The Coward's Way of War

by Nuttall, Christopher

  ***

  General Mohammad Karim winced as the flight of Allied jets roared over the Holy City, seconds before the bombs started to fall. Opinion had been divided on the subject of if it were permissible to use warplanes against Mecca, for using any kind of weapon in the Holy Cities was a great blasphemy. Ironically, the Saudis themselves had pointed the way, with their clerics’ blanket authorisation to fight in the Great Mosque and evict the forces of a religious fanatic so fanatical that even the Saudi clergy had refused to tolerate his existence. They’d used tanks, guns and poison gas to evict the terrorists who had occupied the heart of Mecca, so Karim was prepared to use aircraft to remove another group of terrorists from the city. The Iraqi Government had been very clear. They wanted the city in Iraqi hands before the King of Jordan could do something stupid and get involved.

  The Iraqi Air Force had been designed, originally, for fighting insurgents and had concentrated on CAS and other such operations, relying on the Americans to provide air defence systems and striking power that could be used against other countries. Even now, years later, CAS remained the most prestigious part of the air force and the Iraqi Government lavished money on it, buying a strange combination of the latest American designs and some older, proven aircraft. He watched as a hundred aircraft roared overhead, dropping their smart bombs towards their targets, the command and control centres holding the defenders together. Seconds later, explosions billowed up from the heart of Mecca.

  “A bad business,” the Mullah beside him said. Karim nodded. The clergy of Iraq might have authorised the mission, but no one was very happy about dropping high explosive near the Great Mosque. “Do you think they’ll surrender?”

  Karim shook his head. Iraq had embraced a more moderate form of Islam than either Saudi or Iran, if only because Iraq had direct knowledge of just where the more extreme forms of Islam inevitably ended. The disgust that had led to the end of the insurgency, when Iraqis had turned on foreign interlopers and thrown them out of their country, had been powered by disgust at the many atrocities the foreigners had perpetrated. Forcing the Iraqis to destroy large parts of Mecca in order to destroy them would be just like the fanatics. They didn’t care, for they knew that God was on their side. Anything was permissible, provided it was done in the name of Allah.

  He keyed his radio as the smaller aircraft retreated, while the larger aircraft and the American-designed drones remained on call, ready to drop additional bombs on targets of opportunity. “All units, this is the CO,” he said, simply. “You are ordered to advance.”

  ***

  Fareed smiled to himself as the building disintegrated in front of him, shattered by the force of the American-designed bomb that had smashed through the roof, fallen through several floors and then detonated. The terrorists inside the building probably hadn't even had more than a second to realise that they were under attack before it was too late and the bomb exploded, wiping them and their store of ammunition and other supplies out of existence. He scanned the remains of the burning wreckage with his scope, but there was no sign of any survivors. The nearby buildings had been badly damaged by the blast and people were pouring out of them, yet they weren't the targets. The real targets had been obliterated.

  The ground shook as more bombs detonated within the city, blasting great holes in the enemy defence lines. Fareed and other teams had scouted the city, picking out targets and transmitting the data to the Iraqi commanders. Now, all that targeting was paying off as enemy strongpoints and ammunition dumps were destroyed, shattering the enemy’s ability to resist. If the cities he’d seen in Iraq were any example, they probably wouldn't have destroyed the enemy’s store of ammunition, but they’d certainly crippled their ability to fight back. He heard the sound of secondary explosions as an ammunition cache detonated, hopefully catching a few more terrorists within the blasts.

  Come on, he signalled with his hands, crawling away from the rooftop and back towards the fire escape. The entire city seemed to be up in arms, with thousands of young men running around, unsure of what they should be doing. Fareed was tempted to pose as one of their commanders and start giving orders, but it was far too risky; Khan would have thought that he’d gone insane. Once they were down on the streets, he allowed the crowd to push them onwards, away from the sound of the guns. The Iraqis were shelling the city in preparation for the big push.

  He exchanged a glance with Khan as they found themselves in a more secluded spot. Their orders had been to remain within the city and wreak what havoc they could, once the Iraqis began their bombardment. A wealth of information passed between them and they followed the young men, hearing the sounds of clerics urging them to battle and distributing ammunition and drugs. Fareed had seen terrorists hopped up on drugs before; they felt no pain and came on like zombies, very hard to kill. A shot through the head was the only way to kill one of them instantly.

  The mosque ahead of them had clearly been built by the Saudi Government, for it had the strange combination of fantastic design and spiritual deadness common to all such mosques. The young men were massing inside the compound, being handed grenades and a quick primer on how to use them, much to Fareed’s private amusement. Grenades were dangerous and someone who only had one lesson wouldn't know how to use them properly. He’d had to pull the pin and then count up to three before throwing the grenade; he doubted that the young men in front of him would even be able to hesitate before they threw the grenade.

  Quite calmly, they walked into the mosque and picked up a small number of grenades. No one questioned them, not even a cleric. They’d seen the weapons on their shoulders and realised that they were snipers, the elite among the fighters. The Islamic fighters valued their snipers, Fareed knew, and some were very skilled. They were treated almost like rock stars and few would dare get in their way. He unhooked a tiny American-designed grenade and dropped it to the bottom of the box of grenades, before exchanging nods with the cleric and walking out. Two minutes later, he hit the switch and the grenade exploded, setting off the others in a terrifyingly-powerful chain reaction. The cleric and his congregation died before they even knew what had hit them.

  Good riddance, Fareed thought, as he started to look for other targets of opportunity. The jets were resuming their bombardment of key positions, while the Iraqi gunners were shelling, trying to clear the line of advance. They’d probably block roads through scattering debris over the buildings, but Fareed had the impression that they didn't care. The more they killed through bombardment, the fewer who would have the chance to kill an Iraqi soldier as they advanced through the city. It made sense...besides, Mecca could always be rebuilt. A dead soldier was gone forever.

  Khan made a signal and Fareed followed his gaze. Another cleric was standing on a box, screaming obscenities to his followers, calling down the wrath of Allah on the Americans, the Iraqis and the Saudi Royal Family. Fareed gave him points for bravery, even though the House of Saud was clearly done for in Mecca, but it hardly mattered. He followed Khan as he scrambled up the side of a building and onto the roof, peering over and down towards the cleric. The man had concealed himself from any observers who might be flying over the city, but he hadn't thought about snipers. Perhaps he hadn't realised that enemy snipers were within the city.

  Just keep talking, Fareed thought, as he lined up the shot. I'm going to kill you and your friends won’t even know that I’m here.

  ***

  Hakeem Irfan listened with interest as the preacher - Izz al Din, a man the Americans considered a terrorist – raved on, inciting his followers to a frenzy of rage. He recorded the entire sermon with the camera he carried in one hand, knowing that the Japanese-designed system would be transmitting the live feed directly up to the satellite and from there to the world. Al Jazeera might not be flavour of the month among the Saudi Royal Family – too much honesty was considered a bad thing – but the forces defending Mecca saw the need for publicity. A single American atrocity – or something that could be made to
look like an atrocity - was worth a thousand deaths. The Americans were ultra-sensitive to world opinion, which seemed to matter to them. Privately, Hakeem was no longer sure if that were true, but it wasn't a problem. Live footage from Mecca as the Iraqis attacked the city would ensure that he would become the most famous reporter in the world.

  He allowed the camera to pan across the horde of cheering young men and then back up to the preacher, who was still raving. It was getting boring rapidly for a sophisticated man like Hakeem, but his followers were eating it up and coming back for more. His minders, two tough men from Palestine, seemed to be enjoying it as well, although they were also keeping an eye on him. He’d been warned that there were things he could not broadcast to the world and if he did, he would never leave Mecca alive. He didn't blame the fighters for that...

  Hakeem didn't hear the shot. One moment, the cleric was speaking; the next, his head literally exploded as a bullet passed through it. The entire crowd was stunned speechless as the cleric stumbled backwards and crashed to the floor. Hakeem caught it all on the camera. A shot like that meant a sniper and that meant...the crowd seemed to follow the same line of logic, but they weren't mounting an effective search. They were just raging around, shaking their fists and swearing revenge. Some of the junior clerics got into a fight over who should speak to the people, although Hakeem couldn't tell if they were fighting over who should take on the role or who shouldn’t. The position didn't seem to have a very long life expectancy.

  He shrugged and tapped his camera. The scene was already out and spreading across the world. He nodded to his escorts and they led him away, to another scene. Perhaps this time he could see an Iraqi force as it advanced into the city.

  ***

  Lieutenant Kareef kept his head down as the Iraqi forces met heavy resistance. The enemy forces ahead of them had dug in heavily, using the wreckage from the bombs to conceal their positions. The Iraqi forces were better trained and kept forcing the enemy to keep their heads down, but it didn't look as if the terrorists were going to retreat any time soon. He tapped his radio, sending a signal back to one of the armoured units, and watched as an American-designed Abrams tank appeared and advanced towards the enemy. Their bullets simply bounced off the tank, along with RPGs and other weapons. The tank punched through the barricade and opened fire. Dozens of terrorists died in the first few seconds.

  He ran forward, leading his men up to provide support to the tank and saw a man pointing something at him. He shot the man dead instinctively, realising – a second too late – that his target hadn't been pointing a gun at him, but a camera. Kareef hesitated, and then shook his head. If the reporter was dumb enough to walk into a war zone and point something that could be mistaken for a gun at someone, he deserved everything he got.

  And the Battle for Mecca raged on...

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Terrorists are not rational, or rarely so. They must seek to strike a balance between causing fear and causing hatred, the kind of hatred that leads people to throw away the rules and just hit back. Terrorists who fail to keep this balance get exterminated.

  -Captain Darryl Tyler

  Washington DC, USA

  Day 53

  Nicolas knew that he should be focusing on Operation EXODUS, but his thoughts kept returning to the puzzle in front of him, the odd mysteries that surrounded Henderson’s Disease and how the Saudis had reacted to it. He had thought, or had at least suspected, that the Saudis would have vaccinated their own population against Henderson’s Disease, yet it was becoming increasingly obvious that they hadn't done anything of the sort. The Iraqis had pulled infected bodies out of Jeddah and the parts of Mecca they had occupied and American forces had done the same to the east. He wouldn't have bet good money on the prospect of Riyadh itself being uninfected. If the US had had even a month’s warning that a biological weapons attack was on the cards, the US would have vaccinated everyone in the country against the disease...

  Or would it? The thought was a bitter one, but it had to be faced. There were always people objecting to such programs, either on the grounds that the threat wasn't real or that it would cost money. A few years ago, there had been a proposal to vaccinate the United States against Smallpox, yet that proposal had never gotten off the ground. It would have cost millions of dollars when the country was in a very poor state and caused widespread disruption, and panic. Now, with a third of the country infected or dead, it struck Nicolas that they’d made a very poor bargain. They just hadn't wanted to admit that the threat was real.

  Just for a moment, he recalled Dr Rennet White, the High School psychologist. She hadn't wanted to consider that the threat was real, no matter how much evidence he’d placed in front of her over-long nose. She had preferred to believe that he was suffering from a complex or an attack of racism, just as so many others had done over the years. Their minds couldn't take the thought that perhaps a certain level of paranoia was justified when it came to certain groups; instead, they took refuge in the thought that such thoughts were racist and chose to ignore them. A noble ideal, he was sure, yet it wasn't one he could ever understand. If someone was worried, telling them off for being a racist didn't help, particularly when they knew damn well that they weren't a racist. He looked down at his lightly-tanned skin and snorted at the thought. She might as well have had Martin Luther King joining the KKK.

  He pulled over a map of America and stared down at it, but his thoughts were elsewhere, running through everything he knew. The hell of it was that terrorists were not irrational, at least not in the way they did things. They had a goal – no matter how crazy it seemed to someone who could put two and two together – and they were relentless in working towards that goal. They knew that fear worked and so they spread it, yet they also knew that if they overplayed their hand, fear might be replaced by anger and rage – and a determination to do whatever was necessary to obliterate the terrorist threat, once and for all. After 9/11, the United States had reached out to invade Afghanistan, followed rapidly by Iraq. The terrorists had wanted to provoke a reaction from the United States...yet their plans had failed, because the United States had not broken. The war in Iraq had been won.

  His mind churned rapidly. In Russia, the biological weapons program had been corrupted, a threat the West had chosen to ignore. An element within the Saudi Government had purchased Henderson’s Disease from a rogue Russian doctor, who was currently living within a secret American prison somewhere in Nevada. They’d taken the disease back to Saudi, used it to infect an unknowing victim, and sent him to America. The victim hadn't known that he’d been infected...or had he? Nicolas had no problem, unlike the long-gone psychologist, in accepting that someone was prepared to kill himself to kill others, yet there was something odd about the way the boy had behaved. He’d spent three days in New York and then crawled into his hotel room to die. If he hadn’t known that he’d been infected, why had he not sought medical attention?

  The mystery seemed insolvable and he altered his focus, worrying away at the problem. The Saudi Government had said nothing to the United States when it had issued its demands, not even a denial. It hadn't said anything, even since the invasion had begun, yet they were clearly trying to organise a defence. Why not? Had the overall goal been to lure the United States into invading Saudi Arabia? It might have made sense for one of the transnational Islamic terrorist organisations – like the remains of Al Qaida – to try to lure the United States into a possible quagmire, yet why do it in such a way? It guaranteed that the United States would be anything, but gentle. The world media had been howling about American atrocities – or what they chose to call atrocities – in Saudi Arabia, yet no one cared. The President’s approval rating had barely been affected by their whining. The war had not paused...

  He shook his head, and then frowned. Perhaps the whole idea was not to lure the United States into a war – or not just to lure the United States into a war – but to have an apocalyptic confrontation between east and w
est. The terrorists would be convinced that their side would win such a confrontation, so it made a certain kind of sense to risk the war – and to risk destruction at the hands of a vengeful United States. Henderson’s Disease hadn’t just crippled the United States; it had crippled Europe, Russia, China...and much of the Middle East. There were cases being reported in Egypt, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. India and Pakistan were on the verge of war over reports about Pakistani nukes being misplaced. The heat of the Middle East had slowed the rate of infection...

  Or had that been the plan all along? If no one had traced the infection back to its source, perhaps they’d hoped that the United States would be permanently crippled, while they could vaccinate their own people and launch an invasion of the rest of the world. It was insane, yet somehow Nicolas was sure that he had stumbled on the right answer. The Great Satan, the Lesser Satan, the Little Satan...and all the other Satan-states would all be crippled. He shuddered to think about what a fundamentalist movement could accomplish in such a world.