Counterplay

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  The taxi business wasn’t much better, but somehow they managed to survive for the next six years. Yet, fate was not through kicking the Habibi family. On a visit back to the West Bank to visit friends and relatives, Ishmael was arrested when an inspection at the border of the VW van—which had been loaned for the trip—uncovered a box of detonators packed inside a crate of oranges.

  Though Ishmael denied knowing the detonators were in the crate, he was taken to an Israeli prison to await trial. But he’d died before he ever saw a judge. A virulent strain of pneumonia, the Israelis said. Another lie, thought the distraught family. Adding insult to injury, the Israelis had confiscated the van. The taxi business was no more.

  It had been too much for her mother, who could not get over the deaths of her sons and the loss of her home. She lay down to sleep one night complaining of a headache and didn’t wake up the next morning. A stroke, said the doctor. But her family knew that her death was due to a broken heart.

  Upon the death of his wife, Nathalie’s father had essentially given up as well. He spent his days begging for money to buy hashish to deaden his pain and railing against the “Zionist pigs.” He paid little attention to the comings and goings of his remaining child, until one evening, while crossing the street in a daze, he was struck by, ironically, a speeding taxi and killed.

  Just nineteen years old, Nathalie burned with a desire for vengeance against the Israelis. As she got older, she became enamored with the poetry and writings of Samira Azzam that exposed the “liar claims” of the Jews to Palestine. She swore that she would carry on her hero’s struggle, but with guns and bombs, not words. Soon after her father’s death, when a recruiter from Hamas came to the camp looking for young people willing to kill and die for Allah, she’d eagerly signed up.

  Nathalie, who took the name Samira Azzam when she swore to give her life to jihad, grew into a beautiful woman on the outside. Only a large mole on her right cheek marred her perfection, but even that seemed only to make her other attributes—the green eyes, olive skin, thick dark hair, and perfect body—stand out all the more. But inside there was little room for anything but hatred. Early on, she hoped to be granted the honor of blowing herself up in the middle of a crowd of Jews. However, a Hamas leader had taken a fancy to her and, under the guise of “training” for important missions, also took her virginity. He smiled whenever she begged istish-haad and promised that her time would come, but for now she should accept whatever role she was given. She was, after all, a woman and therefore subject to the commands of men.

  This went on for a year before Nathalie/Samira found a way to pursue her dream. The man’s wife received an anonymous letter telling her of the affair. He suspected that his young lover had sent the letter herself, but regardless he had no choice but to send Azzam away. He arranged for her passage to an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, allowing himself a certain satisfaction in knowing that his betrayer would probably not be long for the world. Too bad, he thought. A wonderful body, but there will be other young desert flowers to nurture.

  Azzam turned her hatred into her motivating force to learn martial arts, especially the killing techniques, as well as weapons training. She’d excelled and soon returned to Jordan. There she led sorties into Israel and detonated roadside bombs to kill passing Israeli army patrols. She also ambushed a school bus full of Israeli children.

  The first time she’d seen a dead child as a result of her work, Azzam experienced a curious regret. The lifeless eyes of the child, the strangely pale skin, and blue lips had haunted her sleep. Once, the face had been that of her brother, Ishmael, and for the first and last time she’d questioned the morality of her actions. But then she’d remembered that Ishmael had died at the hands of the Israelis, and she’d quickly suppressed any more feelings of remorse. After all, she reasoned, her own childhood had been destroyed by the Israelis, why shouldn’t their children suffer, too. There are casualties in every war, she told herself and thought no more of it.

  The only downfall to her new path was that she was still alive. Several times, she’d accompanied some young man to the entrance of a disco or shopping mall, and then waited at a safe distance, listening with envy for the sound of the explosion, the screams, and the wailing of the ambulances.

  After a time, Azzam learned that she was to be arrested by authorities in Jordan who were under pressure from the United States and Israel to crack down on militants coming over the border. She’d fled only minutes before the Jordanian secret police kicked down the door of her apartment. Watching the agents rush her building, she’d listened for the “CRUMP” of the booby-trapped land mine she’d set and then left the country.

  She’d arrived back at the training camp in Afghanistan, where she’d been noticed by a high-ranking lieutenant in the al Qaeda organization who took her under his wing and into his bed. Hamas has grown soft, he said. Now they talk about negotiating with the enemy. All they care about is a Palestinian state. Their leaders fail to understand the big picture of Islamic jihad and the drastic measures and sacrifices it will take to achieve a world-encompassing Islamic state. Join us, Samira, and you will find the martyrdom you seek.

  Tired of being put off from her destiny by the leadership of Hamas, disgusted by the “peace talks,” and flattered by the offer, Azzam switched her allegiance. She liked how her new masters thought in terms of big blows against the infidels, right where they lived—not these insignificant attacks on the Israelis, who merely picked up the pieces, retaliated against some Palestinian neighborhood, and then moved on. She hoped someday she would be allowed to lead such a mission, so she remained with her current mentor/lover.

  After he’d hammered away at her body and finally spent himself, he liked to pontificate on subjects he’d learned from the great man himself, Osama bin Laden. Driving the United States out of the Middle East so that Israel could be destroyed was only the beginning of the jihad, he said—the beginning of the end of Western culture, and the reign of the one true faith.

  After the Jews had been driven into the sea, the apostate regimes of Egypt, Turkey, and the most corrupt of them all, Saudi Arabia, would be toppled by revolution with the assistance of mujahideen from other countries. Then the entire Middle East would be melded into a single fundamentalist Islamic state governed by one man, the Caliph, who as the successor of the Prophet, would be the final word in all things spiritual, temporal, and military.

  Once in control of the world’s most important oil supply and with nuclear capabilities already nearing completion in Iran, the Caliph would unleash the worldwide jihad in which all Muslims would be obligated to rise up and destroy the infidels wherever they lived. All those who survived but would not then bend to the teachings of the Prophet would be put to the sword. In sha’ Allah…God willing.

  Although she’d hardly opened the family Quran growing up, Azzam now studied the book until she was hafiz—someone who knew the book by heart. She considered herself fortunate that whenever she ran into some troubling contradiction between the Quran and what she was being told by the leaders of al Qaeda, her mentor was there to explain. For instance, she’d noted that according to the book, jihad prohibited the harming of women and children, yet bombs detonated in civilian populations didn’t discriminate between gender and age.

  “While the Quran does prohibit the killing of women and children in principle,” her mentor said, “it is also written that if their deaths are in retaliation for the killing of Muslim women and children, or to prevent such killing, then it is allowed. The Crusaders and Zionists have been murdering our women and children for hundreds of years; this is merely payback and to stop them.”

  So she had accepted the deaths of noncombatants, combined with her more immediate goal of self-destruction. She begged for a suicide mission but kept getting told, “You are more valuable to us alive now. There will be plenty of time to die later.”

  In the meantime, he said, the leaders of al Qaeda had a special mission for her. They were s
ending her to Chechnya in southern Russia. There she would meet Muslims yearning to break free from the yoke of their Russian oppressors. The Muslim population in Chechnya, he said, had a story similar to that of Palestinians. They, too, had their lands stolen and were victims of wars of aggression, first by tsars, then the Soviets, and now the army and secret police of the Russian Republic.

  However, she was cautioned, the Russians were not the only enemy. Worse in some ways were Chechen nationalists who wanted to form an independent republic. These nationalists were Muslim in name only and intent on forming a democracy in which Islam would be the state religion but have little power.

  Not only were these nationalists a disgrace to Islam, her mentor explained, but they represented a danger to the ultimate goal of a united Islamic state. Muslims who were lured into the evils of Western-style democracy—whether in Iraq or Chechnya—might be loath to give up their elected governments and submit to Islamic law. Therefore, any such attempts to install a democracy in the Middle East had to be stamped out.

  Chechnya had been in a state of war off and on since the early 1990s. However, the secular nationalists were trying to negotiate a peace settlement with the Russians and establish their republic. It was therefore imperative that the Russians be forced to continue to fight Chechen independence. To accomplish this, the al Qaeda movement in Chechnya was planning a series of bombings and other violent acts in Russia to keep the Russian population angry and unwilling to deal with the nationalists.

  However, al Qaeda had to be somewhat circumspect. It had to appear that al Qaeda was aligned with the nationalist movement; it was important that the Russians, and the Western governments, associate the independence movement with Islamic terrorism.

  “Let the nationalists complain all they want to the Western press that they are being blamed for acts they do not condone,” her mentor said. “We will make sure to give them credit, along with ourselves, for every death. It is the way of these Crusader nations to lump all Muslims into the same pot anyway; they see no difference between any of us and will eventually drive even the moderate nationalists into our camp.”

  So Azzam had been sent to Chechnya to work with local Islamic hard-liners to implement the strategy. She understood the importance of the assignment, but she couldn’t help but feel she’d been sent to a backwater in the struggle. However, it was also how she met Ajmaani, who claimed to be an orphan with no last name and was to serve as her liaison with the Chechens, so she thanked Allah for that small favor. It was difficult to say when professional respect had turned to lust and even, though Azzam had thought herself incapable, to love. Somewhere in the adrenaline rush of placing their lives on the line and the periods of inaction—a congratulatory touch had turned to a kiss that had turned to the wild, sometimes violent, meshing of their bodies. And then it had been easy to return to the cause, satiated for the moment, willing to die while still high on the scent of her lover.

  Azzam had been nearly beside herself with both pride and envy when her brothers in al Qaeda flew the planes into the World Trade Center. More than twenty-seven hundred dead! Alhamdulillah…praise to God, she’d shouted with the others when word reached their camp in the Chechen mountains, and then more softly later in the arms of Ajmaani. She wished that she had been there, listening to the screaming of the jet engines and the passengers just before they struck the building. To be in the cockpit, shouting Allah akbar!…God is great!” and see the frightened faces of the people in the offices and on the planes when they realized they were about to die.

  Shortly after the glorious event, she’d returned for a visit to Afghanistan. She allowed her mentor to have his way with her body so that she could learn more about future plans and beg to be allowed to take on a mission of similar importance. She had actually wept—one of the few times since childhood—with frustration that others were getting the glory that should have been hers. But he’d only told her to be patient and that her time would come.

  Azzam left Afghanistan before the Americans attacked in retaliation for the World Trade Center. She was disappointed that the mujahideen and the Taliban had hardly put up a fight. But she had not wept when she learned that her mentor had been vaporized by a cruise missile that had zeroed in on his cave in Tora Bora and caught him standing at the mouth enjoying the fresh air. There are casualties in every war. She shrugged and went back to planning attacks against the Russians with Ajmaani.

  They had begun with bombings at Russian bus stations and marketplaces. The Russians, as they had for years only now more viciously, retaliated with their own brutality against the Chechen population, leveling whole towns, raping women, and murdering the men. When the Chechen nationalist complained to the Western press that the acts had been committed by Islamic hard-liners and outsiders, the Russians pointed out that they, too, were fighting the War on Terrorism against Islamic extremists, and the West turned their backs on the abuses.

  Azzam was overjoyed when Ajmaani suggested they ramp up the violence by seizing the Nord-Ost musical theater in Moscow. She’d hoped to die with the others, but had been ordered to escape before the Russian troops stormed the building. It was Ajmaani who led her to a tunnel, once used to carry coal beneath the streets to the furnaces that heated the buildings, and out behind the surrounding Russian forces.

  As successful as it was, the attack on the theater had paled in comparison to their greatest achievement, the seizing of the school in Beslan, Russia, on September 1, 2004. The attacking force was comprised of the more radical element of the secular nationalist movement—those for whom negotiation was too slow, or driven to more extreme tactics by Russian brutality—as well as Islamic hard-liners and Arabs intent on the establishment of an Islamic state. More than three hundred Russians had died in the school—two-thirds of them children—and she would have gladly died with them. But once again, her lover Ajmaani was there to lead her to safety during the confusion when the building was stormed. Once outside, they’d blended into the crowd of Russian parents who waited word of their loved ones.

  The attack had been a public relations success for al Qaeda. The Western press, which had begun to turn a sympathetic ear to the nationalists and even reported on Russian atrocities, swung 180 degrees. In their eyes, Muslim nationalists were no different from Islamic extremists—murderers all.

  With the climate too hot in Chechnya—the nationalists and the Russians were hunting for her—Azzam and Ajmaani had fled to the wild country on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan where al Qaeda and the remnants of the Taliban were regrouping. There Azzam fretted as al Qaeda grew bolder in Europe, and still she wasn’t called upon to give her life. She grew more outspoken and critical of the planning. The attacks on the Madrid rail system had been too little, she said. The work of amateurs.

  Then she heard about the plan to blow up Times Square on New Year’s Eve, a blow that would have been even more glorious than that which had destroyed the World Trade Center. But the mission had been placed in the hands of that idiot, al-Sistani, who somehow managed to botch a perfect plan.

  Tired of listening to a woman criticize their plans, she had at last been given a mission that would get her out of their hair. She didn’t care about their reasons; all she knew was that this attack would make all the others, even the World Trade Center, pale by comparison.

  Odd, she thought as she entered the room of the house in Aspen, considering how much I hate him. But she owed her good mood to the plan of the man sitting at a table near a window with his back to her. He was looking out of a large window across the valley at the ski slope on the other side. Aroused at her approach, he reached out toward her. “Ah, the lovely Samira Azzam.” He gestured at the seat across from him. “Please, sit down and let us resume our game.”

  Games, she thought scornfully. He plays too many games and allows himself to be distracted by revenge. I use vengeance to help me focus on the task I am assigned. He uses his for petty personal vendettas.

  Andrew Kane turned
his gaze from the window and the tiny figures sliding down the slope and faced her. “Silly sport, skiing,” he said, his voice partially muffled by the wrappings of gauze that covered his face. “It’s cold and you could fall and break something. And for what?”

  Azzam smiled and looked into Kane’s newly designed brownish appearing eyes peering at her from under the bandages. “It does seem to be a waste of time.”

  She did wonder about these Americans. She’d expected them to panic and collapse after the destruction of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon. When they didn’t, and instead seemed to find some inner reservoir of strength, she’d felt trepidation, a moment’s wavering in her resolve. Perhaps, they can’t be brought to their knees, as her al Qaeda masters preached. But the anger had returned and she’d determined that it would simply take more and better blows.

  They are a stupid people. Surely they knew there were killers in their midst, plotting against their cities, hoping to take down their economy. Yet, here in Aspen, they wandered around in their fur coats, lived in mansions that would have housed a dozen Palestinian families from her old neighborhood, and acted as if the struggles going on in other parts of the world were annoying inconveniences, not matters of life and death. Aspen was the epitome of everything she hated about the United States—superior, wealthy, comfortable, and safe. At least for the moment, she thought with satisfaction.

  The owner of the home where Kane was staying was one of the myriad members of the Saudi royal family, a distant cousin of the king, living off the oil proceeds that belonged by rights to the Saudi people. He was a flabby, lazy man who secretly supported al Qaeda with cash donations and by playing host to the occasional operative who needed a safe place to stay. She supposed he was hedging his bets for the day when the royal family was brought down and Saudi Arabia turned into a theocracy, like Iran.