven to be an expert in the Teutonic art of playing the blue-veined piccolo.

  It had been an unforgettable two weeks of magic flute practice, with memories of Ulrike's flying ass and bouncing boobs enough to last him through many weeks of wanking material. Until he could find another blonde girl with humungous lungs to play the flute with, that is. And Ulrike had given him a new iBippy-capable boom box as a parting token of her affection.

  The boom box went into Sadoon's luggage, and was placed only a few feet from where Al-Kaukji's freight container was located, with Al-Kaukji inside flipping through the Playboy as he ate sparingly, crumbs falling on the naked crotches of the blonde twins that the caption said were from the American town of Modesto, California, home of locally produced wines of international distinction.

  The Brussels Airlines flight 787 was a direct flight whose route swung it steadily southward. The jet airliner's flight plan called most of the journey to be made over water, crossing first the Adriatic and then the Mediterranean seas before transiting land again, hours later, as it passed over the littoral coast of Lebanon. The Alpine regions of Switzerland would mark the plane's last overflight of land for another five hours of travel time.

  The flight passed over the Arlberg valleys at eight in the morning at twenty-five thousand feet. It had reached its cruising altitude forty-five minutes before the lovely Ulrike's present did what the MISIRI action cell in Berlin that used her as a convenient gofer and frequent pump had programmed it to do.

  A combination of flight time and altitude -- this bomb had a dual timer/barometric blast initiator mechanism -- triggered the ice-cube fuse of the bomb which had been secreted in a sheet metal-sided cargo hamper in forward baggage compartment 14L, located just aft of the pilot's cabin and below the "B" in the Brussels Airlines logo.

  Farouk Al-Kaukji was arguably the first casualty of the explosion, feeling the blast effects a third of a second before anyone else on the plane was incinerated. Altogether, it was a strange way to die.

  Melting, shattering, exploding -- all three at once. Without warning or preamble. Without absolution or transition. Dying in the flash of a moment, dead even as the realization of what was happening was making its way along nerve channels leading to the brain.

  After that, he was nothing. No Allah, no Islamic paradise of Behesht Zahra, no ageless harlots to warm eternity awaited him. Unlike Sadoon Daher, Al-Kaukji didn't even have the most fleeting memory of Ulrike's winsome smile and nubi
le ass to speed him on his one-way trip to nowhere. The overtaxed and overstimulated neurons of Al-Kaukji's cerebral wetware were far too busy registering the panic at the death of his body for anything as complicated as that.

  Far below, twenty-eight thousand feet below, to be exact, it was ski season in the picturesque valleys, mountain passes and high meadows of the Glarner Alpen. On the snow-covered slopes around the trendy Swiss Alpine village of Chur, colorfully dressed skiers were startled by the sudden fireball in the skies and the thunder of multiple explosions that quickly followed the sighting.

  For most the experience would begin and end there. For less fortunate others, it would have lasting consequences or be the cause of sudden death amid the festive atmosphere of a carefree ski holiday. As the plane broke apart in midair, jagged fragments of fuselage, gouts of flaming fuel and falling debris of every kind subjected the ski slopes to an unexpected aerial bombardment.

  At least one skier had his limbs torn off by flying chunks of razor-edged steel, and several more had their brains bashed in by miscellaneous objects, including the decapitated head of one of the flight attendants, which crashed into the hapless skier it chanced to strike like a cannonball made of meat and bone.

  In another case, an entire row of seats from the economy class cabin plunged through the roof of a ski chalet to crush two men and a woman engaged in three-way sex, flattening the trio and fusing their mashed corpses together, making it extremely difficult to separate them for autopsy later on.

  For the next several weeks, morgue details were pulling arms, legs and various other assorted body parts out of the snow around Chur, and it would not be until spring came and the edelweiss again bloomed that the entire mess could be finally cleaned up and Chur return to normal as a magnet for the international jet-set and the globe-trotting rich.

  ▪▪▪▪▪▪

  After having had time to mull over his master's performance at the Niavaran Palace earlier that day, the chief bomb-maker had absorbed the full meaning of Bashar's lecture about fish and balls.

  The point was not lost on Dr. Jubaird Dalkimoni -- he needed a success. Failure would not be tolerated.

  The operation had been technically successful -- the Columbine Heads had been assembled in Berlin from stolen Israeli weapons plans and brought intact to Tehran. But the operation in Germany had needed to be closed down due to the carelessness of Dalkimoni's accomplices.

  Nevertheless, Dalkimoni knew that Berlin was still the optimum place in Europe to assemble bombs. Much of the municipal police force was corrupt there, and the government had no stomach for risking the ire of rogue Arab states -- there was far too much money invested in defense and construction contracts with Middle Eastern despots both officially and privately. There were also plenty of ex-nazis still alive and well in the Arab world, and they were powerful middlemen who had to be appeased as well.

  For now, though, Berlin was too hot. It would still be months before operations could resume. But resume they would. Dr. Dalkimoni decided that if he wanted a place in the coming action, he had better not fuck up in his present assignment. But he would not. He was on the beam and would stay that way.

  Suddenly Dalkimoni's attention snapped back to the present. The imported Swedish talent with a set of perfect, creamy 38D's was playing a stimulating pizzicato on his violin neck, getting him ready for a broadside across her tonsils. Right around when he thought he'd solo, the reporter cut away to CNN headquarters where coverage of the breaking story of the bomb that had blown up a 747 jumbo-jet over Switzerland was in progress.

  Dalkimoni laughed out loud, something he always enjoyed doing while getting good head from a talented whore. He laughed now for a good reason: he had succeeded, and Farouk, the little mahmoon of a traitor, had paid in full measure for his cowardice and treachery.

  The bomb-maker now also realized that Bashar had been absolutely correct concerning his little Aesop's fable too. He now understood that it was with men exactly as it was with Siamese fighting fish. This was completely true. Dr. Dalkimoni knew this for a certainty, for in the space of a split-second, his balls had surely grown to twice their former size and girth.

  Now he pulled the giggling girl's head underwater, and felt her do what she did best. The bomb-maker orgasmed violently, pushing the Swede's head onto him as video footage of the fireball erupting over the Swiss Alps caught by a tourist with a camcorder filled the large, flat-panel screen. He held her head down for quite a long time as the girl struggled for air, releasing her finally just before she went completely limp.

  ▪▪▪▪▪▪

  Among those witnessing the fiery bolide in the Swiss skies were five men. Two of them were in a waiting Mercedes, the other three moving quickly and silently across the deserted grounds of the Deutsche Wehrteknik munitions plant.

  The team had found what they were looking for at DWT. Within a secure, vaulted room of the plant, Breaux and two of his men had discovered a cache of Columbine Heads. These were rapid initiation devices, something like the Kryton switches for nuclear detonation secured by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein years before.

  Columbine Heads were used for conventional explosives. But not just any kind of conventional explosives.

  You needed Columbine Heads to trigger the ignition of air-dispersed effluents. You needed Columbine Heads, in short, for use with chemical, nuclear and biological agents or even fuel-air explosives.

  Breaux and his team had left a calling card. The skull-and-crossbones Ace of Spades would be discovered later on by one of the guards, or before, if the one they'd tied up managed to free himself of the gag and handcuffs that now secured his arms and legs. Actually, they had left two calling cards -- the first one and something else besides.

  Breaux and the other two SFOD-O personnel hustled into the Mercedes, which gained the road from the nearby grove of fruit trees in which it was hidden and drove off in the direction of Italy. The team would not be returning to the leased chalet, nor would the car be returned to the Swiss rental office. It would be picked up by someone else, on the other side of the Italian border near Ticino.

  Behind them, a few minutes on the road, there was a sudden explosion. In just a little while, the local fire department had its hands full dealing with yet another five-alarm blaze in a morning that had been nothing short of a pyromaniac's dream. This particular one happened to have taken place at the Swiss headquarters of Deutsche Wehrteknik.

  It apparently had nothing to do with the downing of Brussels Airlines flight 787, for the site of the explosion was far from any of the falling aircraft debris. Months would pass before the details were fully known, because at the moment the Swiss authorities had enough on their plate just sorting out the aftermath of the airline bombing.

  In the meantime, Deutsche Wehrtechnik would find itself facing some very disgruntled customers from the Islamic Republic of Iran, causing the company president, Heinrich Alois Schmetterer, to leave for a protracted stay in the Canary Islands, where the sea breezes were said to be exceptionally healthful at that time of year. Certainly more healthful than facing a MISIRI hit squad dispatched from the Old Presidential Palace or even, at his age, pussy from the Niavaran pleasure dome in Shemiranat.

  But no one would ever figure out why a body bag full of melted ice and crushed beer cans was found in one of the chalets in a picturesque valley near the trendy jet-set ski town of Chur.

  Chapter Six

  Secretary of Defense Lyle Dalhousie -- dubbed by a heartless media "Lyle the Lousy" after allegations of post-Strike Day reluctance to sanction military reprisals against the Mahdi's terror bases in Indonesia -- sat in the rear of the black Lincoln town car that rolled along Pennsylvania Avenue through backed-up midmorning traffic and cold, relentless rain. Dalhousie's destination was the West Wing entrance of the White House building complex where the president and members of the National Security Council were awaiting his impending arrival.

  To the SecDef's chagrin he realized that most of the mo
rning was already gone and that it was approaching noon. Dalhousie had not eaten except for the vanilla ice cream sandwich he'd had for breakfast, bought at the Pick 'N Pay at the Pentagon Mall. Mountains of ice cream and seas of black coffee kept the Pentagon going; the Building thrived on caffeine and sugar. At least, Dalhousie knew, there would be sandwiches and soft drinks served at the White House.

  Dalhousie did not find it at all strange to be preoccupied with his stomach in the midst of a regional war and a deepening international crisis, but this too went with the territory. As SecDef, he weathered whatever storms the Department of Defense weathered, and these were always legion.

  The Building was like a ship in troubled waters, constantly buffeted by the gales of discord that blew in from the four corners of the globe. Keeping that ship trimmed to an even keel required a mental compartmentalization that kept things in perspective. Napoleon had likened this to opening one drawer of a filing cabinet while closing another, and Napoleon, Dalhousie reflected, was a commander who could go to sleep in the midst of a battlefield if he chose.

  Dalhousie checked his watch, and stared out the window, preparing himself for the approaching meeting at the NSC situation room in the White House basement beneath the Oval Office. He estimated another ten minutes, maximum, before he reached the West Wing gate. Meanwhile the SecDef's thoughts turned back to the events of the morning.

  The early meeting in Dalhousie's third floor E-ring office had been mandated by the events transmitted over the global SPINTCOM and CRITICOM (special and critical intelligence communications networks, respectively) the previous night. Along these intelligence nerve channels had poured scattered reports of Russian NBC weapons deployment in the Caucasus, but these previous day's reports had been disproved. Not so the reports of last night.

  As the hours passed, the network of computers, fiber optic cables and secure radio links that made up SPINTCOM/CRITICOM fed data from battlefield reports, spysat imaging, and electronic intercepts to crisis management centers in the United States, including the Pentagon's NMCC and the Emergency Command Center at the White House. These reports made the picture dismally clear. The Russians had almost certainly used chemical artillery strikes against Uzbeki rebels near the town of Igdir.