Root and Branch

by Preston Fleming

  Chapter Twenty-One: Timia

  “Whoever fights monsters should see to it in the process that he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

  –Friedrich Nietzsche

  EARLY AUGUST, ASSODE, NIGER

  When Zorn and Steiner finished their coffee, the base chief left his seat and motioned for Zorn to follow him outside. There the two men passed through a couple of locked gates and a wide strip of ploughed earth before reaching the detention area’s perimeter fence. Inside the wire and under the high tent canopies were two or three hundred men, all wearing khaki work clothes, boonie hats with rear neck protection, and high work boots.

  Most sat cross-legged on the ground or lay atop foam mats, while others played cards or read books. A few meditated or chanted verses from the Quran. None seemed to pay the two visitors much attention. Zorn found this strange, having heard stories about Islamist prisoners in France and elsewhere taking every opportunity to attack their captors by throwing rocks and feces and spewing verbal abuse.

  As far as Zorn could tell, nearly all of the detainees were young, from their late teens to late thirties, though a few were middle-aged or older. Most wore beards or Islamic-style throat whiskers, while others sported five-day growths. None were clean-shaven, so it was difficult for Zorn to guess their national origins. But a few were fair-skinned, with blond, red or light brown hair. These didn't look Middle Eastern or South Asian at all.

  "Blond Arabs?" he asked Steiner, pointing to a group of fair-skinned detainees in the distance.

  "Muslim converts, most likely."

  "You mean, American citizens who converted to Islam and joined the jihad?" Zorn asked, unable to conceal his discomfort. "What would U.S. citizens be doing here?"

  "Are converts any less Muslim than someone born into the faith? Or less deadly once they turn terrorist? Back in the seventies, some of the most bloodthirsty Palestinian terrorists were raised as Christians."

  "So let me see if I have this right, Max,” Zorn challenged, suddenly unable to restrain himself. “First we go after the Islamists. I get that. Then it's the anarchists and Antifa types who aid and abet them. Fair enough, up to a point. But who's next? The lawyers who defend them? Anyone who speaks out against the emergency measures? Just how far do DHS and Tetra intend to go with this?"

  "How far? I'll tell you how far. Complete eradication of Islamist ideology from American soil. Yanking it out by root and branch. That’s how far."

  “You sound just like my father. ‘By root and branch’ was a favorite phrase of his.”

  “Maybe that’s why you and I get along so well,” Steiner replied, a smile forming on his lips but not reaching his eyes. “So, my friend, shall we take a little drive together out into the Sahara?"

  "I wouldn't miss it for the world," Zorn replied, doing his best to stuff down a deep feeling of dread.

  Ninety minutes later, the three Zorn Security SUVs stopped at the Assodé base's main gate to retrieve the electronic devices they had surrendered. A couple hundred yards further on, they linked up with Tetra’s prisoner convoy, consisting of ten Blue Bird school buses and a half-dozen Humvees. The moment Zorn pulled even with the last Humvee, Steiner stepped out to greet him.

  "Just in case we get separated, let me give you the GPS coordinates for where we're going," the base chief said, handing a single-page printout to each SUV's driver. "We're headed to a market town about a two-hour drive from here. That's where the warlords pick up laborers for their bootleg mining operations. Once you've watched the show on the main square, I suggest you drive back with us so the drone jockeys don't mistake you for AQIM. We have some spare berths at the base where you and your team can spend the night."

  "Thanks, we'll do that,” Zorn answered. “By the way, what's the town's name? I'd like to look it up on the map."

  "Oh, it's called Timia. About fifty clicks due south of here. We’ll pass through an oasis going in. You’re going to love it."

  As Steiner predicted, the convoy entered the outskirts of Timia a little more than two hours later, as the shadows were growing long amid low hills of gray stone. To one side, Zorn spotted what looked like an oasis crowded with date palms and fruit trees. Further on, after passing through cramped streets packed with low mud-brick houses, the convoy slowed to a crawl as it approached the town center. Five minutes later, Zorn's SUV turned left onto the town's main square, where crowds had gathered around three low platforms.

  A short distance ahead, half of the buses were lined up along a series of makeshift pens and chutes. Zorn watched as each bus stopped, opened its front door, and its passengers stepped out, still bound to the steel cable that ran between them. Tetra guards armed with truncheons retracted the cable before driving the men into the chutes, flanked on either side by stout natives wielding sticks. From there the natives herded their captives through the narrow chutes into crowded pens.

  Suddenly Guerin put a hand on Zorn's shoulder and drew his attention to the center platform, where a line of khaki-clad detainees, bound at wrists and ankles, were being led up stairs to where the crowd could view them. As soon as each detainee stepped onto the platform, his captors prodded him with their long sticks to make him spin around so that the onlookers could examine him from all sides.

  "My god, it's a slave market!" Zorn said under his breath.

  "It's inhuman. Such a thing cannot be permitted to exist," Guerin sputtered.

  "But what can we do? It's a mob out there. They'd tear us limb from limb!"

  "Then we must leave the convoy at once and avoid being swept up into such madness!" Guerin insisted.

  "But we're here under the Americans' protection, Bernard. Remember what Abu Ahmad said. These people are armed and don’t take kindly to strangers. We wouldn't stand a chance on our own. Besides, I’ve got to take some photos of this."

  Guerin exploded.

  "Photographs! Are you mad?"

  "Okay, then," Zorn responded in a voice so calm that he surprised himself. "If you insist on leaving the convoy, then pull off to the right and stop at the opening to the main street. We can exit the square there, circle back and, with luck, catch the convoy on its way out of town. I see enough room for all three SUVs. I'll take my photos from there."

  Without another word, Guerin hit his turn signal and pulled out of the queue. The other two SUV's did likewise and followed Guerin's armored Mercedes through throngs of robed Tuaregs and Fulanis, youths in jeans and polo shirts, and affluent-looking Arabs in dress slacks and white shirts. They stopped along the edge of the square while Zorn retrieved his Sony pocket camera, equipped with a thirty-power optical lens and video recording capability. Then Zorn opened the car door and waded into the crowd.

  He found a recessed doorway with three stone steps and stood on the highest one to survey the scene. Then he turned his attention to the center platform, where a string of five khaki-clad men was being dragged offstage after having been sold. Two who refused to climb into a pickup truck received blows from clubs and rifle butts while Tetra men, conspicuous in their desert camouflage fatigues, observed from a distance and did nothing to stop it.

  Zorn recorded a short video of detainees being led off the platform before turning his attention to the chutes and pens. There he saw a commotion erupt when a dozen or more detainees sought to scale the head-high walls and dissolve into the crowd. While guards converged from all around to beat them back, a smaller group in another pen climbed over the barrier despite being bound at the wrists with plastic cable ties. Zorn filmed another short video before heading back to the Mercedes, having sensed hostility from the mob around him.

  Only then did he notice three men dressed in khaki running toward him with several bearded youths in hot pursuit. An instant later, pistol shots rang out from the direction of Guerin’s Mercedes and the bearded pursuers hit the dirt, while the escapees ran faster. Foremost among them was a khaki-clad fellow of indeterminate age who waved a
t the Frenchmen who sheltered behind their SUVs. Zorn struggled to make out the man's words over the din.

  What he said sounded like "American" or "Américain" or the Arabic "Amriki.”

  As the fugitive came closer, Zorn could hear the words more distinctly.

  "Help! I'm American!"

  More shots rang out, but the fugitive and his pursuers kept on coming.

  Suddenly Zorn heard three pops from behind. He turned to see Guerin raise his pistol to fire once more over the heads of the fugitive's pursuers, who took cover and stayed down this time.

  Moments later, the escapee reached his goal. He collapsed into Guerin's arms, his chest heaving. The mob edged forward, but shots from Guerin's pistol held them back.

  "Back into the cars, quick!" Guerin shouted to his men. "Let's go!"

  New shots rang out from across the square and Zorn heard the crack of a high-velocity rifle bullet pass by.

  Without a moment's hesitation, Guerin and the bodyguard bundled the fugitive into the back seat of their Mercedes, while Zorn hopped into the front passenger’s seat. Within seconds, Guerin took the wheel and pulled out of the square with the other two French SUVs close behind. Soon the bureau chief was barreling down the shadowy street while Zorn helped guide him out of town with the aid of the car's onboard navigation system.

  Once they were free of the town's congested center, Zorn released his safety belt to turn around and take a closer look at their dazed passenger, who lay sideways across the seat and continued to gasp for breath.

  To Zorn's surprise, the man was not young, despite his wiry physique. His black hair and beard were streaked with gray and deep creases had formed around his eyes and at the corners of his mouth. There was a definite intelligence in those watery eyes, and Zorn found something oddly familiar about him.

  "Do you speak English?" he asked the stranger.

  "Yes," came the man’s halting reply.

  "Are you one of the American detainees?"

  "Yes!" he said again, his dark eyes blazing. "I - am - an - American - citizen!"

  The Frenchmen, no longer counting on the protection of their Tetra hosts, set out at first toward Assodé but then, with darkness falling, stopped briefly to let their passenger change into fresh clothing and discard his old clothes, boots and hat, assuming that all carried tracking devices. A few miles further, they made a sharp left onto a desert trail heading east into the Aïr Massif.

  "There is a mountain pass that leads back to Gougaram, if we can find it," Guerin called out to Zorn, his voice shaking from the adrenalin rush.

  The three-vehicle convoy pressed on until well after sunset, when they pulled off the track and parked for the night behind a low ridge. There they devoured the remaining food they had brought, offering a double ration to their underfed passenger. Rather than light a fire for warmth, which might betray them to pursuing vehicles or to aircraft lurking overhead, they wrapped themselves in space blankets, which also offered a measure of concealment against the drones' infrared heat sensors.

  Zorn waited until the fugitive had eaten before asking him to tell his story.

  "Do you mind if I record it?"

  "You must!" the man answered with unanticipated vehemence. "The world must hear what has been done to us!"

  He spoke American English tinged with a singsong South Asian accent that Zorn recalled having heard somewhere before.

  "Tell me your name, date and place of birth, and where you lived in the U.S.," Zorn went on once he activated on the voice recorder app in his smartphone.

  "Amjad Samir Ibrahim, born 27 August, 1970, in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Until March of this year, I lived in Minneapolis. I am a naturalized American citizen."

  All at once Zorn remembered. Seated before him was the medical engineer with the disheveled hair, restless darting eyes, and high forehead whom he had watched undergo a Triage interview in Minneapolis following that of his Islamist son. The son's interview had gone badly, earning him a Category One rating and a one-way flight to the Caribbean, while the father's interview had gone much better. And yet the father had been assigned to Cat Two rather than Cat Three, to which his low Triage score should have entitled him.

  So here was a prime case of an American citizen detained on false grounds, wrongly deported, and cut loose in the Niger desert to be sold into bondage instead of being returned to his native Bangladesh. Who could invent such a far-fetched story? Yet Amjad Ibrahim was living proof of how far the ESM program had been perverted.

  "Okay, Amjad," Zorn continued, flushed with excitement from his extraordinary find. "Tell me your story, from the day of your arrest until now. Take all the time you need, and include as many names, places and details as you can."

  Zorn fished in his pocket for the portable recharger he had brought for his smartphone and settled in to hear Amjad’s tale for as long as he had the strength to tell it.

  The interview went on for more than an hour until they stopped to catch some sleep, since the convoy needed to set off again at sunrise. When Zorn awoke some hours later, he looked around him and saw the dull glow of dawn approaching from behind low hills to the east. The team’s two native drivers were conversing nearby in low tones. Soon the others would be awake, as well.

  Zorn struggled with what to say to the Bengali-born engineer when the subject of his son arose. How could he possibly confess that he had taken a hand in sending the youth to his death from ten thousand feet? But how could he not reveal it? While his mind raced to resolve the dilemma, Zorn felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Guerin.

  "Do you hear it?”

  Zorn held his breath and listened. There it was, the hum of a distant propeller.

  "It's been overhead most of the night. I don't know if it's routine surveillance or whether the Americans have been following us. But I think we'd better get moving."

  "All right," Zorn replied. "But let’s not panic. By now, Steiner will have told the drone operators who we are. If they haven't hit us by now, I doubt they will. Besides, the Americans would have to think twice before attacking French nationals."

  But the moment the words left his mouth, Zorn no longer believed them. Guerin walked away without speaking and Zorn touched the ex-detainee on the leg to wake him.

  "Time to get up, Amjad. We'll be leaving soon. If you need to take a leak, this would be the time to do it. But keep your space blanket wrapped around you, just in case. And cover your piss with a rock so the heat signature can’t be picked up, okay?"

  Amjad shook off his exhaustion and followed Zorn into the desert, where each chose a different clump of rocks to do his business.

  Zorn was mid-stride when an explosive shock wave knocked him off his feet. Afterward, he lay motionless on the ground, disoriented and unable to catch his breath. At last he opened his eyes to find Guerin and one of the bodyguards standing over him, gesticulating and shouting that he get up. But he couldn't hear a sound.

  Only then did he realize that the explosion must have been a drone-fired missile aimed at Amjad Ibrahim. It had found the man pissing at his rock pile, despite being swaddled in a heat-reflective space blanket. The drone must have waited all night until Amjad stood at a sufficient remove from the Frenchmen to minimize risk to them.

  But how could the American drone operator have picked out Amjad from the others? Certainly not from his Tetra-issued garments, which he had discarded. Nor by his heat signature alone. Then Zorn remembered Steiner’s comments about sensor tags. Could Tetra have injected the former detainee with a reflective chip? It distressed Zorn not to have thought of it earlier. But then, what difference would it have made if he did?

  When it became clear to the other team members that Zorn could not walk unaided, Guerin and one of the security men pulled their chief executive to his feet and helped him into the Mercedes. All the way back to Arlit, Guerin kept the SUV's windows open to listen for drones buzzing overhead. And every half hour the convoy stopped to tune in more closely and search the skies. But now that a missi
le had found Amjad Ibrahim, the buzzing was gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Limbo

  "Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as cooperation with good.”

  –Mahatma Gandhi

  MID-AUGUST, CARCASSONNE, FRANCE

  Zorn stepped out of the whitewashed corridor onto the stone veranda of his Carcassonne estate, where his wife had laid out a breakfast buffet for two on the sideboard. It was a cool, cloudless morning, with just a hint of a breeze, presaging an unusually early autumn in the Languedoc.

  Reaching across the glass-topped table, Kay poured her husband a cup of dark-roast coffee from the cafetière and placed the cup and saucer before him.

  Their aging Bouvier rose from where he lay at Kay's feet and circled around the table to plop down beside Zorn. Since his master's return from America, Asterix's fluffy black coat had grown an inch in anticipation of cooler weather. And despite Zorn's brief absence in Niger, the dog was again fully attentive to his master.

  Zorn's relationship with his wife had also warmed, now that he had finally shared with Kay his reasons for wanting to withdraw from the emergency measures program. He couldn’t tell her everything without risking severe sanctions for breaching confidentiality, but he did paint her a broad picture of how the program had run rampant, deporting thousands of Muslims based primarily on their Triage scores, including American citizens. He even hinted at extrajudicial killings on the program’s fringes, while omitting details and saying nothing about prisoners being tossed out of airplanes. Confiding in Kay, even to this limited extent, was a greater relief than he had expected.

  As for his stay in Niger, he told her that he had visited an American-run base where detainees were being sent for repatriation and that the fate awaiting those men was cruel beyond belief. When pressed for details, he added that he and his Arlit-based team had visited a latter-day slave market and had rescued a former American detainee there, only to see him struck down the next day by an airborne missile. At this point, however, Zorn’s voice had grown husky and he broke off the narrative.