by Tony Bulmer
Evidence of such licentious depravity would no doubt turn the stomachs of the voting public, but their opinions hardly mattered. In the sham democracy of Pakistan, it was he, General Faz Huq, who was the real power behind the throne. The men of God were different however. Allah and the sacred rule of Sharia was their only moral compass, but even they, with their child brides and bacha bazi boys, would frown on the sumptuous and brazen antics contained in these incriminating videos. The Chinaman had threatened to post the videos on the Internet. Once there, their insidious presence would infect the whole world like a virus. The men of God would hear of his antics. They might not see the evidence with their own eyes, but they would hear of it none-the-less. They would hand down a fatwa. Then, the men in black turbans would come in from the mountains and they would take everything the general possessed, including his life. There would be nowhere in the world he could hide. The diseased logic of the mountain men spread everywhere. They had friends in every part of the world. Men who would not rest, until the will of their masters was seen to be done; it was the way of things. It had always been so, and would be until the mighty Allah himself judged otherwise.
General Faz Huq gulped whisky. The smooth burn barely leveling his churning thoughts, or the rush of anxiety created by the multitude of pills he had downed. He ground out his cigarette and lit another. He would have to be careful. Despite a high tolerance to narcotics of every kind, he was running pretty close to the edge of a cataclysmic episode that could end his very existence—a drug overdose? General Faz Huq almost laughed at the absurdity. What a decadent quintessentially American way to die. He sucked on his cigarette with badly jittering fingers. How could it be possible that things had come to this? He was losing his touch. He actually began to laugh now, slow chuckles at first, building gradually until he was roaring with gales of uncontrolled mirth. It was some time before the laughter subsided, but when it did, he reached for the glass of whisky and slammed back the contents of the glass in one giant gulp.
The Chinaman had underestimated him. General Faz Huq drew himself up in his sumptuous seat and smiled drunkenly to himself. The Chinaman had played him with promises of upgrading Pakistan’s nuclear capabilities. How empty those promises had proven to be, but that did not matter. The treacherous Chinaman had involved him in his plot, and that had been a bad mistake. He had promised gifts that would vanquish the common enemy and betrayed the trust of his countrymen to do so. The fool. General Faz Huq smiled. He would have his revenge on the Chinaman a merciless and piquant revenge, the kind that only Allah himself could deliver, God willing.
16
Ministry of State Security, Shanghai, China
The thin steel cell was not much wider than a coffin and not much deeper than a grave, the smooth-brushed metal walls were a featureless machine-grey. There were no windows or doors, at least it appeared that way. Neither was there any furniture in the room. No bed, no chair, no sink—nothing, except the cold, hard floor made from the same brushed metal as the walls. A thin, shallow drainage channel ran down the centre of the room. Periodically, and with no discernable timing, or rhythm, a jet of water would emerge from a hole in the far wall and flood the channel. Sometimes the water would be scalding hot, other times cold, it might gush with the ferocity of a fire hose, or trickle timidly, like the whole world was about to run dry. One thing was always certain however, the water was bad, it had an unpleasant smell and a sour chemical taste that ravaged the tongue and tore at the stomach, like bad whiskey from a short-dog liquor store.
Karyn Kane sat in the corner of the room, in her mismatched bra and panties, meditating in a half-lotus pose—her goals: equanimity, tranquility and stillness—the advanced precepts of the ancient art of Qigong. She had already done 2000 sit-ups, 2500 press-ups and 3000 Hatha yoga sun salutations. In addition, she had run through every one of the 75 ancient forms of Qigong and the 56 modern forms. Now, as she sat immobile in the corner, breathing slow from the diaphragm, she entered into a deep and blissful meditative state, her mind and spirit body journeying far from the prison in which she found herself.
Distant screams and shouting filtered into the cell. Karyn held her pose. The temperature in the cell grew hot, then cold. She held her pose. The single recessed light in the ceiling burned bright hour after hour; then dimmed, then it did not glow at all, for hours or was it days? It did not matter. Karyn held her pose. When the brightness and the heat filled the cell with an almost overwhelming level of humidity, Karyn focused inwards, her mind, journeying through time and space, as she held the pose, relentless and single-minded. She held the pose without effort, drawing energy from her stillness. As she sat immobile, glowing rivulets of sweat tumbled across her taught, muscled body. The many scars inflicted by bullets and knives and the hard passage of years, rose from her flesh, emblematic of pride and honor and duty served. As the temperature dipped low to the point of freezing, her dark, honeyed skin grew paler but no less resolute.
Karyn’s mind drifted far across the oceans, to Los Angeles, California, where in a small palm-fringed enclave called Brentwood, a young girl no more than ten years old, lay clutching her favorite little rabbit toy. Karyn stood silent by the soft billowing curtains and watched the child sleep. The child’s name was Carly, she was Karyn’s daughter, but the child would never know that. All contact was forbidden.
Non sibi sed patriae as the admiral would say. Not self but country, the unofficial motto of the U.S. Navy. Admiral William Arthur Kane was Karyn’s father, the man who had deserted her in childhood, leaving both her and her mother, so that he might serve his country, rather than the family who needed him. The admiral was a hard man, with a robust work ethic fashioned by an austere religious upbringing. These steel-forged attributes had made him vigorously opinionated. The admiral was a hard-man all right, a rough-hewn hero in the image of Dwight D. Eisenhower. He was also no kind of father; just as she, Karyn was no kind of mother. The guilt was all consuming.
Non sibi sed patriae. She had made her choice—or rather the Agency had made the choice for her. The Agency would never let her go. Her work for the National Clandestine Service, Deep Five Division, had ensured that. D5 worked beyond the rim operations, covert action missions that extended outside of the confining boundaries of United States Law.
They would never let her go, she was too involved.
The extent of Deep Five operations ran so far beyond the legal and moral framework of society, the nature of their work could never be made public—not ever. Nothing could be permitted to threaten D5’s covert status. And if anything did—that is when bad things happened. Karyn discovered that first hand, after the Afghanistan mission, Operation Ascension, a mission to avenge the Camp Chapman CIA killings. Everything went wrong. Everybody in the insertion team had been killed, except her and USMC sniper Reed Goodman, the man who made her pregnant. She had compounded the mistake by marrying him. But then there had been Carly—beautiful Carly.
From the minute she saw the red line positive in a Langley restroom. Karyn knew there would be trouble. She went black immediately, using all her tradecraft skills to disappear off the grid. It took the Agency over ten months to find her—a small town, outside Santa Fe, New Mexico. They came heavy, a team entrance with guns drawn. They found her sitting on the bed, watching cartoons with the baby. Carly had always liked cartoons, the crazier the better. Those times were gone now—so long ago it seemed like a different lifetime.
They took the baby, of course. They gave Karyn a black-site de-brief. They told her she could never speak of these events—not ever. They told her she needed, “help”, what kind of help they didn’t say, but she guessed it would be the kind she couldn’t use. One thing she knew for sure, her life was in danger, Carly’s too.
The dark bureaucrats of Langley summoned her. The smiling faces gathered in the seventh floor conference room seemed concerned, but not for human reasons. They told her how things would be. She believed them when they told her that her baby’s life wa
s in danger, although not for the bullshit reasons they gave her. They told her that if she cooperated, acted like a team player, then everything would be all right. Things were not all right—on dark days it sometimes seemed that things would never be all right again.
Karyn told herself that if she worked through the pain, then it would all come good one day. But things hadn’t come good, and now all she had left was the ghost world existence that passed as life, but really wasn’t.
Work was everything.
Her life had been consumed, and now all that was left was the vicious battle to protect the meek and just from the murderous power-crazed forces seeking dominion over all of mankind. Many had died in this battle; many more would follow them, most into unmarked graves. There were no laws anymore, no gentlemen’s agreements, or rules of engagement. The world was engaged in an eternal covert conflict, great nations and corporate superpowers locked in a battle for supremacy. There could be no truce, only victory or death. There could be no overt acknowledgement by the world’s power brokers of the slide towards global anarchy. To admit that the world was engaged in a final desperate struggle to the death, would cause panic worldwide, tilting the culture of conform and obey from its axis and causing a catastrophic global meltdown of organized society.
Karyn felt her heart race suddenly faster. She was a ghost, trapped deep inside the death machine. There would never be any escape. The dark bureaucrats from the seventh floor had made that clear, through their mouthpiece Jack Senegar. They called him the Director, but was he really?
Wasn’t he just the face of a Bête de la Mer?
—A many-headed beast, bejeweled with the fearsome resolve to vanquish all enemies standing against his wishes.
Jack Senegar was the man to blame. He was the man who had kept her from her daughter, destroyed her marriage and inundating her every waking moment with the demands of the Agency. Non sibi sed patriae. He took advantage. Even when he found out her mother was ill, it meant nothing to him. The cancer had metastasized. The diagnosis was terminal. A cruel irony that an oncologist as talented as her mother should be stricken by the very disease she had saved so many from. Every day counted now, each day of separation a further nail in her mother’s coffin, while Jack Senegar and the dark bureaucrats of Langley gerrymandered her life.
Karyn breathed slow and deep.
She sat motionless in the half-lotus position, shielding away the negativity of the past. She focused on her Dantian energy, drawing strength from her internal focal points, feeling invigorated as the primal power of her spirit flowed through her in waves. She allowed the spiritual power to flow through her, feeling the flow, as the energy from deep inside her spiritual core fought back images of Jack Senegar and the dark bureaucrats from the seventh floor.
Her mantra of belief flashed through her mind—justice, freedom, integrity, truth, honor, democracy and peace—these were the core American values she believed—values, filled with the optimism that the world could move out of the darkness and turn good again. This was the life she truly wanted, not just for herself but for the whole of mankind. She would make it happen. Nothing would stop her, no matter how high the stakes became.
She reached slowly for the rosary that always hung around her neck. Its comfort was absent. The faceless goons from the Ministry of State Security had taken it from her, along with her clothes. She smiled slowly, knowing that God was always with her; His power benevolent, all seeing—a universal energy of love beating time in the hearts of the whole of mankind. No amount of evil could overcome this, not ever.
17
Islamabad, Pakistan
“All dead. I wanted every last one of them dead. Do you realize what this failure has cost me?” General Faz Huq was suffering. It was a multi dimensional pain that wracked every part of his body, a savage consequence no doubt, of mixing large amounts of whisky with a cocktail of prescription painkillers. And then there was the flight. No matter how regularly he flew, he just could not manage to conquer the overwhelming mixture of sickness and anxiety that flight caused him.
Tomur looked at the general with his fathomless eyes and said, “I apologize most profusely Excellency. But I have brought you a most satisfying gift that you might find consoling.”
The general looked up to the distant peaks of the Karakorum Mountains and growled, “I have no time for gifts, only unquestioning obedience.” General Faz Huq beckoned to the white-jacketed servant who was standing ready with a loaded opium pipe. The servant stepped forward hesitantly, passing the ivory and gold pipe to his master, with anxious fingers. The general snatched the pipe and waved the lingering servant away impatiently. “Allah does not look favorably on failure Tomur, when he demands sanction, sanction must be provided.”
“This I understand Excellency. Your wise counsel has proven invaluable to the Uyghur cause. Unfortunately, the Americans were forewarned of the attack.”
“Forewarned?” raged the general. “With such careful planning, how could such a thing be possible?”
“An unforeseen circumstance Excellency, an assassin from the Central Intelligence Agency, her heightened awareness alerted the Americans to our ingenious plan.”
General Faz Huq narrowed his eyes. “You said her—are you telling me your army of assassins were defeated by the actions of a woman?”
Tomur bowed his head, “This was no ordinary woman Excellency. She was imbued with the hellish power of Azazel.”
“All Americans are imbued with the power of ancient evil. Did you doubt that for a moment my young friend?”
Tomur frowned, his lower lip thrusting outwards. He opened his mouth very slightly, as if to speak, then closed it again quickly. The general was a very dangerous man, given to capricious and violent outbursts. He did not like backtalk any better than he liked failure. Tomur knew that while the general was a very valuable friend to have, he was also a cold and merciless enemy, more dangerous than a hooded serpent. Many who had displeased him had suffered swift and violent deaths; such ruthlessness gave Tomur inspiration, it also gave him pause.
“The Chinese are to blame for stealing the glory of our great victory. They have announced to the world’s press that the imperialist Shaitan Truman Whitaker and his lapdogs in the Central Intelligence Agency conspired to cause the events at Deng Tao’s funeral. They have stolen from us a great and heroic victory.”
“Imbecile,” bellowed the General. “Have you learned nothing from my teachings? Do you really think that the Chinese would be able to effect such a ingenious subterfuge on their own?”
Again, Tomur opened his mouth to speak; once again he paused. He was very confused. It seemed all attempts to flatter and placate the general were doomed to failure. His bottom lip drooped forwards once more. He stared at the general now, his fathomless eyes growing disconsolate. “I am a simple man Excellency, I have little understanding of the ways of politics. All I know is that the Chinese oppressors would make us look like impotent fools in the eyes of the world. We must teach them harsh lessons, so that they might think more carefully before trying such a deception again.”
The general raised his eyes wearily to the sky. “Don’t you see? The plan was mine, effected by my agents within the Chinese regime. Not only did I create this monumental event, I guided its direction so that we might take fuller advantage of its effects”
“I do not understand Excellency. What possible advantage could we gain having those Chinese dogs steal the glory of victory from the hands of Allah himself?”
“Victory? The Chinese have gained no victory. We have merely baited their great vanity with the scent of victory. Do you not see my boy? This is how the intrigues of great nations are effected.” General Faz Huq raised the opium pipe to his mouth and drew a deadly lungful of the sweet floral smoke. He held it down for what seemed like an eternity, all the while regarding Tomur with dangerous, heavy lidded eyes. Finally, he let the smoke drift slowly out his lips. He smiled ivory and gold, his teeth soiled with the patina of reck
less living. “When hunting beasts of fang and claw, the wise hunter must plan intelligently and bait his traps with only the most appetizing morsels if he is to catch the prize he seeks.”
Tomur nodded. “A Confucian hunting trick—But how Excellency? I beg that you share your great wisdom, so that I might learn at your feet.”
Again the general smiled, much wider this time, as the treacherous and deadly opium took hold of the pains that wracked his body, banishing them into time-lapse purgatory. “The enemies of Islam are vain and easily influenced. With the slightest provocation they turn on each other like wild dogs. As wise hunters of the forest all we have to do is simply poke a sharpened stick into their cages and watch as they tear each other apart.
“Surely they will discover your subterfuge?”
The general laughed. “Of course they will. But that knowledge will only serve to torment them more, and by that time, the next stage of our plan will have moved into effect. Are you ready Tomur, for the great and holy changes that are about to be gifted upon you and the Uyghur people?”
“The Uyghur people have been ready for centuries Excellency. Perhaps now, finally, we will be able to repel the imperialist Chinese conquerors and be united before Allah.”
“An admirable ambition. It will come to pass. You must however ensure that you are ready to seize the opportunity when it comes your way.
“As Allah is my witness, my people will be ready Excellency, you have my word upon it.”
General Faz Huq took another deep breath of opium smoke and nodded slowly. “I trust that you will be true to your word. In the new, emergent world, stout-hearted men of faith will be vital. See that you are fully prepared for the monumental changes—they are almost upon us.” The general gave a benevolent smile. “You mentioned a gift. Now that my pipe has put me in a better humor, I will receive your tribute with thanks.”
Tomur returned the smile. Then looked down across the orchard where a group of armed men in robes stood smoking cigarettes.
