They prayed. The village surrounded Iman and Hasim. They collectively called to Allah and asked him to bless the journey to come. As expected, Farhad ran his mouth without consideration for those frozen in misery. He reinforced the brainwashing of the villagers, using the secret Marines’ willingness to die as support that all devout Muslims should be equally willing to follow in their steps. Unbeknownst to Farhad, Iman had strapped to his thigh the evidence that would be the village’s undoing. Hasim, the more “devoted” of the brothers, was hiding a stabbing weapon in preparation of self-defense and self-preservation. They were no more willing or ready to die for the extremist cause than Farhad. The Marines were, however, willing to kill or die justly and honorably for a virtuous cause.
The counterfeit imam finally finished his blathering drivel of nonsense and repeated rhetoric. Then the crowd dispersed to seek shelter from the cold. Darkness was nearing and they wanted to regain some warmth before their next prayer. Everyone went to their respective tents except for Hasim and Iman. They were left standing in the empty courtyard. They continued to fight the wet air of winter.
Farhad stood over the men. He stared at them as they huffed and shivered in the cold. Each of them waited for one word from the others. Their breaths showed in foggy clouds of anticipation and discomfort.
Hasim kept his eyes locked on Farhad. The true jihadist, psychologically damaged and removed from reality, began to see himself as a god among men. His every order was obeyed. His followers clung to his every word. He influenced feeble people in a way that would be discouraged and pursued legally in the United States. All the while, he stood over two men who could not wait to be rid of the menace.
Rasa suddenly showed herself in the dimming light of the tent behind Farhad. The old man was so fixed on Hasim that he didn’t notice Iman grinning into the small structure. No one other than Iman and Rasa were engaged in their slight exchange. For a second, only a fleeting speck in time, they were separated from the hatred of their worlds. They were together in a winter oasis, set in peace, and bound in yearning.
The young woman’s face was veiled, but Iman could see the message in her eyes. He knew that she was crying for him, though she could not show her tears. He knew that she was smiling for him, but could not show her lips. Then Rasa committed an act punishable by death had anyone other than Iman seen her move. She waved her fingers lightly in a single, calm motion as to tell the Marine goodbye. She wished him well and prayed him safely along his journey. Then she turned away from the open area and disappeared into the dark corners of Farhad’s tent.
Iman hoped and prayed that it would not be the last he saw of Rasa. He hoped to make her a widow. He wanted to rescue her from the place holding her captive. Something inside him boiled to make her his wife, to care for her, and to make sure she would never have to endure another day with Farhad or his kinsmen. Iman wanted to rip her away from the clutches of the hateful place, but he knew that mission priorities held more weight than personal wants. One person was not enough to thwart the American hammer from striking its crushing blow.
The Marines stood in the cold and watched as Farhad disappeared into his tent without another word. They looked at each other with surprise and caught a glimpse of why the old man retreated to warmth. Their armed escort had arrived.
“We must go down the mountain,” the man ordered harshly. He was pointing an assault rifle at Iman. The Marines nodded. Down the mountain meant out of the snow. Snow would become sleet. Sleet would become rain. Every descending step down the mountain led to warmer temperatures, if only warmer by a degree at a time. No true need existed for Iman and Hasim to be escorted by armed guard. On the surface, they descended the mountain to pursue their jihadist-based mission. They walked into warmer temperatures ahead of a pointed rifle. The brothers were ordered out of the snow, and they were happy to oblige.
DRIVEN
In a single moment, Hasim unconsciously reassured Iman that he had returned to the right side of the fight. Hasim’s usual snarky demeanor came back to life as he placed the end of his index finger into the barrel of an assault rifle. He playfully plugged the end of the weapon as if his finger could prevent a shot from being expelled by the enemy escort. He jokingly pushed the man’s aim away from center-mass.
“You really don’t need to point that thing at us, brother,” Hasim coaxed the weapon aside. “I promise you that we aren’t going to resist getting out of the snow.”
Hasim grinned widely to keep his nervousness hidden from plain view. Iman chuckled. The guard conceded. The man with the rifle just nudged them to face down the hill and walk. The guard did not have to ask twice for them to leave the mountain. It was all they could do to hide their eagerness. The Marines had to make a conscious effort not to sprint away from the village.
Iman smiled and slapped the back of his hand to Hasim’s chest. He noticed a small car at the foot of the steep mountainside and pointed it out to his brother. They would not have to walk far before finding the refuge of heat inside the auto. The car and any idea of immediate warmth made Hasim snicker enthusiastically at the notion of getting into whichever available seat out of the rain.
The car was a pebble, a speck of nothing in their broad view of the desert. The men had to walk for nearly an hour before they could make out the true shape of the vehicle. It was a four-door sedan settled into the side of a desert road. Each of the Marines considered how lucky the driver was not to be observed by American snipers. Sharpshooters might have mistaken him for one who is set to bury roadside bombs, and he would have been an easy static target. Even still, they continued walking until the puffs of exhaust at the rear of the car became visible.
Hope for heat became the catalyst for their speed. The young men were actually Marines, so they had an unnatural ability to move quickly through open terrain. The wind still whipped against them. Snow had given way to a bitter, stinging rain. However, Iman and Hasim set a pace that the armed guard could not keep. The guard hollered out for the brothers to slow down, but they were determined to find their way into the safety of the car. More so, they were determined to get into the backseat without being obstructed. They would have the advantage of unrestricted attack positions unabated by their guard.
Iman arrived at the rear door on the driver’s side. Hasim opened the door opposite to his brother at the rear right. They swung the car doors wide against piercing rain and startled the driver awake. Had the driver been armed, they would have likely been shot. They frightened him, triggering his instinctive urge to put to fight or take to flight. However, the man sitting behind the steering wheel was not holding a weapon. Therefore, the Marines remained without mortal wounds beyond their wet and frostbitten appendages.
“Where is Fa’iz?” the driver asked. The armed escort’s location was of chief concern because he was not with Iman and Hasim, men he was supposed to force into the car. The Marines looked at each other and shrugged childishly. They were becoming arrogant and defiant in their exodus from enemy-held territory. Then Fa’iz, the escort, opened the right rear door of the car. He looked inside and saw that Iman and Hasim were already seated. The guard immediately yielded any advantageous position over the other jihadists. He was exhausted from tying to keep up with the brothers on their downhill hike away from camp.
The guard gave up at the sight of younger and stronger men occupying the car’s rear seat. He turned and crawled into the front seat, huffing to catch his breath, with his rifle muzzle pointed downward. The end of his weapon was jammed under the bottom edge of the dashboard. His response to sudden resistance from the backseat would be delayed before becoming a matter of futility. The escort would only be able to shoot at the floor should any need to pull his trigger arrive. The unarmed driver was a proverbial sitting duck.
Fa’iz, breathless and tired, slammed the car door out of frustration. He turned to curse the soon-dead soldiers for making him look foolish. All the men chattered their teeth, having battled against the cold, all except the driver. He chuckled a
t their plight and Fa’iz’s eagerness to bicker with the condemned.
The driver shifted his rickety car into first gear and turned on the headlights as he pulled forward. Night had since fallen. They missed the evening call to prayer, but doing so seemed acceptable when moving to answer a higher calling to die. I wonder if they skip prayer because they think they’re going to be talking with Allah face-to-face, Hasim joked silently to himself and let only the slightest smile curl at the corners of his mouth.
They drove into the desert night for an hour. No signs of civilization or life had come about in the sixty minutes’ time. “Where are we going?” Iman asked, but no one answered. Iman then repeated the question, but staged the query in different form. “Are you allowed to tell us where we are going?” Again, he was answered with silence. However, Iman persisted. He wanted to know where their intended target was and who they were aiming to kill. “Guys, where are we going?” Iman’s harsh Arabic tone presented the question with its intended sense of belligerence.
The guard had enough of Iman’s inquisition and disposition. Fa’iz turned to Iman, just over his left shoulder, and answered, “You don’t need to know where we are going. You just need to sit quietly and worry about obeying orders.” The guard barked like a father irritated with his children on a road trip. Then he turned back to face the windshield once again.
Iman looked at Hasim and nodded. They had traveled far enough into the open desert that the car was well out of the camp’s view. Fa’iz unknowingly had spit his last words on earth. Hasim, seated directly behind the guard, reached nonchalantly into the top of his boot. The younger brother withdrew the shank he had taken from Iman’s former bedroll pallet. Undetected, Hasim reared back then crammed the point of the wood shard deep into the bottom of Fa’iz’s skull. The splintered tip broke off, but Hasim was still able to stab forward through meat and spine.
The top of Fa’iz’s head snapped back with the force of the blow. Triangle-shaped wood ripped through the guard’s brain stem. Every inch jammed flesh and organ further apart. The man’s mouth opened to the wedge of wood being shoved through his spinal cord. Hasim gagged at the spit- and blood-covered atrocity splayed open by his hands. Then he twisted the spear to quickly finish the job.
Fa’iz’s spinal cord was severed from the bottom of his brain. The fatally injured man did not twitch or stir. He blinked and gagged at the pressure of a wooden foreign object over his tongue. He choked on blood before his lungs and heart failed without communication to the man’s brain. His every organ quit simultaneously. Fa’iz was no more.
Chunks of blood and tissue sprayed back onto Hasim before the driver could react. Gurgles preceded Fa’iz’s last gasp just as the driver swerved in response to the attack. The man screamed out of confusion and fear as his friend was stabbed to death in the next seat over. Then Iman wrapped the crook of his elbow around the driver’s throat and jerked upward. The driver’s hands flew from the steering wheel in a desperate effort to claw for life. Every inch that the man fought for was taken from him as Iman wrenched with all his strength. Iman’s elbow became the hangman’s noose, stretching the driver’s neck from his shoulders.
Time in camp, fatigue, and malnourishment had robbed Iman of his previous power. He was not able to break the man’s neck to end a suffocating misery early. Instead, the driver’s foot pressed hard onto the gas pedal and sent the car swerving in a large pattern over wet desert dirt. The driver tried to push his legs against the car’s floor just to lengthen himself under Iman’s pull. He tried to relieve the crushing pressure at his throat, but to no avail.
The driver’s life faded with every constricting second that he was not able to take a breath, but the seconds it took to kill him seemed to drag on well into forever. A high rate of speed and erratic swerving were heading them toward an imminent crash if someone, anyone, was not able to regain control of the vehicle. Hasim realized the lurking dangers, and reacted.
Hasim reached over Fa’iz’s limp body and pulled at the dead man’s rifle. With lightning speed, the young Marine pointed a blood-splattered rifle muzzle at the side of the driver’s head. He yelled, “Clear!” Iman reacted without hesitation. He knew that Hasim was telling Iman to move clear of an outgoing bullet. The driver was nearly strangled to his demise, but Iman released him anyway. Hasim buried the muzzle directly above the man’s right ear. The jihadist escort was not able to regain full consciousness before Hasim pulled the trigger.
A high-velocity rifle bullet penetrated and exited the man’s skull instantly. Sudden cranial decompression sprayed into a fountain of blood, brains, and bone fragments. The smell of death filled the car. Gunpowder, blood, and internal organs created a stink that gagged both living men. However, they had no time to react to any level of stench. The car was careening out of control at full tilt.
Iman took charge. He dove over the remnants of the driver’s open head and slid through blood and gore. Inverted over the driver’s body, Iman shoved the dead man’s foot off the accelerator. Then he crammed both of his hands down hard on the brake. The car’s tires nearly buried in the sand before the transmission choked to a gurgling halt.
Hasim recovered from the mental shock of killing for the first time. He reached forward and forced the shifter into the neutral position as the car slid to its awkward halt. They stopped safely, in the middle of an unknown desert location, having killed two militiamen. They knew that divine intervention was at the core of their survival. They were thankful.
Iman slithered backward until he was upright once again. He landed in the blood-pooled seat between two fatally wounded terrorists. Fa’iz, the dead escort, sat with a shard of wood protruding from the back of his head and through his mouth. His teeth bore down on the spike with an unnatural pressure originating at the base of his skull. The guard had a look of surprise and fear on his face lingering in death’s presence. Iman then looked to his left and instantly regretted glancing in the direction of the driver. Nothing remained of the driver’s skull or face. The bottom half of the man’s head made a red-filled bowl of meat soup. He was no longer recognizable as human. That which held in place showed no signs of a man having just fought for a last breath.
Iman flinched away. His stomach churned, but not nearly as bad as Hasim’s. The younger brother could not hold back at what they had just done. He flung open the rear door of the car and hurled himself into heavy desert rain. He hoped that water from the heavens would rinse him clean, but he knew better. He knew that no amount of water would cleanse him of this deed. Then the feeling became too much. Hasim doubled over and purged his hatred and fear. His stomach emptied in the burning sensation of war and turmoil. He ached and retched until his gut was void of any liquid or solid. Then he recovered with a long wipe of his lower lip against his wet sleeve.
The older Marine had since climbed over the dead to exit the small car. He grabbed the driver by the front of his shirt and jerked him clear of the front seat. Then he yelled over the still running auto at his brother, “Are you okay?” Hasim merely waved his hand as if to confirm he would be alright. Hasim didn’t speak his answer right away because his throat still burned with bile and adrenaline.
Iman then sat in the driver’s seat. The back of his pants slid against bloody and wet vinyl. He leaned across the car and opened the passenger door. He placed the flattest part of his boot to Fa’iz’s ribcage and shoved outward. The dead man’s upper body flopped hard to the ground at the passenger side of the car. Yet Fa’iz’s feet had not cleared the door. Iman’s hope to allow Hasim a means of avoidance was dismissed by the bottoms of Fa’iz’s legs. The dead man held on just long enough to torment Hasim one last time.
Hasim recovered control over his gullet and turned back to the car. He wrenched his fists into the back of Fa’iz’s jacket and pulled the man’s body away from the open car door. The younger Marine joined his older brother in the front seat. He squished into place among enemy blood and brains. Avoidance was impossible against the slime t
hat covered the transport’s interior, so they swallowed hard and carried on.
“What do you think our best route will be?” Hasim asked as if they were two college kids on their first road trip away from home.
Iman answered with a shrug. Then he remembered. “McKenzee said just to head east if we broke loose.” Iman inhaled hard and sighed, “So…I guess we go east. The only thing is…we don’t know who’s out here. We’re probably going to run into some roadblocks. I’m really hoping we just get captured by American troops. Pointing our guys back to two dead jihadists will be a whole lot easier than admitting it to the other side.”
They laughed and Iman threw the shifter into first gear. The transmission let out a quick grind to his lack of practice behind the wheel. The tires tore into saturated desert floor before regaining traction. Then the older brother barreled along a broken roadway with reckless abandon. He was not worried about preserving the vehicle’s tires or engine. Farhad was expecting a report back about their successful detonation within a matter of days. They knew that such a detonation would not come. Therefore, they had to exit the area quickly and rejoin their unit before Farhad had any chance to uproot and move camp. Their time among the enemy would slip into a vain nothingness if they lost track of the camp, so Iman charged east. He drove the car as hard as it would go until he saw lights ahead of them on the road. Then he drove the engine to its maximum capability. The motor whined for a couple of hours before they found hope.
A young soldier, once defeated by the rain and wind, stood atop his post and came alive yet again. “Inbound! Inbound!” he screamed to the other watchmen on guard. The youthful and adrenaline-filled man readied his machine gun. Every soldier on duty gasped at the fast-approaching car.
Iman’s expedited drive toward the guard post fit nearly all standard means of suicide bombers seeking to attack hardened military targets. The enemy charged in vehicles and detonated themselves on impact. They destroyed roadblocks and took as many casualties as possible, so American soldiers were on edge any time a fast-driven vehicle was headed their way.
Operation Jericho Page 10