The normally crowded train station was eerily half empty. I withdrew another 3000 euros. I checked the annunciator board. The next train was to Amsterdam. I bought a ticket with cash.
Only when I had boarded and the train was safely on its way did I pause to think. It was three hours to Amsterdam, with little else to do but watch the countryside unreel outside the window.
Where could I go? What could I do?
Thoughts of suicide tormented and teased me. That was surely what the Caliphate would want me to do. But the Caliphate had betrayed me. Or had it? What else could they have done, acknowledged their hand in the fiasco I had perpetrated without orders? By so doing, had I not betrayed the Caliphate? But had they sent the requested graffiti-bombs rather than grenades, none of this would have happened. Was that not an implicit order to use them? Where did my loyalty now lie?
But suicide was a sin against Allah. Surely my ultimate loyalty was to Him. But might not suicide under these conditions be permissible as the act of a loyal jihadi in the service of His cause? But was what the Caliphate had caused me to do, the hardship it was in the process of inflicting on the Faithful in France, the lies it had told afterward, truly done in the service of Allah?
I tried to pray. It was futile. Allah had abandoned me and who was I to deny the justice in His silence?
When I arrived at the station in Amsterdam and tried to withdraw more euros, the cash machine informed me that I had used up my daily limit. I checked into the nearest hotel and paid for the night in cash, afraid to use a credit card. The hotel was equipped with a satellite television system which supplied many foreign channels, and I spent hours watching them before I fell into a troubled sleep, trying to comprehend the situation and marshal my scattered thoughts.
The French channels were full of pictures of the destruction and the deployment of army troops. Many more Ski Mask Jihadis had been apprehended thanks to the “cooperation” of Saddam and his accomplices, but neither Kasim-Pierre nor Michelle seemed to have been arrested. And Michelle was the only one who could lead the police to the apartment that would reveal the identity on my papers. This afforded me some small relief.
The BBC was more of the same, with pleas for their own Muslims to remain calm. The German and Dutch channels were in languages I could not understand. I returned to a French channel which was broadcasting an appeal by the Imam of the Grand Mosque for Muslims to cooperate with the authorities in apprehending the notorious Osama the Gun to demonstrate that he and his Ski Mask Jihadis were a lone terrorist group acting contrary to the Koran and the laws of Sharia.
Strangely it was CNN, the voice of the Great Satan itself, which provided the only thing that approached useful information, however cynically. The French had not broken diplomatic relations with the Caliphate, nor had the Caliphate made any threat to cut off the oil on the part of the beleaguered French Arabs.
In fact, martial law or not, the French government seemed to be treating the beurs with a judicious hand. Many arrests were being made, the Green Zones were cordoned off and soldiers were sweeping and searching through them, and any Arab caught outside was having his papers thoroughly checked, but there was no mention of deportations or concentration camps.
“Whether the Caliphate was behind this or not, whether the French believe it was or not, both of them have to pretend that it wasn’t,” one commentator on a round table ventured. “The French need Caliphate oil, it’s worth billions to the Caliphate, and though they pretend they’re not, every one knows that the French government is looking the other way while French companies supply arms to the Nigerian government fighting our Christian allies in New Biafra.”
“That’s a pretty cynical analysis.”
“We’re talking about two cynical governments, now aren’t we? The Caliphate is subsidizing French arms sales to the Nigerians while selling us the oil that’s fueling our forces fighting them, and we all know what the French are…”
“So they’re both nominating Osama the Gun as the fall guy…”
“And the last thing either of them want is for him to be captured alive…”
“But they’d better turn up a corpse to show he’s dead. Otherwise, he’ll end up worse than Che, an Osama the Gun out there somewhere maybe dead maybe alive would turn into a T-shirt ghost, another Osama bin Laden.…”
“The invisible face behind the mask of the Ski Mask Jihadi.”
“The Ski Mask Jihadi, Robin the Hood, an Islamic Batman, here, there, everywhere, till the end of prime time—”
* * * *
I awoke just before sunrise the next morning, more alone than I had ever felt in my life, worth more to the cause dead than alive, utterly abandoned, even by Allah, and once more my thoughts turned to suicide. I did what I dared not do the night before, and tuned the television set to the Caliphate channel before going into the bathroom to urinate, perhaps for the last time, and ablute myself for the dawn prayer.
When I emerged, there was a muezzin on the television screen calling the Faithful to prayer. My window looked out eastward, towards the sun just beginning to rise over the low jagged silhouette of the twilit city, towards Mecca.
I prostrated myself and offered up what I then believed would be my final such prayer to Allah, expecting no answer. But as my prayer was concluded, and I raised my eyes to the blinding sun, the Beneficent, the Merciful, did choose to answer, in the voice coming from the television reminding the Faithful that the Hadj was to begin in two weeks time.
And the light of the sun blinding my worldly eyes opened up my inner eyes to a luminous vision. I beheld the bright sands of the Islamic heartland, upon which rode the Holy City of Mecca as of a ship sailing to the rescue of a shipwrecked soul. I beheld the huge courtyard of the Grand Mosque and at its center the great black stone block of the Holy Ka’aba with a million of the Faithful in pure white robes circling round and round it, pilgrims on their Hadj, the greatest of the five Pillars of Islam, the pilgrimage we all must take at least once in our lives by command of Allah, the holy rite which no worldly power may deny to any Muslim.
Where better to cleanse my soul if it could be cleansed? Where else could I go to see His Will clear that I might once more surrender with clarity to it? Where else might Osama the Gun find refuge?
Allah had spoken. He had summoned me to the Hadj.
CHAPTER 18
But first I had to leave the European Union without being arrested.
The Caliphate authorities could connect the identity on my passport to Osama the Gun, but they would not reveal it to European Union authorities; the last thing they would want would be to have me in the hands of the French police. Ali and Michelle could connect the identity of the man who had rented the Montmarte apartment to Osama the Gun, and I had no way of knowing whether either or both of them were being questioned, or if they were, whether either of them could be forced to give me away.
My heart told me that Michelle could not, and Ali had proven his friendship by putting himself at risk when he warned me of possible Caliphate assassins, but my colder mind had less faith in anyone’s ability to remain silent under torture. Saddam, after all, had “sung like a canary with a cattle-prod up his rectum,” as Ali had put it, proof in itself that the French would not be above using such methods in pursuit of the ringleader of the worst terrorist atrocity ever committed on their territory.
But the noon prayer cleared my thoughts to the point where I remembered that Ali had told me that there would be no checking of identity papers within the European Union as long as I did not attempt to board an airplane.
I began to formulate a plan. Turkey had a secular government but it was a Muslim country and many Turks would be joining the Hadj. My Caliphate passport was proof in itself that I was a Muslim, so the Turks would surely allow me to board a plane among them, and a citizen returning to the Caliphate would need no entry visa.
The Caliphat
e could have put my passport on a blacklist supplied to the Turks without revealing that I was Osama the Gun, but the Caliphate was in ill-favor with the Turkish government and it could not afford to have me held and questioned by their authorities for fear that I might reveal that I was Osama the Gun and confess that I had been a Caliphate agent provocateur.
If I could leave the European Union undetected, the only dangerous moment would be when I landed in Jedda. So I would make my way by train to Greece, within the European Union, but bordering on Turkey, and find some way of crossing the frontier without having to confront border guards, and once inside Turkey, I could begin my hadj.
I checked out of the hotel and went to the railway station, where I withdrew another 3000 euros from a cash machine and learned that I could take a fast overnight train to Munich and arrive in time to catch another to Athens. I bought the tickets, and lurked about the station fretfully until it was time to board.
The long train ride to Munich passed uneventfully through the invisible nighttime countryside. I ate a sandwich, and passed the time reading French, British, and American newspapers until I was able to fall into a fitful sleep.
The American papers were full of news of the war in Nigeria, the drought in the Midwest, the rising price of food, and the latest show business gossip, with the aftermath of the “Muslim Terrorist Attack on Paris” and the manhunt for Osama the Gun relegated to the back pages. The French newspapers were full of little else, but there was no mention of the arrest of Ali or Michelle or any other progress, and the Interior Minister had been forced to resign. The British papers were preoccupied with the latest Royal Family sex scandal and a riot that had occurred among the drunken spectators at a football match between Scotland and England.
Thus passed my long passage through the darkened heartland of Europe, so unlike my boyhood’s fantasy of such a romantic journey, yet also mercifully unlike the fearful train rides of fugitive secret agents that boy had seen in too many movies.
The only moment of panic came when the sunrise through the train window awakened me. The train was crowded, I was a Muslim fugitive in the land of the infidels, and there was no room in the aisle to perform the dawn prayer, which in any case would have drawn unwelcome attention.
May Allah forgive me, I locked myself in a toilet, abluted myself as best I could in the tiny sink, and, kneeling with my face inches from the door and my backside up against the toilet bowl, was forced to offer up a prayer that I hoped would not be taken as blasphemous in this obscene posture in such a defiled venue.
Allah, it seemed, was not forgiving.
Or at least the Caliphate was not.
When I arrived in Munich I went straight to a cash machine. When I inserted my credit card and tapped in my code I was informed that my Swiss bank account had been closed.
* * * *
I arrived in Athens unable to speak the language or even read street signs, and this alone was enough to throw me into a state of panic. I searched through the railway station until I found what appeared to be a map of the Greek railway network.
The unreadable names of the towns and cities were subtitled in smaller Roman script so that I could at least pronounce them, and the size of the lettering seemed to indicate the size of the towns, so I picked out one in the smallest type, next to the Turkish border, and some score kilometers between the towns above and below it on the railway line, where I could hope to find open countryside.
I went to a ticket counter, pronounced the name of the town, however badly, and bought a ticket. I knew that Greece was much smaller than Germany, and though the trip would take me through much of the winding length of it, it surely could not be as long as the ride from Amsterdam to Munich.
But the train turned out to be anything but the sleek high-speed one I had expected; old, agonizingly slow, and worse, not a direct one, so that I was forced to change trains twice, each one more decrepit than the last.
But though the seats were hard and lumpy and the trains often rattled along the rails, the long ride through the Greek countryside, green valleys and rocky hills, farmsteads and small villages, grazing livestock and occasional vineyards, became a soothing balm to my soul.
The farther I traveled, the more the journey became a magic carpet ride backwards through time into a simpler and more natural realm, putting the world of fear and strife farther and farther behind me, and I dozed and gazed dreamily, more the boy I had been than the fugitive terrorist the man had become. In truth, though I had begun this train ride chafing at its leisurely pace and endless monotonous duration, in the end I found myself wishing that it would never end.
When it did, it was a rude awakening.
The town into which I finally debarked was indeed on the Turkish border. But the map in the Athens station had been only a railway map. Either I had failed to notice, or the map had not bothered to note, that the border was a river.
There was a bridge over the river but there were guard posts at either end and I could not risk it. The river was more than a stream but the current did not seem swift and it looked as if I could swim across it. I must follow the river out into the countryside to find an isolated place to do so, and if Allah favored me, there might even be a ford where I could walk across it.
So I left the town and followed the river roughly northward for several hours into deeper and deeper countryside. The houses and farmsteads grew fewer and farther between but I found no rocky shallows. As the sun began to sink towards the western horizon I reluctantly admitted to myself that if I found no ford within the next half hour or so I was going to have to swim.
I did not encounter a place to ford the river, but Allah in His mercy provided me with the wreckage of a small rowboat which had beached itself on the river bank. The wreckage must have have lain there a long time; it was nothing but a midden of weathered and splintered gray planking, but one of the fragments seemed large enough to bear my weight or at least that of my suitcase.
So I dragged in into the river. It floated. I put my suitcase and shoes on it. It floated still. I grabbed hold of it and waded out into the chilly waters until my feet could no longer quite find purchase on the muddy bottom. With a short prayer, I kicked off the river bottom with both hands on the plank. The plank began to sink beneath the surface under the added weight and I began paddling with my feet as hard as I could. Praise be to Allah, the plank remained awash but afloat, and so did I.
It was not yet quite dusk, but the cold water enveloping me seemed like a purifying ablution, I was properly unshod, the task of kicking my way clear of the Europe of the Infidels land made it seem appropriate despite the early hour, and so I said my sunset prayer as I crossed the river into Turkey, repeating it over and over again until I had crossed over and set foot on the soil of that wondrous paradox, a European Muslim country.
* * * *
I took off my sodden clothing, dressed myself in damp clothes from the suitcase and trudged off into the Muslim Turkish countryside, which seemed no different from that of Christian Greece. I walked on through nightfall without encountering a road or habitation, and, finally, stumbling on blindly, I gave it up and slept out in a little copse of trees.
In the morning, I marched on and finally reached a gravel road. I followed it past scattered houses and farmsteads until it took me to a small town. Here the lettering on the signs was in the Roman alphabet but the words were in incomprehensible Turkish. But there was a tiny mosque. I went inside. There was no one there save a weathered old mullah.
It turned out that he understood a bit of Arabic, enough for me to tell him that I was a poor Greek Muslim trying to make his way to Istanbul to joined the Hadj. He seemed skeptical as near as I could tell, but his tirade in broken Arabic made clear his low opinion of the infidel Greeks, and his willingness therefore to aid a fellow Muslim.
He directed me to a bus station, where I waited for several hours before being ab
le to take a rickety and otherwise empty old bus to the nearest town with a railway station. There, with some difficulty with the itinerary, I was able to purchase a series of tickets which would take me to Istanbul.
* * * *
When I arrived in Istanbul, it was night-time, and knowing nothing at all about the city, I took a room in a hotel near the railway station, dingy but still over-priced, ate a vaguely Arabic meal of kebabs at the hotel restaurant, which had a menu in several languages, and went straight to sleep, quite exhausted.
After the dawn prayer, I ventured out into the city to seek some sort of hadj tourist agency, for I supposed that my best chance of passing through Caliphate customs without having my passport carefully checked against any possible blacklist would be in as large a crush of fellow hadjis as possible, and on a flight of Turks whose foreign passports and language would cause overworked customs agents the maximum distraction.
I became lost almost immediately in this strange Muslim European city and in more ways than one. The names of the streets meant nothing to me, only the pictures on the billboards, shop fronts, and hoardings were at all comprehensible, and Istanbul was a disorienting metropolitan madhouse after days of tranquil train rides and tramping alone through countryside, more daunting than swimming for my life across a river holding on to a plank.
Then too Istanbul was a bizarre melange of the Islamic and the European, as if two worlds had collided here ages ago to create something that was neither and both. Stark European towers and ornate Arabic palaces. Souks and enclosed shopping malls. Clogged boulevards and mazes of narrow side streets. Mosques everywhere but likewise bars. Grand hotels and grubby street vendors.
And crowds of people. Native Turks. Gawking foreign tourists everywhere and beggars and street urchins preying on them. Curiously enough, men in Islamic robes and headdresses and women in burkas or even just veils were all but absent from the thronged streets.
Osama the Gun Page 13
